A Commonwealth of Thieves (16 page)

I
N
A
USTRALIA
, A
PRIL
is the beginning of autumn but a benign month, characterised in Sydney by daytime temperatures in the early to mid-twenties (20 degrees Celsius), with evening temperatures in the late teens. May brings little more threat of ice to the Sydney autumn, which found Henry Kable and his wife, Susannah, like McEntire, young convicts in a favoured position, dwelling in a hut on the east, less boisterous, side of the stream. Kable wrote, “I am, thank God, very easily situated, never worked one day since I have been here; some officers have been so pleased with my conduct that they continue me in the office of an overseer over the women.” The young couple lived in confidence that some £20 worth of clothes and personal goods bought for them by public subscription in England, and placed on
Alexander,
would be unloaded eventually and given to them. But repeated requests to Captain Duncan Sinclair of the
Alexander
throughout early 1788 failed to uncover anything of theirs except a few books. Though English law theoretically regarded felons as “already dead in law,” the handsome young couple were both great favourites of the officers and useful to the governance of the colony, and David Collins let Kable, the convict, take a civil case, the first in the history of the place, and an assertion of the equality of convicts before the law. Eventually, on 5 July 1788, before the
Alexander
left Sydney Cove, the case would be heard by a civil court summoned by Judge-Advocate Collins, and Provost-Marshal Harry Brewer now had sufficient eminence to ensure the appearance before it of Captain Sinclair. Sinclair being unable to produce the goods collected for the Kables, they received a judgment in their favour to the value of £15.

For young Henry, that court case was a new experience, the first time he saw the law as
his
lever,
his
weapon of equity, and it would never afterwards be far from his hand. Many years later, in 1807, Governor Bligh of New South Wales could claim that Kable and his partners ruined competitors in the nascent New South Wales shipping business “with constant litigation and infamous prosecutions in the courts.” That first of all civil actions in 1788 had given Henry ideas.

Another convict who lived in as privileged a position as the netherworld could offer a felon, in a society where there were not enough public officials to attend to all tasks, was Will Bryant, the former smuggler and attacker of excise men, and now government fisherman. Being a realist, Phillip knew that Bryant would be under pressure from other convicts to create a black market in fish. It was quite possible that one or other of the London convicts might see power and possibility for great leverage in unofficially cornering the fish market in a society where food was the ultimate commodity. To keep Bryant partially insulated from these pressures, a special hut was built for him and for his wife, Mary Broad, on the east side, away from the convict camp, and he was always presented with a portion of the fish he caught. In fact he may have become the first private employer of Sydney Cove, since he had a convict working in his vegetable garden in return for fish. Collins thought him fairly fortunate: “He wanted for nothing that was necessary, or that was suitable to a person of his description and situation.”

Bryant was, however, proud, and considered himself no criminal. He cherished freedom not just as a concept but as a reality, and was aggrieved he did not possess it. Thus he had a raw political sense, and the darkness in Bryant probably reduced the extent to which he was willing to consider himself lucky.

Through another relatively trusted convict, the first European cattle were about to go wild and become strays on the thin topsoils of New South Wales. The convict cow-herder, Edward Corbett, had confessed to a sailor that he had staved off hunger by stealing goods and giving them to another sailor, Kelly, in return for food. Collins committed Kelly in a hearing to trial by a criminal court. Corbett now knew his turn would be next, and ran away into the bush. The same day Corbett ran away, the cattle—four cows and two bulls—strayed from the government farm, a far more grievous loss in the eyes of the administration than was Corbett himself.

Amongst the ark of the First Fleet, these were the first European creatures to go loose in Australia, the first of the hard-hoofed, hard-mouthed beasts in which Europe measured wealth to go out pawing at the ancient Gondwana soil. Corbett similarly was one of the first Europeans to attempt to live off the land and with the Aborigines, but though the Aboriginal groups he ran in with did not treat him with hostility, they did not welcome him either. While wandering in one of the bays near Sydney Cove, looking for his place amongst the Eora, he saw a convict's head which seemed to have been burned, but which he identified as that of Burn, the young man who had run away on the day Ayres was speared while picking native tea and berries. Absconding convicts often made discoveries, horrid or useful, which they stored away to present to the gentlemen if they should have to return.

