On a winter’s day in London, with clear blue skies and a chill to the bone, four hundred men, women and children had gathered on a bustling, crowded London Dock and waited to board the ship Bombay. It was the 22nd of November 1864.
The docks were the gateway to an empire, and the provider for a hungry, consuming London. Filled with exotic foods and smells, costumes and peoples from all corners of the world, it made for a wondrous sight. The four hundred passengers had came from all the corners of the British Isles, from villages and hamlets to great industrial cities, the Scottish Highlands and Welsh Valleys, Cornwall coves and Kent fields. They brought Catholicism and Anglican beliefs, education and trade union and upper class privilege… But, they soon will have one thing in common… sharing the experience of a epic voyage of survival from London, England to Auckland, New Zealand.
Below is a record of the passengers names taken from the New Zealand on the 31st of March, 1865. The following chapters is a detailed look at who they were and what they did on arrival in the country. These people will go on to be the first women in the world to vote, with sons returning to Europe to die for the British Empire in the fields of France and Belgium, and grandsons in the sands of Egypt and in the air over London, and one grandchild will be the first to climb Mount Everest.
THE SHIP BOMBAY! 