Tracing a ship deserter: was he a crew member who ‘jumped ship’?

Issues with immigration records

There are many reasons why we fail to find details of a particular immigrant in shipping and passenger records:

• the relevant records may not have survived
• passenger names may have been incorrectly spelled or transcribed
• or the records may contain too little information to accurately identify an individual.

Having examined these possibilities, it is worth considering: might one of your ancestors have been a seaman who jumped ship?

Finding deserters

From the start of European settlement there were instances of ships’ crew deserting on arrival in Australia.

Records of these early deserters may be scattered through colonial secretary’s letters and papers, and in local court archives. Surviving records have not always been indexed. Mostly, we have to rely on newspaper reports for the names of individuals who deserted ship before the 1850s. Trove digitised historical newspapers are a great resource for locating details of these early ship desertions. However, newspaper reports do not always include the names of the individual deserters and problems with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can complicate searching if the newsprint is blurred or faded

Desertion: a serious offence

Desertions of crew members were advertised because they caused significant disruption to sailing schedules and so were viewed seriously by ships’ masters and owners. Rewards were offered for the arrest and return of offenders and the public were warned that harbouring a deserter could have serious consequences.

Police gazettes

The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 saw a huge increase in crew deserting ship to try their luck on the goldfields. This provoked authorities to even greater efforts to capture and punish offenders. From around 1852, with the publication of the first police gazettes, there was a more systematic approach to recording and apprehending offenders of all sorts, including ship deserters.

Consequences of desertion

If apprehended, deserters faced charges under the Mercantile Shipping Act and could be fined and/or imprisoned before being returned to their ships. Not all deserters were returned to their ships. Deserters who were British citizens might remain in Australia after paying their fines and perhaps completing a prison term (anything from a week to six months).

Other nationalities were not always so fortunate. Deserters from non-British countries were often returned to their ships or deported after serving time in prison. There was therefore an added incentive not to be caught and it was not unusual for deserters to change their names, adding another layer of complexity to the search for their records.

Dutch seaman Borgert Klaassen appears to have been one of the exceptions.

NSW Government Gazette reports his desertion from the vessel Eliza Stewart in 1860.

Through ancestry.com we discover that just one year before deserting in Australia the then 21-year-old native of Emden, Germany, had been a crew member aboard the vessel Phoenix out of the port of Bremen.

Just over a year after deserting Borgert Klaassen and a fellow deserter from the vessel Eliza Stewart, Thomas P. Mozztem, gave themselves up and were duly charged with desertion and sentenced to imprisonment.

However, after serving their prison terms, both were released into the community again.

In 1863 Borgert Klaassen married a Mary Connor in Queensland, where he continued to live until his death in 1911.

Government responsibility for deserters

19th century ship desertions in Australia were a matter for state authorities. State based records include reports published in police gazettes and court records held in the relevant state archives.

After Federation in 1901 ship deserters increasingly came under the jurisdiction of the Australian Government and many 20th century records of ship desertions (approximately 1902-1980) are listed under the name of the individual deserter in Basic search | RecordSearch | National Archives of Australia (naa.gov.au).

Details in the files vary. There are both general registers of deserters during various periods as well as entries for individual seamen.

Resources:

Online:

• ancestrylibrary.com. Free onsite at State Library of Queensland.
• National Archives of Australia
• Trove digitised newspapers & gazettes

Police gazettes

State Library holds police gazettes for most Australian states and in a variety of formats. Electronic versions of the gazettes provide very useful search interfaces and are available for the following states and date ranges.

• New South Wales [1862-1938]
• Queensland [1864-1943]
• South Australia [1862-1947]
• Victoria [1855-1924]
• Tasmania [1861-1933]

A selection of police gazettes is also available via findmypast.com, which you can access for free onsite at State Library.

Indexed records of deserters

• Ships’ deserters, 1852-1900: including stragglers, strays and deserters from H.M. ships / J. Melton
• Queensland ship deserters, 1862-1911 / compiled by Merle D, Grinly.
• An alphabetical list of deserters from ships, taken from the Australian Archives. Covers deserters from South Australian.ports,1852-1890.
• Ship deserters. 1891-1952 Adelaide and other South Australian ports / compiled by Frank W Hall
• Victorian deserters from ships index, 1853-1880 / indexed and published by Lynn Wurm
• Victoria, Australia, Deserter, Discharged and prisoner Crew lists, 1852-1925 available via ancestry.com
  The original records are held at the Public Record Office of Victoria. Details include the date of desertion, the name of the ship and its origin, the name of the seaman and his place of birth, age, height and colour of eyes and hair.
• Deserters from the Port of Geelong, 1852-1925, available via ancestry.com