Mimosa by Susan Wilkinson

The Mimosa was the ship which carried the first Welsh colonists to Patagonia.  Patagonia is the only significant Welsh-speaking community overseas and therefore there is a special affection for it, especially because the life of the early colony was far from easy and on more than one occasion it found itself at the point of collapse.

This book takes perhaps an eccentric approach of chronicling the “life and times” of the Mimosa, such that while the voyage to Patagonia does get special attention it does not dominate the book - and the life of the colony after Mimosa departed is only mentioned incidentally (there are of course plenty of other sources for the story of the colony).

The Mimosa was built in the middle of the 19^th Century in a period of unbelievable change, change which was in part driven by developments in shipping and in part driving the development of shipping.  Therefore the account of this ship’s working life is an excellent key to unlock the period. 

There were little facts that fascinated me as someone working with shipping – for example I knew that ships have to be registered in 64 equal shares, I knew this was an antiquated practice, but I didn’t know that it dates all the way back to the merchants of ancient Rhodes!

In giving the wider story of Mimosa you gain a greater context to the voyage to Patagonia for those first colonists.  We tend to focus our current attention on the negative aspects of British Imperialism (and there are undeniably many such negative aspects).  The “colonists” of Patagonia do not fit into that narrative – they left in order to save there language in the face of ever increasing Anglicisation – as the “Modern” world was born monoglot welsh-speaking life was under threat.  This small poor group of new “Patagonians” are perhaps the anthesis of the arrogantly striding Empire Builder in his pith helmet…