The plot involved men from each of the companies that made up the garrison. Some were established troublemakers, notably Privates Richard Dukes, James Baker, Richard Asky, and Luke Haynes. The previous December all four of them had been lucky to beat a murder charge of having caused the death of Private Thomas Bullmore in a long-ranging brawl in the women's camp over a particular convict girl.
A court-martial now found them all guilty of plundering the stores. Their execution, carried out on a scaffold erected between the two storehouses, not at the notorious convict hanging tree on the western side of the town, was an agony for the corps of marines. Private Easty, who found it sinister that the gallows had been erected before the sentence was passed upon them, was in the ranks of marines paraded to witness the hangings. By now his coat, like that of other marines, had faded and worn, and his shoes were falling apart. But the military rituals were still maintained, and he had his Brown Bess musket ready to present arms at the solemn moment. He noted that the marines to be executed told the assembled crowd that Hunt, who had escaped with his life, was the “occasion of all their deaths as he was the first that began the said robbery, but that he received a free pardon. There was hardly a marine present but what shed tears, officers and men.”
NOT LONG AFTER THE EXECUTIONS, Sirius relieved the hysteria over food by reappearing on the broad sweep of Port Jackson, or as it was commonly called, Sydney Harbour. Sent out the previous October to fetch supplies from the Cape of Good Hope, the vessel had survived a hard journey.
During the voyage the ship's company was afflicted with scurvy so badly that at one stage there were only thirteen sailors available to man the watch, along with the carpenter's crew. Maxwell, third lieutenant of the Sirius, displayed obvious insanity off Cape Horn, when he crowded on all sail before a gale. “The captain,” Nagle remembered, “got on deck in his shirt and began to take in sail as fast as possible, till she was under snug sail. He asked Mr. Maxwell what he was doing.” Maxwell told the captain he would “tip all nines”—sink the ship, that is—to see whether the vessel would re-emerge from the deep with the same set of damned rascals she was carrying. Hunter, “finding he was delirious, ordered another officer in his watch.” Maxwell, forcibly carried below three times in one night, would remain permanently deranged.
Captain Hunter and the surgeon set to work in Cape Town to address the scurvy amongst the crew. Nagle said that the disease was so prevalent that when men bit into an apple, pear, or peach, blood from their gums would run down their chins. The best cure, he thought, was fresh mutton and vegetables, “and the captain allowed us to send for as much wine as we thought fit to make use of, the ship's company recovering daily, till we were well and hearty.”
While the Sirius was anchored at Robben Island off Cape Town, an incident occurred which showed the strange tension between discipline and the personal pride of veteran seamen, a tension wise commanders like Hunter could handle well. A midshipman presumed to beat the whole ship's company with his rattan cane, “and being a stripling not more than fifteen years of age, I told him we would not be treated in such a manner by a boy. When we got on shore, five of us out of six left the boat, not intending to return any more. The other four never did return.”
This act of revolution showed that the men were aware Hunter needed them. How could he replace experienced men for a cruise whose only attraction was a return to a hungry penal nether-earth? Hunter had the wit to know it, and sent officers ashore looking for the lost men with the orders that their demeanour towards such veterans as Nagle was to be amenable. He told his officers to stress to Nagle that his mess-mate Terence Burn missed him and hoped his friend would not abandon him for the journey back to Sydney. Accordingly, Nagle returned to the ship and approached Captain Hunter. Hunter remarked to his first mate, Bradley, in Nagle's hearing, “No wonder, Mr. Bradley, losing our men, when our young officer gives them such abuse against my orders!” He next confined the boy midshipman to his cabin for three weeks, and told Nagle to go to his hammock and get some rest.
They left Cape Town with twelve months' supplies for the ship's company, and about four to six months of flour at full ration for the entire settlement, as well as various other stores, including six tons of barley, sundry private items and stores for officers in Sydney, and medical items ordered by Surgeon White. “A most tremendous and mountainous sea” kept them laying to for twenty-one days. Surprisingly, then, they had good weather until they got off the South Cape of Van Diemen's Land. In the darkness of a storm they found the luminescence of surf breaking higher than their mastheads on huge rocks ahead, and had to wear ship and stand to the westward. Even so, they found themselves with barely enough steerage room, “embayed” as the term goes, with a heavy sea rolling in upon them and nothing but high cliffs under their lee and the gale to windward blowing them towards the rocks. The captain ordered close-reefed top-sails and the mainsail to be set. Nagle heard Hunter cry out above the noise of sea and gale. “He said she must carry it, or capsize, or carry away the masts, or go on the rocks…. I don't suppose there was a living soul on board that expected to see daylight.”
