Abstract
Drawing on the few extant passenger diaries and letters written aboard the ship, this chapter argues that the fast composite clipper Torrens—with her predominantly first-class, well-educated passengers, and her unusually long poop deck, well-lit saloon, and spacious first-class cabins—provided a uniquely privileged moving environment for private and shared reading, for writing, and for musical and dramatic performances during her annual return voyages between London and Adelaide in the late nineteenth century. Most famously, the Torrens was where Joseph Conrad, as First Officer, wrote parts of his first novel Almayer’s Folly; but this chapter focuses predominantly on the literary activities of other individuals who travelled on it, building on Robert Darnton’s work on the ‘where’ of reading and on Andrew Hassam’s work on migrant voyages to Australia to investigate not only the how, why and what of writing, reading and performing, but also the where.
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Notes
- 1.
First published in Blue Peter in October 1923, reprinted in Joseph Conrad, Last Essays, ed. Harold Ray Stevens and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 18–22 (22). The Torrens was eventually broken up in Genoa in 1910, on the shores of Conrad’s ‘sunlit sea’, the Mediterranean.
- 2.
In the same volume, ‘Ocean Travel’ (1923), 27–29, and ‘Memorandum’ (1920), 50–61, provide further details about the Torrens.
- 3.
For details of voyages see http://www.bruzelius.info/Nautica/Ships/Merchant/Sail/T/Torrens(1875).html
- 4.
Robert Darnton, ‘First Steps towards a History of Reading’, in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 154–87 (167). First publ. in Australian Journal of French Studies 23 (1986), 5–30.
- 5.
Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century Emigrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 110–122.
- 6.
See Helen Chambers, ‘“The first mate is a Polish count, a very quiet fellow”: Some new Torrens documents’, The Conradian 42.2 (2017), 69–87.
- 7.
Pelham Young (age unknown, but probably at least in his 40s, as his diary mentions a 19-year-old son, of similar age to Leonard Garbett at the time) was travelling for unspecified reasons, leaving at home a wife and family for whom he wrote his long account. On arriving in Australia, he received news that his wife was ill, so promptly returned, taking the coastal steamer SS Paseo to Melbourne and from there the P&O Line’s SS Britannia, travelling via the Suez Canal route to Marseilles in 31 days. National Library of Australia, Canberra NLA MS 1561/2. In what follows, when quoting from this and other diaries I provide the date for the relevant entry.
- 8.
A very common practice: see Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852–1879 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), xiv, and Hassam, Sailing to Australia, 23–24. Young’s diary includes pasted-in scrapbook items such as newspaper cuttings, Christmas cards, and a menu, as well as a daily log.
- 9.
Diary of Thomas Hamilton, Alexander Turnbull Library Wellington NZ, MS-Papers-1010; Diary of Octavia Wilson, State Library of South Australia PRG 1023/1; Vey family: letters and diaries held privately. See also Leslie Vey, Around the world in a famous clipper. Privately printed, Guildford 1974, State Library of South Australia. S Australiana Pamphlets 910.41 V595 (the misleading title results from an error when ‘Cape Lewin’, i.e. ‘Cape Leeuwin’, Western Australia was mis-transcribed and typed as ‘Cape Horn’); Diary of Margaret MacGillivray, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, London, JOD/78; Diary of F. Stenhouse, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, London, MSS/81/096; Diaries of Leonard Garbett, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, London, MSS/73/107.
- 10.
Hassam, Sailing to Australia, xv–xvi.
- 11.
For a contemporary study see, for example, H. Weber, ‘Remarks on Climate and Sea Voyages in the Treatment of Tuberculosis: Read before the International Tuberculosis Congress in Berlin’, British Medical Journal, Jun. 3 1899, 1321–1324; for a recent study, see Rebecca Le Get, ‘Tuberculosis in Echuca, and the Therapeutic Migration to Southeastern Australia (1889–1908)’, Arcadia 29 (2018).
- 12.
Hamilton Vey, Pelham Young, and Leonard Garbett all recorded deaths and burials at sea.
- 13.
H.V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (London: Heinemann, 1935), 83–88.
- 14.
The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 1, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–102, 105–111, 118–127. All were long letters in French to his Belgium-born relative Marguerite Poradowska.
- 15.
For the original plan see Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, London, DEM/52.
- 16.
The location of the second-class cabins is not clear from the available plan, nor from photos or diaries.
- 17.
Hassam, Sailing to Australia, 1–2, 21, 43–44.
- 18.
Much later, as a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, Garbett would also have appreciated the importance of this archival material as a record of the last days of passenger sail across hazardous oceans.
- 19.
