The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Prisoners were silenced with a gag, or by sluicing them down with sea water; in winter, this brought on pneumonia. On the voyage to Norfolk Island their ill-treatment continued. James Lawrence, the convict son of a London diamond broker who had been transported for fraud in 1836 and sent to Norfolk Island almost as soon as he arrived in Sydney, recalled that on this thousand-mile voyage in the brig Governor Phillip, there were “Seventy-Five of us in cross irons, our clothes taken from us with the exception of our Shirts, and then rove on a chain in a small prison scarce able to breathe, our passage was dreadful in the Extreme.”8 Frayne, cut to ribbons by the lash, had to make the voyage to Norfolk Island on the Lucy Ann in October 1830 with maggots crawling in his back and no chance of a wash or a bandage:

  My shoulders were actually in a state of decomposition the stench of which I could not bear myself, how offensive then must I appear and smell to my companions in misery. In this state immediately after my landing I was sent to carry Salt Beef on my back with the Salt Brine as well as pressure stinging my mutilated & mortified flesh up to Longridge. I really longed for instant death.9

  As soon as they landed at Kingston, the convicts went to work. Norfolk Island had no free settlers and no assignment system; hence, the convicts worked only for government, constructing buildings or growing food. Every structure on the island, from the sentry-boxes to the high stone security walls around the main compounds at Kingston, was convict-built. Few skilled masons were to be found among the twice-convicted “incorrigibles” in exile there, but the last drop of crude labor was wrung from them in iron gangs. They made bricks, burned coral into lime for mortar and ripped the Norfolk Island pines into planks. The jail gang, made up of some thirty-five multiple offenders crammed in a filthy hovel of a prison near the jetty, hewed stone in the quarry wearing double or even triple irons. As a special punishment, men were assigned to the “wet quarry,” a reef partly covered by the sea at the edge of the cemetery, to cut stone under water.

  The workday was sunrise to sunset, with an hour off for the midday meal. Every morning and evening, all irons were inspected for signs of tampering—nick-marks, ovalling of the leg-ring, a loose rivet. At unpredictable times, the convicts would be mustered, counted and given full body-searches with inspections of the mouth and anus. Their daily rations were 1½ pounds of cornmeal, 1 pound of salt beef, 1 ounce of sugar, ½ ounce of salt, and a tiny morsel of soap. At dinner, the superintendent was to issue each “mess” of six men a mess kit (knife, fork, spoon, pannikin) which they used in rotation and handed back. But there were never enough utensils to go round, so that they had to eat in a way “disgusting to any man possessing the slightest degree of decency.… The provisions were brought out to the various Gangs in wooden or large tin Dishes and set down as before a Hog or a Dog and [they had] to gnaugh it just the same.” If a man dared to make his own utensils, especially a knife, he would be flogged at once and jailed.10

  The basis of prison discipline was the informer. On Norfolk the policy of splintering the convicts as a class, dissolving solidarity in mutual suspicion, was taken to extremes; the authorities felt, quite correctly, that if the prisoners were given the smallest chance to combine there could be a bloody uprising, even a general massacre. Thus not to inform became suspicious in itself, and hardly a week passed without the disclosure of elaborate plots, complete with lists of names, as convicts competed for trivial favors from Morisset and his officers by denouncing one another. “Indulgence,” Frayne noted, “was only got by such traffic in human blood.” The quality of the information mattered far less than its quantity. Informers had their quotas of denunciation to fill and were “capable of any act of purfidy or blood no matter how Black or horrifying such a deed might be.” Any Norfolk man could be flogged on suspicion, as long as he was charged; and since prisoners were tried summarily, by tribunal and not by jury, they had no effective defense. In this way the “normal” relations between guilt and punishment mutated into a continuous sadistic fiction, whose sole aim was to preserve terror.

  Frayne described what these punishments could mean. He was brought before Morisset for breaking a flagstone in the quarry. “As usual I found my defence useless,” and thus was sentenced to 100 lashes:

  After the sentence I plainly told the Commandant in the Court that he was a Tyrant. He replied that no man had ever said that about him before. I said they knew the consequences too well to tell him so.—But I tell you in stark naked blunt English that you are as great a tyrant as Nero ever was.

