Leviathan (30 page)

The next morning, 5 February, Baughan and his wife were roused by a drunken mob apparently consisting of every member of the corps who was not then on duty. They broke open the gate to the Baughans' residence, a neat little house the couple had worked hard to furnish in some style and comfort. They smashed the windows, entered the dwelling and took to the corner posts with an axe. They broke Baughan's bed, tore the bedding and smashed chairs, window frames, drawers, chests and in short, according to Governor Hunter's report, ‘demolished everything within his possession'.

Baughan had tried to defend his home, having had a few minutes warning of the mob's approach. He'd armed himself with a gun and threatened to use it on the uniformed rabble who gathered at his front gate. That held them back for a short time but they had the numbers, surrounding his property and trampling the fence on the far side, which he could not defend. A number of soldiers rushed up behind the terrified carpenter, tackled him and wrestled him to the ground, grinding his face into the dust and placing an axe on his neck, swearing that if he so much as stirred they'd chop off his head. Keeping him subdued like this, wrote Hunter, they completed the ruin of his property, ‘to the very great terror of the man's wife, after which they went off cheering', and marched in a body across the parade ground in front their commanding officer's house.

Hunter was under no illusions about the seriousness of the incident. He wrote to Captain Paterson of the corps complaining that the conduct of some of its members had been, in his opinion, ‘the most violent and outrageous that was ever heard of by any British regiment whatever'. He warned that he would regard any further aggravation as open rebellion, for which the ringleaders would answer, ‘most probably with their lives'. He had no idea of how prophetic his words were when he told Paterson that

John Macarthur, who would later pull corps commander George Johnston's strings during the Rum Rebellion, was then a captain in charge of the company from which the rioters were drawn. He wrote to Hunter seeking to have the charges against his men dropped, after they had expressed ‘their contrition' and ‘sincere concern'. They promised not to act up again, said Macarthur, and to cover the Baughans against any loss they may have suffered. Hunter backed down and the men were admonished by their commanders. However, the severity of that jolly good talking-to was called into question by Macarthur's threats to Dr William Balmain over the matter.

Balmain, a civilian magistrate, had made his way to Baughan's wrecked house to interview him about the attack. Baughan and his wife were so fearful of an another reprisal raid, however, that they refused to cooperate. Balmain played the heavy, threatening to charge them for obstructing his investigation, but they wouldn't be moved. Mrs Baughan in particular was convinced the soldiers would murder her husband at the slightest provocation. Word of Balmain's investigation soon made it up the hill to the barracks and the surgeon found himself in receipt of a letter from Macarthur demanding details of his inquiry. Messengers hurried back and forth across the village with a series of increasingly angry notes as the entire officer corps protested their indignation at the magistrate's ‘shamefully malevolent interference' in their affairs. Balmain, who knew only too well that Macarthur lay behind all this, challenged him to a duel, calling him a ‘base rascal and an atrocious liar and villain'.

In reply Balmain received a lesson in solidarity from Macarthur's brother officers. They wrote collectively, rejecting his claim that his quarrel was only with Macarthur. The abuse previously heaped on him was in fact the opinion of the
whole
corps. They regarded his conduct with the ‘highest degree of contempt and indignation'. And if he had a problem with that and wanted satisfaction, he had only to ask and the corps would appoint ‘an officer for that purpose, and if he should fail in giving Mr Balmain the satisfaction required, another and another will be fixed until there is not one left to explain'. They assured the surgeon that this was no empty threat, that they were all ‘earnest for an opportunity of punishing' him. Balmain, for his part, very wisely chose not to fight a rolling series of pistol duels with every officer of the regiment.

This dispute was not just a lot of pompous boofheads standing on a ridiculous code of personal honour. It was a forewarning of the deep rift developing between the town's two most important power centres: the civil administration centred on Government House, and the military–commercial complex nominally centred on the officers' barracks but essentially directed by one man, Macarthur. He was not the only officer to engage in trade and farming of course. The strength of the officers came from their acting in concert. But none acted with more audacity or ruthlessness than John Macarthur. He had organised one of the combine's first trading forays in October of 1792, when the officers chartered the
Britannia
to buy supplies at the Cape. As inspector of public works in 1799, he virtually ran the colony on behalf of the military. But he was only able to play that role because the acting governor, Francis Grose, had largely abandoned his post and its powers.

Grose was not what you would call a dynamic sort of guy. No sooner had he settled his wounded butt into Phillip's chair than he was disposing of as many of his responsibilities as good manners would allow. He devolved responsibility for Parramatta to Captain Foveaux, the corpulent, asthmatic military commander of that expanding satellite town. Similar arrangements took effect in Sydney. Civilian control of the colony evaporated with the quick removal from office of the magistrates and their replacement by army officers. For the first time in the history of the colony, rations for the military were increased above those of the convicts. Grose had little taste for discomfort, according to Judge Advocate Collins, and he certainly had no intention of following Phillip's example of vigorous personal leadership. He retired to his predecessor's farm where, he wrote, ‘I live in as good a home as I desire … [with] a sufficiency of everything for my family. The climate, though very hot, is not unwholesome; we have plenty of fish, and there is good shooting.' It was, all things considered, a spiffing way for a chap to see out his autumn years.

