by Paul Collins
Fresh water was always a problem on non-stop voyages to New Holland. It was carried in sealed barrels, but was often putrid and undrinkable. Sensitive travellers found the water even too smelly for washing. Much of it was taken directly from the badly polluted Thames and had a particularly offensive smell and taste. So British ships often called at Madeira to dispose of their Thames water and to get fresh water from the Portuguese colony. Reid was taking a calculated risk in not calling anywhere on the journey, but it paid off because 116 days en route was very good progress for 1819–20.
The prison occupied most of the lower deck space in the centre of the ship. There were two rows of sleeping berths, one above the other, extending down each side. Each berth was six feet square and held four convicts, which gave each man a width of about 18 inches (46 centimetres) of sleeping space. The hospital was also housed on the prison deck, as was the special area reserved for the adolescent boys. The hatchway was the only exit from the prison to the upper deck and this was secured by an iron grate that was always guarded. Despite air scuttles and portholes, ventilation was an issue, especially as the ship approached the equator where the air was stiflingly hot, humid and oppressive. The men were allowed on deck every day in groups throughout the voyage in two lots of two-hour stints for exercise and fresh air. Even when the weather was bad, Scott always tried to give them at least two hours on deck.
Scott reported to the Admiralty that, throughout the journey, ‘None of the prisoners were allowed to have their irons off, [except] those who contributed by their exertions to the benefit and convenience of the whole, or on account of sickness’. This is unlikely because the usual convention was that chains were only used until the ships were well clear of the Irish coast. However, when they were allowed on deck the convicts were usually chained together, with armed sentries posted on the poop deck. A convict mutiny was always a threat and there were occasional attempted revolts by prisoners. While in their bunks the men were sometimes ironed to ring-bolts attached to the end of each bunk. But as the voyage proceeded Scott seemed to have given the men increasing latitude, and in the last couple of weeks as the ship neared New Holland he allowed them to come on deck without irons at their leisure.
From Cork Harbour, Reid and his crew of three officers, a carpenter, sail-maker and cook, and twenty-five able and ordinary seamen and boys sailed the ship due south, skirting the western edge of the Bay of Biscay and Cape Finisterre, and then on down the Portuguese shore to the West African latitudes. After eleven days they had passed Funchal on Madeira, and then they were off the Canary Islands and sighted the peak of Tenerife. A few days out of Cork, Scott notes that many of the prisoners were a great deal affected by Nausea Marina. Acute seasickness was a constant accompaniment of shipboard life, especially early in the voyage, for people who had never been to sea before and could be completely incapacitating. Some people, like Charles Darwin, never got used to the movement of the ship throughout the long, three-year journey of the Beagle. In March 1835 he wrote: ‘I continue to suffer so much from sea-sickness that nothing, not even geology itself, can make up for the misery and vexation of spirit’.
Headaches, fevers, boils, diarrhoea, dysentery, and constipation were also common complaints, and Scott dealt with them all. Purges such as sulphur magnesium and calomel (mercurous chloride), poultices, mercury and castor and olive oils often featured in his pharmacopoeia. He comments that ‘men apply daily for dressings to slight boils and small sores’. With all the limitations of nineteenth-century medicine, and remedies that were often worse than the disease, this was still the best and most consistent medical treatment that these men were to receive in their lives. In some ways convicts were treated better than many steerage-class passengers who paid their own fares from Europe to North America and Australia two decades after the voyage of the Castle Forbes. At age twenty-nine, Scott was a kind, just and compassionate man, and also an able doctor, although in later life after he had settled in Van Diemen’s Land he was to become somewhat eccentric.
The most serious illnesses that Scott dealt with were what he himself called the ‘venereal cases’. In the course of the voyage seven soldiers and convicts reported to him with gonorrhoea and bubo (an inflamed lymph node in the groin), and the surgeon treated them with the conventional remedies of the time: courses of mercury or sulpha (a derivative of sulfanilamide) – or both. It is hard to tell if the medicines were of any use. Most of these men remained in the hospital for a couple of weeks and, as we saw, the two oldest of them, O’Hegen and Hogan, remained there throughout the voyage.
