Mobility, body and space: emigrant voyages to Australia, 1830s–1880s

Abstract This article uses nineteenth-century migration-themed texts and images as a starting point for investigating the production of various patterns of seaborne mobilities en route to colonial Australia from the 1830s to the 1880s. Within the mobility framework, the floating world of emigrant ships provides a major venue for truthful representations of passengers’ daily practices on board ship in general and maritime historiography in particular. It is argued that the interplay between body and space at different scales enables us to foreground the mobile, therapeutic, and affective dimensions of migration along the lines of class and gender. To this end, the article considers the production of seaborne mobilities within a larger context of maritime culture by engaging with four central thoughts: ship-based mobilities and mobile bodies, bodily motion and spatial mobilities, bodily health and therapeutic mobilities, as well as bodily senses and affective mobilities. These central thoughts, the article further asserts, direct us towards considering how the ship comes to be the prime site for evoking the imagery of mobile Britons, especially with regard to the various ways in which every-day mobilities are intrinsically embodied, practiced and performed through a body in transit.


Introduction
[ … ] our good ship rolls us about in a frightful style, every meal time we have to hold on to the tables and seats and keep our cups from wandering all over the cabin.During the night, we have been constantly on the move, first one side then the other [ … ]. (Heathcote 1874, unpaginated) These lines from a shipboard diary kept by Ally Heathcote on board a steam vessel marked the start of her migrant voyage from England to Australia at the age of 19.They were intimately bound up with a young female's awareness of the ship's uneven movement across and through water when 'leaving one home to make another in the opposite extreme of her Majesty's dominions' (Heathcote 1874, unpaginated) with her parents and two siblings.Heathcote's experience offered partial glimpses of the rolling motion of a ship to make possible great voyages by sea.The Winefred Marvel also picked up this idea of maritime transport, showing how a newspaper launched on an emigrant ship could provide a vehicle for keeping a daily record of the outbound journey to the colonies of Australia. 1 To his fellow passengers, the newspaper editor explained: 'the record of our voyage which will be embodied in the pages of our little journal may serve as a pleasing memento of the then past'.The paper 'will enable them at little trouble to despatch home to their friends a faithful picture of their everyday life "upon the ocean"' (Hetherington 1875, 5).Apart from being 'a pleasing memento', the paper aims to present everyday life at sea faithfully in the passage from London to Brisbane.Emigrant passengers' everyday experiences on board ship, in this instance, form a backdrop to patterns of maritime mobilities in the heyday of migration.How seaborne passengers could contribute to everyday discourses of mobility through their bodily experiences of moving is the key issue to be addressed.
Mobility, a by-word for 'the hallmark of modern times' (Cresswell and Uteng 2008, 1) has become the evocative word of 'a way of life' closely aligned with 'being on the move' (Urry 2002).The theoretical approach to the mobility turn (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006) or the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller andUrry 2006, 2016) covers a variety of topics and processes, attracting various scholarly audiences to analyse the social and cultural implications of forms of movement and motion (Urry 2007;Cresswell 2006;Adey 2010b;Jensen 2013;Adey et al. 2014).Mobilities scholarship takes a more explicitly interdisciplinary approach to the field of migration studies for illuminating the underlying concept of seaborne mobility or watery mobility expressed in myriad ways on a variety of temporal and spatial scales (Anderson and Peters 2014;Monios and Wilmsmeier 2018;Sutherland 2022).Alternatively, increased attention to the formation and construction of mobilities of people, things, objects, events, and ideas upon the ocean (Cresswell 2010;Grieco and Urry 2011) develops insight into the fluidity of everyday mobile practices in spatial terms.The mobile body has also emerged as a key theme in mobilities research.'The movements of our body, or even parts of our body', as Cresswell (2006, 9) writes, convey important information about the production of mobile lives saturated with 'the spatialization of time and temporalization of space ' (2006, 4).Bodily practices and movements register 'part of the play of representational power' (Cresswell 2006, 145).Accordingly, the critical nexus of bodyspace-mobility interrelations is crucial to our understanding of how 'the body produces the act of mobility and experiences it as a process that changes and alters the body', as indicated in 'the distinct socio-spatial configurations of each mobile practice' (Mathieson 2015, 14).
Equally important is the interconnection between body and space that offers a way to interrogate migration and everyday matters (Ho and Hatfield 2011;Merriman 2012) in social and material terms.By capturing the whole experience of moving, one can begin to understand the ways in which the conflation between practice and mobility produces 'spaces and stories -spatial stories' (Cresswell and Merriman 2011, 5).More specifically, the conflation demonstrates how the diasporic and unsettled body's movement coincides with the rhythms of mobility (Cresswell 2010;Adey 2010b;Edensor 2010).The current understanding of everyday mobility is, however, limited by sociological theories which cannot fully present a broader historical geography of bodies at sea.The bodily experience of being at sea, as Pietsch (2016) remarks, implies an increased preoccupation with seaborne passengers' daily practices and spatial behaviour on the waves.Pietsch's statement enhances a historical understanding of migrant experiences of constraint, disturbed temporal perception, and spatial disruption on board ship, which resonates with Hassam's notion of the narratability of Australian journeys in his discussion of British emigrants' shipboard diaries, particularly through the lens of class and gender.Essentially, bodily movements aboard a moving ship help us to envisage a wide range of migrant experiences within the framework of maritime temporalities.
