Mayhew considered the dock labourers of London to be the highest expression of this principle, ‘a striking instance of mere brute force with brute appetites’. Dock work was then largely unskilled, needing neither references nor training, only arms and legs. Being suited to any sort of man it drew every sort. Mayhew met decayed and bankrupt master butchers, publicans, grocers, old soldiers and sailors, refugees, broken down gentlemen, discharged law clerks, suspended civil servants, beggars, pensioners, servants and thieves; that is, the same tattered grab bag of human tailings and misfits first disgorged from the rotting prison hulks of the Thames in 1787 to build a city on the other side of the world.
Mayhew estimated that 20 000 such men made their living among the forest of masts and snapping, coloured flags each day. He moved among them with pen and paper, noting the surrounding factories with monstrous iron wheels arching through their roofs and clouds of black smoke vomiting from tall chimneys. Here came a group of men with faces stained bright blue with indigo; there went barrel gaugers carrying long brass tipped poles, dripping with the spirits of a cask just measured. Flaxen-haired German sailors mixed it up with turban wearing Arabs. A blue-smocked butcher with a tray of fresh meat and a box of cabbages on his shoulder, followed by a ship’s mate with a cage of green birds passed a sorrowful young woman with new bright cooking tins at her feet, an emigrant preparing for her voyage, perhaps to Sydney. The air was pungent with a thousand conflicting odours; tobacco, rum, rich coffee and spices mingled with the stench of rendered animal hides. It rang to hammers on nails, coopers pounding at their casks. Yankee sailors sang Negro spirituals as they hauled away at rattling chains and creaking ropes. Water splashed. Animals bleated and moaned while empty casks rolled down the quay like ‘stones with a heavy drum-like sound’. However, the richness of dock life contrasted sharply with the precarious returns of dock work. Whilst all this treasure seemed as boundless as the sea itself, Mayhew endeavoured to impress upon his readers the desperate nature of the struggle for life in its midst:
Until I saw with my own eyes this scene of greedy despair, I could not have believed there was so mad an eagerness to work, and so biting a want of it, among so vast a body of men.
At seven thirty each morning thousands would gather at the entrance to the docks, waiting for the calling foremen to arrive. A sudden current running through the crowd signalled the start of a ghastly humiliating fight for work. All the men scuffled and scrambled and threw their arms into the sky to catch the eye of the foremen handing out the day’s casual positions. Some jumped up on the backs and shoulders of those in front of them, trying to draw a favourable glance. All of them shouted, some the foreman’s first name, some his last, some their own names. As the minutes passed, the contest became fiercer still, fired by the knowledge that hundreds assembled there would go without.
To look in the faces of that hungry crowd is to see a sight that must be ever remembered. Some are smiling to the foreman to coax him into remembrance of them; others with their protruding eyes eager to snatch at the hoped for pass. For weeks many have gone there, and gone through the same struggle – the same cries; and have gone away, after all, without the work they had screamed for.
Mayhew at first imagined the work they sought so eagerly must be particularly pleasant or light, when in fact it was so heavy and continuous that he quickly came to think only the fittest and best fed could stand it. Even those who did not make the first call often waited in their hundreds in the holding yards on the off chance of a stray ship appearing unheralded in port. Each day the scene repeated itself. Mayhew met some in the waiting yard who had been six weeks without work, living on scraps of bread thrown to them by luckier labourers who knew their own turn in penury would inevitably come. One fallen businessman he came across had been reduced to scouring the streets for rags and offal. He was one small step removed from the lowest of the street grubbers, the turd scavengers who hunted up dog shit to sell to the city’s tanneries. His main source of income was gathering discarded cigar butts, drying them out and selling the tobacco at half a penny per ounce to the thieves in his lodgings.
