1788 Read online

  On the 3rd of last December, I was landed on the island of Goree, with nineteen more, the soldiers were drawn up in a circle on the parade, the Lieutenant of the island ordered us all into the middle of it, and told us we were all free men, and that we were to do the best we could, for he had no victuals, there was a ship lay in the bay, I went on shore several times and did work for the governor, I remained there till the time I came home, which was last Saturday was three weeks.8

  Ruglass was to give a similar explanation to the court in London. The British governor Lacey, he claimed, had ‘sent them off and would not give them any victuals’.9

  So, within a year of being sentenced to seven years’ transportation, Limpus and the others had managed to find their separate ways home. Within three weeks Limpus was recognised as a convicted criminal, re-apprehended and brought before the Old Bailey, charged with ‘returning from transportation’ before the end of his term.

  Limpus was this time condemned to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted to transportation to America – even though by that time there were virtually no convict ships still going there. In April 1784 Thomas Limpus was one of a hundred and seventy-nine convicts, including twenty women, who sailed from England on the Mercury, which would be one of the last convict ships to make an attempt to sell prison labour to the Americans.

  However, the convicts on the Mercury mutinied when the ship was sailing along the English Channel off the coast of Devon. Most if not all the prisoners were recaptured, either while still at sea attempting to reach the shore or having already reached land, and many were to sail on the First Fleet.

  The average age of the First Fleet’s convicts was around 27. Nearly fifty per cent were under 25 and only five per cent were older than 45.10 The oldest male was believed to be Joseph Owen, who was in his early 60s; the youngest was John Hudson, who was nine years old when he was convicted and sentenced to transportation. The youngest female was 13-year-old Elizabeth Hayward, a clog-maker who had stolen a linen dress and a silk bonnet. The oldest woman was Dorothy Handland, who was believed to be 82 years old when she sailed with the First Fleet. Dorothy had been convicted at the Old Bailey in February 1786 for perjuring herself in an earlier trial and sentenced to seven years’ transportation.11 She hanged herself from a gum tree in Sydney Cove in 1789.

  John Hudson’s case is as good an illustration as any that the British judicial system took no account of the age of offenders. He was brought before Justice Hall at the Old Bailey two weeks before Christmas in 1783 and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. He had been found guilty of ‘feloniously breaking into’12 the house of William Holsworth at one o’clock in the morning the previous October and stealing a linen shirt, five silk stockings, a pistol and two aprons, which had a combined value of one pound and two shillings. He was not convicted on the charge of burglary.

  In evidence the court was told that the boy had entered the house by breaking a windowpane, leaving ‘marks of toes, as if someone had slided down the window in the inside of the shutters’. When asked by the court if they were large or small toes, the witness Holsworth replied, ‘They were small toes … I took the impressions of the foot and of the toes that were on the table upon a piece of paper as minutely as I could.’13

  Hudson had also been seen by a woman, Sarah Baynes, as he was trying to wash himself clean of soot in a boarding-house washtub in East Smithfield. Nearby she saw the stolen silk stockings and aprons. Also in evidence John Smith told the court that he recognised Hudson as the boy who came and tried to sell him some of the stolen goods the week after the robbery:

  I am a pawnbroker. On the 17th of October, the boy at the bar brought this shirt to pledge about seven in the morning. He said it belonged to his father. I asked who had sent him. He said his mother. I stopped him.

  Only John Hudson didn’t have a father, or a mother, as the proceedings of the Old Bailey record.

  COURT TO PRISONER: How old are you?

  PRISONER: Going on nine.

  COURT: What business were you bred up in?

  PRISONER: None, sometimes chimney sweeps.

  COURT: Have you any father and mother?

  PRISONER: Dead.

  COURT: How long ago?

  PRISONER: I don’t know.

  Hudson was one of thousands of abandoned or orphaned children left poor and destitute trying to survive in the recesses of urban England. Many died young of malnutrition, cold, exhaustion, neglect, cruelty and a range of ugly infections and diseases.

  It is not known how Hudson survived before he was sent to prison, except the account he gives of working as a chimney sweep. Chimney sweeping required children who were small enough to crawl up the insides of chimney flutes as narrow as ten inches (twenty-four centimetres) to clean away thickened soot. The job was extremely unhealthy and dangerous, and there was a large death rate among the children due to falling down chimneys, asphyxiation, smoke inhalation or lung cancer.

  Hudson was initially sent to Newgate in London and survived several months of the prison’s ‘depravity, profanity, wretchedness and degradation’,14 probably because the conditions in the gaol were little different than those he had been used to at large.

  For many of the convicts, young or old, life in prison in England was no worse, and in some respects better, than trying to survive on the outside. John Nicol, who was to sail as a steward on the all-women convict transport the Lady Juliana in the Second Fleet, said that many of the convicts were hardened and indifferent to prison life and enjoyed the guarantee of food and somewhere to sleep:

  I witnessed many moving scenes and many of the most hardened indifference. Numbers of them would not take their liberty as a boon; they were thankful of their present situation. Many of these from country jails had been allowed to leave it to assist in getting the harvest, and voluntarily returned. When I enquired their reason, they answered, ‘How much more preferable is our present situation to what it has been since we commenced our vicious habits? We have good victuals and a warm bed. We are not ill treated, or at the mercy of every drunken ruffian, as we were before. When we rose in the morning, we knew not where we would lay our heads in the evening, or if we would break our fast in the course of the day.15

  Hudson’s inclusion in the First Fleet was the second attempt to transport him. Three years before being put on board the Friendship in Portsmouth with ninety other convicts bound for Botany Bay, he too had been sent from London on the Mercury in April 1784 bound for America when the convicts mutinied and took the ship.

