William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Unfortunately, whilst convict records are well documented, sailings of passengers on transports often are not. That William might have gone out before is also suggested by his having been sufficiently knowledgeable to take a stock of cheap goods with him on the Minerva to trade profitably in Rio de Janeiro when he did go officially. His familiarity with watchmaking would have helped him in choosing cheap watches to sell. The only possible, but improbable, explanation is that he was enabled to go out before he was officially gazetted to the Corps, which would explain his having been on half pay. It comes down to a question of the couples’ motivation.

  The Minerva had been scheduled to sail in August 1798. It would have been essential to either sell or rent out the Devizes house before then. That the couple chose to sell provides further evidence that they were intending to start a new life. There was then a great delay over the embarkation of Irish prisoners, of whom William was to be in charge. The Coxes did not even arrive at the Cove of Cork until February 1799, having joined the ship in England.68 They left their two eldest sons, William and James, at the grammar school in Salisbury, spending holidays in the care of a Mr and Mrs Dawe at Ditcheat Manor in Somerset.69

  As the crow flies, the village of Ditcheat is 32 miles from Salisbury. By road today it is well over 40 miles. In 1800 that would have been a full day’s journey. The Dawes were a well-known county family, with strong army connections. Charles Richard Dawe had been High Sheriff for Somerset in 1725. His son, Hill Dawe, succeeded him in 1769 and was a captain in the Somerset Militia. One of Hill’s sons, Charles, was born 1789, making him the same age as William Cox Jnr, both nine-year-olds when the boys first stayed at Ditcheat. It is probable that Hill Dawe, although nearly 30 years older than William Snr, would have met him through Militia activities and taken an almost fatherly interest.70 Even so, the Dawes were accepting a considerable responsibility, especially bearing in mind that William and James were with them from 1798 to the end of 1803 and that the boys had, at the end of that time, to be got on board a ship for the voyage to the colony. Yet there is no mention of the Dawe family in William’s letters. When he wrote to his friend John Piper on 28 July 1804, telling him about the boys’ arrival, he said nothing about where they had been, only that they were ‘safe and well’.71

  A feature of military life throughout the ages has been waiting for orders. In the end the Minerva was a year late sailing, during which time Rebecca gave birth to that other son at the Cove on 17 March.72 They finally sailed on 24 August 1799. The voyage provided William with his first direct experience of managing convicts and established his early reputation for humane treatment of them. It also revealed a lack of scruple in his commercial dealings en route at Rio de Janeiro, described in the next chapter, although financial manipulations were generally characteristic of the officer class at the time and of the New South Wales Corps in particular.

  Of his future military duties, William does not seem to have spoken. This again prompts the question of why he chose to emigrate as an officer to a penal colony, when more lucrative openings were available. But simply making money does not seem to have been his objective.73 He was looking for a new life and for land and may, in his mind’s eye, have anticipated the slightly later colonial existence, of which Douglas Woodruff writes: ‘Australia was slowly discovered by the upper and middle classes as a new country where gentlemen might live the free country life which had always been the English ideal … men who were attracted by the idea of a life to be spent largely on horseback, overseeing a vast property’.74 This was a dream that William and his sons eventually came to live.

  Irrespective of whether he did go out in 1797, William would have known from others before he left that John Macarthur, Quartermaster Laycock and other officers had already acquired substantial landholdings.75 It explains his apparent lack of interest in a military career – a paymastership was not an obvious route to command, though it was to making profits. When he exploited that path in trying to achieve landed status he did so with perilous imprudence. Meanwhile, he and his family had to face the more immediate dangers of the journey out to Port Jackson. It was a voyage which proved to incorporate three of the worst perils the master of a convict ship feared: a mutiny, interception by hostile warships and appalling weather. Once those were past, William and Rebecca were able to start a new life, unaware that they were to meet defeat through William’s own risk taking.

