On 25 February 1836 Captain Robert Morgan sat down in his tiny cabin on board the Duke of York to begin a diary of the long sea voyage to the new Province of South Australia. He was well aware that the journey he faced would be long and perilous, indeed the route to Australia was one of the longest sea voyages undertaken at the time, and he knew only too well that he might never return. Morgan was a fond family man who clearly left his family with regret. In his very first entry he consigned them into the ‘hand of God’, but anxiety for his family remained as a constant theme in his first weeks away. Robert Morgan was a deeply religious man, even by the standards of the 1830’s, and his diary is peppered with references to Almighty God, the benign influence of Providence and the beneficial power of prayer. On the long journey to the new province of South Australia, the Christian God would be his constant companion, guide and source of solace.
Model of the ship Duke of York. Collection of the South Australian Maritime Museum
The Duke of York was the second of the nine ships to leave England for South Australia between February and July 1836. The John Pirie was the first to leave, on 22 February, according to a later newspaper report, but we have no other information from this vessel until later in the voyage. A former mail packet, refitted as a whaler, the Duke of York was acquired by the South Australian Company to transport these vanguard colonisers to an initial settlement on Kangaroo Island, where a makeshift unofficial settlement already existed. They went in advance of the government vessels, which would follow with officials appointed by the Colonial Office to establish formal government in the new province. On board the Duke of York was a motley group. A small group of passengers, eager for a new life in a new land, but completely untried at sea, rubbed shoulders with hardened seafarers – whalers anxious to get on with the job and impatient with landlubbers. Captain Morgan would need to call on all his reserves of seamanship, discipline and diplomacy to deliver his vessel and the souls it carried, safely to harbour on the other side of the world.