Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  In Norwich Castle prison after his transmutation of sentence, he had fallen in love with a slightly older woman, Susannah Holmes, guilty of burglary. Their prison child, Henry, had not been allowed to accompany his parents down to the dismal Dunkirk, and was being cared for by the Norwich gaoler, John Simpson. Now that Henry was on Friendship and Susannah aboard Charlotte, the efforts of Simpson to get Lord Sydney to let the baby be reunited with his mother would capture the public’s imagination, which extended itself to romantic tales of doomed young felons, but which, unlike the Victorian imagination, did not require that the lovers be virginal or married. Indeed, during their wait at Norwich Castle, Henry and Susannah had requested they be married but had been refused permission. Soon, Simpson came down to Plymouth by coach with the infant, he was presented to Susannah, and she and Henry were both on Friendship with their baby, and the family would not be broken up again until late in the voyage.

  On 9 March 1787, Lieutenant Ralph Clark, a rather prim, neurotic officer who had volunteered in the hope of promotion, recorded, ‘March with the detachment from the barracks to the dockyard and embark on board the Friendship transport with Captain Lieutenant Meredith and Second Lieutenant Faddy, two sergeants, three corporals, one drummer, thirty-six privates, nine women and children.’

  At the same time the Sirius, its tender the Supply and the remainder of the ships were anchored on the robust tide of the Motherbank off Portsmouth. Here further convicts and marines were rowed out to the transports. Scarborough would receive over two hundred male convicts, and cramped little Prince of Wales (318 tons/324 tonnes) some 49 females and one male. A marine garrison of 89 men came from the Portsmouth division.

  Though officers of marines were not permitted to bring their families to Botany Bay, some wives of private soldiers, about ten per company, were allowed to travel. A total of 246 marine personnel have been positively identified as having sailed in the First Fleet, with 32 wives and 15 children. Ten further children would be born to the families of marines at sea.

  Movement of convicts from London to Portsmouth continued. A report by a gentleman visiting Newgate depicted convicts delighted to be slated for the fleet. One party left Newgate on the morning of 27 February, and a large contingent was moved in bitter weather in six heavily guarded wagons from a Woolwich hulk via Guildford. As this large body of convicts moved through Portsmouth, the windows and doors of houses and shops were closed, and the streets lined with troops.

  By the end of the loading process, some fifteen hundred people were spread amongst the eleven vessels. Bouncing around in the lee of the Isle of Wight, the convicts who had never sailed before became accustomed to the noises and motion of a ship and the claustrophobia of their low-beamed, cramped decks.

  And even then Phillip was up in London arguing for better supplies, but reactive to the reports of the naval agent and surgeons. The enterprising chief surgeon, John White, a veteran at thirty-one of a decade of surgical practice on naval vessels serving in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, approached Captain Hunter, the Scots skipper of Sirius, saying, ‘I thought whitewashing with quicklime the parts of the ships where the convicts were confined would be the means of correcting and preventing the unwholesome dampness which usually appeared on the beams and sides of the ships, and was occasioned by the breath of the people.’ So, by late March, at least some of the vessels were ordered back into dock at Portsmouth for the prison and soldiers’ decks to be fumigated. The convicts were let up on the deck, a mixed blessing in March weather, while the whitewashing of the convict prison was attended to and gunpowder was exploded in small heaps to disperse the vapours associated with disease.

  The competent surgeon for the Lady Penrhyn, young Arthur Bowes Smyth, came to Portsmouth by mail coach, and gives us a picture of the perils and shocks of being a journeyer in a changeable season. ‘A corpse sewed up in a hammock floated alongside our ship. The cabin, lately occupied by the Third Mate Jenkinson, who died of a putrid fever the night before I came on board, and was buried at Ryde, was fresh painted and fumigated for me to sleep in.’

  On Alexander, eleven convict men, sick on loading, had worsened and died, and as April progressed, morale was low. Some relief was provided by seventy-year-old Elizabeth Beckford, guilty of shoplifting, and 82-year-old pedlar, Dorothy Handlyn, sentenced for perjury, who had become minor celebrities aboard Lady Penrhyn, and worth a visit from the gentlemen of the fleet. Beckford would die at sea long before sighting the coast of New South Wales. Handlyn disappeared, perhaps re-landed as absurdly too aged for such a journey.

