A Commonwealth of Thieves (2 page)

Yet the executions were a frightful public spectacle. From the mid 1780s they occurred outside Newgate prison itself. There, on a spring day in 1785, James Boswell, the Scottish writer and familiar of Dr. Johnson, watched nineteen criminals, including thieves, a forger, a stamp counter-feiter, and others who had illegally returned from transportation, “depart Newgate to the other world.”

King George III attended to reprieves himself, sitting in council at St. James's Palace, and receiving advice and lists of prisoners from judges and recorders. Though he was severe on forgers—indeed, it was still possible for women forgers to be burned at the stake—he generally accepted the advice of the trial judge, as did the Prince Regent, the future George IV, during his father's illness and lunacy, and remitted most of those recommended to his mercy to sentences of transportation.

The condition of the gaols of Britain in which the transportees and other prisoners accumulated in such numbers owed much to the neglect of government and the fact that these dingy buildings, ill-aired, ill-lit, and epidemic-prone, were run under licence and as enterprises. To be a prison warder was not to be a servant of society but a franchise-holder, entitled to charge inmates a scale of fees of the warder's own devising. Many if not all prisons had taprooms run for profit by the keeper, and John Howard, a prison reformer, discovered in one London prison that the tap was sub-hired out to one of the prisoners. In another, Howard was told that as many as 600 pots of beer had been brought into cells from the taproom during one Sunday. From such sources as the taproom and those private apartments he could rent out to superior convicts, Richard Ackerman—keeper of Newgate for thirty-eight years and a dining friend of James Boswell and an associate of the great Dr. Johnson—left a fortune of £20,000 when he died in 1792.

In 1777 the first painstaking survey of conditions in English prisons, Howard's
The State of the Prisons,
was published, and gaol reform became a popular issue. Howard was a Bedfordshire squire who had been appointed to the sinecure of county sheriff some years before. To everyone's amazement he took his duties seriously, was shocked profoundly by his visits to sundry prisons, and became the most famous of prison reformers. In his tract, Howard depicted a cell, 17 feet by 6, crowded with more than two dozen inmates and receiving light and air only through a few holes in the door. The “clink” of a Devon prison was 17 feet by 8, with only 5 feet 6 inches of head room, and had light and air by one hole 7 inches long and 5 broad. In Canterbury, Howard found there were no beds but mats, unless the prisoners paid extra. In Clerkenwell prison, those who could not pay for beds lay on the floor, and in many other prisons inmates paid even for the privilege of not being chained while in the shared cells, or wards, as they were called. Howard claimed that after visits to Newgate the leaves of his notebook were so tainted and browned by the fearful atmosphere that on his arrival home he had to spread out the pages before a glowing fire for drying and disinfection.

The most infamous of prisons, old Newgate, was burned down by a mob in 1780. Prisoners were readmitted to the rebuilt prison by 1782. New Newgate prison was divided into two halves: the master's side, where the inmates could rent lodging and services, and where those who had committed criminal libel, sedition, or embezzlement were kept; and the more impoverished section, called the common side. Earlier in the century, the writer Daniel Defoe, who himself had been thrown into Newgate for theft, described it through the eyes of his character Moll Flanders, in terms which seemed to be just as true of the post-1782 new Newgate: “I was now fixed indeed; it is impossible to describe the terror of my mind when I was first brought in, and when I looked around upon all the horrors of that dismal place…. The hellish noise, the roaring, the swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful, afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself.” Both in Moll Flanders's day and in the 1780s, tradesmen in Newgate Street were unable to take the air at their doors for fear of the stench of the prison.