This was not the result of any grievous fault of navigation by Hunter or Bradley. It was what happened amidst improperly charted perils with uncertain reliability of chronometers and in bad-luck weather. Hunter would later think it not improper to observe that to that point three days had elapsed without the weather allowing a sun reading, and three nights without a visible star. But suddenly the wind, to use Hunter's phrase, “favoured us two points,” and half-buried in the sea by the press of sail they had on, Sirius was able to round the rocky columns of the Tasman Peninsula and continue well eastwards before turning northerly towards Sydney. So the vessel survived one of the planet's most dangerous coasts. Had Sirius foundered then, not even Phillip might have been able to control the chaos which hunger would have brought to New South Wales.
On arrival through the heads of Port Jackson and then, to the great joy of all, at Sydney Cove, the Sirius looked beaten-about: she was missing the upper sections of her masts (the fore-topgallant masts), had split the upper part of her stem, and lost the figurehead of the Duke of Berwick. Lieutenant Maxwell was brought ashore raving to the hospital, and would never recover his sanity. His family sent him a draft of 70 guineas from England, and in his fits he got hold of a hoe and buried the heavy coins singly all over the hospital garden, declaring he'd have a good crop of guineas the next year. If an appropriate ship ever arrived, he would be sent home on it.
Hunter, landing, went straight to report to a grateful Phillip, finding him in the company of “a native man of this country, who was decently clothed, and seemed to be as much at his ease at the tea table as any person there.” But the smallpox was already at work in Arabanoo, and when Hunter remarked to His Excellency that the foreshores of Port Jackson seemed empty of natives, Phillip could tell him why.
How sincerely must Phillip have nonetheless wrung Hunter's hand. He had nonchalantly circumnavigated the southern globe so that the earth's unredeemed might live another span of time. It had been a splendid and fraught journey in harsh waters, and he had been prompt about it. What in the northern hemisphere would have gained him renown gained him here an invitation to the governor's dinner table, with the proviso that applied to all officers so honoured, that they bring with them their own bread roll.
Phillip could tell himself that his forthright decisions had saved the experiment in Sydney Cove, on Norfolk Island, and in Parramatta. But he would as promptly have acknowledged Hunter's execution of policy.
fifteen
THE DEPARTURE OF THE FIRST FLEET from Britain had been designed to create space in Newgate, in the hulks and the county gaols, once and for all. There had been no indication from any government document of 1786–87 that it was meant to be followed by further fleets and transports. But Phillip would have felt more secure about being resupplied from England if he knew about the speed with which all the vacated space cre
ated by his fleet had been filled. At the time Phillip was appointed, Botany Bay was perceived as a once-and-for-all alleviation of pressure on Britain's penal system. Now it might need to become a habitual one.
By August 1787, three months after Phillip's fleet had sailed, the Sheriff of London and Middlesex, Mr. Bloxham, had written to Lord Sydney about the problem of overcrowding in Newgate gaol. Most of the 700 Newgate prisoners were living in crowded wards designed for two dozen people but crammed with twice as many. The Sheriff worried about the coming winter, and the prospect of death from congestive disease and gaol fever (typhus). Throughout Britain, gaolers wrote to complain that they had been promised that they would be able to move some of their prisoners down to the hulks once the convict fleet left in May 1787, and this promise had not been kept.
