The subjectification of the nineteenth-century maritime spectator: Shipboard diaries as maritime history

Abstract

In contrast to shipboard journals of the eighteenth century, which often served the function of providing ‘objective’ information for scientific and political networks, shipboard diaries of the nineteenth century reveal a discursive change in which there is a subjectification of the journey. This subjectification, we argue, is evident in the ways in which fee–paying passengers used such diaries as a way to make sense of their experiences of being at sea. Here we examine the 1829 journal of James A. Gardner on his travels aboard a ship from Britain to Australia. We focus on how Gardner described trial scenes on board in the confined space of the ship and his fantasies of the potential of Australian land for settler–colonists. These two aspects of the subject–orientated nineteenth century shipboard diary illuminate how the sea influenced and nurtured contemporaneous British ideas of entertainment, moral codes and hierarchies, as well as colonial ideologies.

Introduction

The experiences, hopes and disappointments of nineteenth-century British travellers are recorded in many forms, including in shipboard diaries. Often handwritten and unpublished, these sources shed light on personal, collective and historical narratives around sea travel and the broader act of travel writing itself. In the eighteenth century, log books were used to record information for the benefit of science, commerce and politics. ¹ Increasingly, from the eighteenth century, shipboard journals were kept by scientists on government-sponsored journeys of exploration into territories previously unknown to Europeans, contributing to imperial ambitions and the objectification of nature. ² The knowledge recorded in such shipboard journals was often only possible with the contribution of Indigenous peoples, who helped translate local knowledge into forms that made sense to Europeans. ³ With the increase in migrant ships and the extension of European travel for pleasure in the nineteenth century, the number of people writing shipboard diaries increased. ⁴ Many of these passengers were not engaged in the daily chores of the journey or trained to ‘read’ the sea scientifically, with their descriptions being much more subjective. Rather than suggesting that the shipboard diaries of nineteenth-century passengers expressed a modern individuality, the documented experiences of passengers provide insight into how the subjects experienced and viewed the journey, often following certain narrative structures, scripts and topoi.

Specifically, this article studies how nineteenth-century diary writing reflected the relationship between the travellers’ sense of self and the realities of the alien experience of being at sea and on a ship. We will demonstrate through a case study that, already in the late 1820s, before the onset of mass emigration from the 1830s and pleasure travel from the late nineteenth century, subject-orientated shipboard diaries illuminate how the sea influenced and fostered British ideas of entertainment, hierarchies and colonial ideologies. Our case study is based on a hand-written nineteenth-century diary kept by James A. Gardner, a self-described ‘gentleman’ who travelled to Australia with his wife in 1829, in the age before steamships, on the barque Percy – although he used the pseudonym Hotspur. ⁵ Gardner's shipboard diary has not been analysed before and thus provides us with new insights into one particular journey, whilst also contributing to broader understandings of the role of diary writing in making sense of maritime activities and travel in British history.

Gardner's ship departed from London on 28 May 1829 under Captain Middleton and arrived in Sydney on 30 October of the same year. In this period before mass migration, this cargo ship held only seven passengers – namely, Gardner, his wife and Mrs. Josiah Smith in cabin class, and Mr. Charles Burge, his wife and his two sons in steerage. ⁶ Gardner's diary follows the common genre of a shipboard journal written by young, well-educated married men travelling in a higher-class passage. It thus represents one of the dominant voices of ‘affluent Englishmen mainly of the middle classes who travelled to Australia in first-class accommodation’, as described by Andrew Hassam in his 1995 monograph on shipboard diaries. ⁷ Gardner's privileged status as a wealthy male passenger ensured that he had more freedom and was less confined physically than other groups of passengers, including single females as well as lower-class passengers. ⁸ Stored in the National Maritime Museum in London, Gardner's text is one of the estimated 850 diaries by British emigrants extant in archives and libraries across the globe. ⁹ This relatively small number of diaries has led other scholars to point out that these sources are problematic as there is no way of knowing how representative they are. ¹⁰ In order to overcome problems of representation, we follow the methodologies of scholars such as Tamson Pietsch and Lilia Sautter, who provide a close reading of shipboard diaries to uncover the subject-based observations that contribute to making sense of the self and the journey. ¹¹ Here, we provide a close reading of two events from Gardner’s diary to argue for the importance of seaboard diaries as sources for studying broader social norms, which were made more pronounced in the limited and confined space of a board on the ocean.