  2 Emigration – Hostile Ships, Storms and Mutinies

  If William and Rebecca had a dream when they emigrated, which there is every reason to believe they did, that dream of a new life in the colony had to endure elements of a savage nightmare en route to its realization. Mutiny, hostile ships and storms plagued the long first sector of the voyage via Rio de Janeiro, not to mention the entertainments of 16 informal ‘marriages’ between female convicts and crewmen.

  It is fortunate that two men on board recorded what happened during this near-epic 139 day voyage. Many of the convict transports suffered from storms and plots. What their voyages usually lacked were such accounts as those of the young Irish ship’s surgeon John Washington Price, who was 21 when appointed, and the Irish rebel ‘General’ Joseph Holt gave of the Minerva’s journey. Although this voyage established William Cox’s early reputation for humane treatment of convicts, and also some of his own hopes for the future, he himself appears to have left no notes about it, so his actions are seen only through the other’s men’s eyes and his thinking has to be deduced from his actions.

  Joseph Holt, the Irish rebel ‘General’ who became William’s farm manager

  Holt had his wife and two children with him. His Memoirs were not collated and edited until 39 years later and are more than a little selfserving, while memory is not always an accurate tool.1 Price described him somewhat scornfully as ‘a quite illiterate man, but possessed of a deal of natural courage and abilities’ who had ‘made himself remarkable in this country [Ireland] for his disloyalty and villainy’.2 He was not a convict, having negotiated a deal with the governor at Dublin to go into exile with his wife and children, instead of being tried for treason. His trial and probable execution would have caused more unrest than it was worth. He eventually left the colony in 1817, so could have had little ulterior motive for praising William Cox’s humanity 20 years later, which he also did in recounting his four years as William’s farm manager after they arrived. Holt has understandably been much quoted by historians, though seldom on the voyage.

  Price’s detailed, neatly penned, not always daily, log had various accomplished watercolour illustrations pasted in and was amusingly idiosyncratic. ‘I do not mean to keep an exact daily journal,’ he wrote soon after he started it in December 1798, ‘but will give an account of all occurrences that are striking, remarkable or will be hereafter entertaining to my friends; in this facts will be related simply as they happen.’3 How they would be conveyed to his friends he did not explain. Of some 600 surgeons’ logs which have survived, few can be of such immediacy.4 An excerpt will give the flavour of his entries, which usually followed notes on the weather and the sick list. On 1 April 1799, long before they sailed, a convict named Kennedy died of fever. Price wrote ‘he was sentenced to transportation for life, but evaded that by escaping to eternity’.5

  The surgeon had arrived by coach from Dublin in May 1798, only surviving an ambush by highwaymen when a troop of Dragoons chanced by and rescued him. This was after both sides had discharged their firearms and missed! He had also, mildly comically, though not for the woman concerned, got married when chafing at the delays in the Minerva’s sailing. ‘In the meantime,’ he recorded, ‘I took care not to disappoint myself, having got married [on] July 24th [1798] to a lady at Corke, with whom I am convinced I shall be happy in whatever situation fortune places me’. Sadly for her, that did not include sailing to Port Jackson. ‘Indeed,’ he explained to his log, ‘when I got married I did not intend going this voyage, but the Minerva arriving so soon after my marriage prevented me fro
m sending in my intended resignation’.6 In reality the ship had arrived seven months after his marriage, so Price was deceiving only his own journal and its unlikely later readership.

  Price and the Coxes were kept waiting by two problems. The Minerva had been lying in the Thames while a dispute raged between her owners and the East India Company, to which she was chartered, over her not having had a proper dry dock survey. The Company had a near-monopoly on transport shipping to the colony. This caused the first delays to her sailing. The sentencing of captives from the Irish rebellion of 1798 caused worse ones. She had originally been scheduled to sail to Ireland in August 1798, but the Coxes did not even arrive at the Cove of Cork until February 1799, on board the ship. They had left their two eldest sons, William and James, at the grammar school in Salisbury and in the care of friends as described in the previous chapter. In the end the ship was to be a year late sailing, so the officers took lodgings in Corke, a little distant from the Cove of Corke, and began what would be a long wait, albeit for Rebecca an eventful one. She was heavily pregnant.

