by Paul Collins
But the ferocity of this storm abated after about a day and a half, although the seas continued very high and the winds strong for several days. In thirty-six hours the Castle Forbes, under almost bare poles, had run 270 nautical miles (500 kilometres).
Storms only highlighted the problems that convicts faced, largely confined below decks in their prison. Here was a group of Irishmen snatched away from their homes, families and all that was familiar and dear to them, and transported to the ends of the earth across the most dangerous and rough seas in the world.The vast majority of them were never to see Ireland again. We know the names of every man on the Castle Forbes from the ship’s indent, or record of transportees, and every detail of their medical history on the voyage, for Surgeon-Superintendent Scott’s meticulous and careful Diary of Occurrences, including his medical record, has survived in its entirety.
All except one of the Castle Forbes’s convict passengers were born in Ireland, and all were tried there. Daniel Hogan was sixty-seven, Daniel O’Hegen was sixty-three, and Samuel Richardson, a boy of fourteen. James Robinson, the only non-Irishman on the ship – he had been born in Edinburgh – and John McColl were fifteen. Hogan, who was from County Cork, spent the entire voyage in the hospital, as did the Belfast-born O’Hegen. Scott reports that ‘to maintain them in life gave more trouble than all the other patients’. Both were suffering from advanced forms of venereal disease. The thirteen boys under the age of seventeen were kept in a separate section of the ship’s prison to protect them from sexual molestation by some of the older men. Most of the convicts were aged between nineteen and twenty-eight, and the majority had been sentenced to transportation for seven years; ten had received fourteen-year terms, and sixteen were lifers.
Almost half of the men had been ‘labourers’, which in the context of early nineteenth-century Ireland probably meant rural labourers. Otherwise there was the usual range of trades and jobs: weavers, indoor and outdoor servants, shoemakers, draymen, butchers, tailors, grooms, gardeners, stonemasons, whitesmiths and herders. There was also a grocer, a button maker, a hawker, a saddler and a clerk. Among the more unusual convicts were Andrew Donnelly, aged forty-two, from County Galway, who was a dancing master and fiddler, and Edward Fitzgerald from Dublin City, aged twenty, who doubled as both a theatrical performer and a clerk.William Leval, aged twenty, from County Derry, was listed as a jockey, and George Ryan from Dublin, aged thirty-eight, had been a soldier, sailor and labourer, while John Wilson, aged fifty-four, from County Wexford had been a gentleman’s servant. Perhaps the two most useful men aboard, at least from the point of view of the Surgeon-Superintendent, were Patrick Hart from Sligo Town, aged twenty-four, a teacher, and Martin Edwards, aged twenty, from Dublin, who was a school assistant. Scott reports that three hours each day were set apart for school, and that Hart and his assistant managed to teach twenty men and boys, most of whom were illiterate, how to read and recite the Christian catechism.
The convict who is the focus of this story, Alexander Pearce, from County Monaghan, is not mentioned anywhere in the Diary, so we know that he neither misbehaved nor became sick on the voyage. In the ship’s indent, Scott describes him simply as ‘quiet’. By this he probably means that Pearce did not come to his attention in any way. The indent also tells us that Pearce was born in 1790. However, there is a discrepancy in other official records about his age on arrival in New Holland in 1820, and he might have been aged anywhere between twenty-seven and thirty. I have followed the indent and opted for thirty. His occupation is listed as ‘labourer’, and he was sentenced in County Armagh in 1819 to transportation to New South Wales for seven years. Much later, just before he was executed, Pearce told the Keeper of the Hobart Town Jail, John Bisdee, that he was convicted of stealing six pairs of shoes, which indicates he was something of a professional thief, and that this was most probably not his first offence. A person in desperate personal need of footwear only need steal one pair of shoes.
We know few details of Pearce’s trial and criminal background, for all the Irish court files for the period between 1790 and 1835 were destroyed in April 1922 when the Public Record Office in Dublin’s beautiful Four Courts building was badly burned during the Irish civil war. However, the courthouse in Armagh where he was tried is still there today on College Street, facing a park. It is a fine Georgian building, with a lovely Palladian entrance supported by four columns, completed in 1809 and recently restored. It stands behind a high, black steel fence, the product of Northern Ireland’s ongoing troubles. No doubt Pearce would have missed the beauty of the formal architecture as he was led in through the prisoners’ back entrance to face the judge who was to send him to the Antipodes.
