A Commonwealth of Thieves (15 page)

He was not the only victim of the hanging tree. A young convict named James Freeman, sixteen when he was sentenced to death at Hartford and reprieved in 1784, had been given the task of being the penal colony's hangman. In the next few days, he too had been sentenced to death for stealing flour from another convict, but there was evidence that he had merely stumbled on the flour cached in the woods. Governor Phillip pardoned him on condition he became the public executioner, and Surgeon Worgan noted that “here was an opportunity of establishing a Jack Ketch who should in all future executions either hang or be hanged” (Jack Ketch being a renowned criminal-hangman from Newgate). Freeman believed it would make him a pariah. In the case of Barrett, the unnamed convict assigned the task had delayed fixing the rope and taking Barrett's ladder away for so long that Major Ross threatened to have the marines shoot him. He had to be severely threatened also by ProvostMarshal Brewer, who disliked the scene anyhow and did not want to have it dragged out. Mr. Brewer, said Surgeon Worgan, “was under the disagreeable necessity of mounting the ladder himself in order to fix the halter.”

Having called on the convicts to take warning from his fate, Barrett was “turned off.” Freeman was in an unhappy position: “All grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner,” wrote an eighteenth-century commentator. “Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.” In the spirit of that principle, Freeman had to be forced to exercise the office every time someone was hanged from then on.

The First Fleet children saw Barrett asphyxiate and piss his pants and were thereby educated in the power of authority. What the Cadigal, drawn by the sound of drums and observing from the bush, thought of this strange ritual would be recorded later. They were astonished and appalled. Strangulation was not one of their punishments. They measured retribution in the more calculable currency of blood.

As thunder clouds came up from the south, the body hung an hour and was then buried in a grave dug very near the gallows. Thus an acre of Eora ground was rendered unholy. Throughout the century, surgeons and physicians, helped by robust beadles and porters, had stolen the bodies of the hanged either from Tyburn Hill, where the London executions took place until 1783, or even from the new scaffold outside Newgate. But here, science had not advanced enough to threaten the eternal rest of Barrett. Overnight a thunderous downpour fell on his grave. Rain gushed in at the canvas and thatched cornices of convict huts. Convicts darted from camp site to camp site with a petition to the great central presence, Phillip, who would find himself presented the next morning with an appeal from the mass of the felons begging that the sentences of Lovell and Hall be commuted. The people who signed it knew well enough that the court system was a lottery, that the condemned had probably been worked at by hefty marines and temporary constable convicts before they confessed, guilty as they may well have been.

Phillip made no immediate reply to the petition. He let the preparatory rites go ahead. Ralph Clark, leading a guard, collected the two men from Harry Brewer's keeping and marched them to the execution site. Johnson prayed with them as they mounted the ladder and Freeman prepared the nooses. But then the judge-advocate arrived with the commutation of sentence. Lovell was to go to Norfolk Island for life, and Hall to be stuck indefinitely on the little island just off Sydney Cove named Pinchgut.

O
NE OF
P
HILLIP'S
MULTITUDE of disappointments was that there were no limestone deposits around the cove, which made it uncertain whether permanent habitations for himself and his officers, the people, and the stores could ever be raised. The sandstone which stonemasons would later craft into splendid honeycomb-coloured public buildings did not answer Phillip's needs now. An adaptable building contractor from Kingston-on-Thames, James Bloodworth, who under financial pressure had committed some felony to do with the endorsement of cheques or the rigging of books, had taken a reconnaissance into the bush south of Sydney Cove and found good deposits of red clay highly suitable for brick-making. That February opened up possibilities for Bloodworth. Known to have a wife in England, he was embarking on a tender and passionate association with the grief-stricken Sarah Bellamy, who had just lost her shipboard-conceived son, and would soon lose his father, Joe Downey, when he sailed with the
Lady Penrhyn
to China. He also drew the attention of Harry Brewer to these potential brick-making deposits and thus, with Harry, assumed the position of chief of construction and superintendent of bricks. Phillip set some of the women to collecting seashells for Bloodworth to burn for mortar. It was urgent work, not just because a government house needed building, and a barracks for officers and marines, but so that the all-important storehouses could be constructed, the precious rations presently standing vulnerably in guarded tents.