  On Sunday 17 March 1799 Price wrote: ‘I was called to see Mrs Cox and found her in strong labour. At ten past 1 AM she was delivered of her seventh son. Both the mother and child are in good health. The child is to be called Francis Edmund Cox, but ought to have been called Patrick being born on his day, but it seems our titular saint is no favourite with Capt. Cox from the unhappy disturbances … in this country.’ All did not stay well for Rebecca after the birth.

  On 23 March the surgeon recorded: ‘Mrs Cox worse this day than she has done since she lay in, the milk in her left breast having ceased and every symptom of mastodymia appears … I have put her on a strict anti-phologistic regimen … the child is in good health’. By 31 March he had to cut open her breast and release ‘a very considerable quantity of pus’, which made her easier. She was unable to feed the child except on ‘pap’.7 Strangely, there is nothing more recorded about the baby. It is not mentioned in Price’s subsequent manifest of all on board, though convict babies are. He only lists Rebecca as ‘Captain’s wife’ with Charles, George, Henry and Frederick.8 Nothing is said about the child in family records either, but Price was always meticulous about details. The main significance of this birth is that, as suggested in Chapter 1, the child would have to have been conceived the previous July, which undermines the family claims that William first went out to the colony in 1797.

  Meanwhile an initial batch of 137 convicts, 19 of them women, had arrived from Dublin on the brig Lively on 19 January 1799 in conditions that displayed the worst aspects of convict transportation. Price found them in ‘the most wretched, cruel and pitiable condition I ever saw human beings in … they were all lying indiscriminately in the ship’s holds on the damp, wet and uneven planks without any sort of covering … half naked some even without the shirt’. He thought that if they deserved death they should have been hung or shot, prior to their departure from Dublin, not treated like this. He immediately had them washed, the men shaved, and provided with clean clothes.9 Those conditions were just as bad as that to which the slave traders of the first and second fleets condemned their cargos, vividly described by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore.10

  Sending criminals to New South Wales (New Holland), America being closed off by Independence, was proposed by Lord Sydney in a letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury dated 10 August 1786.11 Between 1787 and 1868 transportation to the colonies involved 806 ships.12 The First Fleet, under Governor Phillip, was well organized, but considered expensive. The more cheaply organized Second Fleet was contracted to professional slave traders. It reached Port Jackson in June 1790, involved great brutality and an appalling death rate of 256 men and 11 women, many of whom had already been weakened by imprisonment on the hulks in the Thames estuary.13 Following this, the Home Office paid only for convicts who had been checked and approved on arrival, with a bonus of £4 10s 6d for each convict who arrived safe and sound. Even so the Third Fleet of 11 ships in 1791, organized by the same contractors, saw a toll of 184 dead out of approximately 2000, or 9 percent. Selling the convicts’ food was common – Holt noticed that Salkeld sold some of the Minerva’s at Rio – as was confining them more closely in order to fit in private cargo to sell in the colony. But no financial reward could eliminate the risk of disease, as befell another ship in the Minerva’s small convoy, the Friendship, where crew members as well as convicts died.14

  The brutality declined and the shipboard conditions improved (marginally) after 1801, making most of the later voyages less sensational. In any case, every ship was in some way different, as was every master – however brutal and corrupt – and so was every voyage. Whereas the Hillsborough’s in 1798 has had whole books devoted to it,15 the relatively humane voyage of the Minerva is seldom mentioned. Its success has presumably gone against the grain of the ‘brutality incarnate’ historians. Even in the quite comprehensive Bound for Botany Bay published by the British National Archives in London, in which watercolours from the surgeon’s log are reproduced, there is not a word about the voyage itself.16 Yet its extremely low death rate established William’s reputation for humanity in dealing with convicts, even though Price was if anything more responsible for alleviating the conditions. The voyage also provided William with his first direct experience of managing convicts, an aptitude he would refine throughout his life.