Though prisoners and visitors had access to the taphouse, where they could buy liquor, and there were several communal rooms, a chapel, a separate infirmary for men and women, and exercise yards, only the most basic medicine was given in the two infirmaries. Doctors often refused to enter the prison for fear their own health would suffer. Yet every day, ordinary people came to visit or sightsee, as we might now visit a zoo. Prostitutes worked their way around to service visitors and prisoners who had cash, and the turnkeys received a pay-off from this traffic as well. Meanwhile, unless the men and women in the common wards had relatives and friends to bring them food, they lived off a three-halfpenny loaf a week, supplemented by donations and a share of the cook's weekly meat supply. Their bedding was at the discretion of the keeper. One of the motivations for joining gangs, or criminal “canting crews,” was that if imprisoned, the individual criminal was not left to the bare mercies of the gaol authorities. For hunger hollowed out ordinary prisoners in the common wards in severe English winters like that of 1786–87.

In that last winter in England for many convicts who would soon find themselves on the departing fleet, one visitor noted that there were in Newgate many “miserable objects” almost naked and without shoes and stockings. Women prisoners in the wards were “of the very lowest and most wretched class of human beings, almost naked, with only a few filthy rags, almost alive and in motion with vermin, their bodies rotting with the bad distemper, and covered with itch, scorbutic and venereal ulcers.” Many insane prisoners added to the spectacle for the sightseers.

Despite all the criminal and capital statutes, the prison populations had gone on growing before, during, and after the American War, and crimes abounded. The legendary Irish pickpocket Barrington could boast that “in and about London more pickpockets succeed in making a comfortable living than in the whole of the rest of Europe.”

But the Revolutionary War in America meant less transportation occurred even though more were sentenced to it. And so, the 1780 Act having failed to relieve the gaols, a further Act of Parliament passed in 1783 allowed the removal of convicts from the gaols on land to the dismasted hulks of old men-of-war moored in the Thames, and at Portsmouth and Plymouth, where they could do labour around the river pending their transportation. The British government, prevented by rebellious Virginians and vocal Nova Scotians from offloading its dross, was restricted to transporting fallen souls a few miles by rowboat rather than across the Atlantic. During their confinement on the prison decks of the hulks, prisoners were allowed to save their wages. The time of their detention here was to be deemed part of the term of transportation.

The hulks, an eyesore detested by respectable London and unpopular with convicts, were both a phenomenon and an enterprise. Duncan Campbell, the hulk-master, was a highly interesting Georgian figure, a reputable man and a good Presbyterian Scot. He had begun in the convict-transporting business in 1758, carrying felons to Virginia and Maryland. Since then Campbell had seen a great change in the penal-maritime business, and not only because of the war in America. In April and May 1776, even before the American colonies were lost, an end was enacted to the good old practice of placing “the property and the service of the body of the convict” for sale on American auction blocks. Now the convict and his labour belonged wholly to the Crown. Nor could wealthy convicts buy themselves out of servitude anymore.

On top of that, the revolution in America threw the affairs of Campbell and others “into dramatic disarray.” The amounts lost by British creditors in America, when Americans refused to pay British merchants' bills, meant that Campbell had a dizzying fortune of over £38,000 owing to him from gentlemen in Virginia and Maryland. But in modest ways the war in America also compensated Campbell. He continued to receive in his hulks more of the convicts sentenced to transportation. His initial contract, worth £3,560 a year, was for a dismasted hulk (he named it
Justitia
) of at least 240 tons to house 120 prisoners, mainly from Newgate, with necessary tools and six lighters for the convicts to work from, as well as medicines and vinegar as a scurvy cure, and the means to wash and fumigate the vessel. By 1780 he had accommodation for 510 convicts, and had purchased a French frigate, the
Censor,
and “an old Indiaman” which he named
Justitia II.
He had a receiving ship, the
Reception,
and a hospital ship, the converted
Justitia I.
On Campbell's receiving ship, the prisoner was stripped of the vermin-infested clothes he had worn in Newgate or elsewhere in the kingdom, bathed, and held for four days while being inspected for infection by three efficient surgeons employed. The high death rate on Campbell's ships, and also on the less well administered hulks moored in Portsmouth and Plymouth by other contractors, was partially the result of diseases prisoners had contracted originally in the common wards of city and county gaols. “The ships at Woolwich are as sweet as any parlour in the kingdom,” Campbell asserted with some pride.

