Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  They had left Cape Town with twelve months supplies for the ship’s company, and about four to six months of flour at full ration for the entire settlement, as well as various other stores, including 6 tonnes of barley, sundry private items and stores for officers in Sydney, and medical items ordered by Surgeon White. They had good weather until they got off the South East Cape of Van Diemen’s Land. In the darkness of a storm they found the luminescence of surf breaking higher than their mastheads on huge rocks ahead. They found themselves with barely enough steerage room, ‘embayed’ as the term goes, with a heavy sea rolling in upon them and nothing but high cliffs under their lee and the gale to windward blowing them towards the rocks. Nagle heard Hunter, after giving orders for a combination of sail to be set, cry out above the noise of sea and gale. ‘He said she must carry it, or capsize, or carry away the masts, or go on the rocks . . . I don’t suppose there was a living soul on board that expected to see daylight.’

  On arrival through the heads of Port Jackson and then, to the great joy of all, at Sydney Cove, the Sirius looked beaten about, was missing the upper sections of her masts (the fore-topgallant masts), had split the upper part of her stem and lost the figurehead of the Duke of Berwick. Lieutenant Maxwell was brought ashore raving to the hospital, and would never recover his sanity. His family sent him a draft of 70 guineas from England, and in his fits he got hold of a hoe and buried the heavy coins singly all over the hospital garden, declaring he’d have a good crop of guineas the next year. He seemed to represent the madness of exile they all suffered from. If an appropriate ship ever arrived, he would be sent home on it.

  How sincerely must Phillip have nonetheless wrung Hunter’s hand. There were no newspaper columns or levees to greet Hunter, and yet he had made a remarkable journey without hope of great notice or publicity. What in the northern hemisphere would have gained him renown gained him here an invitation to the governor’s dinner table, with the proviso that applied to all officers so honoured, that they bring with them their own bread roll.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE WEIGHT OF PRISONERS

  By August 1787, three months after Phillip’s fleet had sailed, the Sheriff of London and Middlesex wrote to Lord Sydney about the problem of overcrowding in Newgate Gaol. Most of the 700 Newgate prisoners were living in crowded wards designed for two-dozen people and crammed with twice as many. The sheriff worried about the coming winter, and the prospect of death from congestive disease and gaol fever (typhus) amongst his charges. Throughout Britain, gaolers wrote to complain that they had been promised that they would be able to move some of their prisoners down to the hulks once the convict fleet had left in May 1787, and this promise had not been kept.

  When Lord Sydney was asked about future plans, he told the Treasury he wanted to send at least two hundred women from Newgate and the county gaols to New South Wales, but only when favourable reports of the new colony’s progress arrived. Just in case the women could be transported, William Richards (who had fitted out the First Fleet), was given a contract to take up a suitable ship, and in November 1788 officials looked over a 401-ton (409-tonne) ship named Lady Juliana at the Royal Navy’s Deptford dockyard, and found it to be fit to transport convicts.

  Richards appointed George Aitken as Lady Juliana’s master. Aitken was conscientious in fitting the ship out, and very willing also to co-operate with the naval agent put aboard, Lieutenant Edgar. Edgar had been Captain James Cook’s master, that is, navigator, on HMS Discovery during Cook’s last voyage in 1776-79. Little Bassey, as his nickname went, was middle-aged, shocked by nothing and determined to look after the women prisoners’ physical and nutritional well-being. A younger man, Dr Alley, was surgeon.

  By the end of 1788 a new outbreak of gaol fever had been reported from Newgate. At the Old Bailey sessions just finished all windows and doors had been kept open despite the bitter weather, to prevent the spread of the disease. But berths, or cradles, for the convict women selected to board the Lady Juliana were not yet ready, and so the prisoners were not immediately moved out of contagious Newgate. The government still hoped to hear reports from New South Wales before they brought the women aboard the ship. If the colony were judged to be in trouble, Captain Aitken might have to transport those aboard Lady Juliana to Nova Scotia, despite the hostility of the people of that province to the idea.

