1788 Read online

  The loss of the American colonies was a crushing blow to the prestige of the British Empire, and the peace treaty of Paris in 1783 only added to the British humiliation, with the first article of the agreement stating that ‘His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States’.

  The loss of the United States also meant that Britain no longer had a convenient dumping ground for her surplus convicts. As the country had been unable to send convicts to America from the early days of the conflict, Parliament had passed the Hulk Act in 1777, which allowed for the confinement of the growing number of convicts on decommissioned British navy vessels on the Thames and other English rivers and ports. The Hulk Act was envisaged only as an interim measure until the American insurrection was quashed, but with the loss of the colonies the hulks would continue to be used as prisons in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century.

  By the late eighteenth century it was estimated that a hundred and fifteen thousand, or one in eight, people in London were living off crime in the city.5 Horace Walpole complained that robbery in broad daylight had become so commonplace that ‘one is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going into battle’.6

  At the beginning of the 1700s criminal offences that attracted the death penalty had been limited to the most serious acts, such as murder and treason. By the end of the century more than one hundred additional crimes – almost all of them involving offences against property – had been made capital offences. Thirty-three had been added during the reign of King George II and a further sixty-three during the first decades of the rule of King George III.7

  The new crimes that warranted execution included smuggling, selling a forged stamp, burglary, extortion, blackmail, larceny by servants, blackmailers who failed to surrender themselves, arson, wilful destruction of property, petty theft and the stealing of horses. Most of the new capital statutes were passed with very little discussion and ‘were created … by a placid and uninterested Parliament. In nine cases out of ten there was no debate and no opposition.’8

  So great was the increase in the number of capital offences that by 1800 Sir Samuel Riley was to observe that ‘there is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with loss of life than in England’.9 However, despite the dramatic rise in the number of convicts sentenced to death, fewer were actually being executed. The judges in the courts of England were increasingly reluctant to send offenders to the gallows, and more and more death sentences were being commuted to transportation to America – even after such shipment had been suspended. It has been suggested that the judges deliberately ‘went to invent technicalities in order to avoid infliction of the capital penalty’, even though their actions were ‘clearly outside the contemplations of the legislation’.10

  As a consequence of this judicial leniency the proportion of those executed fell dramatically over the second half of the eighteenth century. In the 1750s about seventy per cent of those convicted were actually hanged, but by the time the First Fleet set sail barely a quarter of the condemned reached the gallows. By the end of the century the figure had dropped to less then twenty per cent.11

  By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the gaols and prison hulks of England were overflowing, with their population increasing by more than a thousand a year. This was causing increasing public concern. Periodic riots by convicts spread alarm, and there was the ever-present fear that rampant diseases in the gaols would break out in the wider community.

  There was also concern amongst some quarters for the prisoners themselves. Prison reformers were campaigning against the appalling conditions in the prisons and the hulks. Foremost among them was John Howard. Born in 1726 in Hackney in East London, Howard inherited considerable wealth in his 20s on the death of his successful merchant father. In 1773, when he was 47 years old, Howard was appointed high sheriff of Bedford and became shocked by the conditions he witnessed in the gaols.

  In 1777, after studying prisons in England and other countries, he wrote a book titled The State of Prisons in England and Wales: With Preliminary Observations, and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, which painted a devastating picture of the reality of prisons and brought into the open much of what had been out of sight and out of mind to genteel society. He also gave evidence to the House of Commons about convicts and the question of convict transportation.

  Howard wrote that healthy men who entered the prison system were often soon reduced to illness and death. He said that disease was so rife that ‘more prisoners were destroyed by it in gaols than were put to death by all the public executions in the Kingdom’.12

  In some prisons, he said, there was no food allowance for the prisoners, and in others no fresh water. There was a shortage of fresh air and ventilation in most gaols, which were ‘made poisonous to the more intense degree by the effusia of the sick’.13

  Many of the prisons had no sewers, and in those that did, ‘if not properly attended, they are, even to a visitant, offensive beyond expression’. Many had no bedding or straw and the prisoners were forced to sleep ‘upon rags, others on bare floors’. He said that chaining prisoners in irons made walking and ‘even lying down to sleep difficult and painful’.14

  Howard was especially critical of the half of England’s prisons that were privately run: ‘In these the keepers protected by the proprietors and not so subject as other gaolers to the control of the magistrates are more apt to abuse the prisoners.’15

  Howard called for the building of new, properly planned prisons that would have water pumps, baths, cooking facilities, an infirmary for the sick, clean air and ventilation, and workshops so the prisoners could be effectively employed. He also called for more effective regulation of the gaolers, including a ban on the sale of grog to the prisoners, and placed emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness: ‘Every prisoner who comes to the gaol dirty, should be washed in the cold or warm bath and his clothes should be put in the oven … Every prisoner should be obliged to wash his hands and face before he comes for his daily allowance.’16

  Largely as a result of the agitation of Howard and other prison reformers, legislation was passed in Parliament for the building of two new prisons, but funding was never made available and construction never began.

