A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  On the long sea voyage, Francis Greenway would have stood out among his dishevelled and ill-educated fellow convicts: the illiterate labourers, tinkers and blighted servants; the petty thieves, scroungers, pickpockets and thugs. It is therefore unlikely that one so unusual as Greenway would have escaped the notice of either Piper or Harris for long. Indeed, Greenway’s first architectural commission in New South Wales may well have been hatched within that improbable setting, ’tween decks on the General Hewett as she road the long ocean swells en route to Sydney. Within weeks of arriving in the colony, Greenway would be allowed the freedom to consult Harris further and plan extensions to Ultimo, the doctor’s mansion on the south-western outskirts of the settlement. A couple of years later Greenway may also have been involved with the building of Piper’s Henrietta Villa on Eliza Point (now Point Piper), one of the most fashionable of Sydney’s houses.

  Such potentially fortuitous encounters between a convict architect and two of the colony’s notables belie the grim nature of much of the voyage. The convicts were divided into messes of six men apiece; they ate and slept together, and six messes at a time ‘were admitted on deck in rotation during the day for the benefit of Air’. That was all good practice until the ship reached Madeira, where Master Earl had the convicts confined below for nine days straight. The same happened at Rio de Janeiro, where the men were confined for a further ten days in the tropical heat. Sickness was the inevitable result: ‘In Consequence … the Convicts were very properly allowed Access to the deck during the day for the remaining part of the Voyage. It was now, Alas! Too late. No care, no exertion, however it might lessen, could now remedy the evil’.13

  Throughout the voyage, ‘two days in the Week [were] Appointed for Shaving and cleaning the Convicts’, but even this basic regimen of hygiene ‘was not persisted in with any regularity’. Little fresh water was allowed for the washing of bodies, let alone their clothes or linen. Each man’s total water ration was reduced to just three pints a day early in the voyage, and soap was also severely rationed. With little water or soap to hand, the men were still obliged ‘to appear Clean every Sunday On the quarter deck, in Order to Attend Divine Service’. But as the already lax standards continued to slide, even this ‘Salutary practice was neglected, and the Convicts were suffered to become exceedingly filthy’. It was only a matter of time before dysentery broke out, and within two weeks of leaving Madeira about a dozen cases were recorded.

  In an attempt to keep disease at bay in the tropical heat, the lower berths were cleared while the ship’s fetid recesses were scrubbed with oil of tar and fumigated with sulfur two or three times a week. Vinegar was sprinkled every day. Bedding was aired while bodies basked in the welcome sunshine. But what should have brought relief only led to increased squalor and the advent of disease. Sudden rain squalls strafed the ship, and the men were soaked along with their airing bedding. Mildew and damp were now added to their litany of miseries. Much of their wet and ruined bedding was thrown overboard, ‘from the want of which the Convicts, When they Came into a Cold climate, Suffered exceedingly’. Upon sighting Brazil ‘a great number was very sick and ill of Dysentery’, and by the time the General Hewett anchored on 17 November at Rio de Janeiro, 19 convicts were dead or near death.

  Disease, dampness and death, what else could now stalk the holds of the General Hewett? It seems that hunger, wilfully imposed by those in command, became the next threat to survival. At Rio, ordinary provisions were bartered under duress from the ship’s master in exchange for cheap Brazilian spirits and other comforts such as tea, sugar and tobacco. Master Earl had been responsible for the victualling of the ship. As he ‘had the entire charge and superintendence of them’, he hoarded the convicts’ salt beef for as long as nine weeks, then paid them in kind after the ship had left port. Earl charged the convicts the ‘most Shamefully enormous prices Vizt: – Coffee Four shillings, Sugar One Shilling and Sixpence, Tea twenty Shillings, Tobacco five Shillings per pound, which was not less than Six or Seven hundred per Cent. on prime Cost’. As a consequence, some prisoners went for days, if not weeks, without ‘animal food’.14

  In addition to the deaths before Rio, a further 15 convicts would perish on the passage to Sydney, three within the last five days of the voyage, which mercifully ended on 7 February 1814. To add to the scourge of dysentery on that final leg, four had died of typhus (probably spread by lice or fleas from rats); two of ‘apoplexy’; two from ‘remitting fevers’ (possibly malaria); and two more of ‘extreme debility without apparent disease’, obviously made fatal through malnutrition. Of those 266 who had survived, most were weak and some were near death. Of the men from Captivity, close to one in four did not reach Port Jackson.

  Governor Macquarie’s response to the General Hewett disaster was to swiftly convene a medical court of inquiry headed by D’Arcy Wentworth, the colony’s principal surgeon. The other members of the court were assistant surgeons William Redfern and Edward Luttrell. But despite Macquarie’s obvious concern, the court’s findings were hardly condemnatory. The wet weather and soaked bedding were considered the ‘primary and chief cause of the Sickness’. And although Master Earl’s withholding of the salt-beef ration was described as ‘highly censurable’, there was ‘no reason for supposing a want of humanity or attention on the part of Mr. Earl, Master, and Mr. Hughes, Surgeon’.15

  Two other blighted convict transports soon arrived in Port Jackson – the Three Bees in May and the Surry in July. Like the General Hewett, both disgorged tales of death and misery, as well as faltering lines of patients for the settlement’s squalid hospital. Further alarmed by such tragedies and obviously dissatisfied with the findings of the court of inquiry, Macquarie commissioned Surgeon William Redfern, himself a former convict, to report on the fate of the three so-called ‘fever’ ships. Redfern’s report, delivered to Macquarie at the end of September and forwarded to Whitehall, was a major early contribution to Australian public health policy. Redfern made strong recommendations on the cleanliness, ventilation and fumigation of ships, as well as the diet and clothing of convicts. But perhaps most importantly, he was insistent that government – that is, Royal Navy – surgeons accompany each voyage with ‘full power to exercise their Judgement, without being liable to the Control of the Masters of the Transports’. Thereafter, tighter regulation of private contractors led to a significant reduction in convict deaths at sea. As for the General Hewett, as a result of the ‘Calamitous State of Disease’ on the voyage, Master Percy Earl and James McTaggart & Co. were ‘severely mulcted for their non-compliance with their charter-party’.16 The General Hewett never carried convicts again.

  But on that summer’s day in early February 1814 when the General Hewett moored in Sydney Cove, Francis Greenway was no doubt simply thankful that the journey from Bristol Newgate to the hulks, and then his five-month-long ordeal on such a ship of ghosts, were finally at an end. With good reason, he would prefer to forget; he never wrote of the experience and probably never talked of it much either.

  A STATE OF ‘INFANTILE IMBECILITY’

  Newly arrived convicts in Greenway’s day came ashore unmanacled; the oppressiveness of their unfamiliar surroundings was considered restraint enough. Mustered in the gaol yard, they were issued with clothing and then addressed by the governor’s secretary, who told them firmly but civilly of the heavy consequences of misbehaviour. But rather than being incarcerated in yet another gaol, they were ordered to arrange their own lodgings in the town and to turn up to their assigned gangs or allotted employers without fail each morning when the bell rang calling them to work.

  Francis Greenway left no impressions of this place of exile in the wilderness, and of his first few months in New South Wales very little is known. Still unsteady on his feet after the long sea voyage, what must he have thought as he stared from hollow eyes across a scene so utterly unlike that of his native West Country? The fair skin of his face and hands, now with its added ’tween-decks pallor, felt the sting of the ant
ipodean sun, and the unaccustomed dazzle of summer assaulted his gaze as he scanned the ragged settlement before him.

  Bisected by a small stream, Sydney Town had been built on either side of a shallow valley that fronted tidal mudflats and a tranquil little cove beyond. Irregular rows of dilapidated cottages lined the valley’s flanks, which still sported some of its original forest: eucalypts and contorted angophoras, casuarinas and cabbage palms, trees alien among the oaks, elms or ash of the English architect’s eye.

  On the ridges to the east and west of the cove, windmill sails turned lazily in the summer breeze, their stones grinding coarse flour to feed the hungry settlement. Both ridges also sported the town’s more substantial buildings. To the west lay the military barracks, the conspirators’ lair in the coup d’état against Governor William Bligh some years before and still a place whispering with insurrection. The barracks and its attendant parade ground stood hard by the monumentally ugly St Philip’s, the colony’s only church and, with its squat tower and ungainly proportions, a building devoid of architectural merit.

  On the eastern ridge, the imposing form of the soon-to-be roofed new hospital showed that there just might be progress and confidence afoot in this strange little town. And down by the waterfront on the western arm of the cove, amid the wharves and slipways, boatyards and jetties, lay more evidence of infant prosperity in the stores and large houses of the colony’s nascent merchant class. The most prominent among them belonged to Robert Campbell, a canny Scot who had dared to resist the trading thuggery of those ‘red-coated hucksters’, the officers of the New South Wales Corps.1 The ‘Rum Corps’, as they were widely known, had proved an effective trading ring and political cabal whose officers had intimidated and bullied successive governors before the incumbent, Major General Lachlan Macquarie. Campbell had succeeded where others had not.

  Behind the waterfront bustle of Sydney Cove lay The Rocks, originally a place of sandstone abutments and ledges clothed in unruly sombre-green vegetation. Long since encrusted with shanties and unkempt dwellings, The Rocks was an edgy place of crooked streets and lanes. Inhabited by seafarers, convicts and toughs, it was early Sydney’s underbelly, a place of grog shops, dosshouses and houses of ill repute.

  On the rise a few hundred yards past the head of the cove, and on the eastern side of what had come to be known as the Tank Stream, lay the centre of political and administrative power in New South Wales. Side by side and conspicuous in their newness were the trim pattern-book houses of Judge Advocate Ellis Bent, and the colonial secretary, John Campbell, the latter still to be finished. And a further 100 yards or so to the east stood the governor’s own residence, a decrepit – though enduring against all odds – shambles of a building with which Greenway would soon become all too familiar.

  When the architect was at last allowed to walk the streets, his hopes must have steadily risen as he spied a field of opportunity. It was perhaps not the tabula rasa he had imagined, but in its rude and almost primordial state Sydney Town proffered opportunities for Francis Greenway, the creative artist, that he might only have dreamt of in England. Here was a setting for architecture that lent infinite possibility to the creative mind: a jewel of a natural harbour drawn right up to the doorstep of the town, and vistas and aspects that charmed with every turn. There were honeyed building stones lying conveniently underfoot, straight hardwoods that held the same promise as trusty oak, and salmon and ochre clays to make warm-coloured bricks – a palette of materials from an architect’s Elysium. Could this town of little more than 25 years’ standing actually be the place of his greater destiny?

  Despite recent decrees flowing from the governor’s quill, all aimed at regularising the layout of the town and curbing unplanned and ill-considered building, Sydney was still an unruly urban infant. By the time of Greenway’s arrival, it had tottered southwards out of its geographic cradle around the cove, and now ended with a sombre pause at the burial ground, the site of a future opulent town hall.

  On the eastern boundary of the town, Macquarie’s will held sway on much of an original 320 acres that Arthur Phillip had set aside as the Governor’s Demesne (Domain). Having transformed it in the picturesque tradition of Capability Brown and turned it over to a private pleasure ground, the Macquaries were now busy introducing exotic trees and shrubs to its tamed contours. To the south-east, Macquarie had carved off Hyde Park from the rest of the Domain as a place of release for the energies of the townsfolk in horseracing, cricket and other games such as quoits and hurling.

  And further west, in contrast to the recreational pleasures of the viceroy and the denizens of Sydney Town, convict toil had fashioned farming settlements from the bush at Parramatta and beyond. But that great wilderness of tall forest or tortuous terrain still loomed all around, regarded as the hostile domain of Aborigines, people whose suffering and dispossession passed unconcernedly for most.