This article uses nineteenth-century migration-themed texts and images, including ship newspapers, emigrant guidebooks, shipboard diaries, periodical articles, sketches, and engravings, as a starting point for investigating various patterns of seaborne mobilities en route to colonial Australia from the 1830s to the 1880s.Within the mobility framework, the floating world of emigrant ships provides a major venue for truthful representations of passengers' daily practices on board ship in general and maritime historiography in particular.It is argued that the interplay between body and space at different scales enables us to foreground the mobile, therapeutic, and affective dimensions of migration along the lines of class and gender.To develop this argument further, the article considers how institutionalization, incarceration, and over-proximity define the features of seaborne mobilities by engaging with these questions.How do emigrant passengers enhance their performative capacities alongside ship-based mobilities?To what extent do they benefit from therapeutic mobility activities for health and well beings?And how do they affectively experience ship space during the voyage out?Answers to these questions would prompt a way of thinking about the close ties between a passenger's mobile body and a moving ship from the perspective of everyday matters.Specifically, the article is organized around four central thoughts: ship-based mobilities and mobile bodies, bodily motion and spatial mobilities, bodily health and therapeutic mobilities, as well as bodily senses and affective mobilities.These central thoughts, the article further asserts, direct us towards considering how bodily movement and embodied mobility intersect during the sea voyage to Australia.As will be shown in the following, the verbal and nonverbal texts of migration-themed publications provide a rich resource for understanding how the spatio-temporal interplay between mobility practices and seaborne passengers contains traces of the complexities of journeying in a class-ridden and gender-differentiated society at sea.

Ship-based mobilities and mobile bodies
Following the discovery of gold in Australia colonies in 1851, a growing number of British migrants rushed toward the diggings to seek their fortunes.With the aid of immigration policies and assistance schemes, around 1.3 million free migrants arrived in Australia between 1851 and 1880 (Hassam 1994, 7).They travelled to the Australian colonies by clipper, steamer and liner, the longest sea journey that took between 70 and 150 days (Pietsch 2016, 212) at the time.Approximately 10,000 passenger ship voyages were made to Australia (Staniforth 1992, 50), and a majority of passengers travelled in steerage.A ship usually carried three or four hundred passengers and sometimes doubled that number.With the advent of shipping technology and navigation skills (especially the introduction of iron hulls and steam power in the late 1870s), the amendment of Passenger Acts, as well as the competition between passenger liner companies, the passage to Australia became faster and more comfortable than ever.Population movement facilitated by this significant change over time indicates the movement of passenger vessels highlights an age of increased mobility and helps to intensify the flow between metropole and colony, be it enforced or voluntary.Given this, 'the British were highly mobile in the great "Age of Migration"' (Richards 2019, 38).As summed up in General Hints to Emigrants, "Man is essentially migratory -ever restless, ever on the move [ … ].The history of man may indeed be said to be the history of emigration' (1866, 1).This is particularly true of Britain's maritime history when it comes to the mobile and unsettled nature of migrants' seafaring and oceanic lives (Hasty and Peters 2012;Anim-Addo, Hasty, and Peters 2015).More often than not, emigrant ships figure as a representational site, a micro reproduction of social hierarchy governed by strict gender roles, for the articulation of seaborne mobilities in the context of maritime historiography.
The mobile experience of emigrant passengers, whether outbound or homeward, reveals an important aspect of ship-based mobilities.'Voices of the Sea', an anonymous poem appearing in the Sobraon Gossip, associates the ship's movement with the words like 'rolling', 'motion', 'the restless ocean', and 'the shifting tide' (Profugus 1875, 19), which, for the homeward-bound passengers, accounts for a typical experience of maritime mobilities.Likewise, the Shannon Gazette's references to the outbound vessel as 'a little movable islet adrift on the vast ocean' and 'a grain of sand sailing in the infinity of space' (1879, 1) reinforce how ships function as agents in the production of different scales of movement while moving on the water in the middle of nowhere.Through the medium of mobilities of ships or shipped mobilities (Anim-Addo, Hasty, and Peters 2014), we can image the ordinary, daily reality of what it was to live aboard a nineteenth-century emigrant ship.A long sea voyage was frequently a dangerous trial for oceancrossing passengers, which involved the risks of storm, death, disease, confinement, and shipwreck.Life at sea was uncomfortable, especially in the cramped, ill-ventilated and damp steerage accommodations.The sketch of the scene (Figure 1) concerning a group of steerage  passengers at the table for breakfast is exemplary in this respect.During a storm at sea, '[i]t is a sad trouble at meal-times, when plates, cups and saucers dance wildly on the sloping table, the loaves are shot from the basket at the heads of the eaters, and one is soused with the warm tea from his own tin mug [ … ]' ('Emigrating' 1887, 190).A sense of bodily unease and unrest is visually created through the act of voyaging by ship, which evokes precisely everyday notions of disruptive mobilities across the sea.Dinner on the 'Sobraon' in high seas (Figure 2), as pictured by Harold John Graham in 1881, is a further example of the turbulent sea, which illustrates how food, drink, plates and cutlery slide onto the edge of the table when the ship pitches and rolls during dinner time.However, the passengers (likely officers and cabin passengers) are not disturbed by the rolling waves.Instead, they, untroubled by the disruptive movement of the sea, try to keep themselves steady for dinner.Eating practices in this sense offer a means to illuminate how the passengers remain calm and stationary so as to enhance their bodily control during the rolling motion of the ship.In this way, the body at sea is underpinned by a double dialectic of ordering (well-seated passengers) and disordering (chaotic dinner table), a mode of being which emerges during the experience of ship-based mobilities.