A month out of Cork the Castle Forbes was off the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa, just 8° north of the Equator. The weather was calm, with occasional rain. The convicts were already complaining about the heat. The mid-Atlantic near the Equator was the most difficult part of the journey, with a combination of intense heat, stifling humidity, equatorial storms, light and unpredictable winds, and long periods of being becalmed in what sailors accurately called the doldrums.
The Castle Forbes crossed the Equator on 13 November 1819 out in the mid-Atlantic north-west of Ascension Island. By 22 November they were due west of Napoleon’s final prison, the island of St Helena. The ship made good time through the south Atlantic, passing Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island in early December, and by 8 December they had crossed the Greenwich meridian and had turned east. By 15 December they were 500 miles (805 kilometres) east-sou’-east of the Cape of Good Hope and were well out into the Southern Ocean. They were now on the northern edge of the Roaring Forties.
But there was trouble brewing – the military guard was near mutiny.There had already been conflict between Captain Reid, Dr Scott and Lieutenant Sutherland over their respective areas of authority. A major part of the problem was the failure of the government to delineate clearly their roles. There were also tensions resulting from people being thrown together in cramped quarters with minimal privacy for extended periods. Every little personal idiosyncrasy drove others mad, and tensions were often exacerbated by drunkenness.
However, it is also clear that the soldiers on the Castle Forbes had been troublesome right from the beginning, and that their commander, Lieutenant Sutherland, was incompetent. Scott said that on 16 December several of the guards lodged a complaint with their officer that their rum had been adulterated before it was made into grog, but ‘no truth of the circumstances could be found on enquiry’.
There was also tension between the soldiers and the ship’s crew.‘Some insulting language passed between the guard and the sailors; Lt. Sutherland authorised the corporals to wear their sidearms; excepting Corporal Wallace whom he said could not be trusted as he had threatened to use them on the sailors.’
Things got worse. Scott reported on 17 December that the soldiers were in an open state of mutiny. They acted with the greatest disrespect to their officers, left their posts when stationed as sentinels, and fought among themselves, with corporals challenging the privates and all of them acting in the most irritating manner to the sailors.This led to open conflict between Lieutenant Sutherland and Captain Reid.Things blew up again on 18 December, when Wallace abused the sailors without provocation. He also behaved in an insolent and disrespectful manner to Reid and Sutherland, and after he was put in handcuffs went forward and endeavoured to create more disturbance by jostling one of the sailors. He was confined to the hospital where he was put in irons.
There was trouble again with the soldiers over grog on 21 December, the day Wallace was released from the hospital. Despite Scott’s protests, the soldiers were given their allowance of rum raw with neither lime juice nor sugar. The consequence was that privates Macquarie and O’Loughlin became intoxicated and ‘were so insolent to their officers as to render it necessary to put them under the charge of a sentinel. Cunningham for the same was put into handcuffs for two hours’.
Right through the latter part of December and early January the Castle Forbes passed through stormy and cold weather, and it was probably t
his that quietened the soldiers down. No further complaints were heard from the guard for the rest of the trip. There is nothing like seasickness and diarrhoea to help you forget your other troubles! Scott reports that he let the prisoners come and go on deck in the stormy weather, possibly to escape from the smelly confines of the prison. On 8 January he reported: ‘Weather more moderate. On account of so much motion yesterday the prisoners had no lemon juice, and the weather is unpleasant from cold and occasional rain, [and] with an increase of bowel complaints [I] refused to give them a double allowance of lemon juice’.
