A Commonwealth of Thieves (25 page)

Extra tents had to be pitched on the west side of the cove by the hospital to take in the 200 sick of
Neptune,
seriously ill with scurvy, dysentery, or infectious fever. Several people died in the boats as they were being rowed ashore, or on the wharf as they were lifted out of the boats: “both the living and the dead exhibiting more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed in this country.”

Much of it was attributed, said Collins, to severe confinement, such as had not occurred on the First Fleet: confinement in irons, that is, on the convict deck, without fresh air, without being permitted to exercise on deck. In many cases, convicts had been ironed together for the duration of the voyage. Collins thought Captain Marshall of the
Scarborough
had done a reasonably good job. Sixty-eight men had been lost on his ship, however. “On board the other ships, the masters who had the entire direction of the prisoners never suffered them to be at large on deck, and but few at a time were permitted there. This consequently gave birth to many diseases.”

The sick told an astonished Collins and others that sometimes, on board, when one of their comrades died in irons, the other men in the chain sequence had concealed the death for the purpose of sharing out their allowance of provisions amongst the living. “Until chance, and the offensiveness of a corpse, directed the surgeon … to the spot where it lay.” Such indeed had been the fate of Robert Towers.

Visiting the wharf and the hospital tents, Captain Watkin Tench was also outraged by what he saw. “The sum paid, per head, to the contractor, £17, was certainly competent to afford fair profit to the merchants who contracted. But there is reason to believe that some of them who were employed to act for him violated every principle of justice, and rioted on the spoils of misery, for want of a controlling power to check their enormities.” Tench did not, however, see the problem as a systemic one: “No doubt can be entertained that a humane and liberal government will interpose its authority to prevent the repetition of such flagitious conduct.” Captain Collins summed up the problem in a paragraph: “Government engaged to pay £17 7s 6d per head for every convict they embarked. This sum being as well for their provisions as for their transportation, no interest for their preservation was created in the owners, and the dead were more profitable … than the living.”

No sooner were the convicts unloaded than the masters of the transports, including Trail, opened tent stores on shore and offered goods for sale which “though at the most extortionate prices, were eagerly bought up.” Since cash was lacking, though some had brought quantities of it with them, the goods were in part sold to those amongst the population who had money orders and bills of credit, and even to the commissary for bills drawn on the Admiralty.

Phillip's final figures were that 158 prisoners died on board the
Neptune.
Others said 171, and 36 aboard the
Surprize,
73 aboard the
Scarborough.
Nearly 500 convicts in all were landed sick. Given the weakened state of the arrivals, at first officers could see no benefit to society from the newcomers until they might recover and join the labour force, whose rations and work hours had at least returned to normal for the present.

The Reverend Johnson, who had avoided the hulks after his first visit to them in the Thames, and who seemed to avoid visits to the convict decks on the way to Botany Bay, had become inured to the proximity of convicts and to the universal squalor of Sydney Cove and entered the below-decks of the first of the three scandalous ships to arrive, the
Surprize.
He was galvanised by what he saw. “A great number of them lying, some half, others nearly quite naked, without either bed nor bedding, unable to turn or help themselves. I spoke to them as I passed along, but the smell was so offensive that I could scarcely bear it…. Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried upon the backs of others.” Johnson did not quite manage to carry his Christian compassion to the other holds—the captain of the least fatal ship,
Scarborough,
urged him not to descend into the death hole of its convict prison.

Attentive at the hospital, however, Johnson found many of the ill unable to move and “covered over almost with their own nastiness, their heads, bodies, clothes, blankets all full of filth and lice. Scurvy was not the only nor the worst disease that prevailed among them.” The convicts had not lost sufficient craftiness to beg clothing from Johnson and then sell it almost at once for food, but when it came to food, those who were stronger stole from the weak, as was the case with the blankets as well.

Parties of convicts were sent out collecting the acid berry, also known as the native currant, to combat the widespread scurvy. Since White found the quantity available was insufficient to treat everyone, he also made use of a plant growing on the seashore greatly resembling sage, and a kind of “wild spinage” (samphire) as well as “a small shrub which we distinguished by the name of the vegetable tree.”

