The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The benefits of this plan showed as soon as it was adopted. After 1815, the volume of convict shipping to Australia more than trebled—78 ships carrying 13,221 souls from 1816 to 1820, as compared to 23 carrying 3,847 in the preceding five years. From 1811 to 1815, the gross average death rate on the voyage had been 1 in 31. After Redfern’s plan went into force it plummeted to 1 in 122. Thereafter it seldom rose above 1 in 100, and never beyond 1 in 85.57

  Besides, the voyage was now faster and the vessels roomier, although these are very relative terms. No modern traveller can really imagine the tedium and social friction of this voyage. Down the map the transports dropped, sometimes escorted by naval convoys bound for Africa or India. But soon each was on its own in the blue immensity, a socially infected speck flying the red-and-white “whip” (pennant) that proclaimed the convict vessel. Its route would depend on its supplies of food and water. The First Fleet took 252 days to reach Botany Bay, spending nearly ten weeks in ports along the way. It had to carry several years’ supplies of provisions, and so the rations for the voyage had to be constantly replenished. But by 1810 the ships no longer needed to carry everything for the convicts’ future survival; and by 1820 most captains sailed to Rio and then “ran down their easting” straight to the southern coast of Australia, either dropping their convicts at Hobart or sailing north to Sydney. Sometimes they went out non-stop. By the 1830s, most transports did the passage in less than 110 days, but only four vessels took less than 100: Eliza I in 1820, Guildford in 1822, Norfolk in 1829 and Emma Eugenia, the fastest of all, with a 95-day passage, in 1838.

  No ship was ever custom-built to be a convict transport. They were all (except for a few naval vessels) converted merchant ships, fitted out with the necessary berths and security devices.58 The prisoners’ berths were usually ranged in two rows, each double-height (a berth above and one below) against the hull, with a walkway down the center. Peter Cunningham, who made five voyages to Australia as surgeon-superintendent on convict transports (and lost only three of the 747 convicts, under his care), noted that “ample space” was four convicts in a wooden berth six feet square. There was rarely as much as six feet of headroom, and the only air came from the hatchways, which were kept closed with thick grilles and heavily padlocked. Hence ventilation was always poor; and even though the naval surgeons urged masters to fit wind-sails over the hatches, these primitive airscoops failed to work just when air was most needed—as the ship lay becalmed in the suffocating heat of the doldrums. The Irish “political” John Boyle O’Reilly, transported to Western Australia with other Fenians in 1868 in the Hougoumont, the last of all the convict transports, described the miseries of its hold:

  The air was stifling … [T]here was no draught through the barred hatches. The sun above them was blazing hot. The pitch dropped from the seams, and burnt their flesh as it fell. There was only one word spoken or thought—one yearning idea in every mind—water.… Two pints of water a day were served out to each convict—a quart of putrid and blood-warm liquid. It was a woeful sight to see the thirsty souls devour this allowance.59

  In bad weather everyone suffered, but the convicts worst of all. George Prideaux Harris, who sailed with David Collins’s expedition to colonize Port Phillip Bay in 1803, wrote that after leaving Rio,

  we were constantly meeting with squalls of wind, rain, lightning and heavy rolling seas, so that for many days we could not sit at table, but were obliged to hold fast to boxes &c. on the floor & had all our crockery ware almost broken to pieces, besides shipping many seas into the Cabin and living in a state of Darkness from the Cabin windows being stopped up by the deadlights.—I never was so melancholy in my life before.—Not a single comfort either for the body or the mind—the provisions, infamous—the water, stinking—our livestock destroyed by the cold & wet, and every person with a gloomy countenance.60

  The security had to be formidable. Captain Alfred Tetens, a German master who spent many years traversing the Pacific, took a shipload of 300 convicts on the Norwood to Fremantle in the last phase of transportation in 1861. Her ’tween-decks were “enclosed in a shotproof wall of heavy timbers,” and

  the main and forward hatchways were furnished with three-inch iron bars; through the small door remaining, only one person at a time could squeeze with some difficulty.… [A] barricade was erected across the width of the ship on deck behind the mainmast. This also had a narrow door. A watch of ten soldiers with loaded guns was stationed night and day at the rear of the quarterdeck. Four cannon loaded with grapeshot were aimed forward and a multitude of weapons were piled here. This gave the whole warlike picture an imposing aspect that had a calming effect not only on the prisoners but on their warders as well.61

