A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  Nagle, however, like most of the other new arrivals, saw the Aborigines' assertions of ownership to be pure mischief. “When we would be shooting the seine and came across a school of fish, and the natives see us, they would come down with spear in hand and take what fish they thought fit until we got them [the fish] into the boat, and push off. A few days after we had been robbed of our fish, we were shooting the seine in a large cove opposite the cove we had been robbed of our fish. One of the natives came over in his bark canoe and seemed very friendly. We knew him to be one of them that robbed us on the other side.” Nagle got this native to accept into his hand the powder from a cartridge, and then have fire put to it. “Which he did, but the flame, smoke and the powder flying in his face, and the burning of his hand, he gave a spring and a hollow that I never saw equalled and run to his canoe and put off, sometimes paddling with one hand and then the other until he got to the other side.” Such little games expressed the annoyance that ordinary seamen and soldiers felt at the natives' intrusions on their activities, and carried inherent in them the seed of the interracial tragedy that was taking shape in Sydney Cove.

  By the end of February 1788, the indigenous people began to shun the settlement. But contact between the two races was a daily occurrence on the water. The natives were scared of the 200 red-coated marines of the four companies. “From the first, they carefully avoided a soldier, or any person wearing a red coat,” wrote an observer. The natives called the musket the gerubber, or gerebar, fire-stick. Before long they would experience further demonstrations of its power.

  eleven

  ON 12 FEBRUARY, LIEUTENANT KING came to Phillip's tented mansion to take the oath as superintendent and commanding officer of Norfolk Island. Phillip seemed to see King's occupation of Norfolk Island above all as a penal rather than a commercial expedition. Nonetheless, once King had “taken the necessary measures for securing yourself and people, and for the preservation of the stores and provisions, you are immediately to proceed with the cultivation of the flax plant, which you will find growing spontaneously on the island.” Potentially, for an ambitious young Cornishman just shy of thirty years like King, a man of great endurance and average talents of command, the settlement on Norfolk Island offered great opportunity. In a far clearer sense than the creation of Sydney, which was merely an expansion of convict holding capacity, the occupation of Norfolk Island was explicitly to be the expansion of empire. The party sent thither was “to secure the same to us and prevent it being occupied by the subjects of any other European power.” The corn, the flax, the cotton and other grains produced on the island were to be the property of the Crown, as was the produce of the public farm Phillip had the convicts tilling and planting in Sydney.

  King was particularly warned not to permit the building of any vessel whose length of keel exceeded twenty feet. If any ship of that or greater length were to be driven onto the island, thereby opening up the possibility of sea escape, King was to scuttle it immediately or otherwise render it unserviceable. Norfolk Island was to depend passively on regular visits from Supply.

  The coming settlement on the island was designed for the moment to be a haven for relative innocents. In the earliest days of February King had gone aboard the Lady Penrhyn to ask Surgeon Bowes Smyth about suitable women to take to Norfolk Island. The chief attraction for these women would be in getting away from what they might have considered more dangerous elements in the chaotic, fortnight-old convict camp. All of them volunteered to go.

  The little Supply departed Sydney Cove in mid-February on a cool summer's morning and beneath thundery clouds, with King and his six women and eight men, his surgeon and two marines, his carpenter and his weaver. On their journey they encountered arising from the sea a previously unseen, splendid, and lonely pinnacle of rock, which would be named Ball's Pyramid to honour Supply's master, and next they found an unknown island, unoccupied by Aborigines, with many plump giant turtles on its beaches. They hunted the turtles for their meat and named the island to honour Lord Howe of the Admiralty. These Englishmen operated on a prompt instinct similar to Cook's—that what was named was tamed; what was addressed was possessed.

