To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  As Warren Hastings gazed out from the center of this tempest on the sea of faces, two men would have stood out among the throng. Crammed in with the lords and ladies, with the Grub Street hacks and the gawking plebs, with the elect and the dregs of London society, were two men of conspicuous difference, two representatives of a country and a culture as far removed from the British metropolis as it was possible to be: Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie, Australian Aborigines of the Eora people. What the visitors thought of the trial, whether they heard a personally familiar story in the accounts of British imperial violence and corruption in India, is unrecorded. How they came to witness the trial of Warren Hastings, however, was a direct result of the violent civil war that had so shaken the British world in the 1770s and 1780s. The loss of the American colonies had forced the British to search for new outlets to relieve their overcrowded prisons, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the settling of a new continent, the journey of the two native leaders, and ultimately to the decimation of an indigenous population.

  It must have seemed unnaturally cold to Bennelong as he shivered in his English clothes aboard the HMS Reliance. It was January after all, and in this strange part of the globe the chill could seep deep into the bones, infecting body and soul. He had been in this foreign, frozen land for too long, and now on the brink of returning home to the sunnier climes of his previous life, Bennelong found himself stuck on a ship anchored in Plymouth Sound, still awaiting instructions, provisions, and favorable winds before it could haul anchor and sail for the Pacific. Only eight months earlier, Bennelong had stood in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Eltham, Kent and watched as his young companion Yemmerrawannie was lowered into the hard English ground, the chalky foreign soil heaped upon his remains. The English weather had never agreed with Yemmerrawannie, and for months after their arrival he had suffered and weakened, despite, or perhaps because of, the best attempts of English medicine. Now he was gone, buried as a Christian among the local dead of Eltham, an inscribed stone monument marking the spot where one of the first two Australians to visit Europe was laid to rest. In the month that followed Yemmerrawannie’s demise, Bennelong had returned to the Kentish graveyard, perhaps to mourn or to perform the death rites that in this remote island he alone knew.

  Perhaps his friends and relatives had been right after all when they marked his departure from Australia with their “united distress . . . and dismal lamentations.” He was now all alone in England, and if he were impatient to embark for home before, now the need to be back among his people hit him with a combination of desperation and weary despondency. Accompanying him on the Reliance as it lay frustratingly anchored at Plymouth was the new governor of the British colony of New South Wales, Captain John Hunter, who was quick to grasp Bennelong’s depressed condition and readiness to depart what for him must have become a land of sadness. In a letter to the Admiralty from Plymouth, Hunter made manifest his concern for the homesick Eora man:

  The surviving native man, Benelong is with me, but I think in a precarious state of health. He has for the last twelve months been flattered with the hope of seeing again his native country—a happiness which he has fondly look’d forward to, but so long a disappointment has much broken his spirit, and the coldness of the weather here has so frequently laid him up that I am apprehensive his lungs are affected—that was the cause of the other’s death. I do all I can to keep him up, but still am doubtful of his living.1

  Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie had arrived in England nearly two years earlier in the more pleasant weather of May 1793. The voyage—from Port Jackson across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro and north through the Atlantic to the British Isles—had been relatively uneventful, as transoceanic voyages go, the monotony only broken by the appearance of a French privateer, which fired three guns at the Atlantic as it passed into the English Channel. Everything, however, changed when they disembarked at Falmouth on May 20 and were greeted by the impossibly unfamiliar sights of England.

  The British, for their part, were curious about, if condescendingly dismissive of, the new arrivals. One newspaper, the London Packet, reported that “Governor Phillip has brought home two natives of New Holland, a man and a boy,” but was quick to add a disparaging critique of the visitors. Before the Eora men even had a chance to make a good impression, the London Packet told its readers that the pair were “totally incapable of civilization” and “form a lower order of the human race.” Perhaps the world-weary scribblers and Grub Street hacks thought that they had seen it all before. After all, the steady spread of Britain’s empire around the globe had brought with it a steady stream of captives, ambassadors, merchants, and tourists from parts beyond the seas. In the years following the settling of North America a veritable parade of Native Americans had regularly provided the gawking crowds of London with a taste of exotic worlds beyond their shores. The famous Powhatan princess Pocahontas had traveled to England in 1616, sadly presaging the future fate of Yemmerrawannie. After being presented to King James I and attending a Ben Jonson masque, she succumbed to an undiagnosed illness and was buried at Gravesend in 1617. The young Australian would not be the first transoceanic traveler to breathe their last far from home in the capital of their colonizers.

