The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  None of them did escape. Some tried to capture boats and row them across the Kingston Reef to the open sea; they broached to, were sunk by musket fire, or were chased and caught. Others tried to build escape vessels in secret, with stolen lumber, working at night in caves of the island; they were always betrayed by informers. The “demonization” of the prisoners continued under Anderson’s successors, Major Bunbury of the 80th Regiment and Major Ryan of the 50th. They eased some of Anderson’s more gratuitous punishments—Bunbury, for instance, replaced the hoe with the plough, which almost doubled farm production in the first year—and the pace of building slowed. But for all that, the System ground on; it was too deeply moored in the habits and appetites of guard, overseer and officer to be fundamentally changed by a few leniencies.

  In any case, its reputation had to be kept up. Norfolk Island held a thousand convicts, but its real use was the intimidation of tens of thousands more. If it was not “demonic,” it would have been as useless a deterrent as a gallows with no rope. Mercy on the mainland needed the background of terror elsewhere. Such was the official position. It had no lack of sanction from those who might have been preaching mercy. The Reverend Sydney Smith of the Edinburgh Review, so clubbable and so jolly, had gone on record for himself and thousands of like minds with the view that a prison should be “a place of punishment from which men recoil with horror—a place of real suffering painful to the memory, terrible to the imagination … a place of sorrow and wailing, which should be entered with horror.”54

  But in England, opinion was changing, especially among the Whigs. From 1835 on, such voices as Ullathorne’s, resonant with moral outrage, were added to a growing chorus of liberal indignation against the transportation system. Any system that could create a Norfolk Island—no matter how small a percentage of the mainland convicts were actually sent there—seemed iniquitous and fit to be abolished. But while the upper-class reformers were promoting their belief that transportation should cease, the opinion of the lower classes kept drifting the other way. The belief, or hope, that a convict could make his or her fortune in Australia (or at least, a better living than could be scratched from England) had become fixed in the popular imagination. Meanwhile, little by little, the reformers gained ground. It was in 1840 that transportation to New South Wales ceased; and in that year, a new commandant also found himself in charge of Norfolk Island, a prophetic reformer, a noble anomaly in the theater of antipodean terror and punishment: Alexander Maconochie.

  * He was right, Knatchbull ended on the Sydney gallows in 1844, having summoned enough phlegm to write his memoirs in the condemned cell. After his release from Norfolk Island in 1839 he got his ticket-of-leave, drifted in and out of seaman’s work, and murdered a Sydney widow for her savings. His lawyer made him a small footnote to legal history by attempting, for the first time in a British court, to raise the defense of “moral insanity” that would later be codified as the McNaughton Rules. It did not save him.

  * In fact, fourteen. They were: Michael Anderson, James Bell, John Butler, Walter Bourke, Robert Douglas, Henry Drummond, Patrick Glenny, William Groves, Thomas Freshwater, Henry Knowles, William McCullough, Robert Ryan, Joseph Snell and John Toms. The headstones of 8 of these men (Anderson, Burke, Butler, Drummond, Glenny, Knowles, McCullough and Snell) still stand in the Norfolk Island cemetery but other graves have presumably been covered by the creeping dune sand.

  14

  Toward Abolition

  i

  THE MAN SENT to replace Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land was an early Victorian hero, Sir John Franklin (1786–1847), fresh from the howling wastes of ultima Thule. As a boy in 1801, he had sailed to Australia with his uncle by marriage, Matthew Flinders, in the Investigator, a three-year voyage of discovery, charting the unknown south coast from the Great Australian Bight to the present border of Victoria. In these virgin waters, where the thick red plate of the Australian desert snaps off into the sea and only Antarctica lies to the south, young John Franklin’s passion for geography, hydrography and exploration was born; it would pursue him to his death.

  By the end of 1804, he was back in the Royal Navy, serving under Nelson at Trafalgar on the Bellerophon. After the peace, routine duties followed; but in 1818 he had his first stab at Arctic discovery when he volunteered as second-in-command on the Admiralty’s expedition to find the “North-West Passage,” linking the polar seas to the North Pacific. Blocked by ice, his ship had to turn back; but the north had laid its frozen word on Franklin, and he was to lead two more Arctic expeditions—the first across Canada to Arctic America between 1819 and 1822, a 5,000-mile journey of almost inconceivable hardship, and the second, to Arctic America again, between 1824 and 1828. He published narratives of both, which were avidly consumed by the public. Thus, by his early forties, this gallant English explorer found himself dubbed a knight, promoted to captain and pursued as a social celebrity; he was the muffled figure in W. M. Praed’s delicious satire on the foibles of London society, “Goodnight to the Season”: “the Lion his mother imported / In bearskins and grease, from the Pole.”

  He had also found a second wife (his first having died while he was in the Arctic). Lady Jane Franklin (1791–1875) was a restless, indefatigably curious, highly intelligent and slightly neurasthenic woman, a silk-weaver’s daughter given to consuming projects—mainly, advancing her husband’s career as hero. After 1833, no imperial sea wars were being fought, but Franklin still had to find a post worthy of his talents. Lord Glenelg, Melbourne’s secretary for war and the colonies, was persuaded that there could be no better man for Van Diemen’s Land. Accompanied by Lady Jane and his private secretary, Captain Alexander Maconochie, Sir John Franklin stepped ashore in Hobart from the Fairlie in February 1837.

  His fame had preceded him. He was greeted with relief and good will: illuminations, balls, teas, eulogies, each more florid than the last. Every bottle-nosed, favor-grubbing colonist who could stand up at table seemed to have a toast in him. When Sir John Franklin entered Launceston at the northernmost point of his first official progress across the island, three hundred horsemen and seventy carriages turned out to escort him. After reeling off the speeches Alexander Maconochie wrote for him and receiving tumultuous applause each time, he felt “both oppressed and delighted with the signs of popular joy.”

  For although Franklin was guileless and did not (at first) question the motives of the colonists he had been sent to rule, he was not blind. He soon saw that these outpourings from the middle class of Van Diemen’s Land had something behind them. Many free Vandemonians had assumed, on no authority but their own wishful thinking, that the “polar knight” had come to give them representative government. They were sick of Arthur and his placemen. They expected Franklin to cancel the axioms of Arthur’s rule and somehow convert the island into a democracy without taking away the pleasures of assigned labor. There was no ground for this, and Franklin told them so. He might have liked to make Van Diemen’s Land self-governing, but the Crown had given him no power to change its constitution.1

  Besides, he had to work with the officials he had inherited—the “Arthur Faction,” a much-detested but certainly able administrative team who knew Van Diemen’s Land far better than he did. These included Matthew Forster, Arthur’s chief police magistrate and head of the convict establishment, a brutal man and a cunning political survivor (“When I stick my harpoon into a man,” Lady Franklin heard him remark, “I don’t take it out again”)2; John Montagu, the colonial secretary; John Gregory, the colonial treasurer; and Sir John Pedder, the chief justice. All four had got their money and power from assigned labor and Arthur’s nepotism; none had any time for the airy-fairy liberalism of a new lieutenant-governor who, however intrepid he may have been in the Arctic, seemed in the antipodes not only soft on convicts but governed by the petticoats of his interfering wife. While Arthur’s lady had never uttered a peep about the running of the colony, Lady Franklin never ceased to share her views on the matter with guests at Govern
ment House and grill them on theirs. She displayed an unwonted interest in the experiences, and even the welfare, of convicts. She corresponded at length with the great English humanitarian and penal missionary Elizabeth Fry, sending her regular (and by no means flattering) reports on Van Diemen’s Land. Jane Franklin was particularly concerned about women convicts, who were shamefully treated at the Female Factory in Hobart and often reduced to government-subsidized whoredom in assignment. In 1841 she formed a “Tasmanian Ladies’ Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners,” which was mercilessly ridiculed by the Hobart papers, lapsed for two years and was revived—though never very effectively—in 1843.

