This photograph is one of the most important items in Toitū’s display about life on immigrant ships Across the Ocean Waves. It depicts a group of Otago-bound passengers on the Nelson. What makes it unique is that it was taken on board ship on the morning of 4th September 1863 as the vessel lay becalmed in the South Atlantic Ocean. How can we be so sure of the picture’s date and location? One of the passengers, Miss Isabella Henderson, noted in her diary on that date how a photographer had set up his equipment on deck. She had her photograph taken ‘in a group of about 15 of us’ (there are actually only eleven).
Isabella is the woman in the middle row with the man’s hands on her shoulders. Note the clothes the women are wearing. They must have been sweltering, stuck as they were in the stuffy heat of the windless patch of ocean known as the ‘Doldrums’. Such discomfort was, of course, par for the course for 19th-century immigrants, especially women. They also endured lice and rats, monotonous food, sickness on board (nine children died on the Nelson en route) and the endless tedium of a voyage that took months.
Isabella was a shopkeeper’s daughter from Edinburgh on her way to Otago to get married. She chose to go steerage class to save money but lived to regret it. ‘We are treated more like slaves than any other thing – ordered out of our beds at 5 o’clock in the morning’. On arrival in Dunedin her intended husband, Willie Smaill, was rejected when he greeted her dockside with the smell of whisky on his breath. Instead she became the wife of a draper called William Wallace and died in Mosgiel in 1926 aged 88 years.
Nelson passengers