'Africaine' 1836 voyage, part of first fleet for the South Australian colonists, hit by chaos and pair lost on island
Artist and solicitor John Michael Skipper, on the Africaine's 1836 voyage, captured aspects with the barque shown in big seas and a cabin scene with passengers sprawled about in chaos.
Images courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia
The voyage of the Africaine, one of South Australia’s first fleet of colonising ships in 1836, was hit by conflict and tragedy. A three-masted barque of 317 tons, the Africaine was the seventh settler ship to arrive in the new colony and the first to disembark emigrants at Holdfast Bay (Glenelg).
Built in 1832 in Newcastle, England, the Africaine was chartered by the South Australian Company and left London in June 1836. Colonial secretary Robert Gouger and emigration agent John Brown plus 58 new settlers were on board.
Besides provisions, bricks and building materials, the ship carried the printing press belonging to passenger Robert Thomas, who started the colony’s first newspaper (The South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register). The barque offered comfortable accommodation.
The best cabins, above the deck at the stern, were for captain John Duff (the ship’s joint owner with Thomas Finlay) and Robert Gouger and wife Harriet. Forward of them, with less headroom, were the intermediate passengers’ cabins. An open area with tiers of bunks was for assisted emigrants in third class.
Conflicts on the Africaine journey were documented by two passenger sources: artist and solicitor John Michael Skipper, and Robert Thomas’s wife Mary who kept a diary.
Mary Thomas clashed with the ship’s surgeon Dr Charles Everard but was taken with treatment by “kind-hearted” Irish doctor John Slater. Prone to temper outbursts, Slater one day he shut himself up in his cabin with a loaded pistol, threatening to shoot anyone who disturbed him. Robert Thomas’s printer apprentice E.W. Osborne, managed to calm the Slater on this and other occasions.
When the Africaine arrived, after 133 days at sea, at Cape Borda on the Kangaroo Island’s north side on November 4, 1836, Osborne and Slater, with Charles Nantes, John Bagg, Richards and Richard Warrren*, set out – despite the captain’s reservations but with Gouger’s blessing – to walk across to the south and meet the ship at Kingscote. They became lost in the bush and after several days, having used all their food and water and worn through their boots, Nantes, Bagg, Warren and Richards reached the settlement but the other two were never seen again.
The Africaine sailed via Kingscote and Rapid Bay and arrived in bad weather at Holdfast Bay on November 8. The rough weather delayed the landing and small boats belonging to the Cygnet had to get passengers off the Africaine and to the sand bar closest to shore. From there, women and children were carried on the sailors’ shoulders to the beach. These difficulties in landing the first immigrants influenced Colonel Light’s proposal for a jetty.
Passenger Robert Fisher complained in a letter to the Register that ”Captain Duff had no right whatever to land the passengers the way he did, much less to have treated us with the cool inhumanity he did after our safe arrival. Nor ought Mr Robert Gouger have urged such a mad-headed project then be the first to decline to be carried on sailor’s shoulders to the beach”.
The Africaine was wrecked in a storm in 1843 at Cape St Lawrence on her way to Quebec, Canada.
