Last Voyage of SS Dacca BY CHRISTINE TIMONEY 15 May 1890 - The sea was smooth as glass and a light breeze blew as SS Dacca, under Captain Dugald Stuart, cleared Suez in fine weather just after midnight and set course for five miles west of Brothers Island. She was sixteen days into an expected seventy-five day voyage, her eleventh from London to Queensland Ports, having already dropped passengers at Naples and taken on coal at Port Said. Around 8am some of her 464 passengers slept while others watched with mild curiosity as the ship passed the Big Brothers Island light. There would be plenty more daylight in which to take stock of the wide expanse of the Red Sea opening gradually before them, perhaps a gentle reminder of the even wider expanses yet to come when they would reach the open ocean. As the day wore on, the monotony was eased by sightings of majestic stingrays, pods of dolphins and even the occasional pair of turtles still courting, though the spring mating season was nearly over. With no land in view all day the passengers settled into their largely uneventful daily rhythm, contemplating the unknown life that lay ahead when this seemingly endless journey would finally be over. At 6.30 next morning, barely an hour after daybreak, the calm was shattered when the ship struck a glancing blow on Daedalus Shoal, a small rocky outcrop that rises in deep water to lie in wait just below the surface. Upon inspection she was found to have six feet of water in the forward hold. Evacuation was now the only option. Evacuation? Out here? Evacuation – to where? Lifeboats were lowered and the doctor threatened to put a bullet through the first man who got into a boat before more than 250 women and children were safely taken care of. In a letter home, written within a day after the shipwreck, a female survivor describes how events unfolded. “We were going along beautifully, without a hitch, until yesterday morning, when I was startled as I lay in my berth by the doctor who came and told me we had struck on the shoal, and all hands were to get on deck and make for the boats. How they were all got out of the ship, clothed and with their lifebelts on, seems amazing to me now… I was in my night-dress, dressing gown and slippers. The doctor came running along and put a lifebelt over me, and again as he passed he put a hat on my head; otherwise I should have gone over worse clad than I was.” Among those lining up for the lifeboats were nearly two hundred single female emigrants, sixty-three of them Irish girls. The promise of a new life as a domestic servant in the colonies now counted for nothing as each one scanned the empty blue watery horizons with wide eyes and understood just how fragile her life had suddenly become. 80 | THE IRISH SCENE
Have you ever flown between Ireland and Australia in the cramped confines of a modern aircraft? Have you ever wondered what the long sea voyages undertaken by nineteenth century Irish emigrants were really like? Christine Timoney, a committee member of the Irish Special Interest Group at Family History WA, first took a personal interest in the 1890 voyage of SS Dacca after reading a 1938 obituary for her grandmother Honorah McMahon, which placed 19-year-old Tipperaryborn Honorah on this ill-fated voyage. On further investigation she found Honorah’s name on the outgoing passenger list not of Dacca but of Dorunda, which left London a few weeks after the shipwreck and picked up a group of Dacca survivors in the Red Sea, conveying them on to Queensland. Though surviving the sinking of Dacca is not Honorah’s story after all, it is the story of 158 other Irish emigrants – most of them domestic servants, labourers and farm labourers – and deserves to be told.