  The moment I expressed these words I was sentenced to an additional 100 & to be kept ironed down in a cell for Life and never to see daylight again.11

  The floggings were spaced. Frayne got 50 lashes on his back. In four days, the cuts were partly scabbed over and he got 50 more. On the eighth day, he got 50 on the buttocks; and on the twelfth day, the last 50. Morisset supervised all this “specially to see the infliction … given as severe as the scourgers could possibly inflict it,” so that

  new and heavier Cats were procured purposely for my punishment, & the flagellator threatened to be flogged himself if he did not give it me more severe. He replied that he did his utmost and really could do no more.… The Super[intendent] who witnessed the Punishment swore when I was taken down that i was a Brickmaker, meaning that I was like an Iron Man past all feelings of the punishment. Alas, delusive idea!—I felt too acutely the full weight scourge & sting of every lash but I had resolution enough accompanied by inflexible Obstinacy not to give any satisfaction.… I knew my real innocence and bore up against it.12

  Morisset, insulted to his face, sought new pretexts to break this stiff-necked young Irishman. Nine or ten weeks later, Frayne was up before him again, charged with assaulting a convict informer named Harper. “What have you to say for yourself?” the Commandant asked, and Frayne began a tirade:

  I replied that I would leave it to you to judge whether I am guilty or innocent; you know the character & conduct of the informer; you also know mine. It is useless for me to gainsay anything.… If you actually knew my innocence yourself I well know that you would punish me.… If you acquit me for the assault you will flog me for what I have now said to you, but I disreagard both you and all the punishment you can give me.

  His very next expression was, “I will give you 300 at three different whippings, you damned Scoundrel.”

  I said, “I am no Scoundrel no more than yourself, but I don’t think I can take that punishment.” This I said out of derision and ironically, with a sneer at the Colonel.

  I and the other man was taken out and we received our first 100 in slow time and with heavy cats. The flagellators were almost as much besmeared with blood as even we.… When I was taken down an overseer who assisted to loosen the cords said, giving me a Fig of Tobacco, “You are a Steel Man not a Flesh-and-Blood Man at all, you can stand to be sawn asunder after all that skinning and mangling.”13

  Frayne and his fellow convict were jailed for a week until their backs scabbed over; then Morisset sent the island surgeon, Dr. Gamack, to see if they could take their second hundred. Frayne begged the surgeon to get on with it: “I am ready to be scarified alive again,” as long as the other man (who “had tender flesh”) could take his flogging too.

  Gamack says, “Do you wish to expire under the lash?” I said, “I want to get it over and have done with it & all thought of it, being here injures me more than the flogging.”14

  He got his second 100 and went back into solitary, without any medical treatment. To alleviate the pain from his mangled back Frayne had to pour his water ration on the stone floor of the cell, piss in it to enlarge the puddle, and lie down

  with my sore shoulders on the exact spot where the water lay.… I was literally alive with Maggots and Vermin, nor could I keep them down; to such a wretched and truly miserable state was I reduced, that I even hated the look & appearance of myself.… The trifle of soap allowed me to wash our persons & shirts was stopped from me, as I thought to spur me to
abuse the Gaol authorities and thereby again subject myself to more cruelty … knowing as they all did my hasty temper.15

  Before he could undergo the third part of his flogging, Frayne was reprieved; the colonial secretary in Sydney issued an executive order limiting all floggings to 100 lashes. Morisset then clapped him in the “dumb cell,” a totally dark, soundless stone isolation chamber, for two months. No sooner did he come out, disoriented and staggering in the sudden blaze of Pacific sunlight, than he got in trouble again.