  On arrival, Supply having taken more than two weeks of violent gales to reach Norfolk Island, they were greeted by a furious surf. Eighteen years past, Cook had landed on the north side, but King searched the coastline for a week before finding a halfway safe landing place along that coast. At a place he named Duncombe Bay to honour the Member for Yorkshire in the House of Commons, the first landing party was put ashore. The bay was found to be enclosed by reef, as was most of the island. Landed, King was enthusiastic about what he saw while exploring the central valley and the pine-clad hills with his surgeon, Thomas Jamison. King's journal shows he was quick to name geographic points after possible sponsors—not only was there Duncombe Bay, but also Anson Bay to honour the Member for Litchfield. He noted with some astonishment: “We have not seen a leaf of flax or any herbal grass whatever, the ground being quite bare, which is rather extraordinary as Captain Cook says that flax is more luxuriant here than in New Zealand.” Banks and Cook had misled everyone about Botany Bay, and now about Norfolk Island!

  In essence, King was his own Aborigine here, for he was beginning from the beginning, and no natives inhabited the island. (Its later record for drownings and shipwrecks might explain why.) Once ashore his charges pitched tents on open ground on the south side of the island, where there was a gap in the reef in the area he named Sydney Bay, but soon to become Kingstown, to honour George III. The first Sunday ashore, King called the settlement together for divine service in his tent and read Phillip's commission to him. He took formal possession of the island and drank the toasts to the Royal Family. His subsequent speech was very much in the spirit of a middling officer in the Royal Navy, and rather like Phillip's in Sydney Cove—he told his charges that every encouragement would be given them to behave with propriety and industry, and that those who lacked those qualities would be punished “as useless and destructive members of society.” He told them something Phillip had not told his charges in Sydney Cove—that if they behaved well, he would see to their repatriation. He then settled down to manage the community along the lines set by Phillip, as if it were a large farm and the convicts his farmhands. They did all that the people in Sydney Cove were doing, except the timber was kinder. They split and sawed pines to build storerooms and shelters. They sowed the ground and hauled away the branches of felled pines. And it all seemed to go better here. This might become the penal utopia.

  There were the usual earthly arrangements. Thomas Jamison, King's surgeon, a Trinity College man whom Lieutenant Clark called “a cunning villain,” formed an association with Elizabeth Colley of Lady Penrhyn, and produced two illegitimate sons for whom he would provide. But there was also the idyll: one of the young women, Olivia Gascoigne, would soon marry Nathaniel Lucas, a carpenter and cloth thief, by whom she would have thirteen colonial children.

  As fresh gales combed the great pines and thunderheads hung low, King was delighted to find turtles on a sandy beach on the eastern side of the island. Huge turtles would supply many excellent meals for the people of Norfolk Island. After first planting some vegetables, he went in company with his people, free and convict, to Turtle Bay and there collectively they caught three of the enormous creatures. But on 3 March, John Jay, one of the Supply's quartermasters, insisted on trying to catch a turtle in the surf “although desired to desist,” and drowned. He would not be the last to suffer death in Norfolk Island's turbulent surf.

  At last, later in the month, indeed on St. Patrick's Day, “I discovered,” wrote King, “that the flax plant which Captain Cook takes notice, is of no other than that plant which I have hitherto called the larger kind of iris with which this isle abounds, but it in no manner resembles the flax of Europe.” A bundle of it was tied up and put into a pool of water to soak, with the intention of drying it after the European method of preparing flax, but the fini
shed product was useless.

  AS IN SYDNEY COVE, it was the soldiers who committed the first sin on Norfolk Island. In April, King detected Private John Batchelor, one of his two marines, stealing rum out of the flask in which it was kept in King's tent. He did not doubt what must be done. “In the afternoon I assembled the people together and punished him with one dozen lashes for quitting his work, one dozen lashes for breaking into the King's stores, and one dozen for theft.” In a few months Batchelor too would drown when a huge surf broached a longboat he was travelling in.

