Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  In 1777, the Treaty of San Ildefonso made the Debatable Lands largely Spanish. Phillip resigned his now futile Portuguese commission to seek fresh employment in the Royal Navy and the war against the Americans and their European allies. He had an undistinguished time of it. In the River Elbe, when escorting transports full of Hanoverian recruits for the British army, the onset of river ice forced him ingloriously to run his frigate into the mud at the Hamburg harbourside. During the frustrating months his command Ariadne was stuck there, Phillip came to place great reliance in Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, a sturdy young man of undistinguished background like himself, a draper’s son.

  When in 1782 the Admiralty appointed Phillip captain of the Europe, a 64-gun, 600-man battleship, he became at last commander of a ship of the British battle line. He took Lieutenant Philip Gidley King aboard with him, and his clerk, a most eccentric and remarkably placed man named Harry Brewer. Both these men would ultimately accompany him to New South Wales.

  The American bosun on Europe, a sailor named Edward Spain, would later write an ironic memoir of his time serving with Phillip, and of the relationship between Phillip and Harry Brewer. Brewer was an unmarried seaman of no particular rank—or else he could be counted, at more than fifty years of age, as the oldest midshipman in the Royal Navy. Brewer had for some years skilfully copied Phillip’s diaries and journals for him, and had drawn up watch lists and so on. ‘Our captain was at that time in slender circumstances . . . and as they both [Phillip and Brewer] rowed in the one boat, no doubt they had their own reasons for wishing to make the voyage together.’ Whatever else ‘they both rowed in the one boat’ might have meant, Spain certainly implied they were short of cash.

  At the Cape Verde Islands, said Spain, Phillip ‘was perfectly at home for he spoke Portuguese fluent and could shrug his shoulders with the best of them’. Spain would also provide insight into what appears to be a sexual infatuation Phillip suffered. The Europe put into the mid-Atlantic island of St Helena, and picked up there four British sailors and their women. ‘But don’t imagine that it was out of any partiality to any of them, except one . . . and had he given permission to her alone the reason would have been obvious to the officers and the ship’s company.’ Her name was Deborah Brooks. She and her ship’s bosun husband would be on the fleet to Australia, and she would become Phillip’s housekeeper.

  Phillip’s old friend Evan Nepean at the Home Office was now responsible, as well as for prisons, for espionage in France and Spain. It was as one of Nepean’s spies in the 1780s that Arthur Phillip, after his return from Madras on Europe, became known to Lord Sydney. Though Britain was not at war with France, something like a cold war was maintained between the two nations. Late in 1784 Nepean called on Phillip to journey to Toulon and other French ports ‘for the purpose of ascertaining the naval force, and stores in the arsenals’. His leave documents mentioned his desire to see to ‘my private affairs’, but in November 1784 Nepean gave Phillip £150 for his salary and expenses.

  So when the argument about what to do with prisoners condemned to transportation was at its height, Phillip was largely absent from the country.

  WHO WERE THE CONVICTS?

  The petty crimes of those convicts condemned to transportation frequently contrasted with the cross-planetary transplantation with which they were to be punished. Some characteristic Georgian transportable offences are eloquent in making the point, while those found guilty of committing them reveal much about the upheaval and dislocation suffered by British society following the process known as Enclosure.

  For in that era there were changes across Britain which drove many rural poor to the cities and towards crime. Beginning in the 1760s, the revolutionary and disruptive process of Enclosure would transform the landscape of Britain over the next seventy years. Villages had till then been organised under the old system of scattered strips of open land variously owned by peasants and landlord, as well as shared common ground. Under a series of Enclosure Acts, villages were reorganised by Enclosure Commissioners according to new agricultural efficiencies, so that the ground of the chief landlord, of prosperous farmers and various smallholders was consolidated and fenced. In reality, Enclosure drove small farmers and agricultural workers off land their families had worked for centuries. Many smallholders found the expense of fencing their land with barriers of hawthorn and blackthorn beyond them and gave it up. They also discovered that the common land traditionally shared by the community, upon which they and the peasants depended to run their livestock, was fenced off from them too.

