A Commonwealth of Thieves (24 page)

Without reflecting on Crowley's individual and demonstrably loyal motives, Wentworth, despite his status as the Second Fleet's only paying passenger, was a gentleman with accompanying entitlements—and a vigorous lover. In reality, Wentworth may have been a more lonely figure aboard
Neptune
than Crowley was. And he remained so, not interfering, not being invited to interfere as a physician in what befell Catherine Crowley's convict brethren.

So, in close quarters on
Neptune
could be found two furiously ambitious young men: one a reclusive, prickly officer, John Macarthur, with his wife, Elizabeth, pregnant; and the other the founding social outcast of penal New South Wales, D'Arcy Wentworth, with his lover, Catherine Crowley, pregnant. Elizabeth Veal Macarthur would be a more kindly, more loyal, and more enduring Becky Sharp, to the extent that she broke that mean mould and became her own woman, clear-eyed even amongst the miasmas of
Neptune.
Her as yet callow husband would be harder to admire so unconditionally.

Catherine Crowley would have been as surprised as the politer Macarthurs to find out that the child she carried on
Neptune
would one day become Australia's first great constitutional statesman. But all that future was mired in shipboard squalor, stench, and dimness, and they sailed towards a place whose future was un-guaranteed in any case.

twenty

T
HE THREE SHIPS NOW GATHERED
in Portsmouth were joined by a store ship named the
Justinian,
loading with flour, pork, beef, pease, oatmeal, spirits, oil, and sugar. There were also 162 bales of clothing and a quantity of coverlets, blankets, and cloth, and a portable military hospital, prefabricated for assembly in New South Wales. Four hundred gallons of vinegar were shipped for use as disinfectant and mouthwash.

The wind kept the new convict fleet shuttling between Portsmouth Harbour and the Isle of Wight, but on 7 January, a Sunday morning in the new year of 1790, a westerly allowed them to tack their way down the Channel. The store ship
Justinian
left Falmouth the same day as the other three ships left the Motherbank.

Twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Macarthur kept herself absorbed by writing a stylish journal of the voyage. In the Bay of Biscay the sea “ran mountains high,” she wrote. Down the coast of west Africa, wind sails operated over the deck to keep the lower areas of the ship refreshed, but the terrible heat, particularly in the men's prison deck, could not be dealt with very well. Here was Georgian Hades, the convict deck of an eighteenth-century ship, the pumps on deck having no air to distribute, and men and women locked up with their complex screams and groans and surrenders.

After sailing, the soldiers complained to Lieutenant Macarthur that they were receiving short rations, that they were victims of purloining, that is, short weighting. Nepean did not seem to want to attend to the matter. The Macarthurs' rations were also cut by Captain Trail, without resistance by the incapable Lieutenant Shapcote or by Nicholas Nepean. Nepean dined in Captain Trail's cabin and the two had become cronies, but the Macarthurs “seldom benefited by their society.” As well, the passage the Macarthurs had formerly had to the upper deck was nailed down, and they could get to the deck only via the women's prison. Nepean told a protesting Macarthur that “the master of the ship had a right to do as he pleased.” Increasingly, Elizabeth Macarthur stuck to her cabin. “Assailed with noisome stenches,” she used oil of attar but that did not dispel the reek.

At Cape Town on 19 February, after an argument with Nepean, Macarthur and his wife, child, and servant transferred to the
Scarborough
in protest, where they shared a small cabin with Lieutenant Edward Abbott. Elizabeth liked the ship's master of
Scarborough,
John Marshall, more than Trail. Marshall had a wife and three children in England “of whom he speaks in the tenderest terms.” Her husband was incapacitated for five weeks by fever, during which time, Elizabeth Macarthur complained, the other New South Wales Corps officers did not make “the slightest offer of assistance.” He was beginning to walk again as
Scarborough
neared Port Jackson.

