The Family's Cabin

Friday Sepr 19th



Last night a Singing Contest came off for a beautiful boat made by Mr Wagstaff, for boys & a doll for the girls. Guy sang “Little Cock Spallow” for the boat & as soon as he finished he held his hand towards the boat & said “give me it, give me it” he could not be made to understand he had it to win, he thought it was to be his if he sang. Mr Duff made a speech when he presented the prizes & Guy cried when another boy got the boat. Guy was favorite if he had only sung better. He commenced like this MA. ‘A little’ Guy ‘cock spallow’ MA ‘he sat’ Guy ‘on a tee’ MA ‘He hopped’ Guy ‘an he dumpt’ &c &c You can imagine it no doubt. As soon as ever he finished he said, gih me de boat now, old Mr Duff holding up the boat in front of him all the time. Turned in about 10.30. I don’t think Mrs E had a wink of sleep the whole night, baby was one mass of wet with perspiration & he was as hot as fire, he was first passed to me & after I had struggled with him for a while, passed back to her, he pulled at her until she was fit to sink through the bed & then he was pitched over to me again. We sleep one at each end of the bed, lying side by side is just out of the question at all events in these lattitudes. What with the narrow bed, 3’-6” wide for 3 of us, self, wife & baby & the last, tho= least, takes up most room of any of us; & what with the stinking, close, confined cabins we are nearly suffocated. Certainly if any of my friends come out to N.Zd I would advise them to fight shy of Shaw, Saville Cos. I am quite of opinion that some one is to blame for allowing a ship like this Euterpe to go to sea with such a few really necessary sanitary appliances. I have before taken exception to the W Cs which are disgracefully constructed, then we have no baths, the men turn out early & throw buckets of water over each other, & this past 3 days the Capn has had a space on the Qr deck screened off with a spare sail as a bathing place for Ladies - from say 5.30 to 6.30 AM no convenience of any kind. My wife had a bath yesterday morning. Then we have only one force pump on board & for more than a week that one was broken & if a fire had then occurred we should have been entirely dependant upon hand buckets - it would have been broken yet but a passenger Mr Wagstaff took & repaired it; the remuneration offered him for doing so was so munificant that he told me himself he should not have done it had there been another pump on the ship. Then the hose pipe for the pump is so bad or poor, or perhaps rotten, that they dare not use it for swilling the decks or giving baths, or even drawing the fresh water for passengers use, for fear it should be absolutely useless in a short time & then if required on an emergency we should be without. The fresh water is drawn by a small hand pump & it is such a ricketty machine that it takes 2 or 2 1/2 hours to get the necessary supply, which with the force pump (if we dared to use it) could be got in half an hour, besides the labour is four times as great with the hand pump we use. Then in our cabin we have no proper ventilation, we have put a windsail down, but the only place we have to put it is down the hatchway (our stairway) so that we can hardly get down, or down the foul air shaft which is close to the stairs, in fact on the hatch cover. We have the windsail down the latter & try to make the stairs act as extractor, but it’s a farce. The windsail ought to drive the air in at one end of the cabin & the ventilator take the vitiated air out at the other end, so that we might have a chance of a change of air. I suppose some official has inspected the ship & found matters all right. I only wish he was forced for the rest of his days to sleep in my cabin with six others in the Tropics & only have a broken or rotten pump on board & a couple of hundred reckless passengers, a lot of whom persist in sleeping Tween decks on the sly. Just had dinner - A cup of pea soup & a little, very little sago pudding. Too hot in the middle of the day for meat, especially when you cannot get it, & Lizzie has been too poorly to get anything ready. Cold salt pork was ready, but that was not tempting.