Parmelia left Cork on 29 October, a season of dimness and squalls. The seasick, demented, embittered, grieving, cowed, were still restrained by the ankle chains running the length of their prison deck. Parmelia sailed past the old Head of Kinsale, out to the deeper reaches of the Celtic Sea and into the Atlantic. To the protests of the few who were not seasick, men writhed and vomited where they sat. The hatches were battened down, producing in addition to the noise of sea and the shriek of timbers under stress, a sense of being helplessly chained up in the whale’s belly. Some of the transports were wet ships; water seeped through the seams. Prisoners reported being washed from their bunks by water accumulating in the bilges and forming waves. Conditions were scarcely better for the families of the soldiers of the 50th, but at least the well were able to escape to the deck for a brief gasp of clean air. Parmelia’s convicts had ahead of them a 124-day dose of that mighty ocean so celebrated in Irish ballads.
A few days out into the North Atlantic, the surgeon and captain, after a consultation with the officer of the guard, struck the leg irons permanently off. The well-behaved could now move free of chains until Sydney. It was for all parties an act of normalisation. Routine would carry the inhabitants of Parmelia all the way to Australia, and in honour of the power of routine, Surgeon-Superintendent Anthony Donoghoe’s log maintained a level, functional tone, though he would complain that some of those sent aboard showed debility and emaciation.
The regularly managed days at sea muted if they could not do away with Hugh’s sense of loss. Sometime between 4.30 and 6.00 a.m., convict cooks were admitted on deck and began working up the fire in the galley. At sunrise, in suitable weather, the prison doors were thrown open, and prisoners came up the companionway. In the ever-dramatic ocean daybreak, in good weather Hugh and all the others washed in tubs and were rinsed off with buckets of sea-water. Twice a week at this time convict barbers began to cut hair and shave. At six o’clock, rations were served out in the storeroom to the mess men for the six convicts each represented, while volunteers swabbed the decks, glad of the exercise. Below, the sleeping benches had been raised and all bedding, each man’s mattress and blankets tied with sennit string, was brought up on deck and stowed beneath canvas hammock cloths, which in open sea might not be adequate to protect them from rain or spray. At eight o’clock, everyone below again, the mess men served breakfast out of buckets and pannikins at the central table running the length of the convict deck. Then the prison deck was cleaned by teams using lumps of pumice stone. On most ships there were classes, offered by some well-instructed convict or crew member; Archibald Turnbull might have turned his Oxford knowledge to use. An anti-scorbutic mixture called sherbet—lime or lemon juice with sugar—was served just before noon, or else a few mouthfuls of wine. The noonday meal was usually 4 ounces of salt pork or beef, 4 ounces of suet pudding, a few ounces of biscuit; or sometimes pea soup and bacon instead.
When laundry was done on deck, and clothing spread out in the rigging, the ship took on the normal aspect of crowded vessels of the age: a floating tenement. The bedding was taken below at sunset, prisoners were mustered below and the prison locked up. Supper was a hot drink and left-over biscuit. Climate and mutinous behaviour could vary all this, but the daily timetable brought both solace and an hypnotic tedium.
Men slept crowded together on their platforms. In practice surgeons often took a less than interventionist interest in what prisoners, male and female, did for sexual solace. We do, however, possess some broad indicators in the case of ships like the Parmelia. Governor Gipps of New South Wales wrote a decade later to Lord Stanley, British Colonial Secretary, that sodomy was realistically estimated as involving somewhere between one in eight and one in twenty convicts. ‘The Crime is said to prevail almost exclusively amongst prisoners of English birth,’ wrote Gipps, rightly or wrongly, ‘… and the Irish are (to their honour) generally acknowledged to be untainted by it.’ Certainly Irish social and religious restraints made an uneasy milieu for homosexuality. But the idea that homosexuality did not manifest itself at all on the prison deck beggars modern belief.