  Fifty-two-year-old Major General Lachlan Macquarie had been in charge in New South Wales since New Year’s Day 1810. If not powerful of stature, he was at least tall and well built, with grizzled hair, soft brown eyes and a ruddy complexion. A career soldier of many years’ standing, he wore his proud military bearing in every twist of braid on his high-collared scarlet tunic. Macquarie was born in humble circumstances on the island of Ulva in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland’s west coast. His early life, like that of many Scots of his era, was fashioned in poverty in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising and the brutal dismantling of the clan system following the rout by the English of Charles Edward Stuart’s army at Culloden Moor in 1746.

  But the young Macquarie nevertheless ‘took the King’s shilling’, and enlisted in the British army at the age of 14. By his late thirties he had served from Nova Scotia to New York, Jamaica, and on to India and Ceylon. He saw action in the 1795 siege of Cochin and the capture of Colombo the following year, and was a member of the British East India Company’s 50 000-strong force at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799. At this most famous battle in British Indian history, Tippoo Sultan, the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, was killed, and a certain dashing young major earned prize money of £1300. Macquarie’s military progress accelerated, and six months later he was promoted deputy adjutant general of a 6000-strong force headed for Egypt. He was now regarded as a valuable staff officer and an effective military administrator.

  Back in England in 1803, the ‘awkward, rusticated jungle wallah’, as he self-effacingly described himself, was promoted lieutenant colonel and thrown into the giddy whirl of London society as the local military district’s deputy adjutant general.2 Presented to the King and consulted on matters of Indian policy, Macquarie was still a man whose heart nonetheless resided in his native Scotland. In 1804 he returned briefly to his beloved Hebrides for the first time in more than 15 years, and there hoped to begin the consolidation of an estate on the island of Mull purchased from his uncle. But a further command in India followed, and Lachlan Macquarie would now not see the Hebrides until his return from New South Wales in 1823.

  His last Indian tour was mercifully short, and finding himself once more in England in late 1807, Macquarie soon married his second wife, a distant cousin named Elizabeth Campbell whom he had met on his visit to Mull. (His first wife, Jane, had died in India of tuberculosis in 1796 at just 24.) Now a lieutenant colonel in the 73rd (Perthshire) Regiment of Foot, Macquarie was to be sent overseas yet again, this time to New South Wales, where members of his regiment would replace the corrupt New South Wales Corps. Major General Miles Nightingall was to assume office from the deposed governor, William Bligh. But when Nightingall declined the post, an ambitious Macquarie, sensing that further avenues for promotion might be now be limited, wrote to Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of state for war and the colonies, and offered to take his commander’s place.

  Anxious to restore proper authority in New South Wales after the Bligh insurrection, Whitehall accepted Macquarie’s offer. In the only concession to the changed political la
ndscape after the toppling of Bligh, their lordships had chosen a military man as governor instead of a naval officer. At the head of his own regiment, he was thought better able to maintain firm control over the colony’s military garrison. Macquarie would be promoted brigadier general in 1811 and major general in 1813.

  In May 1809, the same month Francis and Mary Greenway’s possessions were being seized by the bailiffs, Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie boarded the supply ship HMS Dromedary for the seven-month journey to Port Jackson. They were accompanied by the incoming deputy judge advocate, Ellis Bent, the first adequately trained legal officer to be sent to the colony.

  On the voyage to New South Wales, Macquarie devoted himself to a careful study of his official commission and a bundle of lengthy accompanying instructions. Apart from exhortations to ‘improve the morals of the Colonists, to encourage Marriage, to provide for Education’ and so on, he was to build.3 There were no specific instructions given on the subject of the development or character of Sydney, but Macquarie was clearly instructed to build townships that would serve an expanding agrarian populace, one that the government hoped would, as far as possible, cater to its own needs. The spectre of famine that haunted the early years of the colony was to be laid to rest.

  On the matter of convict discipline, nowhere was Macquarie instructed to wield a rod of iron or condemn emancipists to foreverblighted lives. Rather, for the emancipists, it was their lordships’ ‘Will and Pleasure that in every case … you do pass Grants’. They were to be given land, livestock and the wherewithal to make a go of farming. With the help of a gathering stream of free settlers, and the promise of a livelihood to well-behaved convicts, it was hoped that a land of yeomen farmers would continue to develop.