Henry Mainland and Mary Butler

Mary Sinclair’s brother Henry also came out on the Tartar with the Sinclair family. Henry was 14 years younger than Mary and while she was married with a family, he was still single when they left Shetland. He was later to marry Mary Butler, one of the other passengers on the ship.

Henry was the youngest child in the family, born like his siblings in Garthsbanks. He was born in 1840 and lived in the family croft for the early part of his life. The census of 1851 recorded him still living with his parents along with five of his siblings. The census described his occupation as croft labourer, meaning he was engaged in general help around the family croft or neighbouring properties.

When Henry’s sister Sarah married Robert Jamieson he moved into their house in Skelberry. The 1861 census described him and Robert Jamieson, his brother-in-law, as mariners.  Two years later he joined his sister Mary and her family to emigrate to Western Australia.

We might suppose that, as with Thomas Sinclair and his brother John, they had been given favourable accounts of the new colony by Laurence Sinclair and decided to join him. Henry was 23 years old when he boarded the Tartar at Gravesend on the 25^th of August 1863. One of his fellow passengers was a seventeen-year-old Irish girl named Mary Butler who was travelling with her older sister Ellen. The sisters were among 50 single women on the ship, probably attracted by the colonial government’s policy of bringing out young unmarried women to make up for the imbalance of the sexes in the new colony. Henry and Mary struck up a friendship on the voyage and they married two years after they arrived in WA. I am not sure what happened to her sister Ellen after they arrived.

Mary Sinclair remained in Perth for a few years but Henry quickly set off for the north where he got a job as a policeman at Champion Bay. He later managed a hotel in Greenough before moving further north to Shark Bay where he rejoined the police service. After retiring from the police he turned his hand to pearling.