The same Irish conditions which had now rid Ireland of John Hessian, the Strahane brothers and Hugh Larkin, had already produced a large free emigration to the New World. Between 1825 and 1845 the total number of Irish emigrants to North America alone was said to be in excess of 800,000. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Canada attracted two thirds of the Irish emigrants to North America. A high proportion settled in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, which straddle the approaches of the St Lawrence River, or in New Brunswick. But others made their way down the St Lawrence itself to Lower or Upper Canada, Quebec and Ontario. Amongst them were a strong emigration of Ulster Protestant tenant farmers, who looked upon leaving home hard-headedly as an opportunity rather than an exile. One of them would write of the independence farmers enjoyed in London, Upper Canada: ‘I may say I never wrote anything of this country but the truth and I am sorry at nothing so much as that I did not come sooner to it.’
After 1835 the United States became the preferred Irish destination, and would from then on absorb three out of five Irish emigrants. Emigration to America is the stuff of romance and folk-song, but there was also a considerable invasion of English, Welsh and Scottish ports and cities, notably Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester—half a million Irish would be living in Britain by 1843. Karl Marx would ultimately write that Ireland got its vengeance on England ‘by bestowing an Irish quarter on every English industrial maritime or commercial town of any size … ’
Perhaps less than 5 per cent of pre-Famine emigrants from Ireland voluntarily committed themselves to the long voyage to Australia, which Hugh had now no choice but to make. Amongst the emigrants to the Australian colonies were again Ulster Protestant tenant farmers and their families, adventurous people with means to last them the longer journey, and carrying in their luggage astonishing reports of opportunities for free settlers. British government assistance and emigrant societies helped Irish tradesmen emigrate, and in the next two decades, single young women were sent out as domestic help, and to adjust the imbalance of the sexes. But Australia was the opposite of handy Nova Scotia. In the Irish imagination, it was synonymous with the worst kind of exile, the unchosen one; the exile of chains.
Parmelia traversed the Bay of Biscay and passed the north-western capes of Spain. As the weather began to moderate, the Madeiras showed remotely to port, and then the Azores to starboard. Within two weeks, the ship was in temperate waters. Hugh had never known such weather or such sights. The idea of relaying all this—the porpoises, the light, the range of met men—to someone beloved probably flared in him. Surgeons liked to see their convicts sing and dance, and Donoghoe had provided pipes and fiddles for use in this balmy air, these calm seas. It was thought the lethargy of scurvy could be combated by jigs and reels.
The Canaries were distantly sighted, and ahead lay the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape Verde Islands off Africa’s westernmost point. By then, in a zone of stillness, the weather turned torrid. Even with the scuttles open, the prisoners experienced a deadly heat. In the Hive, Anthony Donoghoe’s next ship, prison deck temperatures reached 100º Fahrenheit on a regular basis. He would have sixty men sleep on deck at a time, changing them every four hours. He probably used the same method on Parmelia. If a third of the men were on deck, he estimated, the temperature below fell by between 5º and 8º.
Far out in the Gulf of Guinea, as Parmelia crossed the breathless Equator, Larkin entered the southern world. He must have been occasionally astonished that the powers and principalities he had offended were capable of punishing him with such climes and distances. The Christmas he had anticipated spending in the parish of Clontuskert he now spent with the desert south-west coast of Africa to port and Napoleon’s St Helena far away to starboard.
‘The convicts behaved well,’ wrote Major Anderson, ‘except on one occasion, when one nearly murdered another by striking him violently on the head with a pumice st
one used for scrubbing the decks.’ The offender was placed in heavy irons, ‘and next morning the whole of the convicts were paraded on deck, and with my detachment under arms and loaded on the poop and in the cuddy, the prisoner was brought forward, stripped, and tied to the rigging, and there received the severe corporal punishment of one hundred lashes.’ This rite of discipline was considered neither exceptional, nor a blot on Parmelia’s record.
Surgeon Donoghoe was treating James McGuire, a 25-year-old Dublin shopkeeper who had stolen clothes, for dysentery. The surgeon found McGuire ‘heartily irritable.’ Eye infections had broken out too amongst the private soldiers and spread to the prison deck. Thomas McCaffrey, number 24, suffered pernicious diarrhoea, having in Donoghoe’s opinion been too long in Spike Island. He had lain in the ship’s hospital for six weeks after he first boarded, and had never fully recovered. Donoghoe recorded that by December McCaffrey was ‘suffering hunger, considerable debility, and strongly marked with Scorbutic’ Ulcers appeared on his hips and thighs. Calomel and ipecacuanha were used to dose him. His death occurred on 12 January 1834, and he was committed to the sea south of Africa.
