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This is the Brig Amity

This is the Amity.She’s not a ship or a boat. But a Brig.Feel her timbers. Listen to her sounds.And think again about the sheer courage of your forefathers, men, women and children sailing in such wondrous contraptions of wood, canvas and rope to the ends of the earth, to the new lands, to this Australia. For the Brig was the half-ton truck, the well-worn ute, the general carrier of her day.One third of all the vessels in Lloyd’s register of shipping were classed as brigs when the Amity was in her prime. But in size the old Amity was less than half way up the scale. Even so she was a grand old girl, built for hard wear on a hard ocean some would say the hardest of all. For the Amity was an Atlantic trader, a Western Ocean blood-and-gutser.They launched her in 1816 from a yard at St. John in the Canadian province of New Brunswick and she was named Amity because the word meant ‘Friendship’.A great war had lately ended, Napoleon’s war.And the euphoria of peace made ‘Friendship’ the popular theme of the age.She was a shipwright’s joy, a beauty of black birch and hackmatack, the large tree of North America, copper fastened, bluff and sturdy and more than a little wet in any kind of sea.In old terms the Amity was 75 feet long, 22 feet wide and 11 feet deep inside the hull. And small at 142 tons burden the modern gross registered tonnage. Except for a change of the formula since then. Terms in which, as now, had nothing to do with weight but indicated the volume of the hull at 100 cubic feet to the ton, very small alongside the big ships.And yet powerful.A Brig with her 2 masts was the smallest of the square riggers with great driving power for long trips to chancy places. Look aloft at her masts, the fore and the main crossed by the yards with the huge coarses first then the top sails and the t’gallants above and the royal the highest of all with headsails on the bowsprit and jibboom poking out there in front and the spanker on the boom of the stern.Like a weathervane, giving balance for the steering. 85 Feet up the top of the main mast and you ran up there in the dark of night often enough because the sea will be waiting for no man and gave few second chances and to delay the shortening of sail might cost the brig her life.The average lifespan for a seaman before the mast was only 40 years when the Amity sailed the seas. Many seas: 7 years on the Atlantic and then she was bought by farmers in Scotland, the Ralston family, Ayrshire men, wanting transport to a new life in Tasmania.Now she was Noah’s Ark almost, carrying father and mother, a clutch of sons*, a bull and 2 cows, dogs, chickens and all the tools for starting and running a farm, even a threshing machine.6 Months out of the Irish Sea, down and across the Atlantic, the doldrums and the Equator to drop away from South America and pick up the 40s.Imagine this old girl in the roaring 40s, careening on to find the Cape and on from there through the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific for Van Diemen’s Land: Tasmania and hope. And then they sold her to the colonial government in Sydney.On a November day in 1826 a middle-aged army major joined his new command: 18 privates, 1 sergeant and a captain with a labour force of 23 convicts and a store keeper as well as a surgeon. Major Edmund Lockyer was under orders which laid the foundations of modern Western Australia.He was to establish a settlement at King George the Third Sound.His transport was the Amity and she sailed about 6 weeks later into Princess Royal Harbour to drop anchor a stone’s throw from where you’re standing now, on Christmas Day, December the 25th 1826. And they were glad of it after a shocking voyage half of it in foul winds, gales which had beaten her back and out of Bass Strait to take the outer passage around Van Diemen’s Land. She lost a top mast there and a length of her bulwarks and the cabin skylight up there above your heads. All smashed in and rolling water screaming down.They’d been forced ashore to hunt kangaroo because the meat supplies were rotten, and to replace undrinkable water. The stuff had been sent on board in sugar casks. Think of that, think of it all: 60 odd men cooped up down here in the howling storms, cold, wet and sick. And then in the summer heat in the days before hot showers or decent diet let alone lavatories.After years of government service on the Australian coast the Amity was sold back into private ownership for whaling, sealing, trading, anything. Working out of Hobart getting older, shabbier, beginning to look rather out of date.Until 4 o’clock on a black morning in the Tasmanian winter of 1845, once again in a gale, once again in Bass Strait where 30 long years of hard use came suddenly, terrifyingly to a hard end. The Amity died on an uncharted sandbank on a voyage to fetch sheep for a butcher.The crew survived. No one cared very much, she was just another workhorse soon forgotten. Until we remembered. Look around. This is our memorial.

This is the Amity

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