Major Francis Grose, commander of the New South Wales Corps, officially took control of the colony as Lieutenant-Governor on 31 December 1792.
Under Major Grose the influence of the military, the New South Wales Corps, was greatly enhanced. Civil courts became military courts. He increased the rations of the officers, introduced the granting of land to officers and permitted them to engage in speculative trading. This system was unique to New South Wales. It was of questionable legality. In other parts of the British Empire, civil and military officers were required to resign their commissions before being eligible for land grants.
Private internal trade had been established with markets at Sydney and Parramatta, but as there was a lack of currency most trading was done by bartering, especially among the poorer sections of the community. Coinage had not been included in the provisions of the first settlement on the assumption that a penal colony did not need supplies of minted money. The omission led to many problems, both monetary and social. Alongside bartering, the use of promissory notes became a standard method of exchange, a system that would last for several decades. It led to a trade monopoly run by the civil administrators and military officers. These people also became the principal traders in rum as a form of payment, and the practice spread throughout the colony.
Also under Grose, the New South Wales Corps determined to only carry out garrison duties, neglecting overseeing and policing. Officers devoted the remainder of the time to their private, more profitable, concerns. Constables and overseers had to be appointed from the better behaved convicts.
Settlers at Prospect Hill and around Parramatta complained repeatedly of being robbed by runaway convicts, but ironically in August 1793, John Nichols actually became the victim of runaway soldiers. The incident was recorded by David Collins:
Two soldiers were put into confinement on suspicion of being parties in a plan to seize one of the long-boats, were tried by a regimental court-martial on the first day of this month (August), and one was acquitted; but Roberts, a drummer, who was proved to have attempted to persuade another drummer to be of the party, was sentenced to receive three hundred lashes, and in the evening did receive two hundred and twenty-five of them. While smarting under the severity with which his punishment was inflicted, he gave up the names of six or eight of his brother soldiers as concerned with him, among whom were the two who had absented themselves the preceding evening. These people, the day following their desertion, were met in the path to Parramatta, and told an absurd story of their being sent to the Blue Mountains. They were next heard of at a settler’s (John Nichols) at Prospect Hill, whose house they entered forcibly, and making him and a convict hutkeeper prisoners, passed the night there.10
Hutkeepers seem to have been those women who were not fortunate enough to be selected for wives ‘which every officer, settler and solider is entitled to, and few are without.’ Perhaps because John had been legally married in front of witnesses in the colony itself, as a respectable settler now he could only have a hutkeeper, not another wife, despite the fact he and Mary Carroll were separated and she was on Norfolk Island.
At another settler’s they took sixteen pounds of flour, which they sent by his wife to a woman well known to one of them and had them baked into small loaves. They signified a determination not to be taken alive, and threatened to lie in wait for the game-killers, of whose ammunition they meant to make themselves masters. These declarations manifested the badness of their hearts, and the weakness of their cause; and the Lieutenant-Governor, on being made acquainted with them, sent out a small armed party to secure and bring them in, rightly judging that people who were so ready at expressing every where a resolution to part with their lives rather than be taken, would not give much trouble in securing them.
The parties who had been sent after the runaways, by dividing themselves fell in with them near Toongabbie on the 6th, and secured them without any opposition.
In 1794, Collins reported that, ‘Prospect Hill proved to be most productive, some grounds there returned 30 bushels of wheat for one.’
John Nichols and his neighbours were determinated to succeed but their difficulties were many. Not only did they have to contend with a completely different climate and possibly hostile natives, they also had to adjust to the completely unfamiliar flora and fauna. This was further complicated by their lack of experience in agriculture and farming.
Even the man who had been issued the first grant of land, James Ruse, who had been a convict on the Scarborough with John, ran into difficulties. The seasons were not as favourable to him as he deserved. In 1793, his crop having failed, Ruse sold his ‘Experiment Farm’ at Parramatta to Dr John Harris, whose properties would later form the adjacent suburb of Harris Park. In the following year Ruse took up farming on a thirty-acre land grant on the Hawkesbury River. After many years he sold this too, and he died in Campbelltown in 1837.
