The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  We do not know how many such deaths were enacted on Norfolk Island. Fyans’s wording suggests that it was part of a pattern, as when he has Fitzgerald begin his speech with the words “You all know the plot.” Such rituals evolve through custom; they are not simply invented. But in cheating suicide of its stigma, they covered its traces. Officially, the victim had to be classified as murdered by other convicts. It may be that some other moments when a group of prisoners suddenly killed a convict who was not obviously an informer were, in fact, suicide pacts of this kind.

  Convict killings were common on Norfolk Island by the end of 1833, so common that Governor Richard Bourke realized he had to close the loophole. “There has appeared abundant reason to suspect,” he wrote to England,

  that Capital crimes have been committed [on Norfolk Island) from a desperate determination to stake the chance of capital conviction and punishment in Sydney against the chances of escape, which the passage might afford to the accused and the Witnesses summoned to attend the trial. The number of the latter has been much augmented by the Sinister endeavour of convicts to procure themselves to be summoned.23

  He proposed that a session of the Supreme Court with hanging powers be held whenever it was needed on the island, the judge to be any barrister of three years’ standing and the jury composed of five military officers —a kangaroo court if ever there was one. This was not done, but from time to time a judge accompanied by a crown prosecutor, a defense solicitor and a hangman did visit the island to represent the Supreme Court. The first session of this kind was in September 1833; the judge was James Dowling, the second chief justice of New South Wales. He tried and hanged some convicts for murder. From then on, no Norfolk Island convicts were sent to Sydney for trial.

  ii

  THE CONVICTS’ only chance of relief from Morisset’s regime now lay in open rebellion. There can have been few who did not sometimes dream, like Laurence Frayne, of revenge:

  I should certainly have taken his life … & many a time I prayed, if I knew what prayer was, that the heaviest curses that ever Almighty God let fall on blighted man might reach him, for blood will have blood, and in no depth of earth or sea can we bury it; and the blood of several of my fellow-Prisoners cryed aloud & often to Heaven to let fall its vengeance on this wholesale Murderer and despicable White Savage.24

  Through the summer of 1833–34, the prisoners’ barracks seethed with rumors of a coming outbreak. According to Frayne, Morisset was on the point of flogging confessions out of him and other convicts, as the Reverend Samuel Marsden had done thirty years before to the Irish at Parramatta. But the commander of the garrison, Captain Charles Sturt—whose deeds as an explorer of the Australian hinterland included the discovery of the continent’s largest river, the Murray, and who was known for his decency to convicts—dissuaded him.

  By then, Morisset could barely handle the routines of his duty. He was prostrated by bouts of pain from his old head wound, which struck so fiercely that he could only lie in bed unable to speak, with his eye bulging like a hen’s egg. He stared at failure, a man of fifty-one with nothing to show but this remote post, a brood of unmarriageable daughters and a whistling mask of scar tissue that even the convicts sniggered at. He decided to sell his commission. He wrote to Sydney, announcing that he must remove his daughters from “an abode so unfit for them”; perhaps the colonial secretary could get him a better civil post?25 Then he took to his bed again, glaring at the wooden ceiling and listening to the enveloping drone of the sea wind in the Norfolk Island pines.

  The running of the island now devolved on his second-in-command, Foster Fyans, who had two main informants among the convicts: a prisoner named Bullock and an overseer, Constable Price. Fyans was worried, for something was brewing. An anonymous note was dropped in the soldiers’ barracks warning them to “beware of poison”; and Fyans held fresh in his memory a poison plot hatched two years before by one of the convicts on a ship to Norfolk Island. The man was John Knatchbull.26 Knatchbull, alias Fitch (1792?–1844), was one of twenty children of a baronet in Kent who had married three times. With no inheritance coming, Knatchbull joined the navy and rose during the Napoleonic Wars to the rank of captain. Down on his luck in peacetime, he was arrested, tried and transported for fourteen years in 1824 for stealing a pocketbook with two sovereigns in it from a reveller in Vauxhall Gardens. By 1826, Knatchbull was a convict constable on the Western Road at Bathurst. He had his ticket-of-leave by 1829—won for bringing in eight runaways under the hated Bushranging Act—but two years later he forged a check and was caught. Knatchbull was sentenced to hang, but the sentence was commuted and he was shipped to Norfolk Island in 1832. Once on board, he conspired with fifteen other convicts to lace the crew’s and guards’ food with white arsenic, seize the ship and escape. An informer gave the plan away, and a whole pound of the deadly stuff was found hidden in their quarters. But because no one was actually poisoned, Knatchbull was not tried, as it was too much trouble to ship the conspirators back to Sydney for trial. So they remained on Norfolk Island, admired by their fellow convicts and known, collectively, as the “Tea-Sweeteners.”

