1788 Page 10

  On arrival at the port the English fleet was met by the Spanish authorities, who inquired about its business. The next morning, as protocol dictated, Arthur Phillip sent his loyal deputy Lieutenant King to wait on the local Spanish governor, Marquis Branciforte, while everyone else stayed on the ships. When King attended the governor to announce the arrival of Phillip and the English fleet, he apologised for the Sirius’s not saluting the fort in the customary way because there were too many stores packed on the deck of the flagship to allow it to fire its guns. As Hunter wrote in his journal, the next morning they received

  a very polite reply from the governor, signifying his sincere wishes that the island might be capable of supplying us with such articles as we were in want of, and his assurances that every refreshment the place afforded we should certainly have.15

  The following day Governor Branciforte agreed to receive Phillip, who attended the palace with ten of his officer colleagues. It was Monday 4 June, when the English would normally have been celebrating the king’s birthday, but the business of the fleet put paid to the normal celebrations, leading the marine commander Major Robert Ross to complain that insufficient respect was shown to the British monarch.

  The meeting with the Spanish governor went well, and John White, who attended the audience, gave the following account of him in his journal:

  He is rather above the middle size but cannot boast of much embonpoint; his countenance is animated; his deportment easy and graceful; and both his appearance and manners perfectly correspond with the idea universally entertained of the dignity of a grandee of Spain. This accomplished nobleman, as I have been informed, is not a Spaniard by birth, but a Sicilian; and descended from some of the princes of that island.16

  Two days later Arthur Phillip and his party were treated to a lavish dinner at the governor’s palace, where the extravagance amazed the English, who were accustomed to more restrained entertainment.17 King was to say, ‘We were received and entertained with the liberality and elegance for which the Spaniards are so much distinguished.’18 The desserts made a particular impression on Watkin Tench, who was also at the dinner:

  The profusion of ices which appeared in the dessert I found surprising considering that we were enjoying them under a sun nearly vertical. But it seems the caverns of the Peak very far below the summit afford at all seasons ice in abundance.19

  During the week the fleet was able to acquire some, but not all, of the supplies it needed. Tenerife’s economy depended on being able to sell its fresh produce to the ships that called in on the next legs of their journeys. However, the English fleet was of an exceptional size and it is unlikely that the port had ever before been challenged to provide for so many people at once. The timing was also unfortunate, as the English arrived before much of the food they needed was ready for harvest. The vegetables that could be procured were, according to White, ‘rather scanty, little besides onions being to be got; and still less of fruit, it being too early in the season’.20

  Stocking up on fresh food, particularly fruit, was a vital protection against scurvy, and the fleet was able to take on board large quantities of figs and mulberries, which were then in season. This was accompanied by a temporary improvement to the standard of all rations. The marines were each given a daily ration of a pint of wine, instead of spirits, and a pound of fresh beef, rather than salted meat. They also received a pound of fresh bread and some fresh vegetables. The convicts were not given wine but received three-quarters of a pound of fresh meat and a pound of fresh bread or rice, as well as some fresh fruit and vegetables. The fleet also took aboard some wine but was to stock up further when reaching its next port of call, Rio de Janeiro.

  While the English had no choice but to purchase fresh meat from the Spanish colony, they baulked at the high price of local bread, so instead they drew on their own supply of dried hardtack biscuits.21

  While in Tenerife, a number of officers took the opportunity to do some sightseeing. Captain Hunter of the Sirius describes how expatriate English merchants took him and a number of colleagues on a trip to the island’s old capital, Laguna, some four miles’ walk to the north side of Tenerife.22 On another day they went to the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi, where they witnessed a colourful procession followed by solemn worship. This prompted an indignant comment from the Anglican Richard Johnson that it was all ‘superstition and idolatry’.23

  When the officers went ashore to see the celebrations, all of the English sailors were kept on board their ships for fear that their usual drunken behaviour might disrupt the event and offend the locals.

  Jacob Nagle described in his journal an incident that occurred later during their stay. After rowing Governor Phillip ashore, he and other crew members went to a local inn and he had his pocket picked. It seems that Phillip had unexpectedly returned to his boat to be rowed back out to the Sirius and the other oarsmen made a run to get back on time, leaving Nagle to pay for the wine. Nagle said his purse suddenly disappeared as he was paying the bill and that the innkeeper then strip-searched an old woman beggar who was standing nearby and found his purse behind her neck. He was impressed by the ‘dexterous hand in whipping it out of my pocket’ and was relieved to have his money back. He was even more relieved that the ‘Governor excused my not being at the boat’ when he had wanted to be taken back to the ship.24

  The fleet had intended staying in Tenerife only a few days but needed to stay a week because of how long it was taking to load fresh water onto the ships for the next leg of the journey. Captain Hunter noted that the water pipe to the port only allowed two small boats to fill their casks at the same time, which made supplying water to all eleven ships very protracted.

