Read Leviathan Online

Authors: John Birmingham

Leviathan (4 page)

BOOK: Leviathan
6.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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 three 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.'

Tench had the ‘tiresome and disagreeable' duty of inspecting all the letters written to or from his charges. He found it a heavy burden but centuries on he provides a useful glimpse into those hearts and minds held shackled and mute in the darkness below decks. The great number of letters surprised him, and though the tone varied ‘according to the dispositions of the writers' they all worried about ‘the impracticability of returning home, the dread of a sickly passage and the fearful prospect of a distant and barbarous country'. Tench, a sympathetic observer of human frailty, was certain that this ‘apparent despondency proceeded in few instances from sentiment. With too many,' he argued ‘it was, doubtless, an artifice to awaken compassion and call forth relief, the correspondence invariably ending in a petition for money and tobacco.'

The arc of these lives, over 1000 convicts and their keepers, had been entirely deflected from their normal course on 18 August 1786, when the Home Secretary Lord Sydney wrote to the Treasury authorising the first unsteady steps on a journey to the far side of the world. While Sydney's memo formally set the creaky wooden engines of state to work on founding a jail within the harbour which would bear his name, history had channelled events towards that point many years earlier. When George Washington and crew kicked King George III's worthless royal butt out of North America they not only fathered the United States but also became distant uncles to Australia. No longer able to export its criminal classes to the American colonies, the British government annexed a whole continent for a prison.

Some writers have tried to decode a secret history within the white settlement of Australia, peering beyond the cover story to discern deeply buried strategic agendas: a bid to deny the French a stranglehold over the Pacific, a supply base for pine and flax, a naval station to harass the Spanish off South America. In writing to request the East India Company's help in mounting the First Fleet, Lord Sydney did say the colony would help prevent the emigration of other European powers to the area, an occasion ‘which would be attended with infinite prejudices to the Company's affairs'. But whilst some strategic, military and commercial considerations no doubt played upon the minds of those planning the colony, a stone cold fact remains at the heart of any retrospective embroidery: the city was not established as a military stronghold or a commercial depot but as a far flung desolate jail.

The involvement of the insanely powerful East India Company – the Microsoft of its day – was not unusual. No permanent naval body was ever created to manage the business of convict transportation to Australia. The government contracted out each convoy and shipment to private enterprise, the rationale being that commercial vessels could dump their human cargo then pick up a paying consignment of tradeable goods such as tea or spices on the way home, offsetting the cost of a global journey. Thus, when the government first settled on the idea of unloading its surplus criminal population they approached the directors of the East India Company to tender for the job. The company was certainly large enough to handle the assignment and its charter seemed to indicate that New South Wales fell within the territory ceded to it anyway. On 19 September 1786, they accepted the First Fleet contract.

The fleet initially consisted of ten vessels: two warships, the
Sirius
on which the commander's flag flew and
Supply
, an armed tender; five prison ships:
Alexander
,
Charlotte
,
Friendship
,
Scarborough
and the slow-moving, clumsy
Lady Penrhyn
; and three freighters,
Borrowdale
,
Fishburn
and
Golden Grove
to carry the bulk of the colonists' stores and provisions. Another convict transport, the
Prince of Wales
, with its consignment of forty-nine females and one lone, lucky captive male – a burglar named George Youngson – was added later.

These ships were no wind driven racing chariots. They were young, strong vessels – three were launched in 1786, the year the fleet was conceived – but they were nothing like the sleek, fast clippers which ran between Portsmouth and Sydney in later years. They were small, tiny in fact, given the scale of the undertaking.
Alexander
, the largest, measured just over thirty-four metres in length and nine across. And that was an extreme measurement which overstated the actual space available to her passengers.
Supply
, the minnow of the fleet, stretched all the way out to twenty-one metres, confining her travellers to a space little bigger than a cricket pitch. Blunt-nosed, fat-bellied and flat-bottomed, the fleet ships would wallow in the high seas like hapless wooden whales.

