A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  Phillip, meeting Barrington, found him sober-minded, as if transportation had had an impact on his legendary flamboyance. He was sent to work at Toongabbie, west of Sydney, where he began his convict life in a hut shared with lower-class criminals. They no doubt found sharing their table with him a great privilege and novelty, and pressed him for stories of his glittering, bold career. Though Barrington no doubt satisfied these demands, his seriousness, probably arising in part from depression, lasted, and on the basis of his changed demeanour and his “irreproachable conduct,” he was quickly appointed a superintendent of convicts and ultimately to the night watch. Barrington had found in Parramatta a life not utterly lacking in pleasure: “having had several young native dogs given to me, from time to time, I take great delight in kangaroo hunting, it is not only an agreeable exercise, but produces a dish for the table, nearly as good as mutton and in the present dearth of livestock is not an unacceptable present.”

  BY THE THIRD FLEET, Governor Phillip received from Secretary of State Grenville an answer to his earlier petition for leave. Grenville said he was concerned that the situation of Phillip's private affairs would not be such as to intrude on his services in New South Wales, which “are so extremely important to the public. I cannot, therefore, refrain from expressing my earnest hope … that you may be able, without material inconvenience, to continue in your government for a short time longer.”

  But it was intended that the bulk of the marine garrison, now relieved by the purpose-recruited New South Wales Corps, return to England on the Gorgon. In deciding what to do, Lieutenant Collins was caught between his dislike of Captain Nepean of the New South Wales Corps and his detestation of the departing Major Ross. Had Collins given up his task as judge-advocate and governor's secretary, for which he received only half-pay, and returned to a full-paid but purely military function, he would have been reduced to serving in New South Wales as junior to Nepean, and would have found that distasteful. “I have no prospect of getting on in the army, and I very much dislike the generality of the officers who compose the Corps.” But though he mentions his wife Maria's letters, and worries about her welfare, there is no hint of longing to be back with her via Gorgon in his remarks, even accounting for the reserve that was natural to him. Indeed, he was in an association with Ann Yeates, alias Nancy, the young milliner from Lady Penrhyn, who had borne him two sons.

  As for returning on the Gorgon, Major Ross took his passage in that ship, “and with him I would not sail were wealth and honours to attend me when I landed.” In reality, however, Collins could not reconcile it to his mind to leave Governor Phillip, “with whom I have now lived so long, that I am blended in every concern of his.” Even so, the work he had to do for Phillip “is increased to more than double what it was at first, and my salary has decreased one-half of what it was at first.” But for the moment, stay he did, even though he felt he was spending the prime of his life at the furthest part of the world, “without credit, without, or with but very little, profit, secluded from my family, my connections, from the world, under constant apprehensions of being starved, and constantly living on a reduced ration of provisions.”

  Collins was disgruntled that though the masters of the Third Fleet ships admitted they could have brought out a further thousand tons of provisions, instead they had loaded up with copper, iron, steel, and cordage for sale at Bombay “on account of their owners.” Dependent for his survival on this strange balance of beneficence and greed in shipping merchants, he decided ultimately that he would seek permission to go home and take “the first opportunity that offers of escaping from a country that is nothing better than a place of banishment for the outcasts of society.”

  MEANWHILE, IN DISTANT KOEPANG, in Dutch Timor, some of Bryant's party of escapees had taken jobs. “We remained very happy at our work for two months,” said Martin, “till Wm Bryant had words with his wife, went and informed against himself, wife and children and all of us … we was immediately taken prisoners and was put in the castle.”

  Tench, who would later investigate the case, wrote: “The Dutch received them with kindness, and treated them with hospitality; but their behaviour giving rise to suspicions, they were watched; and one of them at last, in a moment of intoxication, betrayed the secret. They were immediately secured, and committed to prison.”