  On the night before the fleet was finally to leave, a convict on board the Alexander, John Powers, escaped. He managed to get up on deck, lower himself over the side into a small boat and row away. Powers first rowed over to a Dutch East Indiaman anchored in the harbour but his offer to sign up as a member of the crew was rejected. He then rowed to a nearby beach, where he intended to hide until the fleet left Tenerife. The next morning a search party of marines set out in search of him, as Hunter recorded in his journal:

  A little westward of the town they discovered the boat beating on the rocks and rowing in to pick her up they discovered the fellow concealing himself in the cliff of a rock, not having been able to get up the precipice. The officer presented a musket at him and threatened if he did not come down and get into the boat he would shoot him. The fellow complied rather than run the hazard of being shot and was taken on board, punished and put in irons until we got to sea, when he was liberated in the same manner as the rest.25

  On 10 June the fleet left Santa Cruz and headed south for the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa – about fifteen hundred kilometres’ sailing – where they planned to stop briefly for more fresh water and whatever fresh food could be purchased before heading across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro. Captain Hunter said that the main reason for wanting to stop at Port Praya Bay was to stock up on a fresh supply of vegetables, having not been able to procure them in Tenerife. The fleet reached Port Praya on the island of St Tiago on 19 June and had already dropped anchor when Phillip had misgivings and abandoned the stopover. Phillip said in a letter to Evan Nepean:

  I should have stopped for twenty-four hours at Port Praya but when off that port light airs of wind and a strong current making it probable some of the ships might not get in, I did not think it prudent to attempt it.26

  He decided to head on with the supplies they already had, even though it would inevitably lead to water restrictions before they reached Rio de Janeiro.

  Over the next few weeks the fleet headed further south and occasionally passed other ships, including a Portuguese trader that fell in with the convoy for a week, a ship from the coast of Guinea bound for the West Indies and an English ship bound for the Falkland Islands.27 The high temperatures, humidity and heavy tropical rain would have distressed and c
onfused the convicts, who would have been ignorant of geography and climate, and the threat to the health of those on the Charlotte became a particular concern to Surgeon John White:

  The weather became exceedingly dark, warm, and close, with heavy rain, a temperature of the atmosphere very common on approaching the equator, and very much to be dreaded, as the health is greatly endangered thereby. Every attention was therefore 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.28

  Another hazard of these latitudes struck aboard the Prince of Wales, which suffered a plague of bugs. Lieutenant Ralph Clark recorded that his colleague Lieutenant William Faddy had to kill over a hundred of the insects in his small sleeping area before he was able to get any sleep.29

  As they sailed over the equator and into the southern hemisphere, the ships’ crews celebrated the ‘crossing of the line’. In a traditional ceremony that paid homage to the god of the sea, Neptune, those sailors who were crossing the equator for the first time were compelled to be ritually ducked in water, lathered with tar, greased and shaved.

  At night the heat and humidity became insufferable, and it was decided to remove the hatches above the convict quarters to allow in some air. This was not without its consequences, however, as White recorded with distaste:

  In the evening it became calm, with distant peals of thunder, and the most vivid flashes of lightning I ever remember. The weather was now so immoderately hot that the female convicts, perfectly overcome by it, frequently fainted away; and these faintings generally terminated in fits. And yet, notwithstanding the enervating effects of the atmospheric heat, and the inconveniences they suffered from it, so predominant was the warmth of their constitutions, or the depravity of their hearts, that the hatches over the place where they were confined could not be suffered to lay off, during the night, without a promiscuous intercourse immediately taking place between them and the seamen and marines.30

  The living conditions for the convicts at sea were appalling. Many had already spent years in cramped, overcrowded prisons and hulks in Britain and would now spend eight months locked up in even more congested quarters in the bowels of the transports. While the ships’ officers and crews had opportunities to escape the ships and go ashore when the fleet was in port, the convicts were kept on board, and for much of this time they were locked up below deck.

  Because of the risk to security there were no portholes in the convicts’ quarters, and the risk of fire meant the banning of candles below decks, which meant the convicts were always in the dark as well as lacking any fresh air. Rats, parasites, bedbugs, lice, fleas and cockroaches thrived on all the ships. Their bilges (the lowest part of the ship, into which all of its excess liquids tend to drain) became foul and the smell overwhelming to the convicts who were locked below decks. The convicts’ exercise area in the open air at the front of the ships was only a few metres long, because all of the transports had a high wooden security wall with large metal spikes installed across the deck next to the mainmast to keep the prisoners well away from the quarterdeck and the rear of the ship.

  On the way to Rio de Janeiro the number of convicts who fell ill jumped dramatically. Reports of a large number of sick convicts on the transport Alexander brought John White across from the Sirius to investigate, upon which he found the following:

  The illness complained of was wholly occasioned by the bilge water which had by some means or other risen to so great a height that the panels of the cabin and the buttons on the clothes of the officers were turned nearly black by the noxious effluvia. When the hatches were taken off the stench was so powerful that it was scarcely possible to stand over them.31

  White complained to Phillip, who, in turn, ordered the master of the Alexander, Duncan Sinclair, to pump out and regularly replace the bilge water. After this measure the surgeon recorded that the health of the convicts improved.

