Anna Robertson was built in 1816 by Matthew Smith, a shipbuilder and dealer of marine stores in Calcutta. The ship had various owners using her for Far Eastern trade, leading up to her voyage to Western Australia in 1851 when she was owned by A. Nairn & Co. (1).
Specifications: Official #unknown, 441 tons registered in London. An early frigate barque. Hull of teak; three masts, two decks + poop deck, square stern, 1/4 galleries; figure head of a female bust. Length: 112.0 ft. Breadth: 29.1 ft. Draft: 14.0 ft. (2).
Whooping Cough breakout Perth Gazette 26 December 1851
Anna Robertson was contracted as a troop and migrant carrier that left London on 10th September 1851 with a crew of 20 bound for the Swan River Colony. She was not a convict ship and thus carried no enrolled pensioner guards. There are anomalies in reports of the number of ‘troops’ on board. It was intended that 70 Royal Sappers and Miners, a Captain and a Subaltern were to be dispatched (WO1-437 p.373). Lieutenant Henry Wray, Mrs Wray and 2nd Lieutenant Edmund Frederick Du Cane were on board to fulfil the Royal Engineers’ officer requirement.
Contemporary newspapers reported that 65 sappers landed on 18th December 1851. Musters and Pay Lists confirm this number, and together with the five men already in WA since the Scindian’s arrival in 1850, made up the numbers to 70 (3). Captain John Harris’ Report to the Port of Swan River, records 210 steerage and 16 cabin passengers (4). The ten children born on board are recorded by most sources. Whether or not any of those children succumbed to the whooping cough outbreak which occurred on the voyage is unknown.
Some of the cabin passengers were as follows:
Wray and Du Cane as above; William Ayshford Sanford, Colonial Secretary, John Conroy (later Police Commissioner) and Mrs Conroy; Roman Catholic Bishop John Brady; Rev Dr Coyle, Surgeon Superintendent; R C Elliott, Assistant Surgeon (5). The ship’s master on the 1851 voyage was Captain John Harris.
In July 1851 the Anna Robertson was a hot topic in the British Parliament when the Maritime Marine Act Amendment Bill was being debated. The current law required that if a crewman resigned from a merchant ship, mid-voyage, then he forfeited his pay, clothes etc. However, the crew member would be exempt from this forfeiture if he quit in order to join a naval ship. In the case of Anna Robertson, in a voyage from Hong Kong, 12 of her crew left the ship to join two ships of war. This, it was proposed in the debate, endangered the ship and its property (6).
A second ship named Anna Robertson was built in Sunderland and registered in Scarborough in 1842. At first it was problematic to pinpoint the 1816-built Anna Robertson’s fate owing to some confusion between the two vessels by some sources. However it seems that she left Melbourne for London on 5th April 1852 and it was feared had been lost at sea. The master on this, her last voyage, had been Captain Harris, as in the 1851 voyage to Swan River (7).
Nile was built at Sunderland in 1849 for Duncan Dunbar. According to two sources, she was abandoned in late 1880 with no reason given. (1).
Specifications: Official #10726, 763 tons registered in London. An early frigate ship. Hull of oak; three masts; deck + poop. Length: 133.5 ft. Breadth: 32.5 ft. Depth: 21.5 ft. Draft: 15.0 ft. (2).
Nile was employed as a convict transport and left Plymouth, England on 23rd September 1857 with a crew of 34 bound for the Swan River Colony, stopping at Bahia, Brazil en route. She carried the nineteenth of 37 shipments of male convicts destined for Western Australia. The voyage took 100 days and arrived in Fremantle on 1st January 1858 with 268 convicts (two had died on the journey) and at least 60 other passengers. W. Johnson was the captain of the vessel, the ship’s surgeon Robert Whitmore Clarke RN. Rev Mr John Wright was religious instructor (3).
There were no enrolled pensioner guards on the voyage. Captain the Hon. J J Bury, Lieutenants E C Sim and R G Thorold, Royal Engineers, and a small contingent of Sappers and Miners (27 men, 13 women and 29 children) were on board (4,5). The military men together with ten Warders appointed in England to take up employment at Fremantle Prison, were expected to assist in the supervision and control of the convicts. A convict insurrection on the voyage between Plymouth and Bahia proved a frightening experience, and although ultimately quelled, it is clear that the warders in particular were unprepared for the trouble.
Janice Hayes (nee Hale) a descendant of a cabin passenger Mathew Blagden Hale, the Bishop of Perth, has provided two transcripts of personal letters written by him. Hayes’ transcripts give an insight into convict behaviour as Bishop Hale described periods of unrest on board before he joined the Nile in Plymouth and in the months that followed (3).
Trivia: One of the convicts on board was something of a celebrity. Edward Agar ‘the approver’ was perpetrator and leader of the ‘Great Bullion Robbery’ of May 1855 when bullion destined for British troops in the Crimea was stolen from a South Eastern Railway mail train.
Return Journey
On 4th February 1858, Nile made her return journey to England via the Cape. On board was Captain Henry Wray who had completed his work in the Colony as a major player in the construction of public works, notably the Convict Establishment (Fremantle Prison). Wray had spent two years as Acting Comptroller of the CE in the absence of Captain Henderson who had been on leave in England. Wray’s wife and daughter had left for England the previous March on Dolphin, together with four rank and file Sappers and Miners and their families (6).
Also see sources & links
(1) Lloyds Register of Ships.
(2) Derrick Prall’s publication.
(3) Muster Rolls and Pay Lists WO11-126 December 1851.
(4) Port Report CSR213-161, WA State Records Office.
(5) Perth Gazette, 26 December 1851.
(6) Hansard House of Commons Debate, 19 July 1851 vol 118 pp.1049-62.
(7) Argus, 25 January 1853.