Convicts employed in digging up clay and forming it into bricks with brickbats under Bloodworth's direction were met at the clay field, soon named Brickfield Hill, by natives of the Cadigal clan who threw stones at them then ran away. Perhaps some unconscious impulse told the Cadigal to resist the creation of permanent structures. But to Phillip the brick-makers were performing a founding act of good order. Bricks and seashell lime would turn Sydney Cove from a camp to a town.

For it was important that permanent structures of authority and storage be planned. It was 25 March before all the stores were landed from the
Lady Penrhyn, Scarborough,
and
Charlotte,
and those ships were discharged from government service. They were the three going on to China for tea, and their carpenters had made the necessary adjustments in the hold to convert them from convict transports to normal freight carriers. Lieutenant George Shortland, the agent for the transports, confirmed
Lady Penrhyn
's discharge after she landed her government stores of beef, pork, bread, flour, pease, butter, and rice in their various measurements—tierces, puncheons, barrels, firkins, and brams. The ship had also landed a loom for weaving canvas; mill spindles, mill brushes, mill bills, and picks; handcuffs with instruments; nearly 600 petticoats, 600 jackets, 121 caps, 327 pairs of stockings, and 381 shifts; 40 tents and six bundles of ridge poles; a transport jack for repairing wagons; hoses, wind sails, some prefabricated cabins, bulkheads, beds, hammocks, and marine clothing. Who would have thought that in addition to 103 women convicts and sundry marines, all that would have fitted in the 103-feet length and less than 30 feet width?

A new assessment of the rations to be issued was now studiously drawn up by the anxious commissary. An immediate reduction of 12 pounds for every 100-pound ration of beef, and 8 pounds for every 100 pound ration of pork, was made. But the marine wives that day, Sergeant James Scott was happy to report, were ordered their usual allowance of liquor, “with the proviso that their husbands will repay it again.” The ration reduction was not the only bad news, since the same day the governor met the officers on the subject of grants of land, and told them that it was not in his authority to grant
them
land, although he had been authorised to grant land to privates and non-commissioned officers when they had completed their service in the marines. The best he could offer the officers was the use of pieces of ground for gardens or for feeding their stock, but they could not receive permanent grants. In his lieutenant-governor's tent, Major Ross was vocal to his closest friend, Captain Campbell, about what he saw as a carping, letter-of-the-law decision by Phillip. Indeed, had officers been given grants, said Ross with some point, it was likely they could have contributed significantly to the common welfare.

Ross was like a man thrashing about in the coils of Phillip's neglect. Phillip did not come to his tent, or invite him over to the government tent, to discuss executive decisions with him. Nor had he won the affection of his officers even though he had made it clear to Phillip they would not work as convict supervisors. For he grew spiky about small issues concerning the rebelliousness of some of his officers, and his misgivings about the governor and the country in general began to grate on those forced to listen to his complaints.

One matter that had begun plainly enough, but rapidly escalated into tension and conflict, demonstrates Ross's prickliness and lack of adaptability. When at the communal cooking fires and coppers where most of the convicts seemed to want to prepare their rations, as they had at sea, a good-looking Irish convict, Jane Fitzgerald, spoke pleasantly to Private William Dempsey, a series of troublesome events began. When Dempsey answered, a Private Hunt came over and asked Dempsey how dared he speak to a woman from Hunt's ship,
Scarborough,
and so, in Hunt's mind, part of the sexual property of
Scarborough
marines. A convict tried to intervene and Private Hunt called him a “Portsmouth rascal.” Hunt confessed to hitting Dempsey, but denied using any insulting words.

Captain Watkin Tench presided over Hunt's court-martial, taking evidence from Jane Fitzgerald and others. The sentence brought down was that Private Hunt should either ask William Dempsey's pardon, publicly, in front of the battalion, or else he could receive 100 lashes. Within an hour of the sentence coming down, Major Ross sent the case back to the court-martial claiming that they were wrong to bring down alternative punishments. He instructed the court to impose one sentence only.

At four o'clock that afternoon, the five officers signed their reply to Ross, saying that they were unable to reconsider the sentence. Ross wrote to the officers again, and at seven o'clock that evening they wrote back saying that they considered it impossible to alter their decision. Thus rancour went whizzing from tent to tent around Sydney Cove. The members of the court certainly felt that their honour as officers was being impugned, but Ross's personality added a certain tincture of pleasure to their refusing what he demanded. As Private Easty said in his journal, “The court sat four times when Major Ross would not accept the court-martial upon which the court confined themselves … and said that [rather than give way] they would go home to England.” Ross immediately placed them all under house arrest.