  Parliament also passed legislation in 1777 for the reintroduction of the overseas transportation of convicts, but the Bill did not prescribe to which countries the prisoners should be sent. With America closed it would be almost another decade before Botany Bay was selected, and in the meantime more and more convicts had to be crammed into the existing prisons and hulks in England.

  The concept of transportation was not unique to the eighteenth century. Legislation had been introduced in Elizabethan England to banish certain criminals to lands ‘beyond the seas’,17 but the practice had never taken on the dimension it had with regards to America or would later with the first and subsequent fleets to Australia.

  Not everyone in Georgian society supported the idea of transportation. Many believed it was going too easy on the convicted criminals. Lord Ellenborough, who was later to become a member of parliament and chief justice, and who argued that capital punishment should be extended even further to include pickpockets, said he believed transportation was no more than ‘a summer excursion, in an easy migration to a happy and better climate’.18 However, to the convicts in England, transportation to Botany Bay was a frightening prospect, and Australia in the late eighteenth century might as well have been another planet.

  At the time of the First Fleet Europeans knew little about the geography of the globe. The outline of the continents of the Americas and Africa was roughly known, but there was little knowledge of the hinterland or west of America or anything beyond a few of the coastal ports of Africa. Even less was known of Asia, and less again of the southern-hemisphere continents of Australasia and Antarctica.

  The only concrete information the British had when they decided to establis
h a penal colony on the east coast of Australia was Captain James Cook’s account of his voyage there eighteen years earlier, when the Endeavour spent barely a week in Botany Bay.

  While Cook was the first to chart much of the east coast of what was then called New Holland, he was far from the first to discover Australia, as more than fifty European ships had seen or landed on the continent over the preceding two hundred years.

  The earliest European visitors to the region had been the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish. The Pacific Ocean had been named ‘El Mar Pacifico’ by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan in the early sixteenth century, during his remarkable voyage from Portugal to Guam.

  The first undisputed European sighting of Australia was in 1606, although there may have been some earlier discoveries. Around 1300 Marco Polo had made mention of the existence of a great southern continent but offered no first-hand knowledge of the place. Some archaeological evidence suggests that from 1500 a number of Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish ships may have touched on Australia’s west and southern coasts, and it has been more recently claimed, by the author Gavin Menzies, that the Chinese explorer Zheng He charted much of the west coast in 1421.19 There is also evidence of Asian ships regularly visiting the north of Australia from around 1600, including Indonesian traders who harvested the bêche-de-mer, or sea slugs, which were regarded as a delicacy and an aphrodisiac by many Chinese people.

  In 1606 Dutch captain Willem Janszoon landed briefly on the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Duyfken, wrongly assuming the land was part of Papua New Guinea. From 1616 a number of Dutch and other European ships reached the west coast of Australia. In 1642 Abel Tasman sailed below Tasmania, giving it the name Van Diemen’s Land after the Dutch East Indies governor of Batavia, Anthony van Diemen. By 1644 – still more than a hundred years before Cook’s first expedition – the Dutch were able to draw most of the coastline from Cape York peninsula in the north of Australia around to the eastern end of the Great Australian Bight in the south, as well as the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land and parts of the coast of New Zealand.20

  The first English ship to reach Australia was the Cygnet, a small trading vessel captained by William Dampier, who landed on the west coast in 1688, almost eighty years before Cook. Dampier was the first Englishman to provide what were to become many negative descriptions of the Australian Aboriginal people, whom he said were the ‘miserablest people in the world’, ‘nasty people’ and who ‘differ little from brutes’.21

  Even these incomplete reports and maps would not have been known by the uneducated convicts, of course. They would have had little knowledge of geography, and the worldly experience of most would have been confined to the area within walking distance of where they were born.

  Far from seeing it as Lord Ellenborough’s ‘summer excursion’, most of the convicts regarded transportation as the most severe punishment available next to death, one that was intended ‘to purge, deter and to reform’.22 They would be exchanging familiarity for hardship, hostility and the unknown. They would be saying goodbye to loved ones and friends and would have been aware there was little prospect of ever coming home.

  2

  THE BOTANY BAY DECISION

  [T]here was a great plenty of fish … The grass was long and luxuriant, and the eatable vegetables, particularly a sort of wild spinage; the country was well supplied with water; there was an abundance of timber and fuel sufficient for any number of buildings, which might be found necessary.

  The selection of the site on which to establish a convict colony took many years, and Botany Bay was only chosen as a last resort when all the other options had been eliminated.