Jimmy Packham (this volume) discusses the importance of mariners’ craftwork, as well as writing and reflective activities, on the comparably long (or often much longer) voyage of a whaleship.
- 20.
Hassam, Sailing to Australia, 21–23.
- 21.
Hassam, Sailing to Australia, 26.
- 22.
See http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/hamburg.shtml. Hamburg to Valparaiso via the Straits of Magellan was an important trade and immigration route in the late nineteenth century.
- 23.
The North America to England mail route from Australia and New Zealand across the Pacific via San Francisco and the East Coast ports had become increasingly important by the later nineteenth century. See, for example Frances Steel, ‘Re-routing Empire? Steam-Age Circulations and the Making of an Anglo Pacific, c.1850–90’, Australian Historical Studies 46.3 (2015), 356–73.
- 24.
Johanna de Schmidt, ‘“This strange little Floating world of ours”: Shipboard Periodicals and Community-Building in the “Global” Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of Global History 11.2 (2016), 229–50; Roland Wenzlhuemer and Michael Oppermann, ‘Ship Newspapers and Passenger Life Aboard Transoceanic Steamships in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Transcultural Studies 1 (2012), 77–121; Martyn Lyons, ‘Ships’ Newspapers and the Graphic Universe Afloat in the Nineteenth Century’, Script and Print 42 (2019), 5–25.
- 25.
There is no information about this serial, but it was unlikely to have been an early offering by Conrad, who was far too discreet to expose his early writing to public gaze. He was also part of the crew; and ships’ newspapers were produced for and by passengers, only sometimes under the guidance of the first officer.
- 26.
Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, ed. Zdzisław Najder and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26–30.
- 27.
Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 188.
- 28.
John Galsworthy, Castles in Spain and other Screeds (London: Heinemann, 1927), 75–76.
- 29.
Bill Bell, ‘Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Australian Studies 25.68 (2001), 5–18 (13–18).
- 30.
Harry R. Skallerup, Books Afloat and Ashore (Hamden CT: Archon Books, 1974), 204.
- 31.
In the Vey Collection.
- 32.
See Conrad, Last Essays, 50–61 (57).
- 33.
This image and an image of its glass plate negative is held in the Vey Collection.
- 34.
Marrot, Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, 86–87.
- 35.
Susann Liebich, ‘A Sea of Fiction: The Libraries of Trans-Pacific Steamships at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, The Library 20.1 (2019), 3–28.
- 36.
See Liebich, ‘Sea of Fiction’.
- 37.
Marrot, Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, 83.
- 38.
This book, with its inscriptions and bookseller’s stamp, is now in the Canterbury Heritage Museum. See also Helen Chambers, Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, and Networks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 89.
- 39.
‘Juta, Jan Carel’, Oxford Dctionary of National Bibiography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/53752
- 40.
See Chambers, Conrad’s Reading, 68.
- 41.
Very probably the Royal Navy satellite class composite-built screw sloop HMS Pylades under Commander Horace Adams RN, commissioned 1884, which began service at the Australia Station in 1893. She was reported in South Australian waters (Port Lincoln) in the South Australian Register, Tuesday 2 February 1897, and was presumably in Port Adelaide a short time later.
- 42.
The Martins were first-class passengers, mentioned from time to time in Pelham Young’s diary of the same voyage.
- 43.
Colonial editions, specially produced for overseas markets and not for sale in Britain, began with the publishers John Murray, were taken up by several others, notably Macmillan, and grew rapidly in response to the voracious ‘book hunger’ in the colonies. By the 1890s numerous publishers, including Longman’s, were producing these cheaper editions, or specifically co-producing them with the London distributor E. A. Petherick, who was able to ship them rapidly to Australia via the Suez Canal route. For more on colonial editions and their distribution, see Alison Rukavina, ‘A Victorian Amazon.com: Edward Petherick and his Colonial Booksellers’ Agency’, Book History 13 (2010), 104–121; Rukavina, The Development of the International Book Trade (1870–1895): Tangled Networks (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Graeme Johanson, A Study of Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wellington, NZ: Elibank Press, 2000); Luke Trainor, ‘Colonial Editions’, in Penny Griffith, Keith Maslen and Ross Harvey (eds), Book & Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997), 113–16, available at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GriBook-_div3-N11A1D.html
- 44.
These were: A. C. Gunther, Baron Montez of Panama and Paris (1893); Mrs Alexander, Blind Fate (1890), a 3-volume sensation novel; William Clark Russell, The Emigrant Ship (3 vols, 1893); John Holdsworth: Chief Mate (3 vols, 1875), and James Payne, Thicker than Water (3 vols, 1883).
- 45.
