Of all the myriad kinds of thief—“the sons of St. Peter, with every finger a fish-hook”—the most dexterous were the files and buzz-gloaks, or pickpockets. Dickens’s description of Fagin’s school for boy thieves in Oliver Twist was no fantasy. Larger schools (whose ten-year-old initiates were known as erriffs, a straight word for young canaries, or academy buzz-nappers) were a favorite topic of London journalists. They taught the arts of fogle-hunting (drawing out handkerchiefs), bung-diving (taking purses), speaking to the tattler (lifting a watch, with its onions, or seals) and chiving the froe (cutting off a woman’s pockets with a razor). A pupil with no talent for this was scorned as a purple dromedary. A skilled, coordinated adept became a boman prig (from the French “beau,” fine) with rum daddies (expert hands). Out he would go, with a bulker, or accomplice, whose role was to jostle the mark, to do fieldwork among the crowds in Piccadilly, the sauntering dandies in Vauxhall Gardens, or the milling crush in Drury Lane during the breaking-up of the spell, as theater interval was called. It was under such circumstances that George Barrington, an Irish pickpocket of high vanity and considerable skill, was caught picking the pocket of the Russian Prince Orlov during an operatic first night at Covent Garden; he was transported, and ended up as a “decayed macaroni” at Parramatta with no acres farmed for him by lesser convicts. Barrington’s celebrity was such that a number of books, none of which he wrote, were published under his name, including an early “history” of New South Wales.23
One could not, of course, enter the milieu of crime just by learning its argot. It took work to build up a name. There was nothing unlikely about the words Dickens put into the mouth of young Charley Bates, as he sees his beau idéal the Artful Dodger facing transportation for pinching a mere snuffbox. “Oh, why didn’t he rob some rich old gentleman of all his walables, and go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour nor glory!… How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar? P’raps not be there at all.” “See what a pride they take in their profession,” Fagin crows.24
No classless society has ever existed or ever will. Every group has bottom and top dogs. The hostile glare of the decent did not prevent men and women “on the cross” from constructing pecking orders whose minuteness and punctilio were almost worthy of Versailles. From the lowest thief to the highest member of the “Swell Mob,” all was graded; the criminal milieu was a meritocracy with strong tribal overtones. The pyramid of crime was a buried, inverted reflection of the pyramid of respectability, and those who lived where the two met—beggars and charity cases, with neither the skill to work nor the gumption to steal—were despised by both. Thus, Mayhew noted that a poor boy might be “partly forced to steal for his character.” One’s criminal record was an index of rank. At a party in a thieves’ kitchen Mayhew found that
the announcements in reply to the questions as to the number of times that any of them had been in prison were received with great applause, which became more and more boisterous as the number of punishments increased. When it was announced that one, though only nineteen years of age, had been in prison as many as twenty-nine times, the clapping of hands … lasted for several minutes, and the whole of the boys rose to look at the distinguished individual. Some chalked on their hats … the sum of the several times they had been in gaol.25
One had to start young, but inexperience gets caught. The young thief was eager to prove himself, rash, and hence an easy target for the police, even before fingerprints. After 1815 it was quite rare for a first-time thief to be sentenced to transportation, but the number of thefts committed by habitual criminals meant that further convictions, and Botany Bay, were bound to follow.
Illustrators depicted the “criminal type” as a mask of low cunning, stunted but alert. In fact there was no difference between the look of English criminals and that of the working class from which they came. Against the jargon of “criminal types” and the pseudo-scientific babble of the phrenologists one must balance the description of cotton-mill workers offered by Peter Gaskell in 1833:
An uglier set of men and women … it would be impossible to congregate in a smaller compass. Their complexion is shallow and pallid—with a peculiar flatness of feature, caused by the want of a proper quantity of adipose substance to cushion out the cheeks. Their stature low—the average height being five feet six inches. Their limbs slender, and playing badly and ungracefully. A very general bowing of the legs.26
The convicts’ height was not always recorded, but they tended to be short. Thus a giant poster published in Hobart in 1850, listing 465 escaped convicts at large (cumulative over 20 years) puts more than 80 percent of the men below 5 feet 8 inches, with the largest group, some 15 percent, only 5 feet 3 inches tall. Compared to most modern Australians of Irish or English descent, these men were runts, and the difference was one of diet.
They shared other traits with lumpen workers, chiefly a loathing of authority. The “criminal classes” of England were apolitical; on that, all observers agreed. They played no role whatsoever in the radical disturbances of the day. Tribal loyalties could be fanatically strong among them, and they stuck together against the peeler, the beak and the pink chaplain in his “cackle tub,” as the prison pulpit was known. “The more you value your number one, the more careful you must be of mine.… [A] regard for number one holds us all together, and must do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company.” Fagin’s words sum up an ethos of loyalty among thieves, a clannishness much like Sicilian omertà.
