The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

“Privy theft,” including breaking and entering 93

  Highway robbery 71

  Stealing cattle or sheep 44

  Robbery with violence (mugging) 31

  Grand larceny 9

  Fencing (receiving stolen goods) 8

  Swindling, impersonation 7

  Forgery of documents, banknotes, etc. 4

  Other 35

  Total of known indictments 733

  All these were crimes against property, some forced by a pitiful necessity. Elizabeth Beckford, the second oldest woman on the First Fleet, was seventy. Her crime, for which she got seven years’ transportation, was to have stolen twelve pounds of Gloucester cheese. At the Stafford Assizes, a laborer named Thomas Hawell went down for seven years for “feloniously stealing one live hen to the value of 2d., and one dead hen to the value of 2d.” Elizabeth Powley, twenty-two and unemployed, raided a kitchen in Norfolk, took a few shillings’ worth of bacon, flour and raisins, with “twenty-four ounces Weight of Butter value 12d,” and was sentenced to hang; but a reprieve came and to Australia she went, never to eat butter again. Hunger drove a West Indian named Thomas Chaddick into a kitchen garden where he “did pluck up, spoil and destroy, against the form of the statute” twelve cucumber plants; he, too, went to Australia, there to contemplate the exactness with which the god of property had measured out his black life in cucumbers.

  Some purloined inedible trifles. William Rickson, a nineteen-year-old laborer, made off with a wooden box which proved to contain merely a piece of linen and five books. James Grace, an eleven-year-old, took ten yards of ribbon and a pair of silk stockings. William Francis stole a book entitled A Summary Account of the Flourishing State of the Island of Tobago from a London gentleman named Robert Melville. Fifteen-year-old John Wisehammer grabbed a packet of snuff from an apothecary’s counter in Gloucester. They all went down for seven years.

  There were, of course, less trivial crimes. Apprentices robbed their masters’ stock. John Nicolls, a hairdresser’s assistant, drew seven years’ transportation for stealing goods worth £14 9s. 6d., enough to start his own barbershop: fifty-seven razors, sixty-two ivory combs, six bunches of human hair, soap, wig ribbon, pomade, scissors, hairnets and powder. A journeyman watchmaker mugged another watchmaker for a dozen silver watchcases; another stole a mass of parts, comprising 185 complete watch movements, barrels, fusees, arbors, verges and studs.

  None of these acts were news when they happened. They were mere drops in a swollen torrent of eighteenth-century crime. The only exception was Thomas Gearing, who created a brief sensation in Oxford in 1786 by breaking into the chapel of Magdalen College and stealing some ecclesiastical plate. For this sacrilege, he was condemned to death, reprieved and then transported for life.

  Judges were particularly severe on thieves who used violence and threats. In 1782 Thomas Josephs accosted a married woman on a London street, “putting her in fear” and seizing her handkerchief, worth 2 shillings. The sentence was death; after five years in jail he was embarked on Scarborough, to serve the Crown for seven years in New South Wales. All the cattle duffers and horse thieves on the First Fleet were under commuted death sentences.

  The Beauchamp Committee had urged that the new colony consist of “young Convicts,” and so it did. The convicts’ average age was about twenty-seven years. Age distribution was much the same for either sex:

  AGE (YRS.) MEN WOMEN

  under 15 3 2

  16–25 68 58

  26–35 51 50

  36–45 11 6

  46–55 4 3

  over 56 3 3

  Total convicts of known age 140 122

  The oldest female convict was Dorothy Handland, a dealer in rags and old clothes who was eighty-two years old in 1787. She had drawn seven years for perjury. In 1789, in a fit of befuddled despair, she was to hang herself from a gum tree at Sydney Cove, thus becoming Australia’s first recorded suicide. The oldest male convict was a Shropshire man, Joseph Owen, who was somewhere between sixty and sixty-six. The youngest boy was John Hudson, a nine-year-old chimney sweep. He had stolen some clothes and a pistol. “One would wish to snatch such a boy, if one possibly could,” the judge remarked, “from destruction, for he will only return to the same kind of life which he has led before.” So little John Hudson was sent to Australia for seven years. The youngest girl was Elizabeth Hayward, a clogmaker aged thirteen, who had stolen a linen gown and a silk bonnet worth 7 shillings.

