A Commonwealth of Thieves (20 page)

I
N JOURNEYING TO
N
EW
S
OUTH
W
ALES
on the
Lady Juliana
and devoting a chapter of his journal to it, the ship's steward, John Nicol, a young Scot, gives us a rare view of the transactions between convict women and seamen. Nicol was a veteran sailor, thirty-five years old, who had a positive nature, believing that aboard one found not “a great many very bad characters” amongst the women. Most had committed petty crimes, he said. He came to earthy conclusions about why these women were being sent—there were a great proportion who had “merely been disorderly, that is, streetwalkers, the colony at the time being in great want of women.”

Whilst the ship was in the Thames, he had seen a young Scottish girl die of a broken heart. “She was young and beautiful, even in the convict dress, but pale as death, and her eyes red with weeping.” She sat alone in the same corner of the deck from morning to night, and did not make any friends. “Even the time of meals roused her not.” When he offered her consolation as a fellow Caledonian, he found that it was useless: “If I spoke of Scotland she would wring her hands and sob until I thought her heart would burst. I lent her a Bible and she kissed it and laid it on her lap and wept over it.”

It was Nicol's job to go ashore and buy supplies for the ship, but he also shopped for convict women who had money with them, particularly for a Mrs. Elizabeth Barnsley, “a noted sharper and shoplifter.” Barnsley was a high-class, superbly dressed thief, who had brought a splendid chest of clothes aboard with her and had asked Captain Aitken if she could wear them in lieu of convict dress. The captain refused, and told her she had to wear the convict uniform until the journey began. Nicol was awed by this potent woman. “She herself told me her family for one hundred years back had been swindlers and highwaymen. She had a brother, a highwayman, who often came to see her as well dressed and genteel in his appearance as any gentleman.” Mrs. Elizabeth Barnsley became
Lady Juliana
's centre of authority and dispenser of favours amongst the women, who were all pleased to serve her and were rewarded with the groceries Steward Nicol bought for her ashore. In the meantime, to add to her other gifts of personality, she became the ship midwife, one whom Surgeon Alley trusted and thus took advice from. He supported, for example, the women's requests for tea and sugar in lieu of part of their meat ration and also suggested that they be supplied with soap. He would eventually ask for “a supply of child bed linen to be sent on board, for some of the women were pregnant….”

Nicol had been working aboard
Lady Juliana
for three months when the great love of his life came aboard. Seventeen women from Lincoln Castle, riveted irons around their wrists, had come down to Greenwich, travelling thirty-six hours roped to the outside seats of a coach. Their condition after such a journey in English winter weather was pitiable: they were tattered, pale, muddied, and chilblained. Nicol, as ship's steward and trained blacksmith, had the not entirely thankless task of striking the riveted county prison irons off the women's wrists on his anvil. In fact he could present a bill of 2 shillings 6 pence to the keeper of the county gaol for each set of shackles he struck open. In a smithy shack on the windswept deck women bent low to have the task completed, and Nicol fell in love with one of them, despite her bedragglement, in the space of performing his task. “I had fixed my fancy upon her from the moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon my anvil, and as firmly resolved to bring her back to England when her time was out, my lawful wife, as ever I did intend anything in my life.”

Sarah Whitelam, the object of this fervour, was a Lincolnshire country girl, thick-accented to Nicol's ear, and perhaps another victim of enclosure. Nicol had a broad streak of generosity in his demeanour, which this Lincolnshire girl latched on to. Not that she struck him as a gross opportunist like some of the London women. She was “a girl of modest reserved tone, as kind and true a creature as ever lived. I courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman on board.”

During their courtship Sarah told Nicol that she had borrowed a cloak from an acquaintance, and her friend had maliciously prosecuted her for stealing it, and she was transported for seven years for unjust cause. The sentence was the truth, and the fact that she had served nearly a year of it. Sarah's true crime, to whose record the love-stricken Nicol had no access, was that at Tealby in Lincolnshire, she had stolen an amount of material which included 6 yards of black chintz cotton, a Coventry tammy gown, a Norwich crepe gown, 7 yards of “black calamomaco,” a pink quilted petticoat, a red Duffin cloak, and a quantity more of clothing. On the spur of whatever criminality or need, it seemed that she had cleaned out an entire small shop-load.

