The idea tempted him, but a natural caution and his earlier bad experience in a partnership made him reluctant to risk everything on a new venture in a land that they had not even seen. He replied, asking for more time to settle his affairs, then went back to sea, captaining the Myrtle, a steam yacht of 200 tons, out of Wigtown in Galloway.
The following January, Tom was rehired to skipper the Myrtle on a winter Mediterranean cruise for Sir Charles Strickland and ten of his guests. They sailed on 7 January 1884 and had an easy enough voyage out, but the return was stormy and after battling gales and mountainous head seas, they had to put into Corunna for additional coals. When they made port at Dartmouth on 23 April, Tom found a cable waiting for him from Andrew Thompson of the Thames Yacht Agency in London.
Seamen could be recruited on any wharf and harbour in England, but good skippers and mates were rarer breeds and competing yacht owners used agents like Andrew Thompson to secure the best crews. Thompson had known Tom for some years and thought highly of him. When a gentleman from the colonies arrived at his offices in Adelphi Terrace, the Strand, one early spring morning, looking for a man to take a yacht out to New South Wales, Thompson immediately recommended Tom as ‘a bold and fearless man, much sought after by the owners of yachts’.
Jack Want, a flamboyant Australian lawyer and politician, was also a keen yachtsman. His father had been a founder member of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron in 1862; Jack was also a member, and a former commodore of the Royal Prince Albert Yacht Club. He owned a ten-ton yacht, the Guinevere, but had arrived in England looking for a fast — but cheap — boat to take back to Sydney. He had chartered the forty-two ton Terpsichore for the 1883 season and raised hackles among the more hidebound yachting clubs by picking up first prizes at Ostend, Ryde and Torbay.
Want’s membership of the most exclusive clubs in Australia carried no weight in English yachting circles and his bluff manner was not to the taste of English club commodores. Like that other expensive rich man’s fancy, horse-racing, yachting not only provided an opportunity for prodigious expenditure and ostentation, but also the practice of rigid social exclusion. The more élite yachting clubs, like the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, were every bit as exclusive as the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, with great wealth a necessary but by no means sufficient prerequisite for membership.
One of the rules of yacht-racing was that every competing boat must either carry its owner or a member of the sailing club. Breaching the rule by entering races in someone else’s yacht was bad enough, but winning them was most certainly not the conduct of a gentleman. An acrimonious correspondence filled the letters columns of the sporting press and Want found himself blackballed from the leading clubs.
His enthusiasm for English yachting clubs may have been diminished but his admiration for English yachts and crews remained undimmed. He resumed his search for a yacht that could be shipped back to Sydney, anxious both for a competitive edge in races there and for the status that an English-built boat would confer on him.
The Mignonette seemed to fit the bill. A solid, though somewhat elderly boat, first registered in September 1867, she had been raced with some success over the previous few years. She was owned by Mr S. Hall, a member of the Welsh and New Thames clubs, who was having a new yacht built for him.
After a brief period of ungentlemanly haggling, Want purchased the Mignonette for £400 cash. She was too large to be shipped to Sydney as deck cargo, and he began the search for a captain to sail her there.
On Andrew Thompson’s recommendation, he caught a train to Dartmouth to meet Tom Dudley. They took to each other immediately. For all Want’s flamboyance he was, like Tom, a blunt-spoken and honest man, and in Tom’s steady gaze, square stance and soft Essex brogue, he detected the qualities of courage, reliability and honesty that he was seeking.
He offered a handsome fee: £100 in advance, with a further £100 on delivery of the yacht. Even though Tom had to provision the boat and pay the crew from his own pocket, he would be left with around £140 after meeting all expenses — enough to buy a house in Sydney and pay the passage of his wife and family to join him. Want also told him that he could remain as master of the Mignonette after he reached Sydney and keep on the crew as well, if they so wished.
The offer could scarcely have been better timed, for it gave Tom the chance to see Sydney for himself and assess Mrs Pettigrew’s business proposition without any financial risk, but still he hesitated before accepting. The Mignonette was a small, old boat for such a voyage, and for all his years at sea, Tom had little experience of deep-sea sailing and had never crossed the Line.
He asked Want for time to consider the offer and discussed it deep into the night with Philippa. He also read every account of voyages in similar craft he could find and talked with many other sailing masters. Some tried to dissuade him but most felt as Tom did, that if properly handled, a small boat would be at no more risk than a ship ten times her size. He met Jack Want again later that week and shook hands on the deal.
Tom brought the Myrtle into Southampton on Sunday 27 April 1884. He returned home to Sutton the next morning, and the following weekend he and Philippa travelled to Tollesbury with the baby, leaving the other children in the care of Philippa’s sister. On his way across London he took out life insurance of £200 and deposited the policy in the hands of Andrew Thompson.
The shipwright who had fitted out the Mignonette had already brought her the few miles down the coast from Brightlingsea, and they sailed from Tollesbury on Monday 5 May.
Tom remained on deck throughout the rest of that day and the night that followed, fearing the strengthening gale as they came out of the shelter of the Kent coast. Water continued to leak through the ship’s planking so fast that one or both of the Frost brothers was continuously at work on the bilge pumps throughout the voyage.
As they passed off Brighton, two bathing machines floated past them, ripped from the beach by the power of the storm and driven like driftwood before the wind, but the gale and the seas were already abating, and they reached the Solent safely just after dawn on Wednesday 7 May.
They sailed up Southampton Water past the mass of barques and packet boats waiting their turn to unload at the wharves. Rising above them were the iron towers of the steam cranes and the huge, round drums of the old wooden treadmills, driven by the feet of scores of men, which were still used at some of the older docks to raise cargo from the ships’ holds.
The Mignonette sailed on into the Itchen, and they moored at Northam on the west bank of the river, at half past eight. Still pale from the effects of sea-sickness, Philippa and the child left for home at once, leaving Tom to follow once he had organized the repairs to the ship.
As soon as they had tied up, the Frost brothers were ready to jump ship, frightened by the defects in the yacht that the rough passage from Essex had revealed. Jim acted as spokesman while William hung back behind him, his eyes averted and his cheeks crimson with embarrassment.
‘We wish to leave the ship, Captain Dudley,’ Jim said.
Tom paused for a moment, weighing his words. ‘It’s been a difficult voyage from Tollesbury, I’ll grant you, but I’ll have her hauled out here and the planking repaired. She’ll be as sound as any ship then.’