  Hudson and another boy, 13-year-old James Grace, were in one of the Mercury’s two small boats off Torquay when they were recaptured. The two boys and a number of convict mutineers were able to escape the death penalty because they were technically still at sea when they were apprehended – nothing to do with Hudson and Grace being juveniles.

  Young James Grace would also join John Hudson on the First Fleet to Botany Bay. He had been found guilty of theft at the Old Bailey only a month after Hudson, in January 1784, when he was charged with stealing ten yards of silk and some silk stockings and sentenced to seven years’ transportation.16 During his trial a 15-year-old servant boy, George Windsor, told the court that he saw the defendant in Oxford Street, London, with his hand through a broken glass window taking out the silk goods. In his defence Grace said that, while he took the stockings, the window was already broken, which resulted in his being found guilty of burglary but not of breaking and entering.

  After their recapture both Grace and the now ten-year-old Hudson were tried for ‘returning from transportation’ before their term had expired, convicted, sentenced again to transportation and sent to Exeter prison in Devon and then to the Dunkirk, a de-masted former warship that had been converted to a prison hulk in Plymouth harbour. There they waited to see where fate would deposit them next.

  6

  PORTSMOUTH

  A corpse sew’d up in a hammock floated alongside our ship. The cabin, lately occupied by the
third mate Jenkinson, who died of a putrid fever the night before I came on board, and was buried at Ryde, was fresh painted and fumigated for me to sleep in.

  The preparation for the First Fleet’s departure from Portsmouth was characterised by chaos, disease, promiscuity and death. It would take nine months to prepare and load the two navy ships, six convict transports and three supply ships with fifteen hundred people and two years’ provisions and equipment.

  While the convicts dreaded the thought of being banished and transported, it was reported in the press at the time that the government received ‘upward of a thousand applications’ from others wanting to join the expedition.1 The applicants included various military officers who saw the venture as good for their career prospects and ‘upwards of fifty women, wives of convicts’, who had travelled to Portsmouth hoping to be allowed to go with their husbands, only to be referred back to their ‘respective church parishes’.2 According to another press report a number of women applied directly to the Treasury in London to go with their convict men but, after being referred to Evan Nepean, ‘the petitioners were dismissed’.3 In late 1786 The Times reported that there ‘are now about three hundred felons under sentence of transportation in Newgate, most of whom are to be sent with the transports to Botany Bay’.4

  The first convicts began to be loaded onto the transports in Portsmouth towards the end of 1786. From October the order was given ‘for the men to work double tides’ to speed up the loading of the ships.5 Many of the first prisoners to be loaded were to spend more than a year on their ships before being landed at Port Jackson in late January 1788. At the beginning of their ordeal it was winter in England, and they were locked up in the lower decks of the transport ships where it was cold, dark and damp.

  The arrival of hundreds of these convicts at Portsmouth, with many of their cronies and families turning up on shore, caused panic among the locals, many of whom closed and locked their businesses until the fleet left. The press was to report a wave of violent crime as ‘gangs of thieves and robbers’ descended on Portsmouth from London:

  The town and neighbourhood [is] infested with numerous gangs of thieves and robbers, and that scarce a night passes in which some persons are not robbed or some houses broken open. The villains are supposed to have belonged formerly to the hulks at Woolwich and to have come down to see their former friends and companions.6

  In early 1787 hundreds more convicts were rowed down the Thames from the hulks and from Newgate prison and loaded at Woolwich on the convict transport ships the Alexander and the Lady Penrhyn. These were then sailed down to Portsmouth with the two navy ships the Sirius and the Supply to meet up with the rest of the fleet in a journey that was to take several weeks.7

  Not all the prisoners were transported directly to Portsmouth by ship, however. More than two hundred were first brought from London overland to Plymouth, chained together on carts and escorted ‘under proper guard’.8 There they were loaded aboard the Charlotte and the Friendship, which were in Plymouth harbour, along with two hundred and thirty-nine male and fifty-one female convicts who were already being held in Plymouth on the Dunkirk prison hulk, before being sailed around to Portsmouth to join the rest of the fleet.

  In the first days the cautious masters of the transports kept the prisoners, including the women on the Lady Penrhyn, in chains below decks, exchanging one type of metal shackle for another. Sixteen male convicts on the Alexander and a woman on the Lady Penrhyn were to die before the fleet departed Portsmouth. In fact more convicts were to die before the fleet left England and on the first leg of the journey to Botany Bay than during the many months of the rest of the voyage.