By 12 January they were about 250 miles (402 kilometres) due south of the western edge of the Great Australian Bight and the Recherche Archipelago. In an extraordinarily fast run, six days later they were just to the west of Bass Strait. The next day, 19 January 1820, at about noon, they first sighted ‘the land of New South Wales about Cape Otway’. From the position given in the surgeon’s log this was incorrect: they were actually a couple of degrees to the west of Cape Otway, and had possibly sighted Cape Nelson or Cape Bridgewater near the present-day town of Portland. By 22 January they were in the middle of Bass Strait, due south of Melbourne and Port Phillip Bay and just to the north-east of King Island. Again, with a remarkably fast run up the east coast of New South Wales, they entered the narrow heads of Port Jackson (now Sydney Harbour) five days later on 27 January, on a very hot midsummer day. They had arrived in New Holland.
In 1820 there were two colonies in New Holland. New South Wales was established in 1788, and theoretically took in the whole of the mainland of Australia, which effectively meant the east coast to the north, south and west of the town of Sydney. Van Diemen’s Land, an island roughly the same size as Scotland, was first discovered and named by the great Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman in 1642. Settled from Sydney in September 1803, its tiny capital was Hobart Town. Since December 1855 the island has been known as Tasmania, and it lies about 140 miles (225 kilometres) immediately south of the south-east tip of the Australian mainland. The total ‘number of souls’ in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820 muster was 4901, of whom more than half (2666) were convicts, including 275 women. There were 3000 to 4000 Aborigines living in Van Diemen’s Land at the time of European settlement.
If Pearce was on deck as they sailed up Port Jackson, he would have seen a land with a totally different feel and appearance from Ireland. The predominant colour of the landscape there is dark green, and the place is often wet, windy and cold with an overcast sky and soft rain. But in New South Wales the light is extraordinarily clear and in late January the temperature is often over 30° Celsius (the high-nineties Fahrenheit) with the heat intensified by humidity. Just inside the heads the southeastern shore of the inner harbour is now part of an Australian naval base, but in 1820 it was open grassland, interspersed with eucalypt trees. Mobs of Eastern Grey kangaroos would have been sheltering in the shade, the big males sometimes standing up to 2 metres (6 feet) in height.
As the Castle Forbes passed Watson’s Bay and the pilot’s house, those on deck would have been able to see the flagstaff and the back of the South Head signal station, newly built by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. As they moved up the harbour the dry eucalypt forest came right down to the rocky, sandstone shoreline. In a small bay they would have seen the cottage of the Irish ex-convict, Sir Henry Brown Hayes, in the closed valley of Vaucluse. They would have also seen his exotic garden of tree ferns and flowers, and the raucous, squawking flocks of cockatoos and brightly coloured parrots he encouraged. The setting was surrounded by dense forest, although a large field to the south had been cleared. If they had climbed the hill behind the house they would have seen an extensive harbour, dotted with several small islands. And, if the day was clear with no smoke haze, away in the distance they might have glimpsed a rugged range of mountains with an odd blue appearance, now called the Blue Mountains.
As the ship came close to its anchorage, Eliza Point came into view. A little later in the year it was to be renamed Point Piper after that ‘thoroughly good fellow’, the generous and kind Captain John Piper whose waterfront mansion was then almost finished. The Castle Forbes dropped anchor off mid-harbour near Farm Cove, between what is now the Sydney Opera House on the south shore and the suburb of Kirribilli and Admiralty House, the Australian Governor-General’s Sydney residence, on the north shore.
During their stay in Sydney, Scott allowed the prisoners on deck all day except for meal-times.They thus had a chance to see one of the most glorious harbours in the world. However, if they thought that Sydney Town was the end of their epic journey, they were mistaken. The only ones landed were the four sick men – the rest were destined for Van Diemen’s Land. There, the Lieutenant-Governor, Colonel William Sorell, had requested additional convict labour for government work and for assignment to the small but increasing number of mainly middle-class English free settlers anxious to take up land and breed sheep and cattle in the new colony, which had been founded just sixteen years before. The ‘Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies’ (which included Van Diemen’s Land), Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, therefore ordered that the Castle Forbes be rechartered from its owners, and that the Irish convicts on the ship be immediately redirected to Hobart Town. He also instructed that forty-four additional male convicts be sent to the southern colony, and they were transferred from the transport Prince Regent, which had arrived at Sydney Town from England on the same day as the Castle Forbes.
