A Commonwealth of Thieves (11 page)

As for any dream of log cabins, those cutting the tall trees found the timber incorrigible—resistant to adze and plane, knotty, and with a mind of its own, a wood indifferent to European purposes. Hunter had hoped to use local eucalypts for repairs to
Sirius,
but found them unsuitable. “We were here in the middle of a wood in which were trees from the size of a man's arm to 28-feet in circumference, but they were either so very crooked, so rent or so rotten in the heart that we could scarcely get one sound or serviceable in a dozen.” Surgeon White, who had sufficient patients to attend to, would have time to declare of this wood that “repeated trials have only served to convince me that immediately on immersion it sinks to the bottom like a stone.” Clearly, it was not amenable.

Something else momentous but without ceremony occurred: public stock, including one bull, four cows, one bull-calf, one stallion, three mares, and three colts, largely acquired in Cape Town, was landed on the east side of the cove. A range of Western Europe's useful beasts was herded for the first time on this shore, the cattle under the care of a convict named Edward Corbett. The Eora had not presented themselves in any numbers at Sydney Cove yet, but to those natives who observed the inlet, these must have seemed drastically new items in zoology.

On 29 January 1788, when Phillip landed at Spring Cove just inside North Head, twelve natives crowded round the boats, anxious to inspect the newcomers, these owners of fabulous beasts and floating islands. It was the first contact between the races within Port Jackson. The sailors mixed with the native men, who were “quite sociable, dancing, and otherwise amusing,” but who kept their women well away. The whites could not persuade any of the natives to return with them to the settlement at Sydney Cove, but John Hunter found the Port Jackson inhabitants a “very lively and inquisitive race,” straight, thin, well-made, small-limbed, active and very curious.

Phillip was anxious to get the male convicts to work as soon as possible. In his ideal settlement, the convicts would work for the government from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, with a half-day on Saturdays, and then have spare time to grow vegetables or pursue some other useful task thereafter. By 30 January, the first official work party of convicts was put to breaking ground for a garden and farm on the slope of the east side of the cove and just over the hill, in what became known as Farm Cove. As the tools were handed out by the conscientious and always stressed storekeeper, Andrew Miller, the convicts, directed amongst others by Phillip's manservant, Henry Dodd, showed little enthusiasm. The first breaking of sod by some anonymous shoveller in Sydney Cove was unattended by ceremony nor by wry comments on the fact that the earth furthest from Europe was being broken by Europe's lowest, most reviled hands. The urban convicts immediately proved themselves to be the worst, resistant to the cries of Dodd and the convict supervisors to put their bodies into what was to them the alien task of digging and farming. One convict supervisor was a young farmer named James Ruse, who had stolen two watches and stood trial on the edge of his native Cornish moors at Bodmin. But even men as likeable as James Ruse became the enemy to the other convicts once they were put in a supervisory role. The phrase “Kiss my arse!” was a popular one in Sydney Cove—it appears in the records of the judge-advocate's court as standard badinage, and may well have been uttered that penultimate January day in Farm Cove.

Even so, that first slovenly attempt at making a government garden had been a moment much looked forward to by Arthur Phillip, and was significant in that it was an early instance in which the realities of the new society were forced upon him. The earth proved rocky, full of lumps of sandstone. Officers, and the occasional convict stonemason, thought that the yellowish sandstone was comparable to Portland stone and suitable for working. But in the bush around the cove there were no limestone deposits for cement.

The lime trees, the lemons, the oranges, the figs and grapes which had been picked up in the Cape were slowly planted out in the government farm, but marsupial rats emerged at night and devoured them. Phillip's sleep beneath the canvas of his temporary residence was restless, since he suffered from these truths as much as from the chronic renal pain familiar to many of those subjected to the traditional salt-rich seagoing diet.

“The officers who composed the detachment are not only few in number,” Phillip would write to Lord Sydney, “but most of them have declined any interference with the convicts, except when they are employed for their own particular service.” He had imagined them willingly taking at least a monitoring and encouraging role in the work of convicts, but the officers believed “that they were not sent out to do more than the duties of soldiers.” So Phillip was obliged to put trustworthy convicts, such as the young, good-looking, well-liked Henry Kable, into supervisory roles. Kable would become a superintendent of the women prisoners.

