Leviathan Read online

  Tench had the ‘tiresome and disagreeable’ duty of inspecting all the letters written to or from his charges. He found it a heavy burden but centuries on he provides a useful glimpse into those hearts and minds held shackled and mute in the darkness below decks. The great number of letters surprised him, and though the tone varied ‘according to the dispositions of the writers’ they all worried about ‘the impracticability of returning home, the dread of a sickly passage and the fearful prospect of a distant and barbarous country’. Tench, a sympathetic observer of human frailty, was certain that this ‘apparent despondency proceeded in few instances from sentiment. With too many,’ he argued ‘it was, doubtless, an artifice to awaken compassion and call forth relief, the correspondence invariably ending in a petition for money and tobacco.’

  The arc of these lives, over 1000 convicts and their keepers, had been entirely deflected from their normal course on 18 August 1786, when the Home Secretary Lord Sydney wrote to the Treasury authorising the first unsteady steps on a journey to the far side of the world. While Sydney’s memo formally set the creaky wooden engines of state to work on founding a jail within the harbour which would bear his name, history had channelled events towards that point many years earlier. When George Washington and crew kicked King George III’s worthless royal butt out of North America they not only fathered the United States but also became distant uncles to Australia. No longer able to export its criminal classes to the American colonies, the British government annexed a whole continent for a prison.

  Some writers have tried to decode a secret history within the white settlement of Australia, peering beyond the cover story to discern deeply buried strategic agendas: a bid to deny the French a stranglehold over the Pacific, a supply base for pine and flax, a naval station to harass the Spanish off South America. In writing to request the East India Company’s help in mounting the First Fleet, Lord Sydney did say the colony would help prevent the emigration of other European powers to the area, an occasion ‘which would be attended with infinite prejudices to the Company’s affairs’. But whilst some strategic, military and commercial considerations no doubt played upon the minds of those planning the colony, a stone cold fact remains at the heart of any retrospective embroidery: the city was not established as a military stronghold or a commercial depot but as a far flung desolate jail.

  The involvement of the insanely powerful East India Company – the Microsoft of its day – was not unusual. No permanent naval body was ever created to manage the business of convict transportation to Australia. The government contracted out each convoy and shipment to private enterprise, the rationale being that commercial vessels could dump their human cargo then pick up a paying consignment of tradeable goods such as tea or spices on the way home, offsetting the cost of a global journey. Thus, when the government first settled on the idea of unloading its surplus criminal population they approached the directors of the East India Company to tender for the job. The company was certainly large enough to handle the assignment and its charter seemed to indicate that New South Wales fell within the territory ceded to it anyway. On 19 September 1786, they accepted the First Fleet contract.

  The fleet initially consisted of ten vessels: two warships, the Sirius on which the commander’s flag flew and Supply, an armed tender; five prison ships: Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Scarborough and the slow-moving, clumsy Lady Penrhyn; and three freighters, Borrowdale, Fishburn and Golden Grove to carry the bulk of the colonists’ stores and provisions. Another convict transport, the Prince of Wales, with its consignment of forty-nine females and one lone, lucky captive male – a burglar named George Youngson – was added later.

  These ships were no wind driven racing chariots. They were young, strong vessels – three were launched in 1786, the year the fleet was conceived – but they were nothing like the sleek, fast clippers which ran between Portsmouth and Sydney in later years. They were small, tiny in fact, given the scale of the undertaking. Alexander, the largest, measured just over thirty-four metres in length and nine across. And that was an extreme measurement which overstated the actual space available to her passengers. Supply, the minnow of the fleet, stretched all the way out to twenty-one metres, confining her travellers to a space little bigger than a cricket pitch. Blunt-nosed, fat-bellied and flat-bottomed, the fleet ships would wallow in the high seas like hapless wooden whales.