In October 1788, William Richards, the reputable London merchant contracted for the First Fleet, sent to the Treasury Department a detailed proposal for the transportation of further convicts. It was referred to the Home Office and the Navy Board. When Lord Sydney was asked about future plans, he told the Treasury he wanted to send at least 200 women from Newgate and the county gaols to New South Wales, but only when favourable reports of the new colony's progress arrived. Just in case the women could be transported, Richards was given a contract to “take up” a suitable ship, and in November 1788 officials looked over a 401-ton ship named Lady Juliana at the Royal Navy's Deptford dockyard and found her to be fit to transport convicts, provided her hull was newly caulked and sheathed with copper. Richards was to be paid 9 shillings 6 pence per ton for the hire of the ship for the outward voyage. While the Lady Juliana was in port he would be allocated 9 pence per day for each adult convict on board, to provide them with fresh provisions, and while the ship was at sea, he was budgeted 6 pence per day to supply the women with sea provisions. The charter party, or contract, also required the ship to make calls for fresh provisions at Teneriffe, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Good Hope, just as the First Fleet had been instructed to do.
Mr. Richards appointed George Aitken her master. Aitken was conscientious in fitting the ship out. He was willing also to cooperate with the naval agent put aboard her, Lieutenant Thomas Edgar, who had been Captain James Cook's navigator on HMS Discovery on Cook's last voyage in 1776–79. A naval colleague would leave us the information that his nickname was Little Bassey because he was unable to pronounce “Blast ye!” in any other way. He was middle-aged and determined to look after the women prisoners' physical and nutritional well-being.
By the end of 1788 a new outbreak of gaol distemper, a form of typhus, had been reported from Newgate. At the Old Bailey sessions just finished, all windows and doors had been kept open despite the bitter weather, to prevent the spread of the disease. But berths, or cradles, for the convict women aboard the Lady Juliana were not yet ready, and no loading would begin for some months. The government, in any case, still hoped to hear from Botany Bay before they moved the convict women out of contagious Newgate and brought them aboard the ship. If the colony were judged to be in trouble, Captain Aitken might have to transport those aboard Lady Juliana to Nova Scotia, despite the hostility of the people of that province to the idea.
The new year came and went, and it was not until March of 1789 that Prince of Wales arrived back in England with the first news of the colony. The Home Office must have been anxious to get Lady Juliana loaded up, since Phillip's dispatches, though hopeful, and telling of a struggling yet healthily located place, were counterbalanced by the utterly negative voices of Ross and Campbell. Undersecretary Nepean put more reliance on Phillip than he did on Ross. There was enough basis to order that Lady Juliana could now conscientiously be filled up for her journey.
The Lady Juliana had been moved from Deptford to Galleon's Reach just off Greenwich, ten miles downriver from Newgate. One hundred and sixteen women from the prison were embarked during March and April 1789. There was a woman in the death cells of Newgate who would have loved to be with them. Catherine Heyland, in her mid-thirties, had been sentenced to death on 2 April 1787, before Phillip's fleet left, for counterfeiting, and while male counterfeiting drew only the hanging sentence, female counterfeiting was subject to the same traditional punishment as witchcraft—burning at the stake. Police had raided a front garret in Lincoln's Inn Fields and seized scissors, files, crucibles, bellows, charcoal, a casting frame, scales, scouring paper, arsenic, aqua fortis (nitric acid) and blacking, and various other tools of counterfeiters. They arrested a male, William James, alias Levi, who tried to swallow some of his handiwork, and when arrested vomited black foam on the officer's sleeve.
There had been two women in the room, and down the bodice of one of them, Catherine Heyland, the officials found two bags of counterfeit sixpences. Throughout his own trial, Levi intervened frequently to say that Heyland had been innocent and he had merely used her as a hiding post. In court, a young Irish girl named Margaret Sullivan was found guilty of a separate act of counterfeiting, and she and Heyland were both condemned to death. Levi was to hang in two days' time, but Heyland and Sullivan were to be publicly immolated by fire. To enable her to complete an appeal for mercy, Heyland's execution was stayed. The Times the next day asked whether mankind must not laugh at long speeches against African slavery when “we roast a fellow creature alive, for putting a penny-worth of quicksilver into a halfpenny-worth of brass.”