Captain William Hill, a cultivated and sympathetic young member of the New South Wales Corps, was sailing on
Surprize,
where he did himself great honour by being a critic of the contractors from the start. “The irons used upon these unhappy wretches were barbarous; the contractors had been in the Guinea trade, and had put on board the same shackles used by them in that trade, which are made with a short bolt, instead of chains that drop between the legs and fasten with a bandage around the waist, like those at the different gaols; these bolts were not more than three-quarters of a foot in length, so they [the convicts] could not extend either leg from the other more than an inch or two at most; thus fettered, it was impossible for them to move, but at the risk of both their legs being broken.” Forced inactivity on this scale, Hill feared, was an invitation to scurvy, “equal to, if not more than salt provisions.” Even when disease struck, there were no extra comforts offered. “The slave trade is merciful, compared with what I have seen in this fleet; in that it is the interest of the [slaver] master to preserve the health and lives of their captives, they having a joint benefit, with the owners. In this [fleet], the more they can with-hold from the unhappy wretches, the more provisions they have to dispose of in a foreign market; and the earlier in the voyage they die, the longer they [the masters] can draw the deceased's allowance for themselves … it therefore highly concerns government to lodge in future a controlling power in each ship over these low-life barbarous masters, to keep them honest, instead of giving it to one man [a single agent], who can only see what is going forward on his ship.”

The three main transports of the Second Fleet having reached Cape Town, the convict artificers who had behaved so well during the wreck of the
Guardian
and who had been stranded were taken on board the
Neptune
along with some of the
Guardian
's saved supplies. By now,
Neptune
had lost fifty-five men and a woman from scurvy. Young Lieutenant Riou of
Guardian
could foresee an accelerating calamity. He bluntly wrote to Evan Nepean, “If ever the navy make another contract like that of the last three ships, they ought to be shot, and as for their agent Mr. Shapcote, he behaved here just as foolishly as a man could well do.”

All four surgeons employed aboard the fleet had already written to Shapcote about the potential seriousness of the ships' unhealthy milieu. They urged him to get fresh supplies of beef and vegetables aboard. Surgeon Grey of the
Neptune
wrote that “without they have fresh provisions and greens every day, numbers of them will fall a sacrifice to that dreadful disease.” Yet at the Cape, Trail made sure his prisoners were securely ironed, which did not contribute to their rehabilitation through whatever fresh fruit and vegetables were acquired ashore.

Surgeon Harris, the military surgeon to the 100 soldiers of the fleet, was concerned about
their
condition also. William Waters, surgeon of
Surprize,
reported thirty convicts suffering from scurvy. In the
Scarborough
ten soldiers were affected, five of them “very bad.”

But Shapcote was strangely unconcerned, and may himself have been suffering from the lethargy of scurvy or from some other incapacity. He died suddenly in mid-May, after dining with Captain Trail and his wife. Between 3 and 4 a.m. a female convict who had constantly attended Mr. Shapcote came to the quarterdeck with news of his death.

The fleet entered now the zone of storms. On
Surprize,
the New South Wales Corps soldier Captain Hill felt pity for “unhappy wretches, the convicts,” who often “were considerably above their waists in water, and the men of my company, whose berths were not so far forward, were nearly up to the middles.”

I
N THE DISPIRITED COLONY OF
New South Wales, June had opened rainy and hungry, but on the evening of 3 June, there was a cry throughout Sydney Cove of “The flag's up!” It was the flag on the look-out station on the harbour's south head, and was visible from Sydney Cove itself. Tench left a passionate account of what this meant to him and others. “I was sitting in my hut, musing on our fate, when a confused clamour in the street drew my attention. I opened my door and saw several women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other, kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness.” Tench raced to the hill on which Government House stood and trained his pocket telescope on the lookout station. “My next-door neighbour, a brother-officer, was with me; but we could not speak; we wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing.”

Watkin begged to join the governor in his boat which was going down-harbour to meet the ship, and it was while they were proceeding that a large vessel with English colours worked in between the heads. But a full-blown wind, of the kind Sydney folk quickly came to name southerly busters, was blowing her onto the rocks at the base of the cliffs of North Head. “The tumultuous state of our minds represented her in danger; and we were in agony.” She survived, however, and the governor sent out a boat to hail her, and when he knew who she was, the
Lady Juliana
with a cargo of women in good health, he crossed from the vice-regal boat to a fishing boat to return as fast as he could to Sydney, to prepare for the reception ashore of this new population. Meanwhile the seamen and officers in the governor's cutter “pushed through wind and rain…. At last we read the word ‘London’ on her stern. ‘Pull away, my lads! She is from old England; a few strokes more and we shall be aboard! Hurrah for a belly-full and news from our friends!’—Such were our exhortations to the boat's crew.”

