Killigrew and the Incorrigibles

by Jonathan Lunn

  ‘Surely you can stay for dinner?’

  Robertson shook his head. ‘Thank you, Mr Price, but I’ve had just about as much of this island as I can stomach.’ He threw the seven manila folders on to the desk. ‘You can close these now.’

  ‘Wyatt?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Jarrett?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Blake? Lissak? Vickers and Griddha?’

  ‘Dead, dead, dead and dead.’

  Price hesitated before asking his next question, as if hardly daring to hope. ‘Cusack?’

  ‘Dead.’

  The news of Cusack’s death would create an uproar in Irish communities across the globe. There would be accusations of excessive brutality by the Royal Navy; some would even claim that the escape had been a set up, designed to rid the British authorities of the problem of Devin Cusack. But from the broad smile on Price’s face, he clearly did not consider that his problem.

  ‘What about the men who helped them to escape? Captain Quested and the crew of the Lucy Ann?’

  ‘Quested’s dead. So are most of his men; the rest I’ve got secured on board the Tisiphone. They’ll stand trial in Hobart Town.’

  Price chuckled. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Robertson. You certainly don’t pull your punches, do you?’

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ the commander retorted drily. ‘If it had been up to me, I’d’ve taken them all back to Hobart Town to stand trial. But things didn’t work out that way. Lieutenant Killigrew… well, perhaps if I’d been through the ordeal he had, found himself in the situation he did, I’d’ve acted no differently. It’s not my place to judge him. And as Captain Keppel warned me when he recommended Killigrew as my second lieutenant, he’s no worse than God made him.’

  ‘What about Mrs Cafferty?’

  ‘I’m taking her back to Hobart Town. It seems she doesn’t want to work as governess to your children after all.’

  ‘Damn the governess position! That bitch tried to kill me!’

  ‘That’s not the way she tells it. She tells me she threatened to kill you – a serious offence, I’ll grant you, but there are mitigating circumstances – but that she did not have the desire to carry it out.’

  ‘Attempted murder, Robertson! That’s a capital felony! She must be made to stand trial.’

  ‘A trial could be embarrassing for you, Mr Price. I’ve seen the way you like to parade up and down right in front of your convicts with your pepperboxes tucked in your belt, taunting them to try drawing one.’

  Price drew himself up to his full height. ‘It’s strength of will that runs this island, Robertson, not guns and whips. I know those dogs are too cowardly ever to try it.’

  ‘Of course, if word got out that a mere chit of a girl could get the better of you with a pistol, don’t you think that one or two of your charges might get the same idea?’

  Price blanched at the thought.

  ‘Your time’s running out, Price,’ Robertson said contemptuously. ‘You can’t get away with the kind of brutality you’ve been using to run this place for ever. Sir William and Dr Hampton might be prepared to turn a blind eye to your conduct, but when I get back to Hobart Town I intend to raise such a stink the public will demand your dismissal. If you’re lucky, perhaps you’ll be allowed to resign and live the rest of your days on a comfortable pension. If you’re unlucky, one of these days you’re going to push one of your charges too far, and he’ll put a stop to your brutality before anyone else does. But one way or another, you’re going to get your comeuppance. I met some wild savages in the New Hebrides; but none of them was as savage as you are.’

  Price snorted contemptuously. ‘You don’t frighten me, Commander Robertson. My position here is secure. Have you quite finished, or is there anything else?’

  ‘Just one other thing.’ Robertson smashed his fist into Price’s face. The monocle flew from the commandant’s eye, and he crashed to the floor. ‘Get up! I haven’t finished with you yet.’

  White-faced with fear and anger, Price shook his head.

  ‘Just as I suspected. You’re nothing but a bully, Price. A loathsome bully who takes pleasure in the suffering of others. Not so pleasant when someone gives you a taste of your own medicine, is it? Consider that a down payment on your eventual comeuppance. Good day to you, sir!’

  * * *

  The Tisiphone steamed back into the Derwent Estuary one week later. She anchored in Sullivan’s Cove and, within the hour, Killigrew was escorting Mrs Cafferty ashore in the second cutter. The two of them sat in the stern sheets while the crew pulled on the oars.

