Neva shipwreck women commemorated in art

This month in Tasmania the loss of over 200 transported women is being commemorated as never before - through textile art, specifically seaweed garments as memorials. 
Hobart-based artist and psychiatrist Catherine Stringer has done some wonderful maritime art. 
And now she is remembering the convict  women, babies and children who died in the 1835 shipwreck of the Neva. Her show, Sea Stories, is  at the King Island Cultural Centre. https://kingisland.tas.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/Artist-Statement-Sea-Stories.pdf

Skins and clothes

Catherine has put together here the Neva Reliquary and another sequence of art works: The Seal Woman.
She says: "The Neva Reliquary... is my personal response to this tragedy. The work was initiated during a residency at the King Island Cultural Centre in 2011, when I first started experimenting with making paper from the local kelp and subsequently other seaweeds. 
"I became increasingly drawn to the Neva story, feeling a connection with these women, particularly as many of them were mothers, like me, and moreover 28 of them shared my name, Catherine.
"I have developed and refined my papermaking techniques during the past five years to create these garments for selected Neva passengers. They are all made from seaweeds gathered from the Cape Wickham area.
" I have made a small size garment to represent each of the 28 Catherines, and life size garments for each of the Catherines who were children. 
"I have also made a cloak for the youngest convict, Ester Raw, who was only 14. She had been sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing a cloak.
"The six surviving women each have a Survivor’s Cape, which incorporate some shore plants as well as seaweeds.
"The Seal Woman series developed from {thinking about the story that a "woman could slip easily from seal to human form by removing her sealskin. One day her sealskin was stolen by a fisherman ...  She ended up marrying the fisherman...
"but she always yearned for the sea. After many years the woman found her sealskin and returned to the sea, where she had [a further] seven children. She was thereafter torn between two families, two worlds.
"The Neva story and the Seal Skin story are linked by similar themes - mothers and their
children, separation, loss, grief and transformation, and of course their connection with the
sea. 

The Neva - and Elizabeth Fry

Of the 241 people on board when the  three-masted barque which left Cork harbour for New South Wales all but 17 died. 
The small ship, owned by Moates, a Shadwell firm, had previously been used for carrying troops, meaning it would not be in a salubrious state. 
It was on its second convict voyage when it hit the submerged Harbinger Reef north of King Island, four months after setting forth. 
On May 13 1835  the ship sank and is now seen as the second-largest maritime disaster in Australian history. It's one of the worst convict ship disasters. 
The survival rate was 3 per cent for the convicts but 35 per cent for the crew  - which has to indicate malpractice and selfishness in evacuation procedures. There was no chivalry as with the famous Birkenhead Drill of 1852, two decades later, when the Women and Children First procedure was used.

It's common to assume that the disaster is barely known because it involved 'just convicts' and 'just women', allegedly many sex industry workers drunk on a broached barrel of rum.
Actually, If you know your history of women's penal reform, another explanation is more likely.  I suspect that the silence was diplomatic; the authorities didn't want any more public outcry at this major moment in policy on imprisonment. 
When the Neva sank prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (pictured left) had been pushing improvements for over two decades.
 She had:

• urged that transportation should be abolished
• inspected hundreds of convict ships
• founded the British Ladies' Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners in 1821
• visited women prisoners in Ireland  in 1827 
• actually been to the ship before, for its previous convict voyage, and offered the men comforts - probably bibles, blankets and eating utensils

Transportation was to be outlawed as a punishment  only two years later, in 1837. 
The Neva tragedy still reminds us today about the continuing burning issues such as: the morality of exporting unwanted people; under what conditions should people be imprisoned; and should imprisoned women, especially mothers, be treated more humanely?

 

Pregnancy and Mothering at sea in the nineteenth century

Today on cruiseships voyaging with your children can be a pleasure. On Mother's Day, as on any day, amusements, crèches, and babysitters abound. Usually no-one gets seasick. Falling overboard is rare. And women don’t give birth there because shipping lines don’t allow you to sail after 27 weeks.
Refugee mothers, of course, have a frightening time. Survival is the issue on their risky ships and on voyages that take days,not months. See http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/europe-migrants-ship/.Picture by Reuter/Alkis Konstantinidis

Mothering at sea in the nineteenth century
In the past mothering at sea meant not only keeping the kids amused (Ooh, look at that porpoise) and safe (Christine, do not climb on that rail, you’ll fall and drown).
It also meant risking being where illnesses such as measles and dysentery could spread, fatally for you and your offspring.
On top of that, the dehydration caused by seasickness led some nursing mothers to stop lactating. Their babies then were distressed and colicky, causing the mother more distress. One or both might die.
Did mums get any help? Yes, they did, in the nineteenth century depending on the circumstances. Busy stewardesses helped with childcare. Other passengers looked after the children and even gave their own milk to breast-fed babies
And wealthier women had their own servants to help them, especially if they thought they were going to give birth on the voyage. Details of this can be found in the 1826 voyage story of two of Australia’s founding families: that of pregnant sisters-in-law Harriet Parker King and Mary Copland Lethbridge (nee Parker King).

