The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Occasionally a husband and wife would be convicted together and find themselves both sentenced to transportation. The fear of being exiled to different parts of the world would produce its own petitions. From Carlton Jail in Edinburgh, in 1830, Helen Guild begged not to be separated from her husband of six years, “to crave your sanction that he and I may be sent abroad to some place as near each other as we may with propriety be sent. Altho’ it has been our lot to meet with this visitation from both the laws of God & man … your sanction would be receiv’d with more sincere pleasure than even my liberation.”21

  The hope of remission through influence, then, was a constant theme. So was the terror of losing touch. Men on the edge of transportation, about to slip off the social map into the void of the antipodes, were apt to construe every postal delay as a sign of rejection, like poor Thomas Holden writing to his mother:

  Nothing in this life gives me such uneasiness as not hearing from you.… I have not received a letter but one and that was from my wife since i receiv’d my Tryal, surely you have not forgot me so soon, let me know if there is any hopes of my time being shortened.… I will expect to see you if not it will break my Heart that I may take my last farewell of you as I never shall think of seeing you after I leave.22

  But whether the letters and visitors came or not, the day of transfer to the hulks or the transport inevitably did. Holden was carted from Lancaster Castle, via London, to board the hulk Portland in Langston Harbor, where he would work a daily ten-hour shift in the shipyards while awaiting his final departure five months later. The journey, he reported, “has been very wett and uncomfortable and I have been eight days and nights without having my cloaths off my back, so dear wife I will leave you to judge what state I am in at present.” Most transportees were neglected and many brutalized on this stage of their journey. The parliamentarian Henry Bennett, in an indignant booklet addressed to the home secretary in 1819, wrote of convicts on the road to the hulks: “Among them were several children all heavily fettered, ragged and sickly.… The women too are brought up ironed together on the tops of coaches.” Hundreds of them went down from London “in an open caravan, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, to the gaze of the idle and the taunts and mockeries of the cruel, thus exciting … the shame and indignation of all those who feel what punishment ought to be.” John Ward, in 1841, went down to the Portsmouth hulks from Northampton Jail in a coach, leg-shackled to six other prisoners, treating them to gin and ale whenever the Black Maria stopped at a coaching-inn to change horses, “which seemed to shorten the night’s fatigue, and lessen our uneasiness.” But though he was well-clothed, his fellow prisoners “had scarcely clothing … to cover their nakedness, and could only raise 18 pence amongst them.”23

  ii

  THE SIGHT OF the hulks at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich was deservedly famous. They lay anchored in files on the gray heaving water, bow to stern, a rookery of sea-isolated crime. As the longboat bearing its prisoners drew near, the bulbous oak walls of these pensioned-off warships rose sheer out of the sea, patched and queered with excrescences, deckhouses, platforms, lean-tos sticking at all angles from the original hull. They had the look of slum tenements, with lines of bedding strung out to air between the stumps of the masts, and the gunports barred with iron lattices. They wallowed to the slap of the waves, and dark fleeces of weed streamed in the current from the rotting waterlines. Some were French warships captured in battle, but most were obsolete first-raters that had once borne a hundred guns for England; now all that remained of their pride was a battered figurehead and the rusty chains, each link half the size of a man, that held them to their last anchorage. They were like floating Piranesi ruins, cramped and wet inside, dark and vile-smelling.

  The reception never changed. The new convicts were mustered on the quarterdeck and ordered to give their money to the captain for safekeeping. The old hulk hands would descend on the new like locusts:

  When a party of men comes down … it is the hay-day for those who have grown old in the service … [The novice is] asked by those around you “if—if—if” twenty things at once, and at the same time “copping” (stealing) as it is called every little article, such as combs, knives, braces or thread and needles &c, you have been allowed by the Captain to keep, out of the few things you have had the luck to bring on board with you.24

