One of just six women with spouses stuffed among a shipload of strangers aboard the “Hesperus” her name was anglicized to “Mollie” within months of their arrival in British Guiana (BG). They would suffer through the hazardous week-long journey down the winding Hooghly River to the jutting Sandheads and into the unpredictable Bay of Bengal, during which several people, ranging from a thin five year-old girl Meenie to strong men, collapsed and perished from cholera-related and other ailments.
Enduring the 90-day dangerous voyage to the warm South American coast, the group of families would cross the Indian Ocean and round the wild, cold African Cape, as gales suddenly sprung up and two recruits were swept off to the depths and their deaths, before the vessel even reached the vast Atlantic.
Possibly the tiny immigrant Moonah, 25, “Mollie” was a pioneering woman and a courageous survivor of another sort who made inexplicable choices and repeated mistakes in a harsh, foreign environment. She is probably the country’s earliest recorded victim of domestic violence among the newly arrived Indians, in the introductory male indentured labour scheme of 1838. Her real husband may have been one of the 12 men who died during the trip, prompting her to become involved with another passenger who turned out abusive. By the time, the Hesperus reached BG on May 5, she had ended up as a non-indentured female being swayed by the cunning affections of an infamously ruthless figure, but a powerful player in the plantation hierarchy who would personally enforce his domination of the bound men with brutal beatings, exaction and torture.
Within hours of leaving
