by Paul Collins
No. 102 was soon before the bench. Looking at the prisoner the two magistrates saw a man a little under medium height peering over the edge of the dock. The records show that he was five foot three and a half inches tall, somewhat short even for a person of the early nineteenth century. His frame was thin, wiry and strong. Although he was about thirty-two years of age, he looked older. Dark-complexioned, his face was clean-shaven and pock-pitted – like many people of the time Pearce had had smallpox as a child. His eyes were blue-hazel and his brown hair was tousled in the style of the time, with sideburns reaching down below his ears. In other words, he looked like a perfectly ordinary early nineteenth-century man. There was nothing to distinguish him from the never-ending procession of convicts who traipsed through the Hobart Town courts, facing charges that ranged from minor misdemeanours such as absconding from work and insolence to overseers, to the major crimes of rape, murder and sheep-stealing, all three of which resulted in capital punishment.
As Pearce stood in the dock the charges were read. The evidence was obvious and not denied. Then his convict record was reviewed. It showed that this was the third time he had been before the courts since he arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in late February 1820. On the first occasion he was accused of ‘embezzling two turkeys and three ducks, the property of Messrs. Stynes and Troy’. Appearing before Chief Magistrate Humphrey on 18 May 1821, Pearce was sentenced to fifty lashes and to labour in the chain gang for fourteen days and to confinement at night. He was back before Humphrey again on 17 September 1821, this time accused of being drunk and disorderly and absent from his lodgings. The magistrate handed out twenty-five lashes. Without further ado the bench sentenced Pearce to another fifty lashes and discharged him from the service of Thomas Cane, a local constable, to whom he was currently assigned.
What had happened to the ‘quiet’ man from the Castle Forbes who had caused no trouble on the journey out? In order to answer this question we need to backtrack a little and examine how the world of convict settlements like Van Diemen’s Land worked, and see how Pearce had fitted into that milieu.
The day after the arrival of the Castle Forbes in Hobart Town, Brevet-Major Thomas Bell of the 48th Regiment, the military commandant of Van Diemen’s Land and Acting Engineer and Inspector of Public Works, boarded the ship, mustered the convicts on deck, made a list of their names, ages, sentences, places of birth and trial, and their trades and callings, and noted for the Lieutenant-Governor the names of those mechanics who could be usefully employed by the government. Superintendent of Police Humphrey then took down a description of every man, noting height, hair and eye colour, and such personal details as ‘pock-pitted’ or ‘lost two toes on left foot’ or ‘blue mark on upper lip’ or descriptions of their tattoos – about 30 per cent of male and 10 per cent of female convicts had them. The prisoners were landed from the ship and marched up Macquarie Street and across George’s Square by the Chief Constable and a party of petty constables to the jail on the corner of Murray and Macquarie streets, where their number was checked again. This was the first time that the Castle Forbes men had been on terra firma for more than 150 days.
There were many people about, walking or riding horses, or driving gigs, carts and other wheeled vehicles. It was late summer in the southern hemisphere, the streets were dusty and the heat dry and debilitating. Hobart Town in 1820 had a population of about 2700 and a scattering of official stone buildings and substantial houses, alongside private cottages of varying quality, huts, tents and hovels.They were all connected by unpaved streets and tracks that were muddy and often impassable after rain.
His Excellency, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, visited Hobart Town in April 1821 and, even allowing for the exaggeration inherent in descriptions by a superior visiting his dominions and admiring his underlings’ achievements in order to enhance his own, he is lavish in his praise for the changes wrought since his first visit in 1811: ‘The wretched huts and cottages, of which it [Hobart Town] then consisted, being now converted into regular substantial buildings, and the whole laid out in regular streets, several of the houses being two stories high, spacious and not deficient in architectural taste’. His Excellency was something of a statistician for he either went around himself, or sent an underling, to count the houses: all up there were 421. Clearly, by the beginning of the 1820s the settlement had begun the slow process of evolving from a prison camp to a town of free settlers, although the colony was still under the direct military control of His Honor, the Lieutenant-Governor. Because so much had to be imported from the home country, the cost of living was very high and rented accommodation was hard to come by and very expensive, as advertisements in the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Chronicle constantly testified. Prices were higher than in the home country and even more than in London, which everyone agreed was a very expensive city.