  She asked a great many questions about the System (too many, people thought) and, when accompanying her husband on his first visit to Port Arthur in March 1837, she startled the officers there by asking to try on a set of convict irons. Commissary Lemprière obligingly produced a pair of light handcuffs and snapped them on her wrists. Lady Franklin bore this for a short while but then had a mild attack of anxiety and asked to be released.3

  What was more, she wished to intervene in the culture and even the ecology of Van Diemen’s Land. On learning that the island was infested with snakes, she offered convicts a shilling a head for them, hoping to de-herpetize Van Diemen’s Land altogether. This is said to have cost the government £600—and won her great popularity among the prisoners—before it was stopped, for Van Diemen’s Land had more snakes than shillings. Her efforts on behalf of intellectual life were more successful. She sponsored lectures and encouraged the faltering steps of the visual arts in Hobart (although its best artist, the unhappy convict Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, quondam exhibitor at the Royal Academy, received no patronage from Government House). She instituted a yearly regatta on the Derwent to honor the sailors on whom the colony depended. She persuaded her husband to sponsor a learned society which, in 1848, became the first colonial Royal Society for scientific studies. Devoted to the study of natural history, she set up a botanical garden outside Hobart; it boasted a natural history museum in the form of a Doric temple, which, for want of support after the Franklins were recalled to England, was turned into a storehouse for apples. As a friend of the great Dr. Arnold of Rugby, she was committed to the advance of education in the fledgling colony, and founded its state college (although its actual opening was delayed for years by the bitter religious factionalism endemic to Van Diemen’s Land). As a traveller, she might have been the Lady Wortley Montagu of the antipodes: She was the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, to ascend Mount Wellington and to make the appallingly difficult journey from the “settled districts” overland to Macquarie Harbor (borne, however, for much of the way on the shoulders of convicts in a palanquin or litter). Her letters reveal an eager, tough-minded, nosy, idealistic and intensely loyal person, just the lioness her sometimes naïve and administratively timid lion of a husband needed. It was foreordained that the more conservative colonists would dislike Jane Franklin for being a bluestocking and resent her influence on Sir John.

  Perhaps the Arthur Faction would have accorded Franklin a certain grudging respect (followed, as day by night, by undying enmity: that was the Vandemonian way) if he had purged them as Arthur had their predecessors. But Franklin did not have the stomach for that. He vacillated; as Montagu remarked in a letter to his old boss Arthur, now the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, “the high qualities which were so conspicuous in Sir John … at the North Pole, have not accompanied him to the South.”4

  Instead, he decided he had no choice but to work with the existing officials. So the Arthur Faction began to despise him as a vain, good-natured weakling, while the anti-Arthur colonists came to feel they had been sold down the Derwent. Lady Franklin was right when she wrote, in a letter to a friend, that in Van Diemen’s Land “people should have hearts of stone and frames of steel.” For Sir John Franklin, who as a midshipman had been unable to witness a naval flogging without trembling, this convict colony was a taxing place. Its colonists, as the English treasury official George Boyes remarked after nearly thirty years’ experience,

  very much resemble the Americans in their presumption, arrogance, impudence, and conceit. They believe they are the most powerful men on the Globe, and that their little Island “whips all Creation.” They are radicals of the worst kind and their children are brought up in the belief that all Governments are bad—that they are deprived of their rights, and that they are ground and oppressed by the Mother Country, and mocked by the Officers sent out from England to rule them. Their views are of the narrowest and most selfish kind. They are incapable of any generous sentiment, and ever ready to impute the basest motives to their fellow colonists.5