  The lash had made its entry into Norfolk Island like the entry of the serpent into Eden. It would from then on frequently distinguish the governance of the place. Charles McClennan, a fourteen-year-old from Durham who had been sentenced at the age of ten for stealing goods to the value of ten pence, tried to steal rum out of the surgeon's tent and was punished with three dozen lashes. However provoked, and for whatever cause, he had brought down the convictry of Norfolk Island to the level of those on the mainland. King determined he would have to make an even more severe example of the next person found stealing.

  Now unpromising incidents abounded. Hail destroyed corn, barley, and wheat, and grubs all the potatoes. The sawyers were poisoned by trying some native beans, and Charles McClennan was again lashed for uttering “some very seditious and threatening words.”

  There seem to have been kinder exchanges between King and his housekeeper, the convict Ann Innett, in his primitive cottage of pine-wood, that went unrecorded, as did the process by which she became his lover. She was to become pregnant with Norfolk Island's first child early in the Australian autumn. After nine months had passed King still celebrated divine service with a gentlemanly lack of embarrassment, and baptised the newborn infant by the name of Norfolk, “he being the first born on the island.”

  BACK IN SYDNEY, as foreshadowed during the ceremonial of 7 February, Phillip had taken before David Collins the oaths of abjuration and assurance, made politically necessary by the Scottish uprising in favour of the House of Stuart's Bonnie Prince Charlie forty years earlier. “I, Arthur Phillip, do truly and sincerely acknowledge, profess, testify and declare, in my conscience, before God and World, that our sovereign Lord King George is lawful and rightful King of this realm.” The oaths asserted before God the claim of the House of Hanover to the Crown and denounced any claim of “the pretended Prince of Wales and his open and secret abettors.” Phillip was also to make the declaration contained in the Act for Preventing Dangers which might arise from Popish Recusants, basically those who would try to restore the Catholic Pretender, the Bonnie Prince. By the time the oaths were taken in Sydney Cove, the Pretender had already made a sad, liquor-bloated corpse, having perished at the Palazzo Muti in Rome on 31 January 1788.

  In any case, Phillip was an intense supporter of the Hanoverian Crown. He would early emphasise how seriously he took the Crown's ownership of all things in New South Wales. A convict sold an animal “of the squirrel kind” to the steward of Lady Penrhyn for liquor. The governor summoned Captain Marshall of the Lady Penrhyn and told him “that all the convicts got was the property of government,” demanded the animal back, and subjected the steward to fifty lashes.

  Equally the government's property were those areas up-harbour where the waters ultimately narrowed to become a river flowing down into Port Jackson from the hinterland. Officers and men still marvelled at the capaciousness both of the river and the port itself. “In my belief,” wrote Jacob Nagle, “I should suppose Port Jackson to hold nearly all the ships in England.” Phillip would soon investigate the upper reaches of the river, and the area to the north to see if they could be adapted to the colony's use.

  Meanwhile, in Sydney Cove, no sooner had the commissary Mr. Andrew Miller done his calculations over the supplying of rations than four young men were caught with stolen butter, pease, and pork from the tented storehouse. Thomas Barrett had long been a prisoner, having stolen from a spinster when he was as young as eleven or twelve. He had been condemned to death but reprieved to be transported on Mercury, from which he landed in England after convicts took the ship over. Like others, he was condemned to death again for return from transportation, but once more was reprieved. On board the Charlotte a few months out of England, young Barrett had been caught trying to pass counterfeit quarter-dollars made out of old belt buckles and pewter spoons, and Surgeon White had been impressed by his ingenuity in manufacturing the coins when a sentry had been on guard all the time over the hatchway, and hardly ten minutes elapsed without someone going down among the convicts.

  Barrett, now aged about eighteen years, faced the death penalty for a third time under the terms laid down by Arthur Phillip in his first speech to the convicts. Henry Lovell, a London ivory-turner in his mid-twenties; Joseph Hall, another graduate of the Mercury, and John Ryan, a London silk-weaver, also appeared before Judge-Advocate Collins and his bench of officers in the tented court at one o'clock in the afternoon. The first three were unanimously condemned to death, but Ryan was sentenced to 300 lashes, being adjudged more a receiver than thief.