  Fyans was right to suspect Knatchbull. He was helping them make plans. The only way off the island was by ship, and only Knatchbull knew how to run one. On August 1, 1833, before lights-out in the prisoners’ barracks, Knatchbull was stretched on his mat when a convict named George Farrell “laid himself on the mat next to me, when he said I should shortly hear something.” Another lifer, an eighteen-year-old Irish lad named Dominick McCoy, joined them.

  “What do you mean?” asked Knatchbull.

  “Tell him,” said McCoy.

  “The men outside,” Farrell began, “are all mad for their liberty; it is such a gift, especially after the last boat went.”27

  He explained the plan. At dawn muster in the convict barracks yard, they would rush Fyans and his soldiers and overpower them. If any of the guard managed to barricade themselves in the guardhouse, the prisoners would set fire to it and flush them out. Meanwhile the jail gang (made up of prisoners under special punishment in the rickety old calaboose 150 yards away) would likewise rush their own guard as they were being mustered for work in the stone quarry. They, too, were “ready at any time to do anything for their liberty.” Then the convicts would break for Government House, capture Morisset, seize the 18-pound cannon there, slew it around and blow the military barracks down. If the soldiers surrendered they would be spared; if not, they would hang, along with all the hated convict constables, overseers and informers. The convicts would force Morisset to hand over his code book of signals, so that they could flag false messages to the next ship that hove to off the reef. Thus, before the captain realized what was happening, they could get on board in the overseers’ blue jackets and seize the vessel. They could avenge themselves at leisure. Morisset and Fyans “should be put to a lingering death of torture.” Skinned alive by his own cat, the colonel would hang for three days, then be quartered, and the fragments of his carcass would dangle on four trees until the sea birds had stripped them. The women on the island were to be “taken and distributed” to the ringleaders, and Knatchbull wanted the colonel’s timid and neurasthenic wife Emily Vaux. After the orgies, the convicts meant to build a decked launch to hold forty or fifty people, which they would sail to New Caledonia. Knatchbull would pilot the hijacked ship to America, for “if he once got there, the Americans would not allow them to be given up again.”28

  So the plan grew, a poor unlikely project nourished by whispers and swollen by fantasies of vengeance. It linked convict to convict in the lumber yard and the sawpits, at the limeburners’ kiln and the stone quarry, where the convict Redmond Moss, who carried messages between the various gangs, begged Knatchbull to “learn him the compass” before they all sailed gloriously off into the blue. The very thought of escape, however farfetched, gave new hope to the Norfolk Island long-sentence men. (Of the 137 rebels eventually charged with mutiny, half were lifers and another thir
d had sentences of fourteen years.) They devised a password and countersign: “You carry a load.” “Yes, but relief is at hand.”

  Rumors of rebellion filtered back to Fyans through his informants. They were vague about time and strategy, and so Morisset contemptuously dismissed them as a pack of lies. Fyans believed them, however, and slept badly. He pored over the uselessly long list of two hundred names his informers had given him, men they had seen whispering together, whom they had grudges against, or who were merely Irish. But there was no sign from the convicts until January 15.

  That day, a Wednesday, dawned in fog and pale gray light. Soon after the 5 a.m. reveille bell, a downpour swept Kingston. Through the rain, Fyans and his men in the military barracks heard a distant clinking of iron fetters from the seaward side of the jail. They could see nothing. There were shouts and the flat bang of a musket, followed by a ragged volley. The mutiny had begun.

