The life of my great-great grandmother, Helena MacRae, has fascinated me for more than a decade. She was born in Salachy, Lochalsh, Ross-shire in 1840 and married a grocer, Roderick Tolmie in Beauly, Kilmorack, Inverness in 1859 when she was 18 and he was 23.

Roderick and the heavily pregnant, Helena with their two-year-old, Isabella Jessie McRae, sailed aboard the 627 ton Rajasthan in July 1862 from Birkenhead, England with 269 passengers. They followed the Great Circle route, exploiting the earth’s round shape, favourable ocean currents and stronger winds that cut weeks from the old route which had been roughly the forty-degree line of latitude across the Indian Ocean from the Cape of Good Hope to Australia.

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Helena Tolmie 1840-1881Download