Many of the prisoners aboard the flotilla in the distant Southern Ocean in 1788 had less enthusiastic memories of these river-bound prisons. Though Campbell himself had a reputation for decency, the Act of Parliament setting up the hulks called for prisoners to be “fed and sustained with bread and any coarse and inferior food” as a symbol of their shame, with misbehaviour to be punished by “whipping, or other moderate punishment.” There was on top of that the hulks' peculiar below-decks dimness, the frock of sewage and waste which adorned the water around them, and the horror of being locked down at night on the prison deck and abandoned to the worst instincts of the established cliques. The British thought of the hulks as a temporary expedient, but they would not be able to get rid of their floating prisons in the Thames and elsewhere until 1853—indeed, the hulks would make an appearance in Dickens's
Great Expectations.

What Campbell could not control was the habitual brutality and extortion of some of the guards, or the savagery of locked-down prisoners towards the weak or naive.

Periodically reacting to complaints from their constituents, London's members of Parliament and city aldermen kept telling the government that the prisoners on the hulks should be transported anywhere convenient—to the East or West Indies, Canada or Nova Scotia, Florida or the Falklands. But the administration continued with the hulks, for except for the rebellious North American colonies, no one place seemed the right destination for transportees.

Because they were put off by estimates of expense of transportation to New South Wales of £30 per felon, six times the cost of transportation to America, a Commons Committee considered the possibility of Gibraltar, or the Gambia and Senegal Rivers in Africa. In the bureaucratic circles of Whitehall, New South Wales fell in and out of fashion as a destination throughout the mid-1780s. Everyone was aware that New South Wales was still surely a region for small, well-planned expeditions, rather than for an unprecedented experiment in mass transportation and penology. So a draft letter from the Home Office to the Treasury, dated 9 February 1785, described the country upstream on the Gambia River in West Africa as abounding with timber for building, the land as fertile and plentifully stocked with cattle, goats, and sheep, a place where tropical food would grow readily and the natives were hospitable. The site suggested was Lemane, up the river some miles and distant from the malarial coast. Convicts could be left to themselves: “They cannot get away from there for there is not a person who would harbour them.” By April 1785, Pitt's government seemed to have decided on this version of transportation. The only cost would be £8 per head for the journey out and the hiring of an armed vessel as a guard ship on the river during the trading season. Admittedly, “upon the first settlement, a great many of the convicts would die.” But over time, as the land was better cultivated, “they would grow more healthy.”

Botany Bay in New South Wales, on a coast Cook had visited in 1770, had an eloquent proponent, though for a different reason than the penal one. Mario Matra, an Italian-American from New York and loyal to the Crown, had sailed as a gentleman in Cook's company and claimed to be the first European to have set foot in Botany Bay. He had more recently visited New York during the American Revolutionary War to recover what he could of the Matra family property, and disappointed, returned to London in 1781, where he found a great number of fellow American Empire Loyalist refugees living in squalor. With Britain doing little for the loyalist Americans, Matra drafted a pamphlet addressed to the British government,
A Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales to
Atone for the Loss of Our American Colonies.
American Empire Loyalists should be sent as free settlers to New South Wales, and wives should be supplied to them if necessary from amongst the natives of New Caledonia or Tahiti. “Settlement could be a centre for trade with East Asia or a wartime base for attack on the Dutch colonies of Malaya…. And thus two objects of the most desirable and beautiful union will be permanently blended: economy to the public, and humanity to the individual.” Without mentioning convicts, Matra nonetheless brought attention to New South Wales as a potential destination for inconvenient people other than loyalists.

Though Sir Joseph Banks promoted Matra's proposal to the government, the Tories fell and the Whigs came to power, and Lord Sydney, a Kentish squire in his early fifties, inherited the Home Office, including responsibility for prisons and colonial affairs. Even he, though sympathetic, was not as much interested in the fate of loyalists as he was in the pressingly urgent matter of the prisons and hulks. On 9 December 1784, he wrote to the mayor of Hull, who had asked for the removal of his city's convicts to the hulks, saying that not a person more could be at present admitted to them. Sydney answered similarly to a request from Oxford.