The two sow pigs that had been promised to John and the Prospect Hill settlers in 1791 were finally delivered and by 1795 were flourishing and reproducing. In 1996, John was one the suppliers of pork to Norfolk Island. Surviving records show that on 3 July he sold 506 lbs of pig flesh, and just over a month later, on 6 August, another 566 lbs. At sixpence a pound, John was owed £26 16s. How long this arrangement continued is not known.
Nevertheless, many settlers faced bankruptcy because of the exorbitant prices they were obliged to pay for their basic commodities and the low returns they received for their crops. By 1798 only six of the original thirteen Prospect Hill settlers remained. They were John Nichols, George Lisk, Thomas Martin, Samuel Griffiths, Joseph Morley and John Herbert.
In 1797 Governor Hunter, Phillip’s successor, gave the settlers an opportunity to report on the effect the monopoly of trade and labour by the New South Wales Corps was having on them. The report was given to him the following year; in it was a petition from the Prospect and Toongabbie settlers, outlining their ‘Grievances and Complaints’. The name ‘John Nicholls’ appeared along with five others on the petition. All of them were time-expired First Fleet convicts. The document was ‘Signed in presence of Thos Arndell’ on the ‘5th day of March 1798’ and witnessed by the Reverend Samuel Marsden JP.
Despite such petitions, Hunter’s efforts to do anything about the situation were ineffectual. The officers of the New South Wales Corps continued to amass a large percentage of the colony’s wealth through their control of the rum trade and imports and their internal manipulation of favours.
One of those ambitious men who worked the system was John Macarthur. Born near Plymouth of Scottish parents, he joined the Royal Navy and received a commission as an ensign at fifteen. He later left the service for farming but rejoined the navy when he enlisted as a foundation lieutenant in the New South Wales Corps, which was being established in 1789. At the time, his aim was to gain promotion while in the colony to enhance his prospects in England. Arriving with the Second Fleet in 1790, he was posted to Rose Hill, later Parramatta, where he became Corps Paymaster in 1792, and Inspector of Public Works in 1793. That same year with a grant of 100 acres, he began his farming ventures. He named this property Elizabeth Farm after his wife. Within a few years he became the largest landholder in the Parramatta area and a foremost supplier of produce for the Government Store. He quickly established his reputation as a determined farmer and trader, which later included shipping interests. If necessary, he was ready to challenge authority in the pursuit of his goals.
By 1799, the officers of the NSW Corps owned an estimated 32 per cent of the colony’s cattle, 40 per cent of the goats, 59 per cent of the horses and 77 per cent of the sheep. By 1800, Macarthur owned 1,610 acres.
Macarthur’s temperament set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to him being declared ‘The Father of the Australian Wool Industry’. In 1801, he fought a pistol duel with his commanding officer, Colonel William Paterson, who was wounded. Macarthur was sent to England to be court-martialled. He took with him samples o
f the wool he had produced at Elizabeth Farm, where since 1795 he had been breeding from some Spanish Merino sheep brought into the colony from the Cape of Good Hope.
English experts found Macarthur’s wool to be ‘equal to the best which comes from Spain’. At that time, the supply of wool from Spain was not reliable because of the Napoleonic Wars. Macarthur was therefore encouraged to continue with his experiments in producing wool in New South Wales. He resigned his commission in the New South Wales Corps and was free to return to the colony as an influential settler.
*
Ann Pugh had been placed on trial at the Herefordshire Summer Assizes on Tuesday, 16 July 1799, accused of stealing goods to the value of £2 12s 2d. Found guilty, she was sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for seven years.
