Leviathan (5 page)

John Hunter, Phillip's second-in-command, reported light breezes and fair pleasant weather through the Channel but was mortified to discover that two of the transports sailed ‘exceedingly bad'; one of them, the
Charlotte
, had to be towed by
Hyena
. Watkin Tench, finding no comfort in his own thoughts, took a midmorning stroll down past the
Charlotte
's barricades to see how the convicts were faring. With most ‘their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land could not be wholly suppressed'. He found the men affected more badly than the women, only one of whom appeared upset. Borrowing from
Paradise Lost
, another tale of man's fall from grace and journey into banishment, he wrote: ‘Some natural tears she dropp'd, but wip'd them soon'.

Good weather and a change of scene, however, soon brought forth some cheer and acceptance of ‘a lot not now to be altered', according to Tench. Adding to the lighter mood came an order from the
Sirius
that the convicts' chains be struck off. Tench took great pleasure in extending ‘this humane order' to all the prisoners under his control. In the evening of that same day, with a high sea running so strongly that Phillip, a very salty old sea dog, could not even sit properly at his table to write, the
Hyena
's crew gave three cheers and withdrew from the convoy carrying some hastily scrawled dispatches.

One of these letters briefly mentioned an attempted mutiny on board the
Scarborough
. Apparently the marines' stern warnings backed up by cannon and bayonet hadn't been enough to dissuade some of the convicts from attempting a revolt. Hunter thought that Phillip's order to strike off the convicts' fetters may have encouraged them. A number of prisoners on the
Scarborough
had hoped to overpower their guards and sneak away from the fleet at night. Given away by a snitch, two ringleaders were taken aboard the
Sirius
, severely flogged and returned to heavy irons. It was the first major excitement of the voyage, although there had already been some minor personal dramas.

Two days after the Isle of Wight fell away beneath the horizon, a marine corporal named Baker took a loaded musket from an arms locker and laid it down for inspection. The gun discharged, firing its ball through his right ankle. The bullet shattered the bones and deflected with enough force to carry on through a cask full of beef and two geese on the other side of it. The geese did not make it to Australia but Baker recovered, returning to duty with full use of the joint just three months later. It was a small, slightly ridiculous harbinger of the dangers and mishaps which lay in ambush over the next eight-and-a-half months.

Some like Ishmael Coleman, went quietly into their good night. Fleet Surgeon John White reported that eight days after
Hyena
had peeled away, Coleman ‘departed this life … worn out by lowness of spirits and debility, brought on by long and close confinement'. The surgeon recorded that the patient resigned his last breath ‘without a pang'. Others were not so fortunate. Jane Bonner, a convict on the
Prince of Wales
, was crushed by a longboat which rolled from its booms and jammed her ‘in a most shocking manner' against the side of the ship. She lingered in agony through the night, dying before White could reach her. Thomas Brown, ‘a very well-behaved convict' by White's own testimony, fell from a bowsprit where he had been hanging washing. The
Charlotte
hove to at once and
Supply
, realising what had happened, bore down as well. But Brown disappeared before help could reach him. Crewmen on the forecastle who saw the accident said the ship ran him down. White's journal is replete with such mishaps, but not all of the victims were innocent. On New Year's Day, with landfall in Australia less than a month away, the boatswain on the
Fishburn
climbed aloft with a head full of grog. The ship was labouring in heavy, chaotic seas and inevitably the fool toppled from high up in the rigging and ‘bruised himself in a dreadful manner'. Already suffering badly from scurvy, his wounds soon mortified, and he died about half an hour after White clambered over the side to attend him.

Diseases such as scurvy and dysentery were much more of a threat to the wellbeing of the convict ships than drownings, shipwreck or accident. Most of those committed to the deep between Portsmouth and Sydney were simply devoured by sickness. Surgeons were constantly scanning their charges for any sign of illness. Sometimes an outbreak was entirely avoidable as when, in mid-July after crossing the equator, several mariners and convicts aboard the
Alexander
suddenly took ill. White climbed into the
Charlotte
's rowboat and made another of his many difficult shuttle visits, immediately discovering where the problem lay: the ship's bilge water. A filthy toxic swill of human waste, rotting food, decaying animals and sea water sloshing around in the lowest parts of the vessel, it had risen high enough to lap over into the living areas. So poisonous was the atmosphere below deck that it turned the brass buttons on the officers' tunics black, and when the hatches were taken off the stench was so powerful the seamen reared back in disgust, scarcely able to stand over them.

The privations of a long sea journey in the late eighteenth century, the fierce environment, the cramped, primitive conditions and the crude nature of medical science all conspired to kill off large numbers of unhealthy travellers. The First Fleet, however, had an excellent health and safety record in comparison with later convoys. The Second Fleet, for instance, lost hundreds of their male passengers en route and more again in the months following their arrival in Sydney. The hot, dark wet weeks spent traversing the equatorial Atlantic were some of the worst, dreaded by medical staff. Wrote White:

Even in the best maintained vessels the atmosphere below decks was still humid and awful. Despite his efforts Surgeon White was called on a number of times to put down eruptions of fever and diarrhoea. One epidemic which appeared a month before Christmas carried off Daniel Cresswell, a marine, who suffered the most acute, agonising pain White had ever witnessed.