The chief stickler on such issues remained Major Robbie Ross, commander of marines and lieutenant-governor. If he looked on Port Jackson and Sydney Cove and environs with a far more jaundiced eye than other officers, it was partly because he still found Phillip so annoyingly secretive about his intentions. Ross seemed lieutenant-governor in name only, and indeed, if Phillip died, he was according to the Orders-in-Council to be succeeded not by Ross but by Captain Hunter.

Ross was not such a by-the-book fellow, however, when it came to his personal life, and on Captain Shea's death soon after landing he made his own son, John Ross, a child just about to turn ten, a volunteer lieutenant, a rank he hoped would be confirmed ultimately by the Admiralty with appropriate back-pay benefits.

By contrast with feverish Major Ross, one historian has compared Phillip as a figure to the shark, a totemic animal of most coastal or island Pacific peoples, a master of life and bestower of death, inscrutable but reliable in all instincts, an enforcer of nature's rules, ruthlessly just to the level of blood sacrifice, and secretive by very necessity. Phillip was as mysterious a creature to Ross as he was to the convicts.

In the tents placed for the sick on the west side of the cove, beneath the rocky, bush-embowered sandstone ledges, Surgeon White admitted with some concern that, after the preventive medical success of the fleet, the numbers of sick were increasing. Scurvy, dormant on the ships, suddenly manifested itself in some of the convicts now that they had landed, and dysentery as well. This phenomenon of voyagers becoming ill when ashore after long journeys had been commonly noted. In that late January heat Surgeon White's sicker patients sat out on blankets in the sun and raised their mouths to bite off the air. White complained that “not a comfort or convenience could be got” for the sick in those first days, and his frustration was compounded by a quarrel with his querulous young Scottish assistant, William Balmain, a long-standing temperamental conflict that had begun with a professional argument in Portsmouth months before.

Lest the sailors on the two naval vessels—
Sirius
and
Supply
—begin to eat into the public stores not yet landed, and in preparation for any future travels, Phillip appointed for the use of
Sirius
an island not far from the public farm, a “Garden Island” as it soon became known, on which to grow vegetables for the crew's consumption. Soon Ralph Clark would start using another island, Clark Island, in Port Jackson, as a vegetable garden, and despite its relative distance down-harbour from Sydney Cove, it would sometimes be plundered by boat crews, and by hungry convicts swimming out there.

There was no priority to build a prison stockade in Sydney Cove. It had always been the plan that the environs would serve as walls to a great outdoor prison. The strange hinterland would be the chief guard and overseer. The First Fleet convicts were in the ultimate panopticon, where strangeness hemmed them in, and the sky aimed its huge blank blue eye at them. And yet from the day of landing onwards, a number of male prisoners walked the seven miles along a native track down to Botany Bay to bespeak the Frenchmen, and to plead political asylum or offer services as sailors.

Lieutenant Bradley, the teacher from the Naval Academy at Portsmouth, had been out surveying the shoreline of Port Jackson, and found on the north side twelve miles of snug coves and—as in Sydney Cove—good depths of water and freshwater streams entering many of the harbour's inlets. At his task, working in sounding from a longboat, he became aware that the northern shore of Port Jackson, and the southern shore too, down-harbour, carried a considerable population of Eora, “Indians … painted very whimsically with pipe clay and red ochre.” He came to notice that all the women they met had two joints at the little finger on the left hand missing. “It was supposed by some to be the pledge on the marriage ceremony, or of their having children.” Most of the men had lost a front incisor tooth and were highly scarred. Their spears were twelve to sixteen feet in length, and they walked very upright.

In between making his own observations, on 1 February Governor Phillip took his friend King aside by the door of his canvas house to discuss in detail the sending of a few people and some livestock in the
Supply
to settle Norfolk Island, the landfall 1,000 miles out in the Pacific which Cook had found and whose pines and flax plants seemed to offer the resource both of masts and of flax— “strategic commodities” as one historian would call them, as crucial as oil would be to later states. The recent problems of the Royal Navy in acquiring masts and canvas from the Baltic, and under the French blockade of the American colonies during the recent revolution in America, might be solved by Norfolk Island. Thus a potentially exciting opportunity to adjust the balance of the navy's resources seemed to lie ahead for young Mr. King.

But Phillip asked King, before he went away, to slip down south to Botany Bay and visit the illustrious Frenchman La Pérouse. The excursion was no doubt partly a spying expedition. Phillip wanted King to fool La Pérouse about the scale of the supplies the British in Sydney Cove possessed by offering him “whatever he might have occasion for.”

