The author's objective is to explain, describe and evoke wonder about those people who chose to leave family and friends forever and sail half way around the world in a small vessel in order to emigrate to a remote place they had little knowledge about. In order to understand this story the reader needs to know what it was like in the colonies in the nineteenth century, how the home and colonial governments felt about emigration/immigration, what was involved in emigrating, the reasons why people emigrated, who decided to emigrate, what the emigrant vessels were like, what the emigrants...