  There were two assigned convict women working as servants at Government House. They had been briefly jailed for some trivial offense. One of them was not only Irish but came from the same town as Frayne. “Strange to say (and equally true as strange) I purposely got into Gaol if possible to get to them, and while they were walking in the Yard for Air I shewed myself through the Bars.… I told them they might expect me to pay them a visit at all Hazard, & I would put up with the consequences if it was 300.” That night he did contrive to sneak into the women’s cell and hide under their bedding. “They knew too well the Colonel’s feelings towards me.… They were equally as anxious as myself to annoy the Colonel.” So Frayne and the two women had their night of sexual comfort, the only tenderness, perhaps, that any of them had received or given in years. He was found out, of course, and haled before Morisset once more:

  I plainly told the Commandant that it was the only opportunity I had ever had or perhaps ever would have of spending a night in Womens company; it was a very natural offence in a twofold degree. “How do you mean twofold?” asked the Commandant. “The first,” I said, “is too obvious to need explanations, the second is that they are both your servants—now you can do as you please, that is all I have to say.”

  “Well then,” said the Commandant, “I will give you 100 lashes in slow time so that you shall pay for your creeping into the women’s cell.”

  I said, “I hope you will send me back to gaol right after it, and you can give me another 100 tomorrow for the same offence if that will gratify you or give you a pleasure.”16

  Frayne got his hundred, in slow time. So it went on: “I am an oppressed convict,” he raves at Morisset, “oppressed by your Tyranny, & sacrificed by your base Informers & blood hunters, & my hunger and your cruel torture gives you the greatest pleasure & gratification.” But nothing changes; defiance calls forth the lash, torture demands resistance, each side defends its territory, neither will budge. How many men like Frayne were there among the seven hundred Norfolk prisoners under Morisset in 1834? How much implacable, hopeless courage was summoned up to confront the iron machinery of discipline? Frayne spent three years “loaded with French or exceedingly heavy Irons” in the jail gang, reefed to a chain cable every night. Certainly, few convicts can have been like him—otherwise the island would have been uncontrollable.

  More normal was the experience of John Holyard, who had come to Norfolk Island on the same boat as Frayne in 1830. He, too, had had his sentence for a capital crime commuted, but he learned quite early that to truckle was to survive; and so he became an informer. In the miseries of the Phoenix hulk, he “learned a lesson which I trust will never be forgot, viz., Submission to the Authorities.” On Norfolk Island, “the exaggerated accounts told of the misery existing on the Island … wrung tears from me as I got out of the Boat.” Yet he found

  to my great consolation, that to a well-conducted prisoner even on Norfolk Island there is kindness shewn; misery certainly stares the majority of them in the face, but their own doing is the true source of it.… I found that although it is a settlement of hardship and privation, yet not altogether so insupportable as I imagined.17

  Holyard was writing to a clergyman who kept assigned servants and had given him a “character” to one of the Norfolk Island officers, so his tone is predictable. But anyone who rose above passive docility was pounced on, and Frayne was clearly not alone in feeling that the rules and those who applied them were meant “to harass and torture me in a manner repugnant to & not consistent with British Law.” Authority was absolute and capricious, lacking any proportion between the acts it forbade and the punishments it meted out. Frayne knew he had been singled out as a “bush lawyer”—“the leading man among my fellow prisoners particularly among the litigious & disaffected.” Despite his formidable inner resources he began to sink into despair, believing God himself was against him:

  I began to think that the Almighty had decreed that my life should be made a life of infamy & turmoil & degradation, a life to be perpetually harrow’d up & goaded with such inhuman, barbarous and algerine brutality. This place I considered worse than the blackest dens and caverns of Hell.… I began to question in my own then-perverted mind the infinite mercy, nay the justice, of Deity itself.18

  He recoiled from this idea, reminding himself that God “was shewing me as forcibly as possible the truth of holy Writ.” So he resorted to the Bible, particularly the 88th Psalm, which he knew by heart. Ironed down to the jail floor as the Pacific boomed without end on the Kingston reef, each percussion causing a faint shudder in the flagstones, he recited it over and over:

  I am counted with them that go down into the pit:

  I am as a man that hath no help:

  Cast off among the dead,

  Like the slain that lie in the grave,

  Whom thou rememberest no more;

  And they are cut off from thy hand.

  Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit,

  In the dark places, in the deeps.