  The timing was nearly right. At the dawn muster in the prisoners’ barracks, an unusually large number of men—thirty-eight in all—had reported sick and were marched off to hospital by a warder, John Higgins. Once inside the hospital lockup, the men turned on Higgins, overpowered him and locked him in a sickroom. The prisoners burst into other wards; one convict named William Groves found the camp constable from Longridge lying ill in bed. “Here’s old Howley the dog,” Groves cried, “and we ought to settle with him now.” The leaders of the hospital revolt, Dominick McCoy, Lawrence Duggan and Henry Drummond, told Groves to leave the sick man alone.

  Soon they struck off one another’s irons and armed themselves with makeshift weapons, from chair legs to scalpels and a poker; some found axes. They massed in the entrance of the hospital, ready to fall on the jail guard when it came by, and waited in silence.

  A hundred yards away this guard was mustering the jail gang—about thirty convicts under the eye of a corporal and twelve privates of the 4th Regiment. The soldiers formed them up in a column by the jail gate, under the gallows. At this moment the jail wardsman looked toward the beach and saw Laurence Frayne helping a guard empty a night-tub of urine into the sea. Frayne looked toward the sawpits and cried, “Are you ready?” At that moment, the guard corporal ordered the prisoners to march. They would not budge. They stood there, rattling their chains: a signal. Seconds later, a gang of convicts from the sawpits—another forty or fifty men—ran yelling at the rear of the guards around the corner of the jail, while the hospital gang burst from hiding and attacked their front. Suddenly, the dozen guards were trapped in a melee of some 120 convicts. Taken utterly by surprise, they could not get their weapons to their shoulders; the convicts, one of the soldiers recalled, “were within the bayonets of the Guard, before they were aware of them.”29 Their muskets, nearly six feet from buttplate to bayonet tip, were not designed for hand-to-hand combat, and for a few moments the convicts and guards stood locked, grappling for the guns. Two convicts knocked Private William Ramsay down and tried to wrench the musket from his hands. In a daze he heard one of them, Patrick Glenny, shouting “Kill the bugger!” while another named Snell cried that he acted “like a bloody dog over the gang.” Ramsay begged for his life, and Snell, kneeling on the soldier’s arm, said he would spare him if he surrendered his gun; he did, and he lived to testify. Snell stood up but was immediately shot and bayoneted by Private James Oppenshaw. Private Pearson lost his musket to Robert Douglas. “Shoot the bugger, shoot him!” other prisoners yelled. But the gun missed fire; Douglas wheeled on a hated free overseer named Phipps and snapped the hammer six or seven times at him without result. Clutching the musket, Douglas fled into the sugar cane with Phipps in hot pursuit. Henry Drummond, another ringleader, grabbed the musket of Private William Parham, going for his throat with a knife as he did so. The gun was smashed in the struggle, but Parham wrenched free, swung its heavy barrel and brained another convict named Wilson.30

  The guards began shooting, and their shots alerted the barracks far away across the swamp. They backed into the gateway of the jail, frantically loading and firing while their comrades kept the lunging convicts back at saber-point. The rebel Henry Drummond fell, under the gallows at the jail gate. Several others went down and, as suddenly as it began, the melee broke up. Dazed by the firing and the sudden red spouts where the balls struck home, they scrambled back into the refuge of the jailyard: James Shields, the jailer, guessed that ten or fifteen of them “who would not have anything to do with the soldiers” rushed by him to temporary safety. Later, the rebel George Farrell would bitterly complain that their cowardice lost the mutiny. The rest of the convicts, driven back by the guard, started retreating in the direction of Longridge, away from the sea.

  The clash had only lasted a few minutes. Half a mile away in Quality Row, where the barracks and officers’ houses stood, Foster Fyans and his soldiers had come scrambling out in cap and shirts, buckling on their cartridge-belts as they ran; they had not even had time to lace up their boots. They double-timed down the road to intercept the mutineers and formed up panting breathlessly on a small rise, probably where the Norfolk Island war memorial now stands. The convicts came on, but they faltered when they saw the long barrels levelled at them. Fyans gave the order to fire, and when the black-powder smoke cleared, fifteen rebels were seen stretched on the ground while most of the others had plunged into the sugar cane that grew beside the road; only the remnants of the jail gang stood dumbly in surrender, hampered by their irons. Any rebel who tried to head uphill to Longridge was shot. Soldiers followed the escapees into the vegetable gardens and sugar cane. “The men were very keen after these ruffians,” Fyans recalled with some relish. “It was really game and sport to these soldiers … ‘Come on out, my Honey’—with a prick of the Bayonet through both thighs or a little above.” Leaving them to this work he led a detachment up the hill to deal with the convicts at the agricultural station at Longridge.