  Their imprisonment does not seem to have been severe and they were allowed out of the castle two at a time for whole days, and this continued until the arrival of another group of British, the worst group possible for Will and Mary Bryant. Captain Edward Edwards of HMS Pandora had been sent to Tahiti to round up the men who had mutinied on the Bounty. Fletcher Christian and a small group of others, knowing that such vengeance would be dispatched, had sailed away on the seized Bounty across the Pacific towards South America to remote Pitcairn Island, where they could continue to enjoy a form of freedom. The majority remained on the far more kindly islands of Tahiti. There Captain Edwards, “a cold, hard man devoid of sympathy and imagination,” arrived on Pandora on 23 March 1791, about the same time the Bryant party was escaping Sydney. He found fourteen mutineers and detained them on board the Pandora in a structure 11 feet long and 18 feet wide that he had built on the outer quarterdeck. This imprisonment shed would become known in infamy as “Pandora's box.” The only entry was by way of an iron hatch on top, and inside the box the mutineers were attached by leg irons to heavy ring bolts. Pandora headed across the Pacific towards the northern tip of the Australian east coast and through Torres Strait, intending to return its prisoners to England by way of Batavia and Cape Town. Instead she ran aground on an outcrop of the Great Barrier Reef. A few of the prisoners from Pandora's box were released immediately to work at the pumps, but the rest were left chained inside. As the ship sank, three more were let out, but the hatch was again slammed down, closed, and barred. The bosun's mate delayed taking to the sea himself to unbar the manhole to let the rest out, some of whom were picked up by the ship's boats.

  On a little island where the survivors gathered and boats were prepared for the row to Timor, the mutineers were not allowed the use of tents, and they were put to the oars mercilessly by Edwards. They got more sympathy from the surgeon, Hamilton, who would also extend many clemencies to Mary Bryant, her children, and her colleagues when the whole group reached Timor in September.

  If, as Martin said, it was Bryant who gave the group away while drunk, they were all to pay a massive price for it now that Edwards had appeared. In the castle at Koepang, without the help of the Dutch colonial police, Edwards interrogated the prisoners one by one. “We told him we was convicts and had made our escape from Botany Bay,” wrote Martin. “He told us we was his prisoners.” They were no longer allowed any freedom of movement. Edwards had already shown a tendency to care not so much for bringing his captives back to England for punishment as accounting for them. His behaviour during the wreck of the Pandora, even taking into account his many distractions, was not that of a man who wanted at all cost to save the lives of the Bounty mutineers and bring them to trial.

  By early October 1791, Edwards had chartered a Dutch vessel, the Rembang, to take himself and his crew, his Bounty prisoners, and his “Botany Bay ten,” to Batavia. He put the Bryants and their party below decks clamped in bilboes, “irons attached to a long sliding iron bar to confine the prisoner, fastened at one end to the floor by a lock.”

  On the way to Batavia, off the island of Flores, the Rembang ran into a cyclone. “In a few minutes,” wrote the surgeon of the lost Pandora, “every sail of the ship was shivered to pieces; the pumps all choked and useless, the leaks gaining fast upon us.” The Rembang was being driven towards a lee shore seven miles away, but the cyclone passed before she was smashed against it.

  Batavia, near the northern end of Java, was the chief port of the Dutch East India Company in the Indonesian islands. A magnificent Dutch town square opened up from the harbour, just as in Cape Town. Here, where the jungle still pressed close, could be foun
d the same enterprising Calvinist mind as existed in any other Dutch principality, and the Dutch themselves were said to thrive on the swampy exhalations of the place. But for everyone else it seemed to be, to quote Surgeon Hamilton, a “painted sepulchre, this Golgotha of Europe which buries the whole settlement every five years.”