Jacob’s popular work was a lifelong favourite of Conrad and he perhaps also first read it at sea. There is also evidence that Conrad’s early exposure to Mrs Braddon’s works while at sea strongly influenced his early style: see Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 93–94.
- 46.
See, for example, Debbie McCullis, ‘Bibliotherapy: Historical and Research Perspectives’, Journal of Poetry Therapy 25.1 (2012), 23–38.
- 47.
On this point, see also Liebich, ‘Sea of Fiction’, 19.
- 48.
Mr Stenhouse’s age is unrecorded, but playing the part of Orlando suggests that he was relatively young.
- 49.
Concerts were also reported by C. Bowden Smith in ‘Land Ho! The Last of Her Race’ and ‘The Convoy’ (London: Simpkin Marshall Ltd, 1931).
- 50.
In a 1895 letter to E. B. Redmayne, a passenger from the 1891–1892 Torrens voyage, Conrad mentions ‘the voice of the old Torrens piano’: Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 9, ed. Laurence Davies et al. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 16.
- 51.
Marrot, Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, 87.
- 52.
There were also ‘blackface minstrel’ performances by the crew (Vey diary); as Tamsin Badcoe notes in this volume, these also took place on the SS Great Britain.
Bibliography
Bell, Bill, ‘Bound for Australia: Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Australian Studies 25.68 (2001), 5–18
Chambers, Helen, ‘“The first mate is a Polish count, a very quiet fellow”: Some New Torrens Documents’, The Conradian 42.2 (2017), 69–87
——— Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, and Networks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Conrad, Joseph, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 1, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
——— Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Volume 9, ed. Laurence Davies et al. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007)
——— A Personal Record, ed. Zdzisław Najder and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26–30
——— Last Essays, ed. Harold Ray Stevens and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Darnton, Robert, ‘First Steps towards a History of Reading’, in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 154–87
Ford, Ford Madox, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924)
——— Return to Yesterday (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)
Galsworthy, John, Castles in Spain and other Screeds (London: Heinemann, 1927)
Hassam, Andrew, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century Emigrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994)
——— No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852–1879 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995)
Johanson, Graeme, A Study of Colonial Editions in Australia, 1843–1972 (Wellington, NZ: Elibank Press, 2000)
Le Get, Rebecca, ‘Tuberculosis in Echuca, and the Therapeutic Migration to Southeastern Australia (1889–1908)’, Arcadia 29 (2018)
Liebich, Susann, ‘A Sea of Fiction: The Libraries of Trans-Pacific Steamships at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, The Library 20.1 (2019), 3–28
Lyons, Martyn, ‘Ships’ Newspapers and the Graphic Universe Afloat in the Nineteenth Century’, Script and Print 42 (2019), 5–25
McCullis, Debbie, ‘Bibliotherapy: Historical and Research Perspectives’, Journal of Poetry Therapy 25.1 (2012), 23–38
Marrot, H.V., The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (London: Heinemann, 1935)
Rukavina, Alison, ‘A Victorian Amazon.com: Edward Petherick and his Colonial Booksellers’ Agency’, Book History 13 (2010), 104–121
——— The Development of the International Book Trade (1870–1895): Tangled Networks (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Schmidt, Johanna de, ‘“This strange little floating world of ours”: Shipboard Periodicals and Community-Building in the "Global" Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 11.2 (2016), 229–50
Skallerup, Harry R., Books Afloat and Ashore (Hamden CT: Archon Books, 1974)
Smith, C. Bowden, “Land Ho! The Last of Her Race” and “The Convoy” (London: Simpkin Marshall Ltd, 1931)
Steel, Frances, ‘Re-routing Empire? Steam-Age Circulations and the Making of an Anglo Pacific, c.1850–90’, Australian Historical Studies 46.3 (2015), 356–73
Trainor, Luke, ‘Colonial Editions’, in Penny Griffith, Keith Maslen and Ross Harvey (eds), Book & Print in New Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997), 113–16
Vey, Leslie, Around the world in a famous clipper. Privately printed, Guildford 1974. State Library of South Australia. S Australiana Pamphlets 910.41 V595
Weber, H., ‘Remarks on Climate and Sea Voyages in the Treatment of Tuberculosis: Read before the International Tuberculosis Congress in Berlin’, British Medical Journal, Jun. 3 1899, 1321–1324
Wenzlhuemer, Roland, and Michael Oppermann, ‘Ship Newspapers and Passenger Life Aboard Transoceanic Steamships in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Transcultural Studies 1 (2012), 77–121
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Chambers, H. (2021). The Torrens as a Space of Writing, Reading, and Performance. In: Liebich, S., Publicover, L. (eds) Shipboard Literary Cultures. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85339-6_8
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