  In 1779 the House of Commons established a committee to find a workable solution to the escalating prisons problem. The committee heard from a number of witnesses who argued for the establishment of a convict colony in various locations, including Gibraltar and sites along the west African coast. It also heard from Duncan Campbell, a contractor who had transported convicts to North America but had recently ‘declined contracting them upon the revolt of the colonies of Virginia and Maryland’.1

  The committee concluded that the current prison arrangements in Britain were a failure:

  In short, your committee must observe, that the whole arrangement of the prisons, so far as they are informed, is, at present, ill-suited, either in the economy of the state, or the morality of the people, and seems chiefly calculated for the safe custody of the persons confined, without due attention to their health, employment or reformation.2

  The committee also recognised that it ‘was not in the power of the executive Government at present to dispose of convicted felons in North America’ and recommended that some other spot be found in ‘any part of the globe that may be found expedient’.3

  The most significant witness to appear before the committee was the famous botanist Joseph Banks, who was to be a major influence on the ultimate decision to send the First Fleet to Botany Bay. Banks’ reputation had been cemented eight years beforehand when he had travelled as a 25-year-old to New Holland with Captain James Cook in the Endeavour and returned with hundreds of new species of plants.

  When asked by the parliamentary committee where he thought was the best location for the establishment of a penal colony, Banks praised Botany Bay’s fertile soil and plentiful water and food:

  Joseph Banks Esq. being requested, in case it should be thought expedient to establish a Colony of convicted felons in any distant part of the Globe, from whence escape might be difficult, and where, from the fertility of the soil, they might be able to maintain themselves, after the fifth year, with little or no aid from the mother country, to give his opinion what place would be the most eligible for such settlement, informed your committee, that the place which appeared to him best adapted for such a purpose, was Botany Bay, on the coast of New Holland, in the Indian Ocean, which was about seven months voyage from England, that he apprehended there would be little possibility of opposition from the natives, as during his stay there in the year 1770, he saw very few and did not think there were above fifty in the neighbourhood, and had reason to believe the country was very thinly populated, those he saw were naked, treacherous, and armed with lances, but extremely cowardly, and constantly retired from our people when they made the least appearance and resistance. He was in the bay in the end of April and the beginning of May 1770, when the weather was mild and moderate, that the climate, he apprehended, was similar to Toulouse in the South of France having found the southern hemisphere colder than the northern, in such proportion that any given climate in the southern answered to the northern about ten degrees nearer the pole, the proportion of rich soil was small in comparison to the barren but sufficient to support a very large number of people; there were no tame animals, and he saw no wild ones during his stay of ten days, but he saw the dung of what were called kangaroos, which were about the size of middling sheep and difficult to catch; some of these animals he saw in another part of the bay, upon the same continent; there were no beasts of prey, and he did not doubt oxen and sheep, if carried there, would thrive and increase, there was a great plenty of fish, he took a large quantity by hauling the seine and struck several stingrays, a kind of skate, all very large, one weighed 336 lb. The grass was long and luxuriant, and the eatable vegetables, particularly a sort of wild spinage; the country was well supplied with water; there was an abundance of timber and fuel sufficient for any number of buildings, which might be found necessary.

  Being asked, how a Colony of that nature could be subsisted in the beginning of their establishment, he answered, they must certainly be furnished, at landing with a full years allowance of victuals, rainment and drink, with all kinds of tools for labouring the earth and building houses; with black cattle, sheep, hogs, and poultry; with seeds of all kinds of European corn and pulse; with garden seeds; with arms and ammunition for defense, and they should likewise have small boats, nets and fishing tackle; all of which, except arms an
d ammunition, might be purchased at the Cape of Good Hope; and that afterwards, with a moderate portion of industry, they might undoubtedly, maintain themselves without any assistance from England.4

  Banks was not the first person to argue for the establishment of a penal colony in the Pacific. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier the French writer and statesman Charles de Brosses had suggested that France settle a penal colony on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea, where felons could be purged from society. In an analogy with the prevailing medical practice of bloodletting, or leeching, he said, ‘The political body, like the human body, has vicious humours which should be often evacuated.’5

  The Englishman John Callander went on to say the same thing with regards to Britain in 1776. In his three-volume Voyages to the Terra Australis he said that Britain should found a colony on New Britain and explore the possibility of annexing New Holland, New Zealand and Tasmania.

  When Banks was giving his evidence to the House of Commons committee, it was not yet known in London that Captain Cook had been killed. In February 1779 Cook had been searching for a passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans when he was murdered in Hawaii. Cook had provided his own assessment of Botany Bay when landing there with Banks back in 1770, and it was completely different from Banks’ submission to the committee. Cook had said that the land was uncultivated and produced virtually nothing fit to eat.

  At the time of their visit the aristocratic Banks had been at the height of his power and influence. Back in London he had the ear of the government, the Admiralty and the king. He was regularly consulted on a wide range of matters, including botany, earthquakes, sheep breeding and exploration, and was in the habit of corresponding with all the commanders of British exploration ships, whose captains regularly returned with more botanical samples for his analysis.