The officers of the court wrote to Phillip, as did Major Ross, but Phillip had to overturn Ross's suspension of the five officers—the colony needed their services. Ross insisted they remain under technical arrest with their ranks frozen.

Which was all irrelevant to the reality: that for everyone in Sydney Cove, rank frozen or not, a level of hunger and a great yearning for the lost delicacies of Britain became the lot of all the settlement. Fresh meat from marsupials like the kangaroo and wallaby, and fresh fish from Port Jackson, were in inadequate supply, and much of what was caught went to the hospital. Men and women remembered with passionate fondness the food pedlars of the English towns, the sellers of watercress, asparagus, and chestnuts, cakes, mutton, and pork pies and steaming sausages, oysters, fish, and fruit in season. How richly they must have talked about the horse-drawn early-breakfast stalls which would set up on some corner or by the approaches of a bridge and sell scalding tea and coffee and hot, fresh bread soaked in butter, all for a halfpenny. The people of Sydney Cove had wronged the cities which had presented them with such delights, and they were being punished in a shire naked of such pleasures.

Now scorbutic—scurvy-prone—women and children were nursed with infusions of the leaves of the bush named
Smilax glyciphylla
which grew around the cove and contained ascorbic acid. It was prepared like tea and widely drunk not only in the hospital but as a tea substitute in the tents and shelters of Sydney Cove. Such enterprising surgeons as Bowes Smyth and John White set groups of women searching also for the blue berries of
Leptomeria aceda,
of which a cupful was said to be sufficient to keep scurvy at bay. “Our little camp now began to wear the aspect of distress, from the great number of scorbutic patients that were daily seen creeping to and from the hospital tents.” Every carpenter from the transports and store ships still in the harbour of Port Jackson, every half-skilled artisan amongst the convicts was sent to assist in building huts. The longboats of the ships still brought up the cabbage tree fronds for thatching from the lower part of the harbour, and a range of huts was begun on the western side for some of the female convicts. The
Supply,
returning to Sydney from dropping King at Norfolk Island, had brought a beneficial supply of fresh turtle with it, and White suggested it should be sent out to fetch more. Collins was worried by the general condition of the people, because “the winter of this hemisphere was approaching.”

Collins was aware that venereal disease was also in the camp, even though many of the sufferers had tried to conceal it. Typically, Arthur Phillip decided on drastic and community-wide preventive health measures. “To stop this evil, it was ordered by the governor that any man or woman having and concealing this disorder should receive corporal punishment, and be put upon a short allowance of provisions for six months.” Surgeon White could treat the infection with mercury drops and salve, but there remained a few cases, so that this too could bring the penal commonwealth to ruin.

twelve

N
AGLE, A MEMBER OF THE
governor's boat crew, seemed very fond of Phillip. Nagle was aware that the governor liked particularly to escape the cares of Sydney Cove and travel with other gentlemen to explore the region. In early March Phillip was rowed out of the heads and along the coast in his cutter, accompanied by a longboat, to investigate the inlet next northwards from Port Jackson, named by Cook Broken Bay. Rounding its great, bushy headland, Phillip found that on the north side there were shoals and swamps, but on the south side, “the finest piece of water I ever saw,” which he named Pittwater after the prime minister. The hills of Pittwater, however, covered in thick foliage, fell straight to the beach or petered away into tidal mud, and did not offer lowlands of alluvium. Phillip began to realize that he had been lucky to find Port Jackson with its deep anchorages.

Exploring a dozen or more miles up the river, he encountered new clans of natives and spoke to them and traded, not always successfully. His party was fascinated to see that not all the Broken Bay women had the first two sections of their left little finger missing. As for future settlement here, where the river had created floodplains, he concluded, “There are some good situations where the land might be cultivated.” This river for thousands of years had borne the name Deerubbin. Phillip named it the Hawkesbury, in honour of the Earl of Liverpool, Baron Hawkesbury, head man at the Board of Trade in London.

Exploring the foreshores, encountering occasional Aboriginal corpses laid out in a sort of open-air burial, the party heard for the first time that Aboriginal cry
Cooee,
which would become for the whites also a means of finding friends in deep bush.