This contemptuous resistance to everyone and everything outside one’s small group was one of the roots of Australian mateship. But no convict ever felt that all convicts were his brothers. They would often trample and oppress one another, behaving with the utmost cynicism and cruelty toward weaker prisoners. And often they would not. There was no hard-and-fast rule of “convict solidarity.” From authority’s point of view, the London “sneaksman” had something in common with the Northumbrian cattle rustler—both had broken the law. But the two men, who knew nothing of one another’s background and barely had a language in common, would feel no bond at all. Even when people were transported from the same place for the same offense, they did not always stick by one another. “I hope you will not mind what you may hear from anyone that writes to Boulton saying how good anyone have been to me,” wrote the young protestor Thomas Holden, transported with other Luddites in 1812, to his parents. “I in all my illness have Receiv’d no favour from any one of they that come from Boulton, but far the other way.”27
Most were irreligious too—except, obviously, the Irish—since the reformed man or woman devoted to Methodist “enthusiasm” and the Evangelical meeting was the last person apt to be transported. Chaplains on transport vessels and tractarians visiting the hulks felt like missionaries among hostile white heathens. They bewailed the hard-heartedness of the convicts, their imperviousness to the Word, their cynicism about prayer, their inability to imagine God, Heaven or Hell. They were “abandoned,” “profligate,” “irreclaimable.” They respected neither God or man but truckled shamelessly to both when expediency whispered.
Mateship, fatalism, contempt for do-gooders and God-botherers, harsh humor, opportunism, survivors’ disdain for introspection, and an attitude to authority in which private resentment mingled with ostensible resignation—such was the meager baggage of values the convicts brought with them to Australia. They also brought, if men, the phallocracy of the tavern and ken, and, if women, a kind of tough passivity, a way of seeing life without expectations. What they bequeathed to their native-born Australian offspring, the Currency of the colony (as distinct from the Sterling, or English-born free settlers), was summed up by the Australian poet James McAuley in the 1950s as
a futile heart within a fair periphery.
The women are hard-eyed, kindly, with nothing inside them:
The men are independent but you could not call them free.
iv
ONLY A FEW convicts were sent out for political
offenses. Yet transportation was an important feature in the machinery of English state repression. The right to send political offenders to Botany Bay was jealously wielded by the British Government. English interests did not want to make martyrs of radicals—and there were obvious constitutional problems attached to hanging a Dissenting clergyman for owning a copy of Tom Paine. But transportation got rid of the dissenter without making a hero of him on the scaffold. He slipped off the map into a distant limbo, where his voice fell dead at his feet. There was nothing for his ideas to engage, if he were an intellectual; no machines to break or ricks to burn, if a laborer. He could preach sedition to the thieves and cockatoos, or to the wind. Nobody would care.
The first political agitators were transported to Australia early in the life of the System. They were convicted in Edinburgh and were known as the “Scottish Martyrs.”
In the early 1790s, “reforming” English intellectuals flirted with Jacobinism. To enable such parsons, lawyers and pamphleteers to make contact with like-minded workers, discussion groups known as “Corresponding Societies” were formed. Their officers called themselves “Jacobins” but were, in fact, reforming constitutionalists, who wanted to recall Britain’s laborers and artisans to a sense of their ancient rights. It was to this audience that Paine’s Rights of Man sold most of its million copies in Britain. Tories, thinking of Jacobinism in terms of the guillotine and the September Massacres, viewed the Corresponding Societies with horror and set out to break them up.
They would have liked to stage a crushing trial of some English Jacobins in England, but they could not be sure a jury would convict them. So their blow against the Corresponding Societies was struck in Scotland, where juries were easily rigged. It fell on a young, blue-eyed Scottish lawyer named Thomas Muir (1765–1799), vice-president of a Jacobin discussion group in Glasgow. Muir was an ardent constitutionalist whose offense was to advocate yearly elections of Parliament and a broadening of the Scottish franchise. He stood trial for sedition in Edinburgh in 1793, and every juror was handpicked from the rolls of a Scottish Tory organization known as the Life-and-Fortune Men, the equivalent of the Loyal Orange societies in Ireland.28
The main charge against Muir was that he had lent out radical tracts, among them a copy of Paine’s Rights of Man. Muir admitted the charge but claimed he could not receive a fair trial from the packed jury. The judge—Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland—brushed that aside, as he had been told to do. He was a coarse cunning old drunk whose remarks during this trial won long notoriety. (When one of the Jacobins pointed out that Christ himself had been a reformer, Braxfield chuckled and snorted: “Muckle he made o’ that—He was hanget.”) From such a man, Muir was unlikely to escape, whatever his forensic skills.
Braxfield’s instructions to the jury could hardly have been clearer: It was axiomatic that the British Constitution could not be improved. Muir had been telling “ignorant country people” that it must be changed to secure their liberty—“which, if it had not been for him, they would never have thought was in danger.” And what right did the “rabble” have to representation? None, for they had no property. “A government in this country should be just like a corporation,” the judge declared,
made up of the landed interest, which alone has the right to be represented. As for a rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They may pack up all their property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye; but landed property cannot be removed.29
The jury quickly and unanimously found Thomas Muir guilty and he was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation.
