As for D'Arcy Wentworth, he fell passionately in love with a pretty Irish convict of seventeen years named Catherine Crowley. She had been sentenced in Staffordshire for one of the usual offences, stealing clothing—although in her case it was a considerable amount of clothing. Catherine was sent down from Stafford gaol to London on the outside of a coach with three other girls, and boarded the Neptune. Wentworth had at first taken this young woman on as his servant, and she would have welcomed the relative freedom inherent in that situation. With Captain Donald Trail's at least tacit consent, D'Arcy made her his mistress soon after he joined the ship.
Without reflecting on Crowley's individual and demonstrably loyal motives, Wentworth, despite his status as the Second Fleet's only paying passenger, was a gentleman with accompanying entitlements—and a vigorous lover. In reality, Wentworth may have been a more lonely figure aboard Neptune than Crowley was. And he remained so, not interfering, not being invited to interfere as a physician in what befell Catherine Crowley's convict brethren.
So, in close quarters on Neptune could be found two furiously ambitious young men: one a reclusive, prickly officer, John Macarthur, with his wife, Elizabeth, pregnant; and the other the founding social outcast of penal New South Wales, D'Arcy Wentworth, with his lover, Catherine Crowley, pregnant. Elizabeth Veal Macarthur would be a more kindly, more loyal, and more enduring Becky Sharp, to the extent that she broke that mean mould and became her own woman, clear-eyed even amongst the miasmas of Neptune. Her as yet callow husband would be harder to admire so unconditionally.
Catherine Crowley would have been as surprised as the politer Macarthurs to find out that the child she carried on Neptune would one day become Australia's first great constitutional statesman. But all that future was mired in shipboard squalor, stench, and dimness, and they sailed towards a place whose future was un-guaranteed in any case.
twenty
THE THREE SHIPS NOW GATHERED in Portsmouth were joined by a store ship named the Justinian, loading with flour, pork, beef, pease, oatmeal, spirits, oil, and sugar. There were also 162 bales of clothing and a quantity of coverlets, blankets, and cloth, and a portable military hospital, prefabricated for assembly in New South Wales. Four hundred gallons of vinegar were shipped for use as disinfectant and mouthwash.
The wind kept the new convict fleet shuttling between Portsmouth Harbour and the Isle of Wight, but on 7 January, a Sunday morning in the new year of 1790, a westerly allowed them to tack their way down the Channel. The store ship Justinian left Falmouth the same day as the other three ships left the Motherbank.
Twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Macarthur kept herself absorbed by writing a stylish journal of the voyage. In the Bay of Biscay the sea “ran mountains high,” she wrote. Down the coast of west Africa, wind sails operated over the deck to keep the lower areas of the ship refreshed, but the terrible heat, particularly in the men's prison deck, could not be dealt with very well. Here was Georgian Hades, the convict deck of an eighteenth-century ship, the pumps on deck having no air to distribute, and men and women locked up with their complex screams and groans and surrenders.
After sailing, the soldiers complained to Lieutenant Macarthur that they were receiving short rations, that they were victims of purloining, that is, short weighting. Nepean did not seem to want to attend to the matter. The Macarthurs' rations were also cut by Captain Trail, without resistance by the incapable Lieutenant Shapcote or by Nicholas Nepean. Nepean dined in Captain Trail's cabin and the two had become cronies, but the Macarthurs “seldom benefited by their society.” As well, the passage the Macarthurs had formerly had to the upper deck was nailed down, and they could get to the deck only via the women's prison. Nepean told a protesting Macarthur that “the master of the ship had a right to do as he pleased.” Increasingly, Elizabeth Macarthur stuck to her cabin. “Assailed with noisome stenches,” she used oil of attar but that did not dispel the reek.
