Or so it is described in the journal of Mary Ann Field which came up for sale at Christie's South Kensington in London on October 10.
The State Library of Western Australia, however, grasped the nettle and bought the diary for AUD$196,041.
In a second win for the west, the West Australian Maritime Museum (WAMM) secured a silver presentation plate pulled from an auction in Bonhams' rooms in Chester. The undisclosed price was, like that of the diary, being around the reserve, writes Terry Ingram.
Both were flea bites, if importance to their respective collections is any measure.
The plate was to have been offered on September 4 but withdrawn from auction, and the purchase negotiated afterwards.
The WA Culture and Arts Minister John Day was proud to announce the purchase of the diary-journal. It contains one of the few eye-witness accounts of the establishment of the Swan River settlements at Fremantle and Perth in early 1830 and three previously unknown and unpublished watercolours of them.
The diary also came with two manuscript charts of rivers of the region, probably drawn by Mary’s husband, Captain Matthew Friend.
The section written during 30 January to 19 March 1830 was full of anecdotes about day-to-day life on board ship and ashore, Mr Day added..
The Minister did not refer to the insects and rodents of Fremantle and the Swan River. Mary Field wrote of “huge rats and fleas” and “The flies & fleas are beyond description annoying.”
The State Library paid $115,000 towards the purchase with the remainder coming from the Australian Government through the National Cultural Heritage Account Fund.
Mary Anne Friend (1800-1838) was born in London to a wealthy breeches maker, John Ford.
In 1826 she married Matthew Curling Friend, a naval officer who had served in St Helena during Napoleon's captivity.
He subsequently captained a number of commercial voyages and in 1829 was commissioned by the merchant company Gale & Son to captain the Wanstead on which they travelled to Australia.
There are some observations on Hobart where she settled later and from which the SLWA feared competing bidding interest for the journal. This evidently did not come.
The lack of competition in the room (including seemingly no interest from keen Western Australian collector Kerry Stokes) suggested the journal might have done better offered by private treaty.
Sketchbooks are not easily exhibited to advantage in private collections.
Christie's Travel department has had enormous success with such sales. These included $7 million paid by the State Library of NSW for the early copies of NSW natural history subjects from the library of the Earl of Derby.
The WAMM failed to secure the presentation plate when it was listed for sale in Chester on September 4 because it was withdrawn from sale under UK legislation governing the sale of antique silver.
Later altered silver objects require review and re-stamping under by the Goldsmiths Company if offered for sale within the UK.
At sometime in its history the plate had acquired feet. Sale outside the UK was no problem and the museum negotiated its purchase.
The fact that it was technically a fake was irrelevant to the museum which was buying it, because of its connection with the Xantho, a wreck of which remnants are one of the museum's prime attractions.
The plate was presented in Scotland years before to John Smith, for using the ship to extend services to Fife.
The Xantho was excavated by the Fremantle-housed Western Australian Maritime Museum's curator of archaeology, Michael McCarthy.
The Xantho was built in 1848 as a paddle steamer by the Denny Shipbuilding Company, and used by the Anstruther and Leith Steamship Company for crossings of the Firth of Forth between Leith and Aberdour.
In 1871 the ship was purchased by Charles Edward Broadhurst, an entrepreneur involved in colonial ventures in north-west Australia.
Xantho was brought to Western Australia for use by Broadhurst as a transport and mother vessel for pearling operations and as a tramp steamer. In that that role she became Western Australia's first coastal steamship.
The WA museum is the home of the wreck of the Xantho which came to grief in nearby waters.
The plate was made in 1796 and presented in 1849, while the ship sank in 1879. The date the salver was altered is not known. But the goldsmithing laws are such that a date stamp for 1796 is regarded as not accurate for a later altered piece of silver.
Mr McCarthy said the plate was secured for around the estimates which were £500 to £700.
It was going on display with what is left of the Xantho in the museum in an exhibit display devoted to the state's entrepreneurs dating from one of the first - Charles Broadhurst who owned the Xantho.
Those entrepreneurs have been conspicuously missing from the ranks of collectors in the latest mining boom in the west.
Much of WA's best material, such as the paintings in the Mary Louise Wordsworth collection bought a year ago by the National Gallery of Art in Canberra, are surprisingly leaving it.