A few months later another “radical” clergyman was tried in Perth, for circulating a “seditious” pamphlet questioning Britain’s motives in her war against France and helping a Dundee weaver publish an “Address to the People” on the subject of parliamentary reform. This was Thomas Fyshe Palmer (1747–1802), no Scot but an Englishman, a Unitarian minister and fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, who had spent the past ten years preaching as a humble pastor in Dundee. He got 7 years’ transportation.
These sentences caused apprehension in England, and not only among Jacobins. A group of moderate constitutionalists, headed by Lord Lauderdale, complained about them to the home secretary, Henry Dundas.30 They asked Parliament to overturn the verdict on Muir and Palmer. Dundas would hear none of that. He wanted to press on and see if English radicals who did not live in Scotland could be arrested and tried there, and his chance came in October 1793, when the National Convention of British reformers met in Edinburgh.
Its two London delegates were middle-class dissenters, Joseph Gerrald (1760–1796) and Maurice Margarot (1745–1815). The Edinburgh sheriff’s deputies worked hard to break up the other assemblies at which they spoke. William Skirving (d. 1796), the Scottish secretary of the convention, was arrested at home and his papers impounded. Gerrald and Margarot were dragged out of bed in the dead of night, later to be released on bail. Braxfield’s court tried Skirving for sedition and sentenced him to 14 years’ transportation. Gerrald, temporarily free, went back to London and “as an Englishman in whose person the sacred rights of his country have been violated” publicly challenged Dundas to confess that he had instigated the night arrests.31 He was ignored. His friends urged him to jump bail and flee to Republican America. But Gerrald refused to abandon his comrades, whose trials were now taking place in Edinburgh. Margarot was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. Gerrald’s turn came a month later, and Lord Braxfield gave him 14 years. Both judge and prisoner knew that this was a death sentence, for Gerrald had tuberculosis.
Palmer, Muir, Skirving and Margarot were shipped to Australia along with eighty-three less celebrated convicts in the transport Surprize in February 1794. Gerrald followed a year later. On the voyage, Maurice Margarot seems to have had a nervous breakdown, and he denounced his comrades to the captain as parties to a mutiny plot. The indignant “Martyrs” spent the last five months of the voyage in the brig, on short rations. No wonder Muir wrote to a friend in London after their arrival to announce that “Palmer, Skirving and myself live in the utmost harmony. From our society, Maurice Margarot is expelled.”32
In fact, despite their lamentations, Sydney did not treat them harshly. They did no forced work, wore no chains, and never tasted the cat-o’-nine-tails. Palmer and Muir got land grants and even managed to turn a profit in the rum trade. The government only wanted them neutralized. But they needed watching and the acting governor, Francis Grose, promised Palmer “every indulgence,” provided that he “avoid on all occasions a recital of those Politicks which have produced in you the miseries a man of your feelings and abilities must at this time undergo.”33 Although Skirving was granted a hundred acres and Gerrald was bought a house on Sydney Harbor, the “Martyrs” felt the hostility of the Rum Corps—“they have kept us poor,” said Palmer, though he may only have been complaining about the difficulty of getting into the rum trade himself. Political discussion was out—“they are all aristocrats here from ignorance, and being out of the way or desire of knowledge.”34
Transportation did not destroy the political beliefs of the Scottish Martyrs. But it cooled their ardor, and one sees this reflected in “The Telegraph: A Consolatory Epistle,” a lengthy poem Thomas Muir addressed to his fellow reformer Henry Erskine in Scotland. It opens with the depressing landscape of exile, “Where sullen Convicts drag the clanking chain / and Desolation covers all the plain.” Here, Muir reflects that he is still a Jacobin and that
The best and noblest privilege in Hell
For souls like ours is, Nobly to rebell,
To raise the standard of revolt and try
The happy fruits of lov’d Democracy.
The sacred right of Insurrection there
May drive old Satan from his regal chair
And the same honest means may raise perchance
A France in Hell, that raised a Hell in France.
&n
bsp; But doubts arise. Does not revolution wreck the constitutional principles they all stand for? (Muir was so much a moderate that he even went to Paris to plead with the real Jacobins for the life of Louis XVI.) Brooding on the dangers of the mob, he devised a new metaphor of revolution; thus, an Australian bushfire makes its first appearance in English poetry, as a symbol of political passions ignited by ignorance. He had seen aboriginal hunters setting fire to the scrub:
Some naked Savage on the distant shore
With rapid step advancing to the view
Reminds me, Henry, of my friends and you:
Of those dear friends who join with heart & hand
To spread the flame of Freedom round the land,
And restless labour, anxious to inspire
Each sluggish bosom with the sacred Fire.—
To clear the forest’s dark impervious maze
The half-starv’d Indian lights a hasty blaze
Then lifts the Torch, and rushing o’er the Strand
High o’er his head he waves the flaming Brand
From Bush to Bush with rapid steps he flies
Till the whole forest blazes to the skies.
Often, ’tis true, this deed of Madness done
He mourns the mischief which his hand begun,
When the red torrent rushing o’er the plain
No art can stop, no human power restrain,
The Fatal Shore Page 26