The worrying disappearance of the cattle occurred on the eve of George III's birthday, 4 June. It would be celebrated that year in places both distant and tenuously retained by the Crown—in Martinique, for example, at Cape Castle in southern Africa, in Canada and in remote princedoms in India. But Phillip, being such an enthusiast for the constitutional monarchy, ensured that nowhere would it be better celebrated than in this most unsubstantial and grotesque of all the King's possessions. At Phillip's canvas house on the day, healths were drunk to the person of the King, certainly, but above all to the Protestant liberties of mind and property for which he stood. Phillip's housekeeper, Mrs. Deborah Brooks, staged a dinner during which the marines' band played patriotic tunes. It was a feast by Sydney Cove standards—Surgeon Worgan lists mutton, pork, ducks, kangaroo, fish, salads, and pies, Portuguese and Spanish wines and English porter. The extended Royal Family was toasted, as well as Pitt's Cabinet, “who, it was observed, may be Pitted against any that ever conducted the affairs of Great Britain.” There did not seem any concern in Phillip's big Antipodean marquee that these paragons of British statesmanship to which the officers were drinking might forget to resupply New South Wales, but the thought must have been there in some minds.

The day “was a little damped by our perceiving that the governor was in great pain,” though “he took every method to conceal it.” He explained that he had intended to lay the first stone and name the town Albion that day, but the lack of progress in breaking the ground and the lack of skilled hands made naming a premature act. But to honour the Royal Family he named the Sydney area the County of Cumberland, the “boundaries of which is Broken Bay to the northward and Botany Bay to the southward as far inland as a range of mountains seen from Port Jackson from the westward.”

The soldiers were given a pint of porter each, on top of their regular ration of grog, and men who had been surviving on the rock named Pinchgut near the east side of the cove were pardoned and brought filthy, scrawny, and haggard back to the cove. About five in the evening an immense bonfire was lit. Convicts had been gathering wood for two days and the eucalypt trees in particular contributed by being great shedders of bark and branches. Worgan thought the bonfire a noble sight, bigger than the one traditionally set that day on Tower Hill in London. A number of convicts formed ranks on the far side of the flames and greeted Phillip with a verse of “God Save the King.”

But the Tawny Prince again took some of the honours that night. The next morning everyone was astonished by the number of thefts that had occurred, in particular from the huts or tents of officers whose servants had been told to keep watch but had wandered away to nearby convict fires for companionable talk and drink. Passionate Captain Meredith of the marines, coming back from the bonfire, found a convict in mid-theft and struck him on the head with a club, disabling him and sending him to hospital. The convict caught so by Meredith, Sam Payton, was a type for which the British public had a lot of time—the gentleman convict, well-dressed and well-spoken. Earlier in the night of the King's birthday, before being stupefied by Captain Meredith's blow, he had stolen shirts, stockings, and combs from Lieutenant Furzer's tent or hut, and had them with him in the swag he was carrying.

Payton spent his time awaiting trial under the care of Surgeon White at the hospital. “I frequently admonished him to think of the perilous circumstances he then stood in.” White suspected he had accomplices and urged him to come up with their names rather than be hung and find oblivion in New South Wales at the age of twenty. With some credibility, Payton claimed that because of his head injury he could not remember robbing Lieutenant Furzer's place, let alone entering Captain Meredith's—though he would suddenly admit to both once sentenced.

As for the missing Corbett, during his nineteen days out of the settlement, he lived chiefly by what he could get by creeping down to the edges of the fledgling town by darkness. When food went missing from the houses of convicts and marines, Corbett was declared an outlaw, a further distinction for him.

On the afternoon of 22 June, while Payton awaited his trial, a brief earth tremor ran through the settlement. It came, said young David Blackburn, master of the
Supply,
living ashore as so many of the ships' company did at that stage to build up their health, “from the south-west like the wave of the sea, accompanied by a noise like a distant cannon. The trees shook their tops as if a gale of wind was blowing.” It was the decisive experience for the wandering Corbett, for he presented himself on the edge of the settlement again and was captured by the governor's perhaps most trusted servant, Henry Dodd, a free man who was already showing considerable skill as an agricultural supervisor of convicts.

