Drink (32 page)

The prices, allowing for the cost and risk of transport to the colony, were expensive but not ruinous. A gallon of American rum every now and then was within the purses of most settlers, and they used it not only to refresh themselves but to purchase the labor of convicts. The convicts were permitted to offer themselves for work under a “free time” system that had been introduced in 1789-91, when a reduced food allowance had been thought inadequate to maintain them through a full day’s worth of punishment, and so they had been given part of each afternoon off to grow their own food. When the ration was restored, the free time remained, which the convicts usually spent in working for reward—preferably rum: “The passion for liquor was so predominant among the people, that it operated like a mania, there being nothing which they would not risk to obtain it: And while spirits were to be had, those who did any extra labor refused to be paid in money, or any other article than spirits.”

Widespread intoxication persuaded the new governor, John Hunter, to revise the licensing system. If people had access to legal drinking places—somewhere they might go for a pint or two at the end of each day—they might rein in their drunkenness. Ten men were granted licenses, including James Larra, a French convict who had been transported for stealing a tankard from an alehouse while visiting London, and who had been emancipated the prior year. In 1796, Larra opened Australia’s first legal pub, the Masons Arms in Parramatta. In addition to a variety of spirits, he sold imported porter, Madeira, and quite possibly Australian brewed beer. This last beverage was being produced not far away by a Mr. Boston. It was made from “Indian corn, properly malted, and bittered with the leaves and stalks of the love-apple.” Despite such unusual ingredients, it was reported that “Mr. Boston found this succeeded so well, that he erected at some expense a building proper for the business.”

Unfortunately, instead of responding to the introduction of pubs by drinking moderately, the settlers persisted in indulging themselves “in inebriety and idleness, and robberies.” These problems were compounded by the rising price of imported drinks, despite a steady and increasing supply; and drunken convicts left, right, and center, despite the official impossibility of them obtaining alcohol. And the government had been frustrated whenever it tried to solve these conundrums. It was as if a vast conspiracy was at work, which indeed there was.

From the instant of their arrival, the New South Wales Corps had been aware of the extraordinary thirst for alcohol in the colony, and the lengths to which its settlers and convicts would go to get hold of it. Little by little, they had exerted control over the importation and distribution of alcohol in Australia, until they had a monopoly. This process had begun in 1792, when the first governor had returned to Britain, and was completed over the next three years while the colony was administered by Major Francis Grose of the New South Wales Corps. During this period, he and his military colleagues purchased all spirits landed in the colony and chartered boats to bring in more. They started by selling cheap, to fuel demand, then raised prices step by step, until drink was the most valuable thing in New South Wales. By 1795, when Governor Hunter had arrived from Britain, alcohol had become the “recognized medium of exchange. So much so, that even labor could only be purchased with spirits.”

In addition to monopolizing the supply of alcohol, the NSW Corps also established control over the workforce. The convicts, as part of their punishment, were required to do hard labor, in theory on farmland and public buildings. They might also be assigned to free settlers and emancipated convicts to help them hew homesteads out of the bush. However, during Grose’s tenure as acting governor, they were assigned, almost exclusively, to members of his regiment: “Convict servants were lavishly bestowed, not only upon commissioned officers of the Corps, but also upon sergeants, corporals, and drummers, until scarcely a score of unengaged men remained for any public purposes.”

The conflict of interest between public duty and private gain, which would not have been possible in most British regiments, did not trouble the New South Wales Corps. It was hardly an elite unit. Its ranks contained “deserters from other regiments brought from the Savoy” and, horror of horrors, a mutineer; its officers were “old tailors and shoe-makers, stay makers, man-milliners, tobacconists, and pedlars” who made their fortunes in the colony by “extortion and oppression.” The extortion and oppression was made the subject of a formal agreement in 1797 when “a combination band was entered into” by the New South Wales Corps, under which they were “neither to underbuy nor undersell each other.” It was at about this time that the corps acquired the nickname by which it is known to history—the “Rum Regiment”— an ironic tribute to its status as sole supplier to the colony it was intended to protect. Governor Hunter, to his intense annoyance, found that his power was slight compared with that of the Rum Regiment, who had succeeded in turning a penal colony run on martial lines into a drunken and anarchic hellhole—a sort of Gin Lane by Sea.