Our text is divided into three main parts. First, we provide an overview of Gardner's diary and ask how it fits into the broader genre of British shipboard journals, contrasting it with the ‘objective’ descriptions of the eighteenth century and comparing it to the ‘subjective’ descriptions of similar journals from the nineteenth century. In this first section, we illustrate the importance of diaries in processes of making sense of the world and subjectification amongst British passengers to Australia. In the second step, we analyse life on-board as presented by Gardner through two main experiences that took place in the confined space of the ship. The first is a series of legal trials, which enables us to reflect on the way in which Gardner presents himself as a knowledgeable subject and spectator in his text. In describing the events, Gardner makes sense of the discrepancies between the lived realities and the idealized expectations of shipboard travel through aspiring to a fantasy of English respectability. The second concerns the event of reaching Tasmanian coastal waters, which illustrates Gardner's way of making sense of arrival through British imperial world views. Gardner makes sense of the coastline as a colonial fantasy of settler-colonist desires. Our analysis of Gardner's diary focuses on how his experiences of being at sea are reflected in his own subjecthood through events and fantasies that were intensified in the confined space of an early nineteenth-century ship.

The diary of a passenger

Gardner's diary focuses on events rather than descriptions of individual days, which was uncommon for shipboard diaries. ¹² It is full of amusing tales, poignant moments and ‘grammatical, as well as orthographical errors’, as he himself freely admits. ¹³ His main intention was to fulfil his ambition of being a writer. ¹⁴ His writing is creative in parts, providing pseudonyms for both the ship described in his diary (he uses the name Hotspur for the barque Percy) and the convict ship on which he was initially engaged (the Lady Rabittwood, presumably the Lady Harewood, which sailed on 24 March 1829). ¹⁵ He mentions a Mr. Josiah Smith, but not a Mrs. Josiah Smith as per the passenger list. He also abbreviates Burge – the surname of the family in steerage – to B. and refers to his wife as Mrs. J. Abbreviating names was a common literary technique of the nineteenth century, and this, along with his quotes from poets and writers and long, emotive, descriptive passages, indicates his indebtedness to the Romanticism of the period. Gardner's diary contains many references to people from different cultural backgrounds, and he notes variations in skin tones, but unlike the writing of travellers in the latter half of the century, which is commonly infused with ideas of racial hierarchies, Gardner's journal is mostly free from explicit racial hierarchies. ¹⁶ Instead, his class-consciousness as a form of ‘respectable whiteness’ is much more evident than a focus on ‘race’. ¹⁷ As Rowan Strong notes, social status was not as rigidly upheld on-board a ship as on land. For instance, access to cabin-class travel depended greatly on buying power. ¹⁸ It was therefore all the more important for Gardner to represent himself as upper class.

The diary begins with Gardner's decision to leave England on a convict ship bound for the penal settlements in Van Diemen's Land. Before he could leave, his affluent wife found him and stated that she would accompany him on his adventure. They left the convict ship and, after some time on land, found passage on the Percy. Once departed, Gardner describes his seasickness, portrays some of the ship's crew and describes nature, including the aesthetics of sunset in the tropics.

Gardner's diary was primarily written whilst at sea, with the sea being the backdrop to, rather than the main stage of, the dramas that unfold. It digresses from the majority of extant journals insofar as he aspired to return to England, and thus his diary was not intended to be sent back home as a sign that he had arrived safely. If a ship diary ‘actively contributed to the way in which the voyage was lived’, Gardner's diary can be seen as a project of ‘making sense’ of being at sea, just as journals are more generally used to make sense of travel. ¹⁹ Gardner reflects the sea as a liminal space where different and broader gender roles could be performed and modulated. As noted in other shipboard diaries, on-board to Australia, even though the behaviour of women (especially those who were unmarried or travelling alone) was subject to control and policing, there often occurred a ‘transgression of gender boundaries’. ²⁰ This becomes particularly clear when he writes about his gun-toting, duelling wife. Mrs. J. was involved in unusual female behaviour in a duelling scene on-board, in which she wounded an onlooker, and demonstrated her adventurous spirit on land in the Cape Colony. ²¹ However, with the limited descriptions that Gardner provides of his wife and the lack of reported speech, it is not entirely clear whether it was the sea or her financial independence from him that provided her with the ability to transcend ‘respectable’ gender roles on the voyage.