As with so many ordinary people from the past, we know nothing about Pearce personally until he came to the notice of the authorities and was sentenced to transportation. His convict records consistently say he was born in County Monaghan, which today is in the Republic of Ireland but immediately to the south of the present border with Ulster and close to Armagh where he was tried. The town of Monaghan is only 27 kilometres (17 miles) from Armagh. It is an area of low, green rolling hills and small stands of trees, intensively farmed. However, Pearce himself confused the picture when he told John Bisdee that he was born in the neighbouring county of Fermanagh, which is now in Northern Ireland and just to the west of County Monaghan. County borders were probably not clear in Pearce’s mind as he moved across the whole area of north-central Ireland seeking work.
Despite the truce of the last few years, violence is still endemic in this part of Ireland, and it goes back as far as the sixteenth century. Among the most potent contemporary symbols of this disturbance are the commemorative parades of pro-Unionist ‘Apprentice Boys’: formally attired, hard-faced ‘Orangemen’ in bowler hats and green, gold and orange stoles with furled umbrellas engage in provocative marches through poorer Catholic areas of Derry and Belfast to assert the ‘Protestant ascendancy’. Although they have been re-routed nowadays, the parades still commemorate the successful defence of the city of Derry by a group of ‘resolute apprentice boys’ against a Catholic occupying army in December 1688, and the victory of the Protestant King William III over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
We can assume that Pearce came from the lowest level of Irish Catholic rural society. The French Revolution had broken out in July 1789 about a year before he was born. Revolutionary ideas quickly began to permeate Ireland. Despite token attempts by the British government to conciliate the Catholics, Irish nationalists, both Protestant and Catholic, became increasingly anti-British. In response, the establishment-dominated Irish parliament passed a brutal Insurrection Act in 1796, and habeas corpus was suspended. Meanwhile, a yeomanry corps of conservative northern Protestants, under the pretext of defending the constitution and the establishment, revived an earlier campaign to push Catholics off their land and make the province of Ulster exclusively Protestant. Between 1796 and 1798 the British army, the militia and the Protestant yeomanry corps attempted to suppress rural agitation across the country. By this stage cruel reprisals were perpetrated on Catholics. The purpose of the exercise was to protect Protestant power and ascendancy. It was almost a foreshadowing of the post-World War I use of the notorious ‘black and tans’ by the British government to suppress the Irish, and of the uncontrolled violence of the First Parachute Regiment in January 1972 in the Bogside in Derry, when fourteen Catholic citizens were killed in a peaceful protest march. It has become an all-too-familiar pattern of British behaviour in Ireland.
In May 1798, when Alexander Pearce was probably eight years old, a long-delayed Irish nationalist insurrection broke out in the south-east in Kildare, Meath and Carlow. It quickly spread to the mountainous Wexford–Wicklow area. Through late May and June there were battles across county Wexford, but by early July the regular army had defeated the insurgents and a general amnesty was offered. Gradually calm returned to the country. Later outbreaks in Ulster were quickly
dealt with by the government forces, and by the end of the year the insurrection was over. More than 30,000 people were dead.
Pearce was born into and passed his childhood in a volatile area in a dislocated society. He probably grew up as an orphan, or without a great deal of parental or adult supervision, and became a petty criminal early in life. He not only seems to have lacked sustained and loving intimacy with either parent, friends or extended family, but he also probably missed out on any type of moral, religious or social formation.
Pearce was born right in the middle of the population explosion that had begun in the eighteenth century and was first highlighted by Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population in 1798. In 1767 the population of Ireland was about two and a half million. By 1781 it was just over four million, in 1801 about five million, and by 1845, the year of the beginning of the terrible Potato Famine, it had reached eight and a half million. In Ireland, with almost all land in the hands of Protestant landlords, this population increase led to ever-deepening poverty for the landless rural Catholic masses, the class from which Pearce came. This population increase also put immense pressure on both productive land and social structures, with the vast majority of Catholics living in grinding poverty.