  ‘You know, you handled yourself quite well back there at Thorpetown,’ said Killigrew.

  She arched her eyebrow. ‘For a woman, you mean?’

  ‘For anyone. If I was the marrying kind—’

  ‘No, thank you! I like my independence too much. And so, I suspect, do you.’

  ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I stopped living after my brother died and my husband was killed in Afghanistan. I’m starting to think it’s time I started living again. How about you?’

  ‘The same. You know, I expect the Tisiphone will be tied up here in Hobart Town for a couple of weeks. I don’t know when the next ship departs for England, but it could be several days…’

  ‘I’m not in any hurry to go anywhere.’

  ‘Capital! Perhaps I could have the honour of calling on you at your hotel?’

  ‘I think I should like that very much.’

  He moved to kiss her, but then became aware of the grins of Molineaux, Endicott, and the other men pulling at the oars. ‘Look to your oars, lads,’ he growled. Taking his cap from his head, he held it up to hide his and Mrs Cafferty’s face from them as he kissed her.

  ‘Oh! Mr Killigrew!’ she protested. ‘Well! At least now I know what the “I” stands for.’

  He grinned. ‘Irresistible?’

  ‘Incorrigible!’

  Historical Notes

  The south-west Pacific certainly seems to have been a lively place in the mid-nineteenth century. The Royal Navy had a negligible presence in the South Seas at the best of times during these years, and between 1843 and 1846 most of this was concentrated in New Zealand, where shore parties from HMS Hazard and other vessels were helping the army in the First Maori War. Certainly the navy was too busy to send any vessels to New Caledonia or the New Hebrides to protect British traders against attacks from natives – or vice versa. But all that changed in 1848, when HMS Dido was dispatched to New Caledonia as part of a cruise of the South Seas to investigate incidents relating to Benjamin Boyd’s trade in island labour and accusations of slavery.

  The inspiration behind Thaddeus Thorpe, Boyd was a man who cropped up again and again in some of the diverse sources I read while researching this novel, including a book on whaling in the South Seas, the biography of an admiral of the fleet, an account of the sandalwood trade in the New Hebrides, a history of the Royal Yacht Squadron and even a dictionary of surnames! Boyd sailed his yacht the Wanderer into Sydney Harbour in 1842 and over the next nine years tried his hand at a variety of money-making schemes: sheep-farming, whaling, sandalwood, and shipping indentured labour.

  He built his own settlement, Boydtown, at Twofold Bay on the south-east coast of Australia, setting up his own magistrates and printing his own currency. He employed the artist Oswald Brierly – later Sir Oswald – to manage his whaling station there. Brierly was a fine artist but a poor manager, and the station did not last long. The lighthouse built there was never lit because Boyd forgot to get permission to light it, and before long it was known as ‘Ben Boyd’s folly’.

  Captain Maxwell of the Dido failed to find any proof against Boyd, perhaps because he was, it is said, too afraid to land at the Isle of Pines, even though Captain James Paddon had established a trading station on the island the previous year. Boyd sailed to California to take part in the gold rush at the end of 1849, but like all his other schemes that too pro
ved to be pie in the sky. He was killed in 1851 – either on Guadalcanal or Guam, depending on which source you read – but all agree he was killed by the natives while trying to establish his own private empire.

  The Royal Navy paid another visit to these waters in 1849, this time in the shape of HMS Havannah, which visited the New Hebrides to investigate a clash between Samoan sailors on an American sandalwood ship and the natives of Éfaté: the Samoans had chased the natives into caves, and there lit fires outside to suffocate them with smoke. Although a later generation of naval officers would respond to such difficulties by bombarding native villages, Captain J. E. Erskine of HMS Havannah – a member of the Aborigines Protection Society – seems to have been more tolerant, and made a real effort to investigate the matter fully. But since he did not arrive in the New Hebrides until seven years after the event, and the white population of the islands was mobile in the extreme, his chances of bringing anyone to justice were negligible.

  Barzillai Quested was inspired by Captain Edward Rodd, an alcoholic, one-eyed, one-handed, blunderbuss-wielding sandalwood trader, who had sustained his injuries in a fight with natives in New Caledonia. Rodd was accused of seizing the natives from Tanna and selling them to the Erromangoans in exchange for sandalwood (a trade which seems to have been two way) in the late 1840s. Whether or not the accusation was true was never satisfactorily established, but one has to wonder about any man who chose to call his trading ship the Terror. Another source of inspiration was Captain White, ‘the vindictive man who would wait in the bush for days to shoot an islander against whom he had a grudge … probably the same White who, when master of the Deborah late in 1851, shot a young chief on board his ship at Tana [sic] after some high words had passed between them.’

  Whether or not there is any truth in the stories of traders kidnapping natives to sell them for sandalwood we will probably never know; but if they are true one trader who can be absolved was Captain James Paddon. He established his trading station on Inyeug in 1844, having purchased the island from the natives of neighbouring Aneiteium in return for an axe-head and some blankets (the natives had no use for it, believing it to be haunted). Paddon purchased a steamship and cannibalised it for parts to build his steam-powered sawmill, and did a roaring trade in sandalwood, whale oil, ship’s provisions, and bêche-de-mer, as well as meeting a demand amongst the natives for jew’s-harps. Today he would be condemned for having cheated them with worthless baubles, but they do not seem to have complained at the time. While many missionaries perished at the hands of the natives of these islands (not Geddie: by learning the natives’ language, he succeeded in converting three thousand natives on Aneiteium to Christianity over the course of thirteen years), Paddon seems to have enjoyed good relations with the natives, and eventually married one.

  Although Paddon helped Geddie set up his mission at Aneiteium in 1848 by providing the frame for the mission building, the two of them soon clashed. Geddie’s protests strongly hinted that Paddon and the other traders on Inyeug were enjoying carnal relations with native girls, and he abhorred Inyeug as a den of every kind of vice. If the Presbyterian Geddie seems to have been excessively puritanical, forbidding his flock from dancing, smoking, drinking kava and taking part in traditional ceremonies, he should be given credit for discouraging the local custom of strangling wives on the death of their husbands; although, as with suttee in India, the wives seemed to resent this interference.

  Paddon, meanwhile, expanded his operations to include a second trading station on the Isle of Pines in 1847. He helped to set up a Roman Catholic mission on the island two years later, perhaps as a way of getting back at the Presbyterian Geddie. Eventually – inevitably – the sandal trees were logged out in the New Hebrides, and Paddon moved to Grande Terre in New Caledonia and took up cattle farming.

  The Naghol, or ‘land-dive,’ was peculiar to the natives in the south end of the island of Pentecost for many years. It is still carried out by the natives, but has recently become a more widespread practice, with an elastic cord known as ‘bungee’ substituting for yam vines.

  Devin Cusack is a fictional character, although inspired by William Smith O’Brien and Thomas Meagher. Despite the desultory nature of their uprising at Ballingarry in 1848, O’Brien and his associates became heroes of the Irish people, perhaps because of the martyrdom of their transportation to the colonies of Australia. There can be no doubt that their original sentences of death by hanging, drawing and quartering were excessively harsh, even by the standards of the age, and one can only suspect the British authorities ordered these penalties so that they might appear merciful when these sentences were later commuted to transportation for life.

  Although the Young Irelanders defied Daniel O’Connell’s objection to the use of force in the cause of Irish freedom, their hearts do not seem to have been set on it if the low body count of the rebellion is any indication. Only two men were killed outside the Widow McCormack’s house on Boulagh Common near Ballingarry, both of them rebels. O’Brien always professed loyalty to Queen Victoria to the end of his days, and only ever argued for repeal of the Act of Union. He was horrified by the activities of the more hard-line Fenian Society that emerged in the 1860s, which unhesitatingly used assassination as a means to put pressure on the British Government; what the Young Irelanders would have made of the atrocities committed by both sides in Ireland during the twentieth century can only be guessed at.

