People of the African diaspora came to Australia and New Zealand as convicts and free settlers throughout the nineteenth century. These immigrants are much harder to quantify as they were often seamen who jumped ship. African seamen had been a feature of British maritime life since the Seven Years' War, and in the nineteenth century, they could be as much as a third of the crew. In the age of steamships, a high proportion of crew were African sailors called 'seedies', from the Swahili coast, especially Zanzibar, who fed the coal into the engines (Stanziani, 2014, p. 63). Desertion was a weapon in the limited arsenal of the seafaring man, but for an African man, desertion in any Atlantic port, or anywhere in the Caribbean, carried the very real fear that they would be caught and immediately re-enslaved or traded into slavery elsewhere. Such a man need not fear being caught in the illicit slave trade in the distant ports of Oceania. These were places where a man might get a new start, regardless of his background. This made Australia and New Zealand very likely places to  
jump ship and many sailors did, evading immigration registration (Goodall et al., 2008, pp. 44-74).