A Commonwealth of Thieves (7 page)

The sentiment in the last lines was a common one. At Botany Bay in the southern hemisphere, where south, not north, pointed to the polar region, reversal of destinies was possible.

A London broadside would more earthily proclaim:

Let us drink a good health to our schemers above,
Who at length have contrived from this land to remove
Thieves, robbers and villains, they'll send 'em away
To become a new people at Botany Bay.
… The hulks and the jails had some thousands in store,
But out of the jails are then thousand times more,
Who live by fraud, cheating, vile tricks, and foul play,
Should all be sent over to Botany Bay.

For such an exemplary officer, Arthur Phillip would sometimes hanker for tokens of respect, even for vanities. This tendency to press for distinction would remain into his old age. Before he left England, he tried to persuade the Admiralty to give him a specially designed pennant to fly from his ship. He was not permitted one.

five

T
HE FLEET'S PRODIGIOUS JOURNEY
began in darkness at 3 a.m. on Sunday 3 May 1787. Phillip's instructions were to punctuate the voyage with calls at the Canary Islands, at Rio de Janeiro, his old Portuguese home base, and then at Cape Town. Behind these orders was fear of that great eroder of human flesh and spirit, scurvy, almost inevitable on even shorter voyages than this.

The run down the Channel took three days, with great sickness amongst the women on the
Lady Penrhyn,
the new-built ship whose timbers were still howling and settling and whose master, William Sever, was unfamiliar with her. Uncontrollable seasickness filled the low-roofed prison deck with its acid, gut-unsettling stench, and spread rapidly down the crammed lines of women starboard and port. On top of that, the escort
Hyena
had to take the
Lady Penrhyn
in tow to keep her up to the other ships.

Phillip was to find a companion spirit in John Hunter, captain of
Sirius,
Phillip's flagship. The sea had claimed Hunter's ultimate affection over competing passions for music, the classics, and the Church of Scotland. His first shipwreck, when sailing with his father, a ship's master, had been on a howling Norwegian coast at the age of eight. Once rescued, he had been saved from hypothermia by being clasped to a Norwegian woman in a warm bed, an experience which seems to have reinforced his suspicion that the sea was his true mother. Just over fifty and no ninny, he was the sort of officer others might describe as the navy's backbone.

The fleet hove to some two hundred miles west of the Scilly Isles and
Hyena
departed, taking Phillip's last dispatches. By now, Phillip knew that there was a range of speed and performance between the various ships. Apart from the
Lady Penrhyn,
the transports
Charlotte
and the
Prince of Wales
were slowed by heavy seas, and their convicts suffered the worst discomfort and seasickness in storms. The deep-laden store ships,
Borrowdale, Golden Grove,
and
Fishburn,
were susceptible to storm damage to masts and rigging. The
Alexander, Scarborough,
and
Friendship
were the three fastest transports. The handiest sailer was the little snub-nosed tender,
Supply,
which could reconnoitre ahead and double back to round up stragglers, but could safely carry little sail in really big seas. At first, Lieutenant King could not see much sense in
Supply,
since she was not big enough to carry a significant amount of stores. But he now thanked God for the existence of this tough and speedy little sloop.

By 3 June, the eleven ships reached Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, after a journey on which the irons of the convicts, except those under punishment, had been totally removed, and a routine for allowing the transportees on deck in fine weather had been established.

Sailors generally had two hammocks, which were regularly scrubbed and aired each day in nets hung in the rigging around the deck. In well-run ships, convict bedding was also aired and dried in the nets. But despite all such care a number of males had died on the
Alexander,
which was the unhealthiest ship in the fleet. She had lost twenty-one convicts to fever, scurvy, pneumonia, and the bloody flux (dysentery) in the few weeks since sailing and had a further twenty-one on the sick list.