  Mansfield Silverthorpe, an impecunious young actor who, having trod the boards in the 1830s as Iago, Edgar, the Ghost in Hamlet, Eugene Aram, and Bernard in Guy Mannering, stole a trunk from a Scottish officer and was sentenced to transportation, went in irons down the river to Woolwich on a public steamer, still in his frilly shirt and long tumbling locks. He found that, on the Ganymede hulk,

  I was soon metamorphosed into a very different looking Animal, my long hair underwent the operation of clipping by the Barbarous Barber, I was then soaked in a cold bath & afterwards was arrayed in the Uniform of the Hulks. When the Quartermaster took our clothes from us I observed he thrust a knife through each article, and they are then considered to be the property of the Queen; however, when he came to Mine (which were of the best quality) he omitted this act, and as my new Shirt scraped me very much I asked him to let me wear the one I had brought down; but he threatened to flog me for what he called my impudence, and told me all my clothes would be burned. Next week I was not at all surprised to see my own Hat and Satin Scarf adorning his goodly person, and my Coat & Trowsers that of the Captain’s son, a young man about my own size.25

  Usually the captain had a deal with an old-clothes merchant: “An old Jew paid us several visits, for the purpose of buying up all the ordinary clothes of the men, and no matter how new a suit might be it was either a matter of take half-a-crown or throw it away.” In exchange, a prisoner got shirts “like coarse wrapping,” canvas trousers, a gray jacket and shoes that slopped or bit, “to remedy which you must give a couple of white loaves, a week’s allowance, to one of your shipmates to change for his and so get a good fit.”26

  Every kind of graft and corruption flourished in the hulks. George Lee, sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for having a forged banknote, wrote in January 1803 from his captivity on a hulk in Langston Harbor to denounce “the bad Police and the injudicious Government so prevalent in places of this kind, making them in reality seminaries not of penitence and reform … but of every vice which degrades human nature below the ferocious brute.” Of the 440 prisoners on his hulk, about half were “what they call Johnny Raws, i.e., country bumpkins in whose composition there is more of the fool than the rogue,” who were relentlessly preyed on and cheated by all officers from the captain down. Only the chaplain and surgeon, he thought, were honest. “Owing to the impositions on all hands by Contractors, Agents, Victuallers and Captains, nine at a time out of Four Hundred have lain dead on the shore, the pictures of raggedness, filth & starvation.”27

  A 14-pound iron was riveted to the felon’s right ankle—a practical discouragement to swimmers. Some were more heavily ironed, for no discernible reason: Bennett in 1817 saw a “very little boy 13 years of age” miserably creeping about the hulk Leviathan in double fetters, while adult men wore single ones; presumably the child had not been able to pay the warder’s bribe for “easement of irons,” and an example was made of him. (Months later, when the weight was removed for the voyage, the prisoner’s right leg would jerk up uncontrollably as he walked.) After a felon was put in irons, he was ready to go to work in the government dockyards. He was taken off the hulk at dawn and rowed back to it at dusk. Chained convicts working for the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich were a sight for tourists; gawking at them satisfied some of the impulses that had been denied the British public when English madhouses stopped letting them in to jeer at the lunatics. The chain gangs presented a moral spectacle, good not only for adults but for naughty children as well. Being stared at amplified the convicts’ shame, especially since many of them had chosen to embrace their social death, cutting off all cont
act with friends and family. James Grove, soon to sail for Van Diemen’s Land, wrote to a friend in 1803 that “I purposely delayed writing to you at Portsmouth, in order to avoid the continuance of your notice of me.… I shrank from being noticed by the world.” Mansfield Silverthorpe was glad to be in a coal gang; it rendered him black and unrecognizable, a toiling absence whom not even his mother would have known.28 John Mortlock, a young Cambridge graduate and army officer who was soon to sail for Norfolk Island, glimpsed in the crowd of onlookers a fellow student from Cambridge, the son of a banker:

  I shrank within myself, but need not have been alarmed, for his eye passed unconsciously over the group of smudged, cadaverous-looking wretches, one of whom a few weeks before had cheered him riding in winner of the steeple-chase at Bythorn.29