At the 1819 Armagh Lent Assizes (an ‘assize’ was a travelling circuit court), Pearce was sentenced to transportation to New Holland. The name ‘New Holland’, given to Australia by Dutch explorers in the seventeenth century, was still generally used then. It was as far from England as you could possibly go, and was thus an ideal place for His Britannic Majesty’s government to send – or ‘transport’ – convicted criminals. Transportation in the early nineteenth century was seen as a merciful alternative to the death penalty, which was then applied to a whole range of what are now considered minor crimes, such as petty theft.While there has always been something of a myth among Australian Catholics of Irish extraction that the majority of the 40,000 Irish convicts (made up of just on 29,500 males and over 9000 females) transported to Australia were either ‘political prisoners’ or ‘pocket handkerchief thieves’, driven to minor misdemeanours by poverty, starvation and an oppressive and bigoted Protestant British government, the reality is that most Irish convicts were like Pearce and the others on the Castle Forbes: petty criminals and thieves who already had one or more convictions. It was usually recidivists who were banished. Only a tiny proportion were ‘political’ in any sense.
Convicts sentenced to be transported to New Holland were usually returned to the local jail and held there while the keepers sent a list of the prisoners to the centre of British administration in Ireland at Dublin Castle. It was the responsibility of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and his officials to deal with the details of the transport of prisoners from Britain’s oldest colony, and to pay the cost of shipping them to New South Wales. After Pearce had spent several months in Armagh jail, approval from Dublin arrived, and probably some time in July 1819 he and about fourteen other convicts sentenced to transportation at the Armagh Lent Assizes trudged on foot under guard the 220 miles (354 kilometres) down the east coast of Ireland via Dublin to Cork.
Both men and women convicts often arrived in the southern city exhausted. They were briefly housed in Cork jail, an ugly, overcrowded, filthy, castle-like prison that had once been part of the city walls and gates. They were then moved to the nearby town of Cove on Great Island in Cork Harbour, the finest natural harbour in Ireland. It had been a British naval base since the late seventeenth century. In 1776 British troops were shipped out of this port to fight in the American War of Independence, and throughout the nineteenth century it was the primary port of departure for Irish emigrants going to the United States, Canada and Australia. It was also the last port of call for the Titanic before it struck an iceberg and sank in the mid-Atlantic in April 1912.
When he arrived in Cove, Pearce would have seen a town that straggled up a steep, wooded hill from the water’s edge. A contemporary sketch shows nine two-masted ships lying at anchor offshore, served by smaller skiffs running back and forth between them and the shore. The convicts from Armagh would have boarded one of these skiffs and sailed out to the convict depot on Spike Island, which until 1822 housed both male and female convicts. Pearce was lucky in his timing because the depot was a lot more comfortable than the usual housing for convicts awaiting transportation – a hulk. At Spike Island he and his fellow convicts would have been stripped and washed, then issued with coarse grey jackets and breeches marked with the convict broad arrow. Their health would also have been checked. All up, Pearce spent about six months in the Irish penal system.
The Castle Forbes had meanwhile sailed from Deptford on the Thames on 18 July and arrived in Cork on 30 July 1819. Surgeon-Superintendent Scott had reported for duty on 7 July at the same time as a guard of four non-commissioned officers and twenty-two privates assembled from two regiments, the Thirty-Fourth and the Eighty-Ninth. This motley company were under the command of the none-too-competent Lieutenant Sutherland of the Thirtieth Regiment. Throughout the journey Sutherland had difficulty controlling his troops, who on a couple of occasions were close to mutiny. There was trouble with the guard right from the beginning: while the ship was waiting in Cork Harbour, a court-martial sentenced one soldier to the extraordinary total of 300 lashes and another to seventy-five ‘for disobedience of orders and disorderly conduct’. The ‘disorderly conduct’ was to continue on the journey out to Sydney Town. Accompanying the soldiers were five wives, two of whom were pregnant, and four children, ‘all in perfect health’, as Scott commented. The same cannot be said for their menfolk, a couple of whom were suffering from venereal disease.