Hunter had a particular bête noir among the officers of the rum regiment, Captain John Macarthur, who had been given command of the settlement at Parramatta and who had abused his position of trust comprehensively—buying land, assigning himself convicts to clear and farm it, and paying them with spirits at a 500 percent markup. By the turn of the nineteenth century Macarthur was a wealthy man. He was also a brilliant politician, and as his power grew in New South Wales, he set about undermining that of the governor via a stream of letters to his increasing range of commercial contacts in the City of London. His success can be gauged by Hunter’s short tenure—he retired in 1800, an embittered man, and was replaced by Philip King, who had no more success bringing the Rum Regiment to heel than his predecessor.

King began determined to assert his authority and sent Macarthur to Britain to be court-martialed. Unfortunately for King, Macarthur turned out to have the greater influence in the metropolis. He was acquitted and returned to Sydney in 1805 in his own ship, the
Argos,
which bore a golden fleece as its figurehead. Not only had Macarthur been exonerated by the court, but he had also received a land grant of five thousand acres on which to graze the prize merino stud rams he had bought while on trial. The potential of Australia for sheep had aroused more interest among the great and the good in London than any other news from New South Wales. The need for wool was dire in Britain, which was locked in war with Napoleonic France and had lost access to its traditional suppliers in continental Europe. The fact that much of the evidence against Macarthur, including Governor King’s report, had been stolen en route between Australia and Britain was overlooked, in favor of the possibility that he might be the man to turn the new colony into a giant “sheep walk.”

As well as rewarding Macarthur for his faith in sheep, London decided to remove Governor King, who clearly did not have the measure of his colonists, and to replace him with one of its best sea captains. The man they chose had sailed with Captain Cook, had received the personal thanks of Admiral Nelson for his gallantry during the battle of Copenhagen; had performed one of the greatest feats of navigation of the age, in piloting an open boat 3,618 miles across the open Pacific, and had successfully transported breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean, where it now served as a cheap staple for slaves. Captain William Bligh was fifty-two when he landed in Sydney to take control of New South Wales. He was armed with instructions to clean up the colony, for the complaints of two embittered ex-governors had carried some weight in Whitehall, and while the British were happy to encourage sheep walks, they were also genuinely concerned that their penal colony was full of vice. High on the list of vices to be eradicated was drunkenness. Clause eight of his instructions required Bligh to ensure that no spirits were landed in the colony without his consent.

Once he had had time to form an impression of New South Wales, Bligh wrote to London, setting out the situation as he had found it and his policy for improving the place. He felt that drink was the key issue—the mother of all vices. Booze was the unofficial currency, and its use “as an article of barter had added to its pernicious effects . . . beyond all conception.” Prices and wages in the colony had become hopelessly skewed because of alcohol: “A sawyer will cut one hundred feet of timber for a bottle of spirits, value 2/6d., which he drinks in a few hours; when for the same labor he would charge two bushels of wheat which would furnish bread for him for two months: hence those who have got no liquor
²⁸
to pay their laborers with, are ruined by paying more than they can profitably afford for any kind of labor . . . while those who have liquor gain an immense advantage.”

In addition to the evidence of his eyes, Bligh had been presented on arrival with a report on the moral welfare of the colony, prepared by its chaplain, the Reverend Samuel Marsden. Marsden had little good to report of his flock, whom he characterized as depraved and libidinous inebriates. He drew particular attention to the plight of the children born in New South Wales. According to his statistics, the population consisted of 7,000 inhabitants, of whom 395 were married women and 1,035 were concubines. Of a total of 1,832 native-born children, 1,025 were illegitimate. Moreover, there was little available in the way of schooling, and the offspring of convicts tended to reveal their bad blood at an early age. Indeed, intoxicated children had become a feature of Sydney’s mud streets.