  In April, a Portsmouth newspaper complained that the longer the sailing was delayed the more the port was thronged with thieves and robbers, those who had come down to see their old hulk- and prison-mates and fellow gang members (‘rum culls’) away. By now the idea of the departing fleet no longer attracted universal applause. One Londoner complained: ‘Botany Bay has made the shoplifters and pickpockets more daring than ever. To be rewarded with settlement in so fertile a country cannot fail of inducing every idle person to commit some depredation that may amount to a crime sufficient to send him there at the expense of the public.’

  Meanwhile, the Duke of Dorset informed the British government of a journey to the Pacific undertaken by a French nobleman, the Comte de la Pérouse. There were rumours that a race was on to claim the region.

  Early in May two late wagonloads of prisoners arrived from Newgate. The prison decks were now filled up and the cargo decks of Phillip’s fleet were crowded with water casks and shacks and pens for animals. Phillip would bring his pet greyhounds aboard Sirius to add to the noise and clutter. But there was other and more sophisticated freight. At the Board of Longitude’s meeting in February 1787, the Astronomer Royal, Dr Maskelyne, had proposed adaptations for three telescopes and the acquisition of a 10-inch Ramsden sextant to serve the marine lieutenant William Dawes, surveyor and astronomer, in making nautical and astronomical observations on the voyage to Botany Bay ‘and on shore at that place’. Dawes, on the Sirius, was one of the Portsmouth division of marines, a very spiritual young man, who had been wounded in a sea battle with the French in Chesapeake Bay during the war in America, and had volunteered for New South Wales out of scientific rather than military fervour.

  On the crew decks, new Brodie stoves, big bricked-in ovens, were kept alight and guarded twenty-four hours a day, producing cooked food for sailors and marines and—if there were time or bad weather—convicts as well. Often the prisoners’ breakfast of gruel or pease porridge, and their main midday meal, stews of bread and biscuit, pease and beef, were less satisfactorily cooked in coppers in a shack-galley on the open deck.

  When on 7 May Arthur Phillip at last was able to reach Portsmouth from London, with his servants and his clerk, Harry Brewer, he brought with him the Kendall timekeeper which would be used on board Sirius to calculate longitude. There too was his old inamorata, Mrs Deborah Brooks. Phillip had a final inspection of his fleet and looked particularly into the availability of caps, porter, women’s clothing, and the unloved scurvy-deterrent, sauerkraut.

  On board Sirius, greeted by the Scots master, John Hunter, Phillip met a marine officer who would become his staunch friend, Captain David Collins, a stalwart fellow of not much more than thirty who was assigned to be Botany Bay’s judge-advocate. In an age when boy officers sometimes commanded grown men, Collins had been a fifteen-year-old officer in command of the marines aboard HMS Southampton when in 1772 it was sent to rescue Queen Caroline Matilda from Denmark. He had served on land, climbing the slope against defended American positions at the fierce battle at Bunker Hill, at which American sharpshooters caused great casualties amongst British officers. Though married, he was pleased to go back on full wages in December 1786, and willing for the sake of employment to be separated from his wife, who filled his absence by writing romances to enlarge their income.

  Collins’s military superior, the leader of all the fleet’s marines and Arthur Phillip’s lieutenant-
governor, was Major Robert Ross, a Scot whom some found hard to get on with. John Hunter of the Royal Navy, captain of Sirius, was more a companion spirit to Phillip; the sea had ultimate affection over his competing passions for music, the classics and the Church of Scotland. Hunter’s first shipwreck had been on a howling Norwegian coast at the age of eight. Just over fifty, he was the sort of officer others might describe as the navy’s backbone, though, like Phillip, his career was rendered uncertain by lack of family connections. His fortitude, rigour, energy and tenacity would prove valuable commodities during the voyage of Phillip’s improbable fleet, and also once it had reached its staggeringly distant destination.