At Cape Town on 19 February, after an argument with Nepean, Macarthur and his wife, child, and servant transferred to the Scarborough in protest, where they shared a small cabin with Lieutenant Edward Abbott. Elizabeth liked the ship's master of Scarborough, John Marshall, more than Trail. Marshall had a wife and three children in England “of whom he speaks in the tenderest terms.” Her husband was incapacitated for five weeks by fever, during which time, Elizabeth Macarthur complained, the other New South Wales Corps officers did not make “the slightest offer of assistance.” He was beginning to walk again as Scarborough neared Port Jackson.
Captain William Hill, a cultivated and sympathetic young member of the New South Wales Corps, was sailing on Surprize, where he did himself great honour by being a critic of the contractors from the start. “The irons used upon these unhappy wretches were barbarous; the contractors had been in the Guinea trade, and had put on board the same shackles used by them in that trade, which are made with a short bolt, instead of chains that drop between the legs and fasten with a bandage around the waist, like those at the different gaols; these bolts were not more than three-quarters of a foot in length, so they [the convicts] could not extend either leg from the other more than an inch or two at most; thus fettered, it was impossible for them to move, but at the risk of both their legs being broken.” Forced inactivity on this scale, Hill feared, was an invitation to scurvy, “equal to, if not more than salt provisions.” Even when disease struck, there were no extra comforts offered. “The slave trade is merciful, compared with what I have seen in this fleet; in that it is the interest of the [slaver] master to preserve the health and lives of their captives, they having a joint benefit, with the owners. In this [fleet], the more they can with-hold from the unhappy wretches, the more provisions they have to dispose of in a foreign market; and the earlier in the voyage they die, the longer they [the masters] can draw the deceased's allowance for themselves … it therefore highly concerns government to lodge in future a controlling power in each ship over these low-life barbarous masters, to keep them honest, instead of giving it to one man [a single agent], who can only see what is going forward on his ship.”
The three main transports of the Second Fleet having reached Cape Town, the convict artificers who had behaved so well during the wreck of the Guardian and who had been stranded were taken on board the Neptune along with some of the Guardian's saved supplies. By now, Neptune had lost fifty-five men and a woman from scurvy. Young Lieutenant Riou of Guardian could foresee an accelerating calamity. He bluntly wrote to Evan Nepean, “If ever the navy make another contract like that of the last three ships, they ought to be shot, and as for their agent Mr. Shapcote, he behaved here just as foolishly as a man could well do.”
All four surgeons employed aboard the fleet had already written to Shapcote about the potential seriousness of the ships' unhealthy milieu. They urged him to get fresh supplies of beef and vegetables aboard. Surgeon Grey of the Neptune wrote that “without they have fresh provisions and greens every day, numbers of them will fall a sacrifice to that dreadful disease.” Yet at the Cape, Trail made sure his prisoners were securely ironed, which did not contribute to their rehabilitation through whatever fresh fruit and vegetables were acquired ashore.
Surgeon Harris, the military surgeon to the 100 soldiers of the fleet, was concerned about their condition also. William Waters, surgeon of Surprize, reported thirty convicts suffering from scurvy. In the Scarborough ten soldiers were affected, five of them “very bad.”
But Shapcote was strangely unconcerned, and may himself have been suffering from the lethargy of scurvy or from some other incapacity. He died suddenly in mid-May, after dining with Captain Trail and his wife. Between 3 and 4 a.m. a female convict who had constantly attended Mr. Shapcote came to the quarterdeck with news of his death.
The fleet entered now the zone of storms. On Surprize, the New South Wales Corps soldier Captain Hill felt pity for “unhappy wretches, the convicts,” who often “were considerably above their waists in water, and the men of my company, whose berths
were not so far forward, were nearly up to the middles.”
IN THE DISPIRITED COLONY OF New South Wales, June had opened rainy and hungry, but on the evening of 3 June, there was a cry throughout Sydney Cove of “The flag's up!” It was the flag on the look-out station on the harbour's south head, and was visible from Sydney Cove itself. Tench left a passionate account of what this meant to him and others. “I was sitting in my hut, musing on our fate, when a confused clamour in the street drew my attention. I opened my door and saw several women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other, kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness.” Tench raced to the hill on which Government House stood and trained his pocket telescope on the lookout station. “My next-door neighbour, a brother-officer, was with me; but we could not speak; we wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing.”
