A Commonwealth of Thieves (32 page)

Their imprisonment does not seem to have been severe and they were allowed out of the castle two at a time for whole days, and this continued until the arrival of another group of British, the worst group possible for Will and Mary Bryant. Captain Edward Edwards of HMS
Pandora
had been sent to Tahiti to round up the men who had mutinied on the
Bounty.
Fletcher Christian and a small group of others, knowing that such vengeance would be dispatched, had sailed away on the seized
Bounty
across the Pacific towards South America to remote Pitcairn Island, where they could continue to enjoy a form of freedom. The majority remained on the far more kindly islands of Tahiti. There Captain Edwards, “a cold, hard man devoid of sympathy and imagination,” arrived on
Pandora
on 23 March 1791, about the same time the Bryant party was escaping Sydney. He found fourteen mutineers and detained them on board the
Pandora
in a structure 11 feet long and 18 feet wide that he had built on the outer quarterdeck. This imprisonment shed would become known in infamy as “
Pandora
's box.” The only entry was by way of an iron hatch on top, and inside the box the mutineers were attached by leg irons to heavy ring bolts.
Pandora
headed across the Pacific towards the northern tip of the Australian east coast and through Torres Strait, intending to return its prisoners to England by way of Batavia and Cape Town. Instead she ran aground on an outcrop of the Great Barrier Reef. A few of the prisoners from
Pandora
's box were released immediately to work at the pumps, but the rest were left chained inside. As the ship sank, three more were let out, but the hatch was again slammed down, closed, and barred. The bosun's mate delayed taking to the sea himself to unbar the manhole to let the rest out, some of whom were picked up by the ship's boats.

On a little island where the survivors gathered and boats were prepared for the row to Timor, the mutineers were not allowed the use of tents, and they were put to the oars mercilessly by Edwards. They got more sympathy from the surgeon, Hamilton, who would also extend many clemencies to Mary Bryant, her children, and her colleagues when the whole group reached Timor in September.

If, as Martin said, it was Bryant who gave the group away while drunk, they were all to pay a massive price for it now that Edwards had appeared. In the castle at Koepang, without the help of the Dutch colonial police, Edwards interrogated the prisoners one by one. “We told him we was convicts and had made our escape from Botany Bay,” wrote Martin. “He told us we was his prisoners.” They were no longer allowed any freedom of movement. Edwards had already shown a tendency to care not so much for bringing his captives back to England for punishment as accounting for them. His behaviour during the wreck of the
Pandora,
even taking into account his many distractions, was not that of a man who wanted at all cost to save the lives of the
Bounty
mutineers and bring them to trial.

By early October 1791, Edwards had chartered a Dutch vessel, the
Rembang,
to take himself and his crew, his
Bounty
prisoners, and his “Botany Bay ten,” to Batavia. He put the Bryants and their party below decks clamped in bilboes, “irons attached to a long sliding iron bar to confine the prisoner, fastened at one end to the floor by a lock.”

On the way to Batavia, off the island of Flores, the
Rembang
ran into a cyclone. “In a few minutes,” wrote the surgeon of the lost
Pandora,
“every sail of the ship was shivered to pieces; the pumps all choked and useless, the leaks gaining fast upon us.” The
Rembang
was being driven towards a lee shore seven miles away, but the cyclone passed before she was smashed against it.

Batavia, near the northern end of Java, was the chief port of the Dutch East India Company in the Indonesian islands. A magnificent Dutch town square opened up from the harbour, just as in Cape Town. Here, where the jungle still pressed close, could be found the same enterprising Calvinist mind as existed in any other Dutch principality, and the Dutch themselves were said to thrive on the swampy exhalations of the place. But for everyone else it seemed to be, to quote Surgeon Hamilton, a “painted sepulchre, this Golgotha of Europe which buries the whole settlement every five years.”

The Botany Bay ten were put aboard a Dutch East India Company ship lying in the roads of Batavia. Smothering heat hung over them and an unhealthy damp filled their prison deck like mist. There are no accounts, either from the party itself or from observers, of bitter recriminations amongst the group, even though survival seemed unlikely. Mary knew, however, that if she could get her two children back to England alive, they would have the privilege of breathing softer air. For many others of the party, death seemed an intimate certainty.

twenty-six

S
PEAKING THEIR OWN LANGUAGE
, and bound together in many cases by secret oaths and compacts, the Irish who had come into Port Jackson on
Queen
on 26 September 1791 presented particular problems. A later Irish genius would call Ireland
John Bull's Other Island,
and the officers in New South Wales would have nodded as ruefully as any Anglo-Irish magistrate on Irish soil at the Gaelic wrong-headedness of Irish convicts' refusal to behave like Englishmen, and to speak English. Irish was still the first language of over 80 percent of Irish hearths, and now it was heard, to the discomfort of the officers and officials, in the fringes of the bushland of New South Wales. What were they plotting, what was behind their frequent, secret laughter?

