Lady Kennaway: A ship story

Abstract

My paper is a meditation on the performativity of history writing and uses the case of the ship, Lady Kennaway, as a point of departure. Lady Kennaway was a 19th century ship whose last voyage included transporting young women to the port city of East London, South Africa. This was under the auspices of the Colonial Office in London, as part of the Cape Governor’s scheme to increase the region’s settler population. I recycle the genre of the epic poem to present this history as a tale, to draw together histories of sexuality and gender relations under colonialism and oceanic crossings.