So at three o'clock in the morning of 2 February, King and the astronomer, Dawes, set out by longboat with some marines for Botany Bay. King would report that they were received aboard the French flagship by the Comte with the greatest politeness. After King had delivered Phillip's message, La Pérouse sent his thanks to the governor and made the same formal offers of help, La Pérouse playing the game Phillip had set up by saying exaggeratedly that he would be in France in fifteen months time and had three years' stores aboard, and so would be happy to oblige Mr. Phillip with anything
he
might want. He reported that a number of the male convicts had already visited and offered to serve aboard the French ships, or had pleaded for asylum, but that he had dismissed them all with threats and a day's provisions to get them back to Sydney Cove. If convict women, once landed at Sydney Cove, should present themselves, they would be treated in the same manner. Indeed, La Pérouse would write that “
les déserteurs nous causèrent d'beaucoup d'ennui et d'embarras
[the deserters caused us a lot of trouble and embarrassment].”

Yet a French-born convict named Peter Paris went missing and
was
hidden by sympathetic Frenchmen in La Pérouse's vessels. Having disappeared from Sydney Cove in February 1788, he would later be lost in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) with La Pérouse himself and all the other members of the French expedition.

Before that happened, however, Monsieur de Clonnard, the captain of the
Astrolabe,
made a return visit to Sydney Cove and again told Collins and others he was frequently visited by convicts. Abbé Monges, a scientific priest, accompanied de Clonnard on the visit, and Clark entertained the
abbé
by letting him look at the butterflies and other insects he was collecting for his wife, Betsy Alicia.

The stiff politeness between English and French had never been so remotely played out as here, in Warrane, Sydney Cove. The same could be said of the death in Botany Bay of the Franciscan friar-cum-scientist, Fr. Receveur, who would be buried on the foreshore and whose grave would be periodically tended by the British.

But basically, Phillip wanted the French gone, so that British New South Wales could establish itself in isolation.

eight

A
ND NOW SOCIETY IN
New South Wales really began. The convict women came up from the prison decks to be landed on 6 February. On
Lady Penrhyn,
Surgeon Bowes Smyth was happy to see them taken off in the ship's longboats, beginning at five o'clock in the morning. Those with goods, portmanteaux, or duffel bags full of clothing, decorations, and hats, which had been carried in the holds, were handed their property and toted or wore it ashore, in combination with their well-worn penal clothes. “Some few among them,” said Bowes Smyth, “might be said to be well dressed.”

How silent the ships must have suddenly seemed to the sailors, as if the life had gone out of them. The women were landed on the western side of Sydney Cove, where bedraggled canvas and some huts of wattle and bark delineated their camp. The last of them landed at six o'clock on what would prove to be a typical summer evening, still and hot, but promising a southerly squall. “The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed,” said Bowes Smyth. At the same time a number of suddenly lonely sailors from the transports also came ashore, bringing grog with them, and the marines were unable or unwilling to keep the women separate.
Lady Penrhyn
's crew, in particular, joined in one mass outdoor party, Sydney's first fëte of hedonism.

“It is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot which continued through the night,” wrote Bowes Smyth. The evening had turned humid and thunderous, the sentinel in front of Major Ross's marquee being so intimidated by lightning that he abandoned his post and ran in to join the gentlemen Major Ross and Lieutenant Clark as they were eating a wild duck Clark had shot that day. While the night proceeded, one potent stroke of lightning would kill six sheep, two lambs, and a pig, all belonging to Major Ross.

The great Sydney bacchanalia went on despite the thunderstorm. Fists were raised to God's lightning; in the name of the Tawny Prince and in defiance of British justice, the downpour was cursed and challenged, and survival and utter displacement were celebrated in lunges and caresses. “The scene which presented itself at the time, and during the greater part of the night, beggars every description. Some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing, not in the least regarding the tempest, though so great that the thunder shook the ship….”

There is little doubt either that some women were by dark safely with mentors. The forceful young Cockney Jewish convict Esther Abrahams was the passion of twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant George Johnston, a Scot severely wounded by the French as a fifteen-year-old in 1780 but now returned to manhood's bloom. The alliance between Scot and Jewish girl would ultimately lead to marriage. Jewish immigrants had begun arriving in England from Eastern Europe and Tsarist pogroms from the seventeenth century onwards, and settled in such London areas as Wapping and Spitalfields. Esther had been aged about twenty at the time of her seven years transportation for stealing lace to the value of 50 shillings, and at the time Lieutenant Johnston became interested in her, she had already given birth to a daughter in Newgate and brought her on board the
Lady
Penrhyn.