What can we make, in our own brutal-by-proxy world, of such public savagery? A Westerner who in this age saw eight friends and acquaintances twitch to death at a rope's end, as did the marine garrison of Sydney, or saw a young woman burned alive, as did any gentleman, woman, or child who wanted to be a spectator in Newgate Street, would perforce be offered counselling. Not only did Boswell in the spring of 1785 watch nineteen criminals hanged outside Newgate without its spoiling his appetite, but later the same year he persuaded Sir Joshua Reynolds to attend the execution of five convicts at the same place. Perhaps it was the unquestioning certainty that such events were ordained for solemn instruction, for education and grievous sport, and the certainty that God acquiesced with British statute law, that made them less shocking to the mind of the eighteenth-century felon, soldier, or citizen.
Margaret Sullivan faced her unspeakable death in the spring of 1788 with great courage. She spent her last evening praying with a priest and rejected the offer of a treat of strawberries from Sheriff Bloxham's wife. On a Wednesday morning a crowd gathered in St. Paul's churchyard and around the Old Bailey for the executions. As was normal at such times, neighbouring inns profited from the crush. Levi came through the covered walkway from the Debtors' Gate to the roar of “Hats off ” from mannerly gentlemen in the crowd. The chaplain of Newgate preached for three quarters of an hour. From her place in the condemned cells, Catherine Heyland heard the crowd, segments of the sermon, and the drop of the trapdoor as Levi, to whom her relationship remains a mystery, plummeted into air. Fifteen minutes later Margaret Sullivan, dressed in a penitential white shroud, emerged with the priest. And it was all done as ordered. The morning Chronicle of 17 March 1788 records that Sullivan was “burnt, being first strangled by the stool being taken from under her.” City worthies sat on a viewing platform nearby, the horrified Sheriff of the city of London, Mr. Bloxham, amongst them.
Friends and strangers sent the doomed Catherine Heyland gifts, letters, and messages of support as her month's grace passed and the stake was put in place again. Sheriff Bloxham had a distaste for burning women, and believed Catherine Heyland did not deserve to burn anyhow. He had already been involved in the burning of a female in June the year before, and even though she was mercifully hanged or garrotted while tied to the stake and before the flames devoured her, it had been a catastrophic and barbarous affair for everyone involved. Sheriff Bloxham went searching for the Secretary of State, Parliament having closed for the summer. Bloxham found Lord Sydney, was taken to his bedroom, and galloped back to London with a four-day stay of execution, arriving at Newgate two
hours before the pyre to be lit. The four days were designed to permit time for the King in Council to order a stay of execution during His Majesty's pleasure. That pleasure was, as well as indefinite, unpredictable.
So Heyland saw the first lot of women leave Newgate for the Lady Juliana, and must have thought their destiny sweeter than hers. Another female counterfeiter, nineteen-year-old Christian Murphy, was mean-while found guilty and publicly burned at the stake. We are not given any details of the anguish and resistance of victims, nor of the stench of the whole exercise, but if Catherine Heyland, who could hear the crowd and the procedure from the condemned cells, was not by now half-crazed, it must say something for her endurance and spirit.
But out of nowhere, mercy descended on her. George III having recovered from his madness, bells were tolled, cannon were fired, and a restorative deity was praised by choirs in St. Paul's. The normally five-day sessions at the Old Bailey in April finished in four days, and a spirit of for-giveness prevailed. The twenty-three female convicts then under death sentence were brought from their condemned cell the following day to the Old Bailey. These women, all young, in various states of dress, were told by the recorder that His Majesty had granted pardon to them on condition that they undergo transportation for the terms of their natural lives.
Of the twenty-three women, only sixteen accepted the offer, a grateful Heyland amongst them. To the amazement of the court, seven refused transportation. Three of them were young accomplices in the same crime of assault and highway robbery. The victim, Solomon, was a glass-blower, who had been walking near Petticoat Lane when he was set upon by the three women who inveigled him away, and using “very bad expressions,” threw him on a bed, with one of them lying on top of him while another held his mouth. During his ordeal they stole 14 guineas and a further 10 shillings from his pockets. The oldest of these three girls, Sarah Cowden, now told the recorder, “I will die by the laws of my own country before ever I will go abroad for my life. I am innocent and so is Sarah Storer.” Her two accomplices, Storer and Martha Cutler, made similar speeches, raising the issue that it had been on the glass-blower's word alone that the sum stolen had been fixed at 14 guineas and 10 shillings. The astounded recorder warned that if they did not accept the King's reprieve now, it would be too late thereafter.