An emigrant passenger named John Joseland portrayed how life on board was immersed in disruptive mobility in the passage from Plymouth to Melbourne in 1853.His diary revealed how noise was produced by the moveable things in the cabin when rolling in heavy seas: 'We were awoke by the noise of boxes casks etc., getting adrift and rolling from one side to another as if determined to break down our partitions.Then again the breaking of bottles in the cabin, the crockery in the pantry, the unsettling of water pails, basins etc, etc' (Hassam 1994, 104).Similarly, to its on-board passengers, the White Star Journal gives a comprehensive account of how they will experience mobility and disruption under changing weather conditions.As the Journal makes clear, 'it is the nature of ships to croak and groan, and pitch and roll about, and to make desperate plunges, now to one side, now to the other' (White Star Journal 1951, 1).At a certain level, the uneven movement of the ship is inseparable from the production of maritime rhythms arising from chaotic scenes on the journey to the southern hemisphere.The ship serves as a reference point that tells how mobility as 'a chaotic thing' (Cresswell 2006, 6) is created and experienced across the sea.
Fundamentally, the experience of maritime travel is the entry point to understanding 'the instability of space on board ship, the combination of an enclosed space and the moving vessel' (Hassam 1994, 68).More than this, the mobility of ships involves the dynamics of 'mobile spatialities' (Dusinberre and Wenzlhuemer 2016, 157) intertwined with the popular association of an emigrant ship with 'our floating colony' (Somersetshire News 1869, 3) and 'our floating commonwealth' (Aconcagua Times 1879, 3).The word 'floating' indicates how oceanic mobilities emerge 'within two interlocking spatial contexts: the ship, as a physical as well as socially and culturally constructed space; and the material environment of the sea' (Liebich and Publicover 2021, 29).This echoes Michel Foucault's notion of ships as 'Heterotopias' or 'a piece of floating space, a placeless place' in the watery world (1998,(184)(185).The enduring connection between ship, space and place thus shows how mobility is linked with a polarized understanding of travel and dwelling, embarkation and disembarkation, generating the narratives and discourses of movement, meaning and practice throughout time and across space.

Bodily motion and spatial mobilities
The ship, despite its spatial limits, functions as a fluid space for passengers to engage in a variety of bodily practices amid flux and motion at sea.As Urry (2007, 48) states, the body 'senses as it moves' and therefore boosts awareness of kinaesthetic sensations through movement.This point is central to an analysis of the so-called 'kinaesthetic movement-space' (Jensen, Sheller, and Wind 2015, 365), a manifestation of the sensations and aesthetics of body in motion within the context of temporalities (Dant 2004;Jensen 2013).Everyday mobilities, in the shape of emigrant passengers' on-board activities, constitute the fabric of seafaring life.Most of emigrants' daily schedules aboard a moving ship, such as washing, eating, sleeping, cleaning, reading, writing and worship, replicate the land-based practices they do on shore.The bodily experience of being at sea through mobile practices evokes a sense of everyday familiarity that helps migrants to stabilize their life at sea.One illustration of this is the Gull, in which a general view of life on an emigrant ship is depicted through the cultural practices of single girls' reading under the guidance of a surgeon (Figure 3) and single men's eating between decks (Figure 4).Both images centralize the notion that mobile practices on board ship, as typified by reading and eating, are spatially contingent.This perspective also elucidates that the division of activities between male and female is regulated by bodily boundaries within the ideology of class and gender in a movement-space.From a gender perspective, however, Figure 3 satirises the ship surgeon's performance of masterful masculinity and his sexualized devotion to young girls.It ridicules Dr. Macdonald's inability to show his medical abilities as he neglects the duties towards the single men and married people.He prefers the company of the single girls by attending to their own interests during the daytime: 'he was with them, reading poetry, chatting, and helping as a rule, a special one of the fair flock to compose poetry or learn recitations' (Cameron 1884, 194).This is reminiscent of John Maffey, a sea physician whose time was taken almost entirely with editing a ship newspaper rather than attending the sick passengers on the Parramatta heading to Australia (1882-1883).
Keeping the classes and sexes separate was a priority for the officials to set up a hierarchical moral code to govern life at sea.Strict class boundaries determined different levels of shipboard accommodation and thereby restricted movement on board ship.Privileged first-class passengers were entitled to private cabins, yet the poorly ventilated and cramped steerage quarters, the very embodiment of the close proximity of ship space, were divided into three areas to accommodate single men, single women, and married couples and children, without any privacy.Such a social and spatial division of the ship is similar to Goffman's concept of a total institution 'where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life ' (1968, 11).Following Goffman, we may conceive of the ship as a total institution in which the same single authority conducts passengers' tightly scheduled activities.In these terms, incarceration, institutionalization and enforced over-proximity constitute three important elements featuring the body-mobility-nexus within cramped shipboard space.Passengers' mobile bodies are institutionalized to perform their roles under coercive control based on 'a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials' (Goffman 1968, 17).This reminds us of the matron who, like prison warders with locks and keys, has complete authority over single women aboard ship.John Hood's shipboard diary speaks of gender segregation enforced by the matron en route to New South Wales: 'At nine at night all the women are called below; a matron superintends their arrangements, and no communication whatever is after this permitted with our sex, from whom they are divided by a wooden grating' (Hood 1843, 11).Hood also recounts how an English farmer emigrant's break into the women's apartment, the forbidden division of the ship, leads to the surgeon and the captain's discussion of using irons as punishment (1843,(19)(20).Irons or confinement upon bread-and-water, for Hood, represents a strong punishment for securing order and security.The point is that '[f]irmness is the very first requisite in the management of masses -prudent promptitude the second' (Hood 1843, 54).