Power abhors a vacuum, however, and others rushed in to assume the prerogatives of his office, if not the trappings. Left to their own devices, says Ross Fitzgerald, the military began to arrange colonial affairs to their own benefit. Grose decided that private farms, especially the large holdings of the officers, would be the colony's salvation, granting to his fellow officers thousands of acres and convicts to work them. The man in charge of this process was Macarthur, whom Grose increasingly relied on as an advisor and administrator. Appointed inspector of public works for the Parramatta and Toongabbie areas, Macarthur, whom Grose called ‘the old head on young shoulders', was virtually handed the keys to the colony. He was also the regimental paymaster between 1792 and 1799, an appointment which doubled his own salary and placed him in control of the funds which financed the officers' mercantile ventures.

In Macarthur we find a nemesis for Bligh's Greek tragedy. The sources of power are many: economic, military, religious, social and political institutions are all imbued with their own forms of authority. The activation of such power, however, requires an act of human will. Grose arrived in Sydney with almost unlimited power
on paper
, but he seemed happy to disperse his authority, first ceding it to men like Foveaux and Macarthur, then watching it leach away as they applied it to their own ends. Other governors, Hunter, King and Bligh foremost amongst them, struggled to retain their authority in the face of daily challenges from competing power centres. In John Macarthur greed, treachery, cunning and a monomaniacal gift for self-promotion combined with undeniable business acumen, a razor-sharp mind, and dreams of glory way above his station, to forge the strength of will needed to build an empire from nothing and lay waste to its challengers. He was also fortunate in having married well. His wife Elizabeth was an astute farmer and businesswoman and arguably contributed more to the establishment of Australia's pastoral industry than her troublemaking partner. Indeed, had Elizabeth's wise head been on John's shoulders, the family fortune would probably have been many times greater and the Macarthur name would never have been inextricably linked with infamy and rebellion. Her dial should have been on the old two-dollar note instead of her scheming husband's.

Almost every governor who encountered Macarthur had trouble with him. Reprimanded by Phillip, he withdrew from all social contact with Government House, this while still a mere lieutenant. Grose, who gave him as much land and autonomy as he could deal with, had an easier time of it. But Hunter, the next naval officer to try to rule the colony, quickly fell out with the now Captain Macarthur after attempting to reverse some of the policies by which Grose had entrenched the military autocracy. Macarthur then ‘sent serious criticisms of Hunter's administration directly to the secretary of state and military commander in chief', precipitating Hunter's recall to England. Hunter's official caution that ‘scarcely anything short of the full power of the Governor would be considered' by Macarthur as sufficient was echoed by the next governor he tormented, King. Governor King sent the ‘perturbator' back to London for a court martial after Macarthur had shot his own commanding officer in a very dodgy duel, King writing: ‘Experience has convinced every man in this colony that there are no resources which art, cunning, impudence and a pair of basilisk eyes can afford that he does not put in practice to obtain any point he undertakes …' and ‘that if Captain Macarthur returns here in any official character it should be that of Governor, as one half of the colony already belongs to him, and it will not be long before he gets the other half'.

Relentless pressure, confrontation, subterfuge and violence were all well within Macarthur's tactical range. Besides the duel with his commander which led to his initial exile from Australia, he also drew his pistol on the master of the convict transport which carried him to Sydney, shooting a hole in his greatcoat on the Old Gun Wharf at Plymouth Dock. He would boast later to Governor Ralph Darling that he had ‘never yet failed in ruining a man who had become obnoxious to him'; and his long-running feud with Judge-Advocate Richard Atkins, himself a rogue of the first order, stands as a near-perfect example of how to wage a savage campaign of personal vituperation. Atkins, a ‘tall, fine-looking, over-rosy and middle-aged gentleman, prepossessing in appearance, engaging and easy in manner' vied with Bligh for the honour of being Macarthur's most hated adversary, although this didn't redeem him much in the judgmental governor's eyes. In 1807 Bligh described Atkins to the Home Office as ‘the ridicule of the community'. He said that Atkins had passed sentences of death ‘in moments of intoxication'.

To Atkins, the high born legal officer who was finally humiliated during the rebellion, must go the honour of one of the most withering attacks on Macarthur's character after the latter, a mere draper's son, charged him with a catalogue of crimes in an early feud:

Atkins was wrong as it turned out. The day of retribution was a long way off for Macarthur, who returned from his banishment to London in triumph, having convinced the authorities that far from being punished for shooting up a superior officer, he should instead be given five thousand acres of prime grazing land and thirty convicts to work it so that he might establish a colonial wool industry.

While he deftly turned to his own advantage an episode which would have ended in ruin for anyone else, Macarthur's enforced absence between November 1801 and June 1805 coincided with a further atomisation of Sydney's power structure which he could not control or even respond to. Although a succession of governors had been unable to check the rising commercial influence of the officers' cartel, a couple of former convicts and one free settler proved themselves more than capable.