  The Botany Bay ten were put aboard a Dutch East India Company ship lying in the roads of Batavia. Smothering heat hung over them and an unhealthy damp filled their prison deck like mist. There are no accounts, either from the party itself or from observers, of bitter recriminations amongst the group, even though survival seemed unlikely. Mary knew, however, that if she could get her two children back to England alive, they would have the privilege of breathing softer air. For many others of the party, death seemed an intimate certainty.

  twenty-six

  SPEAKING THEIR OWN LANGUAGE, and bound together in many cases by secret oaths and compacts, the Irish who had come into Port Jackson on Queen on 26 September 1791 presented particular problems. A later Irish genius would call Ireland John Bull's Other Island, and the officers in New South Wales would have nodded as ruefully as any Anglo-Irish magistrate on Irish soil at the Gaelic wrong-headedness of Irish convicts' refusal to behave like Englishmen, and to speak English. Irish was still the first language of over 80 percent of Irish hearths, and now it was heard, to the discomfort of the officers and officials, in the fringes of the bushland of New South Wales. What were they plotting, what was behind their frequent, secret laughter?

  One thing about them was the ready—some would say gullible—comfort they took in millennial dreams. After all, a new century was nearing, and at its dawn the justice of Christ might reverse the order of the world, putting the first last, and the last first. In Sydney and Parramatta, there developed amongst them like a fever “the chimerical idea” of finding China from New South Wales, the idea that it was beyond the mountains to the north-west of Sydney Cove. In terms of the Enlightenment it was a preposterous idea. In terms of their extreme poverty and of religious belief and Irish psychology, it made perfect sense. Somewhere on earth there must exist a veil the Irish could penetrate, beyond which they would have their old powers and remembered spaciousness restored to them. Their ignorance of strict geography was something chosen for them by their masters—the schooling of Irish Catholics was contrary to the penal laws of Britain—and so they made up a geography of hope from fragments of information, namely that New South Wales was part of the same unknown zone as China. They drew their compasses on a piece of paper, with the arrow fixed on north, a practice which would be laughed at by their betters. Yet the Defenders and other secret societies were influenced by Freemasonry, to which the Irish nationalist Protestants such as Robert Emmet, Napper Tandy, and Wolfe Tone belonged, and in Freemasonry, and other secret societies too, there was an inherent importance and a power in the representation of the compass. The north was potent, even if invoked merely on paper, and the Irish convicts, eating bitter rations by the camp fires of Sydney and Parramatta, had caught the belief that not too many days walk northwards from the Parramatta River and Port Jackson, a habitable kingdom lay awaiting them.

  One sight of the dense bush around Parramatta and Sydney was enough to make many delay their Chinese pilgrimage. The strangeness of the natives, matched by the strangeness of the forests, the tangles of ungodly acacias and melaleucas, the spiteful sharpness of narrow-leaved shrubs determined to survive fire and drought, and the feeling of godlessness and lack of familiar presences in the place, had been for three years sufficient to stop most convicts walking away, and promised to be effective well into the future. Yet on 1 November—All Saints' Day—twenty male Irish convicts and one pregnant female in Parramatta took a week's provisions, tomahawks, and knives, and set out into the bush to find China. Collins and others suspected that this was a cover story, and that their real purpose was to steal boats and get on board the transports after they had left Sydney waters. But he almost certainly misstated their ambitions.

  A few days later, sailors in a boat belonging to the Albemarle met the pregnant Irish woman down-harbour. She had been separated from her group for three days. The woman's husband was also later found and gave the same “absurd account of their design” to the officials back in Sydney. Thus the proposition of Irish stupidity made its entry onto the Australian stage.

  Other men were captured to the north near Broken Bay, and despite their suffering, attempted escape again a few days afterwards. Thirteen of those who first absconded “were brought in, in a state of deplorable wretchedness, naked, and nearly worn out with hunger.” They had tried to live by sucking flowering shrubs for their honey and by eating wild purple berries.

  Phillip ordered the convicts at Parramatta to be assembled, and told them that he would send out parties looking for them with orders to fire on sight, and if they were recaptured he would land them on a part of the harbour whence they could not depart, or chain them together with only bread and water during the rest of their term of transportation. The declaration did not staunch the magnitude of their hopes.

