Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers: Provisional Settlement at Sea

Abstract

Chapter Two takes up the concerns of the first chapter regarding the grey areas between public and private spheres and the binaries of manuscript and print in the context of two manuscript shipboard periodicals, the Alfred (1839) and the Open Sea (1868). These were periodicals that emigrants had made themselves during the voyage to Australia. Whereas success is the inevitable conclusion of printed emigrants’ letters (and other propaganda), shipboard periodicals remain distinct from these genres because of their ostensible lack of participation in these narratives. Manuscript shipboard periodicals aim to invest themselves with the qualities of printed, land-based periodicals through their mimicry of them. Thus, rather than focussing on the colony as a place of settlement, these periodicals produce a culture of settlement on board the ship. In constructing the voyage out as a preparatory stage to the actual task of settlement in the colonies, these periodicals participate in the colonial push to turn emigrants into successful settlers.