  It was not until March 1789 that Prince of Wales arrived in England with the first news of the colony. Phillip’s dispatches, though hopeful, and telling of a struggling yet healthily located place, were counter-balanced by the utterly negative voices of Ross and his ally, Captain Campbell. Undersecretary Nepean put more reliance on Phillip than he did on Ross. There was enough basis to order that Lady Juliana could conscientiously be filled up for her journey.

  The Lady Juliana had been moved from Deptford to Galleon’s Reach miles downriver from Newgate. One hundred and sixteen women from the prison were embarked during March and April 1789. There was a woman in the death cells of Newgate who would have loved to be with them. Catherine Heyland, in her mid thirties, had been sentenced to death on 2 April 1788 for counterfeiting, and while male counterfeiting drew only the hanging sentence, female counterfeiting was subject to the traditional punishment of burning at the stake. She had been arrested in a police raid on a front garret in Lincoln’s Inn Fields used by counterfeiters. Down Catherine Heyland’s bodice, the officials found two bags of counterfeit sixpences. Throughout his own trial, a male counterfeiter frequently reiterated that Heyland had been innocent and he had merely used her as a hiding post. A young Irish girl named Margaret Sullivan had previously been found guilty of a separate act of counterfeiting, and she, like Heyland, was condemned to be publicly immolated by fire. To enable her to complete an appeal for mercy, Heyland’s (but not Sullivan’s) execution was stayed. The Times asked whether mankind must not laugh at long speeches against African slavery when ‘we roast a fellow creature alive, for putting a penny-worth of quicksilver into a halfpenny-worth of brass?’.

  The Sheriff of the City of London had a similar distaste for burning women, and believed Catherine Heyland did not deserve the death penalty anyhow. What can we make, in our own brutal-by-proxy world, of such public savagery? A Westerner who in this age saw eight friends and acquaintances twitch to death at a rope’s end, as did the marine garrison of Sydney, or saw a young woman burned alive, as did any gentleman, woman or child who wanted to be a spectator in Newgate Street, would perforce be offered counselling. Not only did Boswell in the spring of 1785 watch nineteen criminals hanged outside Newgate without its spoiling his appetite, but later the same year he persuaded Sir Joshua Reynolds to attend the execution of five convicts at the same place.

  Margaret Sullivan seemed to face her unspeakable death in the spring of 1787 with great courage. She spent her last evening praying with a priest and rejected the offer of a treat of strawberries from the sheriff ’s wife. As was normal at such times, neighbouring inns the next morning profited from the crush. As two male counterfeiters waited on the scaffold, the chaplain of Newgate preached for three-quarters of an hour. Fifteen minutes after the men died, Margaret Sullivan, dressed in a penitential white shroud, emerged with the priest. And it was all done as ordered. The morning Chronicle of 17 March 1787 records that Sullivan was ‘burnt, being first strangled by the stool being taken from under her’. City worthies sat on a viewing platform nearby, the horrified sheriff amongst them.

  Parliament having risen for the summer of 1788, the sheriff pursued Lord Sydney to the country, was taken to his bedroom, and galloped back to London with a four-day stay of execution, arriving at Newgate two hours before the pyre for Catherine Heyland, whose appeal had been unsuccessful, was due to be set alight.

  When, to secure against escapes, Lady Juliana moved downriver further to Gravesend, Heyland seemed an unlikely candidate to join it. But out of nowhere, mercy descended on her. George III having recovered from his madness, bells were tolled, cannon were fired, and a restorative
deity was praised by choirs in St Paul’s. The twenty-three female convicts then under death sentence were brought from their condemned cells the following day to the Old Bailey. These women, all young, in various states of clothing, were told by the recorder that His Majesty had granted pardon to them on condition that they undergo transportation for the terms of their natural lives.

  Heyland gratefully accepted, but only sixteen of the women did so. Seven snubbed the King’s mercy. One of them told the recorder, ‘I will die by the laws of my own country before ever I will go abroad for my life. I am innocent and so is Sarah Storer.’ Nellie Kerwin, 29 years old, whom one of her shipmates would call ‘a female of daring habits’, made a politer refusal of transportation in these words: ‘I have two small children; I have no objection to confinement for life; I cannot live long.’ She had kept a rakish boarding house for sailors at Gosport near Portsmouth.

