We Are the Rebels Read Online Free Page B

seasickness. Our floating world , they called it.
    This intense bonding, coupled with the sense of having endured an ordeal together,
would later make an important contribution to solidarity on the goldfields.

A DIRTY DISAGREEABLE LOT
    The ‘floating world’ might have been novel but, as many ship diaries reveal, it still
had plenty of pride, prejudice and plain old snobbery.
    Englishman John Spence considered the third class rabble to be the scourge of the
ship. These Irish poor are the greatest nuisance we have on board —worse than vermin,
stale biscuits, wild children or rank water — and a dirty disagreeable lot . Spence
assumed the frequent robberies to be the work of the Irish mob. I expect before we
reach Melbourne we shan’t have a spoon left on us , he complained. They are such expert
thieves .
    CATHERINE BENTLEY (NEE SHERWIN)
    THE BIGGEST LOSER
----
    THE HIGHER THEY COME, THE HARDER THEY FALL

    BORN Sligo, Ireland, 1831
    DIED Neerim South, 1906
    ARRIVED 1850
    AGE AT EUREKA 23
    CHILDREN One boy born September 1853. She was pregnant at Eureka; five children were
born subsequently.
    FAQ Irish Protestant. She and her sister arrived in Victoria as free emigrants. Married
James Bentley, November 1852. Proprietor of Bentley’s Eureka Hotel, burned down by
rioters 17 October 1854. Tried for the murder of James Scobie, and acquitted; James
was found guilty and jailed.
    What a literate Irish Protestant lass like Catherine Bentley might have thought
of such bla tant bigotry is not clear. At any rate she quickly climbed the ladder
of social mobility once she reached Melbourne.
    Religious intolerance surfaced too. During a fierce storm, James Menzies had a gripe
about his Methodist shipmates who went to prayers, thought they were going to the
bottom, they were all oh Lord have mercy on my soul enough to give any one the belly
ache . Menzies wasn’t much for the Brotherhood of Man. Later in the voyage, he confided
that he’d sooner be among a lot of Irish for they are all Cornish people except two
or three and a more ignorant set I never was with in my life . Bear in mind that in
the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Scots were just as likely
to communicate in their native languages as in English. Prejudice against non-English
speakers was common.
    So was disapproval of women, and it was often based on their sexual conduct. As ships
sailed towards the tropics and temperatures rose, women stripped back their layers:
corsets were unlaced, stockings removed. On clear nights there might be dancing on
the high poop deck. In stormy weather there was always a dark corner for a liaison.
    Of all the places of iniquity my eyes ever beheld , wrote one shocked passenger sailing
on the Star of the East in September 1853, an emigrant ship is the worst, men and
women packed indiscriminately together, married couples and young girls, and I am
sure some of the girls will have cause to remember the STAR OF THE EAST . A shipboard
romance could leave a souvenir that needed feeding and changing several times a day.
    Women were technically free to move about the ship, but they were expected to conform
to nineteenth-century standards of respectable femininity. This was particularly
true for the single ladies. On James Menzies’ ship, there was a disturbance in the
women’s quarters and the ship’s doctor told them that he would have a prison made
for some of them . It wasn’t a bluff. The carpenters were called in to install wooden
uprights—like prison bars—across the berths of the offending women. Menzies, who
for some reason was a witness to this, chuckled that it put me in mind of the wild
beast cages at the Surrey Zoological Gardens.

CROSSING THE LINE
    It isn’t particularly surprising if there were moments of passion on this long journey.
The migrants were young, hard-drinking thrillseekers, mostly unchaperoned. But sometimes
the steamy encounters took unexpected forms.
    The Sir William Molesworth stopped at