Uncle Tom, as he was known even to my father, was the youngest child of George Beaumont senior.
He was staying at the Port Philip Club Hotel..... a very nice place and a first rate Hotel with a jolly back yard and garden at the back for smokers, there is a veranda covered with (festooned) passion flowers magnolia trees and an artificial roof covering the whole yard, made of grapes & vines, secure on straight wires, a rock work and fountain is in the centre, altogether it is very jolly. Notwithstanding mosquito curtains I have been bitten slightly by these fierce insects which find you out anywhere and raise very sore red spots. There are some very fine streets here all of which are set out at right angles to each other.
His passage, on the "Superb," had taken no less than thirteen weeks. He says:
I
got through the voyage very well but towards the end it got awfully stale – we ran out
of champagne claret potatoes &c &c meat (sans vegetables) for
six weeks is very stale work.
He had sent some things home:
I have consigned to you a box of furs
and Indian goods – and I hope to enclose you a receipt for the
goods I send, when the goods reach you please pay carriage and tell
the parties who write to you that "you expect Yr. Brother T.E.B.
home in a week or two and he will give a receipt as soon as he comes"
– Unpack the furs &c and see that they do not get moths &c
in them. I hope to reach home before the goods but I tell you this by
way of precaution.
It appears that he made the trip for his health:
You may however report that my health
generally is better than when I left and though I am rather short of
wind yet I am decidedly better and I trust shall be mended before I
reach home – I was never sick on board for a day – I had slight
and fashionable sore throats but never worse than that – I have
received your and Annie’s letters for which I am obliged. It is of
no use recapitulating the news they convey or can I at this distance
express any opinions on it. It is strange but not I trust stranger
than true. I hear by the last mail of Paris having fallen and peace
being proclaimed. Bravo
I wonder what this news was, that his brother and sister had told him in their letters.
He intends to leave Melbourne shortly, and then:
I expect to stay at Sydney till 8th
April. I then embark on the Wanga Wonga for Fiji, Honolulu, & San
Francisco...........I hope
to see in crossing America – Salt Lake perhaps Denver &
Colorado City, Chicago then by Detroit to Niagara Falls,
then to St.Lawrence and down the River Hudson to New York. I hope to
be there early in June. It is six days from Sydney to Auckland NZ
where I call for any letters, 18 days Auckland to Honolulu where
change steamers and 10 days to San Francisco. I wish my outward
voyage had been shorter but it cannot be helped now.
The family's Tory leaning is revealed by the mention of someone's despicable friend Gladstone
and nothing really changes does it:
Such
politicians serve old England badly and simply render [her the] object of
the derisive pity of her rising and progressive dependencies which
they leave in their infancy to fight their own battles after their
mismanagement has fanned the flame of a war of extermination.
Uncle Tom did get home. He went to Sheffield where he married a rich widow and lived in an enormous house, now a hotel.
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