Ann was taken on board the transport ship Earl Cornwallis commanded by Captain James Tennant, along with 193 male and ninety-four female convicts. The vessel left England on 18 November 1800. The journey took a tragic 206 days. By the time the vessel arrived in Sydney Cove on 12 June 1801, no fewer than twenty-seven male and eight female convicts had died along the way.
The arrival of female convicts was always eagerly anticipated because of the great imbalance between the sexes. There was a standard protocol in place. A book called A Brief Account of the Colony of Port Jackson by an Ensign G. Bond was published in Southampton, England, in 1803. In it, the author described a typical selection procedure. First, on their arrival, the female convicts were ‘well washed and furnished with a change of suitable apparel’. After that:
The commissioned officers then come on board, and as they stand upon deck, select such females as are most agreeable in their person … The non-commissioned officers then are permitted to select for themselves; the privates next; and lastly, those convicts, who, having been in the country a considerable time, and having realised some property, are enabled to procure the governor’s permission to take to themselves a female convict. The remainder, who are not thus chosen, are brought on shore.11
They could then be sent to the ‘Factory’ at Parramatta prison. This prison for women convicts was actually a curious marriage bureau. It was half prison, half barracks, where the women were fed and clothed by the Government in return for their labour spinning and weaving wool into clothing and blankets. Well-behaved convicts in the colony were encouraged to choose a bride from the ‘Factory’.
How and when John and Ann actually met remains uncertain but it is likely that it happened through one of these established processes, or she may have been simply assigned to him as a servant or hutkeeper under the system set up by Major Grose and continued by his successor Captain William Paterson. Ann was living with John before 1802 – it was sometime in the middle of that year that their first child, a boy, was born at Prospect. They named him John. In the muster of 1802, John Nichols was listed as a Prospect landholder supporting one woman and one child without assistance from the Government Store. For Ann, the arrangement had to have been an agreeable change compared with the life she left behind in England and what she had gone through. She had been so desperate that she used ‘force and arms’ to commit robbery; she had been arrested, placed on trial, imprisoned; and she had survived a lengthy journey by sea in which thirty-five of her fellow convicts had died.
By now, John was well respected and enjoying a measure of prosperity. The 1800 muster showed that he possessed forty acres sown with wheat; twelve acres planted with maize; 110 sheep, twenty-eight pigs and a horse. Musters were surveys of the people in the colony who were not government-employed or dependent on the Government Stores. Calls to attend the musters were placed up on public notice boards.
The years 1798 to 1799 were a period of severe drought in New South Wales in which wheat and maize crops failed, but this was followed in March 1799 by torrential rain. The Nepean–Hawkesbury area suffered dangerous flooding. Livestock and wheat stacks were swept away and one man was drowned. Many settlers spent a frightening night clinging to the roofs of their houses.
A survey in August 1799 showed that there were only ten horses and fifteen mares in the colony held by settlers. The price of a horse in 1796 was £90 ($180). How and when John Nichols obtained his horse is not known, however, it enabled him to lease his horse and cart out to other farmers for a fee.
John was also a constable. Constables were elected by the people of designated districts. Once elected they chose from among themselves a head constable for each district who had to report the number of inhabitants in his division, including births and deaths, to the Acting Magistrate each month. Other duties included suppressing gambling; enforcing respect for the Sabbath; and seeing that all persons in their district attended the general musters. They had the power to search houses for suspicious persons or concealed goods. For their service, constables and their families were placed on the ‘Free Ration’, received an issue of spirits, and occasionally clothing from the Government Stores when available. Constables continued in their elected role for twelve months and could be re-elected at the end of the term. John seems to have performed his duties to the satisfaction of his peers and the authorities because he held the position for at least nine years, probably from 1799, and at times was a head constable.
In 1800, Governor Hunter was replaced by the colony’s third Governor, Philip Gidley King. During his second stint on Norfolk Island, King had been plagued by ill-health and he and his family left the island in September 1796 aboard the whaling ship Britannia. After convalescence, instead of returning again to his post as commandant of Norfolk Island, he was sent to replace Hunter as Governor of New South Wales.