The returnee Edward Corbett and gentlemanly Sam Payton appeared before the criminal court and were both condemned to death. They were to be hanged the next day at 11:30 a.m. by the executioner convict, Freeman. Samuel Payton took the time to dictate a florid letter to his mother, wife of a well-respected stonemason in London. He no doubt had half an eye to the poignant impact such a letter would have on the London public, to whom, via inevitable publication, he may have been chiefly speaking. “My dear mother! With what agony of soul do I dedicate the few last moments of my life to bid you an eternal adieu! My doom has been irrevocably fixed, and ere this hour tomorrow I shall have quitted this vale of wretchedness, to enter into an unknown and endless eternity. I will not distress your tender maternal feelings by any long comment on the cause of my present misfortune. Let it therefore suffice to say, that impelled by that strong propensity to evil, which neither the virtuous precepts nor example of the best of parents could eradicate, I have at length fallen an unhappy, though just, victim to my own follies.”

Both Payton and young Corbett “died penaten,” noted Sergeant Scott, Payton in particular addressing the convicts “in a pathetic, eloquent and well-directed speech.” Indeed, Reverend Johnson may well have reached his maximum efficacy at the gallows tree that day, 25 June, since both men prayed fervently, “begging forgiveness of an offended God.” They expressed the hope too that those they had injured would not only forgive them, as they themselves already did all mankind, but would offer up their prayers to a merciful Redeemer. Then they were both turned off by Freeman, the steps taken from beneath first one and then the other, “and in the agonising moments of the separation of the soul from the body,” dangling and jerking, they “seemed to embrace each other.” The execution of these two young men, said White, had a powerful impact on the convicts who watched. The big fig tree of Sydney Cove had become a regular Tyburn.

thirteen

I
N MID-
J
ULY THE
Alexander, Friendship, Borrowdale,
and
Prince of
Wales
all sailed down the harbour and made ready for the journey home under the direction of Lieutenant Shortland, agent for the transports.

Phillip knew that on these vessels, and those already departed, Major Ross and Captain Campbell had sent off letters of complaint on every aspect of his administration, on every issue of hypocrisy. They were directed to people of influence in Britain, especially to Lord Sydney and Evan Nepean. To Evan Nepean, Ross wrote, “Take my word for it, there is not a man in this place but wishes to return home, and we have no less than cause, for I believe that never was a set of people so much upon the parish as this garrison, and what little we want, even to a single nail, we must not send to the Commissary for it but must apply to His Excellency, and when we do he always says there is but little come out [from England], and of course it is but little we get.” To Lord Ducie, Campbell complained, “This man will be everything himself—Never that I have heard of communicates any part of his plan for establishing a colony or carrying on his work to anyone—much less, consult them.” What men like David Collins and Watkin Tench saw as Phillip's admirable composure and prudence, Campbell and Ross saw as selfish and pettifogging remoteness.

There must have been some genuine desperation and stress behind the officially framed pleadings in the dispatches Phillip sent off to Lord Sydney on different returning transports. He hoped, he had told the Secretary of State by the same ships which had carried the complaints of Ross and Campbell, that few convicts would be sent out that year or the next unless they “should have at least two years provisions on board to land with them.” He suggested that putting provisions on one ship and convicts on another “must be fatal if the ship carrying the provisions had been lost.”.

All the provisions, Phillip told Nepean in a private letter, were now in two wooden buildings, which were thatched. Bloodworth had not yet made enough bricks to undertake the building of more substantial storehouses. “I am sensible of the risk,” Phillip had confessed, “but we have no remedy … if fifty farmers were sent out with their families, they would do more in one year in rendering this colony independent of the mother country, as to provisions, than a thousand convicts.” He confided to Nepean also that the masters of the ships had departed with whatever bonds and papers they had received on boarding their convicts in England. Surely this was a mistake not only on the part of the masters but on that of Phillip's office, of what might be called his secretariat, which consisted, after Mr. Commissary Miller gave up his temporary post as the governor's secretary, of David Collins and other occasional auxiliaries like Harry Brewer.

The upshot was, as Phillip admitted to Nepean, that he had no record of the time for which convicts were sentenced, or the dates of their convictions. “Some of them, by their own account, have little more than a year to remain,” he wrote, “and, I'm told, will apply for permission to return to England, or to go to India, in such ships as may be willing to receive them.” But if they decided to remain on the basis of land being granted them, the government would need to support them for at least two years, and it was probable that one half of them would need support even after that period. “If, when the time for which they are sentenced expires, the most abandoned and useless were permitted to go to China, in any ship that may stop here, it would be a great advantage to the settlement.” But that was as close to daydream as Phillip could permit himself to come, for the most abandoned and useless were unlikely to get employment on a visiting vessel.

