Richard Haydon: Shipboard Diary to New Zealand, 1883 - #4

Festivities on Crossing the Line

Athletic sports were held on crossing the Line. Haydon records the sports events as:

1st Standing Long Jump
2nd Three Legged Race
3rd Standing High Jump
4th All Fours Race
5th Wheel Barrow Race
6th Hop Skip & Jump
7th Cock Fight (?)
8th Sack Race
9th Obstacle Race
10th Tug of War

Amount of money: 6 pounds, 18 shillings.

Richard Haydon: Shipboard Diary to New Zealand, 1883 - #3

Crossing the Line

The Graphic (London), 26 November 1887.

30 August

A fine day she is gone off her course we are expecting bad wind in crossing the Line tonight sailing about 7 miles an hour got a nice breeze for the Tropics all well the setting of the Sun in the evening is a splendid sight to see in the Tropics it turns all colours.

31 August

A nice cooling breeze sailing about 9 miles an hour but it is rather ? and cloudy we crossed the Line last night sailing about the same rate as yesterday.

1 September

A fine day nice breeze sailing about 9 miles an hour we passed two vessels we had some amusements this afternoon. Athletic Sports by the emigrants and sailors and had a concert this evening all's well.

Richard Haydon: Shipboard Diary to New Zealand, 1883 - #2

SS Taranaki

Richard Haydon's diary continued:

23 August

she is sailing about 3 1/2 miles up to 1/2 past 3 o'clock when the wind began to sprang up and sent her on about 7 miles an hour we had a shower of rain with it we are about 860 miles from the line [Equator] we saw several vessels about 6 o'clock this morning it gets dark about ? of 6 o'clock evenings.

25 August

A strong side wind. sea washed over the deck bit calmed down a little towards the evening sailing about 9 miles an hour.

28 August

Its very hot today this ship is got a little out of her course the wind still the same sailing about 7 miles an hour we saw a large numbers of birds they were called the stormy petrels.

Richard Haydon: Shipboard Diary to New Zealand, 1883 - #1

Richard Haydon's shipboard diary of his voyage to New Zealand upon the SS Taranaki between 4 August and 21 October 1883 is a modest affair both in prose and physical appearance. Written in pencil on a small folding notebook 5" x 3" it lost its cover & back somewhere through the years, and possibly a few opening pages. It is so unprepossessing that it was nearly mistaken for a child's scribble book & likely would have been discarded but for a curious descendant taking a closer look...

The diary starts on 19 August 1883, suggesting early entries on the voyage have either been lost or Richard did not start writing until nearly two weeks into the voyage. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation have been retained as in the original, with some editorial comments in brackets for clarification. Not all entries are included here:

19 August

[first few lines indecipherable] today in the _____ held service at half past 10 o'clock on the poop. we saw a large number of flying fish this afternoon she is sailing about ? miles an hour. I am on duty as Watchman from 10 tonight till 2 morrow morning.

20 August

Its very hot today. we had to get our bedding on deck to air it and .... [indecipherable]. for the first time this morning the ship sailing about 5 miles an hour.

21 August

We ____ an Island in the afternoon called Cape De Verde very hot had to lift off a lot of our clothes is sailing about 6 miles an hour all's well.

22 August

The sea very calm ship sailing very slow today only going about 3 miles an hour and she is gone off her course we saw a large shark this afternoon a steamer past us about half past 4 with passenger on board she was called the Gelicia homeward bound for Liverpool our Captain reported to her with the flags to say that we was all right and we will be reported in the paper when she gets to England and the weather is still getting hotter.

Richard Haydon: Embarkation, August 1883

The Departure, Illustrated London News, 1850

It must have been with mixed emotions that young Richard Haydon journeyed from Chudleigh to the port of Plymouth on the Devonshire coast to embark aboard the clipper sailing ship the Taranaki for the voyage to New Zealand.

On the one hand, he was saying farewells to family members well-knowing that he might never see any of them ever again. A return voyage "Home" was expensive, hardly affordable on a carpenter's wage, and would take just as long as the voyage out to New Zealand. On the other hand, here was a chance for a young man to strike out on his own in a new land, to create a life for himself that might be more stable and rewarding than the one he had lived thus far.

There is no intimation in Haydon's shipboard diary that he was accompanied by other family members or friends on the voyage. A few names and addresses, presumably of other young men on the voyage, who may have disembarked in South Africa are recorded in the diary. A few years later, members of Richard's extended family seem to have arrived in New Zealand, opening a new chapter in his life. But that's another story, as they say.

On 4 August 1883, the Taranaki slipped her moorings and headed out to sea...

The Emigrant's Farewell: The Lord Be With You, artist James Fagan, 1853

Richard Haydon's Chudleigh

Church Hill, Chudleigh, at the turn of the twentieth century.

Richard Haydon's father, Thomas, moved from Bradninch on the other side of Exeter, Devon, to Chudleigh, sometime between 1851 and 1861 according to England censuses.

In 1861, Thomas was 26 years old, married to Sarah Haydon (nee Ellis) and was living on Exeter Street with their one year old son, William. Sarah's sister, Jessie, rounded out the household. Thomas had been a shoemaker apprentice in Bradninch in 1851 but by 1861 was employed as a gardener in Chudleigh.

Richard was born two years later in 1863, being joined by younger siblings John, Elenor, Peter, and Ann in subsequent years. After basic schooling along with his brothers and sisters, Richard took up a carpentry apprenticeship.

Chudleigh was a small market town that had relied on the wool trade for its livelihood. When the wool trade declined as the demand for substitute fibres such as cotton increased during the industrial revolution, Chudleigh experienced a loss in trade and the population fell from around 2,400 in 1841 to 2108 in 1861.

With the prospects for improving one's standard of living in traditional trades in Chudleigh looking uncertain, one can speculate that a young, unmarried carpenter's imagination and ambition were receptive to the sales pitch of agents seeking new emigrants for Australasia. Thus, in early August 1883, Richard Haydon embarked upon a long voyage to better his circumstances by settling in New Zealand.

But Richard Haydon was never to forget his home town, years later naming his house in Clarence Road, Christchurch, New Zealand, "Chudleigh".

Greetings from Devon postcard.
A type of card Haydons remaining in Chudleigh might have mailed to Richard Haydon in the early 1900s.

Richard Arthur Haydon, 1863 - 1927

Richard Arthur Haydon was born in Chudleigh, Devon, England about 1863 but would travel to the other side of the globe as a young man to live the rest of his life in New Zealand.

In August 1883 at the age of 21 he embarked at Plymouth, England for Lyttelton, New Zealand to start a new life. A carpenter by trade, he would work for the New Zealand Railways for the balance of his working life. Marrying within a few years of his arrival, he lived with his family firstly in Wanganui, then Dunedin, and Christchurch, the latter being where he ended life.

Neither famous nor distinguished, he - with tens of thousands of fellow emigrants - left his Old World home for a new one, never to return to whence he came. It was a one-way ticket.

No author or historian, Richard, with relatively little schooling, wrote a shipboard diary of his 1883 journey that has been read by but a mere handful of people over the past 125 or so years. No work of great literary value, it nevertheless leaves a young man's penciled account of his journey that may as well have been to the moon given the technological and emotional "distance" involved.