  * Some of the material relating to British society, crime and punishment, and to the administration of Arthur Phillip has also been covered in this author’s earlier work The Commonwealth of Thieves.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE PASSAGE

  The First Fleet’s prodigious journey began in darkness at 3 a.m. on Sunday 3 May 1787. Phillip’s instructions were to punctuate the voyage with calls at the Canary Islands, at Rio de Janeiro, his old home base, and then at Cape Town. The run down the English Channel took three days, with great suffering amongst the women on the convict deck of the Lady Penrhyn, the new-built ship whose timbers were still howling and settling and whose master, William Sever, was unfamiliar with her. Uncontrollable seasickness filled the prison’s low-roofed deck with its acid, gut-unsettling stench. And, of course, no one could stand up, as the roof hung low, even between the beams. The unrecorded but certain anguish of the adolescent country girl Sarah Bellamy was matched by that of the teenager Mary Brenham, who at the age of fourteen had stolen clothing while babysitting.

  Phillip quickly discovered that there was a range of speed and performance between the various ships. Apart from Lady Penrhyn, the transports Charlotte and Prince of Wales were slowed by heavy seas, and their convicts suffered the worst discomfort and seasickness. The handiest sailer was the little snub-nosed tender Supply, which could nonetheless safely carry very little sail in really big seas. The Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship were the three fastest convict transports.

  By 3 June, the eleven ships reached Tenerife in the Canary Islands, after a journey in which the irons of the convicts, except those under punishment, had been removed, and a routine for allowing the transportees on deck in fine weather had been established. Alexander, the unhealthiest ship in the fleet, recorded twenty-one convicts suffering fever, scurvy, pneumonia and the bloody flux in the few weeks since sailing.

  South of Tenerife, in the calms, amidst the cram of bodies, the air below decks reached fierce temperatures, and a skirt of stinking waste and garbage surrounded each ship. Wind sails were rigged like great fans, and swung across the deck to blow air below, and while the convicts exercised or slept on deck, gunpowder was again exploded in their prison to disperse evil vapours. The marine officers on Friendship found the ship infested with rats, cockroaches and lice, but the women convicts still needed to be battened down on their ill-ventilated deck at night, to prevent ‘a promiscuous intercourse taking place with the marines’. Despite the ban on fraternising and prostitution, there were so many alliances between convicts, male and female, and between marines and sailors and sundry women aboard, that one begins to suspect that Phillip and the Home Office were not gravely disturbed that such associations should occur.

  Lieutenant Clark on Friendship hated the disorderly women and ordered four of them to be put in irons for fighting, which must have been a hard punishment in that climate. ‘They are a disgrace to their whole sex, bitches that they are.’ Clark was gratified that the corporal ordered to flog one London prostitute and Mercury escapee, Elizabeth Dudgeon, later in the voyage ‘did not play with her but laid it home’. Liz Barber, another reprobate, abused Surgeon Arndell and invited Captain Meredith ‘to come and kiss her cunt for he was nothing but a lousy rascal as were we all’.

  When the north-east trades blew, ships were capable of making good time, as on 17 June, when Friendship logged a refreshing 174 nautical miles to the Sirius’s 163. Phillip was already contemplating splitting the flotilla into fast and slow divisions. Even on a good day for the whole fleet, 26 June, Friendship made 29 knots to Sirius’s 25.

  Phillip knew from the stories of Mercury how endemic the dream of mutiny was amongst the convicts, their chief fantasy, and an attractive one in the northern part of the Atlantic from which the newly self-liberated American colonies, champions of men’s rights, could most easily be reached. But Phillip seems to have accepted the presence of former escapees and mutineers on his ships with sang froid. One wonders did he ever look at William Blatherhorn of the Charlotte, who had escaped from both the Swift and Mercury, with special attention? Did he look twice at the highwayman Charles Peat of the Scarborough who had been sentenced to death for escaping Mercury?

  ‘There are so many “Mercurys” on board of us,’ Clark confided to his wife, on the same day a convict told the commanding marine officer on board the Scarborough that two convicts were planning to take the ship over. Both were brought aboard the flagship Sirius to have two dozen lashes inflicted by the bosun’s mate. The two of them must have hoped that ultimately, when their time was served, their seamanship skills would at least earn them a journey back to Britain, and that in fact would turn out to be the case.

