The Voyage of the Rajah and Creation of the Rajah Quilt
Kezia Elizabeth Hayter is traveling on a small boat that will take her from Woolwich Dock to the Rajah sailing ship. With her are some of the 180 women convicts she will oversee on their three-month journey from London to Van Diemen’s Land in Tasmania. While on board she and 18 of the convicts will produce one of Australia’s most revered textiles--The Rajah Quilt. This is the beginning of her story told by author Hope Adams’ in the extraordinary debut novel Dangerous Women.
For this author’s review, see: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/dangerous-women/
Dangerous Women slips back and forth in time from April, 1814, when 180 Englishwomen who had been convicted of petty crimes begin their journey to the other side of the world and three months later when one of the women is stabbed to death and an inquiry seeks to find the culprit. It tells the stories of three major characters--Kezia herself, Clara Shaw, a convict who drugged a fellow inmate and assumed her identity so she could travel on the Rajah, and Hattie Matthews who boarded the ship with her small son Bertie and succumbed to the vicious knife attack.
It is a retelling of the voyage of the Rajah that relies on documentation from ship’s logs to fictionally recreate historical figures--Kezia, Captain Charles Ferguson, and Royal Naval surgeon James Donovan, MD. The novel sheds light on the imprisonment and forced migration of women who had been convicted of crimes, such as stealing or receiving stolen goods, or women convicts who pleaded with a magistrate to be sent to Tasmania rather than serve out their sentences in overcrowded and unsanitary Newgate prison. Rajah's Granddaughter: The Rajah Quilt – the Truth, and the Myths, Misconceptions and Exceptions. (rajahsgranddaughter.blogspot.com)
And it highlights the work of the “quilt worked by the convicts of the ship Rajah during their voyage to van Dieman’s Land is presented as a testimony of the gratitude with which they remember their exertions for their welfare while in England and during their passage and also as a proof that they have not neglected the ladies kind admonitions of being industrious." – June 1841 (Detail of the Rajah Quilt. (Image Credit: National Library of Australia Collection)
The Rajah Quilt
The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)
The quilt joins together 2815 pieces of fabric in a medallion or ‘framed quilt’ style that was a standard design for quilts made in the British Isles in the mid-1800s. The center section matches the border, both made of appliqué chintz. The center section, decorated with chintz birds and florals, is surrounded by 12 rows or bands of patchwork printed cotton. The outer edge is made of cotton which has been decorated with appliquéd daisies on three sides and flowery chintz on the fourth. It measures 3372 x 3250 mm, and the variations in stitching show that the quilt was made by many different “hands.” The quilt was sewn primarily by 18 women convicts on board the Rajah, but incorporated work by as many as 29 women. The Rajah Quilt - National Quilt Register
After the Rajah arrived in Hobart on July 19, 1814, Kezia Hayter presented the quilt to Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor of Tasmania. In 1987 the quilt was found in a private textile collection in Scotland, and in 1989 the Australian Textile Fund purchased and donated it to the National Gallery of Australia. The Rajah Quilt | Australia Yearly Meeting (quakersaustralia.info)
The Rajah Quilt | Australia Yearly Meeting (quakersaustralia.info)
The Women behind the Quilt
The woman directly overseeing the stitching of the quilt was Kezia Elizabeth Hayter. As matron on board the ship Rajah, she was responsible for keeping order among 180 women prisoners and their ten children. Kezia was one of many members of the British Society of Ladies for the Reformation of Female Prisoners and made the trip to Australia to help Lady Franklin form a similar society--the Tasmanian Ladies’ Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners--to improve the lot of women convicts in the Australian penal colony. Hayter, Kezia Elizabeth (1818-1885) (trc-leiden.nl) The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)
The woman who led the reform movement was Elizabeth Fry.
NPG 118; Elizabeth Fry - Portrait - National Portrait Gallery
A Quaker minister of the Society of Friends, Fry established the first national women’s organization in Great Britain--the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners--in 1817, five years after her first visit to Newgate prison. Appalled by the living conditions, she wrote to one of her children: “I have lately been twice to Newgate to see after the poor prisoners who had poor little infants without clothing, or with very little and I think if you saw how small a piece of bread they are each allowed a day you would be very sorry.” Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons — East End Women's Museum (eastendwomensmuseum.org)
Newgate prison had many women prisoners in the 1700s and 1800s, largely because of declining living standards for rural women in England and Wales after the rise of the Industrial Revolution. A study of Living Standards of Women in England and Wales, 1785-1815: New Evidence from Newgate Prison Records shows that younger and younger women were being incarcerated. In 1795, the average age of a female convict was 37. By 1814, it was 22. Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton
The women in Newgate were crowded, with as many as 120 in a single ward, sleeping directly on the cold, stone floor, and many had no clothing. As Fry described: “the filth, the closeness of the rooms, the ferocious manners and expressions of the women towards each other, and the abandoned wickedness which every thing bespoke, are quite indescribable.” Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton
In addition to advocating for improved prison conditions, Fry and the Society gave prisoners the chance to learn or improve skills, such as needlecraft, to not only give them something to do while imprisoned but offer them a way to perhaps make a living after their release by donating fabric, thread, needles, patchwork and other supplies. The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)
Fry also worked to improve the transport of women convicts to the penal colony in Tasmania, meeting with ships’ captains to assure women and their children would get adequate food and water, and she provided the travelers with sewing tools and fabric to use onboard such as 10 yards of fabric, seven balls of white and colored thread, black wool, needles, threads, scissors, pins, and nearly 10 meters of patchwork pieces. Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)
Dangerous Women
Women aboard the Rajah at first resent their sewing duties, “moaning and complaining:
“She’s taken my scissors…
“They’re not your bloody scissors…
“Why d’we have to do this anyway?...
“I can’t bear her…
“She’s smelly…
“Can’t thread this sodding needle, can I?...
“Blasted ship keeps moving around too much…” (page 122)
But after 100 days at sea, the activity has brought the women together. As Kezia reflects: “the very act of coming together every single day, of sitting quietly sewing, one next to another, of knowing that what they were achieving was something of beauty: that had made them more than a gathering of individuals…a sisterhood” (page 297)
At the end of the journey, Clara realizes: “We’re many small pieces, each of us different but now stitched together. A patchwork of souls.” (page 301)
As the National Gallery of Australia explains: “The Rajah quilt is one of Australia’s most important textiles, and a major focus of the NGA’s textiles collection. While it is a work of great documentary importance in Australia’s history, it is also an extraordinary work of art; a product of beauty from the hands of many women who, while in the most abject circumstances, were able to work together to produce something of hope.”
Dangerous Women honors those women. It pieces together the circumstances surrounding the knife attack that left Hattie bleeding and unconscious on deck and gradually reveals the story Clara has been hiding. More important, the story delves into the personal histories of convict women and the connections they make on board as they stitch one piece of fabric to the next, making the quilt and their relationships with one another a unified whole.
Sources:
Home » Australian Quaker Narrative Embroidery Project »
The Rajah Quilt | Australia Yearly Meeting (quakersaustralia.info)
The Rajah Quilt – 1841 - National Gallery of Australia (nga.gov.au)
Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons — East End Women's Museum (eastendwomensmuseum.org)
Female Prisoners at Newgate and Elizabeth Fry - Geri Walton
Hayter, Kezia Elizabeth (1818-1885) (trc-leiden.nl)
Detail of the Rajah Quilt. (Image Credit: National Library of Australia Collection)
The little-known story of Australia’s convict women - Australian Geographic