The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The dispatch contained good news for the prisoners, Old and New hands alike. All the men to whom Maconochie had promised a discharge at the end of their sentences would get it; everyone holding an “Island ticket-of-leave” would go on probation to Van Diemen’s Land, where after a year or two of good behavior they would be issued a fully valid ticket-of-leave.

  With it, on the same ship, came Stanley’s choice as the new commandant. He was Major Joseph Childs (1787–1870) of the Royal Marines, a harsh, blundering turkey-cock bearing orders to make the island a place of exemplary terror once more. Yet the signs were that Maconochie’s mildness had done more to reform the Norfolk Island men than any amount of terror. Throughout his administration, Maconochie had discharged 920 of the twice-convicted prisoners to a new life in Sydney. Despite the hysterical agitation against former convicts, and especially against men with the Norfolk Island taint, by 1845 only twenty of them—a mere 2 percent—had slid back and been convicted again.

  But the moment of reform clanged shut. Alexander Maconochie and his family began their long trip back to England. He was fifty-six now, and his great opportunity to raise his fellow men from degradation had been taken from him, never to be handed back. The Colonial Office did not give him another post. In England, he kept campaigning for prison reform; but, although the English ardor for transportation was rapidly ebbing, the authorities were not interested in his views. “Captain Maconochie,” wrote James Stephen, “has not much that is really important to urge.” There was no point in punishment without terror.

  For once again, English authorities were anxious about a crime wave. The number of males committed for trial for serious offenses at Assizes and Sessions had nearly doubled in less than two decades, from 170 per 100,000 population in 1824 to 326 per 100,000 in 1842. Over the same period there had been a steady tightening of prison discipline at home as well as in Australia. Its aim was to crush the criminal subculture, to deprive the individual convict of the support of his “family felons.” The day of the American penitentiary had come to England. It had two alternative forms, each named for its American model: The Auburn (or Silent) System, and the Philadelphia (or Separate) System. The Auburn System had prisoners working in gangs, but under a rule of absolute silence, whose least infraction was punished by summary flogging. By contrast, the Philadelphia System was based on monastic solitary confinement. It took away a prisoner’s name and past, reducing him to a number; not even the warder who brought his food knew his name or his crime. In haggard anonymity, masked in a black hood whenever he was brought from his cell for exercise, he lived out the sand grains of his sentence. He had no visitors, received no letters, and saw no human faces except those of his warders. He could never talk to a fellow prisoner; even his shoes were felted, to make his presence the more ghostlike. In old Newgate, criminals had been jammed together in social chaos, yelling, talking, weeping, wheedling, plotting, like cats in a great stone bag. But in the new penitentiary, this sense of criminal community was voided: All other prisoners were silent, invisible abstractions to the man in his solitary cell. The republic of crime was vaporized, and all social sense along with it, leaving only a disoriented, passive obedience. The young Charles Dickens was horrified by the great Eastern Penitentiary at Philadelphia, which he visited in 1842 in order to see the Benthamite machine of benevolent punishment at first hand:

  I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts.… [T]here is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers can fathom. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface … therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.63

  Such was the new engine of reform, begotten by Utilitarianism on Idealism, to which English authorities were turning for relief from the uncertainties of transportation. The conversion of the prisons from mere incarceration to punitive brainwashing, through solitary confinement, dumb cells, crank labor and the treadmill, proceeded throughout the 1830s. In 1834 the great Coldbath Fields House of Correction in London doubled its ratio of guards to inmates and adopted a system of perpetual silence and inspection. Other prisons followed suit. By 1842, England had its first Panopticon; the ideas of Jeremy Bentham had at last completed their long loop across the Atlantic, to Philadelphia and back, creating the 450-cell “model prison” on the Caledonian Road in north London known as Pentonville. Its orthodoxy filled the horizon of penal thought, and left no room for Maconochie’s more humane ideas.64

  Unable to get a hearing, Maconochie settled down to write a book: Crime and Punishment, The Mark System, framed to mix Persuasion with Punishment, and Make their Effect Improving, yet their Operation severe (1846). Although it would later become one of the classical reforming texts of modern penology, it was largely ignored—except by Dickens—in Maconochie’s lifetime. In 1849, through the friendship of the Recorder of Birmingham, a liberal barrister named Matthew Hill, he secured a post as governor of a new prison in Birmingham—but could not control its sadistic deputy-governor, a naval officer named William Austin. After two years of reversals and humiliation, Maconochie was dismissed. By then he was sixty-four, and in failing health: erect, prematurely aged, refined in bearing, with snow-white hair, a bitterly disappointed man too proud to bear the outward marks of self-pity. Too obscure to be given more than a brief death-notice in The Times, he died in 1860 at the age of 73.

  v

  THE REVERSES Maconochie had endured at the hands of the System were bad enough. But those suffered by his former chief, Sir John Franklin, were even more stinging. The former officials of Arthur’s regime through whom Franklin had decided to govern—chiefly the able and insidious John Montagu, his colonial secretary—thought him weak. Since he could not trust them (he found that out too late, as good-natured men do) and Maconochie was gone, he naturally relied more and more on the advice of the one person in the colony he could trust, his wife. Lady Jane Franklin was highly intelligent, but the thought of a Sir taking private lessons in statecraft from a woman was appalling to the Arthur Faction—and to most of the other colonists, case-armored in dogmas of masculine ascendancy. Franklin’s leanings toward pity and mildness—not only to convicts, but to the dying Aborigines as well—were proof of effeteness. He was besieged by lobbyists, but whenever he did anyone a favor he created one ingrate and ten malcontents.

