Leviathan (31 page)

Margaret Stevens has observed that, apart from Macarthur, the officers' business activities remained ‘rudimentary and unenterprising, based mainly on the permanent demand for spirits. They made no attempt to anticipate a more sophisticated demand, or to carry the risk this would entail.' Others were not so lethargic. It was considered more than a little
déclassé
for the officers to openly engage in trade, being gentlemen and all, so they had to retain the services of frontmen or women. Some of these cutouts, such as the convicted thieves Simeon Lord and Henry Kable, took to commerce with infinitely more zest and guile than their uniformed masters. Lord, who acted as a retail agent for Lieutenant Thomas Rowley, used his experience to set up as an auctioneer and wholesaler after 1800, providing visiting ships with an alternative outlet to the officers' syndicate which had long skimmed the cream off the high prices of imported goods. About the same time Kable, who had kept shop for a number of officers, went into business with James Underwood, a boat builder who had arrived on the
Admiral Barrington
in 1791. Kable and Underwood launched themselves into the sealing industry, using vessels built in Underwood's yard on the Tank Stream, and by 1804 they were employing sixty men and gathering up to thirty thousand skins a year from Tasmania.

The most important economic development of that period, however, was the arrival of a free man, a merchant and trader by the name of Robert Campbell, the same Campbell who rushed from Government House on the night of the rebellion, responding to the screams of Bligh's daughter Mary as she attempted to block the charge of the main guard. Campbell was an honest Scotsman, fair-minded, brave and charitable. He was the youngest surviving son of the laird of Ashfield and at the age of twenty-seven took sail for India to join his brother in the family's colonial business. He passed through Sydney in 1798, scouting for opportunities, and returned with a speculative cargo in February 1800. Campbell must have been a far-sighted man to see the commercial promise of a poor, remote village surrounded by dry, dull-looking forest and serviced by one rickety wooden wharf. The month he arrived to establish a new branch of his company, the total white population of Australia was less than 5000 and Sydney's share of that but a fraction. The people who made up this potential market were a deeply unimpressive crew, many of them near permanently drunk on the 50 000 gallons of hard liquor which had arrived in just the previous four months. Campbell had chosen to hazard the family silver on a prison town which could not afford to build a new jail. As the summer southerlies pushed his ship up the side of the continent, Governor Hunter worried about the lax arrangement for storing the colony's gunpowder, given all of the Irish troublemakers who had been arriving recently. The Reverend Marsden was grumbling to the Duke of Portland that ‘Satan's Kingdom seems to be so fully established and his power and influence so universal among us that nothing but an uncommon display of Almighty power can shake his throne'.

The less than impressive state of Campbell's local market was mirrored in the chaotic regulatory structure within which he would have to operate. The legal system of the hybrid prison society was arbitrary, untrustworthy and run by some truly underwhelming judicial minds. For instance, as Campbell prepared to sell his cargo from the
Hunter
, Joseph Holt, a recently arrived Irish rebel, tried to sue Captain Salkeld of the
Minerva
for sixty guineas which had been paid for the passage of Holt's son. Instead of allowing the boy to stay with his parents, Salkeld had insisted on quartering him with the sailors and had then made him work through the voyage. Holt sued for a refund of the fare and for the wages his son should have been paid. However, having been warned about the town's judge, Richard Dore, Holt kept watch late one night and spied Dore receiving a bribe of ‘a ferkin of butter, a cheese and five gallons of spirits' from Salkeld. Unsurprisingly, the judge trashed Holt's case, saying he and his family were just convicts. Holt, who had not actually come to Sydney as a convict, protested and the judge ordered him to shut up. Holt tried again and Dore had him thrown out of court, saying his conduct was a perversion of justice and if he said another word he'd be committed to jail. In explanation of Dore's behaviour (assuming the free cheese wasn't to blame), he'd probably drunk more than his fair share of those 50 000 gallons of rum which were sloshing around town and he was in the middle of slowly and painfully carking it. At any rate, this was not the sort of predictable, rule-based environment in which your average businessman prefers to operate.

Campbell had entered an economy which had no money and no certainty, where the courts, such as they were, had been thoroughly contaminated and abused by the town's contending power players. The workforce, drawn largely from Britain's urban centres, was demoralised and unsuited to agrarian pursuits. A military cartel controlled much of the primitive trade and financial markets. And tens of thousands of nautical miles, haunted by privateers and hostile foreign warships, lay between Campbell's Sydney outpost, the family's Indian operations and their metropolitan headquarters back in the UK. In the face of all this, Campbell prospered. The wharf and warehouses he raised were the finest in the harbour and by 1804 held £50 000 worth of merchandise, which was ‘worth more than all the paymaster's bills drawn during the seven or eight years of the officers monopoly'. Campbell amassed this fortune through the revolutionary practice of paying a fair price to his suppliers and taking only a small margin from his customers. He offered credit at generous rates and took payment in grain. It was a complete departure from the methods adopted by his competitors in the corps who gouged margins of up to 1200 per cent from their captive market, and Campbell proved very popular with both the small settlers and the governors. Two hundred farmers signed a memorial for him in 1804 which stated, ‘But for you, we had still been a prey to the mercenary unsparing hand of avarice and extortion.' He was too powerful for his competitors to destroy, although he was probably lucky that Macarthur had been banished from Sydney for the first years of his company's life. Nobody else had Macarthur's malign genius for destruction and by the time he returned, Campbell's empire had expanded beyond his reach and had, with the help of men like Lord, Kable and Underwood, undermined the hegemony of the corps. Fitzgerald and Hearn summarise the shift neatly:

And the officers, notwithstanding the rise of Campbell and Company, were not quite finished yet.