Mothers of Oz’s founding families, afloat
Harriet Parker King, nee Lethbridge (above pic), a thirty-year old Launceston-born woman (1796-1874,) was travelling to Australia in September 1826. She was emigrating to Dunhevid, in New South Wales, the farm of her distinguished husband’s family.
While Harriet and the children were sailing by merchant vessel ship her husband was leading an expedition to Patagonia on the HMS Adventure, accompanied by HMS Beagle. Phillip Parker King (1791-1856) was to become an increasingly famous Royal Naval hydrographer, and surveyor. Phillip was later celebrated on postage stamps.

Harriet had married 26-year-old Phillip in January 1817 when she was 21. By the time of her 1826 journey she had six sons. Four (Robert, Essington, Charles and Baby) sailed with her to Australia, when Harriet was five months pregnant with her seventh or eighth child.

In their large party on the sailing ship Cumberland were also Mary Copland Lethbridge (1805-72) (Phillip’s sister, and also the wife of Harriet’s brother Robert).
The couple sailed too, along with Harriet's Nanny, Phillip’s brother-in-law Hannibal Macarthur, and Miss Waring, the future governess of Hannibal’s family.
Mary Copland Lethbridge had only married on 25 July. Age twenty-one, Mary too was pregnant. perhaps just three months by comparison to Harriet’s more advanced stage.


Help needed on the trip, whatever the price
On arriving at the port of Plymouth, Harriet wrote her husband that she had found that on their pre-arranged ship ‘there was no surgeon engaged, and as it is almost probable I will confined ere I get to Port Jackson I could not [make myself]….sail without a nurse.’
She found one, Mrs Rowland, for £100 (the equivalent today of between £740 and £40,000 depending on what conversion method is used).
‘I did not expect to give her so large a sum but no woman, who was qualified for such an event, would give up her practice here without a handsome remuneration.’ And Harriet liked her ‘very much.’
It sounds as if Mrs Rowlands who a professional midwife and children’s nurse who was using the opportunity to leave her business and settle in Australia if she took to it.
On the four-month voyage Harriet was feeling the stress of mothering her big family at sea.
‘Our dear Charles’ was poorly but ‘rallied amazingly the last month we were at Sea, and I now beginning to hope he will be spared... but my Nurse says, he is too sensible to live.
Harriet was also ‘most anxious’ about Essy as he had ‘much spirit’.
Seeing so much of their (cooped up) children on ship must have meant mothers got to know them better than at home, and worried about their developing characters.
‘Mrs Rowland, my nurse, I find very handy with them. I do not now I should have done without her as Charles is quite as much, if not more trouble, than the Baby.’
But at least the party on the Cumberland weren’t in livid seas beset by fierce winds. And there were no epidemics. ‘We have had a fine breeze and … the Weather is beautiful’

Miscarrying at sea
Without a surgeon, women on ships had to help each other if they started losing their foetuses, as roughly 30 per cent of all women did at that time.
On 13 October Harriet wrote that after several days of Mary being poorly, 'This morning I was called up to her at 3 o’clock as she was very ill, she has since been very bad and it has ended in a miscarriage. She is now doing well.’ Seemingly Mrs Rowland wasn’t expected to help.
~~
Their voyage took four months. Published extracts from Harriet’s letters don’t speak of homesickness or of expectations of NSW or even the discomforts of pregnancy on sailing ships.
Her main feelings are that she misses her husband and is concerned for the welfare of those in her party.

After landing
Luckily Harriet landed on 24 Jan 1827, sixteen days before baby Arthur Septimus Parker King was born on 9 February. He seems to have been her last child.
Mary went on to have eight live children.
Finally settled, Harriet wrote to Phillip on 20 March that their Nanny was going to carry on working for the family, despite her brother trying to persuade her to marry a man he knew in Sydney.
And the nurse, Mrs Rowland, decided to ‘return to England, her time with me is nearly up.’
Five years later Harriet’s (poorly) husband and eldest son returned safely from Patagonia in 1832.
Harriet and Mary founded some of Australia's 'royalty'.

(Sources include Dorothy Walsh, ed, The Admiral's Wife: Mrs. Phillip Parker King: A Selection of Letters 1817-56, Melbourne, 1967. Hawthorn Press; http://person.ancestry.co.uk/tree/28094330/person/12850836018/facts).

Picture: Mary in 1874, 47 years after her momentous voyage.