The town lay on the western bank of the wide mouth of the Derwent River and sheltered directly below the 1270-metre (4100-foot) high Mount Wellington, then often called ‘Table Mountain’ because it resembled the similar massif near Cape Town in South Africa. The setting was spectacularly beautiful. Behind the town were the foothills of the steep mountain, its sides thickly timbered to two-thirds of the way up. In the narrow gullies, watered by cascades coming down from the melting snow, were many pockets of cool temperate rainforest. The top third of the mountain comprised organ-pipe-like cliffs and large areas of scree. Throughout winter Mount Wellington was usually covered in snow. A rocky mountainous plateau continued westward across the island from the peak of the mountain, which even today is not settled and is very rough country that is only crossed by walking tracks.
Despite the fact that Van Diemen’s Land was a long way south, the weather in late summer was hot and dusty, the heat intense. Working out in the full blaze of the sun was utterly exhausting. Hobart Town and the Derwent estuary were surrounded by dry sclerophyll forest, woodland and native grassland that burned easily and regularly. Summer could be a season of scorching winds that quickly fanned wildfires that moved with ferocity and amazing speed. During February, the month that Pearce arrived, the vegetation would have been tinder dry, even though the summer of 1820–21 was relatively mild.These are the ideal conditions for bushfires and south-eastern Australia is the most dangerous place in the world for such conflagrations.
In 1820 Hobart Town was the southernmost settlement in the world. Even today, only Dunedin and Invercargill in New Zealand and Punta Arenas in Chile are further south.When Pearce arrived, the town was merely a European toe-hold on an isolated island of 6.62 million hectares (just on 16.3 million acres) that was largely unknown. Pearce was to be one of the first white men ever to pass through the worst of this wilderness and live to tell the tale.
At Hobart Town jail that morning in 1820, the convicts from the Castle Forbes selected for the public works were inspected by Lieutenant-Governor, Colonel William Sorell, who then addressed the gathering. At this stage Pearce and the others would have been assigned their convict numbers. The Irishman now became Convict No. 102.
Dressed in black and standing in the sun watching the arrival and muster of the convicts was a special visitor to Van Diemen’s Land, John Thomas Bigge, Commissioner of Inquiry into all aspects of the government of New South Wales and its dependencies, and particularly into the cost-effectiveness of convict transportation as a means of discouraging crime. He had been appointed by His Majesty’s Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Earl Bathurst, in 1819, and had arrived in Hobart Town from Sydney just a few days before the Castle Forbes. Bigge was a snobbish high Tory of minor aristocratic lineage who never married. His reports give us considerable insight into the operations of the Australian colonies in 1820, but they were grossly unfair to Governor Macquarie in Sydney Town and played a major role in his recall. Bigge particularly objected to Macquarie’s humanitarianism and willingness to re-admit emancipated convicts who had served their terms to mainstream society.The Commissioner, an academic lawyer,
considered that this was incompatible with the purpose of criminal law.
No doubt for Pearce and his Castle Forbes companions, unaware of his importance, Bigge was just another pompous official inspecting them like cattle in the yard of the jail. They would have taken much more notice of Lieutenant-Governor Sorell in full colonel’s uniform of black shako cap – a high round hat in the shape of a cylinder with a metal badge, and topped by a red-and-white pompom – bright red coat and short tails, a white sash across his chest, white breeches and long, black, knee-high boots. They knew that their fate and path to freedom lay ultimately in his hands, so they would have been more interested in him than the dark-clothed and sweating bureaucrat, Bigge.
