Voyages of Hope: The Saga of the Bride-Ships - Peter Johnson

I know. The picture is shitty. That's all GoogleImages had for me. Deal.

So, once upon a time there was this country named England, and they were in the middle of an Industrial Revolution, and so lots of people were poor. Because men, in those days, could jaunt about however they pleased, any number of England's youngest and finest and poorest males scrimped and scraped or stowed away, and got themselves to British Columbia. Women, on the other hand, were fairly fixed location-wise, and eventually England found itself with a glut of young(ish), unmarried women barrelling towards spinsterhood. Gasp.

At this same time, a handful of missionaries who'd been sent off to missionize the 'new Britain' (that is, Canada) discovered that the gold-rushers and boom-towners were all living in sin. With no available women but the natives, and inter-racial marriages being illegal, men were shacking up or out whooring and generally living debauched lives full of moonshine and non-British women. Again, gasp. Clearly what this colony needed was an influx of civilized, British wifery.

Enter the bride-ships.

Almost completely independently of each other, and acting at cross-purposes (one to bring wives to stop the sinning, the other to get poor women out of England and into British Columbia where they could find some sort of gainful employment), the Christians and the feminists each sent across a ship or two of lovely British lassies.

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Unfortunately for the lassies, the ships were plagued with all kinds of troubles, and the New Country was a hard one, full of hard men and hard living. Unfortunately for the hard men, no ship brought any more than sixty lassies, and one of those made the fool mistake of stopping off at San Fransisco first, where the girls succumbed to the charms of the Golden State. All in all, the bride-ships were pronounced a bust, and the project was abandoned.

Peter Johnson has done his research for this book, and the topic is certainly an interesting one. And maybe it's the woman in me speaking, but I wanted to hear more about the brides. I mean, you get a chapter of the guys over in BC, which, fine, that part's interesting and necessary, but then you get a whole other chapter on some different guys in BC, which, whatever. Then you get some stuff on the English brou-ha-ha that led to the bride-ships, and then you get a gloomy chapter detailing the first ill-supplied, disaster-fraught voyage. Juicy stuff. The ship arrived earlier than expected, catching everyone on land with their pants down, so to speak. One girl was proposed to on the spot, and the others were whisked away to a slap-dash dorm before they could be snatched up by the crowds of excited menfolk.

Look at me, I'm getting all caught up in this. If I tell you how it all went down, you wont go and read the book for yourself. Maybe that's best, it's not awesome. But it's interesting, and if Victorian-era shenanigans are your thing, then pick it up. Otherwise, I've told you just about all you need to know, and it isn't worth reading for the read.

Six caterpillars.