  The decisive way out of this misery was suicide. “If ever it once had entered my mind that a Self-Murderer could obtain salvation I would not have seen a 10th part of the misery I underwent.” But religious instruction was so basic to the rearing of many convicts, especially the Irish, that suicide was unthinkable. By killing themselves, they believed they would exchange the pains of the island for a real and eternal Hell, from which there would be no release. And so most of the prisoners who felt, like Frayne, “heartsick of my own existence,” still could not bring themselves to “that climax of human depravity, to take away my own life with my own hands.” They were caught between God and Commandant, condemned by their will to survive.

  Yet in Morisset’s time, a remarkable usage emerged on the Island. It turned suicide into an act of solidarity, not of solipsism and despair. A group of convicts would choose two men by drawing straws: one to die, the other to kill him. Others would stand by as witnesses. There being no judge to try capital offenses on Norfolk Island, the killer and witnesses would have to be sent to Sydney for trial—an inconvenience for the authorities but a boon to the prisoners, who yearned for the meager relief of getting away from the “ocean hell,” if only to a gallows on the mainland. And in Sydney, there was some slight chance of escape. The victim could not choose himself; everyone in the group, apparently, had to be equally ready to die, and the benefits of his death had to be shared equally by all survivors. Suicide by lottery thus acquired a Roman tinge of disinterestedness.

  There are several references to such suicides in the 1830s. Thus William Ullathorne, the Catholic vicar-general of Australia, visited the island in 1834 and remarked that

  so indifferent had even life become, that murders were committed in cold blood; the murderer afterwards declaring that he had no ill-feeling against his victim, but that his sole object was to obtain his own release. Lots were even cast; the man on whom it fell committed the deed, his comrades being witnesses, with the sole view of being taken … to Sydney.19

  But one full account of such a ritual survives. It was written by Captain Foster Fyans, Morisset’s second-in-command, who had questioned the survivors of the event.20

  One day in 1832 or 1833 a gang of 16 convicts was marched out from the Kingston barracks to labor on a road. At the site they seized and manacled their overseer to the only “outsider” in the gang, an unnamed Jewish prisoner, remarking that “Jews are not to be trusted.”21 The gang leader, Fitzgerald, produced a makeshift knife and h
arangued his mates:

  “Now gentlemen to business. You all know the plot, is anyone against it? Nil. I have sixteen straws in my fist—the long straw will gain a prize, and the short will be his mate, and here is as good a piece of Hoop Iron as any on the island, and what is more it would shave a Bishop—fair play is a jewel, who draws for Lazarus?”

  “Oh my Codd almighty, spare my life, Gentlemen,” cried the poor Jew.

  “Fair play is a jewel, come Mr. Jew, you shall have first prize.”

  “So help me Codd, spare me”—the Jew fainted, when all cried out for the overseer to choose for the Jew. With some difficulty he was forced by kicks and threats to draw; he did so, the others following, when Fitzgerald was left with the longest straw, and the other with the shortest; either were to suffer a cruel death on the spot.

  The long straw now drew against the short “for who was to suffer.” Fitzgerald himself won, and made a brief speech to his comrades:

  “I am sorry boys that I am leaving you, but I am not the man either to peach or tell a lie—you’ll have fine fun before you going to Sydney, and a chance of giving them the go-by. Think of me, boys, you’ll all get off alone. Tell old Dowling the judge that it’s my own free will, and that Pat Larkins sticks me. I am all ready now. Come on, my heartys … now quick, please yourself and give me as little pain as you can.”22

  At this, Pat Larkins drove the hoop-iron knife into Fitzgerald’s stomach “up to his fist” and disemboweled him, there in the dust of the road. The gang ran away; the Jew and the overseer found the key to their handcuffs in the dying man’s pocket and freed themselves; after two days of anguish Fitzgerald died in the hospital. Later, most of the gang “with some other aspiring youths for the gallows” were shipped back to Sydney for trial. Clearly, Fyans was impressed by the stoic courage of Fitzgerald’s death; he was a soldier and could respect the clan-bound toughness of such men.