In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ayahs were a familiar sight on board ships, caring for the children of British families as they travelled to and from ‘home’. Existing and contemporary literature, however, only addresses their experiences once on British soil, and positions them as victims of an inequitable colonial system, abandoned by their employers and in need of rescue. This paper moves the focus away from the metropole towards an ayah-centred understanding of the journey and reveals an infrastructure that linked global sites of empire. This shift in perspective enables a richer understanding of the ayahs’ experiences both as racial and gendered ‘others’ and as agents who leveraged situations to their own advantage. By exploring the intersection of colonial and colonized, the paper shows how, at each stage of the journey, spaces designed to contain could be transformed into spaces of gain.