By early August, the Reverend Johnson wrote that he had buried eighty-four of the convicts, one child, and one soldier, nearly all of them from the Second Fleet. People would afterwards remember the dingoes howling and fighting over the bodies in a sandy pit over the hills above the Tank Stream. By 6 August, Phillip reported an improvement in convict health, with the sick list down to 220, but deaths continued.

Captain Hill, landed from
Surprize,
suffered the normal shock of arrival but was pleased in some respects with his landfall. “It is now our winter quarters, and had I superior abilities to any man that ever wrote, it would be possible for me to convey to your mind a just idea of this beautiful heavenly clime; suffer your imagination to enter the regions of fiction; and let fancy in her loveliest moment paint an Elysium; it will fall far short of this delightful weather. It is well we have something to keep up our spirits, everything else is unpromising. And did the gloomy months prevail here as in England, it is more than probable that the next reinforcement on arrival would find a desolated colony.”

But he was not happy with the amenities of his life. “Here I am, living in a miserable thatched hut, without kitchen, without a garden, with an acrimonious blood by my having been nearly six months at sea, and tho' little better than a leper, obliged to live on a scanty pittance of salt provision, without a vegetable, except when a good-natured neighbour robs his own stomach in compassion to me.” Fresh meat cost 18 pence a pound, fish was not abundant (for it was winter), and “should one be offered for sale, 'tis by far too dear for an officer's pocket.”

All the healthy male convicts from the Second Fleet were sent to the farming settlement at Parramatta. Captain Hill began surveying and laying out an enlargement of that township, “in which the principal street will be occupied by the convicts; the huts are building at the distance of 100 feet from each other, and each hut is to contain ten convicts … and having good gardens which they cultivate, and frequently having it in their power to exchange vegetables for little necessaries, which the stores do not furnish, makes them begin to feel the benefits they may draw from their industry.” He found that people who had lived in huts with their own gardens for some time rarely abused the confidence that was placed in them, and if they did it was to plunder some other convict's garden.

Women convicts were put to work making clothes out of the slops, the raw cloth brought out on sundry ships. The population had by now quadrupled, and so when on 1 August the
Surprize
left for China, Phillip leased it to drop off 157 female and thirty-seven male convicts at Norfolk Island on the way.

D'Arcy Wentworth had been working on a voluntary arrangement with Surgeon White, but was now sent to Norfolk Island with his convict paramour, Catherine Crowley, with the provisional post of assistant surgeon, based on the help he had given in the grounds of the Sydney hospital. His sense of exile and of being neither bond nor free threw him more and more into the company of pregnant Catherine, and it seemed to have been adequate for him.

When the
Justinian
turned up at Norfolk on 7 August, the ration on the island was down to 2 pounds of flour and 1 pint of tea per person weekly, and only fish and cabbage tree palms and mutton birds and their eggs had saved the population. The
Surprize
joined her late that afternoon, with D'Arcy Wentworth and his eighteen-year-old convict woman aboard, but the Wentworths did not have a high priority for landing, so when the ship had to back off again and go to Cascade Bay on the north side of the island to shelter from a gale, Catherine Crowley gave premature shipboard birth to a son who was to be named William Charles Wentworth. D'Arcy Wentworth helped his son from his mother's womb, cut the cord, and washed him, noticed an inturned eye, but wrapped, warmed, and caressed the baby. It took some weeks of tenderness and care to ensure his survival.

Wentworth landed into a turbulent scene, every human's negative passion enhanced by hunger and isolation and the limits of a small island set in consistently dangerous seas. He saw that the officers of the
Sirius
snubbed Major Ross and would not pay him the normal respects. Appointed quartermaster-general, Ralph Clark was now seen as Ross's favourite, even though Clark's opinion of the man had not previously been high. Clark's new posting gave him a tin-pot power, but it was also power of life and death over those who served time on Norfolk. D'Arcy Wentworth, fortunate to be free of all that, found five other surgeons and assistant surgeons on the island, and liked most of them: the fellow Irishmen Thomas Jamison and Dennis Considen, then Surgeon Altree, and the former convict John Irving. Irving, sentenced in Lincoln, had served as assistant surgeon on his own ship in the First Fleet,
Lady Penrhyn,
and after the arrival of the portable hospital in the Second Fleet had done such conspicuous work there that Phillip granted him an absolute pardon and appointed him to assist Considen. Back in Sydney, he had a grant of 30 acres awaiting him.