  Sydney Cove was now to achieve its first executions “in terrorem, testimony to the Majesty of the Law, a Dreadful and Awful Example to Others.” At five in the afternoon of a late February day, with the summer sun falling down the sky, the marine garrison marched to the place of punishment, a tree between the men's and women's camp on the western side of Sydney Cove. All the convict population were compulsorily gathered to see this demonstration of the fact that their rations were considered sacrosanct. The three men appeared beneath the tree's long branches, probably a Moreton Bay fig tree. Barrett asked to speak to one of the convicts, a Mercury crony, Robert Sideway, who on the Friendship had incurred a flogging and chaining and had a risky reputation. This request was granted and a confidential hugger-mugger passed between them. Then Barrett requested the chance to talk with one of the women but was refused, and mounted his ladder under the tree, as did Lovell and Hall theirs, the nooses hanging level with their necks. But as all three men stood there, Major Ross was approached by a sentry who came running from the governor's tent with a twenty-four-hour stay of execution for Lovell and Hall. They came down their ladders and it was time for the final rites for Barrett. “The Reverend Mr. Johnson prayed very fervently with the culprit before he was turned off, and performed every office appertaining to his function with great decorum.” Barrett, of “a most vile nature,” expressed not the least signs of fear until he mounted the ladder, “and then he turned very pale and seemed very much shocked.”

  He was not the only victim of the hanging tree. A young convict named James Freeman, sixteen when he was sentenced to death at Hartford and reprieved in 1784, had been given the task of being the penal colony's hangman. In the next few days, he too had been sentenced to death for stealing flour from another convict, but there was evidence that he had merely stumbled on the flour cached in the woods. Governor Phillip pardoned him on condition he became the public executioner, and Surgeon Worgan noted that “here was an opportunity of establishing a Jack Ketch who should in all future executions either hang or be hanged” (Jack Ketch being a renowned criminal-hangman from Newgate). Freeman believed it would make him a pariah. In the case of Barrett, the unnamed convict assigned the task had delayed fixing the rope and taking Barrett's ladder away for so long that Major Ross threatened to have the marines shoot him. He had to be severely threatened also by ProvostMarshal Brewer, who disliked the scene anyhow and did not want to have it dragged out. Mr. Brewer, said Surgeon Worgan, “was under the disagreeable necessity of mounting the ladder himself in order to fix the halter.”

  Having called on the convicts to take warning from his fate, Barrett was “turned off.” Freeman was in an unhappy position: “All grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner,” wrote an eighteenth-century commentator. “Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disa
ppears.” In the spirit of that principle, Freeman had to be forced to exercise the office every time someone was hanged from then on.

  The First Fleet children saw Barrett asphyxiate and piss his pants and were thereby educated in the power of authority. What the Cadigal, drawn by the sound of drums and observing from the bush, thought of this strange ritual would be recorded later. They were astonished and appalled. Strangulation was not one of their punishments. They measured retribution in the more calculable currency of blood.

  As thunder clouds came up from the south, the body hung an hour and was then buried in a grave dug very near the gallows. Thus an acre of Eora ground was rendered unholy. Throughout the century, surgeons and physicians, helped by robust beadles and porters, had stolen the bodies of the hanged either from Tyburn Hill, where the London executions took place until 1783, or even from the new scaffold outside Newgate. But here, science had not advanced enough to threaten the eternal rest of Barrett. Overnight a thunderous downpour fell on his grave. Rain gushed in at the canvas and thatched cornices of convict huts. Convicts darted from camp site to camp site with a petition to the great central presence, Phillip, who would find himself presented the next morning with an appeal from the mass of the felons begging that the sentences of Lovell and Hall be commuted. The people who signed it knew well enough that the court system was a lottery, that the condemned had probably been worked at by hefty marines and temporary constable convicts before they confessed, guilty as they may well have been.