A very good idea of the life on an immigrant ship is given in a letter I have received from Mr. J. B. Davey, of Manunui, near Taumarunui, who came out to Lyttelton in the ship Star of India, and retains a very lively recollection of what was an eventful voyage. the Star of India, a vessel of 1045 tons, was built by Stephens, of Dundee, away back in 186I. She was owned by the Merchant Shipping Co., but was under charter to the Shaw, Savill Co. when she visited New Zealand in 1874. She made two trips, one to Lyttelton, and the second to Wellington. Captain Holloway was in command on both occasions. Leaving London on September 26, 1873, she reached Lyttelton on January 1, 1874, a passage of 97 days. She sailed from London again on July 31, 1874, and made Wellington on November 10, 1874, the passage occupying 102 days. On this latter trip one of the male immigrants seized his child one day and jumped overboard in a fit of dementia. Both father and child were drowned.

Of the voyage out to Lyttelton Mr. Davey writes: "We had about 300 passengers aboard. They were a mixed lot—English, Irish, Scots, Swedish, Danes, Germans, and a few Russians and Poles. I well remember the rough weather we ran into in the Bay of Biscay and the dismay it spread among the passengers. There was a lot of seasickness, of course, and the immigrants were very downhearted. You would hear the women blaming the husbands and the men blaming the wives for deciding to come on such a dangerous undertaking. The people from the Emerald Isle would be vigorously telling their beads, while the Cockneys were liberally swearing at each other and everybody else for being such fools as to leave good old London. But this only lasted a short while, and then all hands settled down to shipboard life. The women would be sitting round sewing and singing, and the men's favourite pastime was to play pitch-penny on the deck.

"It was a lonely trip in some ways, as we did not see any land, with the excepton of St. Paul's rocks, in the South Atlantic, until we sighted the Snares. At least the passengers did not sight any other land, but I was taken up to the royal-yard by one of the sailors, and from that lofty perch I saw Table Mountain when we were off the Cape of Good Hope. It was rather a desperate trip for a youngster, but the sailor put a rope round my waist and kept a good hold of me. The only other thing out of the way we sighted, with the exception of a ship on fire, was an iceberg.

"I remember that when we were near St. Paul's rocks the mate caught a nautilus in a bucket, and carefully put it over the side again, as it would have been bad luck to do otherwise. We also caught a shark and cooked some of it. Several people tried it, and I was among the number.

Ship on Fire.

"The most outstanding incident of the whole voyage happened just before we got to the Cape of Good Hope, where we fell in with a ship on fire. She was the Isabella Kerr, bound from England to Calcutta with coal. She was terribly short of food and water, and to make matters worse her captain was ill. Captain Holloway and our doctor were pulled off to the stranger, and our ship also supplied them with what they wanted in the way of food and water. We kept company with the Isabella Kerr for quite a number of days, and she eventually left us when we were abreast of the Cape. She never reached Calcutta, and we heard afterwards that the fire broke out again, and that she was burned in the Indian Ocean. Her crew were rescued by a tea clipper. This Isabella Kerr was a fine sailer. I have seen her shorten sail while she was in our company, get almost out of sight of us astern, and then, loosening her canvas, show what she could do with everything set and the wind on the quarter. When we met her she had no flags that could be got at—through being battened down on account of the fire, I suppose—and to make her number and name she stood quite close in to us, and we could read the information that had been written on a board and hung over her side."

Mr. Davey says that when the Star of India got to Lyttelton, and the day arrived for landing, quite a number of the women shed tears as they took their last look at the good old ship which had been their home for so many weeks, and had brought them safely to the new land in which they hoped to better themselves.