  Classed by occupation, the First Fleet convicts were an anthology of country and town trades—but that did not guarantee their fitness as pioneers. The details of employment (or lack of it) for 190 men and 125 women have survived. Of the men, twenty-four (12 percent) were noted as unemployed. The largest occupation group was laborers, mostly rural—eighty-four men, or 44 percent of the total. From there the size of the professional groups dropped sharply:

  TRADE NO. OF PERSONS

  Seamen 8

  Carpenters, shipwrights and cabinetmakers 6

  Shoemakers 5

  Weavers 5

  Watermen 4

  Ivory turners 3

  Brickmakers 1

  Bricklayers, masons 2

  Other trades 47

  “Other trades” included three domestic servants, two leather-breeches makers, two tailors, two butchers, a jeweller, a baker and a silk-dyer. There was also one fisherman, a Cornishman named William Bryant. Of the women, fourteen (11 percent) were “unemployed,” and some if not most of these may have been prostitutes. More than half the women were domestic servants. The rest were milliners, mantua-makers, oyster-sellers, glove-makers, shoe-binders—a spatter of trades that reflected the kind of jobs women in eighteenth-century England could expect to find, all of them fairly menial.

  So it had a motley crew, this Noah’s Ark of small-time criminality; and for all the trades represented aboard, it was absurdly ill-chosen for the task of colonizing New South Wales. The authorities had used no criteria of selection apart from youth, and that erratically. There was no choice by trade. The colony that would have to raise its own crops in unknown soil had only one professional gardener, and he was a raw youth of twenty. It would need tons of fish, but had only one fisherman. There were only two brickmakers, two bricklayers and a mason for all the houses that would need building; no sawyers were aboard, and only six carpenters. It had no flax-dressers or linen-weavers—proof of the government’s indifference to the prospect of a “strategic” colony. This muddle and lack of foresight in the choice of convicts typified the planning, being one of many matters over which Captain Arthur Phillip had no control.

  And there was one general class of crook not represented on the First Fleet: the successful ones. This was pointed out a few years later in a mordant ballad entitled Botany Bay: A New Song (1790):

  Let us drink a good health to our schemers above,

  Who at length have contriv’d from this land to remove

  Thieves, robbers and villains, they’ll send ’em away,

  To become a new people at Botany Bay.

  Some men say they have talents and trades to get bread,

  Yet they spunge on mankind to be cloathed and fed,

  They’ll spend all they get, and turn night into day—

  Now I’d have all such sots sent to Botany Bay.

  There’s gay powder’d coxcombs and proud dressy fops,

  Who with very small fortunes set up in great shops,

  They’ll run into debt with design ne’er to pay,

  They should all be transported to Botany Bay.…

  There’s nightwalking strumpets who swarm in each street,

  Proclaiming their calling to each man they meet:

  They become such a pest that without more delay,

  Those corrupters of youth should be sent to the Bay.

  There’s monopolizers who add to their store,

  By cruel oppression and squeezing the poor,

  There’s butchers and farmers get rich in that way,

  But I�
��d have all such rogues sent to Botany Bay.…

  You lecherous whore-masters who practice vile arts,

  To ruin young virgins and break parents’ hearts,

  Or from the fond husband the wife lead astray—

  Let such debauch’d stallions be sent to the Bay.

  There’s whores, pimps and bastards, a large costly crew,

  Maintain’d by the sweat of a labouring few,

  They should have no commission, place, pension or pay,

  Such locusts should all go to Botany Bay.

  The hulks and the jails had some thousands in store,

  But out of the jails are ten thousand times more,

  Who live by fraud, cheating, vile tricks and foul play,

  And should all be sent over to Botany Bay.