The gentlemen removed from the fretfulness of Sydney Cove, dining on mullet on the north side of Broken Bay within hearing distance of the seamen and soldiers, were in good spirits. According to Nagle, Dr. White said to the governor, “I am amazing fond of those mullet.” The governor being in what Nagle called “jocus youmer” answered, “So I perceive, for you have eaten six of them as you say, and you must allow that the least of them weigh 3 pound, and by calculation, the whole must weigh 18 pounds.” This created an atmosphere of what Nagle called “sport and diversion.”

Phillip returned to Port Jackson after a nearly ten-day journey. He had intended to march back to Sydney Harbour overland, but had caught what he called “a cold in his side,” with resultant pain. His kidney and urinary pain had become a chronic problem.

P
HILLIP FOUND THE LAND
near his house on the east side of Sydney Cove to be aesthetically pleasing with its park-like spacing of trees and gentle slopes from which he could look down on the ferny tangle around the Tank Stream. As for the site of government gardens and farms, however, it was serviceable but not wonderful. Phillip was driven by a desire to find superlative farming land, adequate to sustain his people—the sort of Eden new worlds were supposed to deliver up as a matter of course. The Hawkesbury floodplains were too far away, so he decided to take another trip, this time up the broad river which entered Port Jackson from the west and which could be considered a continuation of the great harbour. The river was a magnificent complexity of bays, inlets, and entering streams, and the first night out, having taken a southward-leading tributary, they came to mangrove swamps and had to camp “near some stagnant water” amidst a typical Sydney thunderstorm. At about eleven o'clock, sleeping on drenched ground, the governor fell ill again; he “was suddenly attacked with the most violent complaint in his side and loins, brought on by cold and fatigue.” Surgeon White, who was with him, thought correctly he had not got over his journey to Broken Bay. But Phillip insisted on continuing, up the main artery of water, and passed bushy tiers of sandstone, beaches and bays of mangrove, and then found grass “tolerably rich and succulent … interspersed with a plant much resembling the indigo.” The second night White fed the sick Phillip by hand with an excellent soup made out of a white cockatoo and two crows. The evening thunderstorm came, and again the governor suffered.

The next day they at last came to an expanse of large broad sandstone, a natural weir over which the by-now freshwater river ran. There was a native quarry of slate nearby. And amidst the trees, which were spaced with very little underbrush, the beautiful rainbow lorikeets flashed like hurled clots of colour. Here too ducks and teal were plentiful, and during their migration season from brackish water downriver to the fresh water via the natural rock weir, masses of eels would be found writhing and tumbling in the river, in great knots of potential food. The local Aborigines for that reason called the place
Burramatta,
eels, and themselves the Burramattagal, the people of the eel country.

Phillip's party continued on foot, approving the open ground as they went. The hill at the southern end of this stretch of promising riverbank, fourteen miles from the heads of Port Jackson, was named Rose Hill by Phillip to honour his former neighbour at Lyndhurst, Sir George Rose, who had spoken up to get Phillip this job. But the usage
Parramatta
became gradually more common. In any case, Phillip felt a weight lifted from his body. This new world was not as recalcitrant as everyone feared. Writing to Lord Sydney, Phillip was relieved to report, “There is good country near us and it shall be settled and cultivated early in the spring.”

Three of the fleet were ready now to carry his message to London. The departure of the
Charlotte,
the
Lady Penrhyn,
and the
Scarborough
on 1 May brought an end not only to many a long association between seamen and women ashore, but to the companionable crowdedness of Sydney Cove, and was a token that within weeks the last ship would go. The authorities were anxious that convicts, soldiers, and even sailors associated with the remaining ships,
Sirius
and
Supply,
would stow away, and searches of the vessels both by the masters and by the military were thorough. Nonetheless, the
Charlotte
carried away a naval rating belonging to the
Supply
and a young sailor who was an apprentice to the boatswain of the
Sirius.