  Into their holds went convicts, marines, officers, seamen, wives and children along with the food, stores and equipment needed to sustain so many lives for two years. Phillip did not think the months spent at anchor taking on these supplies excessive, and indeed when he gave the signal to weigh anchor and lay on sail for the great unknown, there were still serious shortfalls in the inventory – notably, adequate clothing for the female prisoners and ammunition for the marines. That there were such shortfalls should not be surprising. The ships were already crammed to bursting point. From dawn until dusk, for week after week, convoys of heavily laden ferries and barges had trawled back and forth to service them as they lay off Portsmouth, settling lower and lower into the water. Jammed up hard against the human travellers were scores of penned animals, sheep, pigs, chickens and geese. Those passengers with the freedom to move around had to squeeze past forty-five tonnes of tallow, eight hundred sets of bedding, hundreds of boxes of seeds, ten blacksmiths’ forges, seven hundred steel spades, seven hundred iron shovels, seven hundred garden hoes, seven hundred felling axes and two hundred canvas beds. Dozens of scythes for hacking through weeds and wheat were hauled over the sides with dozens of razors for scraping off stubble. Beef, bread, potatoes and pease porridge came on board with coal, tents, boots and bayonets. Ten thousand bricks, eight thousand fish hooks and three quarters of a million nails were packed in tight with thousands of boxes and bags of sundry items.

  The claustrophobic crush was made worse by the renovations carried out to turn mercantile traders into secure, sea-going prisons. Philip Gidley King, second lieutenant of the Sirius and later a governor of the colony described the security. Very strong, thick wooden walls, studded with nails and punctuated by loopholes to fire through in case of ‘irregularities’, were run across the lower decks behind the mainmast. The hatches were secured by crossbars, bolts and heavy oak stanchions. Above, in the fresh air, a wooden barricade about a metre high ‘armed with pointed prongs of Iron’, divided the soldiers and ship’s company from the convicts. Sentinels and armed guards hovered around hatchways and up on the quarterdeck to ‘guard against any surprise’. Watkin Tench reported that as the convicts were embarked the opportunity was taken ‘to convince them in the most pointed terms that any attempt on their side either to contest the command or to force their escape should be punished with instant death’. Cannons loaded with grapeshot and pointed down the hatchways into the prisoners’ quarters backed up the stern words.

  In spite of all this, a rough sort of egalitarianism prevailed. The convicts may have been manacled to each other below decks, but by some measures the marines were little better off. In mid-April their commandant, Major Ross, wrote of grave concerns for his troops aboard the Alexander, many of whom were afflicted with a terrible illness. The trouble, thought Ross, lay with their quarters, which were located beneath the seamen’s, thereby cutting them off from any fresh air. Their berths were suitable only for storing provisions, he wrote. They lived in a funk ‘rendered putrid’ long before they breathed it in. Apparently even convicts couldn’t be stashed away down there. During the last week and a half in March the ship was evacuated and cleaned out.

  On 7 May, when Phillip arrived from London keen expectation swept through the assembly whose enthusiasm had been blunted by previous delays. Officers and common men bent themselves to their tasks with renewed vigour. But when at last, on the morning of 12 May, the fleet commander ran up the flags to signal departure, nothing happened. The ships’ masters had withheld many months’ pay from their men, hoping to gouge them with inflated prices for supplies bought from ships�
� stores whilst at sea. A day was lost sorting out the dispute, with some of the men being put ashore. At three in the morning the next day, Phillip tried again. This time the sailors followed the signal flags aloft. Their shouts mingled with the rumble of unfurling canvas and, escorted by the frigate Hyena, the eleven groaning wooden buckets with their burden of outlaw pilgrims dipped their bows to the waters of the Solent and began to crawl slowly into the west.

  John Hunter, Phillip’s second-in-command, reported light breezes and fair pleasant weather through the Channel but was mortified to discover that two of the transports sailed ‘exceedingly bad’; one of them, the Charlotte, had to be towed by Hyena. Watkin Tench, finding no comfort in his own thoughts, took a midmorning stroll down past the Charlotte’s barricades to see how the convicts were faring. With most ‘their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land could not be wholly suppressed’. He found the men affected more badly than the women, only one of whom appeared upset. Borrowing from Paradise Lost, another tale of man’s fall from grace and journey into banishment, he wrote: ‘Some natural tears she dropp’d, but wip’d them soon’.