Into their holds went convicts, marines, officers, seamen, wives and children along with the food, stores and equipment needed to sustain so many lives for two years. Phillip did not think the months spent at anchor taking on these supplies excessive, and indeed when he gave the signal to weigh anchor and lay on sail for the great unknown, there were still serious shortfalls in the inventory – notably, adequate clothing for the female prisoners and ammunition for the marines. That there were such shortfalls should not be surprising. The ships were already crammed to bursting point. From dawn until dusk, for week after week, convoys of heavily laden ferries and barges had trawled back and forth to service them as they lay off Portsmouth, settling lower and lower into the water. Jammed up hard against the human travellers were scores of penned animals, sheep, pigs, chickens and geese. Those passengers with the freedom to move around had to squeeze past forty-five tonnes of tallow, eight hundred sets of bedding, hundreds of boxes of seeds, ten blacksmiths' forges, seven hundred steel spades, seven hundred iron shovels, seven hundred garden hoes, seven hundred felling axes and two hundred canvas beds. Dozens of scythes for hacking through weeds and wheat were hauled over the sides with dozens of razors for scraping off stubble. Beef, bread, potatoes and pease porridge came on board with coal, tents, boots and bayonets. Ten thousand bricks, eight thousand fish hooks and three quarters of a million nails were packed in tight with thousands of boxes and bags of sundry items.

The claustrophobic crush was made worse by the renovations carried out to turn mercantile traders into secure, sea-going prisons. Philip Gidley King, second lieutenant of the
Sirius
and later a governor of the colony described the security. Very strong, thick wooden walls, studded with nails and punctuated by loopholes to fire through in case of ‘irregularities', were run across the lower decks behind the mainmast. The hatches were secured by crossbars, bolts and heavy oak stanchions. Above, in the fresh air, a wooden barricade about a metre high ‘armed with pointed prongs of Iron', divided the soldiers and ship's company from the convicts. Sentinels and armed guards hovered around hatchways and up on the quarterdeck to ‘guard against any surprise'. Watkin Tench reported that as the convicts were embarked the opportunity was taken ‘to convince them in the most pointed terms that any attempt on their side either to contest the command or to force their escape should be punished with instant death'. Cannons loaded with grapeshot and pointed down the hatchways into the prisoners' quarters backed up the stern words.

In spite of all this, a rough sort of egalitarianism prevailed. The convicts may have been manacled to each other below decks, but by some measures the marines were little better off. In mid-April their commandant, Major Ross, wrote of grave concerns for his troops aboard the
Alexander
, many of whom were afflicted with a terrible illness. The trouble, thought Ross, lay with their quarters, which were located beneath the seamen's, thereby cutting them off from any fresh air. Their berths were suitable only for storing provisions, he wrote. They lived in a funk ‘rendered putrid' long before they breathed it in. Apparently even convicts couldn't be stashed away down there. During the last week and a half in March the ship was evacuated and cleaned out.

On 7 May, when Phillip arrived from London keen expectation swept through the assembly whose enthusiasm had been blunted by previous delays. Officers and common men bent themselves to their tasks with renewed vigour. But when at last, on the morning of 12 May, the fleet commander ran up the flags to signal departure, nothing happened. The ships' masters had withheld many months' pay from their men, hoping to gouge them with inflated prices for supplies bought from ships' stores whilst at sea. A day was lost sorting out the dispute, with some of the men being put ashore. At three in the morning the next day, Phillip tried again. This time the sailors followed the signal flags aloft. Their shouts mingled with the rumble of unfurling canvas and, escorted by the frigate
Hyena
, the eleven groaning wooden buckets with their burden of outlaw pilgrims dipped their bows to the waters of the Solent and began to crawl slowly into the west.

BOOK: Leviathan
6.06Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Buchanan's Pride by Pamela Toth
Deadly Little Secret by Laurie Faria Stolarz
The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann
North Reich by Robert Conroy
Longarm #431 by Tabor Evans
Hue and Cry by Patricia Wentworth
As Good as Gold by Heidi Wessman Kneale
Renegade by Nancy Northcott