How did my ancestors, James Houghton and Jane Inglis, get from Quebec City to Melbourne, Australia in 1852? First, to get to New York City they had to take a steamship to Montreal and then a train to New York.
From there, they sailed on the Oneco, a sailing ship built by E. Weston & Sons of Duxbury & Boston, Mass. The voyage from New York to Port Phillip near Melbourne left on October 27, 1852. It arrived at Cape Town, South Africa on January 11, 1853 and finally at Port Phillip in March, 1853. The captain was Lewis Peterson. On board were 192 passengers, whose average age was 25. More than half were from Canada.
This is a drawing of Hope, another ship built by Ezra Weston & Sons
The Oneco made a circumnavigation of the globe on its previous voyage in 1850, after it dropped off gold miners at San Francisco for the Gold Rush of 1849. One of the crew wrote a book about this voyage from which several interesting stories found their way in to Maid of Gold. Unfortunately, I did not bookmark this website and I can no longer find it.
The Alexander von Humboldt from Hamburg, Germany, was the ship that Jane Houghton returned on from Australia. It arrived at the port of New York on August 5, 1854 after a voyage of five months.
This ship appears in The Maritime Heritage Project – San Francisco (1846 – 1899). In 1849, the Humboldt was in the San Francisco harbour. A rumor circulated that there was cholera on board due to the fact that she had picked up 400 American passengers who were stranded in Panama trying to get to the gold field overland. The rumor turned out not to be true and the passengers were finally allowed to debark after two days. The ship was subsequently sold. The cover illustration of Maid of Gold is based on a painting of the Humboldt from 1849.
The clipper ship Champion of the Seas (ca. 1854) built in Boston by the Nova Scotia shipbuilder Donald McKay for the British Black Ball Line.
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