  Good weather and a change of scene, however, soon brought forth some cheer and acceptance of ‘a lot not now to be altered’, according to Tench. Adding to the lighter mood came an order from the Sirius that the convicts’ chains be struck off. Tench took great pleasure in extending ‘this humane order’ to all the prisoners under his control. In the evening of that same day, with a high sea running so strongly that Phillip, a very salty old sea dog, could not even sit properly at his table to write, the Hyena’s crew gave three cheers and withdrew from the convoy carrying some hastily scrawled dispatches.

  One of these letters briefly mentioned an attempted mutiny on board the Scarborough. Apparently the marines’ stern warnings backed up by cannon and bayonet hadn’t been enough to dissuade some of the convicts from attempting a revolt. Hunter thought that Phillip’s order to strike off the convicts’ fetters may have encouraged them. A number of prisoners on the Scarborough had hoped to overpower their guards and sneak away from the fleet at night. Given away by a snitch, two ringleaders were taken aboard the Sirius, severely flogged and returned to heavy irons. It was the first major excitement of the voyage, although there had already been some minor personal dramas.

  Two days after the Isle of Wight fell away beneath the horizon, a marine corporal named Baker took a loaded musket from an arms locker and laid it down for inspection. The gun discharged, firing its ball through his right ankle. The bullet shattered the bones and deflected with enough force to carry on through a cask full of beef and two geese on the other side of it. The geese did not make it to Australia but Baker recovered, returning to duty with full use of the joint just three months later. It was a small, slightly ridiculous harbinger of the dangers and mishaps which lay in ambush over the next eight-and-a-half months.

  Some like Ishmael Coleman, went quietly into their good night. Fleet Surgeon John White reported that eight days after Hyena had peeled away, Coleman ‘departed this life … worn out by lowness of spirits and debility, brought on by long and close confinement’. The surgeon recorded that the patient resigned his last breath ‘without a pang’. Others were not so fortunate. Jane Bonner, a convict on the Prince of Wales, was crushed by a longboat which rolled from its booms and jammed her ‘in a most shocking manner’ against the side of the ship. She lingered in agony through the night, dying before White could reach her. Thomas Brown, ‘a very well-behaved convict’ by White’s own testimony, fell from a bowsprit where he had been hanging washing. The Charlotte hove to at once and Supply, realising what had happened, bore down as well. But Brown disappeared before help could reach him. Crewmen on the forecastle who saw the accident said the ship ran him down. White’s journal is replete with such mishaps, but not all of the victims were innocent. On New Year’s Day, with landfall in Australia less than a month away, the boatswain on the Fishburn climbed aloft with a head full of grog. The ship was labouring in heavy, chaotic seas and inevitably the fool toppled from high up in the rigging and ‘bruised himself in a dreadful manner’. Already suffering badly from scurvy, his wounds soon mortified, and he died about half an hour after White clambered over the side to attend him.

  Diseases such as scurvy and dysentery were much more of a threat to the wellbeing of the convict ships than drownings, shipwreck or accident. Most of those committed to the deep between Portsmouth and Sydney were simply devoured by sickness. Surgeons were constantly scanning their charges for any sign of illness. Sometimes an outbreak was entirely avoidable as when, in mid-July after crossing the equator, several mariners and convicts aboard the Alexander suddenly took ill. White climbed into the Charlotte’s rowboat and made another of his many difficult shuttle visits, immediately discovering where the problem lay: the ship’s bilge water. A filthy toxic swill of human waste, rotting food, decaying animals and sea water sloshing around in the lowest parts of the vessel, it had risen high enough to lap over into the living areas. So poisonous was the atmosphere below deck that it turned the brass buttons on the officers’ tunics black, and when the hatches were taken off the stench was so powerful the seamen reared back in disgust, scarcely able to stand over them.