  The filth of the lower decks was made worse by the lack of regard of some of the convicts for hygienic behaviour. At one point in the tropics Margaret Hall on the Friendship was put in irons for ‘shitting between decks’ rather than off the poop deck, as was required.

  There is no surviving convict’s account of the experience below decks on the First Fleet, but on a later convict ship the Irish political prisoner John Boyle O’Reilly was to write of the conditions:

  When the ship was becalmed in the tropics the suffering of the imprisoned wretches in the steaming and crowded hold was piteous to see. They were so packed that free movement was impossible. The best thing to do was to sit each on his or her berth, and suffer in patience. The air was stifling and oppressive. There was no draught through the barred hatches. The deck above them was blazing hot. The pitch dropped from the beams and burned their flesh as it fell. There was only one word spoken or thought – one yearning idea in every mind – water, cool water to slake the parching thirst. Two pints of water a day were served out to each convict – a quart of half putrid and blood warm liquid. It was a woeful sight to see the thirsty souls devour this allowance as soon as their hot hands seized the vessel. Day in and day out, the terrible calm held the ship, and the consuming heat sapped the lives of the pent up convicts. Hideous incidents filled the days and nights as the convict ship sailed southward with her burden of disease and death.32

  The appalling conditions of the prisoners did nothing, however, to halt the prostitution and promiscuity involving the convict women and the crews. White describes the behaviour of the women as being ‘so uncontrollable that neither shame (but of this they had long lost sight) nor the fear of punishment could deter them from making their way through the bulkheads to the apartments assigned to the seamen’.33

  Ralph Clark was equally damning in his judgement of the convict women’s sexual conduct on the voyage: ‘I never could have thought there were so many abandoned wenches in England. They are ten thousand times worse than the men convicts and I am afraid that we will have a great deal more trouble with them.’34

  Such was Clark’s disgust that he looked forward to 21-year-old Sarah McCormick’s illness giving those who had fornicated with her their just deserts:

  [T]he doctor has been oblige[d] to bleed her twice today and says that she will not live the night out – She is now quite speechless I am apt to think (God forgive) if it is not so, that she is eating up with the p[ox] … She is one of them that went through the bulk head to the seamen – I hope she has given them some thing to remember her.35

  Clark’s low opinion of the convict women and his repeated declaration of love for his wife in his daily journal entries did not prevent him from striking up a relationship with 17-year-old Mary Branham, a convict on the Lady Penrhyn who would become his mistress in the new colony and mother his child. And this was after recording in his diary before reaching the Cape of Good Hope:

  Two of the convict women that went through the bulkhead to the seamen … have informed the doctor that they are with child … I hope the commodore will make the two seamen that are the fathers of the children marry them and make them stay in Botany Bay.36

  Mary Branham was only 13 years old in 1784 when she was sentenced in the Old Bailey to transportation for seven years for stealing two petticoats, some clothing and some cloth that was worth a little more than two pounds.37

  Clearly neither of the main punishments – flogging and chaining below decks for prolonged periods of time – was an effective deterrent. Under Arthur Phillip’s influence discipline aboard ships was more lenient than severe – a policy that was not always enthusiastically endorsed by the governor’s colleagues. Captain John Hunter, although a loyal deputy to
Phillip, believed that the flogging of convicts Farrell and Griffiths for only twenty-four strokes and then releasing them from their chains shortly afterwards was too lenient a punishment for their planned mutiny on the Scarborough: ‘This indulgence had no doubt left it more in the power of those who might be disposed to exert their ingenuity in so daring an attempt to carry their plan into execution with a greater probability of success.’38

  When convicts became ill on the ships, there was not a great deal that could be done for them, and in most cases they were left until they got better or died. The best that most of them could hope for was a medicinal measure of rum. Unfortunately this almost always came hand in hand with the other common remedy of the time: bleeding. Draining blood from the patient was a widely used treatment for convict and non-convict patients alike. While the practice is now highly discredited and believed to have taken more lives than it saved, by the time of the First Fleet it had become a standard treatment for almost every ailment.

  The reasoning behind bleeding goes back to the fifth century BC, when ancient Greeks believed that many diseases were caused by an excess of ‘humours’ in the blood. Every surgeon on the First Fleet carried a range of instruments designed to puncture the flesh of the patient and suck out various quantities of blood.

  Convict deaths were an accepted part of the journey, and when anyone died there would usually be a burial at sea, which involved a simple funeral ceremony, the reading of prayers and the sliding of the deceased’s body, weighted and wrapped in cloth, over the side of the ship.

  Most individual convict deaths were not worthy of any special mention, but there were a number of records involving the death of small children. Ralph Clark was moved to record how a small child of a convict died in the middle of the night and was buried at sea the next morning: