Having read about both Norfolk Island and the more infamous Devil’s Island in some depth, I can assure the reader that life on Devil’s Island was a tea party at the vicarage compared to life on ‘the Isle of Mis’ry’. The spread-eagle, the scavenger’s daughter, the water pit, the frame and the tube gag: all these instruments of torture were in use on the island at one time or another during the first half of the nineteenth century. The colony suffered from a succession of vicious and sadistic commandants (and one or two good ones, including Major Maconochie, who was years ahead of his time as a penal reformer, and thus dismissed for being too ‘soft’).
One reads of punishments of thirty-six lashes of the cat-o’-nine-tails being handed out for ‘having a tame bird’, ‘pushing a lot with his foot’ or ‘being at the latrine when the supper bell rang’. Punishments of 200 lashes and upwards were not uncommon; a death sentence to ordinary men, but few of the men who made it through the British penal system of the early nineteenth century to end up on Norfolk Island could be called ‘ordinary’. Yet despite the island having been chosen because its geographic remoteness rendered it escape-proof, some convicts did escape, including one party of seven who drifted as far as Maré, one of the Loyalty Islands, in an open boat in 1844: five of them were promptly eaten by cannibals.
The rescue of Cusack from Norfolk Island by a whaler was inspired by an event that actually took place much later, in 1876. An American whaler, the Catalpa, was purchased outright by the Clan Na Gael, the successor organisation to the Irish Directory. The captain of Catalpa, George B. Anthony, succeeded in rescuing six Fenians from Fremantle Prison and carrying them to California, even stopping to hunt whales on the way to offset the cost of the voyage. Anthony was not an Irishman, but neither was he a mercenary, and he seems to have been motivated out of genuine sympathy for the Irish cause. It need hardly be pointed out that Quested was in no way based on him.
I cannot close without a mention of John Giles Price. The last commandant of Norfolk Island, he was probably the worst. I hope my portrait of him is a faithful one, right down to the two pepperboxes tucked in his six-inch wide leather belt, his monocle and his beribboned straw boater. He believed his skill at handling convicts lay in his ability to understand how their minds worked and to speak their cant; and he certainly instilled the fear of God in them with his savage punishments. To be fair to him, he seems a man of many contradictions, alternately referring to his charges as ‘desperadoes’ and his ‘children’. He had a similar ambivalence to his work, proud of his skill as a penal colony commandant but at the same time wanting to raise his family in a more congenial atmosphere.
In 1852, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hobart Town, the Right Reverend Dr Robert William Willson, paid a third visit to Norfolk Island to inspect conditions there. Either Price had grown worse in the three years since the bishop’s last inspection, or this time he made less of an effort to cover up his atrocities: Willson’s thirty-page report to Lieutenant-Governor Denison pulled no punches. When Price saw it, he apparently burst into tears and begged the bishop to suppress it, but to no avail. By now the system of transportation was in its long-overdue death throes – Norfolk Island was to be closed down as a penal settlement, and Price was happy to leave. The Secretary of State for the Colonies read the bishop’s report, but decided that no censure should be passed on Price: the whole business was swept under the carpet.
And there it might have ended: yet another case of one of history’s great villains getting away with it, and spending the rest of his days in comfortable retirement. Price became a gentleman farmer in Van Diemen’s Land for a while, but within a year he had accepted a new post as inspector-general of penal establishments in Victoria. There, where his responsibilities included running five prison hulks moored in the port of Melbourne, he resorted once more to the most sadistic excesses of Norfolk Island.
The historian Robert Hughes tells us what happened next far more eloquently than I could ever hope to:
On March 26, 1857, Price paid an official visit to the quarry at Williamstown where gangs of hulk convicts were labouring. He had come, as his office demanded, to hear their grievances; and with his usual bravado, he walked straight into the midst of them, escorted only by a small party of guards. A hundred prisoners watched him marching up the tramway that bore the quarried stone from the cutting-face to the jetty. Quietly they surrounded Price, and their circle began to close. There was a hubbub of hoarse voices, a clatter of chains, a scraping of hobnails on stone. Rocks began to fly. The guards fled; Price turned and began to run down the tramway when a stone flung from the top of the quarry-face caught him between the shoulder blades and pitched him forward on his face. Then, nothing could be seen except a mass of struggling men, a frenetic scrum of arms and bodies in piebald cloth, and the irregular flailing of stone-hammers and crowbars.
To end on a lighter note, and included for no reason other than the fact I have been discussing escapes from the British penal colonies in Australia – and because a good anecdote always bears retelling – I should make mention of William Hunt, an actor who tried to escape from Port Arthur by disguising himself as a kangaroo. His costume was convincing enough to fool two guards, and he might well have made his escape had the guards in question not decided they had a hankering for ’roo stew for their supper. How they reacted when the kangaroo put its paws up and pleaded ‘Don’t shoot, I am only Billy Hunt!’ is not, sadly, a matter of historical record.
Acknowledgements
I should like to round up the usual suspects who are guilty of aiding and abetting me in writing this book, namely: James Hale (fence), Sarah Keen and Yvonne Holland (accessories after the fact), and last but by no means least Alastair Wilson, for his patience in correcting my technical errors, from the obscure to the embarrassingly basic (once again, if you find any mistakes, I guarantee it’s because I occasionally took liberties with strict historical accuracy for dramatic effect, rather than because he failed to set me straight).
I should also like to thank the following for providing inspiration: J. M. Barrie, Walter Brennan, Charles Dickens, Sidney Greenstreet, Robert Hughes, Thomas Keneally, Jan Lawrence, Granville Allen Mawer, Herman Melville, Liam Neeson, Diana Rigg, Jack Rosenthal, Dorothy Shineberg, Kevin Spacey and Donald Thomas.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Headline
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
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Copyright © Jonathan Lunn, 2002
The moral right of Jonathan Lunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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ISBN 9781911591887
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Killigrew and the Incorrigibles Page 48