  An avalanche of administrative problems was teetering behind Government House. And by a peculiar irony, the man whose voice started its descent was the best ally Franklin had in the colony apart from his wife: his private secretary, the incorruptible Captain Alexander Maconochie (1787–1860), who would emerge as the one and only inspired penal reformer to work in Australia throughout the whole history of transportation.

  ii

  ALEXANDER MACONOCHIE was a lawyer’s son, born in Edinburgh. His father died when he was nine, and he had the good luck to be raised by a kinsman, Allan Maconochie, later Lord Meadowbank, who assured him a better-than-average education. He was expected to become a lawyer. But young Maconochie wanted to go to sea, not to the bar, and by 1804 he was a midshipman in the Royal Navy, serving for several years under Admiral Cochrane in the Caribbean. In 1810, as a lieutenant on the brig Grasshopper, he underwent perhaps the most significant experience of his career. The Grasshopper, on convoy duty in the Baltic, was wrecked on Christmas Eve 1811 off the Dutch coast, and Maconochie, with everyone else on board, was taken prisoner and handed over to the French. There ensued a forced march in the bitter cold of winter from Holland to Verdun, and more than two years’ misery as a prisoner of war—at a time when, half a century before the signing of the Geneva Convention, a POW’s lot was even less enviable than it is today. This was Maconochie’s one traumatic taste of life in prison, and he never forgot it. Indeed, he was the only major official of the transportation system who had ever spent time behind bars.

  Released by Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, Maconochie rejoined the English Navy in its war against America, captaining the gunboat Calliope; he was promoted to commander just before peace was signed in 1815. For the next thirteen years he lived in Edinburgh, studying geography and geopolitics and writing lengthy tracts on Pacific colonization and steam navigation. (His interest in the Pacific, at this point, was somewhat abstract, as he had never been there.) He married in 1822, moved to London in 1828, and in 1830 became the first Professor of Geography at University College, London, and the first secretary of the newly formed Royal Geographical Society. From these chairbound labors he was plucked in 1837 by Sir John Franklin, who offered him the chance to see the Pacific, and England’s remotest colony, at first hand. Maconochie’s acquaintances in the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline asked him, since there was such a dearth of first-hand observers with no vested interest in the System, to complete for them a 67-point questionnaire on the treatment of prisoners in Van Diemen’s Land. The Scot had no theories about the System and no prior acquaintance with it; he seemed quite unprejudiced. He agreed to make the report, a task to which neither Franklin nor Sir Henry George Grey, under secretary for the colonies, had any objection so long as he sent it through Franklin to Grey, not directly to the Society.

  Maconochie’s troubles began almost as soon as he arrived in Hobart. He saw that the wily colonials “read [Franklin] in a moment,” while Franklin the new-chum was far too vulnerable to their flattery:

  I was a looker-on all the while, neither sharing in the applause nor … very likely to be imposed on by it—I read it thus at its just value, and tried to expose it equally to him, but that was hopeless—it was like trying to force a piece of barley-sugar out of a child’
s mouth.6

  Montagu, Forster and the rest of the Arthur Faction quickly sized Maconochie up as a potential enemy whose influence on the new lieutenant-governor had to be neutralized quickly. They blew a cloud of innuendo at Franklin, calling his private secretary an ideologue—who but a man with unrealistic pro-felon prejudices would do a report for an English reform society?—a “perfect Radical” who “encouraged all the disaffected, and promised what he could not perform.” Soon, Franklin and Maconochie began to draw apart—partly because Franklin wanted the Arthur Faction on his side, partly due to Maconochie’s own bluntness, but mainly because Franklin’s sworn duty was to run a system that horrified Maconochie. For Maconochie liked neither the harshness of Arthur’s police state nor the cant of those who profited from it. The System, he roundly declared in the report that Franklin transmitted to the Colonial Office in October 1837,

  is cruel, uncertain, prodigal; ineffectual either for reform or example; can only be maintained in some degree of vigour by extreme severity: some of its most important enactments are systematically broken by the Government itself.…[T]hey are of course disregarded by the community.7