Tench was still overwhelmed as they boarded, so that he saw the women on board not so much as the fallen but as “two hundred and twenty-five of our own countrywomen, whom crime or misfortune had condemned to exile.” Letters were brought up from below, and those addressed to the officers who had boarded were “torn open in trembling agitation.”

The
Lady Juliana
was moored in Spring Cove on the Manly side of Port Jackson for some days, as the women prepared for landing. Then it came down-harbour and the women finally came ashore on 11 June 1790. They were better dressed than most of barefoot New South Wales, having been permitted to replenish wardrobes in Rio and Cape Town, and they made their way as paragons of health through mud to the huts of the women's camp on the west side of the town.

But the presence of the
Lady Juliana,
and the bad news of the
Guardian,
were at least signs that the settlement had not been forgotten by Whitehall. Above all, so was the appearance of the store ship
Justinian,
a few weeks later. “Our rapture,” wrote Watkin, “was doubled on finding she was laden entirely with provisions for our use. Full allowance, and general congratulation, immediately took place.” The
Justinian
had taken only five months to make its transplanetary journey. The profound gratitude and almost personal affection which would have gone Lieutenant Riou's way had the
Guardian
not been lost was now directed at
Justinian
's young captain, Benjamin Maitland, for his ship carried the bulk of the stores Phillip needed, including nearly 500,000 pounds of flour and 50,000 pounds of beef and pork, as well as sugar, oil, oatmeal, pease, spirits, and vinegar. Here was the end of famine, and the return to full and varied rations! And from what the
Justinian
told them, the settlement knew to look out for three more convict ships.

The first of the new ships, the
Surprize,
under jury masts from damage in a Southern Ocean storm, was seen from the look-out on South Head on 25 June. By the next day it was anchored in Sydney Cove, with its convicts, and one captain, one lieutenant, one surgeon's mate, and twenty-six other ranks of the New South Wales Corps. The officers from Sydney Cove who boarded it might have expected the degree of health found in the
Lady Juliana.
In fact the peculiar disorders of the Camden, Calvert and King ships could be smelled for a hundred yards off. Phillip and King found the ill health of the New South Wales Corps soldiers was in stark contrast to the women of
Lady Juliana,
and the contrast with the convicts of
Surprize
was even more marked. Many of the
Surprize
prisoners were moribund. Upwards of 100 were now on the sick list on board, and forty-two had been buried at sea during the journey. The portable hospital which had arrived by the
Justinian,
measuring 84 by 201/2 feet, was assembled to take some of the spillage from White's timber-and-shingle hospital building, for the other transports were believed to be close, “and we were led to expect them in as unhealthy a state as that which had just arrived.”

The other two transports were spotted by the look-outs on South Head two days later. Lieutenant John Macarthur's fever caught at the Cape had spread throughout the ship. In the mad Southern Seas men and women had perished amongst the jolting, incessant swell, and beneath the scream of canvas and wind. Aboard
Neptune
in particular, according to later witnesses, a black market had broken out for lack of proper supplies. It might cost 1 shilling 6 pence for an additional pint of water, a pair of new shoes for a quart of tea or three biscuits, a new shirt for four biscuits, two pairs of trousers for six. Crew members would later sign a statement swearing that they sold food and drink to convicts on board at these elevated prices.

The
Neptune
and the
Scarborough
now entered Port Jackson. A visit by White and others showed them that the health of the people aboard
Neptune
was much worse even than that of the convicts on
Surprize,
and Collins was appalled by their condition. Indeed, Phillip and all the garrison officers looked judgmentally at masters like Captain Trail of
Neptune
but got back the unembarrassed stare of self-justified men. With all Phillip's power, he lacked the capacity to try them before his Admiralty court, so he was reduced to condemning them in dispatches.