To allow the sort of courtship which Nicol describes, the
Lady Juliana
must have been a relatively relaxed ship, where for their own good the women were allowed on deck for exercise a considerable amount, and some were permitted access to the sailors' quarters to an extent not openly countenanced on most of the First Fleet. Not that Lieutenant Edgar and Captain Aitken were incompetent in managing the ship or maintaining discipline in its other forms. But they were Georgian pragmatists, not evangelical Christians. In a wooden ship of 400 or so tons, there was not a lot of room for private courting, but the poor of the time were used to cramped quarters, to cohabiting in one-room hutches, to copulating by stealth and with minimal privacy. So space for love was not the issue as Nicol chattered away to Sarah Whitelam. Sarah would be pregnant with Nicol's child by the time the ship left England.

In early June,
Lady Juliana
left the Thames to sail to Spithead off Portsmouth, where it was joined by ninety women from county gaols and five late arrivals from London who had been rushed down chained to the outside of wagons. The last load of women was brought on in Plymouth, and it was July 1789 when the
Lady Juliana
sailed with a crowded prison deck.

Indeed, John Nicol says there were 245 women aboard
Lady Juliana
as she left Plymouth. The official records indicate about twenty fewer, but with pardons and vanishings they were not accurate either. “When we were fairly out to sea,” Nicol tells us, “every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath.” The same had happened surreptitiously on the First Fleet, but on
Lady Juliana
the practice seemed to be virtually official policy, and relieved the crowding on the convict deck.

As the
Lady Juliana
with Nicol and his pregnant Sarah Whitelam made its solitary way out of English waters, past Ushant and into the Bay of Biscay, it was in a sense a precursor, the first ship of an as yet not fully planned Second Fleet to get away. It carried on board a letter Home Office Under Secretary Evan Nepean had written to his friend Arthur Phillip in Sydney Cove informing him that “in the course of the autumn I expect that about 1000 more convicts of both sexes will be embarked from the several gaols and dispatched to Port Jackson.”

sixteen

A
S FAR AWAY FROM
N
EWGATE
as one could get, on Sydney Cove on 4 June, the King's birthday was celebrated again with a volley fired towards Port Jackson's brilliant sky. That day Phillip gave a dinner to all the officers, and in the evening convicts performed the George Farquhar play
The Recruiting Officer,
a broad farce written by a hard-up Irish military officer and former actor more than eighty years earlier.
The Recruiting Officer
was very English in a jolly, sentimental, affectionate way, and in telling its central love story, full of mistaken identities, maids posing as ladies, men dressing as women, and other devices gave a picture of the dodges used by recruiting officers and sergeants to fill His Majesty's forces.

It is poignant to think that the convict cast took to this theatrical option. We do not know who their director was, but there must have been many enthusiastic rehearsals. Young convicts, spat out by Europe, unlikely to be seen by their former fellow citizens again, nonetheless felt bound to reproduce the European rituals of the theatre, doing so even as others in Sydney Cove were honouring the Tawny Prince in theft and as the Eora struggled through their smallpox epidemic.

English exiles of all stamp laughed and cried that June night as the drama temporarily lifted them out of their remoteness, the peculiarity of their situation. Tench wrote a wonderful evocation of this first emergence of European theatre in the netherworld. “The exhilarating effect of a splendid theatre is well known: and I'm not ashamed to confess that the proper distribution of three or four yards of stained paper, and a dozen farthing candles stuck round the mud walls of a convict hut, failed not to diffuse general complacency on the countenances of sixty persons, of various descriptions, who were assembled to applaud the presentation. Some of the actors acquitted them selves with great spirit, and received the praises of the audience; a prologue and an epilogue, written by one of the performers, was also spoken on the occasion.” Collins said that the performers “professed no higher aim than ‘humbly to excite a smile; and their efforts to please were not unattended with applause.’”

B
Y THE TIME
Lady Juliana
had left England, Phillip was faced with the continuing problem of convicts saying their time was expired. Phillip's reply, that he regretted he had no records to verify these matters, was “truly distressing” to many convicts. Several men told the governor that when the records
did
arrive, they would want to be paid for their labour as free men. One such man was mangled by his attempts to be heard. John Cullyhorn claimed to have been told by Major Ross that he could now do what he liked, his term having finished by July 1789. He came over the stream to make a direct appeal to the governor on 29 July 1789 for a full pardon on the grounds that his term was served. In the course of his conversation with Phillip, Cullyhorn asserted that Lieutenant-Governor Ross had told him that there were two years' provisions available for any convict who finished his or her time, and he sought to claim them now. Ross denied having told the convict that, and demanded Cullyhorn be punished as a liar. At Ross's insistence, but with Phillip's consent, Cullyhorn was charged with calumny and sentenced to receive 600 lashes and to work in irons for the space of six months. That is, the court, its judgment influenced by a need to shut up the turbulent Ross, ordered what a later historian would rightly call “a savage (and illegal) punishment for a free Englishman.” For documents arriving in Sydney later would prove Cullyhorn correct—his time had indeed expired.

Privately, Judge-Advocate Collins was not unsympathetic to such people, who were “most peculiarly and unpleasantly situated.” But the reality was Phillip could afford to advance no person two years of rations. Despite the supplies
Sirius
had brought back from South Africa, by November 1789 the ration had to be reduced by two-thirds again. Amongst other factors, the storehouse supplies had proved to be very appetising to rats and to native marsupials—bush rats, potoroos, bilbies, and possums. Nonetheless, said Collins, “The governor, whose humanity was at all times conspicuous, directed that no alteration should be made in the ration to be issued to the women.”

Despite abiding hunger, by the end of the Antipodean winter of 1789 the camp of Sydney Cove had taken on the look of a permanent town. Two barracks were finished, two storehouses, and the large brick house the governor occupied. Many male and female convicts had brick huts. But the brick-makers were not always the servants of civilisation. Because of ongoing turbulent behaviour at night, and a conviction in the camp that the Brickfield convicts who were camped a little way west of town came down to the men's and women's area to steal property, a Jewish Cockney convict named John Harris, a
Mercury
returnee, came to Captain Collins and asked him whether a night guard might be established, a patrol of reputable convicts.

This was an early example of the New South Wales conundrum, the overthrow of Phillip's initial intention that the positions of the free and the condemned should not become blurred. The convicts began to take on an official importance in the great open-air experiment of Sydney that they could not have achieved in Newgate or on the hulks. In a criminal kingdom, a clever and reputable man like Harris ended in a position akin to that of police chief, as, without a free police force to keep order, a night watch of eight convicts was indeed initiated. Collins wrote about this paradox. “It was to have been wished that a watch established for the preservation of public and private property had been formed of free people, and that necessity had not compelled us … to appoint them from a body of men in whose eyes, it could not be denied, the property of individuals had never before been sacred. But there was not any choice.”

For the purpose of the night watch, the settlement was divided into four districts, and three men patrolled each. The watch, it seemed, was guarding the settlement not only from the nocturnal evil of convicts, but from other prowlers also. When one of the night watch stopped a marine in the convicts' compound, Ross viewed it as an insult, and Phillip was forced, wearily, to ensure it did not happen again. So efficient was John Harris's guard that Collins would record that by comparison with Sydney Cove, “many streets in London were not so well guarded.”

A
GING
V
ISCOUNT
S
YDNEY HAD NOW
resigned from the Home Office. His replacement, and Nepean's new superior, was one of Pitt's young cousins and parliamentary colleagues, the twenty-nine-year-old William Grenville. Grenville, soon to be Lord Grenville, was an enemy of slavery and a campaigner for the emancipation of Catholics from the legal disadvantages which kept them out of civic life. A future prime minister, he was presently subject to the same political pressures as Sydney had been, and wrote to the Lord Commissioners of the Treasury in early July 1789 telling them, “His Majesty has therefore been pleased to signify to me his Royal Commands that 1000 of the said convicts should forthwith be sent to New South Wales.” The dispatch of this further 1,000 was exclusive of the women already on
Lady Juliana.

The Navy Board immediately called for tenders from merchants to supply ships and stores. William Richards bid again, but the successful contractor was the slave-trading company Camden, Calvert and King, the largest slave transportation company in Britain. It is on the face of it a curious decision for an abolitionist to make. Perhaps Grenville wanted to wean Camden, Calvert and King off slaves and onto criminals. Grenville was energetic, too, and wished to do away with laxities in the Home Office. If, as a means of turning a new and more efficient page, he gave his ministerial consent to the Navy Board's choice of Camden, Calvert and King, he would come to regret it.