  The recorder warned them not to try to delay things until after ships such as the Lady Juliana sailed. They were given twelve hours to think about it. If they refused this beneficence again, they would be sent down from the bar and, ‘You will depend upon it that you will suffer death with the first culprits.’ In fact they were kept in solitary confinement and brought back to the dock of the Old Bailey after a month, and seem to have gradually come to terms with their pardons.

  In journeying to New South Wales on the Lady Juliana and devoting a chapter of his journal to it, the ship’s steward, John Nicol, a young Scot, gives us a rare view of the transactions between convict women and seamen. He had a positive nature, believing that aboard one found not ‘a great many very bad characters’ amongst the women. Most had committed petty crimes, he said. He came to earthy conclusions about why these women were being sent to New South Wales—there was a great proportion who had ‘merely been disorderly, that is, streetwalkers, the colony at the time being in great want of women’.

  While the ship was still in the Thames, he had seen a young Scottish girl die of a broken heart. ‘She was young and beautiful, even in the convict dress, but pale as death, and her eyes red with weeping . . . If I spoke of Scotland she would wring her hands and sob until I thought her heart would burst. I lent her a Bible and she kissed it and laid it on her lap and wept over it.’

  It was Nicol’s job to go ashore and buy supplies for the ship, but he also shopped for convict women who had brought money with them aboard, particularly for a Mrs Barnsley, ‘a noted sharper and shoplifter’. Nicol was a little awed by this potent woman who became Lady Juliana’s centre of authority and dispenser of favours amongst the other prisoners. They in return were all pleased to serve her and were rewarded with the groceries Steward Nicol bought for her ashore. To add to her other gifts of personality, she became the ship’s midwife, one whom Surgeon Alley very much trusted and thus took advice from. He supported, for example, the women’s request for tea and sugar in lieu of part of their meat ration and also suggested that they be supplied with soap. He would eventually ask for ‘a supply of child bed linen to be sent on board, for some of the women were pregnant . . . ’ Mrs Barnsley had left behind in England a somewhat younger husband, Thomas, a musician by trade, now on the Thames hulk Ceres. Elizabeth Barnsley, well settled in on Juliana, hoped that she would be joined by him in Sydney.

  Nicol had been working aboard Lady Juliana for three months when the great love of his life came aboard. Seventeen women from Lincoln Castle, riveted irons around their wrists, had come down to Greenwich, travelling for thirty-six hours roped to the outside seats of a coach. Their condition after such a journey in English late winter weather was pitiable; they were tattered, pale, muddied and chilblained. Nicol, as ship’s steward and trained blacksmith, had the not entirely thankless task of striking the riveted county prison irons off the women’s wrists on his anvil. (He could present a bill of 2 shillings and sixpence to the keeper of the county gaol for each set of shackles he struck open.) In a smithy shack on the windswept deck women bent low to have the work done, and Nicol fell in love with one of them, despite her bedragglement, in the space of performing his task. ‘I had fixed my fancy upon her from the moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon my anvil, and as firmly resolved to bring her back to England when her time was out, my lawful wife, as ever I did intend anything in my life.’

  Sarah Whitelam, the object of this fervour, was a Lincolnshire country girl, thick-accented to Nicol’s ear, and perhaps another victim of Enclosure. Nicol had a broad streak of generosity in his demeanour, which this Lincolnshire girl saw in her extreme situation and latched on to. Not that she struck him as a gross opportunist like some of the London women. ‘I courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman on board.’

  During their courtship she told him that she had borrowed a cloak from an acquaintance, who had maliciously prosecuted her for stealing it, and she was transported for seven years for unjust cause. Sarah’s true crime, to whose record the love-stricken Nicol had no access, was that at Tealby in Lincolnshire she had stolen an amount of material which included six yards (5.5 metres) of black chintz cotton, a number of gowns, seven yards (6.4 metres) of ‘black calamomaco’, a pink quilted petticoat and a red Duffin cloak. On the spur of whatever criminality or need, it seemed that she had cleaned out an entire small shop-load.