South of Teneriffe the weather was extremely hot and characterised by calms and rain storms. In the calms, amidst the cram of bodies, the air below decks reached fierce temperatures, and a skirt of stinking waste and garbage surrounded each ship. Wind sails were rigged like great fans, and swung across the deck to blow air below, and while the convicts exercised or slept on deck, gunpowder was exploded again in their prison to disperse evil vapours. The marine officers on
Friendship
found the ship infested with rats, cockroaches, and lice, but the women convicts still needed to be battened down on their ill-ventilated deck at night, to prevent “a promiscuous intercourse taking place with the marines.” By such a term, prostitution might have been meant, yet the rigour of separation between the sexes must have varied from ship to ship, to account for the pregnancies of convict women. In prison and on the convict decks of the fleet, experienced women tried to avoid pregnancy. They delayed weaning if they already had a child, practised
coitus interruptus,
pleaded illness, including syphilis, and so on. Patent abortion medicines were advertised in newspapers, but the young women of the transports had no access to them. As for condoms, they were available in London but were expensive, and were gentlemen's devices, designed more to avoid venereal disease than to prevent pregnancies.

Despite the ban on prostitution, there were so many alliances between convicts, male and female, and between marines and sailors and sundry women aboard, that perhaps Phillip and the Home Office, within the bounds of what they saw as proper discipline, were willing for such associations to occur. Some officers acquired housekeeper-lovers from amongst the convict women, and on at least some of the ships, sailors were permitted to attach sea-wives to themselves. There was a common Georgian belief, subscribed to by James Boswell, that sexual abstinence induced gout. The sailors were taking no risks.

Lieutenant Clark on
Friendship
hated the disorderly women and ordered four of them to be put in irons for fighting, which must have been a hard punishment in that climate. “They are a disgrace to their whole sex, bitches that they are. I wish all the women were out of the ships.” Clark was gratified that the corporal ordered to flog one London prostitute and
Mercury
escapee, Elizabeth Dudgeon, later in the voyage “did not play with her but laid it home.” With the same ink and at the same hour he raised fervent thanks that God had sent him his wife: “Oh gracious Jesus, in what manner shall I humble myself to make you a recompense for giving me so heavenly a gift?” By contrast, Liz Barber, a less than heavenly gift, abused Surgeon Arndell and invited Captain Meredith “to come and kiss her cunt for he was nothing but a lousy rascal as were we all.”

But apart from the ten or twelve women who were always in trouble on the
Friendship,
the others behaved well, which might have meant in part that they were amenable to discipline but also to washing and sewing and other chores and demands.

Phillip knew from the stories of
Mercury
and
Swift
how endemic the dream of mutiny was amongst the convicts, the chief fantasy, and an attractive one in the northern part of the Atlantic from which, in the schemes of mutiny, the newly self-liberated American colonies, champions of men's rights, could most easily be reached. Lieutenant Clark and Captain Meredith on
Friendship
were very concerned; they asked the master, Captain Walton, to go on board
Sirius
and tell Phillip they doubted whether his order to unchain the convicts for their health's sake was wise. “There are so many
Mercury
s on board of us,” Clark confided to his wife, Betsy Alicia, by letter. That same day, a convict came to the commanding marine officer on board the
Scarborough
and told him that two men were planning to take the ship over. Neither of them had been involved in earlier mutinies, but they were both sailors and knew how to work a ship. One of them, Farrell, had been transported for stealing a handkerchief—in his case, a handkerchief with a value of one shilling. The two men, Farrell and Griffiths, both in their twenties, were brought aboard the
Sirius
to have two-dozen lashes inflicted by the bosun's mate. Both men “steadfastly denied the existence of any such design as was imputed to them.” Nevertheless, they were transferred to yet another transport in the fleet, the
Prince of Wales,
and put under special watch.

A group baptism on the
Lady Penrhyn,
with the Reverend Johnson, the chaplain appointed to New South Wales, performing the rite, was an event of “great glee” with “an additional allowance of grog being distributed to the crews of those ships where births took place.” But crossing the equator, the
Lady Penrhyn
and the
Charlotte
came close to colliding with each other, as the
Lady Penrhyn
's crew were distracted by the ceremonies of an officer or bosun dressed as King Neptune apparently rising from the sea to chastise and initiate those who had never crossed the line before.