  The scurrilous screed of the London press at Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie’s arrival was an opening salvo in an ongoing attempt to justify the colonization of an already inhabited land. By labeling the indigenous people of Britain’s new imperial target “incapable of civilization,” such writers were merely reiterating the very same pretext that had been used since the seventeenth century to justify taking land from an already established society. In the eyes of imperial apologists, such peoples did not use or improve the land as Europeans would, and thus had no right to it. The new arrivals were compared to Africans as well, who, as descendants of Ham were, according to the Book of Genesis, destined to be “a servant of servants to his brothers.” In this view, irredeemably uncivilized and inherently subordinate, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie’s people would have to give way to British colonization. British settlement and exploitation of Australia could proceed with a clear conscience.2

  We cannot be sure if Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie were aware of these unflattering characterizations, or if they sensed beneath their hosts’ generous veneer the canny logic of empire, but outwardly at least they seemed to embrace their role as tourists. From Falmouth, the pair made their way to London, where they were given lodgings, board, a servant, and a washerwoman to clean the new clothes ordered for them by Arthur Phillip, the former Governor of New South Wales who had accompanied them to England. Phillip hoped to introduce the visitors to King George III and so had them dressed identically in green coats with blue and buff striped waistcoats, slate-colored breeches and silk stockings. Whether their European kit stripped them of their previous identity or accentuated their exoticness in British eyes, dressing them identically robbed them of their individuality, making them into empty cyphers for a new British spot on the map rather than presenting them as distinct humans.

  The audience with the king never materialized, but the newly Europeanized tourists were kept busy. In July 1793, they moved to more fashionable lodgings in Grosvenor Square in the glamorous West End, where books were bought and reading and writing teachers acquired to see if the pair were truly “incapable of civilization.” Phillip had told Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society and the resident naturalist on Captain Cook’s first Australian expedition, that much information could be gleaned from the men once they were taught English. They were taken by coach and carriage to see the sights of London—the Tower, St. Paul’s—and attended performances at Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden theaters. In an odd or malicious twist, they were also taken to Parkinson’s Museum, which housed an entire room dedicated to a display of items brought to England from the Pacific by Captain Cook. If they were less inclined to view the two Pacific “chieftains�
� ” heads with the comfortable curiosity of the genteel London crowds, we should not be surprised.3

  Beneath the surface of this busy itinerary, however, things were becoming bleak. As the weather turned inclement and intemperate in September, Yemmerrawannie fell ill. He and Bennelong, periodically ill himself, were moved to the house of Edward Kent in Eltham, then 7 miles outside of London, to distance themselves from the fetid air and pestilential damp of the metropolis. For the next seven months, the two were moved back and forth between London and Eltham, continuing their tour while remedies were sought to cure the ailing Eora youth. Despite the ministrations of a Dr. Blane and his regimen of bleeding, emetics, diuretics, and even Dr. Fothergill’s famous pills, Yemmerrawannie continued to languish. Almost exactly one year after arriving in England, he eventually succumbed to a pulmonary illness, or perhaps pneumonia, in May 1794, aged about 19.4

  We only know the outline of Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie’s itinerary, but if in their trips around the capital they happened to find themselves in Woolwich they would have encountered a new fixture blighting the bank of the Thames. Anchored there were the infamous prison hulks, teeming with convicts forced to labor on the improvement of the Thames. Before 1775, these convicts would have been destined for penal servitude in America, but now they were held in the pestilential dank of the rotting ships. If Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie did indeed gaze upon the overcrowded hulks during their London sojourn, they might not yet have realized the profound effect these vessels had wrought on their native shores. For just as the trial of Warren Hastings was about to commence, a fleet of ships was landing its first cargo of convicts on the shores of Australia. The same events that had led the Governor-General of India to the dock had also set in motion the founding of a new penal colony in the South Pacific. The story of the founding of British Australia and the story of how two Australian Aborigines came to witness the trial of Warren Hastings in London are both, at their base, stories of the unforeseen impact of the American Revolution.

  By 1785 the penal problems caused by the revolution was only becoming worse. Britain still retained imperial possessions in the Americas in the aftermath of the American Revolution, but criminal transportation across the Atlantic had ground to a halt. In defense of a client charged with returning from transportation, the celebrated attorney William Garrow made the de facto embargo on transportation clear. He informed the court that “your Lordships know, that you no longer have the power to transport to America, or at least you no longer exercise it.”5 Indeed, the law had been altered to reflect the new geopolitical reality, though the language of the bill did its best to ignore the growing rebellion in the colonies. Instead of recognizing the practical state of affairs in the colonies, the bill stated that “the transportation of convicts to his Majesty’s colonies and plantations in America . . . is found to be attended with various inconveniences, particularly by depriving this kingdom of many subjects whose labour might be useful to the community, and who, by proper care and correction, might be reclaimed from their evil course.” Hard labor was to replace transportation, and, at least officially, no further felons would be sent to America.6

  Transportation to the Americas might have all but ended, but the bloody legal code remained in need of more merciful options for those convicted of minor felonies. With one safety valve closed forever, new destinations were sought for Britain’s unwanted criminal population. At first, British authorities thought that perhaps they could turn their new problem to their advantage. Troops were always in demand in the various theaters of war around the empire, and so some convicts were offered pardons if they agreed to enlist in the British army. The felons aboard the Tayloe, loaded and ready to depart for America when news of passage of the Criminal Law Act of 1776 reached them, were given the option of joining up. Despite attempts to substitute hard labor and imprisonment for transportation—a move some progressive reformers, following the arguments of the influential judicial reformers Cesare Beccaria and Jonas Hanway, had long advocated as a means of instilling “labor discipline” among the criminal classes—Britain did not possess the infrastructure needed for such a monumental shift in carceral policy. William Eden, a criminal justice reformer, gave voice to the penal crisis caused by the American Revolution, stating that “the fact is, our prisons are full, and we have no way at present to dispose of the convicts.”7

