Pages from ss Great Britain Passenger Diary, 1874
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Object number1998.066.6
TitlePages from ss Great Britain Passenger Diary, 1874
DescriptionOne sheet containing pages 19-20 of a diary believed to be from an unidentified passenger on the SS Great Britain. It is possible that this diary belonged to someone called George Prengt Hughes, who travelled with his younger brother Charles P Hughes on this voyage in 1874. This would have been the 42nd voyage the ship made- it was travelling from Liverpool to Melbourne on the 4th of June 1974, carrying 601 passengers and 141 crew. The voyage took 57 days, and in these pages the writer talks about the ships arrival at Cape Otway. The ship was said to have arrived around midnight on the 28th of July 1874, with a surgeon and pilot boarding at breakfast to check the health of the passengers, and ensure a quarantine was not necessary. ‘In one case however we had a clear bill of health and were allowed to enter Port Philip’ .The author writes that the entrance to Port Phillip is narrow but spreads into a ‘splendid sheet of water’. It takes the ship three to four more hours to arrive in Hobson’s bay, but the author writes about the views of 1000s of acre fields, ‘stocked by the best sheep I saw in Australia’ and the many dwellings of Melbourne merchants.
Transcript available.
Production date 1874 - 1874
Object namediary sheet
Object categorypersonal record
Materialpaper
Techniquehand-written
Dimensions
- height: 200 mm
width: 185 mm