On the Australian route, single female migrants were bound together, and their on-board activities were highly regulated and disciplined.To avoid physical and moral dangers, single women were incarcerated to prevent from any communication with single male passengers and male crew, whereas middle-class women could visit the cabin, the poop deck, and the dining saloon.'Female Emigration' (Figure 5) calls attention to the restricted bodily motions of single female migration on board ship.The lithograph, consisting of ten small scenes with captions, gives a powerful visual expression to the poor mental and physical well-being of single women emigrants in transit.Every two women share the same hammock with little space between them, and they are 'fed on A mouldy biscuit and water pouch per day', while 'the Superintendent Captain Chaplain &c Guzzle themselves with "3 courses a dessert"'.Apart from the shortcomings of government emigration, the lithograph highlights the strict incarceration of on-board single women.Like portable and transportable objects, their agency is taken away by the action of being emigrated to Australia.Fanny Shorter, one of the thirty-two assisted single woman emigrants voyaging to Australia, wrote about their regularized and segmented life during the journey.They 'are divided on deck from the married people by a wooden fence & a constable stands by the gate to see that no one talks to their friends' (Shorter 1884, 4-5).Unlike the distressed single women in Figure 5, however, Shorter has space for writing and for giving voice to their jolly moods: 'We girls have not suffered from much melancholy/for we united our efforts to pass the time jolly/With working and singing to the best of our notion/And also danced off the effects of the Oacean' (Shorter 1884, 68).Through the lens of class and gender, we can also see how the distressed needlewomen are controlled under male guidance on deck and between decks ('Emigration ' 1850, 156).The distressed needlewoman has become a representative working-class figure in a hierarchical society ever since the publication of Thomas Hood's 1843 poem 'Song of the Shirt'.'The Song of the Ship', a parody of Hood's poem written by Colonel C. W. Grant during his passage to India and printed in the London Journal for 1853, appeared in the Nemesis Times to illustrate a female cabin passenger's sense of tediousness during the passage: With features pallid and wan, With colourless cheek and lip, A lady sat on the quarter-deck, Watching the heaving ship.
Pitch, pitch, pitch, As her bow in the water dip, In a tremulous voice, with a nervous twitch, She sang the Song of the Ship.("The Song of the Ship" 1877, 3) The stanza above evokes the ironic image of a lady's endeavour to adapt herself to the flux of mobility and her moans of stagnation at sea, an image contrasting with the hardships that a needlewoman suffers on land.
A mobile ship may enable or disable its passengers' daily practices in relation to spatial and temporal understandings of life on board.A body's capacity to act means one's physical experience of movement and activity at sea, which unravels the dynamics between mobility and immobility at the same time.Often-cited examples are emigrant passengers' inactivity or inability to continue their land-based rituals within the liminal spaces aboard ship.As revealed in The Three Colonies of Australia, 'taking a berth in a ship to Australia is like taking apartments with no exit for four months'.The analogy between 'berth' and 'apartment with no exit' raises the question concerning how a travelling body could be immobilized or stuck in a sleeping accommodation where 'the passengers stand the risk of being, if not quite stifled, half poisoned' (Sidney 1852, 265).Bodies unsettled by the waves, an integral part of the everyday routine on board ship, become the key to understanding a kinaesthetic sense of bodily motion.Much the same applies to 'Life Afloat and Life Ashore', an article appearing in the Superb Gazette during the voyage to Melbourne.The article singles out the disadvantages of life afloat-'the limited space [ … ] allotted to each individual on board ship' and 'the difficulty in dressing, walking about, &c., when the ship is rolling' (Hibernius 1882, 2).The implication is that confined space on board violates the idea of comfort, 'a fluid, frictionless form of mobility' in connection with 'the material conditions of convenience and bodily ease' (Stafford 2019, 584).A passenger's inability to move freely through the cramped living conditions represents one of the restrictions on daily activities during long-term sea travel.
Thomas Warre Harriott's sketches on board the barque Mary Harrison draw distinct attention to different scales of bodily motions and spatial mobilities in the limited and restricted space of a ship.Particularly fascinating is the 'Gymnastics of Dressing' which demonstrates the obstacles to a male passenger's practices of dressing, washing and brushing polls in a narrow cabin space.As indicated in one of the sketches (Figures 6), the cabin passenger's movement is highly restricted within the physical space of the cabin.However, he manages to arrange his body spatially, which ensures his own capacity to act aboard a moving ship at the same time.Harriott's sketches, in general, provide some insights into the cabin environment as a site of discomfort and inhospitality in a world of spatial-temporal flux.More generally, they paint a lively picture of the mobility of a male body as a spatial practice, which is in contrast with the furniture articles that are fixed to the floor and bulkheads (a manifestation of spatial fixity without any loss of order).The connections between body, space and mobility thus converge in the sketche's evocation of the art of dressing, as implicated in the cabin passenger's endeavour to enhance his bodily performance at sea.For female passengers, their 'little exciting gymnastic experience' (Withers 1857, 5) was made explicit in the difficulties in getting on board from the tug steamer to the ship while holding onto their petticoats.They were in constant fear that 'they will either fall off it or that the Steamer will drift away, the Ladder dropping between the Vessels' (Withers 1857, 5), which would make them feel unease about their bodily motion.