The late 1820s, when Gardner travelled, was half a century before the non-stop steamships of the 1870s. ²² The barque Percy made the usual calls en route to Australia. Although the Percy was unable to dock at Madeira due to inclement weather, it was able to dock at the Cape Colony, which was at that time already a multicultural urban settlement and the hub of trade and movement in the region, influenced by the Dutch imperial period and integrated into British imperial networks. ²³ Gardner and his wife spent time in Cape Town, South Africa, where further adventures transpired, including a journey to various places of interest – a reflection of the growing tourism industry in the area. Considering his land-dwelling experience, Gardner's descriptions of Cape Town and its society and nature are more detailed than those of the ship's company. With its reference to and description of maritime communities, islands and port cities, particularly English coastal towns and Cape Town, Gardner's journal also echoes events ‘around the sea’. ²⁴ Nevertheless, he reduces the port to an interface between land and sea, with his interest being more ‘land-facing’ than ‘sea-facing’, to draw on terminology from Sarah Palmer. ²⁵ Just before they were about to leave the Cape, Gardner was detained and put on trial by a Magistrate for insulting a military officer, who, according to Gardner, had insulted his wife by using foul language in her presence. As Nigel Worden has demonstrated, there is a long history of conflict between seafaring temporary visitors and land-based military personnel in Cape Town, reflecting the tensions between land-based and sea-based codes of conduct and notions of order. ²⁶ Gardner was, however, fortunate, as he was able to leave without further consequences. Back on the boat, Gardner ends the first volume of his diary with the suspense of an ensuing trial over stolen government alcohol by the first mate, which we analyse below in more detail.

The second volume of the journal, entitled ‘Ups and Downs’, describes the trial of the first mate, John Freeboy, and its consequences (examined below). After some four months at sea, the tedious nature of the journey expresses itself through the increased violence between the crew members and the agitated nature of the passengers. Finally, the Percy entered Sydney Harbour on 30 October 1829. The joy was great, as the ship had tacked for three days outside the Harbour trying to enter. Gardner describes the fraught last days as being ‘extremely uncomfortable considering we were almost out of water, entirely out of fresh meat, a long time out of soft tack, no butter, sugar, pepper or vinegar, out of sorts & out of temper’. ²⁷ The Percy was still discharging cargo at the King's Wharf on 5 November, by which time Gardner had already secured the services of a servant and was residing in a hotel in Sydney. ²⁸ Gardner's adventures did not end there, as his journal provides further information on his time in Sydney. The second volume ends with him finding lodgings, with subsequent pages detailing the coroner's inquest of a young woman who was accidently killed when thrown from a gig that Gardner was driving. In a last act, Gardner travels to Van Diemen's Land, his original destination.

Gardner's diary is unfinished, ending mid-sentence and having a number of pages ripped out of it, which is not untypical for the genre of the diary, often being connected with incompleteness and open-endedness. ²⁹ After returning to England, Gardner seems not to have followed his desired profession as a writer, rather his death certificate records his profession as retired captain. ³⁰ The ‘messy’ nature of the copy of his diary suggests that the diary-writing process was dynamic, with editorial interventions evident on the page. It is not known if Gardner ever produced a fair copy. There are indications that at least parts of the journal were written retrospectively, which, as Hassam notes, was not uncommon in the shipboard diaries he examined. ³¹ Gardner's journal includes 33 images painted in watercolours, which both compliment and provide more detail to the journal. They depict the boat, scenes on-board and on land in the Cape Colony, and views of the sea. The inclusion of watercolour paintings was unusual for diaries of the 1820s and remained uncommon into the mid nineteenth century. ³² These illustrated diaries deserve to be the subject of their own research for they are as much a form of visual appropriation of the diarist's journey as an example of ‘imperial eyes’ – a concept that we examine below.