Here the Atlantic Ocean met the Indian. The air became colder again, as Parmelia reached down for the edge of the Southern Ocean that surrounded Antarctica, and the global band of winds called the Roaring Forties. The made the transit between South Africa and Australia a fast but uncomfortable one. Donoghoe noted in his log that at 48º south the convict deck was full of men coughing and rasping with catarrh. They suffered because their clothing though lice-resistant was ‘nothing calculated to resist cold.’ The hospital forward filled up with cases of pneumonia.
An unfortunate man named John Gleeson, rural thief, was one day swept overboard in the violent Southern Ocean and sank in a second with a bitter cry to mercy in his mouth. Gleeson’s details—age, literacy, crime, place of trial, marital status—would not be finally inked in on the muster; no need existed to do so for the Sydney authorities. In Donoghoe’s log his loss was recorded in a brief paragraph of slanting handwriting.
Larkin endured as Parmelia was swept past the unoccupied sub-Antarctic islands of Crozet and Kerguelen, and towards its encounter with Van Diemen’s Land. That island’s stormy west coast was at all costs to be avoided. Then a last great turn at Southeast Cape, and the Van Diemen’s Land convict establishment at Port Arthur, brought Parmelia on the final long reach north for Sydney. It was March, late summer, and under electric blue skies off a long New South Wales coastline of noble headlands, brilliant beaches and blue coastal mountains, they were back in kindly air. Tacking up the coast against northerlies, or else zooming along before a southerly, they passed the wide mouth and low headlands of Botany Bay. This inlet which Captain Cook had made famous more than sixty years before was popularly used in the British Isles as a synonym for New South Wales, but Sydney Harbour itself was 7 miles north of it.
Parmelia had been at sea for 124 days.
3
ASSIGNING IRELAND
Convicts embarked in Ireland generally arrive in New South Wales in a very healthy state and are found to be more obedient and more sensible to kind treatment during the passage than any class. Their separation from their country is observed to make a strong impression on their minds.
Report of John Thomas Bigge,
Special Royal Commissioner, 1819
When on 2 March 1834, the Parmelia entered through the august sandstone headlands which were the gate to Sydney, and the great, accommodating stretch of Sydney Harbour spread away to its south, the scuttles on the convict deck were opened fully on the pleasant, humid late summer day. Parmelia, avoiding the mid-harbour rocks named the Sow and Pigs, anchored well down-harbour. From the deck and ports, what the travellers could chiefly see was not the half-penal, half-free town itself, for it lay in its own little deep-water cove some miles upstream. For the moment, Larkin beheld stretches of coastal hill and headland, covered with deep-green foliage of plants from before the Fall, and the yellow of the harbour beaches. It was a landscape without familiar saints and presences. Hugh could also see the scatter of buildings of South Head (lighthouse, signal station), the shacks of convict fishermen at Watson’s Bay, the first anchorage inside the harbour, and the fires of the natives on Middle Head rising into a bright godless sky. Parmelia was not immediately rushed by officials or news-hungry colonists. The Fairlie, a larger ship with over 300 English convicts had recently arrived. The officers went ashore both to report and to taste the raw, boozy pleasures and limited civilised intercourse of Sydney. The convicts would not be landed for some days, for their existence, their behaviour and the skills of those eligible for employment had to be advertised. The garrison of Parmelia were landed four days after arrival and marched 30 miles inland to the town of Liverpool. Major Anderson did not o with them, however. The governor had another task for him, one that would endow him with Australian penal notoriety.
The Sydney Gazette of 6 March told the readers of Sydney that the prisoners of Parmelia ‘appear to be a healthy, robust set of men.’ But on 18 March, Parmelia was still ‘lying in the stream’ with convicts aboard. Larkin’s boredom and anxiety to land must have begun to transcend any doubts he had about penal life ashore.
