The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [60]
The Westmoreland was a world unto itself, where lives began and ended between the masts. As the ship made her way through the Indian Ocean, Sarah Robinson gave birth in a water closet to her second child. The twenty-six-year-old had stolen clothing and received a sentence of seven years’ transport. She had attempted to conceal her pregnancy, although her berth mates knew the truth and kept a close eye on her condition. About midnight on October 18, another prisoner heard the cries of an infant. Surgeon Superintendent Ellis recorded what happened next: “The woman who had suspected her state immediately ran to the closet and actually drew out of the pan a female child apparently arrived at the full period. The miserable mother was found in a state from which she was, with difficulty, aroused. On the removal of the placenta which it was found necessary to do by the introduction of the hands, hemorrhage followed and for two days to an alarming extent, but which was eventually controlled.36
Dawn broke and the Westmoreland rocked the newborn and her exhausted mother in its oaken arms. Sarah and her namesake baby were safe and alive for today, but Elizabeth Booth became the first casualty of the journey. The forty-year-old died from apoplexy the day after little Sarah was born.
Burial at sea was one of the few traditions in British society that class did not govern. Captain Brigstock commanded Surgeon Superintendent Ellis, the entire crew, and every able prisoner onto the upper deck for a somber ceremony. In life, the British captors treated their chattel like animals. In death, they extended dignity. The crew carried Elizabeth Booth on a plank, inside a plain sack weighted with ballast and covered by the Union Jack. The captain read from the standard burial service: “We . . . commit her body to the deep, to be surrendered into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead.”37 The plank was lifted, and Elizabeth’s body slipped from beneath the flag into the sea, where it quickly vanished from sight. The ship never stopped moving, not even for the dead. Agnes looked over the railing at the retreating wake and felt the closeness of death. Sharks began following the Westmoreland, waiting for more corpses to be dropped overboard.
The strange land was still a long way away, but at least the heat abated when the ship left the tropics. On the twenty-seventh of October, Surgeon Ellis made this entry in his log: “We soon began to experience a more congenial climate, the temperature had much downwards [sic], the weather was moderate and clear, and its beneficial effects were soon observable in the increased activity and improved looks of the prisoners.”38
Tranquility, however, was short-lived. On November 11, twenty-one-year-old Anne Sergeantson went into labor. The redhead from Hull gave birth to a baby girl in the infirmary, delivered about one month prematurely. Six days later, the infant passed away after suffering from diarrhea and convulsions.39 Once again, Captain Brigstock mustered the women and crew on deck. The baby girl, wrapped in white muslin from the surgeon’s supplies, lay on the lee gangway until her mother pressed a final kiss and witnessed her quick descent into a watery grave.
The last two weeks of the voyage were spent in relative calm as the ship neared the shores of Van Diemen’s Land. Agnes and Janet had been at sea for more than three months, and signs of the journey’s end began to manifest. First there were the birds. As the Westmoreland approached the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, curious Pacific gulls flew overhead from rocky islands sculpted into odd formations by the tempestuous sea. Dolphins dove alongside the ship, riding its wake and bidding a welcome to the southern seas.
The crew anticipated landfall when the smell of the ocean changed to the musky odor of the earth