For Gardner, what fascinated other shipboard diarists on the Australia route was, however, hardly worth mentioning. ³³ He only briefly mentions the ritual of crossing the equator or how the weather affected their voyage. But more than the ocean itself, he was interested in the communities around the ocean. In the first maritime diaries from the seventeenth century, the diarist is barely evident as an individual in the writing. ³⁴ Many maritime diaries of the eighteenth century contain detailed ethnographic or scientific observations; some, such as the journals of Captain James Cook and other members of his voyages, contain both. ³⁵ The shipboard diarists of the eighteenth century were predominantly interested in external conditions, reflecting in part the desire to collect ‘useful’ information for maritime and naval expansion, and for the ‘betterment’ of western science. ³⁶ Those of the nineteenth century have a stronger focus on the self – reflecting also the increase in the bulk passenger freight trade. ³⁷ There are, of course, examples of ‘sentimental sea journeys’ earlier, ³⁸ just as there are shipboard diaries after 1800 in which the self is placed in a secondary role. ³⁹ Using Gardner's text, however, we argue that from the 1820s onwards, there was a tendency towards subjectification in shipboard diaries. As an early example of this genre, Gardner's diary is exemplary in its subjectivity. Compared to shipboard diaries from professional seafarers, Gardner's diary provides little in the way of useful scientific observations, either in terms of metrological data or ethnographical observations, with his shipboard diary not referencing the laboratory of the oceans evident in texts from the eighteenth century. ⁴⁰ Rather, his diary is a portrait of his own subjecthood and reflective of his place in the early nineteenth century. This represents a subjective turn that can also be found in other diaries of the same period, such as those of soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, who not only recorded but also reflected on combat operations. ⁴¹

In the subjectification of shipboard diaries, we see less of a final breakthrough of the ‘modern individual’ than a change in the objects of observation: the (constructed) self receives the attention that was previously given to the sea, weather, flora and fauna. This does not mean, however, that the sea becomes insignificant. On the contrary, the maritime space becomes the comprehensive framing of all observations and constructions of individuals, social relations and places. ⁴² One of these maritime constructions was the concept of ‘the passengers’, who did not simply appear with the increase of mass migration and commercial-shipping passenger freight trade, but whose social roles had to be invented and modelled specifically. ⁴³ Only after 1800, but already before the steamship revolution, ⁴⁴ were there increasingly more people on-board who were no longer part of the crew, integrated by a chain of command. The new role of passengers, for all their differences, was characterized by the fact that they were not called on to do regular sailors’ work on and below deck and in the rigging. Non-forced global migration around and after 1800 had not only technical and economic implications, but also cultural consequences: for both cabin and steerage passengers, the voyage to Australia was accompanied by long periods of involuntary inactivity. Evident in Gardner's diary is the fragility of movement and the self-fashioning required to survive the lengthy journey as a transient interloper. Time, for Gardner as for many passengers, was unstructured. By the mid nineteenth century, writers such as the author of a published emigration manual, William Kingston, conceived of unstructured time as an opportunity, imploring readers to use their time on a ship wisely with Bible study and self-improvement, as ‘you will never again, probably, have so much leisure in the whole course of your lives; never such an opportunity in every respect of improving yourselves’. ⁴⁵ Not all people took such advice, with some passengers simply enduring their leisure time, punctuating it with minor amusements and distractions such as playing music, dancing and drinking. ⁴⁶ For the higher-ranking passengers, eccentric behaviour and the temporary crossing of social or gender boundaries was not only a way to pass the time, but also a form of self-expression and social distinction. ⁴⁷ Diary-writing had the potential to be one of these practices of distinction, in that diarists set themselves apart as silent observers. With the focus on comic situations or punchlines, this was also a way to entertain oneself – if one could afford the time and had the cultural qualifications for the production of such texts. ⁴⁸ Gardner took to writing and spent much of his time describing events both at sea and on land, although his descriptions demonstrate his lack of agency in the working of the ship beyond its ability to provide him with his immediate needs of shelter, food and transportation. In the following sections, we analyse the ways in which he makes sense of being at sea through two events – namely, a series of legal trials and the arrival in Tasmanian coastal waters.

Trials at sea: Entertainment and hierarchies

By the end of the nineteenth century, shipboard diaries were filled with references to activities that committees established amongst the passengers to pass the time on a journey. ⁴⁹ Gardner's diary, however, was written before the period of organized on-board entertainment. He describes the activities on-board the ship that helped him and his fellow passengers maintain a sense of order, and provided structure to the period at sea. A set of legal trials on-board, for instance, enabled him to position himself as a morally superior person, with a heightened knowledge of the law. Moreover, we argue, trials at the same time served as a form of entertainment.