  Before Enclosure, smallholders and agricultural labourers’ families had the right not only to graze livestock on the common land, but to take from it undergrowth, loppings, peat, fish from lakes and streams, sand and gravel, and acorns to feed pigs. Enclosure put an end to those practices, and was occurring in many districts at a time when the great loom factories were coming into being and cloth spun in cottages was less sought after. Traditional village, church and family controls on the way men and women behaved broke down as families sought parish poor relief or became itinerant and set off for cities. For, says an historian of the period, ‘Everyone below the plateau of skilled craftsmen was undernourished.’

  Over time the new system would cause more than unrest in the countryside. Threatening letters were one of the options for the aggrieved, as in this letter of the Enclosure era: ‘Mrs Orpen, I am informed that you and your family whent before last year and glent up what the pore should have had but if you do this year it is our desire as soon as your corn is in the barn we will have a fire . . . ’

  Rather than become scarecrow people of the countryside, many of the rural dispossessed made their way to already crowded cities to become a dangerous under-class who saw crime as a better option than working an 80-hour week as a servant, or toiling for the unregulated and dangerous gods of machine capital.

  Esther Abrahams, for example, a young Jewish milliner of about fifteen years who would one day grow old in New South Wales, was indicted for feloniously stealing black silk lace, value 50 shillings, from a London shop while the assistant had her back turned. She was remanded to Newgate, and at her trial in July 1786, her counsel, Mr Garrow, ascertained by questioning that Abrahams stayed in the shop for twenty minutes following the supposed theft. Two doors from the business, however, Esther was said, as if wanting to get rid of the evidence, to have dropped two cards of silk, and also a bit she had stuffed into her purse. Though she called three witnesses who all gave her a very good character, she was found guilty of stealing and sentenced to seven years transportation.

  In the public wards of Newgate, she became pregnant and at the end of the following winter gave birth to a daughter, Roseanna. Whether the child came from an alliance of convenience or a prison romance or even a rape, we cannot say, except that all three of these were common in Newgate. A petition for royal mercy had been lodged in February 1787 on Esther’s behalf, probably by her parents and local worthies they had interested in her case, but it failed, and soon after the birth mother and infant were sent aboard the Lady Penrhyn.

  Thomas Barrett was one of a number of First Fleet prisoners who were referred to as ‘Mercuries’—in 1782, barely twelve, he was found guilty of stealing one silver watch worth £3 and various other items, when a spinster was showing Barrett and two others the house of a London gentleman available for letting. Barrett made an attempt to escape but was caught and searched by a beadle of Marylebone. At the Old Bailey, Barrett gave an accustomed defence— he said that he had gone with a young servant to rent a house for his master, and the servant picked up a watch during the house inspection and at a cry of ‘Stop thief!’ the young man offloaded the watch on Tom. If this were the truth, then Tom would endure a short and bitter life for that £3 watch found on his person. He was first sentenced to death in September 1782, then the sentence was commuted. Next he would escape from Mercury, a convict vessel bound for Nova Scotia and taken over by the convicts while it was still in B
ritish waters. He was recaptured, sentenced to death again, and again received the royal mercy, so finding himself on board the Charlotte, where he would prove intractable. In time, while still less than twenty years of age, Thomas Barrett would be the first man to hang in New South Wales.

  Margaret Darnell, a woman in her teens, was indicted in April 1787 for stealing a dozen knives and forks, value sixpence, from the shop of an ironmonger and cutler in Holborn near Chancery Lane. Margaret had come into the shop about nine in the evening, wearing a large cloak under which she secreted the goods. The shop assistant pursued her and she threw the goods down just as she left the store. The prisoner’s defence was quoted in the Old Bailey papers: ‘I was sent for a penny-worth of nails . . . there were two women in the shop when I went in; they went out while I was there; as I was going out I saw the parcel lay; I never touched it.’