In some ways the First Fleet women were in a worse position than the men. Their irrepressible sexuality and the grim prudishness of their masters meant they were boxed up at night in even the hottest climes. At one point White describes an evening rumbling with distant thunder ‘and the most vivid flashes of lightning I ever remember'. The weather was so hot that the female convicts, ‘perfectly overcome by it, frequently fainted away; and these faintings generally terminated in fits'. Unfortunately for the women, the fleet's commanders took such a dim view of ‘the warmth of their constitutions' and ‘the depravity of their hearts' that the hatches over their bunks remained battened down through the night lest they make their way to the seamen's quarters to take their warm, depraved hearts' delight. Their desire to be with the men was so strong that neither shame – considered a negligible modifier in matters of erotic hunger amongst the lower orders – nor the fear of punishment – somewhat more effective – could deter them.

Not that White could talk. Like many of his peers he enjoyed the indulgence of a breathtaking double standard. As Aveling points out, it wasn't the sexual activity of the women which offended the officers. It was their lack of ‘deference'. Most of the officers took a mistress from among the ‘clean' and ‘well behaved' females and a selling point of White's journal was the detail provided of the sexual escapades accessible to His Majesty's far flung officer corps. After docking at Tenerife, a hot dry volcanic island off the north west coast of Africa and the first of three ports of call on the journey, those officers not concerned with restocking the fleet's fresh food and water supply took their liberty in the town. White seems to have been a little unlucky in his wanderings. He testily recorded that the women of the Spanish port were ‘so abandoned and shameless' that it would do an injustice to the prostitutes of London ‘to say they are like them'. Someone had told him all the women of Tenerife had ‘an amorous constitution' and were addicted to ‘intrigue', by which White seems to mean semisecret carnal encounters. The sort, that is, which he seems to have gone without.

At Rio de Janeiro, the next port, thousands of miles south and across the other side of the Atlantic, White mentions the flogging of Cornelius Connell, a private in the marines, ‘for having an improper intercourse with some of the female convicts'. Shortly afterwards he regales us with his trip to a festival on shore, a noisy colourful affair at a church. A band ‘exerted themselves with might and main to please the surrounding audience'. Fireworks and rockets concluded the evening at about ten o'clock, after which White speculated, ‘some intrigues' followed. Both he and Watkin Tench acted on the advice of Daniel Solander, a naturalist on Cook's voyage, who wrote that Rio women exposed themselves at their doors and windows as soon as it became dark, ‘distinguishing, by presents of nosegays and flowers, those on whom they had no objection to bestow their favours'. Walking through the town each night, White and Tench waited for the flowers and the favours to descend. Sadly it was not to be. Tench retained his humour at being misled by Solander's tale. ‘We were so deplorably unfortunate as to walk every evening before their windows and balconies without being honoured with a single bouquet,' he wrote, ‘though nymphs and flowers were in equal and great abundance'. White meanwhile spent more time describing the
señoritas
than the port itself. The sense of a slightly desperate, long deprived sailor stepping ashore with a whole lot of loving to give comes through strongly in his narrative.

He was particularly taken with the local women's fashion of growing their thick, black hair to prodigious length. They wore it plaited and tied up in a kind of club or large lump, which did not complement their delicate and feminine appearance, according to White. However, he did convince a local gentleman he was visiting to have his wife untie her braids which cascaded down and dragged upon the floor as she walked. White offered his services to tie them up again and the mind boggles at the effect on this randy old goat as he ran his gnarled hands through the lengths of sweet, thick, lustrous femininity after months at sea. One can only hope that for the sake of the Royal Navy's honour he kept any excitement to himself.

Whilst at Rio the convicts were strengthened with a daily serve of rice, fresh meat and a generous allowance of vegetables. The tropical port also abounded in fresh oranges, an unbelievable luxury for the outcasts of London's slums and an excellent defence against scurvy. Phillip took the opportunity to make up his inventory shortfall by purchasing extra musket balls for the marines and one hundred sacks of tapioca which came in tough, coarse burlap bags. Just the thing for the female convicts to wear as their own clothing rapidly disintegrated.

At least one convict, Thomas Barrett, demonstrated similar enterprise, minting his own coins below decks and passing them off on unsuspecting Brazilian slaves as legal tender. Barrett, given ninety-nine years for absconding from a previous sentence of transportation, had somehow rigged up a coin press in the bowels of the
Charlotte
. A genuine alchemist, he had turned some old buckles, buttons and pewter spoons into quarter dollars. The finished work was so authentic that had his raw materials been superior, he could have minted himself a fortune. This ingenuity extended beyond counterfeiting to subterfuge. A painstaking search failed to find any trace of his coin press and the officers were left to ponder how Barrett and his accomplices had pulled it off as they were never allowed near a fire, a guard constantly watched over their hatchway and officers walked through the area every ten minutes or so. White was so impressed by their ‘cunning, caution, and address' he could only wish ‘these qualities had been employed to more laudable purposes'. Some evidence of collusion with their overseers came later in the month when a marine received 200 lashes for trying to pass off one of the fake coins on shore.

The fleet departed Rio on 4 September, arriving in Table Bay, Cape Town, on 13 October. Phillip reported a ‘prosperous course' which carried them to the edge of European culture without ‘any extraordinary incidents'. Of course the ghost of poor Thomas Brown who went to hang out his washing and never came back, might disagree. In contrast with the sensual
carnivale
of Rio, the dusty, drought-locked Dutch settlement at the hard southern nub of Africa presented a threadbare farewell to civilization. But a farewell it was. David Collins, the colony's first law officer, admitted to a melancholy reflection on the prospect before them – the abandonment of polite society for the world of savages. Who knew for how long? Years at the very least. All communication with families and friends now unalterably cut off, they sailed into a state unknown and ominous. Their decks and holds were packed even tighter than when they had left Portsmouth. The hard bargaining Dutch, who had initially expressed fears of being unable to supply the English because of a recent famine, eventually produced the desired plants, seed and livestock at a grossly inflated price.