  The privations of a long sea journey in the late eighteenth century, the fierce environment, the cramped, primitive conditions and the crude nature of medical science all conspired to kill off large numbers of unhealthy travellers. The First Fleet, however, had an excellent health and safety record in comparison with later convoys. The Second Fleet, for instance, lost hundreds of their male passengers en route and more again in the months following their arrival in Sydney. The hot, dark wet weeks spent traversing the equatorial Atlantic were some of the worst, dreaded by medical staff. Wrote White:

  Every attention was … paid to the people on board the Charlotte and every exertion used to keep her clean and wholesome between decks. My first care was to keep the men, as far as was consistent with the regular discharge of their duty, out of the rain; and I never suffered the convicts to come upon deck when it rained, as they had neither linen nor clothing sufficient to make themselves dry and comfortable after getting wet: a line of conduct which cannot be too strictly observed, and enforced, in those latitudes.

  Even in the best maintained vessels the atmosphere below decks was still humid and awful. Despite his efforts Surgeon White was called on a number of times to put down eruptions of fever and diarrhoea. One epidemic which appeared a month before Christmas carried off Daniel Cresswell, a marine, who suffered the most acute, agonising pain White had ever witnessed.

  In some ways the First Fleet women were in a worse position than the men. Their irrepressible sexuality and the grim prudishness of their masters meant they were boxed up at night in even the hottest climes. At one point White describes an evening rumbling with distant thunder ‘and the most vivid flashes of lightning I ever remember’. The weather was so hot that the female convicts, ‘perfectly overcome by it, frequently fainted away; and these faintings generally terminated in fits’. Unfortunately for the women, the fleet’s commanders took such a dim view of ‘the warmth of their constitutions’ and ‘the depravity of their hearts’ that the hatches over their bunks remained battened down through the night lest they make their way to the seamen’s quarters to take their warm, depraved hearts’ delight. Their desire to be with the men was so strong that neither shame – considered a negligible modifier in matters of erotic hunger amongst the lower orders – nor the fear of punishment – somewhat more effective – could deter them.

  Not that White could talk. Like many of his peers he enjoyed the indulgence of a breathtaking double standard. As Aveling points out, it wasn’t the sexual activity of the women which offended the officers. It was their lack of ‘deference’. Most of the officers took a mistress from among the ‘clean’ and ‘well behaved’ females and a selling point of Whit
e’s journal was the detail provided of the sexual escapades accessible to His Majesty’s far flung officer corps. After docking at Tenerife, a hot dry volcanic island off the north west coast of Africa and the first of three ports of call on the journey, those officers not concerned with restocking the fleet’s fresh food and water supply took their liberty in the town. White seems to have been a little unlucky in his wanderings. He testily recorded that the women of the Spanish port were ‘so abandoned and shameless’ that it would do an injustice to the prostitutes of London ‘to say they are like them’. Someone had told him all the women of Tenerife had ‘an amorous constitution’ and were addicted to ‘intrigue’, by which White seems to mean semisecret carnal encounters. The sort, that is, which he seems to have gone without.

  At Rio de Janeiro, the next port, thousands of miles south and across the other side of the Atlantic, White mentions the flogging of Cornelius Connell, a private in the marines, ‘for having an improper intercourse with some of the female convicts’. Shortly afterwards he regales us with his trip to a festival on shore, a noisy colourful affair at a church. A band ‘exerted themselves with might and main to please the surrounding audience’. Fireworks and rockets concluded the evening at about ten o’clock, after which White speculated, ‘some intrigues’ followed. Both he and Watkin Tench acted on the advice of Daniel Solander, a naturalist on Cook’s voyage, who wrote that Rio women exposed themselves at their doors and windows as soon as it became dark, ‘distinguishing, by presents of nosegays and flowers, those on whom they had no objection to bestow their favours’. Walking through the town each night, White and Tench waited for the flowers and the favours to descend. Sadly it was not to be. Tench retained his humour at being misled by Solander’s tale. ‘We were so deplorably unfortunate as to walk every evening before their windows and balconies without being honoured with a single bouquet,’ he wrote, ‘though nymphs and flowers were in equal and great abundance’. White meanwhile spent more time describing the señoritas than the port itself. The sense of a slightly desperate, long deprived sailor stepping ashore with a whole lot of loving to give comes through strongly in his narrative.