  Typically, Watkin Tench visited the Irish convicts who had made the dash for China—it was he who called them “the Chinese Travellers.” Four of them lay in hospital, variously wounded by the natives. Watkin's enquiries were not contemptuous, but grew from genuine human impulses of investigation. He asked them if they really supposed it possible to reach China, and they informed him that they had been told that at a considerable distance to the north lay a large river, “which separated this country from the back part of China.” When they crossed this Jordan, they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people who would treat them generously. On the third day of their wanderings towards this hoped-for place, one of their party died of fatigue, and another was butchered by the natives as they fled the scene. They had reached Broken Bay and the Hawkesbury River, where the wide entrance and estuary stopped them from going further.

  Though a great proportion of the Irish were of farming backgrounds or had agricultural experience, and though this was a hopeful aspect, Hunter would later describe them as “dissatisfied with their situation here,” and “extremely insolent, refractory, and turbulent.” For the Irish combined their dream of China with a keen sense of their small quota of rights. The convicts of Queen at Parramatta were the first to stage an organised public protest, outside Government House in Parramatta in the humidity of December 1791, demanding that the issue of rations be changed back from weekly to daily. There was a certain justice in this. A weak or sickly person might be deprived of a week's rations by a bully in one swoop, but if the ration was doled out daily, the weak could appeal to the strong to prevent any large-scale ration-snatching.

  THERE WAS A PREGNANT IRISH girl named Catherine Devereaux aboard Queen who did not seek China but stuck close to camp for the sake of her unborn child, who would be christened James, taking the name of his father—the Queen's cook, Kelly. James Kelly would reach young manhood under the tutelage of two entrepreneurial former convicts, Henry Kable and James Underwood, and in Van Diemen's Land would become a whaling, sealing, and shipping tycoon of some renown before dying in 1859. But all that was in a future version of Australia, the mercantile one.

  Despite a few nods towards mercantilism in the founding of Sydney, such as murderous Captain Trail setting up his general store with impunity in a tent at Sydney Cove, it was not a trading post, and Phillip did not want it yet to be one. But he was interested in how the three Third Fleet transports which had gone off to try the whale fishery on the coasts of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land fared. The Britannia returned with seven sperm whales in November, having hunted in company with William and Anne, which had caught only one whale on its own account. Thirteen barrels of oil were procured from the whales killed by Britannia, “and in the opinion of Mr. Melville [Britannia's captain], the oil, with its containing a greater proportion of that valuable part of the fish called by the whalers the head matter, was worth £10 mo
re per ton than that of the fish of any other part of the world he had been in.”

  William Richards Jr., who had dispatched the First Fleet, had commercial dreams for the faroff colony he had never seen, and remained in touch with New South Wales through his Botany Bay agent, Zachariah Clark, who was now the commissary of stores in New South Wales. Still a visionary eccentric, Richards hoped to take over the convict-handling business, and combine it with other forms of trade between the south-west Pacific and Britain. The whole idea was irksome to Campbell, the contractor for the Thames hulks. But if Francis Baring, chairman of the East India Company, would describe Sydney as “the serpent we are nursing at Botany Bay,” William Richards was prepared to be both father and midwife to that serpent. He was willing to receive a land grant and to live permanently in New South Wales as Sydney's shipping magnate. Outraged by stories of the Second Fleet, the devoutly Christian Richards had moved towards the twin beacons of utility: a settled, regular, low-yield market in the conscientious transportation of convicts, and on the other side, high-yield trading with India and China and what he may have been convinced would be an increasing traffic of whalers. His ideas, an accurate depiction of the future of New South Wales though they were, were not well received. Indeed, in a year or two he would become bankrupt due to other contracts gone bad, and some of his children would be left to consider New South Wales as an option for free settlement. But far more than anyone else in the penal equation, Richards had desired New South Wales. Not many did. Even Tench would write, “If only a receptacle for convicts be intended, this place stands unequalled … when viewed in a commercial light, I fear its insignificance will not appear very striking.”