 

One early meeting between Bligh and Macarthur was a scorcher. The most detailed description comes from Macarthur's testimony at George Johnston's court martial, although we should probably recalibrate this version in light of Macarthur's well-known penchant for lying his arse off. He portrayed himself as something of an innocent little lamb wandering into the mad governor's slaughtering pen; but if you ignore the self-portrait of a delicate petal, bruised by the violence of Bligh's temper, and instead imagine two ferocious egomaniacs turning purple with rage and gobbing poison phlegm into each other's eyes, chances are you'd be right on the money.

Macarthur had approached Bligh about the extravagant promises of land and servants he had been given in London. King had managed to fudge the issue long enough for it to become his successor's problem. About a month after Bligh had taken control of the government, Macarthur rode out to the Governor's residence at Parramatta to front him on the issue. He found Bligh walking in the gardens alone and, seizing the chance, smarmed up to ask whether Bligh ‘had been informed of the wishes of the Government' respecting Macarthur's affairs. He was particularly anxious that Bligh understand the advantages which would accrue to the colony from Macarthur's own ascent to the ranks of the grotesquely rich. The impression created by Macarthur at this point is of a hand-wringing Uriah Heep, desperately trying not to upset the infamous Bounty Bligh's volcanic temper. Upset it he did, however, Bligh exploding in his face, ‘What have I to do with your sheep sir? What have I to do with your cattle? Are you to have such flocks of sheep and such herds of cattle as no man ever heard of before? No Sir!' Macarthur then told the court martial:

Later in the day, with Macarthur still tugging at the Governor's elbow, seeking his indulgence, Bligh burst into another rage, again damning the Secretary of State and screaming violently, ‘He commands at home. I command here'. In the meantime Bligh had upbraided poor old ex-Governor King who was lingering a short while in the colony, abusing his long-suffering, emotionally fractured predecessor so vehemently for indulging Macarthur that he actually burst into tears. In William Bligh, it seemed, Macarthur's unyielding Olympian will had finally met its match. Bligh had arrived in the colony unsure of the extent of his powers but with no doubts about the mission he had been assigned. He was to bend Macarthur and his ilk to the imperial will, and if they would not bend, he was to break them.

The wild energy generated by the clash of these two men and the interests they represented was constrained and intensified by the cramped political structures in which they were forced to make war. Twenty years of ill-considered policies and neglect had created a polity every bit as primitive, crude and harsh as the physical environment in which their battle unfolded. Civil society in convict-era Sydney was to London's political mores and practices as the rough, meandering huts of Soldiers' Row were to the Houses of Parliament. In conception, the governor stood as a facsimile of the king before the Civil War. He was almost an absolute monarch, with the power of life and death over his subjects. Rivalry, folly and indolence, however, soon drained authority from the governor's office, and when Bligh was approached to take the position in 1805 he confessed to his patron Sir Joseph Banks that he had no idea of the limits to his power in the colony. Soon after arriving he seems to have decided there were none, other than the desire of Macarthur and his allies to thwart him. Richard Atkins told Johnston's court martial that Bligh had once fumed at him, ‘The law sir! Damn the law. My will is the law, and woe unto the man who dares disobey it'.

Bligh, in one sense, was right, so flimsy was the legal foundation of British rule. Jeremy Bentham, the legal philosopher and neophyte criminologist, obsessed about the tyranny which he insisted had been unlawfully established within the folds of Sydney Harbour. Bentham described the penal settlement as a system of misgovernment and a nursery of martial law and, examining the laws passed to establish the colony, professed himself astonished. ‘Compared with the immensity of the superstructure,' he wrote, ‘the scantiness of the basis exhibited a Colossus mounted upon a straw.' For the most part, what passed for justice in New South Wales was, to Bentham, ‘so much lawless violence' and the criminality of the convicts was but a trifling matter compared with that of the ruling class. He was less concerned with the outrages of the corps than with the lack of anything approaching liberty or democracy within the remote society. The governor had full legal power over the convicts, he agreed, and considerable authority over the naval and military officers and other ranks. He likewise had some power over the masters and crews of British vessels in the port, and arguably some limited power over foreign vessels which called in. But over the civil officers and the convicts who had served their time, and over free settlers and their families, said Bentham, he had none. The problem was that, as free British subjects, they could not be ruled by the King or his governor without their consent, given through an elected parliament.

Bentham said it was totally repugnant to the constitution and Magna Carta that the King or his representatives should exercise legislative power ‘over English subjects in England, or anywhere else' without the concurrence of Parliament. For whom or what was the protection afforded by Magna Carta intended, he asked? For the inhabitants of the land, or for the soil only; for the flesh and blood, or only for the stocks and stones? ‘Limited as the power of an English King is over Englishmen in England, in what book will he find that it is absolute over them everywhere else?'