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On 11 June 1873 Thomas Laws, a carpenter and Methodist lay preacher, together with his wife and two small children boarded the sailing ship Douglas in London. They were emigrating to New Zealand, and they travelled in the cheapest part of the ship. The journey took them round the south of Africa and then east to New Zealand - a non-stop voyage, without sight of land, lasting 108 days. Thomas kept a detailed diary of this and of a return trip in 1901 via the Suez Canal, when he visited for the last time, his childhood home town of Ponteland near Newcastle. There are a few published accounts of the emigration journey by ship to New Zealand, and none of them includes the contrasting descriptions of sail and steam that are found in Thomas’s diaries. In addition, while Thomas was visiting Ponteland, he wrote about his childhood and early life in a series of reminiscences. These reveal to the reader the inner motivation for his urgent desire to leave England. His diary is not merely factual; he describes not only what he sees but also what he feels about the situations he encounters. For example, when he leaves his home town and his relatives, after his visit in 1901, knowing he will never see them again, he writes: As we lost sight of each other, the blackness of midnight settled upon my soul. The last 48 hours have almost made me wish I had never left New Zealand, the agony of parting being almost too big a price to pay for the all too brief enjoyment of the old scenes and friends of former times. Almost everyone in New Zealand and Britain with the surname ‘Laws’ is related to Thomas Laws. In addition to Thomas’s full text, this book includes a full introduction and over fifty contemporary photographs.