Margaret Dawson from the
Lady Penrhyn,
a seventeen-year-old Lancashire girl who had stolen clothing and jewellery to the death-earning value of 22 pounds 18 shillings from her master and taken it away with her on the Liverpool coach, joined her lover, Assistant Surgeon Balmain, a twenty-six-year-old Scot. Dawson must have been very pretty, since the Old Bailey trial documents explicitly note her youth and beauty as reasons for her being saved from the scaffold.

There were grounds for a riotous, desperate party of some sort. The women had been on their ships a deranging eight months. Their sentences were now terminal—they had arrived inextricably in this outlandish and humid summer place. They would be buried in sandstone-strewn earth in this unfamiliar and inscrutable region amongst the angular and tortuous eucalyptus trees. Their frenzy was that of people ejected from the known world and making a rough, brutal bed in the unknown one.

Surgeon Bowes Smyth was an evangelical Christian, and so easier to render aghast than some, such as the less outraged Watkin Tench, who wrote (inaccurately), “While they were on board ship, the two sexes had been kept most rigorously apart; but, when landed, their separation became impracticable and would have been, perhaps, wrong. Licentiousness was the unavoidable consequence and their old habits of depravity were beginning to recur. What was to be attempted? To prevent their inter-course was impossible, and to palliate its evils only remained. Marriage was recommended.” That was the voice of the Enlightenment, not of the fervent. Social good might arise from a regulated mingling of the sexes, and licentiousness was to be abhorred not so much as an abomination in God's eyes but as a threat to reason and good order.

But before the Reverend Johnson was to perform the first marriages, civil governance had to be officially commenced. The orgy prevailed until the dripping, thundery small hours of 7 February, but by noon that same day civic formalities took hold. All the marine officers, their metal gorgets glistening at their throats, took post before their companies, which marched off the rough-hewn parade ground to adjoining ground especially cleared for the occasion, “whereon the convicts were assembled to hear His Majesty's commission read.”

Bowes Smyth and Collins describe a scene that seems ridiculous if abstracted from its symbols and rituals, and the inherent beliefs of its more significant participants. Phillip, having dressed in his full uniform of post-captain and wearing his British and Portuguese awards on his breast, emerged from his palazzo of canvas and proceeded to the ceremonial ground at the head of the cove. Upon arrival, he took off his hat and “complimented” the marine officers, and the marines lowered their colours and paid him respect as governor. The marines then formed a circle around the convicts, who were ordered to sit down like so many school children on the ground. A camp table had been set up with two red leather cases laid on it; they contained the commissions and letters-patent, ready to be unsealed and opened in the sight of everyone present and read by Judge-Advocate Captain Collins.

As Phillip stood by, Captain Collins read aloud the documents signed by King George III and his Cabinet which empowered Phillip in New South Wales. Waves of august language rose and perched in the trees: George III, by the Grace of God King of Britain, France, and Ireland, “to our trusty and well-beloved Arthur Phillip, Esquire.” Never had a more exceptional claim of territory been uttered than in this commission now read amongst the eucalypts and cabbage tree palms, and heard without comprehension by the no doubt observant Cadigal and Wangal clans of the area. Arthur Phillip was to be Captain-General and Governor-in- Chief over New South Wales, which was an area declared to run from the northern extremity of the coast, Cape York, to the southern extremity of South Cape—from 10 degrees South to 43 degrees South, that is, or the southern hemisphere equivalent of from the Tagus River in Portugal to Trondheim in Norway. The claim also extended to all the country inland westward as far as 135 degrees East. What ever was out there, 1,500 miles west of Sydney Cove, a greater distance than London to Moscow, in this document now being read aloud by a captain of marines the Crown claimed it. A massive stretch of earth had been mysteriously transformed. It had become, for the first time, estate and realm.

This claim of George III, released into the sky and certified by Phillip's presence, did not run all the way to what would prove to be the west coast of Australia. Phillip, listening to Captain Collins that humid and hung-over day, with the sun already sucking up the water of the glittering harbour to make the coming evening's thunderstorm, knew well enough that the extent of the claim, the fact that it did not go further than 135 degrees East, made room for the claims of other nations—especially of the Dutch, who had made many landings in what is now called Western Australia. Even though they despised it as a desert coast and had not yet claimed it, their sensitivities had to be respected. And the Portuguese had a long-standing claim on Timor, with which George III and his ministers saw no reason to quarrel, particularly given England's friendly relationship with Portugal. Just the same, it was a massive claim, close to three-fifths of what would later prove a continent of 3 million square miles, and it was uttered in front of such humble and debased and ragtag company, and amidst canvas, wattle-and-daub, and eucalypts.