At this level there was little separating the poor from the criminal classes, as they were imagined. Mayhew numbered hundreds of common thieves amongst the supplicants of the dockyards’ foremen. They lived heaped upon each other in sprawling slums, in cramped and winding rows of badly constructed terraces, often in damp, unlit mud lined cellars. The streets in these parts of town were almost always unpaved open sewers which on dry, windy days gave off thick clouds composed of pulverised horse and cattle dung and further contaminated with a silt of rotting fruit and offal and human sewage. A horrific fetid stench pervaded these neighbourhoods at all times, the constricted buildings allowing little, if any, ventilation. Good weather meant simply that the narrow lanes were used for drying masses of wet clothes on lines strung between the tightly packed dwellings.
Through much of the eighteenth century these streets were awash with a violent, hard running tide of alcoholism. Parliament encouraged gin distilling to eat up the island’s mountainous surplus of corn production. (A lot of it produced on members’ estates, coincidentally.) So liberal were the gin laws that nearly every shop and business in London was free to deal in the rough, fiery spirit. Many of the distillers were themselves hopeless drunkards whose stills often exploded and sent fire racing through the old wooden quarters of the town. Official figures estimated that by 1725 every fifth house in the city was selling gin. This was probably an underestimate which did not take into account the huge number of street vendors and freelance grog merchants. ‘All chandlers, many tobacconists, and such who sell fruit or herbs in stalls and wheelbarrows sell geneva, and many inferior tradesmen begin now to keep it in their shops for their customers,’ declared an investigator’s report. It was impossible to go about your day without confronting the opportunity for cheap drink and constant imprecations to partake. By the 1730s over eighty trades including barbers, tailors, labourers, weavers, dyers and shoemakers were retailing the stuff. Many workers were encouraged by their employers to take their pay in gin, inevitably finding they had nothing to take home at the end of the week.
The orgy of spirit drinking was a public disaster, greater – by several orders of magnitude – than the troubles visited on the late twentieth century by heroin, amphetamines or indeed all of the legal and illegal drugs combined. Cheap, ubiquitous, warm and numbing, it was especially ruinous for the poor. During the worst years of the epidemic three quarters of their children died before the age of five. Those who were consigned to the parish workhouse had even less chance. The mortality rate for children taken in under the age of twelve months was ninety-nine percent. The ravages were not restricted to a general depression of already marginal living standards. The drink inflamed terrible passions. In 1750 Judith Dufour strangled her two-year-old child to death and threw the body in a ditch so she could sell the clothes for gin. Although reforms in the middle of the century put an end to the worst excesses, the mortality bills still reflected an increased death rate from the long binge fifty years later. Many of the first convicts were raised in this debauched environment.
In the 1840s Friedrich Engels dived into the underworld to describe the rookery of St Giles, an infamous den surrounded by the rich environs of Oxford Street, Trafalgar Square and the Strand. He found:
a disorderly collection of tall, three or four-storeyed houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in [which] there is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except that here, people of the working class only are to be seen. A vegetable market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits, naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers’ stalls, arises a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in comparison with t
he dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves’ quarter, where no doors are needed, there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools.
Engels, as industrious and sympathetic an observer of the poor as his class enemy Mayhew, agreed with the magazine publisher that these crowded slums were as great a source of moral corruption as they were of diseases such as scrofula and typhus. He sermonised that there is a degree of misery, a proximity to sin which virtue is rarely able to withstand and which the young cannot resist. In such circumstances the progress of vice is almost as certain and rapid as that of physical contagion. In slums like St Giles lived ‘the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately huddled together’. Those who hadn’t drowned in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounded them sank daily deeper, progressively losing their power to resist ‘the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings’. Engels wondered that there was not much more crime emanating from these human waste dumps.
