The "Julia Ann" reached Sydney on August 5, 1853. Pond had wanted to sail straight to Melbourne, but the shortage of provisions forced him to stop at Sydney. Pond ended up abandoning his crew and half of his passengers ashore in Sydney and recruiting a new crew from the remaining passengers to sail on to Melbourne, which he reached in three days.   There he disbanded his new crew and joined the many other crew-less and cargo-less ships in the harbor. After a week or so, he rounded up a new cargo of passengers for San Francisco. He says, "I also obtained a reliable crew of able seamen, who shipped to work their passage to California and the gold diggings..."

The reason why I wanted to share these details of the first voyage was to give a sense of how fluid the makeup of "the crew" was at any given point. There seemed to be constant turnover for one reason or another. I have been unable to find a record of the names of the crew for this first arrival in Sydney, or for any of the new crew picked up in Melbourne. It would be a safe bet to guess that there were both Australians and Americans coming and going, back and forth from the gold fields of California and the new ones just discovered in Australia. This would have had some impact on what shanties might have been sung on this first voyage. The roughness of the crew and passengers (although there were women aboard) might also suggest the nature of some of the shanties.