  The idea that such public labor did anything but degrade the prisoners was, as Bennett pointed out, absurd: “Among men who are condemned to labor in public, exposed to the gaze and criticism of all around them, self-debasement and the loss of personal pride … are not instruments to work moral reform.” He claimed that within a few months the prisoner’s expression changed to “a furious cast of countenance, expressive of bad passions and suppressed rage.… This dreadful look is to be seen universally in the Presidii of Naples and Spain, in the Galleys of France, and the Hulks of England.”30

  The food was adequate if one got one’s whole ration, but that did not always happen. There were three meat days a week, on which the convicts were issued an “institutional pound” (14 ounces) of fresh raw meat. But as it passed down the line to the convict, first the steward took his cut, then the cook, then the inspectors, then the boat’s crew who rowed the food ashore, and lastly the dock overseer; at the end, the convict was lucky to receive 4 ounces, clapped ori “a pound of stuff named bread.”

  When the “new chums” went to their cells, they lay down in darkness and foul air. John Mortlock, on board the hulk Leviathan in Portsmouth—an old 90-gunner from Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet, jammed with 600 convicts rendered “tame as rabbits” by starvation and discipline—was reminded of a verse in Lamentations 4: “They that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.” They also had to put up with the damp, since to make life harder for the prisoners it was often the custom on hulks to sluice the upper decks with sea water instead of holystoning them with sand. And then there were the endless practical jokes the “old hands” played on the new, starting with lessons in how to tie up a hammock with running knots so that, when a man turned into it, he crashed to the deck in a tangle of canvas.31

  Discipline was a foretaste of what the convicts were to expect on the “Bay side,” as Australia was called. The great emblem of desire and repression in hulk life, more than sex or food or (in some cases) even freedom itself, was tobacco. Possession of tobacco was severely punished, but the nicotine addict would go through any degradation to get his “quid.” Silverthorpe noted how this cycle of addiction and flogging broke prisoners down: “They grow indifferent … they go on from bad to worse until they have shaken off all moral restraint.” He described how this befell a quiet, harmless man named John Woolley, one of his hulkmates on the Ganymede. Woolley’s nicotine addiction was such that

  he had been flogged and put in the Black Hole a dozen times but it was no use: “I cannot help it, sir,” he would say to the Captain. “Then I will cut the flesh off your back,” the Captain would reply, and indeed the Boatswain used to do his utmost, for stepping back a couple of Paces he would bound forward with his arm uplifted, take a jump and come down with the whole weight of his Body upon the unfortunate victim, at every Blow making a noise similar to a paviour when paving the streets. At length the poor fellow (as I often heard him say) became weary of his life. He found that his blameless conduct in every other respect could not save him from the consequences of this trifling breech of discipline … and from being one of the best he became the worst character in the Yard. When I left it, he was in the Black Hole for having bitten off the first joint of the finger of Mr. Gosling the Quartermaster, who had put it in his mouth to see if he could detect any Tobacco.32

  Each prisoner’s life was governed by a maze of rules, interpreted at the whim of the hulk’s quartermaster. “Sometimes my Iron was too dirty.—at other times too bright.—At one time my Hat was not properly poised on my head.—At another my neckerchief was not tied according to the rules of the Establishment.” These gave endless scope for extracting bribes, large and small, from prisoners or their families. Three gold sovereigns bought Silverthorpe a transfer from coal-heaving to easier labor for three months. The naval clerks would slip a name in or out of the “Bay drafts”—the lists of who was to be shipped to Australia—for a bribe that ranged between one and six pounds. Though prisoners could not carry money, the hulks (like all prisons) supported a labyrinthine and complicated underground economy, with convict bankers, moneylenders and even lobbyists. “A man that can get money on board, he can buy anything he wishes.… There are so many stratagems of the convenience, and so many schemes of barter and trade, that it would be tedious to particularize.” Even the doctors were on the take, Mortlock found; when a hulk prisoner died, his corpse would sometimes be sold for £5 or £6 to the dissectors’ agents who haunted the docks, instead of being buried on the cemetery mudbank in the Portsmouth estuary known as Rats’ Castle. And die they did, in numbers, because the naval doctors saw no harm in bleeding a sick prisoner a pint too much. Then the coffin would be rowed to Rat’s Castle, where a chaplain intoned his brief exequies over a box full of stones and sand. Thus, few prisoners looked forward to a spell in the hospital hulk.33

