Hard down! Hard down!. Captain Jack Isbester
voyages lasted from three to four and a half months, including a month or so in the destination port, and were separated by no more than a few days of leave – insufficient time for a return to Shetland. That is not surprising. When I was 20, life at sea was fascinating – there were skills to learn, sights to see and adventures to be had – and time away from home was no hardship. John Isbester did not even have parents to whom to return.
He next joined the barque Beulah, 746 tons nett, for what was to prove a very different voyage. In the space of 20 months she went from Liverpool to Sydney in Cape Breton Island, thence to Darien in Georgia, USA, next to Pensacola in Florida, and from there to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Following a month or so in Buenos Aires, Beulah rounded Cape Horn carrying John Isbester into the Pacific for the first time and working her way north to Portland in Oregon, USA, close to the Canadian border. Her cargo was probably discharged in Portland, and she then moved to Albany, still in Oregon, to load wheat for Europe. As was very common she proceeded via Cape Horn to Queenstown, Ireland, for orders, from where she went immediately to Liverpool to discharge, the passage from Albany having taken four months.
John Isbester paid off on 8 April 1875, at the right time of year for a bit of a holiday and probably with a few pounds in his pocket. He took more than five months’ leave at that time and it is likely that he returned to Shetland for some or all of that summer. While there, staying at Haggersta or visiting his aunt and uncle, he may have learnt that his absent father was in Sydney, Australia.
In September he was back in Liverpool to find a ship. He’d done India, he’d done North and South America, east and west: where was new and where would be interesting? Australia sprang to mind – he might meet his father – and John Isbester joined the iron ship North Riding, 1,432 tons gross, as able seaman for the voyage to Sydney, which port was reached on 19 December, in comfortable time for Christmas 1875. North Riding seems to have spent about five weeks in Sydney before proceeding to Adelaide and then to Port Wakefield in the Spencer Gulf to load wheat, before returning to Adelaide to clear for Queenstown, Ireland, for orders. Seven of the ship’s ABs, including two Shetland men,11 deserted towards the end of the ship’s stay in Sydney in late January 1876. John Isbester, however, remained to complete the voyage in Liverpool paying off, in August 1876, with a healthy £30.7s.11d.12
My grandfather used to mention that he had met his own father on his own early voyages to Australia.13 In fact this was the only early voyage that he made to Australia, though he called there regularly during the last 15 years of his life.
He was of course referring to my great-grandfather, John Isbister, who had probably left Shetland in the 1850s, and earned a living intermittently as a gold miner on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island for the better part of 50 years between 1860 and 1911. Like other miners who reached the area in the 1860s he had probably moved to the west coast from gold mining in Victoria in the 1850s and Otago in the early 1860s,14 having first reached Australia as a seaman. The evidence that he and his younger brother Henry spent their declining years and died on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island is convincing, but there is evidence that he mined for gold in Australia from time to time as well. An item in a New Zealand newspaper describing gold mining in Red Rock, New South Wales, Australia, in 1887 contains an editor’s note reading ‘John Isbester, late of Kumara [a town on the New Zealand west coast], has a claim next to the aforementioned party’.15 In view of family tradition it is likely that he had several spells of mining in Australia and was mining in New South Wales in 1876 when my grandfather was there aboard North Riding, as well as in 1887. Sydney would be the natural place for a gold miner to go for a break or when travelling to or from New Zealand.
During the five weeks that North Riding remained in Sydney there would have been plenty of time for the Shetland network – the informal contacts between people of Shetland origin throughout the world – to bring news of family and friends both near and far. Meeting other Shetland folk in far parts of the world was not at all unusual, but was certainly a matter of interest. A number of encounters of this sort are described in my grandfather’s correspondence from his later years. It is tantalising to reflect that we will never know what passed between my goldmining great-grandfather in his fifties and his 25-year-old son, an able seaman with his future before him when they met for the first time. Did my great-grandfather leave Shetland unaware that he was to become a father and only learn the truth years later? Did he intend to return? And if so, was he prevented by some difficulty, or did he decide that Sarah Anderson was not the woman for him?
Some feeling for the special nature of life in the New Zealand goldfields during the gold rush days can be gained from the account16 of the 1909 annual reunion of the West Coast Old Boys.
After doing ample justice to the good things provided the toast of The King was duly honoured. [Officers were elected] and the health of Mr Russell the newly-elected president was drunk. The chairman proposed the toast of West Coast and West Coasters and was ably responded to by Messrs J. Keating, J. Jackson and J. Kerr, who paid a high tribute to the pioneer work done by the early arrivals on the Coast. The toast of Departed West Coasters was drunk in silence.
Mr E. Sheedy proposed the toast of Old Sports and held that the West Coast had turned out some excellent athletes. The toast was ably responded to by Messrs D. McKay, J. Evans, L. Broad and C. North. Mr Ashton proposed the toast of Commercial and Professional Interests and [it was] responded to by Messrs Joyce, Kerr and Cunliffe.
Mr Joyce proposed the toast of the Pioneers of the West Coast, those who made our roads and developed our district. Messrs Splaine, Hinkley and Isbester responded.
Several other appropriate toasts were proposed and responded to and an excellent musical programme rendered. The singing of Auld Lang Syne brought a most successful re-union to a close.
By then my great-grandfather was a man of 84. It sounds like a good party!
John arranged his brother Henry’s funeral in 1906, though there is nothing to suggest that they actually worked alongside one another over the years. At the time of his death Henry was described as a ‘miner, highly respected throughout Westland’.17 The brothers seem to have mined separately, and there were clearly several other unrelated Isbisters in New Zealand towards the end of the 19th century. Tantalisingly the New Zealand newspapers of that period frequently refer to the activities of Isbester or Isbister18 without giving a forename. Another younger brother, Robert, also appears to have been in New Zealand for some years until the 1870s, though I have found no evidence that he died there. Like his brother John, he may have decided to move to Australia but, unlike John, decided to stay there. Nowadays there are plenty of Isbesters and Isbisters in Australia!
In John Isbister’s will, written three years before his death when he was 83, he describes himself as formerly19 a miner of Woodstock, Westland. After payment of his debts he specifies that a sum of no more than £30 sterling was to be used for ‘paying the costs of my funeral and in erecting a Headstone over my grave and concreting it over and railing it in’, instructions that were carried out.20 The total value of the estate was declared to be less than £100 sterling, and the balance was to be left to Helen Robina Wallace (née Morgan), wife of William Wallace of Kumara, Westland, Bushman.21 (A bushman was a logger or forestry worker.22) It is likely that Helen Wallace was John Isbister’s carer before he entered hospital.