On 5 July, Phillip felt it necessary to reduce the water ration to three pints per person per day, all of it going to consumption, leaving everyone to have recourse to salt water for washing clothes and bathing. Sometimes garments were washed by being dragged on a rope overboard, and one sailor lost a pair of breeches to a shark this way. A convict was washed overboard and lost when he went on deck to bring in the washing during the sudden onset of a storm.

On the
Prince of Wales
Jane Bonner, married, one child, guilty of stealing a coat, was hit on the head when a longboat fell from the booms where the ship's carpenter was caulking it. She died of brain injuries six days later. On matters of general health, Chief Surgeon John White and his three assistants were rowed around the fleet when weather permitted to consult with captains and such resident surgeons as Bowes Smyth of the
Lady Penrhyn,
and to inspect health arrangements or undertake care of the convicts.

Where the north-east trades blew, ships were capable of making good time, as on 17 June, when
Friendship
logged a refreshing 174 nautical miles to the
Sirius
's 163. For the fast sailers to keep in touch with the slow ones was tedious, and Phillip was already contemplating splitting the flotilla into fast and slow divisions. Even on a bad day for the whole fleet, 26 June,
Friendship
made 29 nautical miles to
Sirius
's 25.

The run was good to Rio, and on 5 August the fleet stood in the estuary off that city. Private Easty on
Scarborough
was impressed with the thirteen-gun salute from the fort, and the similar response from the
Sirius.
The total deaths since embarkation were twenty-nine male and three female prisoners, which was considered an excellent result. The convoy had been able to keep in contact, although the journals of the gentlemen indicate that the
Lady Penrhyn
was continually lagging.

The Portuguese filled the first boat to return to the
Sirius
with fruit and vegetables “sent as presents to the Commodore from some of his old friends and acquaintances.” On the second morning, when Phillip and his officers paid a courtesy call on the Viceroy, a guard stepped forward and laid the national colours at Phillip's feet, “than which nothing could have been a higher token of respect.” That night the town was illuminated in his honour. The English officers could go where they wanted within the city, without escorts. One evening a Portuguese soldier presented himself to Phillip and asked to be allowed to sail to New Holland with the expedition. Phillip would not hear of it and had him dropped off onshore, “but with great humanity permitted him to be landed wherever he thought he might chance to escape unobserved, and have an opportunity of returning to his duty.”

Collins tells us that while in harbour in Rio, every convict was regularly given one and a half pounds of fresh meat, a pound of rice, a suitable portion of vegetables, and several oranges. Sailors returning from jaunts ashore brought a great number of oranges and even pelted the convicts with them. The Viceroy set aside Enxadas Island to allow the expedition to set up tents for the sick and use as a shore base. Lieutenant Dawes of the marines also set up a temporary observatory there. In February 1787, the Astronomer Royal, Dr. Neil Maskelyne, proposed adaptations for three telescopes and acquisition of a 10-inch Ramsden sextant to serve Lieutenant William Dawes, surveyor and astronomer, in making nautical and astronomical observations on the voyage to Botany Bay “and on shore at that place.” Dawes was one of the Portsmouth division of marines, a spiritual young man who had been wounded in a sea battle with the French in Chesapeake Bay during the war in America, and had volunteered for New South Wales out of scientific rather than military fervour. The chief astronomical need was to check the Kendall chronometer of the
Sirius.
The correct local time could be found instrumentally from reading the sun and by fixing the exact time of an eclipse of Jupiter's third moon and comparing it with the astronomical tables which gave Greenwich time for such eclipses. By this means, Dawes found that there had been only an insignificant loss of clock time since leaving Portsmouth.

Also ashore, young Surgeon White watched religious processions, and was astonished but titillated by the fact that there were many well-dressed women in the crowd, “quite unattended” and trawling for lovers. He lingered by the balconies of convent novices and students, girls “very agreeable in person and disposition,” and felt a sentimental passion for one in particular. He also performed a demonstration leg amputation according to the controversial Allenson's method on the patient of an eminent Portuguese military surgeon, Dr. Ildefonso. Ildefonso and his juniors were not impressed by the procedure but were happier about the quicker healing the method seemed to promise.