  Elizabeth, wife of Henry Needham, was indicted for feloniously stealing two pairs of silk stockings, value 30 shillings, from a hosiery shop on a summer night in July 1786, in Sackville Street. She went to trial within two weeks. The prisoner said a particular man had sent her to get a pair of stockings for herself, to make up for a ring of her deceased father’s that he had failed to raffle off on her behalf. She told the shopkeeper she was a servant to this man, a perfumer in Bond Street on a particular corner of that thoroughfare. There’s no perfumer there, the shopkeeper claimed to have told her. The hosier became convinced she was hiding stolen merchandise and, under challenge, she dropped both pairs of stockings. Nonetheless, the shop assistant was sent to fetch the local Bow Street runner. At the Old Bailey, near Newgate prison, Elizabeth was found guilty of stealing ‘but not privily’, and transported for seven years. She would never return to trouble the law officers of London.

  And so it went. Isabella Rawson (Rosson) was a laundress, mantua-lace maker and former schoolteacher, tried in January 1787 for stealing three quantities of goods from the gentleman for whom she was laundress. Her loot included a waistcoat and bed curtains taken from her master, Stewart Kydd, a barrister of Gray’s Inn. She would go down to the cellar to fetch coals and other things, said Kydd, and stole things from a trunk deposited there. When he returned from the country just before Christmas in 1786, he found that his wife had put Rawson in the custody of a constable. The girl begged he would forgive her; she fell down on her knees and begged for mercy. ‘I told her she had no reason to beg for mercy, because she had behaved ungrateful.’ Rawson handed over the pawnbroker’s tickets she had received when selling the goods.

  In court, Mrs Eleanor Kydd’s melodramatic evidence was not uncharacteristic of the time. She described going down into the cellar ‘and the prisoner seeing me advance up to the trunks to open them, she immediately fell on her knees, and cried out, Madam, I have robbed you; says I, I know very well, Bella, you have robbed me all along . . . She said, Madam, do what you please with me, kill me, I deserve it, if I had twenty lives; says I, You deserve no mercy from me.’

  The prisoner made no pretence of innocence and left herself to the mercy of the court. She was found guilty and transported for seven years, giving birth to a prison child aboard the Lady Penrhyn which died in infancy.

  William Richardson, who would one day be Rawson’s husband, had also been a ‘Mercury’, and was originally tried in December 1783 for an attack with an accomplice on a servant who was walking home to James Street from Chelsea. A handkerchief, a guinea, a crown piece, a silver sixpence and six copper halfpence were taken. Bow Street runners caught the two men in Hyde Park, and the victim would identify them, saying at the trial the night had been moonlit enough for that. Prisoner Richardson threw himself upon the mercy of the court. Both accused were found guilty and sentenced to death, but both were humbly recommended to mercy by the jury.

  James Sheers, also Shiers, argued his innocence at length and did not submit as easily as Richardson when charged with a similar crime: feloniously assaulting a man on the King’s Highway, in this case the Strand in London, and putting him in fear and danger, taking from him a watch, value 40 shillings, a ring, a seal, a metal key and so on. The offence took place at half past two in the afternoon and the victim-cum-prosecutor said the prisoner jostled him and tore the watch from his pocket. ‘I instantly catched him by the collar and with my other hand endeavoured to regain the watch.’ Four friends of the victim saw the watch in Sheers’s possession.

  As, in court, this evidence was given, the prisoner Sheers cried out to ask the victim whether he had been drunk or no at the time of the crime? Witnesses, friends of the prosecutor, said their friend was not drunk. But the prisoner declared that there was a mob all round the prosecutor, they caught hold of Sheers and a woman, stripped them both naked, and unjustly accused them of having the watch. ‘I was going to Smithfield market about 5 o’clock and these gentlemen was coming along drunk and had three or four girls with them, and two or three watchmen, and I came up to see what was the matter and they took me. I had not so much as a stick to walk with.’

  ‘Have you any witnesses to call to your character?’ asked the court.

  The prisoner responded that he did not think he had a friend in the court; it was a very hard case indeed, he said.

  The judge, despite Sheers’s interesting defence, found him guilty, sentenced him to death but recommended him to the King’s mercy. When he went aboard Scarborough it was with a sentence of transportation for life.