One thing about them was the ready—some would say gullible—comfort they took in millennial dreams. After all, a new century was nearing, and at its dawn the justice of Christ might reverse the order of the world, putting the first last, and the last first. In Sydney and Parramatta, there developed amongst them like a fever “the chimerical idea” of finding China from New South Wales, the idea that it was beyond the mountains to the north-west of Sydney Cove. In terms of the Enlightenment it was a preposterous idea. In terms of their extreme poverty and of religious belief and Irish psychology, it made perfect sense. Somewhere on earth there
must
exist a veil the Irish could penetrate, beyond which they would have their old powers and remembered spaciousness restored to them. Their ignorance of strict geography was something chosen for them by their masters—the schooling of Irish Catholics was contrary to the penal laws of Britain—and so they made up a geography of hope from fragments of information, namely that New South Wales was part of the same unknown zone as China. They drew their compasses on a piece of paper, with the arrow fixed on north, a practice which would be laughed at by their betters. Yet the Defenders and other secret societies were influenced by Freemasonry, to which the Irish nationalist Protestants such as Robert Emmet, Napper Tandy, and Wolfe Tone belonged, and in Freemasonry, and other secret societies too, there was an inherent importance and a power in the representation of the compass. The north was potent, even if invoked merely on paper, and the Irish convicts, eating bitter rations by the camp fires of Sydney and Parramatta, had caught the belief that not too many days walk northwards from the Parramatta River and Port Jackson, a habitable kingdom lay awaiting them.

One sight of the dense bush around Parramatta and Sydney was enough to make many delay their Chinese pilgrimage. The strangeness of the natives, matched by the strangeness of the forests, the tangles of ungodly acacias and melaleucas, the spiteful sharpness of narrow-leaved shrubs determined to survive fire and drought, and the feeling of godlessness and lack of familiar presences in the place, had been for three years sufficient to stop most convicts walking away, and promised to be effective well into the future. Yet on 1 November—All Saints' Day—twenty male Irish convicts and one pregnant female in Parramatta took a week's provisions, tomahawks, and knives, and set out into the bush to find China. Collins and others suspected that this was a cover story, and that their real purpose was to steal boats and get on board the transports after they had left Sydney waters. But he almost certainly misstated their ambitions.

A few days later, sailors in a boat belonging to the
Albemarle
met the pregnant Irish woman down-harbour. She had been separated from her group for three days. The woman's husband was also later found and gave the same “absurd account of their design” to the officials back in Sydney. Thus the proposition of Irish stupidity made its entry onto the Australian stage.

Other men were captured to the north near Broken Bay, and despite their suffering, attempted escape again a few days afterwards. Thirteen of those who first absconded “were brought in, in a state of deplorable wretchedness, naked, and nearly worn out with hunger.” They had tried to live by sucking flowering shrubs for their honey and by eating wild purple berries.

Phillip ordered the convicts at Parramatta to be assembled, and told them that he would send out parties looking for them with orders to fire on sight, and if they were recaptured he would land them on a part of the harbour whence they could not depart, or chain them together with only bread and water during the rest of their term of transportation. The declaration did not staunch the magnitude of their hopes.

Typically, Watkin Tench visited the Irish convicts who had made the dash for China—it was he who called them “the Chinese Travellers.” Four of them lay in hospital, variously wounded by the natives. Watkin's enquiries were not contemptuous, but grew from genuine human impulses of investigation. He asked them if they really supposed it possible to reach China, and they informed him that they had been told that at a considerable distance to the north lay a large river, “which separated this country from the back part of China.” When they crossed this Jordan, they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people who would treat them generously. On the third day of their wanderings towards this hoped-for place, one of their party died of fatigue, and another was butchered by the natives as they fled the scene. They had reached Broken Bay and the Hawkesbury River, where the wide entrance and estuary stopped them from going further.

Though a great proportion of the Irish were of farming backgrounds or had agricultural experience, and though this was a hopeful aspect, Hunter would later describe them as “dissatisfied with their situation here,” and “extremely insolent, refractory, and turbulent.” For the Irish combined their dream of China with a keen sense of their small quota of rights. The convicts of
Queen
at Parramatta were the first to stage an organised public protest, outside Government House in Parramatta in the humidity of December 1791, demanding that the issue of rations be changed back from weekly to daily. There was a certain justice in this. A weak or sickly person might be deprived of a week's rations by a bully in one swoop, but if the ration was doled out daily, the weak could appeal to the strong to prevent any large-scale ration-snatching.

T
HERE WAS A PREGNANT IRISH
girl named Catherine Devereaux aboard
Queen
who did not seek China but stuck close to camp for the sake of her unborn child, who would be christened James, taking the name of his father—the
Queen
's cook, Kelly. James Kelly would reach young manhood under the tutelage of two entrepreneurial former convicts, Henry Kable and James Underwood, and in Van Diemen's Land would become a whaling, sealing, and shipping tycoon of some renown before dying in 1859. But all that was in a future version of Australia, the mercantile one.