In August the contracts for a second fleet of ships were signed by the Navy Commissioners and Camden, Calvert and King. As had the charter parties for the First Fleet, they specified the rations for each mess of six male convicts for seven days, and similarly for each mess of six female convicts. The contractors were to be paid a sum of 17 pounds 7 shillings 6 pence for each convict embarked, somewhat less than Richards had quoted. Five pounds would be paid to the contractors once the cabins and bulkheads had been fitted, and £10 when the stores had been loaded and the ships were ready to receive the convicts. The remainder was to be paid when a certificate was received in London from the commissary in New South Wales confirming that the stores had been delivered. There was no money held back pending the delivery in good condition in Sydney Cove of the convicts themselves.

The Australian legend that the British “dumped” convicts in Australia was enhanced and nearly justified by the horrors which would characterise this core section of the second flotilla—just as the
Lady Juliana
helped generate the concept that women's ships were “floating brothels.”

The War Ministry had been thinking about New South Wales too, and decided that the marines who had travelled on the First Fleet would be gradually replaced, in part because of their internal dissension, the unwillingness of Ross to allow marine officers to serve as superintendents of convicts, the fact that half the officers were technically under house arrest over the quarrel about punishing Private Hunt, and because of the other conflicts Ross had with Phillip. During the summer of 1789, from England, Scotland, and Ireland, 300 men were recruited for a new corps, and the first 100 privates and NCOs, along with two captains, three lieutenants, an ensign, and a surgeon's mate, would travel on the transports of the Second Fleet. The new unit, the 102nd Regiment of Foot, would be more commonly called the New South Wales Corps, but they were also referred to, whether ironically or otherwise, as the Botany Bay Rangers.

Three transports—
Neptune, Scarborough,
and
Surprize
—were readied at Deptford for the journey. In the meantime another store ship had been sent from Spithead six weeks after the female convicts in the
Lady
Juliana.
The ship in question was a naval frigate of 879 tons, the HMS
Guardian,
and it left Britain in September 1789 richly burdened with the supplies for which Phillip had asked, and with twenty-five “artificers,” convicts with trades, for whom Phillip had also pleaded. With all it carried, and with its small corps of talented convicts, the
Guardian
represented a secure future for the people of Sydney Cove.

S
ALVATION COULD NOT INDEFINITELY COME
from outside New South Wales. Some had to come from within the colony itself. And one of the iconic figures of redemption from within would be the young Cornish convict James Ruse. He was the farmer who would maintain throughout his life that he was the first person from the fleet to step ashore on the east coast of New South Wales, when he carried Lieutenant Johnston from the
Supply
to the Botany Bay shore on his shoulders.

The clerks who had drawn up the lists for the First Fleet had not hesitated before including people who had already served the greater part of their sentence. And Ruse, who had been sentenced in 1782 for burglarously entering a house in Launceston to seven years transportation to Africa, had spent five years on the depressing and brutal hulk
Dunkirk,
moored off Plymouth, before being loaded on the
Scarborough.
Without verification that Ruse's sentence had expired, Phillip nonetheless knew enough about him from his supervisory work at the government farm in Sydney Cove to decide to embark on an experiment with him, and turn him into New South Wales's first yeoman. Ruse had told Tench, “I was bred a husbandman, near Launcester [Launceston] in Cornwall,” and now Phillip gave him a conditional grant of 30 acres and convict help to clear it in the promising area known as the Crescent on the riverbank near Parramatta/Rose Hill. Phillip also authorised the issue to Ruse of necessary tools and seed for planting. Full title to the land was withheld until Ruse proved himself the first viable farmer.

Phillip, surrounded by men who regularly told him New South Wales could not serve as a place for settled agriculture, wanted to test whether it was possible for a skilled farmer to live off the land. Above all, he needed to rebut the nihilist voices such as that of Major Ross, who hated New South Wales with an almost theological passion. “I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worst country that what we have seen of this. All that is contiguous to us is so very barren and forbidding that the main truth be said, here nature is reversed.” The perverse behaviour of the convicts confirmed Ross in a sense that he was stuck in an irremediably perverse land, a country of contrary, obdurate gods.

Indeed, it seemed to Ross that New South Wales bore the same motto as Lucifer the fallen angel—
Non Serviam,
“I shall not serve.” The terms “will not serve” and “will not answer” pepper the reflections of many diarists and correspondents, but Ross's above all. Ross, for example, criticised Phillip's choice of Sydney Cove for the settlement, declaring it “would never answer.”