CHAPTER XIII.
CAROLINE CHISHOLM.
MRS. CAROLINE CHISHOLM arrived in Sydney in 1839, with her children and husband, Captain Archibald Chisholm, of the Madras army, who had been making a tour of the Australian colonies during a limited sick leave. On returning to India he decided to leave his family in New South Wales.
Soon after their arrival, during the first crash of insolvency of 1839, some Highland emigrants, who spoke no English and had large families, found difficulty in obtaining employment. A little money lent them by Captain Chisholm to purchase tools, and a little useful advice, set them up as wood-cutters, and they prospered; while assisting his countrymen, having seen the neglected state of the bounty emigrants, he pointed them out to his wife as fit objects for her charitable zeal and energy. There is a wonderful freemasonry among the poor by degrees Mrs. Chisholm's rooms were crowded by emigrants seeking advice. But it was 'the unprotected position of female and often friendless emigrants that awakened her warmest sympathies. She commenced her work, in the literal sense of the term, by at the same time gathering information and acquiring the confidence of the working classes.
Mrs. Chisholm found young women who had emigrated nominally under the care of friends, but really under that of strangers, at the instigation of the bounty agent, without home, some lodged in tents with companions of indifferent character, others wandering friendless through the streets of Sydney. Many of them having been collected in rural districts, knew more of cows and pigs than housework, and if engaged in town, soon lost their situations, and were superseded by more accomplished servants from ships which arrived daily. Some of these poor creatures slept in retired nooks out in the public gardens and in the rocks, rather than face the contamination of the streets. The total number of respectable females unemployed in Sydney at one time in 1840-1 amounted to six hundred.
There were other and more serious evils attendant on emigration, as then conducted, than the condition of the emigrants on landing. A considerable number of females of notoriously bad character were sent out in the bounty ships for whom bounty was never claimed. The
