As the Heintzelman neared the Australian coast, a Souvenir Edition of the 1st Sailing to Australia was published on board. It appeared on 26 November, edited by a team of Reinhold Valter Põder (Estonian), Emils Dēlinš (Latvian) and Romuldas Mazillauskas (Lithuanian). They must have had typists and artists among the passengers to help them.
They had the use of the ships roneoing equipment and supplies. A roneod newsletter was issued for each day of the voyage, but only a few individual copies survive. Clearly, those who ran the ship had learned already what was necessary to keep their previous US Army passengers occupied and entertained. Below is the front cover of the Souvenir Edition.
For those of you not old enough to remember, roneoing involved typing or drawing first on a stencil with a wax-coated surface. The typing was not clear unless the typeface had been cleaned first. It was hard for the artist to see if their artwork was creating clean lines. No wonder photocopying took over from roneo stencils in the 1970s!
Fortunately for our interpretation of some places on the map above, there is a list of dates and places elsewhere in the Souvenir Edition. It advises that:
The Colombo stop was needed to allow the ship to refuel while taking on fresh water and provisions. It also provided the passengers a few hours ashore in an exotic location.
The 11 pm crossing of the Equator explains why there are no photos in albums of the usual visit of King Neptune and associated rituals.
The Souvenir Edition contains summaries in English of the histories of the three Baltic States, which a foreword confirms are for the benefit of the Heintzelman's crew. There's other information of continuing interest to descendants of the passengers on this 'First Sailing', such as lists of the senior crew and profiles of their leaders. An anonymous contributor has written an essay about shipboard life. These will be added to this blog.
My copy of the Souvenir Edition comes from the archive of its Estonian editor, Reinhold Valter Põder. This is held by the Estonian Archives in Australia and I thank the Archives for granting access.
One of the editors of the Souvenir Edition, Romualdas (Romas) Maziliauskas, settled in Adelaide and was an active journalist and writer within the Lithuanian community. He was well known to my father. Romas emigrated to Canada in 1963 and died there in 1978.
ReplyDeleteThank you for that extra information, Jonas! Presumably, Romas wasn't able to make a living from being a writer within the Adelaide Lithuanian community — do you know what type of day job he had?
ReplyDeleteAnn - all I could find was a record on Trove to the effect that he was up before the Court of Bankruptcy in Adelaide in 1957; he had been carrying on business as an agent (whatever that means).
DeleteIs Trove, Feb. 22, 1950-Dec. 19, 1956, the only place and date period for which Mūsų Pastogė can be searched online, Jonas Mockunas? Did Adelaide have its own Lithuanian language publications during that time?
DeleteAlmost all editions of Mūsų Pastogė have been available for online searching for some years through the Epaveldas.lt site (originally created I think by the National Library of Lithuania). However a new cross-government platform has replaced it this year and I haven't yet worked out how to use it. As for Adelaide's local paper 'Adelaidės Lietuvių Žinios' that began publication in the the early 1960s; prior to that local news was published in the national weekly 'Australijos Lietuvis' which was published in Adelaide until the late 1950s and a competitor to MP.
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