  To allow the sort of courtship which Nicol describes, the Lady Juliana must have been a relatively relaxed ship, where for their own good the women were allowed on deck for exercise a considerable amount, and some were permitted access to the sailors’ quarters to an extent not openly countenanced on most of the First Fleet. Lieutenant Edgar and Captain Aitken were Georgian pragmatists, not evangelical Christians. In a wooden ship of 400 or so tons, there was not a lot of room for private courting, but the poor of the time were used to cramped quarters, to cohabiting in one-room hutches, to copulating by stealth and with minimal privacy. Space for love was not the issue as Nicol chattered away to Sarah Whitelam; Sarah would be pregnant with Nicol’s child by the time the ship left England. Thus, as in the First Fleet, the fallen young of Britain were busy at their associations, generating on whatever terms an enlargement of the convict nation towards which they headed.

  A number of friends and family of the women of the Lady Juliana made plots to rescue particular women before the transport left the Thames. An attempt at Gravesend on the night before sailing was the only successful one—four women of the convict party below decks went over the stern and into a boat. The escapee whose identity we know was 24-year-old Mary Talbot—one of an army of young shoplifters—who fled the ship with her baby, William. But she was later to be recaptured and would find herself, in the end, without any of her children, wasting on a ship to New South Wales, the Mary Ann, and soon enough yielding up her bones to that soil.

  In early June, at Spithead off Portsmouth, the ship was joined by ninety women from county gaols and five late arrivals from London who had been rushed down chained to the outside of wagons. The last load of women was brought on in Plymouth, and it was July 1789 when the Lady Juliana sailed with a crowded prison deck.

  Indeed, John Nicol says there were 245 women aboard Lady Juliana as she left Plymouth. ‘When we were fairly out to sea, every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath.’ As the Lady Juliana with Nicol and his pregnant Sarah Whitelam made its solitary way out of English waters, past Ushant and into the Bay of Biscay, it was in a sense a precursor, the first ship of an as yet not fully planned Second Fleet to get away. It carried on board a letter Home Office Undersecretary Evan Nepean had written to his friend Arthur Phillip in Sydney Cove, informing him that ‘in the course of the autumn I expect that about 1000 more convicts of both sexes will be embarked from the several Gaols and despatched to Port Jackson’.

  EXPIREES

  By the time Lady Juliana left England, Phillip was faced with the continuing problem of convicts saying their time had expired. Phillip’s reply, that he regretted he
had no records to verify these matters, was ‘truly distressing’ to many convicts. Several men told the governor that when the records did arrive, they would want to be paid for their labour as free men. One such man was mangled by his attempts to be heard. John Cullyhorn (probably Callaghan) claimed to have been told by Major Ross that he could now do what he liked, his term having finished by July 1789. He came up over the stream to make a direct appeal to the governor on 29 July 1789 for a full pardon on the grounds that his term was served. In the course of his conversation with Phillip, Cullyhorn asserted that Lieutenant-Governor Ross had told him that there were two years provisions available for any convict who finished their time, and he sought to claim them now. Ross denied having told the convict that, and demanded Cullyhorn be punished as a liar. At Ross’s insistence but with Phillip’s consent, poor Cullyhorn was charged with calumny and sentenced to receive 600 lashes and to work in irons for the space of six months. That is, the court, its judgment influenced by a need to shut up the turbulent Ross, ordered what a historian would rightly call ‘a savage (and illegal) punishment for a free Englishman’. For documents arriving in Sydney later would prove Cullyhorn correct—his time had indeed expired.

  Privately, Judge-Advocate Collins was not unsympathetic to such people, who were ‘most peculiarly and unpleasantly situated’. But the reality was that Phillip could not afford to advance any person two years of rations. Despite the supplies Sirius had brought back from South Africa, in November 1789 the ration was reduced to two-thirds again, since there were only five months of Sirius’s flour left. Amongst other factors, the storehouse supplies had proved to be appetising to rats and various native marsupials—bush rats, potoroos, possums. Nonetheless, said Collins, ‘The governor, whose humanity was at all times conspicuous, directed that no alteration should be made in the ration to be issued to the women.’