  But nearly all lived, and for them the day came eventually: Cast for transportation, they filed on board the Bay ship. Her sailing was always preceded by a flurry of requests for money, clothing, tobacco, combs, mementos; sometimes a convict’s family could get a trifle to him, but more usually not, for if they had money to spare, who would have turned thief? Some who had been “mechanics” or skilled craftsmen in their previous life brought their tools, against the day when they would win their emancipation and work for themselves again. When relatives came to say goodbye, pathetic scenes ensued. John Ward remembered how his mother “was ill able to support herself under such trying circumstances; we exchanged but few words; for grief choaked her utterance, and shame kept me silent.”34 John Nicol, steward on the women’s transport Lady Juliana fifty years earlier, described the reactions of the parents of a young convict, Sarah Dorset, who had been “ruined” by a London rake and then, like thousands of other girls, driven into prostitution and “taken up as a disorderly girl”:

  The father, with a trembling step, mounted the ship’s side; but we were forced to leave the mother on board. I took them down to my berth, and went for Sarah Dorset; when I brought her, the father said, in a choking voice, “My lost child!” and turned his back, covering his face with his hands; the mother, sobbing, threw her hands around her. Poor Sarah fainted and fell at their feet; at length she recovered, and in the most heart-rending accents implored their pardon.35

  Some women had been subjected to terrible psychic cruelty, and would not soon recover:

  A woman was sent up from Carlisle on the top of one of the coaches.… [S]he had been brought to bed of a child while in prison, which she was then suckling,—the child was torn from her breast, and deposited, probably to perish, in the parish poor-house: in this state of bodily pain and mental distraction she was brought to Newgate … and was then sent out to Botany Bay.… I saw her on board, and she could not speak of her child without an agony of tears.36

  There can hardly have been a soul among the 162,000 men and women transported to Australia who did not feel, as the transport weighed anchor and began the long voyage to its unimaginable destination, the sentiments that Simon Taylor tried to express in stumbling verse to his father:

  The distant shore of England strikes from Sight

  and all shores seem dark that once was pure and Bright,

>   But now a convict dooms me for a time

  To suffer hardships in a forein clime

  Farewell a long farewell to my own my native Land

  O would to God that i was free upon thy Strugling Strand.37

  iii

  WE NOW TURN to the mechanics of transportation. How did Britain get its outcasts to Australia? Like everything else in the System, the method was made up over the years. Its changes had direct consequences for the prisoners, affecting their health, their state of mind, and their chances of survival.

  Between 1787, when the First Fleet sailed, and 1868, when the last convict transport Hougoumont deposited its load of Irish Fenians in Western Australia, the Crown sent 825 shiploads of prisoners from England and Ireland, an average loading of about 200 convicts per ship. This exodus began feebly: By the end of 1800 only 42 ships had gone to Australia. It continued to be weak and irregular for another fifteen years, because England was too hard-pressed in her war against France to expand her empire with Pacific thief-colonies. There was no year from 1801 to 1813 in which more than five convict transports anchored in Sydney, and not until 1814 would as many as a thousand convicts arrive in a single year.

  Then, after 1815, the flood began. Its climactic period was 1831–35, in which no less than 133 vessels brought 26,731 convicts to Australia. The peak year was 1833: 36 ships and 6,779 prisoners, some 4,000 to New South Wales and the rest to Van Diemen’s Land. With this practice, the system of transportation, which had begun uncertainly and with great loss of life, became smooth-running. It was not only efficient and profitable (to the contracting shipowners), but quite safe, at least by the standards of nineteenth-century ocean travel. Nobody, however, could say it was pleasant.