No Simple Passage by Jenny Robin Jones

The Journey of the London to New Zealand, 1842

Many of our forebears emigrated to New Zealand with little more than the dream of a better life. No Simple Passage tells the story of the passengers on board the London in 1842, undertaking a four-month journey from London to Port Nicholson at the end of which they will begin the process of becoming New Zealanders. Keeping company with her ancestor Rebecca Remington, author Jenny Robin Jones imagines herself on board and records life at sea on the London using the journals of the ship's surgeon and a cabin passenger. We meet the emigrants, discover the lives they left behind, their expectations for the future, their relationships, their living conditions, as well as who got sick, who was born, and who died. No Simple Passage also looks forward twenty years, revealing the fortunes of the passengers during the difficult years of early European settlement, those who survived and flourished and those who foundered. It describes Wellington as the emigrants will find it and the historical events they will soon find themselves caught up in. This is narrative non-fiction history at its most intimate and immediate.