Popular mythology would not have Sydney founded by such people. Rather, goes the fairytale, the city fathers were honest starving farmers and hapless Irishmen down on their luck and forced to steal to feed their sooty-faced urchins. Unfortunately, not everyone was exiled for making off with a loaf of bread or a guvnor’s silk hanky. The common British trait, shared by all classes, of sneering at Australians’ criminal origins has a solid basis in fact. Many of those transported to the colony were serial offenders, the natural end product of an undeclared class war which raged across the landscape of Britain like a giant threshing machine, chewing up and spitting out hundreds of thousands of lives to feed a fantasy of the propertied classes: that crime was a moral contagion which could be cut from the flesh of the lower orders and cast away to rot on the hot, fatal shore of the antipodes. The main point of transportation, as Robert Hughes put it, was not what happened to the criminals once they were there, but that they would no longer be here. It was a delusion based on the false premise that crime had no external causes such as grinding poverty, starvation and despair. Instead it sprang in every case from the contaminated soul as an act of free will.
In truth criminality, like greatness, was a contingent affair. Some were born to it, some achieved it, and the rest had it thrust rudely upon them. The forlorn extremes of the latter in no way detracted from the lusty embrace of lawlessness by the former. Mayhew met bands of thieves who were proud of their profession and took imprisonment as a sign of achievement; rather foolishly, given the savage nature of the legal system at the time. Eighteenth century English justice encompassed punishment cut from the cloth of the DarkAges, including amputating hands, slicing off ears, slitting nostrils, branding and whipping, often served up as an entrée to the state’s main course of vengeance, death by hanging. The law itself was confused, stitched together from a patchwork of ancient Roman doctrine, a great unwritten mass of mediaeval common law, and the formal codified statutes dating from the reign of Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century. The result was an ambiguous and contradictory body of laws with barbaric ambitions and arbitrary effects. Many judges and juries actually used this to mitigate the cruelties of the system. Charges of many First Fleet convicts were worded so as to attract the lesser penalty of transportation instead of execution.
None of which seemed to affect the thinking of those criminals who still revelled in their own infamy. Interviewing a large party of thieves, Mayhew found they cheered each other on as each replied to questions about how many times he had been jailed. One junior desperado, who claimed to have been locked up twenty-nine times in his nineteen short but action-packed years, drew a long thunderous standing ovation from dozens of his mates. A seaman ordered to draw up a list of the occupations of the convict ship Recovery’s transportees in 1819 reported back to the surgeon-superintendent that three quarters of their charges claimed to be nothing more than thieves. Scratching his head, and providing an insight into the accuracy of convict records, he asked whether he should just list them as ‘labourers’, one of the most common job descriptions of the men sent out to Australia. In 1797, in A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, Patrick Colquhoun described a whole underground society of idle and disorderly mechanics, labourers, pilferers, embezzlers, coiners, receivers of stolen goods, spendthrifts, rakes, and ‘giddly young men … in the pursuit of criminal pleasures’. They were ‘profligate, loose and dissolute characters … seducing others to intemperance, lewdness, debauchery, gambling and excess …’
They really were a sorry lot and they tried the patience of those appointed as their moral guardians. Surgeon Haslam’s attempted reforms fell on arid ground. He tried to educate the convicts in the hulks about ‘the beauties and conveniences which the light of truth and rectitude of conduct would present’ in contrast to the infamy and contempt they then wallowed in. They were having none of it. ‘My admonitions,’ Haslam lamented, ‘were drowned in a roar of blasphemy.’ The Reverend Bedford of Hobart Town was subject to the gross indignity of being mooned by a group of uppity female convicts who drew up their skirts and smacked their arses as he attempted to tell them off. Some just admitted defeat; the Reverend Richard Johnson regretted on his departure from Sydney that the convicts had not been improved at all by their odyssey. They were still indulging themselves in sloth and idleness, engaging in most ‘profane and unclean conversation, and committing abominations which it would defile any pen to describe’.
Contrary to the hopes of those in the United Kingdom who thought transportation a salutary and reforming example, the likelihood that the blinking, benighted creatures who stumbled from the convict transports in Port Jackson were hard core criminals actually increased over time. Reforms to the English legal system saw exile to the colonies progressively reserved for more and more serious offences. The system which consigned the first convicts to Australia was much more ferocious and haphazard, however, and some really were exiled for petty misdeeds born of want and desperation.
