Free The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka by Clare Wright

reduced strong men to whimpering invalids or sentimental fools, this unexpected encounter on the cusp of sea and land was the first of many acts of reversal as immigrants headed south. ‘Going south’ was in itself an inversion. The Antipodes as the opposite of true north. Women themselves were constructed as a kind of vessel in the cultural armada of colonisation. As symbols of home, civilisation and order, women represented the goals of British expansionism, with the loyal wife and marriageable domestic servant cast as the good imperial subject. But as the unsettling episode at the Cape Verde Islands demonstrates, the authorised script could readily be abandoned for improvisation if necessary. How should a precious English rose act when suddenly thrust into the arms of a buck-naked black man, who is not her bête noir but her saviour? If the knight in shining armour is not a handsome prince but a savage, does a maiden blush, laugh or fervently embrace the startling possibilities of this altered reality? For many immigrants, the ship voyage fractured timeworn fairy tales abruptly.
    Of course, you didn’t need to be unexpectedly beached to experience the magnetic pull of limbo. The ship itself was a liminal space. Neither on land nor of the sea, neither leaving nor arriving, immigrants stood betwixt and between, caught in the vast hiatus of transhemispheric travel. It was a topsy-turvy time, when judging the distance between the real and the fantastic, the defensible and the inadmissible, was increasingly problematic.
    Sometimes this disarray was literal. On the night of a tremendous storm, Fanny Davis described the effect of the mountainous waves like this: It is like being in a great cradle only that instead of rocking us to sleep it rocks us more wide awake for every now and then it seems as if we’re going to turn bottom upwards . How frightening, that the hand that rocks the cradle might be malevolent, not maternal after all. Ever watchful for edifying details, Fanny also tells us that she observed a Catholic prayer service, below deck, conducted by a young woman . What had possessed this girl to subvert the strict institutional hierarchy of her faith?
    Other moments of chaos were not so much quietly irreverent as madly entertaining. Alpheus Boynton, a young Canadian Episcopalian, described the scene on the promenade deck at night, where the ordinarily staid space assumed the appearance of a dance hall . There were fiddlers, tambourines, dancing. Folks stood in a ring, clapping and cheering. Had it not been for a sober and quite respectable company , wrote Boynton, one might have imagined himself in an Ann Street gathering: in short, we had a regular break down . The geographical reference here is to the red-light district of Boston, centred around Ann Street, where the city’s blacks and whites would notoriously intermingle. So here is a vivid tableau of moral disintegration, as sexual and racial decencies are openly flouted. But for Boynton the prospect of a break down was not threatening; he enjoyed the bonhomie, the way he became encircled in a sphere of companionship and mirth. 12
    John Hopkins, travelling aboard the Schomberg , enjoyed a silly affair when the lads in his cabin put on a show: the star was a ‘beautiful young lady’ with a beard . And girls just wanted to have fun too. Fanny Davis described one of her ship’s full dress balls where women went to pains to out-do each other’s outfits. Some of the girls , she wrote, dress in the Highland costume as men. It looks first rate . Such carnivalesque gestures—overturning polarities—were a longstanding feature of going south. When women don men’s clothes, argues cultural studies scholar Jean Howard, they become ‘masterless women’, signalling a breakdown of systems of control and compliance.
    The collapse of sartorial superstructures was aided by geography. Six weeks out from London and Jane