  Worst of all, he was blamed for events over which he had little or no control. In 1840 the economy of Van Diemen’s Land began to slide into a five-year depression. Banks and businesses failed; Hobart, Launceston and the townships between were silted up with unemployed workers. At the same time, the end of transportation to New South Wales meant that the whole yearly exodus of convicts was directed to Van Diemen’s Land. In 1839, less than 1,500 convicts had arrived there. By 1842 the figure was over 5,300. The machinery could not handle them, and the island could not absorb them. Worst of all, in the midst of the confusion, it was Franklin’s Sisyphean task to change the whole apparatus of convict management. The Colonial Office, under the new management of Lord Stanley, had decreed that from 1842 onward the assignment of convicts to private settlers in Van Diemen’s Land must cease. It would be replaced by something Lord Stanley had cooked up in his office in Whitehall: the so-called Probation System, whereby they would all be worked in government gangs distributed at outer stations around the island (see Chapter 15). Now, the settlers could not only blame John Franklin for the depression that was bankrupting them; they could also curse him for taking away the free labor on which the whole economy of the island had depended.

  It would be tedious to list the innuendos against Franklin that John Montagu and his colleagues poured into the ears of Whit
ehall. At the start of 1842, Montagu had written Franklin an impertinent letter, suggesting in thinly veiled terms that he was getting soft in the head. At this, Franklin’s patience snapped. He suspended Montagu from his job as colonial secretary. The Iago of the Derwent took himself to England and appealed to Lord Stanley, citing Franklin’s “dependence” on his wife as the cause of the myriad harassments that had gummed up the administration of Van Diemen’s Land. He won. Franklin found himself censured; and his letter of recall came in 1843. When he reached England, he found that the whispers of petticoat domination had preceded him—a searing humiliation for a man who loved his wife but who had also been a brave sailor and an indefatigable explorer.

  To clear his name, Sir John Franklin returned to his old love, the clean cold place he had known before his country had dropped him into the vile antipodes. Once again, in 1847, the Admiralty was equipping an expedition to the Arctic, in search of the Northwest Passage. At fifty-nine, Franklin was too old for exploring in the world’s high latitudes, but his daemon would not be assuaged. Reluctantly, but in a spirit of obligation, the Admiralty gave him command. This time Sir John Franklin did find the Northwest Passage, dying of starvation with the rest of his men within sight of it, on their iced-in ship the Erebus. In doing so, he not only expunged his failure in Van Diemen’s Land but entered the Victorian pantheon of explorers (despite evidence of cannibalism in the last weeks of the expedition) as one of the heroic legends of the Arctic. Which, all in all, was more than his luckless successor at the other end of the earth could claim.

  * Maconochie’s critics especially relished, as light relief, the fate of his eldest daughter Mary Ann, or Minnie. It only showed how this Caledonian do-gooder, the felon’s friend, could be hoist with his own petard: Minnie’s education had been entrusted to an educated convict, a young and handsome Special transported for forgery. The nineteen-year-old girl (bored stiff, one may surmise, by the social horizons of Norfolk Island) had shown a tender and deep sentiment for her tutor. It is not known whether he actually seduced her. But when the story got out, it sent the colonial conservatives into fits of sniggering delight and filled the Sydney and Hobart papers with columns of innuendo. Minnie, bereft, was packed off to England and the care of an aunt, she died there, a spinster verging on old-maidhood, at the age of thirty-two. Gipps to Stanley, July 8, 1839, HRA, Series r, vol. 20, pp 217–18, and October 13, 1841, HRA, Series 1, vol. 22, pp. 541–42.

  15

  A Special Scourge

  i

  LORD STANLEY had never been to the antipodes or met a felon, but he glowed with ideological confidence in his new plan for mending the morals of both. It was meant to benefit England first, the convicts second, and Van Diemen’s Land not at all.

  Stanley took the whole matter of convict discipline to be “an Imperial interest,” to whose running the interests of local free settlers were quite irrelevant. Let them complain about losing their cheap labor; that was not the Colonial Office’s problem. He only wanted to get criminals out of Britain cheaply, while satisfying the much louder and closer chorus of English MPs, clergy and editors, most of whom wanted the assignment system buried forever.