Watkin begged to join the governor in his boat which was going down-harbour to meet the ship, and it was while they were proceeding that a large vessel with English colours worked in between the heads. But a full-blown wind, of the kind Sydney folk quickly came to name southerly busters, was blowing her onto the rocks at the base of the cliffs of North Head. “The tumultuous state of our minds represented her in danger; and we were in agony.” She survived, however, and the governor sent out a boat to hail her, and when he knew who she was, the Lady Juliana with a cargo of women in good health, he crossed from the vice-regal boat to a fishing boat to return as fast as he could to Sydney, to prepare for the reception ashore of this new population. Meanwhile the seamen and officers in the governor's cutter “pushed through wind and rain…. At last we read the word ‘London’ on her stern. ‘Pull away, my lads! She is from old England; a few strokes more and we shall be aboard! Hurrah for a belly-full and news from our friends!’—Such were our exhortations to the boat's crew.”
Tench was still overwhelmed as they boarded, so that he saw the women on board not so much as the fallen but as “two hundred and twenty-five of our own countrywomen, whom crime or misfortune had condemned to exile.” Letters were brought up from below, and those addressed to the officers who had boarded were “torn open in trembling agitation.”
The Lady Juliana was moored in Spring Cove on the Manly side of Port Jackson for some days, as the women prepared for landing. Then it came down-harbour and the women finally came ashore on 11 June 1790. They were better dressed than most of barefoot New South Wales, having been permitted to replenish wardrobes in Rio and Cape Town, and they made their way as paragons of health through mud to the huts of the women's camp on the west side of the town.
But the presence of the Lady Juliana, and the bad news of the Guardian, were at least signs that the settlement had not been forgotten by Whitehall. Above all, so was the appearance of the store ship Justinian, a few weeks later. “Our rapture,” wrote Watkin, “was doubled on finding she was laden entirely with provisions for our use. Full allowance, and general congratulation, immediately took place.” The Justinian had taken only five months to make its transplanetary journey. The profound gratitude and almost personal affection which would have gone Lieutenant Riou's way had the Guardian not been lost was now directed at Justinian's young captain, Benjamin Maitland, for his ship carried the bulk of the stores Phillip needed, including nearly 500,000 pounds of flour and 50,000 pounds of beef and pork, as well as sugar, oil, oatmeal, pease, spirits, and vinegar. Here was the end of famine, and the return to full and varied rations! And from what the Justinian told them, the settlement knew to look out for three more convict ships.
The first of the new ships, the Surprize, under jury masts from damage in a Southern Ocean storm, was seen from the look-out on South Head on 25 June. By the next day it was anchored in Sydney Cove, with its convicts, and one captain, one lieutenant, one surgeon's mate, and twenty-six other ranks of the New South Wales Corps. The officers from Sydney Cove who boarded it might have expected the degree of health found in the Lady Juliana. In fact the peculiar disorders of the Camden, Calvert and King ships could be smelled for a hundred yards off. Phillip and King found the ill health of the New South Wales Corps soldiers was in stark contrast to the women of Lady Juliana, and the contrast with the convicts of Surprize was even more marked. Many of the Surprize prisoners were moribund. Upwards of 100 were now on the sick list on board, and forty-two had been buried at sea during the journey. The portable hospital which had arrived by the Justinian, measuring 84 by 201/2 feet, was assembled to take some of the spillage from White's timber-and-shingle hospital building, for the other transports were believed to be close, “and we were led to expect them in as unhealthy a state as that which had just arrived.”
The other two transports were spotted by the look-outs on South Head two days later. Lieutenant John Macarthur's fever caught at the Cape had spread throughout the ship. In the mad Southern Seas men and women had perished amongst the jolting, incessant swell, and beneath the scream of canvas and wind. Aboard Neptune in particular, according to later witnesses, a black market had broken out for lack of proper supplies. It might cost 1 shilling 6 pence for an additional pint of water, a pair of new shoes for a quart of tea or three biscuits, a new shirt for four biscuits, two pairs of trousers for six. Crew members would later sign a statement swearing that they sold food and drink to convicts on board at these elevated prices.