  A variety of solutions to manage the surfeit of convicts were attempted, including, most infamously, the use of prison hulks. The idea was to use men who had been sentenced to transportation to dredge the River Thames, improving the carrying capacity of London’s increasingly crowded port. The act authorizing this plan did not specify where these forced laborers were to be housed, but the prisons were too full to cope with any more residents. Duncan Campbell, a former convict transporter who had won the contract to dredge the Thames, thus decided to house the felons in two ships refitted for the purpose. Conditions on the hulks, as the prison ships were known, were dreadful, and overcrowding and poor diet and sanitation led to astonishing death tolls (more than a quarter of the convict population in a twenty-month period), escapes and mutinies.8

  The hulks and their soul-crushing conditions captured the imaginations of contemporaries and posterity alike, most famously in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, but they could never hope to accommodate even a small fraction of the men and women convicted in British courts each year. Although the ships were packed to the gunwales with convicts, with transportation to America at an end there were far too many convicts for the hulks to house. As Campbell, in his capacity as superintendent of the convicts at Woolwich, informed the Court of King’s Bench in 1785, there were as many as 800 convicts housed in the hulks and many more who had been sentenced to transportation with no prospect of being sent abroad. The jails throughout the country were full of convicts awaiting discharge onto the hulks, but there was neither space nor work at Woolwich for them. Lord Mansfield, the long-serving chief justice, received the information with great alarm and recommended Campbell’s report to the attorney-general and other government ministers.9

  By 1781, the crisis was so great that judges once more began to sentence criminals to transportation. One ship delivered convicts to the African coast, but conditions at the chosen landing site were so poor that the captain proclaimed the felons free men who could make their way as they saw fit. In 1783, a second transport ship, the Swift, left London bound for Nova Scotia, although its actual, secret destination was Maryland, long a favored landing point for British convicts. However, before the Swift had managed to leave British waters, the convicts—fearing their true destination was Africa—rose up and escaped to the coast of Kent, where most were eventually recaptured and successfully transported to Baltimore. Shortly after, a second ship bound for Maryland was turned away, putting a definitive end to the second period of convict transportation to America.10

  With other outlets proving to be a distinct failure, a solution finally was found in the form of a remote, hardly explored new continent: Australia. Australia, or New South Wales as it was then known, was certainly on the minds and lips of many in the late eighteenth century. The famous Captain Cook, whose voyages, discoveries, and tragic death had so captivated a war-weary nation, had charted the eastern coast of Australia in 1770. On April 23 of that year, Cook and his party made their first landfall on mainland Australia on a sandy peninsula in a shallow bay originally christened “Stingray Harbour.” The name was quickly changed to Botany Bay after Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, two pioneering naturalists traveling with the expedition, had great success in their botanical collecting at the bay.

  To British officials, the location seemed perfect for a penal colony. It was far enough away to be considered a harsh punishment and thus a real criminal deterrent; its distance was also sufficient to prevent any of the felons from returning to Britain. Settling convicts halfway around the world in New South Wales also had strategic geopolitical benefits. In an era of intense competit
ion between imperial powers, planting Britons, whatever their origins, in the South Pacific would help solidify British territorial claims and potentially open up new markets for British trade. Willing settlers would be hard to find, given the plethora of more well-known and well-established colonial outlets for those looking for opportunities not available in Britain. Forced-settlers were thus a perfect solution both to the problem of overcrowded jails and imperial ambition.

  In December 1785, Orders in Council were made for the creation of a penal colony at Botany Bay, and by early 1787 the first convicts from the London courts had been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay. This rather dubious distinction went to twenty-nine men and four women sentenced at the January 10 session of the Old Bailey. As the official summary reads:

  The following prisoners who were capitally convicted at former Sessions received his Majesty’s pardon, on condition of being transported for the following terms, to the Eastern coast of New South Wales, or some one or other of the islands adjacent, (viz.) Charles King, Thomas Thompson, Benjamin Rogers, Hugh M’Donald, Joseph Dyer, George Charlwood, Thomas Colebrook, John Langford, Sarah Parry, Thomas Harris, Hannah Mullens, James May, Edward Paild, John Delove, Henry Asser, Daniel Chambers, John Turwood, Thomas Freeman, and John Crawford, for life. George Dunstan, Thomas Scrivenor, John Bateman, Abraham Boyce, John Mears, George Shepherd, John Lockey, Mary Smith, Henry Palmer, Joseph Burdett, James Evans, William Knight, Joseph Butler and Margaret Dawson for the term of seven years.11