  The fleet would not sail until May, and there was already concern about the outbreak of disease among the convicts on the transports. Arthur Phillip successfully sought permission from Nepean for the transports to be moved several miles out to sea into Spithead. There the convicts could, for part of the day, be allowed out of their cramped quarters up onto the deck, where they could get some fresh air.

  You will, sir, permit me to observe that it will be very difficult to prevent the most fatal sickness amongst men so closely confined; that on board that ship which is to receive two hundred and ten convicts there is not a space left for them to move in sufficiently large for forty men to be in motion at the same time, nor is it safe to permit any number of men to be on deck while the ship remains so near the land. On this consideration, I hope you will order the Alexander and Lady Penrhyn to join his Majesty’s ship Sirius immediately, and proceed to Spithead, where more liberty may be allowed the convicts than can be done with safety in the river.9

  The chief surgeon of the fleet, John White, had first gone to Plymouth from London on 7 March 1787, two months before the fleet eventually departed. He carried with him various dispatches from the secretary of state and the Admiralty authorising the loading of convicts for transportation.10 He had travelled overland for two days in ‘the most incessant rain I ever remember’, to be greeted by gale-force winds at Plymouth that delayed the loading of the convicts from the Dunkirk hulk onto the Charlotte and Friendship. The ships were then to sail round to Portsmouth with the convicts ‘placed in the different apartments allotted for them’.11

  When White arrived at Portsmouth, he recommended to Phillip that the Alexander be temporarily evacuated so the ship could be fumigated. Phillip communicated White’s advice to the government: ‘The surgeon states the situation of the convicts to be such that I am under the necessity of requesting … ordering lighters from Portsmouth yard to the Alexander, to receive the convicts while the ship is cleaned and smoked.’12

  Based on advice he received from White in Portsmouth, Arthur Phillip was also to complain that the convicts were being sent there in a state wholly unsuitable for being aboard ship and at sea:

  The situation in which the magistrates sent the women on board the Lady Penrhyn stamps them with infamy – tho’ almost naked, and so very filthy, that nothing but clothing them could have prevented them from perishing, and which could not be done in time to prevent a fever, which is still on that ship.13

  On White’s prompting, Phillip was to propose a series of measures to improve the health of the convicts, including washing and dressing new arrivals in clean clothes before loading them onto the transports, allowing the sick a little wine and supplying all of them with some fresh meat while they were in Portsmouth Harbour.

  It was not only the convicts who were sick and dying. By early 1787 a number of the marines had arrived at Portsmouth to be assigned to the different transport ships to oversee the convicts. The marine commander Major Robert Ross had also arrived and complained that conditions on the Alexander and the other ships in Portsmouth Harbour were so bad that his men were falling ill and dying. Many had been assigned quarters in lower decks ‘under where the seamen are berthed’ and where they were ‘excluded from all air’. He complained of this in a letter to Stephens, the secretary of the navy:

  I have to request you will please to inform their Lordships that the sickness that has, and still does prevail among the marine detachment embarked upon the Alexander, transport, gives me a great degree of concern. Since the time of their first embarkation no less than one sergeant, one drummer, and fourteen privates have been sent sick on shore from her, some of whom, I am informed, are since dead.14

  Ross had also written to Nepean to complain about the food rations his marines were receiving:

  I likewise beg to observe to you that the contractors for the victualling the marines have not put any flour on board the transports for their use, and of course, as they are the only people deprived of that necessary article, which I believe was never intended to be the case, may I request that you will use your endeavours to get the mistake rectified, as you know that the preservation of their health is of the utmost consequence on the present occasion.15

  Ross was a larger-than-life character who would become unpopular with other officers and a thorn in the side of Govern
or Arthur Phillip when the fleet reached New South Wales. He jealously guarded his command over the marines and was difficult to handle.

  At 47 Ross was one of the oldest officials on the First Fleet, along with Arthur Phillip and Captain John Hunter. It is widely believed that he was born in Scotland, although details of his family are not clear. He joined the marines as a 16-year-old second-lieutenant, which suggests that he came from an established family or was at least well connected.

  In his early career with the marines he served in the Seven Years War against the French in north America for nearly four years and was involved in the siege of French-held Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758 and the capture of Quebec the following year. He appears to have been well regarded and was promoted to first-lieutenant in 1759, captain in 1773 and brevet-major in 1783. He also fought in the American War of Independence and was involved in the pyrrhic victory at the battle of Bunker Hill in Massachusetts in 1775, when the British incurred more than two hundred dead and eight hundred wounded to achieve victory. On his way home to England on the Ardent he was captured by the French but subsequently returned as part of an exchange of prisoners. From 1781 he served in the Mediterranean and the West Indies until he was appointed lieutenant-governor to Arthur Phillip.

  Ross sailed to New South Wales and took with him his eight-year-old son, whom he signed up to the marines and later, in Sydney, attempted to have commissioned as an officer.16

  Also arriving at Portsmouth were the twelve surgeons whom the ‘Government had appointed at the public expense to go to Botany Bay’.17 Arthur Bowes Smyth, the 37-year-old assistant-surgeon who replaced the ill John Turnpenny Altree, described the appalling squalor that confronted him when he went aboard the women’s convict ship the Lady Penrhyn in March to take up his cabin: