Abstract
This chapter revisits the voyage experience of migrants to New Zealand direct from Britain and Ireland during the nineteenth century, but extends it to encompass the twentieth century. Drawing on a range of testimony including shipboard journals, personal correspondence, official shipping accounts, and psychiatric institutions, it has two main aims. First, it seeks to assess change over time, beginning with an overview of the nineteenth-century voyage experience. Although evidence exists of excitement and enjoyment at sea, the voyage, irrespective of whether undertaken by sail or steam, was portrayed during this period in a predominantly negative fashion. The twentieth-century transit, by contrast, found more favour. Why this was so is a fundamental concern of the second section of the chapter. The chapter’s second aim is to situate the analysis in a comparative context with the voyage to Australia and the United States, in order to help rectify studies that position migration to New Zealand in isolation spatially and chronologically. While migrants travelled to New Zealand by many diverse routes, including via Australia, what follows focuses on the majority of migrants who arrived direct from Britain and Ireland. Shorter journeys, by contrast, appear elsewhere in this volume.