As the last transports vanished, the sense of isolation which would bedevil New South Wales became entrenched. In many cases it was doubtless expressed by those women ashore who had borne children and who saw their fathers, aloft in rigging, waving futilely (or with some cynical relief) as the transports receded down-harbour for the Heads. Captain Tench was sensitive to the feelings occasioned by the departure, the “anxiety to communicate to our friends an account of our situation,” which only the departing ships could relieve with the letters and reports they carried. Similarly, he wrote understatedly, “It was impossible to behold without emotion the departure of the ships.” But the naval vessels
Supply
and
Sirius,
which were on station at Port Jackson, remained..

The convicts' experience of the world of authority, of the prisons and the hulks, made the idea they would be abandoned in their little huts on this abominably distant foreshore not unlikely to their minds. They did not know, and neither did Arthur Phillip, that one of the factors guaranteeing their future was that the criminal arts had not been diminished in Britain by their removal, that the gaols and hulks were newly, densely crowded. The government, which had thought of Phillip's fleet as perhaps the final answer to overcrowding, now knew it was but a partial relief. The inhabitants of New South Wales—or as the British press still referred to it, Botany Bay—did not know that their strange new domicile would figure more permanently in the plans of the Home Office.

On the three convict transports going home, but not by China—
Alexander, Friendship,
and
Prince of Wales
—the crews suffered from the symptoms of scurvy and diarrhoea, especially of the kind called bloody flux. Surgeons like White had been assiduous in preaching their gospel of fruit and vegetables, but often the sailors, and even the convicts they had left behind in Sydney Cove, preferred their rough, salted food to any form of fruit, which after years of salt overload they found too acidic for their taste. And in any case, Sydney, unlike Rio, did not abound in obviously succulent native fruit. Scurvy sapped the strength of the crew of the
Alexander
and the
Friendship
to such an extent on their journey back to England that the
Friendship
had to be scuttled in the Straits of Macassar on 28 October, and her survivors transferred to the
Alexander.
It would be 28 May 1789 before the
Alexander
arrived off the Isle of Wight. The
Prince of Wales
had gone home by way of Cape Horn and reached Rio with its crew in great distress, but got home at Deptford a little earlier than
Alexander
on 30 April 1789.

These journeys undermined the assumption that scurvy could somehow be held at bay when it came to a long journey out to New South Wales, a sojourn in Sydney, and a return.

T
HE EARTH SEEMED TO
P
HILLIP
resistant to kindly gestures. The first crop that year came from the mere ten to fifteen acres of wheat the convict supervisors had been able to persuade their fellows to plant in Phillip's government farm, and some further acres of corn. Much of the planting had failed to germinate and the crop promised to produce only enough for seed. Phillip calmly attributed the disaster to the seeds' having been overheated on the long journey from England and having been planted under a severe Australian summer sun.

Aware of coming famine after the crop's poor showing, Phillip approached his friend John Hunter and told him he had decided to send Hunter's cranky converted frigate,
Sirius,
to Cape Town “in order to procure grain and at the same time what quantity of flour and provisions she can receive.” He wanted Hunter to leave behind his guns, powder, shot, and other impedimenta to enable the
Sirius
to make as much speed and have as much deck space for supplies as possible.

At the time, Hunter was using an old convict on the task of caulking the ship. The fellow was making a bad job of it, but Hunter was unable to use his carpenter since that gentleman was ashore working non-stop for Phillip, building public and private structures. Captain Hunter was, however, a seaman since childhood, and showed all the alacrity and contempt of low grievance that was the mark of a good officer. The
Sirius
quickly prepared and set out on its emergency mission on 2 October. Because of the wind directions around the south of the earth below 40 degrees, Hunter intended to sail east to Cape Town by way of Cape Horn, and then return to Sydney from the west. That is, he meant to sail around the world, on a track south of 40 degrees, a most gallant undertaking. He and Phillip, at dead of night, when renal pain and discomfort woke the governor in his bed, and dreams of past
Sirius
near-misses woke Hunter in his, must have wondered whether
Sirius
would survive such a circum-global shaking of its timbers.

