3 - ‘Seas may divide’: the voyage

Summary

In 1876, 28-year-old John Gilmore and his 18-year-old sister Alice travelled from the Ards Peninsula, County Down, to Gravesend in Kent, where they prepared to embark as assisted passengers on the Bebington. As they were listed as a labourer and domestic servant on the shipping registers, their fare of £16 each had already been paid by the New Zealand government. Altogether, 272 passengers prepared to make the voyage on the 17-year-old ship, with the Gilmores among 135 natives of Ireland. The vessel's immediate destination was Auckland, but John and Alice would eventually move on to Tauranga, where their brother Andrew had settled two years earlier. Although assisted passengers had little choice as to the vessel on which they voyaged to New Zealand, migrants were often keenly aware of a ship's capabilities. John Gilmore ascertained details of his ship's statistics prior to its departure:

This ship is 941 tons reg’d and is 13 years old – has made several voyages with passengers with great success. She is not an extreme but of a medium size and I beli[e]ve her to be a good ship in bad weather so far as my judgment goes and I think I ought to know something about it… . I made a mistake about the Capt name. It is not Scott. It is Holdich. (Ge 2)

That the ship was in fact four years older than John indicated suggests that accurate information was not always obtainable. And despite his optimism, passengers would later recollect the 1876 passage of the Bebington ‘as a very grim episode in their lives’.

Misfortune characterised the sailing from its very outset. A day after leaving Gravesend on 26 February 1876, the Bebington collided with another ship in the English Channel and had to dock at Portsmouth for repairs. The delay was later held responsible for outbreaks of disease on board after less than a week at sea. Foul weather also contributed. As the despatching officer alleged, ‘nothing but gales of wind and heavy rains prevailed and that to the constant state of damp that consequently have existed is to be attributed the generation of the low fever and not to any defect in the ventilation of the ship’.