Paying passengers on seaborne vessels were confined to moral and legal codes of conduct, even though being at sea allowed some transgressions to occur without the harsh punishments or consequences expected on land. However, with more time on their hands, paying passengers also needed to be entertained or find some ways of structuring the days and months of the journey. The experience of migrating from nineteenth-century Britain to Australia has been described as a liminal space, ‘a period of extraterritoriality: between worlds, they no longer belonged to their place of departure, nor yet to their place of arrival’. ⁵⁰ Indeed, the ship can be seen not only as a closed-off, but also as a historical social space. ⁵¹ In this space, as Malcolm Prentis has noted, tensions existed between ‘the relief of boredom and the need for social control leading to occasional “unpleasantness” amongst passengers and between them (especially the young and single steerage passengers) and the authorities’. ⁵² In order to maintain social order and structure on-board, social activities on passenger ships, such as the writing, printing and reading of shipboard newspapers, were increasingly evident throughout the nineteenth century. ⁵³

Such tensions between ‘the relief of boredom and the need for social control’ come to light in Gardner's three descriptions of legal trials. In two of these, Gardner was the accused – once after insulting a military officer in South Africa and a second time at a coroner's trial following the accidental death of a young woman in Australia. Coincidently, he was acquitted in both of these land-based trials. In the only trial at sea, the first mate, John Freeboy, was accused of taking multiple bottles of brandy and distributing some of them to the passengers without the permission of Captain Middleton (for whom Gardner used the pseudonym Joshua Halfton). To try this charge, a ‘Merchant man's cabin court martial’ was set up, with the captain as judge. ⁵⁴ While this type of procedure followed clear rules on warships, it remained comparatively unregulated on civilian passenger ships. ⁵⁵ It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, in the period of mass migration, that regulations were issued for civilian ships as well. As Gardner's account shows, such trials could be very challenging for the captain, which may be one reason why they remained an exception in early transoceanic passenger shipping. We have found no other accounts of trials held on-board ships in later diaries, even when similar crimes had been committed. ⁵⁶ Instead, the matter was handed over to the authorities in Australia on landing. ⁵⁷ The court martial on the Percy also makes it clear that it required the active participation of the passengers, not as jurors, who were the exception in this type of trial, but as clerks. This is the role that Gardner took. He acted as a note-taking clerk, and thus in a position of authority close to the high-ranking officers of the Percy. For the duration of the trial, he was not only a silent observer, but also part of the judicial staff, which allowed him the opportunity to make sense of this trial at sea through his writing.

The trial began with the reading of the indictment: ‘Without the fear of God before his eyes’, Freeboy was said to have repeatedly stolen brandy, drunk it himself and distributed it to the steerage passengers. ⁵⁸ This ‘injudicious conduct’ had created ‘scenes of drunkenness’, ‘contrary to the established rules of society, and tending to dis-organize, good order & decency, & brought a spirit of in-subordination, in the Ships Company’. ⁵⁹ It is not clear whether Gardner participated in the drafting of the indictment or merely recorded it.

Gardner reports that two witnesses were questioned by Mr. Josiah Smith, who thus acted as prosecutor. The steward, William Clinch, was the first witness. He had known Freeboy for a long time as a man who was ‘fond of grog’ and had sometimes broken open lockers on other ships in search of alcohol. But because Clinch had assumed that ‘the mate was always allowed as much grog as he required’, he had thought nothing of it. ⁶⁰ Clinch described Freeboy as a heavy drinker, yet sympathetic and kind in his distribution of liquor to the steerage-class passengers, as it came with a warning: parents should not give their children too much of it, and the older ones should drink it in bed so that they would not be discovered. A second witness was called, the cabin boy William Harrington, nicknamed ‘Carroty Tom’, who knew the first mate very well in that he ‘had lately been flagged severely by him’. Harrington not only confirmed the distribution of the brandy to the sailors, but also alleged that Freeboy was ‘asleep on his watch’. ⁶¹ This concluded the evidence and it was Freeboy's turn to defend himself – without a lawyer, which was the rule in criminal proceedings on land at that time. ⁶²

Gardner took the occasion of Freeboy taking the stand to remark on the latter's appearance:

The Little copper coloured offender, appeared remarkably barkful – he seemed agitated with an up & down palsy – his cap in hand, has been turned round almost as many times as a coach wheel from London to York, before he ventured a reply to the unpleasant sonorous question of Joshua Halfton. ⁶³

‘Little copper coloured offender’ was probably a reference to Freeboy's skin tone. Along with his surname, this suggests that Freeboy may have been a person of mixed racial descent. Gardner's comment on Freeboy's skin tone, coupled with the term ‘little man’, can hardly be read as anything other than pejorative. The fact that he thought Freeboy was ‘barking’ in his defence may indicate that Gardner expected nothing more from Freeboy than a contrite confession. Freeboy did not deny stealing the liquor. But there was no proof of the accusation of distributing it among crew and passengers. Nevertheless, Freeboy felt that he had been thoroughly disgraced:

I have been Sir (commenced the little man) in all climates, and in all weathers but I never was so ‘taken a back’ as I have been to day – I have been chared [sic] down like a pirate and condem’nd without a hearing, for unlawful appropriation, which can never be proved – I can solemnly swear (here the steward whispered the word consider) I never drew off more than six or eight bottles, & which I will joyfully return on landing at Sydney or authorize you to stop the full amount from my wages. ⁶⁴

With this unclear evidence, the captain did not want to pass sentence immediately, but ordered that Freeboy should be barred from dining with the other officers until further notice. He did not want to sit with a person ‘who had conducted himself so shamefully’. ⁶⁵ At the pleading of Gardner's wife, the banishment from eating at the captain's table ended after only a week. She missed Freeboy's company at dinner, which the upper-class passengers also attended. She also spared the captain from sentencing insofar as he informed his mate that he would now let the matter rest, but that Freeboy would have to leave the ship after returning to London.

The moral undertone of the trial scene reflects more broadly the subjectification of the journey in Gardner's diary. Intoxication was a common state on journeys at sea, with many examples of passengers on other ships complaining about drunken crew members who neglected their work. ⁶⁶ In the passages preceding the trial, Gardner dismissively describes the Burge family in steerage class, who were frequently intoxicated. Gardner himself partook in the consumption of alcoholic beverages, thus his concern was not with drinking, but with excessiveness and respectability. Similar notions of respectability in conjunction with the limited consumption of, or total abstinence from, alcohol are evident in other shipboard diaries. ⁶⁷ The mystery of how the Burges accessed alcohol on-board the Percy was solved when bottles of brandy were found in Freeboy's cabin, with this discovery being the reason for the trial.

Even if the trial remained without serious consequences for the first mate, its rigorous procedure served to mark Freeboy's behaviour as deviant and at least to sanction it morally. As an outsider to the workings of a ship, Gardner's judgement of the trial may well be related to his status as a passenger. ⁶⁸ Gardner's view of the trial was formed by his standards as a non-seaman and by his upper-middle-class ideals of respectability. By acting as clerk, Gardner subscribed to his moral condemnation. At the same time, he was able to record another curious incident in his diary. The trial was not only a moral showcase, but also entertaining because of the situation comedy. The onlookers found it very funny, for example, that Mr. Smith said he could ‘always tell a drunken man, from a sober one’. ‘Carroty Tom’, on the other hand, used his role as witness to make fun of the ship's cook, suggesting that he used rotten geese in his cooking – ‘here the Cook who was in attendance said “it a lie, for they were ducks”’, and caused laughter. ⁶⁹

The humiliation of crew members was not uncommon on ships, and the trial provided an opportunity for Freeboy to be degraded both during the trial and after it. ⁷⁰ The disruption of Freeboy's position of authority through his humiliation by the crew, in particular, upset the inner dynamics of the working relationship between the crew members. His comrades shamed him at the trial, although they had previously accepted the bottles he offered them, thus implicating themselves in the offence. Freeboy subsequently became bitterly superior to the other crew members and engaged in physical fights with the second mate. Gardner calls the trial nonsensical, yet, as we can see, the trial had consequences within the logic of the crew and for the journey, drawing as it did on the notions of separation, opening the spaces of liminality and the providing the prospect of reincorporation. As Gardner was not part of the crew, or familiar with the dynamics within the crew, he could not know the internal rules or what was expected within a crew. However, he could use his own description of this trial at sea to write order for himself.

Arriving and colonial fantasies

Stemming from a period before mass migration to Australia, Gardner’s diary also illuminates the early nineteenth-century logics of British colonization, conquest and settlement. In contrast to writers of emigrant dairies, who often showed little explicit engagement with abstract ideas referring to outside the ship, ⁷¹ Gardner's self-identifications as a writer and a traveller predict his comments on wider political issues related to the British Empire. From his viewpoint at sea, Gardner's descriptions of the Percy's passage along the coastal regions of Tasmania mirror his British imperial world view. Even though Gardner is not grandiloquent in his descriptions of the sea itself, and at times even takes its presence for granted, the sea is an intricate part of the history of the British Empire, as well as Gardner's personal adventures. We focus in this section on Gardner's shipboard diary as a resource for studying the historical connection between the sea, the experience of British travellers and imperial ideologies of the early nineteenth century. We draw on vocabulary developed by Gelina Harlaftis to examine how the sea has been an ‘inspiration to … ideology’, thereby contributing to maritime history about the sea. ⁷²