  The prisoners’ food was coarse but sufficient, except for the lack of greens. Its staple was still brined beef, known to passengers as “salt horse”—which, no doubt, some of it was. An officer of the 50th Regiment, John Gorman, sailing to Australia on the transport Minden in 1851, wrote down the words of a sailor’s verse about it:

  Salt horse! Salt horse! What brought you here?

  I have been carrying turf for many a year

  From Limerick going to Ballyhack

  I fell down and broke my back.

  Cut up was I for sailors’ use,

  Now even they do me despise—

  They turn me over and they Damn my Eyes.62

  Peter Cunningham adjudged the rations “both good and abundant,” about two-thirds of the standard navy allowance. The convict Mellish, sailing to Australia at about the same time (the early 1820s), found

  not much reason to find fault; on Sundays, plum pudding with suet in it, about a pound to each man, likewise a pound of beef; Monday, pork (a pound with peas in it); Tuesday, beef and rice; Wednesday, same as Sunday; Thursday, same as Monday; Friday, beef and rice and pudding; Saturday, pork only.63

  Against scurvy, the convicts got lime juice, sugar and vinegar. For a bonus, they received a nightly half-pint of port wine to keep their spirits up. This was considered a great luxury and on some ships, like the Wood-bridge when she sailed in 1840 with the convict diarist Charles Cozens on board, its distribution was a ritual:

  for the purpose of exercising the men, and as preventive to disease, each man entered at one door on the quarter-deck, danced to the cask, drank his allowance, and then danced off again, round by the opposite doorway.… [T]he steps, as various as the performers, formed altogether a most amusing “ballet.”64

  The prisoners’ irons were struck off when the ship was in blue water, though their bunks usually carried chains and basils so that the refractory could be fettered down in an emergency. The surgeon-superintendent got the convicts on deck for fresh air and exercise as often as possible. They holystoned the decks, swabbed and scrubbed and laundered, and took as much menial work off the crew’s shoulders as discipline would allow. They could not carry knives—all eating-irons except spoons were issued with each meal and collected after it—but they could get needles, and bones from “salt horse.” So they passed the long weeks making scrimshaw, “manufacturing seals, toothpicks, tobacco-stoppers, and other ornaments out of bones; and likewise a few ingenious and experienced ones, in making rings, brooches &c. out of common buttons, at which they were very expert.”65

  They fished, trolling hooks with strips of canvas greased with fat. Bonitos would grab them and be hauled like silvery finned melons, shuddering and tail-tapping, into the scuppers; they were eagerly eaten, as were the sharks, the ominous “sea-lawyers” that followed patiently at the vessel’s stern. These “were pronounced excellent; the most trifling change of circumstance in so long and wearisome a voyage being greedily grasped at and joyfully entertained.” Now and then sailors would catch albatrosses with baited hook and a sounding-line, drag them screaming on board, slaughter them, and skin them, there being a market for their stuffed carcasses.66

  The convicts’ efforts to amuse themselves were noted by various surgeons and free passengers. They danc
ed and (when in irons) managed a clinking beat with their chains. On Christmas Day, one ship’s carpenter observed, “the greatest joviality prevailed among the Convicts, who celebrated the anniversary of the Christian era by the execution (in a masterly style) of an abundance of vocal music in the shape of glees, trios, duets &c., probably the result of their double allowance of wine.”67

  They gambled for anything from tobacco to clothes, and if no one had cards they would dismember Bibles and prayer-books to make them, as a clergyman found to his distress on a transport in 1819. Sometimes they staged amateur plays, or held mock trials on deck—cathartic parodies in which the “judge,” robed in a patchwork quilt with a swab combed over his head for a wig, his face made up with red-lead, chalk and stove-backing, would volley denunciations at the cowering “prisoner.”