The Neptune and the Scarborough now entered Port Jackson. A visit by White and others showed them that the health of the people aboard Neptune was much worse even than that of the convicts on Surprize, and Collins was appalled by their condition. Indeed, Phillip and all the garrison officers looked judgmentally at masters like Captain Trail of Neptune but got back the unembarrassed stare of self-justified men. With all Phillip's power, he lacked the capacity to try them before his Admiralty court, so he was reduced to condemning them in dispatches.
Extra tents had to be pitched on the west side of the cove by the hospital to take in the 200 sick of Neptune, seriously ill with scurvy, dysentery, or infectious fever. Several people died in the boats as they were being rowed ashore, or on the wharf as they were lifted out of the boats: “both the living and the dead exhibiting more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed in this country.”
Much of it was attributed, said Collins, to severe confinement, such as had not occurred on the First Fleet: confinement in irons, that is, on the convict deck, without fresh air, without being permitted to exercise on deck. In many cases, convicts had been ironed together for the duration of the voyage. Collins thought Captain Marshall of the Scarborough had done a reasonably good job. Sixty-eight men had been lost on his ship, however. “On board the other ships, the masters who had the entire direction of the prisoners never suffered them to be at large on deck, and but few at a time were permitted there. This consequently gave birth to many diseases.”
The sick told an astonished Collins and others that sometimes, on board, when one of their comrades died in irons, the other men in the chain sequence had concealed the death for the purpose of sharing out their allowance of provisions amongst the living. “Until chance, and the offensiveness of a corpse, directed the surgeon … to the spot where it lay.” Such indeed had been the fate of Robert Towers.
Visiting the wharf and the hospital tents, Captain Watkin Tench was also outraged by what he saw. “The sum paid, per head, to the contractor, £17, was certainly competent to afford fair profit to the merchants who contracted. But there is reason to believe that some of them who were employed to act for him violated every principle of justice, and rioted on the spoils of misery, for want of a controlling power to check their enormities.” Tench did not, however, see the problem as a systemic one: “No doubt can be entertained that a humane and liberal government will interpose its authority to prevent the repetition of such flagitious conduct.” Captain Collins summed up the problem in a paragraph: “Government engaged to pay £17 7s 6d per head for every convict they embarked. This sum
being as well for their provisions as for their transportation, no interest for their preservation was created in the owners, and the dead were more profitable … than the living.”
No sooner were the convicts unloaded than the masters of the transports, including Trail, opened tent stores on shore and offered goods for sale which “though at the most extortionate prices, were eagerly bought up.” Since cash was lacking, though some had brought quantities of it with them, the goods were in part sold to those amongst the population who had money orders and bills of credit, and even to the commissary for bills drawn on the Admiralty.
Phillip's final figures were that 158 prisoners died on board the Neptune. Others said 171, and 36 aboard the Surprize, 73 aboard the Scarborough. Nearly 500 convicts in all were landed sick. Given the weakened state of the arrivals, at first officers could see no benefit to society from the newcomers until they might recover and join the labour force, whose rations and work hours had at least returned to normal for the present.
The Reverend Johnson, who had avoided the hulks after his first visit to them in the Thames, and who seemed to avoid visits to the convict decks on the way to Botany Bay, had become inured to the proximity of convicts and to the universal squalor of Sydney Cove and entered the below-decks of the first of the three scandalous ships to arrive, the Surprize. He was galvanised by what he saw. “A great number of them lying, some half, others nearly quite naked, without either bed nor bedding, unable to turn or help themselves. I spoke to them as I passed along, but the smell was so offensive that I could scarcely bear it…. Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried upon the backs of others.” Johnson did not quite manage to carry his Christian compassion to the other holds—the captain of the least fatal ship, Scarborough, urged him not to descend into the death hole of its convict prison.