In that waiting time, the convicts were brought on deck and inspected by the Colonial Surgeon, the Principal Superintendent of Convicts and other officials. These shipboard inspections in theory gave prisoners opportunity to lodge complaints. Another opportunity came when at last, sometime before 25 March, the convicts were landed at the dockyard on the western tip of Sydney Cove itself, and the governor or his deputy inspected them and explicitly asked for complaints.
Sydney had seen exiled Irish trouble-makers already in its history of forty-five years. Amongst the first Irish to be transported were members of the loosely knit society named the Defenders, founded to counter attacks on Catholics in the North. After an armed resistance to the burning of Catholic homes, the so-called ‘Battle of the Diamond’ in Armagh in 1795, the Defenders were sentenced in job lots. Some were pressed into the Royal Navy, others sent to New South Wales. They were the first to bring the Irish language to Australia, where it generated great official suspicion.
In the same decade, Irish Protestants of the professional classes and the gentry involved themselves with their poorer Catholic brethren in a revolutionary organisation, the United Irishmen, which pulled against the more inward-looking Orange Order. The United Irishmen, and indeed women, a movement whose saints included Voltaire, Tom Paine, Washington and Jefferson, had been enlivened by the successful revolutions in North America and France, and by the chance of fraternity across the divide of Irish sect and class. Larkin knew and venerated, like every member of his class, the names of the Protestant United Irish martyrs of 1798 onwards. They were passed around like smoothed and lucky stones amongst the poor. The name of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, dead of wounds inflicted during his capture. The name of Wolfe Tone, who in an act of self-destruction which a merciful God understood, cut his throat with a razor smuggled into his cell by his brother. These men had shown a passionate philosophic sympathy for their powerless Catholic fellow countrymen. Some United Irishmen fled into exile—Thomas Addis Emmet, for example, to enjoy a career as a New York jurist and state Attorney-General. But Robert Emmet, his brother, attempting to revive rebellion in 1803, was publicly hanged and then torn apart in Dublin. His speech before the hanging judge, Lord Norbury, was much quoted by hedge schoolmasters and hence familiar to Hugh. ‘Let no man write my epitaph … When my country takes her place amongst the nations of the earth, then and not till than, let my epitaph be written.’
United Irish were shipped to Australia on six vessels which arrived between 1800 and 1806. Of these prisoners, one of the best known was General Joséph Holt, a Wicklow farmer, United Irishman, Presbyterian, who came as an amnestied prisoner aboard the Minerva in 1800. Holt had become for a time commander-in-chief of the remnants of the rebel army at Glenmalure in the mountains
south of Dublin, and in Wicklow generally, taking command of 3,000 or 4,000 men gathered by a young United Irishman Michael Dwyer, the Wicklow Chieftain, another transportee-to-be. Holt and Dwyer had entertained great hopes for the success of a French army under General Humbert, which landed in Mayo late in the summer of 1798. But the French-Irish Republic of Mayo collapsed in October. A further French fleet which had set out from Brest to invade Ireland was in part destroyed, in part captured, and Wolfe Tone captured with it.
Holt surrendered to an amnesty offered by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Cornwallis, who had had experience of rebels when his British army had been surrounded by Washington’s forces at Yorktown, Virginia, in the War of American Independence. In 1800 Holt would be permitted to travel as a gentleman detainee with his wife and children on Minerva, where below decks there were many rebels, summarily tried by court-martial, and placed aboard without proper warrants.
Hundreds of such unrepentant Irish seditionists, full of savage memory and unsettled scores, reached Australia in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The survivors brought to New South Wales a virulent memory of the instruments of torture which had been used against their forces and supporters: the shears for docking ears, the triangle for flogging, the pitch cap—a cap of tar put on suspects’ heads and lit to burn flesh and boil brains.
In 1804, the transported rebels rose against their captors at a place to the west of Sydney which the rebels inevitably named Vinegar Hill after the site of the battle in Ireland on 21 June 1798 in which Irish rebels fought the British. Major Johnston of the New South Wales Corps pursued the Sydney and Parramatta rebels, capturing the two leaders while a parley was in progress in the bush. Dozens of the rebels were hanged, and Holt was sent to Norfolk Island, 1,000 miles off the New South Wales coast.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 6