  The big ceremony of the voyage was always the Crossing of the Line, a boisterous rite of passage in which Neptune would come aboard and initiate those who had never crossed the equator before. Fearsome in swab-wig and iron trident, shells and dried starfish entangled in his oakum beard, sewn into the flayed skin of a dolphin and stinking to heaven under the vertical sun, the sea-god would bear down on the neophytes flanked by grinning Jack-tar “mermaids” holding buckets of soap and gunk. The initiates were clipped with scissors and lathered with a mop, “shaved” and then ducked in a tub of seawater. No wonder the tradition has since been much attenuated by mass tourism. “Neptune was on board for two nights shaving the soldiers & People,” Lieutenant William Coke reported to his father from the transport Regalia in 1826,

  he was a sulky Old Fellow & covered his new born sons over with Tar from head to foot, each night after having finished shaving he & his Constables came into my cabin to know if I was pleased with the Lenity he had treated my men, but His Majesty was such a drunkard that he & his Constables drank three gallons of my Whiskey & made my head ache terribly by obliging me to drink raw spirits with him.68

  By the 1820s discipline ran smoothly, almost automatically, in most ships. Captains kept a vigilant eye on their human cargo, and rumors of mutiny brought down summary punishment—though not, as a rule, with the flagellatory orgies staged on early hell-ships like the Britannia. Four dozen lashes was usually enough; the convict would be triced to a grating, and the ceremony of his pain watched by the mustered prisoners and the ship’s company. Minor offenders were ironed, or put in a cramping-box for a few hours.

  Dreams of mutiny, however, were rarely absent. Lieutenant Coke mentioned that the Irish prisoners he was guarding on Regalia “had formed a scheme to seize & carry the ship to South America. I and my men were all to have been murdered. The Doctor, Captain & sailors were to have been saved … [I]t was lucky they did not attempt it or else they would have been most of them shot, and had any of the Soldiers been killed the rest would have been so enraged they would have murdered every convict on board.”69

  If there was a rising, the ship’s master had to act fast and shrewdly, like Captain Tetens facing rebels on the Norwood:

  Hardly had I told the nearest soldiers what was going on when with revolvers cocked, I stormed into the midst of the startled gang. In spite of the stinging wound which the ringleader gave my arm with some sharp instrument, I did not let go [of him]. I kept both hands around the criminal’s neck so that he had no little trouble in breathing.… I should not have shot him except in the greatest need, so as not to make the others needlessly embittered.70

  But such mutiny attempts were few. The Norwood’s was fomented by a group of “former captains and pilots who scuttled their ships,” but no ordinary convicts could navigate. Generally they would remain passive and mutter threats, rather than go up against overwhelming odds of firepower. In the whole period of transportation (1788–1868), more than eight hundred outward voyages produced only one successful mutiny—on a female transport, the Lady Shore, in 1797. The insurgents were not female convicts, but their guard—a detachment of the New South Wales Corps who rose “in the name of the French Republic,” seized the ship without much bloodshed, sailed her to Montevideo and were eventually accepted by France as political refugees, after they had disposed of the bewildered women prisoners as servants to Spanish colonial ladies of quality.

  A captain who treated his prisoners well—as Tetens did, by making the regulations “markedly more lenient” and having long individual chats with his charges so that they could unburden their minds—was certain to be shown gratitude and even affection. At the end of the voyage “the exiles prepared a surprise for me which I remember today with deep emotion.… [H]atred and bitterness seemed to have vanished.” Before they filed ashore the prisoners lined themselves up in ordered ranks, clasped Tetens’s hand one by one, “all looking very serious,” and presented him with a letter of thanks signed by 270 out of 300 men:

  HONORED SIR!