The difficulties in dressing, as elucidated in Harriott's sketch, pinpoint a male passenger's manipulation of his travelling body in the spatial setting of a cabin, especially through the frictions and rhythms of movement.The sketch is remarkably expressive of 'a "mobile kinaesthetic"' (Jensen 2013, 199) invested with a body's performative capacities and embodied mobility.The idea of 'mobile embodied performances' (Jensen 2013, 199) helps to articulate the experience of space on board ship.It provides a vehicle for conceptualizing 'the physicality of mobility -how the body produces motion, and changes and is changed by its movement through space', adding to our understanding of 'how movements are performed, experienced and interpreted' (Aguilar, Mathieson, and Pearce 2019, 14).The sea passage conveys a vivid sense of journeying, allowing us to think about the way in which the mobility of the body is instrumental in the changing production of space (Mathieson 2015, 16).This is also the point that emerges when we consider how the notion of therapeutic mobilities contributes to the practices of bodily exercise and hygiene habits performed to preserve health across the sea.

Bodily health and therapeutic mobilities
Addressing largely to the intending emigrants, Mackenzie raises issues of the inconveniences brought about by a ship's limited space.His Emigrant's Guide tells the readers that 'Dr.Johnson defines a life on board ship as "being in prison, with the chance of being drowned"' (Mackenzie 1845, 257).In making reference to Samuel Johnson's sarcastic association of ship with prison, Mackenzie brings the issue concerning the lack of bodily exercise to the forefront.Another guidebook on emigration points out that craving for food, coupled with the want of means of exercise, results in an increase of flesh on the bones (Mackenzie 1853, 45).The importance of gaining health and strength is intrinsically dependent on the action to exercise the whole body at sea.Being physically active can help acquire a fit and healthy body on a journey during which the mind becomes languid.The Emigrant's Medical Guide draws further attention to the pernicious effect of monotonous sea travel on bodily health, mentally or physically.In concentrating on how the whole muscular system can benefit from bodily exercise, the Guide suggests that prospective emigrants spend hours on walking between decks, swinging the arms to and fro, jumping, dancing, or skipping (Fraser 1853, 23).The Guide entails a focus on the significance of healthy action for the human body by stating how the analogy between the mechanics of the body and a steam engine testifies to the significance of bodily exercise (Fraser 1853, 22-23).Surely, the statement illuminates an ongoing interest in bringing to the fore the conversation between mobility and therapeutics in the maritime context.It makes a case for contributing to our understanding of bodily movement for health and well-being, an important part of the life experiences of seaborne passengers.The production of therapeutic mobilities is tied up with the process of migration, and perhaps more significantly, with the bilateral relations between moving bodies and kinaesthetic practices.
Through a health-mobility-nexus, multiple movements of health-related things and beings are crucial to the formation of therapeutic mobility activities.Mobility could be seen as 'a generator of therapeutics' to help with the production or consumption of therapy (Kaspar, Walton-Roberts, and Bochaton 2019, 4).Such a viewpoint enables us to probe into the therapeutic qualities of bodily acts, particularly within the sporting-mobility paradigm.As described in the Vain Effort, a journal published on board the Great Britain steam ship, '[n]othing is so conducive to good health as playing quoits and other games cheerfully' on board ship (Branscombe and Leary 1860, 13).Following this, the Fiery Star Gazette reiterates in a 'Sporting' column: playing quoits is 'a fine game, and exercise tends more than anything to promote health and muscular power' (1863, unpaginated) for the improvement of physical fitness.The popularity of on-board games like quoits and cricket, an iteration of understanding sporting recreations through the journey, attests to the significance of physical performance in the maintenance of maritime health.Figure 7 articulates a similar idea in its account of ship quoits in conjunction with a sense of mobile kinaesthetic.What is noteworthy about the game is that the male passengers are allowed to exercise their bodies at sea and devote themselves to the mobile practice of sporting together for a sense of well-being.With their capacities for movement, they can go through the process of being and becoming 'healthy, able-bodied subjects' (Kaspar, Walton-Roberts, and Bochaton 2019, 4) on board ship.
The idea of 'healthy, able-bodied subjects' finds expression in the wood engraving 'Sea cricket' (Figure 8) as well.This emblematic scene, which depicts a group of male passengers playing cricket on ship deck, takes on special importance as an illustration of sport-based mobile practices.For the sake of exercise and amusement, the ship's deck provides a sports field for male passengers to come to terms with their kinaesthetic mobilities.In this regard, the wood engraving is instrumental in creating the visual effects of the bodily practices of exercise and health along with the physical movements of sea-going vessels.And yet, sporting, as mediated through and altered by the motion of the male body, produces a crucial counterpart to the limitations of therapeutic mobilities along gender lines.Noticeably, sick nursing mothers in steerage, instead of participating in sporting on board ship, experienced their incarceration, discomfort and distress during sea travel.This is evidenced in John Hood's diary which acknowledged his sympathy for Irish emigrants onboard, in particular a seasick Irish mother's inability to breast feed and her husband's considerate support during the wretched time.As Hood conveyed, '[s]ilent and watchful lies a poor man supporting his partner in distress, -her head upon his breast, and a child in her arms, which she is feeding from her withered breast, when any short respite from extreme illness enables her to do so' (Hood 1843, 13-14).Hood's observation allows us to envision how maternal seasickness, along with teething-related infections and dehydration from diarrhoea, constituted the main cause of infant mortality during migration.Many infants got colic and died partly because their severely seasick mothers' milk failed.The failure to provide sufficient nurturance in this case counteracted the effect of therapeutic mobilities.