  Now should any take umbrage at what I have writ,

  Or find here a bonnet or cap that will fit,

  To such I have only this one word to say:

  They are welcome to wear it in Botany Bay.40

  In March 1787, with two months to sailing date, typhus broke out in the ships anchored on the Motherbank outside Portsmouth. The crammed decks of Alexander incubated it; by April 15, eleven of its prisoners had died, and the rest were hastily disembarked. Enlisted men fumigated the ship, scrubbed her with creosote (the navy’s all-purpose disinfectant and pesticide) and swabbed the convict quarters with quicklime. Even so, five more men died on Alexander before she sailed. One woman convict died of “jail fever” on Lady Penrhyn, but luckily the disease did not spread through the squadron.

  This outbreak of fever provoked a flood of rumors on shore. The expedition to Botany Bay had piqued the curiosity of the public from the moment it was announced. It had been furiously lampooned and defended by pamphleteers. “What is the Punishment intended to be inflicted?” cried Alexander Dalrymple, the official of the East India Company who was an unsparing critic of penal colonies in the South Seas:

  Not to make the Felons undergo servitude for the benefit of others, was the Case in America; but to place them, as their own Masters, in a temperate Climate, where they have every object of comfort or Ambition before them! and although it might be going too far to suppose, This will incite men to become Convicts, that they may be comfortably provided for; yet surely it cannot deter men, inclined to commit Theft and Robbery, to know that, in case they are detected and convicted, all that will happen to them is that they will be sent, at the Publick Expense, to a good Country and Temperate Climate, where they will be their own masters!41

  In the same vein but more facetiously, ballads had described the southern arcadia, free of death and taxes, where the lucky felons were going:

  They go to an Island to take special charge,

  Much warmer than Britain, and ten times as large:

  No customs-house duty, no freightage to pay,

  And tax-free they’ll live when in Botany Bay.42

  A theatrical producer commissioned an opera entitled Botany Bay, which opened at the Royal Circus in London in April and closed the night before the fleet sailed.

  The typhus outbreak was played up by the newspapers, which had one good effect: At last Duncan Campbell, the contractor, was forced to issue the fresh beef and vegetables Phillip wanted for the convicts and marines. The marines also complained that they would not be issued liquor in New South Wales, “without which … we cannot expect to survive the hardships”43—and three days later Nepean guaranteed them a three-year issue of rum and wine. However, the womens’ clothes had still not arrived, and neither had the small-arms supplies for the marines. “We have neither musquet balls nor paper for musquet cartridges, nor have we any armourers’ tools,” Phillip complained—and it had to be kept a dead secret all the way across the Atlantic, for fear of a convict mutiny.44

  Nevertheless, on the evening of May 12, Phillip ordered his flagship Sinus to weigh anchor. The signal flags fluttered, but nothing happened; the merchant seamen in some of the transports refused point-blank to go aloft. Lieutenant King went to investigate. It turned out that the seamen—who were not under military command, being the crew of chartered commercial vessels—were on strike against the ships’ owners, who owed them seven months’ back pay. The owners, skinflints all, hoped to force their crews to buy “necessaries” from ships’ stores on credit at inflated prices during the long voyage; the sailors naturally wished to equip themselves cheaper and better, for cash, in Portsmouth. Their complaints were sorted out, after a fashion, and at three in the morning of Sunday, May 13, before the first cold gristle of pre-dawn light had spread upon the sea, the First Fleet weighed anchor and shaped its course in a rising wind for Tenerife.

  vi

  THE CONVICTS were “humble, submissive and regular” on this first leg of the voyage, Watkin Tench wrote with relief. They had been told “in the most pointed terms that any attempt … to force their escape should be punished with instant death.” Escape, however, was unlikely, as they were chained, in shock and atrociously seasick. Through the long rolling weeks at anchorage on the Motherbank, the literate prisoners had written letters to their families and friends ashore, and Tench had had the “tiresome and disagreeable” duty of acting as censor. “Their constant language,” he noted, “was an apprehension of the impracticability of returning home, the dread of a sickly passage, and the fearful prospect of a distant and barbarous country.” He dismissed their laments as “doubtless an artifice to awaken compassion.”45

  There was nothing artificial about them. None of the convicts could have had any idea of their destination. Before them yawned a terrifying void of time and space. They were going on the longest voyage ever attempted by so large a group of people. If they had been told they were off to the moon, the sense of loss, deracination and fear could hardly have been worse—at least one could see the moon from England, which could not be said for Botany Bay.