The name “Australia,” meaning “Southland,” was not mentioned. In 1569 and 1570, respectively, Mercator and Ortellius used the terms
Continens
Australis
and
Australia Continens.
Discovering Vanuatu in 1606, Pedro Fernandes de Quirós had posited a southern continent named
Australia de
Espíritu Santo
or
Australia Incognita.
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the terms
Australia
and
Australis
appeared on maps as an ill-defined given. Cook, finding this eastern coast in 1770, thought of it as part of New Holland but did not know if it was a continent or an archi-pelago stretching away to the west. So he named this east coast New Wales and New South Wales. As a result, in Phillip's commission, the name New South Wales was used, not Australia, which would not then have had international meaning. But the terms New Holland, Botany Bay, and New South Wales soon became interchangeable in the mind of the British public.

Arthur Phillip was, by the commissions and letters-patent, to have the power to appoint officials and administer oaths—he would administer one to Collins before that gentleman began his work as judge-advocate. Phillip had the power to pardon and reprieve, punish offenders, and make land grants to civilians. He was empowered also to create a criminal court, a civil court, an admiralty court, and so on.

The commission read, the marines fired three volleys to seal this extraordinary advent of authority. The light did not change and the air held its humidity, and somewhere in the huge harbour, native women fished from the insecure platforms of their bark canoes. The vast, mute, electric blue sky hung sceptically over the giant claims of the British.

The volleys fired off, Phillip now spoke to his charges—Bowes Smyth used the word “harangued.” He was probably not in the mood for eloquence, and suffered from a certain post-landing depression and the onset of the gritty task. So he offered them no golden promise. By now, he knew that many among them were incorrigible and he said that he was persuaded that nothing but severity would have any effect on them. If they attempted to get into women's tents at night, the soldiers had orders to fire upon them. (This would prove an unenforceable threat.) He had observed that they had been very idle—not more than 200 out of 600 of them were at work. Phillip told his people that labour in Sydney Cove would not be as severe as that of a husbandman in England who had a wife and family to provide for. They would never be worked beyond their abilities, but every individual should contribute his share “to render him-self and community at large happy and comfortable as soon as the nature of the settlement will admit of.” In England, stealing poultry was not punished with death, he said, but here that sort of loss could not be supplied and it was of extreme consequence to the settlement that chickens and other livestock be preserved for breeding. Stealing the most trifling item of stock or provisions therefore would be punished with death. This severity, he said, was contrary to his humanity and feelings for his fellow creatures, but justice demanded such rigid execution of the laws.

This extraordinary executive decision would ultimately scythe down a number of those felons sitting listening to him. On landing, Phillip had implemented his plan to provide full rations from the two years of supplies the ships had brought. Convicts were to receive an equal share to men and officers—7 pounds of salt beef or 4 of pork, 3 pints of dried peas, 7 pounds of flour, 6 ounces of butter, half a pound of rice or, if it were not available, an extra pound of flour weekly. Females, whether marines' or parsons' wives or fallen creatures, received two-thirds of that ration. Phillip had no doubt at all—neither did any officer express an opposite view—that those rations needed to be protected from bullies and thieves by the sanction of death.

But some officials disapproved of the democracy of rations. Talkative Major Robbie Ross thought it appalling to give a lazy or malingering convict the same ration as an industrious one, or as one of His Majesty's marines, or, for that matter, as the governor himself. He complained that the convicts were unduly “sustained by the humanity (I might have said folly)” of the government. Personal industriousness should be encouraged by imposed hunger, and industry should also be rewarded.

Phillip knew that chaos and a wild unofficial market in food would result from an inequity in the rations. He was also aware from long naval experience of inspecting opened barrels of rations that the contents were never as copious in reality as they were on paper. The weight of beef and pork was enhanced in many cases by bone and fluid, and the meat, so mummified that sailors and convicts called it “mahogany,” shrank to a much lower weight when cooked. The butter was inevitably rancid and the weight of flour and rice included plentiful weevils. Phillip also knew that rations would soon need to be reduced unless the hinterland and the harbour proved unexpectedly to be bounteous sources of food. Indeed, the first reduction of twelve pounds per every hundred pounds of beef, and eight pounds in every hundred pounds of pork, would be ordered within seven weeks.