Lieutenant-Governor Sorell was a likeable man and popular with most people in Hobart Town. He was a straightforward, blunt, decent soldier. More importantly, from the perspective of the British government and of his superior Governor Macquarie in Sydney Town, he was an unusually good administrator. Both Macquarie and His Majesty’s Secretary of State and the Colonial Office bureaucrats in London had a high regard for him, even if his married life was, to put it mildly, confused. Early in his career he had married the daughter of a Lieutenant-General. It seems to have been a loveless match, even though they had seven children before they separated. His wife remained in London after he was appointed Adjutant-General at the Cape of Good Hope colony. Here he began a liaison with Mrs Kent, the wife of one of his officers, a Lieutenant. While the Colonial Office was aware of his marital status and de facto relationship, they still appointed him Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land in 1816. Mrs Kent went with him, and was more or less accepted by most people in Hobart Town as his consort. Sorell had several children by her, and around town she was generally referred to as ‘Mrs Sorell’. However, in 1817 Sorell was forced by the Colonial Office to pay the then enormous sum of £3000 as damages to Lieutenant Kent for ‘criminal conversation’ with Mrs Kent, as adultery was then charmingly called in British law. In 1819 the Secretary of State also forced the Lieutenant-Governor to pay £200 a year from his salary for the support of his first wife and seven children back in England.
In the two years before Pearce’s arrival, Sorell had been subjected to a series of attacks from a local capitalist, Anthony Fenn Kemp, who had participated in the New South Wales Corps’ mutiny against Governor William Bligh in Sydney Town in 1808. Kemp had subsequently moved his mercantile and farming interests to Van Diemen’s Land. In November 1818 he complained bitterly to Earl Bathurst about Sorell’s relationship with Mrs Kent, and he told Commissioner Bigge on 9 November 1819 that his complaint was that Sorell was ‘in the habit every day of parading the garrison on horseback with the lady with whom he lives in adultery; that he introduces her to his table as Mrs Sorell; and that the magistrates and clergyman . . . are in the habit of appearing with this person whose name is Kent in the public streets’. The real reason for Kemp’s antagonism was that Sorell had put a limit to the merchant’s grubby financial dealings, and had challenged his assumption that he could do what he liked in the pursuit of wealth. However, in the end it was the relationship with Mrs Kent that led to Sorell’s eventual recall to London in May 1824.
Sorell administered a prison work camp rather than a jail. Convicts in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were not incarcerated in the contemporary sense. The penitentiary system was not established until a decade or more later, and then largely under the influence of an odd combination of Utilitarians and Evangelical Protestants who believed that the incarceration and isolation of prisoners would bring about repentance and amendment of life. In Hobart Town in 1820 convicts had much more freedom of movement than prisoners generally do today. Those working for the government usually had to find and pay for their own lodgings, so prisoners often had to be content with dreadful hovels, unless they could find a woman to move in with who already had a dwelling. But another problem was that women were very scarce. In 1826 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur reported to London that there were 11,700 males and 3300 females in Van Diemen’s Land, about 3.5 men to every woman. This was one reason for the widespread homosexuality in the convict system.
Convicts worked for the government from six until nine in the morning before an hour’s break, and then again until three o’clock in the afternoon. They had the rest of the time for themselves. They also had most of Saturday and the whole of Sunday off, except for the church muster. This meant that they could work in their spare time to pay their rent and purchase what they needed.They drew their food rations and slops from the government stores on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Major Bell told Bigge that the system worked well for industrious men, who were able to make the most of it and work toward a ticket-of-leave. This allowed the prisoner complete freedom to work for himself, his only obligations being attendance at Sunday muster and not leaving his district without the permission of the Inspector of Public Works. Bell said that ‘others, such as notorious thieves, London pick-pockets and housebreakers do not work [in] their after hours . . . [Their free time is] . . . principally spent in lounging about the streets, gambling and robbing at night’. When he was in town Pearce would have joined men like this. There is no evidence that he was in any way industrious.
Interestingly, from very early on the word ‘convict’ was avoided altogether in colonial speech, especially by convicts themselves, and the circumlocution ‘government man’ was preferred.