  Up there, the morning had begun casually. The convicts had lookouts planted where they could see the Kingston jail buildings and signal the start of the mutiny. Walter Bourke, the leader of the Longridge rebels, was in the toolhouse sharpening hoes when these “cockatoos” burst through the door, shouting “Turn out, my lads—now is the time for Liberty.” Convicts came crowding exultantly around, and with a swing of his hoe Bourke smashed the lock on the main toolchest and started passing out axes and pitchforks to the men. “Come on, my boys, follow me,” he shouted. “I do not value my life more than I do that piece of dirt—if you think you can do any good follow me.”31 Crying “Death or glory!” “Liberty or death!” and “Huzza for liberty!” about eighty convicts followed him down the road to Flagstaff Hill, pausing only to crack off one another’s irons with their axes.

  Foster Fyans and his men heard them coming, as a thin straggle of cheers carried over the crest of the hill in the wind. The Longridge men expected to see a victorious crowd of their fellow rebels surging to meet them. Instead they saw two men stumbling up the hill, one of them wounded, and behind them, the redcoats in pursuit. The huzzahs died away, and the surge of adrenaline turned to panic. The soldiers fired a few rounds, but the range was too great. Soon, they closed in and beat the rebels back to Longridge, taking twenty-eight prisoners on the way; with difficulty, Fyans kept the soldiers from bayonetting them to death on the spot, and felt later that “perhaps such lenity is ill bestowed.”32 Nevertheless the soldiers kicked, stabbed and beat the rebels so hard that Fyans himself broke his sword in pieces hitting them with the flat of it.

  Within a couple of hours, all of the Longridge rebels were subdued and bound together with cord in a line, which the soldiers marched down the hill to Kingston. At the foot of Flagstaff Hill, they found the youngest ringleader, Dominick McCoy, dying on the ground; cut down by musket-balls, he had been repeatedly bayonetted in the lungs, liver and diaphragm. Now Fyans gave the order to drag him by his chains to the Police Office; and when Dr. Gamack protested and demanded McCoy be carried to the hospital, Fyans told his men to wheel right and drag him there
, his head bumping across another 200 yards of stones and mud. Other soldiers, with blood in their eyes, came up and threatened to shoot the doctor.33

  By noon, Fyans had the mutineers behind walls in the main prison barracks—“nearly one thousand Ruffians,” he wrote later, although it was more like two hundred.34 A few were still missing, among them Robert Douglas, who was found later on the other side of the Island at Anson’s Bay, groping along but still carrying a musket with ninety rounds of ammunition wrapped in a palm leaf. A bayonet thrust had destroyed his left eye, and infection blinded the other a few days later. Fyans interrogated him daily in the hospital, but Douglas refused to say a word about the rebellion. The final tally of casualties was light: five rebels dead, and about fifty crippled. No guard was killed until the night after the mutiny, when two military search parties met in a cornfield while looking for rebels still at large and, each believing the other to be convicts, opened fire. One fluke shot killed both a civilian constable and a young private of the 4th Regiment, Thomas York.

  So ended the Norfolk Island mutiny of 1834. It had been the only mass convict uprising in the history of transportation to Australia since Castle Hill in 1804. It was ill-planned, badly coordinated, and a failure. It was over in seven hours, but the vengeance of the prison authorities lasted for months. When Captain Fyans, a sweaty, dishevelled figure with his double-barrelled gun on one shoulder and an old rusty dragoon sabre in his hand, reported to Colonel Morisset (who was still in bed from his migraine attack), Morisset gave him carte blanche, saying—as Fyans remembered it—“Glad I am that I am not responsible. Do as you like.”