  Of the Young Irelanders transported to Van Diemen’s Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856), O’Brien was the first to be the subject of a rescue attempt. The only one of them who refused to give his parole, O’Brien was incarcerated on Maria Island. If his living conditions were not what he had been accustomed to as an aristocratic gentleman in Ireland, as a political prisoner and something of a celebrity he enjoyed better conditions than the ordinary convicts transported to Australia, and certainly nothing like as bad as propagandists in Ireland and the United States suggested. He had a small cottage to himself within the prison grounds, and became good friends with his gaoler, a Kildare Irish Protestant named Lapham, and even better friends, it was scandalously alleged, with Lapham’s young daughter Susan.

  O’Brien was permitted to go for walks on the island, as long as he was accompanied by a convict constable. It was on one such occasion, on 12 August 1850, that the master of the Victoria, a small vessel that sometimes supplied Maria Island, with the encouragement of the Irish Directory in New York, sent a boat ashore to rescue him. O’Brien had been told to expect such an attempt, word having been passed to him from Thomas Meagher, then on parole on mainland Van Diemen’s Land, who had helped to organise the escape.

  As soon as the boat drew near to the shore, O’Brien dashed in the sea and tried to swim out to meet it, but being weighed down by his clothes he got into difficulties and almost drowned. A second constable appeared, armed with a gun, and ordered the crew of the boat ashore. They complied, and O’Brien had to be dragged out of the surf. Once back on shore, he promptly sat down in the beached boat and refused to be moved; so the constables ordered the boat’s crew to carry him back to the prison, and O’Brien suffered the ignominy of being dragged back to his gaol by the very men who had come to rescue him. The master of the Victoria, Captain William Ellis, turned out to be a ticket-of-leave man who had served fourteen years for piracy. He and his chief mate were fined £60 each.

  The first of the Young Irelanders to escape successfully was Terence Bellew MacManus, who did so with the aid of a lookalike who substituted for him, enabling him to be smuggled on board a ship bound for San Francisco in February 1851. Thomas Meagher escaped in January 1852. While waiting to be picked up by the Elizabeth Thompson – the same ship that had rescued MacManus – from a deserted island off the coast of Van Diemen’s Land, he saw an eight-oared boat approaching. At first he thought it was the police, come to drag him back, but when the eight men came ashore it soon became apparent they were escaped convicts. They kept him company until the Elizabeth Thompson
arrived three days later. Meagher gave them all the money he had out of gratitude for their kindness to him before going aboard, while they continued their journey to the newly discovered goldfields of Australia.

  Like MacManus, Meagher was welcomed as a hero in the United States: he went on to serve with distinction with the Union Army in the Civil War, rising to the rank of Brevet Major General. After the war, he was appointed acting governor of Montana, where he seems to have become involved in some kind of local feud reminiscent of the enmity between the Clantons and the Earps in Tombstone, finally dying in mysterious circumstances by falling (or being pushed?) from a paddle-steamer on the Missouri River in 1867.

  One of my favourite accounts of an escape from the penal colonies of Australia is that of John Mitchel, who had been transported for ‘sedition’ some weeks before the Ballingarry uprising. His escape in 1853 was aided by another Young Irelander, Pat ‘Nicaragua’ Smyth, who had been involved in the uprising but had evaded arrest and escaped to the United States. All the Young Irelanders were gentlemen who took their word of honour very seriously, so Mitchel marched into the police station at Bothwell, and handed a note retracting his parole to the local magistrate (a copy of which he had also forwarded to Sir William Denison). It was tantamount to announcing his intention to escape, except that in the time it took the magistrate to finish reading the note, Mitchel calmly walked out of the police station, jumped on to a horse and rode off with ‘Nicaragua’ Smyth. Smith O’Brien himself did not escape, however: ‘Nicaragua’ Smyth was planning to spirit him away also when news arrived that Lord Palmerston, then Home Secretary, had granted him a pardon conditional only on his never returning to Britain.

  Norfolk Island was (and is, of course) a real place. It was first settled as a penal colony in 1790, and abandoned in 1814; it was re-established ten years later as the ne plus ultra, the final sanction against irredeemable convicts – the ‘incorrigibles’ – short of the death penalty. When reading about the sufferings of the criminals transported in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, it is worth remembering that the worst criminals were still executed – those who were transported tended to be petty thieves, prostitutes, and con men, with an admixture of Chartists and trade unionists such as the Tolpuddle Martyrs for good measure.