Dennis Considen befriended Wentworth at once and began to instruct him in the use of native plants for treating disease, an area of practice in which he had been a leader in Sydney. Indeed, in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks he had written, “If there is any merit in applying these and other simples to the benefit of the poor wretches here, I certainly claim it.” As well as promoting the use of native sarsaparilla and spinach, red gum from angophora trees, yellow from grass trees, and oil from the peppermint eucalyptus tree, he found that the native myrtle would serve as a mild and safe astringent in cases of dysentery.

Wentworth was appointed surgeon to the little inland hamlet of Charlotte's Field, soon to be known as Queensborough, in the interior of the island, to which he walked each day. Wentworth had to treat, above all, diarrhoea and dysentery. He also had to attend lashings. Clark seemed to think flogging increasingly appropriate, and for some time, Wentworth was a mediator between the lash and convicts. There had been the case of John Howard, former highway robber, already lashed early in 1790 for stealing potatoes and selling his clothes in return for food and drink. Later in the year, he would be ordered to receive 500 strokes for selling the slops issued to him by the public store and for telling a lie about it to Major Ross. Wentworth humanely called off the punishment when he had received eighty strokes—though Howard was still, in theory, to receive the remainder when he had recovered. Wentworth also attended when a man of almost seventy was given 100 lashes for stealing wheat and neglecting his work; and a young convict boy received thirteen strokes on the buttocks for robbing his master.

Ralph Clark, the Norfolk Island punisher, gave later Australian feminist historians every opportunity of accusing him of rancour against the women convicts. He said of First Fleeter Rachel Early that she was “the most abandoned woman that I ever knew or heard of,” but that seemed to be a definition Clark applied to whichever woman he had last been required to punish. He was embarked on an affair with Mary Brenham, a First Fleet woman of about nineteen years of age with a son who had been born to one of the
Lady Penrhyn
sailors. She would soon be carrying Clark's child. He seemed to take the relationship seriously—ultimately he would call the girl-child born of Brenham “Alicia,” to honour his wife, irrespective of whether she would ever find out or not.

As claustrophobic as the cheek-by-jowl society of Sydney and Parramatta were, the even narrower tensions of Norfolk Island sometimes made men like Clark sound nearly unhinged. He wrote, for instance, of a fellow officer, Lieutenant Creswell: “I am a damned thorn in his side as he thinks I will get some thing by my volunteering this business of building a town out at Charlotte's Field [Queensborough]. I don't care how much he grins but by God, he must not attempt to bite for if he does this world will be too small for both of us to live in.”

The marine garrison showed they suffered obsessions of their own, to match those of the convicts and gentlemen, by refusing to take their provisions, alleging that the convicts were better off through getting preferential treatment and extra greens. Their hunger was no doubt sincere, but Clark was convinced that what they wanted was to test whether they or Major Ross were to be the masters here. He believed that the air of revolution, let loose in France, had reached even this remotest post.

Captain Johnston and his officers called the roll of the two companies, parading without arms in front of the barracks preparatory to implementing orders from Ross to march them disarmed to the store with their supply bags. The authority of the Crown felt tenuous here, and yet, haunted by the possibility of severe punishment, the ranks broke and left their muskets in place and marched to the store to take their rations. “This day has been near one of the most critical days in my life,” Clark sighed. “Never was club law near taking place in any part of the world than it was in this—I wish that we were fairly away from this island, for I am afraid if we stay much longer we will not get away without a great deal of bloodshed, for our men here are the most mutinous set I ever was amongst and are ripe for rising against any authority.”