Therapeutic mobilities, as represented by the mobile practice of physical exercise, fulfil multiple functions: they can represent the physical entity of one's moving and sporting body, and they can also express the concept of staying fit, establishing the dynamics between maritime health care and well beings.On this account, life on board ship may bring up some further questions for discussion, especially relating to the enforcement of sanitary measures and hygiene practices for the preservation of bodily health.In addition to general information about medicines required to carry for sea travel, a majority of emigrant guidebooks and ship newspapers shared a preoccupation with the idea concerning how to stay healthy and hygienic on board ship in the nineteenth century.The emigrant-themed writings constantly comprised a coherent and unitary message about personal health and public sanitation, sometimes fused with fears about epidemic disease.Emigrant passengers encountered many life-threatening dangers prevalent on the cramped confines of a ship: death from disease and the spread of disease like whooping cough, diarrhoea, scarlet fever, measles, small pox, tuberculosis, and constipation.Broadly, fewer than six people died per voyage on most Australia-bound ships (Haines 2003, 29).Journals kept by emigrant passengers expanded notions about death, such as the casualties suffered by children.In his account of a voyage from Plymouth to Sydney, Arthur Wilcox Manning expressed his fears for the spread of typhus fever on board (1839)(1840)154) and worries about the maintenance of cleanliness in a crowded ship 'where so many people are huddled together' (Manning 1839(Manning -1840, 41), 41).On board the 'Lady Kennaway', John Hood (1843, 13) recorded his concern for the concealed news of scarlet fever and its influence on unclean children: 'We have twenty-six children on board, uncleanly in habits, several of them poor in health, and most likely therefore to be attacked by the disease'.Hood (1843, 14-15) lamented his annoying and unsanitary surroundings: 'the sight of so many poor creatures so ill around him [ … ] the knowledge that a fatal disease is on board, the sleepless nights, the creaking of the ship, the soreness of bones from the rolling, the pain in the back from the cramped position in my berth, formed altogether a grievous amount of annoyance'.Fanny Shorter (1884, 55), in turn, detailed the break-out of measles among children, a Welsh girl's suffering from 'pleurosy', and hospitalization of a young man due to rheumatic fever.
The Emigrant's Guide to Australia appeals to those would-be emigrants by writing that despite the lack of good food and ventilation, 'the voyager across sixteen thousand miles of the ocean may enjoy health, decency, and comfort, and land with his physical energies in full vigour' (Mackenzie 1853, 34).The Emigrant's Guide, for the most part, underlies the bourgeois concept of vigour and bodily health with regard to the living environment aboard.Equally revealing are the medical guides for future emigrants that contain advice on the maintenance of good health on board ship.Domestic Medical and Surgical Guide, an 1853 book by the surgeon Jabez Hogg, provokes concern about the preservation of health at sea.The section on 'health at sea' refers specifically to the ideas of self-preparation and medical self-care during the sea voyage to Australia.In Hogg's words, the chief sources of health for British emigrants 'are personal cleanliness, cleanliness of berths, wholesome food, means of ventilation, supply of water, and convenience for washings ' (1853, 145).A similar point is made by Fraser (1853) who argues that 'Cleanliness is not only a great duty but a great pleasure, at once conductive to health, essential to comfort, and so naturally allied to purity of mind, that it deserves to be esteemed a physical virtue' (1853,19).To avoid 'contagious disorders ' (1853, 14), one must obey the sanitary rules in a crowded vessel that Australian emigration entails.
Cleanliness is not only next to godliness but also next to morality.In other words, the moral idea of cleanliness fabricates a culture of personal hygiene, which helps to reduce public health threats aboard emigrant ships.The Eagle Herald, for example, addresses health concerns in an isolated and constrained state.The on-board newspaper conveys the message that lack of cleanliness is one of the great sources of contagious diseases aboard ship.To put it in the words of the editor, '[h]ealth may fail despite every precaution, and disease scatter death [ … ] it is evident that cleanliness is not a dress assumed merely for the voyage' (Eagle Herald 1853, 3).With these words, the editor raises sensitivities about the links between dress and cleanliness within the ideology of middle-class respectability. 2This resonates with the idea that '[c]leanliness was one of the qualities that conferred gentility.Purity of person and clothing made refinement visible' (Whorton 2000, 19).Cleanliness of body and clothing ensures the proper functioning of everyday life on board ship.
How to maintain personal cleanliness or hygiene was the cause for broad concern about sanitary measures and the timely implementation of precautionary measures within the internal spaces of the ship in the course of the nineteenth century.This brings into mind the historical link between nineteenth-century ships and 'working laboratories' (Foxhall 2012, 55) for implementing measures to improve maritime health.The term 'sanitary' played a vital role in increasing public awareness of health and cleanliness (Ward 2019, 49).The Eagle Herald communicates to the Australia-bound passengers that 'health, comfort, and pleasure were promoted, did the sun never catch us a-bed, but up, washed, dressed, and on deck to "hail the smiling morn"' (Eagle Herald 1853, 3).How to purify the body through the act of washing becomes an important feature of emigrant mobility when travelling by sea.Very often the unwashed body is the source of anxiety for the prevention of disease and the enforcement of  health and hygienic endeavours.The association of unclean bodies with moral impurity suggests the need to purify the skin or to get rid of the smell of an unwashed body.With this in mind, we may recall the directions for body washing on a moving ship: 'Washing is only allowed to be done once, or sometimes twice, a week, usually on Friday or Tuesday' (Ford 1854, 18).Requirements for personal hygiene and public health aboard a moving ship enforce the bodily practices of steerage passengers, such as the weekly event 'Cleaning Day' and 'Washing Day'.Compared with paying passengers, the steerage emigrants on governmentassisted passages to Australia were more mentally and physically disciplined for health and morality.Figure 9 involves a clear understanding of male passengers' kinetic and dynamic experiences of sea travel linked with the rules of cleanliness and hygiene routines that are mostly physically involved.By the same token, steerage passengers' scraping, rubbing and scrubbing the berths under the lower decks (Figure 10) appear to be the most basic form of hygiene practices and sanitary precautions for purifying the shipboard environment.Their kinaesthetic responses to bodies at sea indicate the somatic practices in line with the performance of gendered daily rituals in the spatial contexts of ships.

Bodily senses and affective mobilities
'[M]obility is something we feel in an emotional and affective sense', as Adey (2010b, 162) asserts in his study of the relationship between affect and the feeling of mobility.Predominantly, the body is an affective vehicle for the construction of 'emotional geographies' (Davidson, Bondi, and Smith 2007).Sea travel from imperial Britain to colonial Australia, in this instance, is the key to mapping the geography of affective mobilities.How a moving ship shapes personal or emotional experiences may offer a lens through which to understand the 'emotional geographies' of mobility characterized by migrant life experiences in the field of migration studies (Adey 2010a;Christou 2011;Wise and Velayutham 2017).To some extent, affective mobilities assume a role 'in triggering and accompanying movement as well as in settling down and building a sense of home and of belonging to a place and community' (Glaveanu and Womersley 2021, 629).The influence of mobility on migrants' daily lives on board ship helps to construct 'the spatiality and the temporality of emotions' (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2007, 3), which subsequently encapsulates the interrelations between emotion, space and place (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015, 74).Emotionally speaking, bodies on the move are endowed with their affective capacities for working together to create a space to feel at home and to cultivate a sense of belonging.
Travelling by sea as passengers, as is well known, is accompanied by feelings of bodily unease, confusion, discomfort, disorder and unrest, or the emotional experience of 'imperial boredom' (Auerbach 2018), in the fluids of mobility.Put simply, the mutual dependence of motion and affect provides a focal point for analysis of shipboard passengers' maritime travel in a migratory context.The living environments on board ship can render themselves as fluid and affective spaces to stir one's emotion.An Australia-bound lady's description of her strange feelings about the confined shipboard space during the initial period at sea is typical in this respect.The English lady's bodily senses of the exchange of 'the comforts of Old England for the "roughing it" of a sea life' (Clacy 1853, 6) become an expression of emotional mobility ridden with strangeness and unfamiliarity aboard ship.Likewise, the feelings of bewilderment find expression in 'Aboard an Emigrant Ship' in which the outbound passengers begin to feel disoriented and puzzled when the ship is leaving for Australia.The passengering practice of sailing to Australia is intimately bound up with the transmission of emotions, as revealed in the narrator's observation of the thoughts and feelings of an emigrant woman: [ … ] the confusion is like the darkness of the night [ … ].A helpless woman is shedding tears upon her topmost trunk, which stands breast-high before her.She [ … ] tells me, weeping, that she is losing her faculties, for she is certain sure that when she came on deck Liverpool was to our right-hand, and now it is to our left.I look, and to my amazement find that her statement is correct; and from that moment I myself am plunged in bewilderment.(Smith 1862, 114) The conversation between the narrator and the helpless emigrant woman takes us closer to the idea of (e)motion at the outset of a life-changing journey.Crying comes to be an expression of the bitterness of separation.The woman's loss of spatial differentiation indicates a state of spatial disorder and confusion from the moment of embarkation.
When a body is in motion, "[i]t moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving" (Massumi 2002, 1).A moving ship in this sense allows for the tangible expression of spatial belongingness entangled with the sensuous and emotional experience of mobility.One particularly noteworthy account is 'Last Glimpse of Home' (Figure 11), a manifestation of 'affective atmospheres' (Anderson 2009) that showcases a woman's bodily senses of sea travel.The accompanying illustration depicts a tearful and anguished young lady who finds comfort alone in the cabin after Albion's shore disappears into the distance.The furnished cabin, together with its pillows and books, helps to assuage her 'tearful sorrow' ('Last Glimpse' 1878, 42).Tear drops that glisten on her cheeks afford possibilities of emotional involvement with the absence of loved ones.This supports the idea that the two processes of 'missing' and 'longing' ensure the circulation of emotions in four ways: 'discursively (through words), physically (through the body) as well as through actions (practice) and imagination (ideas)' (Baldassar 2008, 250).Affect in this sense becomes a key element in mediating the experience of passengering and involves a juxtaposition of both motion and emotion on a moving ship.