By studying Gardner's description of the event of arriving near the Australian coast, we can reconstruct the ways in which his experiences at sea were ‘foreign’ and new to him, and how he tries to make sense of his own positionality whilst being on a ship, and the process of transferring from sea to land. When the Percy sails along the Australian coast, Gardner provides his readers with rich descriptions of the land, and expresses his fantasies of how potential British settlers could make use of it – a narrative in which the sea and the land are strongly connected. It becomes clear that he observes the lands he visits and sees from the ship as part of the British Empire. Indeed, in the period when he was travelling, the colonies of Australia were increasingly being envisaged as potential sites for free settlers, rather than just a dumping ground for convicts. ⁷³ Gardner's ways of describing the land make sense in reference to his nationality and Britain as a ‘maritime nation’ – one that had used the sea in building its national narrative. ⁷⁴ His own position in this world order is constructed through his role as a British traveller and adventurer, and not as an emigrant who is about to settle in Australia. He also positions himself as a knowing writer and observer by giving advice to an imagined audience.

His fashioning as an adventurer exploring the furthest reaches of the British Empire becomes especially clear when approaching the Australian coastline. Drawing on the metaphor of the ‘Land of Promise’, Gardner describes King Island and other coastal islands in terms of their potential for settlement, colonization and exploitation through agriculture. ⁷⁵ In his view, the island has ‘excellent cultivable land’ and he finds it ‘surprising that no settlement has been formed here, considering the many advantageous prospects it holds out for any indefatigable emigrant desirous of exclaiming “I’m the Monarch of all I survey”’. ⁷⁶ Here, Gardner is situating himself in a larger tradition where recommendations were made to emigrants arriving on land that had only recently been settled by Europeans. ⁷⁷ Gardner's suggestions to the aspiring emigrant reflect the genre of emigrant manuals of the nineteenth century, which Gardner himself makes reference to in his diary. ⁷⁸ His recommendations to potential settlers of the islands are so extensive that they form a short side story – a fantasy of settlement that Gardner imagines when sailing along the coast. This fantasy includes different actors, such as emigrant families, indentured labourers and the Home Department, which is expected, in Gardner's view, to provide food, for instance. He alludes to the connection between King Island and the South African market, which he suggests is a good place for new emigrants to buy cheap cattle. Furthermore, he mentions the various animals that live on the island and especially warns readers about dangerous snakes. Accompanying Gardner's textual representation and commentary on the coast is a drawing of a part of the island's dunes and cliffs, and the sea, with a sailing ship in the foreground. It shows that the island is situated along popular routes for ships, and that it is rather hilly and sandy with some green areas. This corresponds with his description of the coast's nature and the island's function as being a stopping point for returning ships to Britain. However, the image he draws of King Island is from the perspective of the sea, underscoring the fantasy of settlement as he is not himself on land.

These descriptions of arriving, and textual and visual descriptions of the coastal areas, not only illustrate some of the ways in which Gardner makes sense of his experiences at sea, but also allude to his cultural frames of reference and early nineteenth-century European ideologies of occupation, conquest and settlement of foreign territories. ⁷⁹ In this sense, the diary is useful for studying ways of thinking about the sea. ⁸⁰ An analysis of Gardner's representation of the coastal islands illustrates how ship diaries reflected the desires and cultural frames of reference of the passengers. Gardner can be described as a ‘seeing man’, to use a term from Mary Louise Pratt describing ‘the European male subject of European landscape discourse – he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess’. ⁸¹ As a ‘seeing man’, Gardner was invested in making a strange and foreign landscape familiar to himself as a British writer and passenger. From the vantage point of a ship, land has a particular significance. This perspective allowed passengers to objectify the land to some extent, and to evaluate it with regard to its aesthetic and agricultural qualities. ⁸² Pratt emphasizes how the kinds of processes of looking and describing in which seeing men like Gardner were involved were also processes of possession. ⁸³ Moreover, Gardner's diary shows a world order of connected sea networks. He views the sea as the natural connector of different British territories that could potentially be settled and occupied – as he imagines with regard to King Island. The idea of sea networks is also illustrated by the fact that Gardner imagines a future emigrant to first buy cattle in South Africa before settling on King Island.