Convicts not chosen for government service would usually be assigned to free settlers, who were informed in advance when a new shipload arrived. Settlers were able to come into the jail and make a choice from the men available. It was something of a lottery from both points of view because a convict had no knowledge of the person he was going to serve, and the master had no idea how good a worker an individual convict might be. However, the imbalance of power was in favour of the master: as an assigned prisoner a convict could be reported to the courts on a range of charges from absconding to insolence and laziness. As a result the convict could be severely flogged by a magistrate who might be a friend or neighbour of the master. In exchange for his labour, the convict lived on the farm and was supposed to be given sufficient food, reasonable lodging, clothing and some free time.
Pearce was first billeted to a man named John Bellinger, who ran a farm of 500 sheep and a few cattle just north of Hobart Town on the west side of the Derwent, near what is today the suburb of Glenorchy. While Pearce apparently had no close personal ties to Ireland, he must have still hankered for the ‘old country’ with its familiar landscape. And even though the food was better in Van Diemen’s Land and he was left much more to his own devices than he expected, he would still have been angry about what had happened to him. He found mates easily, but there is no evidence that he had any lasting friendships, so he must have felt very much on his own. From his perspective, life had always been a battle to survive, which could be won by those who could best manipulate the system.Yet, at the same time, his frustration often boiled over into impulsive acts such as getting into fights, stealing or bolting from his assignment. He also quickly learned that in Van Diemen’s Land such actions led to the lash or the chain gang.
Also there were so few women that Pearce, like many other convicts, must have become sexually frustrated. Occasionally a captured Aboriginal lubra might be available, but there is no evidence that Convict No. 102 ever had enough money to pay a prostitute. Quite a few men found relief in either short- or long-term homosexual relationships. Sometimes, as the Catholic priest and Vicar-General of New South Wales, William Bernard Ullathorne, informed the 1838 Molesworth Parliamentary Select Committee on Transportation, both homosexuality and bestiality were practised in isolated rural areas. The surgeon John Barnes told the same Select Committee that bestiality was ‘common’ in the backblocks of Van Diemen’s Land.
For Pearce, the most effective relief from loneliness came from grog, the more the better. As one traveller in Australia remarked, ‘the great charm of life here is to be as d
runk as often as possible’. Ullathorne says that he knew one small town with 1800 inhabitants that had fourteen fully operative public houses. There were hotels and sly-grog shops everywhere, often in bark huts just off the side of a main road.
Convict No. 102 seems to have stayed about nine months with Bellinger before being returned by his master to the government gang. Perhaps he was no longer needed, although one suspects he was lazy, surly, self-willed or drinking too much. He was then assigned to William Scattergood of New Norfolk, himself an ex-convict, but Pearce soon bolted from Scattergood’s run (as sheep farms were called) and headed into the partially explored frontier country, which began about 32 kilometres (20 miles) to the north and north-west of New Norfolk. In an area within a 30-kilometre arc around the town, convicts laboured as shepherds on scattered runs that extended right out to the edge of white settlement and the beginning of Aboriginal land. Probably Pearce was acting as a shepherd for Scattergood when he absconded. Most likely he could not stand the isolation and danger of the shepherd’s life, and he was too far away from his mates and drinking companions.
The early 1820s economy of Van Diemen’s Land was largely based on sheep, whose fine wool was exported to the industrial mills of England. On 30 November 1821 the statistically inclined Macquarie reported to London that there were 170,381 sheep in the southern colony, as well as 34,790 head of cattle, 4864 hogs (used locally for meat) and 550 horses. He did not give an account of the acreage already alienated, but there was constant pressure in both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land to move further and further into Aboriginal territory.The expansion of European settlement was driven by the arrival of an increasing number of free settlers. Between 1818 and 1824 over 4000 arrived in Hobart Town, most of them being granted land by the government, and a convict servant. By 1830 there were a million sheep on the island, more than on the mainland of Australia.Thus there was constant pressure to expand the grazing areas and this quickly led to conflict with the Aborigines, who saw the newly introduced sheep and cattle literally as fair game.