  Yet another intriguing ‘Mercury’ was Robert Sideway, indicted in September 1782 for stealing a deal luggage box containing various goods including a cloth coat, a linen waistcoat, one pair of silk stockings and one pair of shoes. He had climbed on a coach at the Cross Keys in Wood Street between two and three in the morning and taken the goods. A porter and a watchman intercepted the fleeing man. But the coachman could not definitely identify Robert Sideway as the thief. The prisoner’s counsel made much of that and of the fact that the man was dressed in black because it was June 1782 when everyone was in mourning for the King’s madness.

  Sideway made an accustomed defence—he had heard the watchmen’s rattles clacking away to warn of a theft and saw another man in black escape. Later, shipped off on the Mercury, he returned to shore and incurred a death sentence, now commuted.

  The destination of these people was not to be a home for the chosen, a chosen home, but instead was a place imposed by authority and devised specifically with its remoteness in mind.

  THE STATE OF THE PRISONS

  The gaols of Britain as experienced by Sideway and the others already condemned to transportation in such numbers in the 1780s had been neglected by government. They were ill-aired, ill-lit and racked with fever epidemics. Crucially, they were run under licence as private enterprises. To be a prison warder was not to be a servant of society but a franchisee, entitled to charge inmates a scale of fees and run a taproom, where liquor could be bought, for profit. John Howard, a prison reformer, discovered in one London prison that the tap, frequented both by prisoners and visitors, was sub-hired out to one of the prisoners. From such sources as the taproom and rooms he could rent out to superior convicts, Richard Ackerman, keeper of Newgate for thirty-eight years and a dining friend of James Boswell and the great Dr Johnson, left a fortune of £20 000 when he died in 1792.

  In 1777 the first painstaking survey of conditions in English prisons, Howard’s The State of the Prisons, was published, and gaol reform became a popular issue. Howard, a Bedfordshire squire, was shocked profoundly by his visits to prisons and became the most famous of prison reformers. In his tract, Howard depicted a cell, 17 feet by 6 (c 5 × 1.8 metres), crowded with more than two dozen inmates and receiving light and air only through a few holes in the door. The ‘clink’ of a Devon prison was 17 feet by 8 (c 5 × 2 metres), with only 5 feet 6 inches (167 cm) of headroom, and light and air entered by one hole just 7 inches long and 5 broad (17 × 13 cm). In Clerkenwell prison, those who could not pay for beds lay on the floor, and in many other prisons inmates paid even for the pr
ivilege of not being chained. Howard claimed that after visits to Newgate the leaves of his notebook were so tainted and browned by the fearful atmosphere that, on his arrival home, he had to spread out the pages before a glowing fire for drying and disinfection.

  The most infamous of prisons, old Newgate, was burned down by a mob in 1780. Prisoners were admitted to the rebuilt prison by 1782. New Newgate prison was divided into two halves—the master’s side where the inmates could rent lodging and services, and where those who had committed criminal libel, sedition or embezzlement were kept, and then the more impoverished section called the common side. Earlier in the century, the writer Daniel Defoe, who himself had been thrown into Newgate for theft, described it through the eyes of his character Moll Flanders, in terms which seemed to be just as true of the new Newgate: ‘I was now fixed indeed; it is impossible to describe the terror of my mind when I was first brought in, and when I looked around upon all the horrors of that dismal place . . . The hellish noise, the roaring, the swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful, afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself.’

  Though prisoners and visitors had access to the taphouse, and there were several communal rooms, a chapel, a separate infirmary for men and women, and exercise yards, only the most basic medicines were dispensed in the two infirmaries. And every day, sightseers came to view the spectacle, as we might now visit a zoo, while prostitutes worked their way around to service visitors and prisoners who had cash, and the turnkeys received a pay-off from this traffic as well. Meanwhile, unless the men and women in the common wards had relatives or friends to bring them food, they lived off a three-halfpenny loaf a week, supplemented by donations and a share of the cook’s weekly meat supply. One of the motivations for joining a gang, or criminal ‘canting crew’, was that if imprisoned, the individual criminal was not left to the bare mercies of the gaol authorities.