  Stanley dispatched his plan in November 1842 and it reached Hobart early in 1843. It cancelled the last area in which convicts could be assigned—service on farms. Instead, the felons were to pass through five stages on their way to reformation and liberty.1

  The first was detention on Norfolk Island, usually for a year, to instill discipline. This penal antechamber could only take 750 new convicts a year direct from England. Hence, Norfolk Island was kept for long-sentence men, mainly lifers who, Stanley reasoned, were more apt to be desperate and so would need more isolation and discipline to make them tractable. The rest would go straight to Hobart, where, along with the current crop of men emerging from their time on Norfolk, they entered the second stage: the probation gangs.

  Each of these gangs was to be made up of 250 to 300 men, laboring in the “unsettled districts,” on long, arduous government projects—building roads and bridges, clearing Crown land to improve its sale value or logging on the Tasman Peninsula. The gangers would need special religious instruction (for which Stanley wanted Franklin to gather more penal chaplains), but, if properly supervised on long-term projects, they might grow their own food. Stanley figured that if England sent out 4,000 men a year (the actual numbers were close to that: 4,819 men in 1842; 3,048 in 1843; and 3,959 in 1844) and the average term of probation gang-labor was 18 months, then twenty gangs of 300 men would absorb them all. Each man would cost about £18 to ship to Van Diemen’s Land, and £27 a year to feed; reckoning in £35,000 for the costs of Norfolk Island and £10,000 for overheads, Stanley thought the Probation System could maintain about 35,000 convicts in government service and continuous punishment for less than £300,000 a year, half the estimated cost of building penitentiaries for them all.2

  That would be England’s only expense. After their probation labor the prisoner received a “probation pass,” which meant he could work for wages for an approved settler or for the local government of Van Diemen’s Land. The Crown would not contribute a penny to these wages. The convicts could work or starve—that was up to them and to their prospective employers. The probation pass led to the last two stages: the normal ticket-of-leave (allowing the man to choose his own master without a say-so from Hobart) and, lastly, a conditional or absolute pardon.

  So much for the men. With less relish, Stanley turned to the women and children. Boy criminals would begin with a term of 2 to 3 years in Parkhurst Prison. “Every boy who enters Parkhurst,” declared one of Stanley’s underlings in Whitehall to the prison authorities there, in words that rang of iron and cold corridors,

  is doomed to be transported; and this part of the sentence passed on him is immutable. He must bid a long farewell to the hopes of revisiting his native home, of seeing his parents, or of rejoining his companions. These are the hopes and pleasures which his crimes have forfeited.… [H]is future prospects in life depend entirely on his conduct at Parkhurst.3

  If he behaved well at Parkhurst, the boy would get a ticket-of-leave on landing in Van Diemen’s Land “and virtually be pardoned,” although Whitehall did not explain how he was expected to survive thereafter. If his conduct was indifferent, he would start with a probationary pass, “which is far short of freedom.” A bad boy went to Point Puer at Port Arthur, where “every hardship and degradation awaits him, and where his sufferings will be severe.”4

  As for the punishment of women, Lord Stanley entrusted his thoughts on this “more difficult subject” to Franklin in November 1842. Though as depraved as men, they could not be worked in probation gangs. The government could lock them up in Van Diemen’s Land or “permit them to enter, in some mode or other, into the mass of the population.” It could hardly revive assignment for them, because “respectable” settlers did not want them and, were they to be “assigned to the less scrupulous and less moral portion of the community”—namely, Emancipists—“they must continually be exposed to criminal solicitation, to grievous oppression, and often to personal violence.” Moreoever, they would confront Authority with their own version of the Cretan paradox, because even if they were solicited, oppressed and beaten, “little confidence is placed, or can be placed, in the truth of their complaints.”5

  Nor could Franklin keep them in the existing Female Factories at Hobart and Launceston, which (Stanley had learned) were chaotic sumps where evil “is constantly perpetuating and increasing itself.” They held three classes of female convict, each as bad as the next: those who could not be assigned at all, those who were returned from assignment to the government for punishment, and helpless women pregnant with bastard offspring who were thrown back on the government’s hands. Conditions in such places, and in the Queen’s Orphan School in Hobart which took in illegitimates, were “sufficient to make the blood run cold,” wrote a clergyman who knew them well, the Reverend Robert Crooke (1818–1888). Cr
ooke had been a catechist with the Convict Department in 1843, and he described the life of the seven hundred inmates of the Queen’s Orphan School. Pale and sick, these young prisoners were segregated, kept on low coarse rations and frequently punished.

  The slightest offence, whether committed by boy or girl, was punished by unmerciful flogging and some of the officers, more especially females, seem to have taken a delight in inflicting corporal punishment.… The female superintendent was in the habit of taking girls, some of them almost young women, to her own bedroom and for trifling offences … stripping them naked, and with a riding whip or a heavy leather strap flagellating them until their bodies were a mass of bruises.6