So, after a two-week sojourn in Sydney Harbour, the Irishmen were joined on 16 February by convicts from the Prince Regent. One distinguished passenger joined the ship: he was Edward Ford Bromley, Esquire, who had just been appointed Naval Officer at Hobart Town. Scott stayed on as the Castle Forbes’s Surgeon-Superintendent, but the guards were replaced by a sergeant, a corporal and twelve privates of the 48th Northamptonshire Regiment of Foot, which was assigned to New Holland between 1817 and 1824.
That same day the ship slipped out of Port Jackson on the 1300-kilometre (800-mile) trip south down the east Australian and Tasmanian coasts, around Capes Pillar and Raoul, up Storm Bay and into the estuary of the Derwent River toward Hobart Town.
They arrived there on 28 February 1820. Again, it was a fast passage.
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CONVICT NO . 102
For much of January 1823, the Reverend Robert Knopwood, MA, parson of the Church of England and convict chaplain, was laid up in bed with a recurrent illness at his home, ‘Cottage Green’, in Battery Point, Hobart Town. Throughout the month the weather had been very hot and he was unable to do many of his duties as parson, chaplain and magistrate. He missed a number of important social occasions, including a dinner invitation to Government House from His Honor, the Lieutenant-Governor, Colonel William Sorell, and his lady, Mrs Sorell, more accurately described as Mrs Kent. In fact, when His Honor did see him he commented on how the reverend gentleman had ‘shrunk and fallen away’.
‘Bobby’, as all the lower orders called Knopwood behind his back, seemed like a fixture in Hobart Town. He had arrived in February 1804 with the first Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Colonel David Collins. He always exuded a parsonic noblesse oblige to those below him in the social pecking order, although it did not prevent him handing out some pretty severe floggings to convicts who appeared before him. But as more and more free settlers arrived, there were increasingly divided opinions about Knopwood and his parsonic talents.The smart convict conman Henry Savery said that he was basically a good fellow, an old-fashioned cleric with slightly high church tendencies, a remarkably placid countenance and easy and gentlemanly manners. Savery felt that his conversation was lively and agreeable. But others saw him as a lazy bon vivant who never missed a social occasion and who drank far too much. Some of his enemies characterised him as a drunken womaniser who failed to carry out his pastoral duties.
Illness forced Knopwood in late 1822 to hand in his resignation as the full-time local par
son and convict chaplain, although he continued in a part-time pastoral capacity and as a sitting magistrate until 1828, ten years before his death at the age of seventy-three. He had many personal weaknesses, which were no doubt exaggerated in the vituperative atmosphere of the tiny colonial town, but there is no evidence to support the more extreme claims made about him, and he was certainly not a womaniser. He was a friendly clergyman who served faithfully for over thirty years in a prison camp and colonial outpost about as far from England as you could possibly go.
In early February 1823 he seemed to recover rather well and was able to welcome his ecclesiastical superior to Van Diemen’s Land. This personage was the principal chaplain of the territory of New South Wales, the Reverend Samuel Marsden, the oxfaced, anti-Irish ‘flogging parson’, as he was popularly and justifiably known by the convicts and lower classes in Sydney Town. Accompanying Marsden was Knopwood’s replacement as convict chaplain in Hobart Town and its surrounds, the strongly Evangelically inclined Reverend William Bedford, a former London stay-maker and prison visitor, whom the convicts quickly dubbed ‘Holy Willie’. Henry Savery observed that Bedford possessed much affability of manner, that his lisp was ‘by no means disagreeable’, and that ‘his well cased ribs bore evident marks that, whatever other doctrines he might preach, that of fasting was not one upon which he laid much stress, at least in its practice’.