Rich Colonists and Poor Emigrants
Upper class ‘colonists’ and lower class ‘emigrants’ paid different amounts of money to travel to Canterbury. As a result they stayed in separate accommodation areas which had very different conditions.
- How do we find out what it was like?
One of the most important sources of clues to the past are images e.g. drawn illustrations, paintings, diagrams or maps. Small collections of paintings of the Four Ships by colonists have survived and are often held by libraries, museums or archives.
Some of these show us what the ships looked like from a distance and on the inside.
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| The Randolph | The Charlotte Jane | First Class Cabin |
Colonist James Edward Fitzgerald (born 1818- died 1896) painted this watercolour of The Randolph on paper on 6 September 1850 and of The Charlotte Jane sometime around 1850. His painting of a first class cabin aboard The Charlotte Jane is helpful too.
Life on Deck
We can begin to imagine life-on-deck when we look at colonist and Ship’s Surgeon Dr A C Barker’s (born 1818- died 1873), ink drawing on paper: Deck of The Charlotte Jane fr. [from] the starboard quarter boat which he did on 25 October 1850.
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| Deck of the Charlotte Jane |
However these images can sometimes leave us with as many questions about life-on-board as answers. For example, they don’t tell us about the separate accommodation spaces for the rich and poor on board.
- How can we use other images to find out more?
By studying other images of the Four Ships as well as images of other typical emigrant ships of the mid 1800s we can build our ideas of accommodation was like for ‘colonists’ and ‘emigrants’.
Images of typical emigrant ships often came from The Illustrated London News, which was very popular a long time before photographs became common in newspapers.