The convicts were not alone in their exile. Having volunteered for the adventure of the First Fleet, Ralph Clark, a newly-wed second officer of His Majesty’s Royal Marines, found himself haunted and depressed at the prospect of a long separation from his home and family. Clark took time to set down his feelings as Arthur Phillip’s squadron weighed anchor and set course for a brisk run down the Solent, a deep strait which bends sharply, just like a boomerang, between the low broken shoreline of Hampshire and the steeper, chalky northern coast of the Isle of Wight. As watery daylight leaked into the world, the estuaries of the Medina, the Newton and Yar Rivers slipped by on the port side and then Hurst Castle loomed, a grim sixteenth century fortress squatting at the end of a long, thin pebble bank jutting out into the channel. The castle’s contribution to English penal history – King Charles was held there after the civil war before being removed to Westminster for trial and execution – meant little or nothing to Clark. He was busy imploring God to allow the fleet to put in at Plymouth so he could see his ‘dear friend and affectionate Alicia’ and their ‘sweet son’. Sadly the Lord wasn’t taking requests that morning and a little further on, as England receded, Clark wailed, ‘O my God all my hoppes are over of seeing my beloved wife and son’.
He was an attentive diarist but a bit of a hypocrite. His journal is replete with furious references to the female convicts, abandoned trollops who were not to be compared with the lovely lost Alicia. A few days after sailing from Tenerife four tradesmen aboard Clark’s vessel, the inappropriately named Friendship, broke through a bulkhead to get to the female convicts. They were discovered in bed with Sarah McCormick and thre
e Elizabeths: Pulley, Dudgens and Hackley. There had been similar trouble in Portsmouth, and Pulley and Dudgens had previously been confined to irons for fighting. Clark wrote that they were greatest whores who ever lived and blamed some nascent industrial action amongst the ship’s civilian crew on their influence. His pen dripped venom at their every mention. On their release from irons Clark predicted a ready return to confinement. ‘I am convinced they will not be long out of them,’ he wrote. ‘They are a disgrace to their whole sex, bitches that they are. I wish all the women were out of the ships.’
When the Friendship’s carpenter, boatswain, steward and a seaman were transferred to the fleet’s command vessel, the Sirius, after breaking through to the women that second time, all but the carpenter were whipped. Clark was disappointed that the women were only returned to irons. Were he the commander, he wrote, he would ‘have flogged the four whores also’. When one of these ‘damned whores’, Elizabeth Dudgens, was finally flogged for abusing the captain, Clark worked himself into a righteous lather as a marine corporal flayed her back with the whip. He did not play with her, the young officer noted, ‘but laid it home, which I was very glad to see’. Dudgens was then tied to the ship’s pump to ponder and repent. Clark, bitter at being forced into close communion with such degraded creatures – so inferior to his own good and graceful wife – felt not a whit of compassion. The prisoner ‘had been long fishing’ for such a violent correction and now she had it ‘until her heart’s content’. What delicious irony then that Lieutenant Clark, loving husband and father and stern unbending moralist should later be found on Norfolk Island shacked up with the teenaged Mary Branham, a thief and housebreaker and mother to his bastard child.
Ralph Clark’s mood may have been amongst the worst affected by the fleet’s separation from home. Others testified to an adventurous spirit below decks, a sense of anticipation and an eagerness to be done with the Old World which had manifestly failed most of the travellers. The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, a contemporary account cut and pasted from Phillip’s despatches, described the convicts as ‘regular, humble, and in all respects suitable to their situation’. Watkin Tench, a young captain of the marines, wrote in his journal that during the two months spent at anchor after their rendezvous at the Motherbank ‘the ships were universally healthy and the prisoners in high spirits. Few complaints or lamentations were to be heard among them and an ardent wish for the hour of departure seemed generally to prevail.’
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