The departure of
Sirius
left only the tiny
Supply
in Port Jackson, in the harbour which had recently teemed with ships. There must have been hope in the Eora clans that now the great ships had gone, the interlopers might wither. Many of them already showed harrowed faces to the blank bush of the hinter land or the dazzle of Port Jackson. Every year in New South Wales, Collins would later tell his father, a man aged two years. The disintegration of these intrusive white souls might sometimes have seemed almost certain to some native observers, as well as to Phillip and Ross.

But as the Antipodean spring came on, Phillip had plans to spread his hold on the earth, and prepared to send part of the garrison and a number of male and female convicts up the Parramatta River, to the extension of Port Jackson which he had explored the previous spring, to begin a new settlement at Rose Hill, or what would be called, in ordinary daily usage, Parramatta. He was pleased to appoint Major Ross the commandant of this inland settlement fifteen miles from Sydney Cove, and he seems also to have recognised that this major of marines would be competent when less irritated by the presence of a governor who did not treat him like a peer. Secretly, Phillip had decided that Rose Hill would be the place of his principal city, because it was surrounded by good farming land and “was beyond the reach of enemy naval bombardment,” a reference to a grievance Ross had held against him during the previous months in Sydney and had complained to the Home Secretary about—that the marines had no point, or stronghold, where they could muster and resist civil unrest or enemy attack.

Ross and a garrison of twenty marines occupied the open ground by the banks of the Parramatta below Rose Hill, and Governor Phillip and the Surveyor General, Augustus Alt, accompanied by further marines and convicts, travelled to Rose Hill and marked out the town. Alt was a mature soldier with an expertise in surveying, more aged than Phillip, but like him a man raised in a German household. Phillip and Alt were able to converse in German as they worked at this pleasant task of city-making on the banks of the Parramatta. There, Phillip hoped, harvests might rise to feed his felons and his soldiers.

M
UTUAL SMALL CONFLICTS BETWEEN
the Eora and the settlers continued. On Thursday 21 August, two canoes landed Eora people on the west side of the cove. Some of them distracted an officer with talk while others speared a goat. Grabbing the dead goat, the party decamped. They were pursued in a boat but the chase was given up. In Lieutenant Bradley's terms, “It was too late, either to recover the goat or discover the thief.” There is no doubting Bradley's sincerity in defining the incident as the work of a
thief.

As Bradley and the other gentlemen of New South Wales well knew, the Enclosure Acts in Britain had established a system in which the ordinary peasant's access to game on common ground, even to a rabbit for his pot, had vanished. The landlords of large estates were endowed with fishing and game rights which once were more commonly held. Many poachers would be sent to Botany Bay for entering enclosed land and taking, or trying to take, game or fish. Yet when birds and animals were shot in the woods about Sydney Cove, often to the great excitement of White and Tench, the enthusiastic naturalists, or fish taken from the harbour, it was done without any enquiry as to pre-existing rights, and the natives' stealing of a goat seemed as culpable an act to Bradley as the stealing of game under the Enclosure Acts.

Some commentators wish to attribute this failure of perception to malice, but it seems more a failure of cultural imagination. Many of the officers, including Phillip, were the sort of men who fancied themselves as well informed on the matter of savages as it was possible to be, and genuinely desired to behave with good will. Phillip recently had written to Nepean a letter (which had gone off with the returning transports) asking for government aid to supply clothing for the natives, which he believed they would accept gratefully. The failure to see any native claim on land and water and animals was a sad lapse of empathy which would blight the settlement's present and future, and produce victims on both sides of the divide, many more—in the end—on the side of the Eora.

Nevertheless, Phillip was determined to end “this state of petty warfare and endless uncertainty” between the races. He intended to kidnap one or more natives and retain them as hostages–cum–language teachers– cum–diplomats in Sydney Cove. He knew and seems to have accepted this would bring things to a head, either by inflaming the natives to vengeance or, preferably, by creating a dialogue. Arthur Phillip explained the reasons for such an abduction to Lord Sydney: “It was absolutely necessary that we should attain their language, or teach them ours, that the means of redress might be pointed out to them, if they are injured, and to reconcile them by showing the many advantages they would enjoy by mixing with us.”