  The Minerva eventually sailed on 20 August 1799. On the afternoon of the 19th, Price and William became involved in an incident with some locals ashore which displayed tempestuousness in both of them, as well as physical bravery and a touch of arrogance. ‘Captain Cox having spent this afternoon on shore with me, we were insulted by a number of the Cove blackguards and obliged to fight very hard.’ Helped by a soldier and a seaman with them, they ‘procured some sticks and completely beat off a dozen or more of them from the beach’. Price boasted that the locals would ‘remember the Botany Bay men for some time’.17 As throughout his life, William was a man of action, but in this instance seized a boat which Price admits had ‘in some measure created the dispute’. Reading between the lines of Price’s account, it sounds suspiciously as though the two of them, aided by the soldiers, had decided to have a final afternoon’s amusement. The local men had objected and wanted their boat back. The soldiers’ reaction was typical. They gave the locals bloody noses for their cheek.

  By contrast, William had not hesitated a few weeks earlier, in June, to go armed aboard a troopship to arrest two deserters. He then exercised a combination of firmness and humanity, Price considering that ‘were it not for Captain Cox’s exertions, they both would have been severely punished’.18 Throughout the voyage, William would display an inclination to talk tough, but be lenient in his punishments. Thus he warned the convicts that any attempt ‘to contest the command or to force their escape, should be punished with instant death’, yet in the event of the attempted mutiny he only gave the offenders six lashes.19

  The episode with the locals shows that the relationship between William and Price, though amiable, was unstructured. William was an officer. Price was a civilian under contract, not subject to military discipline. In practice this does not appear to have caused problems. It would not be until 1815 that the transport commissioners rectified this by giving the surgeons naval rank as surgeon-superintendents and therefore subservience to the officers.20

  On the day of their sailing, Price left his new wife behind, not telling her until that very morning. ‘With a heavy heart I tore myself away from the arms of my dearest wife.’ Only many months later, after the Minerva had gone on from Post Jackson to India, did he whimsically send her a message: by attaching one to the neck of a seabird, a tern, which had briefly rested on board.

  Between them, the accounts of Price and Holt enable a good picture to be established of William Cox in his role as officer in charge of the convicts. They reveal something of his character and give indications that he might have already been to the colony and expected to buy a
farm, although the conception date of the baby makes this improbable. He is referred to throughout as Captain Cox, and continued to be so-called intermittently after he left the army, to the annoyance of his former fellow officers. This rank is not recorded in the Army Lists.

  The most probable explanation is that there was another lieutenant named Maundrell on the ship, junior to William. It would have been logical therefore for William to have been given the local acting rank of captain for the voyage. The absurdly eulogistic Memoirs confirm this by saying: ‘his commission was really that of Lieutenant, but he had command of the troops’.21 However, William managed to be known as Captain Cox for the rest of his life, though not by Governor Macquarie. Price incidentally had an exceedingly low opinion of Maundrell, who on 6 May 1799 took some opium, saying he needed sleep. ‘But in my opinion he has been asleep since he came on board of this ship,’ the surgeon suggested.22 Indeed when the armed confrontation at sea, described below, took place Maundrell discovered himself to be unwell.

  The Minerva was a typical three-masted freight ship, built in Bombay in 1773 for charter to the East India Company and not designed as a convict transport.23 The convicts were held, Price says, in ‘a clear airy prison, being eight feet between decks, with a scuttle to each birth [sic]’ of five men. This deck height was completely exceptional and must have helped to keep the prisoners healthy.24 The ship had a line of square ports on each side and was armed with eight guns, which she was going to need. In order to avoid extra taxation, she was narrow hulled, which meant she rolled in rough seas.