Meanwhile, the eighteenth century closed with great unrest. Although halfway around the world from the ‘Mother Country’, events so far away overseas did have their impact on New South Wales. First, there was the bogey of French conquest under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. Then rumours of a rebellion in Ireland in 1798 began to circulate throughout the colony. The Irish uprising was unsuccessful but many of its ‘political malcontents’ were exiled without trial to New South Wales.
If there was an uprising in the settlement, or an invasion in force by another power, or both, it was highly unlikely the New South Wales Corps would cope. Governor Hunter had believed extra precautions needed to be taken. He appealed to the ‘patriotism’ of the colonists, and the Loyal Sydney and Parramatta Associations were born in 1800 ‘to protect public and private property and to assist the military in the preservation of order.’ There were fifty armed men in the Sydney association, all properly equipped and clothed in regimental dress, and the same number in Parramatta. The men in each association were chosen from free men of good character who possessed property.
King was authorised to take over the office of governor as soon as Hunter could arrange departure, but there were delays. He did not assume command until 28 September 1800. Before that, the Irish rebels were Hunter’s problem. He was wise to worry. A revolt was in the process of being planned on the Government Farm at Toongabbie. The plan involved taking Parramatta and dealing with the hated Anglican Minister and Magistrate Samuel Marsden, the ‘Flogging Parson’ who freely ordered punishment in the form of the cat ‘o nine tails. After disposing of Marsden the rebels planned to kill the soldiers in their beds using self-made pikes, take their muskets and then march on Sydney. However, informants exposed the plan to Marsden, and when the rebel leaders learnt they had been betrayed they were quick to cancel the uprising.
Once aware of the planned uprising, fear of the Irish convicts spread like wildfire through the colony. Nor did failure dampen convict enthusiasm for rebellion. Another uprising was planned for September but again was revealed, this time to Captain John Macarthur of the New South Wales Corps. Macarthur advised the governor to wait for the convicts to rebel and deal with them in the open but that did not happen. The leading rebels realised their plan was discovered and cancelled it again. More floggings followed and those merely suspected of involvement with the rebels w
ere made to watch.
Then, late in the year a dispatch arrived from Norfolk Island revealing that a conspiracy among the Irish exiles to seize control of the island had been suppressed. The ringleaders had been arrested and hanged as an example, and others allegedly involved in the plot were flogged. It was the beginning of the cruellest chapter in Norfolk Island’s history.
In February 1801, four months after Governor King, assumed command, the transport ship Anne I (or Luz St Anna) arrived in Sydney with 178 convicts, sixty-nine of them former United Irishmen. King was uneasy, but the ship also brought more welcome news that Britain and Ireland had united in Union. It gave the Governor hope that the Irish exiles might feel greater empathy with the English in future and be more accepting of their situation in New South Wales.
Hope? Yes, but the situation had to be watched closely … The New South Wales Corps was mainly concentrated in Sydney, with the other settlements only having small garrisons. Clearly, if there was trouble, the colonists in the Parramatta, Prospect and Toongabbie areas would be at most risk.
Governor King maintained the existence of the Loyal Sydney and Parramatta associations until August 1801 when he had them disbanded as fears of a rebellion seemed to decline. The following year, however, responding to reports of likely trouble, King authorised a search of dwellings and other buildings throughout the colony. All offensive weapons were confiscated although the settlers were allowed to retain one musket each. John Nichols at Prospect was listed as having two weapons in his possession, a gun (probably a musket) and a pistol.
Meanwhile, more ships arrived from Ireland. Each brought more exiles from the 1798 Irish Rebellion, and there were reports again of growing unrest. Then in 1803, when news reached Sydney of a renewed war between England and France, the Loyal Sydney and Parramatta Associations were re-established.
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