The affective pull of passengering practices can further be seen in the seaborne passengers' craving for a home on the waves.The popular association of an emigrant ship with home, such as 'our floating homestead over the blue waves' (Our Voyage 1875, 60) and 'marine homes' (Superb Gazette 1882, 1), typifies an individual's diasporic belonging intertwined with affective mobilities.The ship as a home in motion is saturated with affect and carries connotations of familiarity and attachment at the same time.In this regard, the temporal relationship between home and belonging affects passengers' interaction with others and their perception of moving and settling (Nieto, Massa, and Bonfanti 2021, 1), which invariably shapes the emotional embodiment of 'dwelling-in-motion' (Sheller and Urry 2006, 214) embedded in the course of the voyage.Also relevant for our discussion of 'dwelling-in-motion' is what the author of 'Emigrants at Sea' has termed 'a country village' (An Old Sailor 1867, 822), which, through affective appeals, elicits emigrant passengers' collective feelings toward the same sailing vessel.We can notice how onboard newspapers image the ship as a town and a community on the move expressed through the dynamics between maritime mobilities and migratory movements.Notwithstanding the social/spatial division of shipboard accommodations, the ship is positioned as 'a floating township' (Zealandia Free Press 1884, 7) or 'the "Australasian" community' (Harrison 1884, unpaginated) for emotional management of the migration progress in ship newspapers.The editor frequently addresses to their readers the mutual feeling of a close-knit community.Similar to the modern sense of being a flight attendant, the male editor manages to make seaborne passengers happy and comfortable by following their feeling rules (Hochschild 1983).Arguably, the material side of ship newspapers stresses elite male editors' emotional labour as part of their job expectations, but not for financial profitability.As such, passengers' daily lives are spatially interconnected to the sense of attachment, establishing a unifying element of the imperial experience of seagoing movements and boundary crossings.In its temporal aspect, the ship is 'a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion' (Gilroy 1993, 4) or part of 'zones of connectivity' (Sheller and Urry 2006, 210) that facilitates the construction of togetherness and communal feelings (De Schmidt 2016) at sea.

Conclusion
While the central concern of this article is with ocean crossings from imperial Britain to colonial Australia, it presents a critical reorientation in the studies of the dynamics between seaborne mobilites and bodily movement within the enclosed area of a ship.Utilizing emigrant-themed publications as a focal point allows for an analysis of recorded lived experiences and long-term journeys of the passengers which permeate the verbal and nonverbal texts of moving in the global nineteenth century.The reproduction of daily lives as a performative social practice at sea sets up a stage in a journey made up of comings and goings between Britain and the colonies of Australia.In a sense, ocean travel is essential to the experience of time-space compression in a context of maritime culture featured by bodily mobility, water movement, and boundary crossing.The physical movements of sea-going vessels and the production of ship-based movements evoke the imagery of mobile Britons, which also mirrors the growing complexity of migration flows.
Bearing all this in mind, the ship facilitates the production of maritime mobilites, especially with regard to the various ways in which every-day mobilities are intrinsically embodied, practiced and performed through a body in transit.In some situations, ship space can be addressed as a factor that shapes the interconnections between individual mobility and the experience of sea travel-'[s]ometimes we see a ship, sometimes we ship a sea', as described by a British passenger bound for Australia (Hassam 1994, 103).Given this, the body-space-mobility dynamic becomes a locus through which a seaborne passenger's kinaesthetic sense of bodily motion could be conceptualized and represented as an embodied, spatial practice at sea.The corporeality of mobility, in all its forms, constitutes a key representational mode of an emigrant ship as movement-space, inviting us to consider the implications of how the unsettling experience of mobility at sea is mediated and negotiated by the very performance of passengers' daily spatial practices on board ship.

Notes
1. Ship newspapers were handwritten and usually reproduced in print at their destination.Following the custom of satirical journals on land, many ship newspapers adopted a light-hearted and humorous tone to address life at sea and record all matters of general interest.Most ship newspapers were circulated on a weekly basis, in an attempt to entertain, amuse, and relieve boredom during the long journey.Editing and publishing a newspaper aboard a moving ship began with the formation of an editorial committee.A few of the elite cabin passengers met and chose male editors or sub-editors to invite contributions from all passengers.Like shipboard diaries, passengers' contributions were part of their self-produced writing for organizing feelings and keeping away from monotony or idleness.While the editor has authority over the choice of contributions as preferred narratives on the it, nonetheless, implies his tendency to skew the content and elude the dark side of migration.2. It was common for ship newspapers to contain medical officers' reports about passengers' general health.The Winefred Marvel, for instance, contains sanitary reports detailing the health condition of on-board passengers and the editor's thanks to Dr. Concanon's devotion to 'the bodily health and to the moral and mental elevation of the emigrants' (Hetherington 1875, 50).This, in part, affords valuable insights into an editor's alternative role as an authoritative writer for strengthening health care regimes as a propaganda exercise.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. 'Reading to the single girls -the surgeon's invariable morning and afternoon devotions'.The Gull: A Weekly Newspaper Published on Board the 'Otago' during a Four Months' Voyage from Glasgow to Brisbane.May 10, 1884.Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.nla.obj-52848757.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. 'The single men at dinner between decks'.The Gull: A Weekly Newspaper Published on Board the 'Otago' during a Four Months' Voyage from Glasgow to Brisbane.May 10, 1884.Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.nla.obj-52848757.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.'Gymnastics of dressing: washing in a fresh breeze'.Thomas Warre Harriott's sketches on board the barque Mary Harrison and ashore in Australia, 1852-54.Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.PXB 341, FL892682.

Figure 9 .
Figure 9. 'Emigrants washing themselves on deck'.The Gull: A Weekly Newspaper Published on Board the 'Otago' during a Four Months' Voyage from Glasgow to Brisbane.March 1, 1884.Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.nla.obj-52848757.

Figure 10 .
Figure 10.'Scrubbing between decks'.The Gull: A Weekly Newspaper Published on Board the 'Otago' during a Four Months' Voyage from Glasgow to Brisbane.March 22, 1884.Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.nla.obj-52848757.