  The convicts, of course, were not the only ones who felt their lives cut in half. As the flotilla sailed from Portsmouth, a young second officer of marines, not long married, began his diary:

  5 o’clock in the morning. The Sirius made the signal for the whole fleet to get under way. O Gracious God send that we may put into Plymouth or Torbay on our way down Channel that I may see my dear and fond affectionate Alicia and our sweet son before I leave them for this long absence. O Almighty God hear my prayer and grant me this request … what makes me so happy this day is it because that I am in hoppes the fleet will put into Plymth. O my fond heart lay still for you may be disappointed I trust in God you will not.

  But Plymouth fell astern, and Ralph Clark’s journal for May 14 bears the anguished scrawl, “Oh my God all my hoppes are over of seeing my beloved wife and son.”46

  The run to Tenerife passed almost without incident. The weather was fine and, once out of sight of land, the convicts were allowed on deck to exercise. On June 3 the fleet made its anchorage in the port of Santa Cruz, under the high conical peak of Tenerife.

  The officers and crewmen had a week to stretch their legs on land, while the ships took on fresh water, pumpkins, onions, indifferent and costly meat and Canary wine. Phillip and twenty of his chief officers were lavishly entertained by the Sicilian-born governor of the Canaries. One night, a convict named John Power escaped from Alexander by shinnying down her anchor hawser. He swam quietly astern, scrambled into a dinghy, cut its painter and drifted on the current across the bay to a Dutch East Indiaman. Its crew would not take him on board; so Power rowed to a small island in the lee of the fleet, where he beached the boat, rested up for the night (his plan being to row thirty miles to the Grand Canary) and was captured by a search party the next morning. But Power’s was the only such venture, and on June 10 the fleet set sail for Rio de Janeiro.

  At first, Phillip’s track looks remarkably indirect: Why cross the Atlantic twice to get to Australia? In fact, his course from Portsmouth to the Cape of Good Hope via the Canaries and Rio made the best of prevailing winds and currents. Boosted south-sout
hwest by the Canary Current and the northeast trade winds, a ship would pass the Cape Verde Islands and sail south until it entered the equatorial doldrums in the Atlantic Narrows. Once through that zone of calms and fluky winds it could pick up the southbound Brazil Current, getting a good slant on the southeast trades to reach Rio and drop further south into the zone of the westerlies, around 30°S. Then it had a straight run downwind to Cape Town.47

  The fleet raised the Cape Verde Islands on June 18. Adverse winds prevented the ships from anchoring at Port Praia on São Tiago, and on they sailed. Now the weather became intolerably hot and humid, and as the fleet entered the tropics waves of vermin crept out of each vessel’s woodwork, up from the bilges—rats, bedbugs, lice, cockroaches, fleas. Officers and convicts alike were tormented by them and fought back as best they could with “frequent explosions of gunpowder, lighting fires between decks, and a liberal use of that admirable antiseptic, oil of tar.”48

  The bilges were foul in all of the ships. Even those whose guts have heaved at the whiff from the boat’s head at sea can have little idea of the anguish of eighteenth-century bilge stink: a fermenting, sloshing broth of sea water mixed with urine, puke, dung, rotting food, dead rats and the hundred other attars of the Great Age of Sail. On Alexander, another batch of convicts fell sick from the bilge effluents,

  which had by some means or other risen to so great a height, that the pannels of the cabin, and the buttons on the back of the officers, were turned nearly black, by the noxious effluvia. When the hatches were taken off, the stench was so powerful that it was scarcely possible to stand over them.49

  When tropical rainstorms whipped the fleet, the convicts—who had no change of dry clothes—could not exercise on deck. They stayed below under battened hatches, and conditions in their steaming, stinking holds were extreme. “The weather was now so immoderately hot,” noted John White, surgeon on Charlotte, “that the female convicts, perfectly overcome with it, frequently fainted away, and these faintings generally terminated in fits.” At night, some of them rutted like stoats. “Notwithstanding the enervating effects of the atmospheric heat,” White recorded with some amazement,