A man who had first-hand experience of what Irish convicts went through in the process of transportation was the young Cork priest John England, later to become the Bishop of Charlestown, South Carolina, and one of the most influential Catholic bishops in the nineteenth-century United States. England said that from November 1808 until May 1817 ‘I had the best opportunities of knowing the disposition and sentiments of the great bulk of convicts sent from Ireland to New South Wales, having been in constant attendance upon them in the gaol of the city of Cork . . . and in the transports at Cove’.The priest maintained that their greatest problem was the deep loss in leaving home and family forever, of being exiles who realised they would never be able to return. Most of these men had never been more than 50 miles from where they had been born. England maintained that there was a sense of religious loss, as the only clergy in New Holland were Protestant. He used this as an argument for the need to provide Catholic clergy to minister to Irish convicts, and his efforts were rewarded when two Irish priests were appointed to New South Wales as official convict chaplains in 1820. Pearce was later to encounter and confess to one of them in Hobart Town, the Reverend Philip Conolly, as he prepared for his execution, and it was this priest who accompanied him to the scaffold.
The 140 Castle Forbes convicts were embarked on 16 September and underwent a superficial medical examination by Scott. From 16 to 27 September the surgeon himself was laid up in bed with what he called ‘a bilious fever’.The men were left on board the ship for three weeks while its sailing date was delayed by the always slow-moving Dublin Castle bureaucrats. It was not until 3 October 1819 that the Castle Forbes actually got underway.
Before departure Scott issued a set of regulations for the convicts that he hoped they would ‘cheerfully obey as they will not only be conducive to your comfort and the preservation of your health during the voyage, but by a close adherence to them a habit of regularity will be acquired; which in the new life you have just entered on will tend considerably to promote your future happiness and respectability’. While Pearce seems to have ‘kept’ all the rules, they did not promote in him either a ‘habit of regularity’ or ‘happiness and respectability’ after he reached Van Diemen’s Land. The rules, however, do introduce us to some sense of what shipboard life was like for the convicts. Boredom could easily lead to trouble. The regul
ations were designed to keep the prisoners busy throughout the day. Perhaps the fiddler and dancing master, Andrew Donnelly, and the theatrical performer, Edward Fitzgerald, provided some entertainment on the long voyage?
The regulations decreed that Divine Service would always be performed on Sundays, when circumstances permitted.This consisted of Scott reading from the Anglican Prayer Book, but especially in the latter part of the journey this was often cancelled due to bad weather or to wet, slippery decks. Prisoners were also to avoid blasphemy, rioting, disputing or gambling, as well as smoking and chewing tobacco below decks. The maintenance of cleanliness in the prison was all-important, and floors were swept and scrubbed out every day. Clothes were washed on Mondays and Fridays; prisoners were to wear clean clothes, which were to be kept in a proper state of repair, at the muster on deck on Sunday and Tuesday. Each man was given three shirts, two pairs of trousers, a pair of shoes, a Guernsey frock (a close-fitting woollen sweater) and a woollen cap. Prisoners could shave on Thursdays and Saturdays. Clothes and bedding issued to the convicts from the government stores were referred to as ‘slops’, following the usage of the British navy. The material was of poor quality and the clothes were threadbare by the time the prisoners reached Sydney Town, so they had to be refitted in the colony.
The convicts were divided into messes of six men for the purpose of keeping their area clean and distributing food. There was little problem on the Castle Forbes with the prisoners’ behaviour, and very few punishments were meted out by the sensible Scott, who had complete control of the prisoners. Generally the food seems to have been adequate, and for the first couple of months while supplies lasted, their diet included bread, beef, pork, pea-meal, butter, rice, oatmeal and sugar. Throughout the journey sweetened lime juice was issued to ward off scurvy. However, the large number of digestive complaints in the last month or so of the voyage, including diarrhoea and dysentery, indicate that they had run out of fresh food and had fallen back on the ship’s supplies of salt meat and pork. Even though this meat was kept in sealed containers, it was often badly adulterated. Ship’s biscuits were sometimes so rotten they crawled with weevils and maggots. As the ship neared the New South Wales coast there was a serious outbreak of food poisoning from adulterated flour. Scott reports that ‘thirteen of the guard and two of the ship’s boys were attacked suddenly with violent vomiting and intense pain in the head and a burning sensation in the stomach extending to the bowels with constant thirst. Pulse about 140 in almost all of them, with the tongue very white and tremulous . . . I learned that they had all partaken of pudding which was made from the remains of a cask of flour. When eating it some of them remarked that the pudding had a singular taste’. Five days later several of them were still convalescing in the ship’s hospital.