Despite a few nods towards mercantilism in the founding of Sydney, such as murderous Captain Trail setting up his general store with impunity in a tent at Sydney Cove, it was not a trading post, and Phillip did not want it yet to be one. But he was interested in how the three Third Fleet transports which had gone off to try the whale fishery on the coasts of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land fared. The
Britannia
returned with seven sperm whales in November, having hunted in company with
William and Anne,
which had caught only one whale on its own account. Thirteen barrels of oil were procured from the whales killed by
Britannia,
“and in the opinion of Mr. Melville [
Britannia
's captain], the oil, with its containing a greater proportion of that valuable part of the fish called by the whalers the head matter, was worth £10 more per ton than that of the fish of any other part of the world he had been in.”

William Richards Jr., who had dispatched the First Fleet, had commercial dreams for the faroff colony he had never seen, and remained in touch with New South Wales through his Botany Bay agent, Zachariah Clark, who was now the commissary of stores in New South Wales. Still a visionary eccentric, Richards hoped to take over the convict-handling business, and combine it with other forms of trade between the south-west Pacific and Britain. The whole idea was irksome to Campbell, the contractor for the Thames hulks. But if Francis Baring, chairman of the East India Company, would describe Sydney as “the serpent we are nursing at Botany Bay,” William Richards was prepared to be both father and midwife to that serpent. He was willing to receive a land grant and to live permanently in New South Wales as Sydney's shipping magnate. Outraged by stories of the Second Fleet, the devoutly Christian Richards had moved towards the twin beacons of utility: a settled, regular, low-yield market in the conscientious transportation of convicts, and on the other side, high-yield trading with India and China and what he may have been convinced would be an increasing traffic of whalers. His ideas, an accurate depiction of the future of New South Wales though they were, were not well received. Indeed, in a year or two he would become bankrupt due to other contracts gone bad, and some of his children would be left to consider New South Wales as an option for free settlement. But far more than anyone else in the penal equation, Richards had desired New South Wales. Not many did. Even Tench would write, “If only a receptacle for convicts be intended, this place stands unequalled … when viewed in a commercial light, I fear its insignificance will not appear very striking.”

In December 1791, as the
Gorgon
lay in Sydney Cove ready to return the marines to Britain, offers were made to the non-commissioned officers and privates to stay in the country as settlers or to enter into the New South Wales Corps. Such offers could only have derived from a British government with a sense of population pressure. Three corporals, a drummer, and 59 privates accepted grants of land on Norfolk Island or at Parramatta, as Rose Hill was by now officially named. The rest wanted to return—indeed, of those who stayed, Tench thought the behaviour of the majority of them could be ascribed to “infatuated affection to female convicts, whose characters and habits of life, I am sorry to say, promise from a connection neither honour nor tranquillity.” As for tranquillity, only the parties to the relationships could say anything, but it is a matter of record that many of the remaining soldiers and their women were founders of enduring Antipodean stock.

Before packing to leave on
Gorgon,
in the summer of 1791–92, Tench made a reconnaissance around Prospect Hill and the ponds along the Parramatta River. Looking at the settlements with the eyes of a man about to depart forever, Tench gave a report of mixed skill and ineptitude on the part of convict and other farmers, and of New South Wales as something less than a bountiful garden. Its tough and plentiful flora might seem to promise a form of Eden, but here in the Sydney basin it all grew from an ancient, leached, and worn-down earth that demanded great skill and determination from those who would profit from it.

For its natural fertility, Tench admired the Parramatta farm of the former sailor and highway robber John Ramsay. Ramsay had settled there with his wife, Mary Leary, from the Second Fleet. Like Ruse's wife, Elizabeth Perry, Mary Leary might have been unjustly transported, and was a woman with an unresolved and burning grievance against her mistress, the wife of a London attorney. She claimed that the woman not only docked her pay but sold used garments to her for exorbitant prices. When the lawyer saw some of his wife's clothing on Leary, his wife swore under oath that she had never “sold her any one thing in my life.” On the farm in New South Wales, Leary probably enlisted her husband's belief in her innocence. No doubt, at their rough-hewn table, she reiterated the extremely credible tale to Captain Tench. Tench thought Ramsay “deserves a good spot, for he is a civil, sober, industrious man. Besides his corn land, he has a well-laid-out little garden, in which I found him and his wife busily at work. He praised her industry to me; and said he did not doubt of succeeding.”

By contrast Tench found Joseph Bishop, former fisherman and convict, had planted a little maize “in so slovenly a style, as to promise a very poor crop.” To survive here as a farmer, thought Tench, a man “must exert more than ordinary activity. The attorney's clerk, Matthew Evering-ham, I also thought out of his province, and likely to return, like Bishop, when victualling from the stores ceased, to drag a timber or brick cart for his maintenance…. I dare believe he finds cultivating his own land not half so heavy a task, as he formerly found that of stringing together volumes of tautology to encumber, or convey away that of his neighbour.”

It would turn out that Everingham, son of an earl, whose crime was to have acquired legal textbooks under false pretences, and his wife, Elizabeth Rymes, Spitalfields bed-linen thief from the Second Fleet, would succeed, however touch-and-go it might have seemed in that early summer of 1791, and would give birth and habitation to nine small “cornstalks” or Currency children, as native-born New South Welshmen came to be called.