  More cheeringly, a group baptism took place on the Lady Penrhyn, the Reverend Johnson, the evangelical chaplain, officiating. It was an event of ‘great glee’ with ‘an additional allowance of grog being distributed to the crews of those ships where births took place’. But crossing the equator, the Lady Penrhyn and the Charlotte came close to colliding with each other, as the Penrhyn’s crew was distracted by an officer or bosun dressed as King Neptune apparently rising from the sea to chastise and initiate those who had never crossed the line before.

  On 5 July Phillip felt it necessary to reduce the water ration to three pints per person per day, all of it going to consumption, leaving everyone to have recourse to salt water for washing clothes and bathing. Sometimes garments were washed by being dragged on a rope overboard, and one sailor lost a pair of breeches to a shark this way. A convict was washed overboard and lost when he went on deck to bring in the washing during the sudden onset of a storm.

  On matters of general health, Chief Surgeon John White and his three assistants were rowed around the fleet when weather permitted to consult with captains and resident surgeons such as Bowes Smyth of the Penrhyn, and to inspect health arrangements or undertake care of the convicts.

  The run was good to Rio, and on 5 August the fleet stood in the estuary off that city. Private Easty on Scarborough had been impressed with the 13-gun salute from the fort. The total deaths since embarkation were 29 male and three female prisoners, which was considered an excellent result. The ships of the convoy had been able to keep in contact with each other, although the journals of the gentlemen indicate that Lady Penrhyn was continually lagging.

  The Portuguese filled the first boat to return to the Sirius with fruit and vegetables ‘sent as presents to the Commodore from some of his old friends and acquaintances’. On the second morning, Phillip and his officers were greeted ceremoniously by the viceroy, and that night the town was illuminated in his honour. The English officers could go where they wanted within the city, without escorts.

  Collins tells us that while in harbour in Rio, every convict was regularly issued one and a half pounds (680 grams) of fresh meat, a pound (450 grams) of rice, a suitable proportion of vegetables and several oranges. Sailors returning from jaunts even pelted the convicts with oranges. The viceroy set aside an island to allow the expedition to set up tents for the sick and to use as a shore base. Lieutenant Dawes of the marines set up a temporary observatory there. The chief astronomical need was to check the Kendall chronometer of the Sirius.

  Ashore, young Surgeon White watched religious processions, and was astonished but titillated by many well-dressed women in the cr
owd, ‘quite unattended’ and trawling for lovers. He lingered by the balconies of convent novices and students, girls ‘very agreeable in person and disposition’, and performed a demonstration leg amputation according to the controversial ‘Allenson’s method’ on the patient of a Portuguese military surgeon.

  When the fleet departed after a fortnight, the viceroy saluted Phillip with twenty-one guns, and could be forgiven for wondering whether such a varied and implausible expedition would be heard from again.

  On Charlotte, incorrigible young Tom Barrett was caught trying to pass off counterfeit quarter-dollars made out of pewter and belt buckles. Surgeon White was astonished at how he had been able to create the fakes, given that there were always guards on the hatchway and hardly ten minutes would pass without someone going down to check on the prisoners.

  On the long stretch between Rio and Dutch-controlled Cape Town, rancour, ill-temper, cabin fever and paranoia seemed to overtake many of the officers, not least on Friendship, and similar rancour and grievances must have filled the convict prison decks. Discomfort, too, was surely felt by all. In late September, on the deck level occupied by marines and women convicts, a sea broke which washed all parties out of their bunks. It must have been harder still for the male convicts on a lower deck. Fortunately, the trip was relatively brisk. On one day Friendship logged 188 knots. Cape Town, the Dutch headquarters in Africa, was reached on 11 November.

  There, a convict tambour-maker or embroiderer named Eve Langley, sailing on the Lady Penrhyn with her small son, Phillip, gave birth to a daughter on a bed of clean straw in one of the shacks on deck. A foremast hand was listed as the father. By now the country girl Sarah Bellamy, and the teenage maid Mary Brenham were showing their pregnancies. There was a common Georgian belief, subscribed to by James Boswell, that sexual abstinence induced gout. The sailors of Penrhyn were taking no risk of acquiring the disease.