When comparing Gardner's notes on the coastal islands of Australia with other nineteenth-century British sea diarists, this focus on potential colonization is remarkable. In other journals, land is not imbued with ideas of cultivation and occupation; rather, islands are seen as markers of progress on the long ship voyage. ⁸⁴ Seeing Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia, after an extensive period at sea filled another traveller, John Davies Mereweather, in his 1852 published journal, for example, with a feeling of joy. For Mereweather, the event of arriving in Australian waters thus caused different types of feelings than for Gardner. The former tracks the ship's progress sailing by this coastal island and describes it in a rather romantic way, labelling its hills ‘picturesque’ and the weather ‘delicious’. ⁸⁵ Instead of evaluating the coast according to its potential merits as agricultural land, Mereweather describes his individual interpretations of the surroundings and expresses his amazement at the sunset and other natural elements, which he considers as God's creations. Gardner, in comparison, is less concerned with the beauty of nature and more with the raw materials and potential use of the land for his nation. This comparison illustrates the way in which nineteenth-century diaries manifest a variety of cultural ideas and can be used as valuable sources for maritime history and the study of multiple ideologies and experiences of the sea.

Gardner's diary entries on arriving in Australian coastal waters and his descriptions of natural elements, especially the coast of King Island and its surroundings, are relevant for maritime history as they reflect the ideologies and imaginaries of British empire-building in the early nineteenth century as fostered by the sea. They illustrate some of the ways in which a national maritime imagery was a condition for and fed British imperial ideologies, showing how the sea has indeed been a ‘dynamic agent’ in forming cultural concepts and world views. ⁸⁶ Gardner's writing reflects not only the colonial zeitgeist and the idea of seeing non-European land as colonizable and empty, regardless of its native inhabitants. ⁸⁷ The colonial fantasy written up in his diary is also an intellectual appropriation and thus a prerequisite and justification for the actual seizure of a supposed terra nullius. Gardner's way of looking at and conceptualizing the coastline and King Island reveals a cultural narrative of British imperialism, which, in turn, allows him to present himself as an individual who can proactively contribute to British expansion, and consequently to his own subjectification as a way to make sense of his experience at sea.

Conclusion

Harlaftis describes ‘maritime history’ as ‘the study of the relationship of humankind with the sea’. ⁸⁸ The genre of shipboard diaries reflects this relationship between humans and the sea, for without the medium of the ocean there would be no way to travel and no ships in which to be confined. From the eighteenth century, and with the expansion of imperial aims, there was a focus in shipboard journals on controlling and making sense of nature, the sea and thus the self through measurements and scientific observations. Although this focus was still evident in the nineteenth century, with ways of writing about the sea informed by previous traditions, there were also other ways of making sense of the self on a sea voyage through a subjecthood that focused on the relationships born during the voyage and the changes in self and society on the seas. The genre of the shipboard diary has been overlooked as a source of maritime ego documents. Through our detailed analysis of one particular shipboard diary, we have demonstrated how, already in the 1820s, at a time before mass travel, the subjectification of a journey contributes to our understanding of how the sea influenced and nurtured contemporaneous British ideas of entertainment, moral codes and hierarchies, as well as colonial ideologies.

Written in the early nineteenth century, Gardner's shipboard diary is an example of subject-making. He considers himself a member of the British Empire, who, through his privileged position of class and race, is able to engage in large colonial fantasies. This contrasts with shipboard diaries of the latter nineteenth century, particularly those of assisted passengers, which tend to focus on the small personal worlds of the traveller's experience. ⁸⁹ Gardner remains aloof from the maritime workers he describes. He has only a fleeting engagement with the ocean. Yet, as an external observer, he is able to provide insight into various aspects of maritime history that maritime interlopers have taken for granted. His description of a trial scene reflects not only the tension between boredom and the need for social order, but also the ways in which the trial was a performative act, which was used as a ritual of segregation, liminality and reincorporation to make sense of the world. In playing out the fantasy of legal order, moral codes were re-established and social order reassigned. Similarly, the view of land from the ship demonstrates the tensions between a single British male confined on-board and the larger fantasies of settlement and imperialism that Britain was engaged in. In playing out the fantasy of settler colonialism, Gardner places himself as a knowledgeable spectator in the broader imperial ideologies. Shipboard diaries such as Gardner's demonstrate moments when cultural categories could be transcended, as well as moments in these categories that were rigid and unyielding. They also demonstrate the value of examining these texts in detail as moments in which the relationship between humankind and the sea affected, and was affected by, social norms and the search for subjectivity.