  It is our deep regret that we are not able to give you a greater proof of our thankfulness and respect. We can only ask you to receive our sincere thanks for the kindness, generosity and liberal treatment which you have always shown us on the long voyage to Western Australia. To this earnest request we add the sincere wish that Heaven may grant you every earthly joy, that you may succeed in all your future enterprises, and while we must follow our unknown fate in an inhospitable land far from home and family, may the hand of the Almighty protect you and bring you back to a happy home.71

  However, the usual representative of humanity was the surgeon-superintendent, who was not only a healer but the closest thing to an ombudsman the convicts had. Most captains were not like Tetens; they were not sadists by nature, but they were tough unlettered men risen from the foc’s’le in the harsh school of the sea, and they placed scant value on convict comfort. On a ship with no surgeon-superintendent, Thomas Holden (the political exile from Bolton) complained in 1812 that “we have been three weeks without Clean Shorts and we asked the Captain for Shorts and he said they could not be Durty yet, and I wear Irons on both legs … Dear honored Father and Mother if you cannot do nothing for me and very soon I am sure you will never see me alive again.”72 That, in essence, was what the surgeon-superintendent was on board to prevent, and when he did so, showing a constant level of “firmness alleviated by compassion,” the convicts trusted him.

  The surgeon’s logs had to be kept in duplicate and turned in at the end of the voyage. The duller reading they make, the better the voyage for the prisoners. The log of Surgeon-Superintendent John Smith on the Clyde, carrying 215 men from Ireland to Sydney in 1838, is typical. It is a record of cleaning and scraping, sprinkling chloride of lime by the water-closets, supervising the laundry, lancing abscesses; blankets become lousy and are soaked all night in the urine-tubs in the hope of killing the accursed insects; the coarse trousers give some convicts “excoriations of the scrotum and thigh”; prisoners squabble and are put in the cramping-box, a lad whispers about mutiny and spends the night handcuffed on deck; the soldiers and their women fight like Kilkenny cats—“a more undisciplined, quarrelsome, noisy set have seldom come together, yet the behavior of the Prisoners is quiet and orderly with little exception.” Surgeon Smith dispenses advice, purges, blisters and bleedings; he buries the dead (but very few men die); and there is a note of quiet gratification at the end, when Clyde warps into Sydney Cove and an official from the colonial secretary’s office asks the customary question of the mustered prisoners: Is there any complaint about the Surgeon? “No, no, God bless him, was the universal cry.”73

  Individual convicts also poured forth their gratitude and hoped that Surgeon Smith would commend them to the authorities in Sydney, as in this letter from a middle-aged man of some education, Bernard Murray, protesting his innocence:

  Money turned the scales of Justice and unfortunate Murray was cast—yes Sir, cast out of Society, and banished from his home—his friends & his Country—but in you, Sir, I have found the tender & feeling Gentleman,—you have done more to meliorate my unhappy condition than I, in any manner, deserved,—you knew n
othing of me, I was a stranger, but your humanity for an injured man—now nearly in the decline of his life—Sir, your masterly and very impressive discourse delivered to us last Sunday week, will be long remembered and, please God, strictly followed by me. Altho’ a convict, Sir, I hope to bring my grey hair unsullied by Crime to the Grave.—Should you, Sir, still think of recommending me here to notice—rest assured, Kind Sir, that sobriety, steadiness & honesty with the strictest attention will not be wanting on my part.74

  A good surgeon-superintendent represented whatever was best in the System; he might not be a great doctor, but his decency made him exceptional in the netherworld of transportation. Once ashore, few convicts could expect as much fair play. The society into which they now came, as they were mustered at the side of Sydney Cove or the Hobart dock, feeling the beaten clay heave beneath their feet after those months at sea, was more punitive in its conventions, more capricious in its workings: a lottery, whose winners went on to found Australia but whose losers were no better off than slaves.

  * The ticket-of-leave system is discussed on pages 307–308.

  6

  Who Were the Convicts?

  i

  IT IS A QUARTER-CENTURY since the Australian in London risked hearing languid sneers directed at his criminal ancestry. This colonial vestige was already dying a generation ago. Nevertheless, it was part of English attitudes to Australians before 1960, and especially before World War II. When it appeared, it would send upper-middle-class Australians into paroxysms of social embarrassment. None wanted to have convict ancestors, and few could be perfectly sure that some felon did not perch like a crow in their family tree. Fifty years ago, convict ancestry was a stain to be hidden.