Bligh developed a five-point plan to revive the penal spirit in New South Wales and to rescue its free settlers from themselves. The extermination of all clandestine trade in alcohol was his first priority. He made rapid progress, and by October 1807 he felt able to report to London that the barter of rum had been abolished and that sterling had been reestablished as the currency of the colony. In a private letter home he confided that “this sink of iniquity Sydney, is improving in its manners and its concerns.” However, a blow struck at rum was not one that the regiment that bore its name was ready to take without retaliation. According to Macarthur, the colony had “become a perfect hell” and the Rum Regiment was “galloping into a state of warfare with the governor.” He and his associates decided to engage Bligh where they knew him to be most vulnerable—in the law courts. Bligh was nervous of courts. Sixteen years before he had been subjected to a level of official scrutiny, and public fascination, that few men of his time had had to face. The notorious mutiny that had occurred on HMS
Bounty
when she was under his command had been examined by the Admiralty, sensationalized in the press, and commemorated in poetry, and while Bligh had been exonerated, the stigma of having been on trial in the first place remained.

Testing the authority of Bligh in court not only served the useful purpose of awakening bad memories in the man, it also placed him in a forum where he could not win. The new judge advocate, Richard Atkins, had long been corrupted by the Rum Regiment. By all accounts he was a very public drunk, who committed some spectacular injustices while performing his official duties. He is reported to have sentenced people to death while himself so intoxicated that he could not stand up unaided, and was often too drunk to be able to speak. Bligh considered Atkins to be a “disgrace to human jurisprudence” and had written several letters to Britain requesting a replacement.

The challenge was thrown down to Bligh in October 1807, when Macarthur launched a lawsuit against Robert Campbell, an officer appointed by Bligh to control imports. Macarthur claimed Campbell had illegally seized two copper spirits stills that he was trying to ship into New South Wales. Moreover, not only had Campbell the temerity to detain the stills, but when Macarthur had arranged for the extraction of their boilers from government guard, claiming that they had been packed with medicines, for which he had an urgent need, Campbell had insisted that they be returned. On the face of it the case was absurd: Bligh, as governor, had prohibited the importation of stills, period; and his subordinate had been doing no more than his duty.

The court found, by a majority, the casting vote being delivered by Atkins, in favor of Macarthur. In retrospect, the Rum Regiment and its allies were providing a wonderfully clear message to Bligh—that the courts were utterly corrupt. Another legal challenge to his authority, once again an especially flagrant contravention of the law, was mounted in December 1807. A ship owned by Macarthur had been arrested for exporting a runaway convict. This was an offense of the utmost seriousness—the penal colony was intended to be secure, and shipowners were required to post bonds with the government, which were confiscated if it was proven that they had assisted a convict to escape Australia. Macarthur petitioned to have his bond returned and refused to attend court when requested. He was arrested and charged with sedition.

Events thereafter moved quickly. On January 24, 1808, the New South Wales Corps held a regimental dinner. Its purpose was to rally the troops so that “when heated by wine” they would be encouraged to make “a unanimous resolution of possessing themselves of the administration of the country,” i.e., to stage a coup. Thirty-six hours later, on the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the colony, The New South Wales Corps took part in its only military engagement. While success was complete, the action was hardly glorious—it consisted of the arrest of Bligh in Government House at bayonet point, followed by a celebratory debauch lasting throughout the night. Free drink was handed out to the victorious soldiers, effigies of Bligh were burned in the streets, sheep were roasted, “and those scenes of riot, tumult, and insubordination that are ever incident to the subversion of legitimate government and authority ensued. Macarthur, the hero of the day, paraded the streets, in the most publick parts of which he was always conspicuous.”