Before the ships sailed, there was much official and unofficial trafficking in souvenirs and curios to give to everyone from King George III downwards, and that would produce a reaction from the Eora later in the month. On 21 May 1788, William Ayres, a young convict recovering from scurvy, wandered with another recuperating convict, a young Irishman named Peter Burn, to the cove beyond the farm, Woolloomooloo, to pick greens and sweet tea or sarsaparilla (
Smilax glyciphylla
or
Smilax australis
). That evening Ayres stumbled back into camp with a broken-off spear protruding from his back. Burn had been with him, but had run away when Ayres had been speared, and the natives had pursued him. It would be a few days before a soldier found a shirt, hat, and a piece of Burns's jacket pierced by spear-holes in a native shelter in the bush.

The natives used different weapons to administer different degrees of discipline. The spear used on the convict Ayres was designed to stick fast amidst bone and musculature and to be difficult to extract. White wrote, “The weapon was barbed and stuck so very fast that it would permit no motion. After dilating the wound to a considerable length and depth, with some difficulty I extracted the spear, which had penetrated the flesh nearly three inches.” Ayres, recovered, told the officers what had happened. The Aborigines had tried to drive them away from the place with rocks, and he and Burn had thrown rocks back. Then the Aborigines had proceeded to throwing spears. As Ayres had been taking the spear in his back, Burn had been pursued by another party of Aboriginals who then hauled him away with his head bleeding “and seemingly in great distress.” Peter Burn was in fact dragged off and speared to death, an excruciating process.

The wounding of Ayres and murder of Burn produced a spate of comments about the treachery of the natives, although Tench said their skill in throwing spears was “far from despicable.” And the reaction of Phillip was not as vengeful as some would have wished. The governor suspected with virtual certainty, but without firm evidence, that there had been earlier attacks on and misuse of Aborigines, and rapes of native women by convicts, let alone theft of their tools, nets, shields, and spears.

Mutual murders did not end, despite Phillip's regular warnings to the convict population at morning muster. Some male convicts had been set to work cutting rushes to thatch cottages. Two of them were killed at the end of May 1788. Captain James Campbell of the marines—a man who had been scandalised by what he had thought of as chaos in the camp under Phillip's direction, and who doubted that the “three kingdoms could produce another man, in my opinion, so totally unqualified for the business he had taken in hand, as this man is”—had visited the rush-cutters in their camp. Finding some splashes of blood near the tent, Campbell followed them into the mangrove bushes and found both cutters, William Oakey and Samuel Davis, two cellmates from Gloucester prison and shipmates from the
Alexander,
lying dead some distance from each other. White wrote, “Oakey was transfixed through the breast with one of their spears, which with great difficulty and force was pulled out. He had two other spears sticking in him, to a depth which must have proved mortal. His skull was divided and comminuted so much that his brains easily found a passage through. His eyes were out, but these might have been picked away by birds.” Davis mysteriously had few marks on him, “and his body, lying amongst the mangroves in which he had sought shelter, was warm.” White concluded that while the natives were dispatching Oakey, Davis had crept into the trees where he was found, “and that fear, united with cold and wet, in a great degree, contributed to his death.”

Again, there was a curious reaction to these two deaths. John Hunter of the
Sirius
said of the deceased: “As they had hatchets and bill-hooks with them, it is believed they might have been rash enough to use violence with some of the natives.” There was also the sense, not shared by many convict males, however, that the murders of Oakey and Davis were payback killings. There was a story the two men had stolen a native canoe, an alternative form of an Eora man's soul, and the authorities tended to believe it. Surgeon White thought “that from the civility shewn on all occasions to the officers by the natives … I am strongly inclined to think that they must have been provoked and injured by the convicts.” (Typically, he then went on to describe a new bird, a yellow-eared flycatcher that had been caught that day.)

Nonetheless, Phillip felt that the killers needed to be identified so that there could be at least a parley and a mending of grievances. Phillip, White, some marine officers, six marines, and two armed convicts visited the murder site and then followed a native path running from there to the north-west arm of Botany Bay, where they found forty-nine canoes drawn up on a beach. Keeping an eye out for the murdered men's tools, they had a friendly meeting with more than 200 Eora men, women, and children gathered for some ritual occasion. Each man was armed with spear, woomera, shield, and hardwood club. When Phillip approached them, unarmed and offering fishhooks, beads, and other presents, one man stepped forward to show him a wound in his shoulder apparently caused by an axe, and another claimed by mime that the rush-cutters had killed a native by slashing him across the stomach. Returned to Sydney, Phillip gave an order that no group with less than six armed men was to go into the bush “on account of the natives being so numerous.” Phillip said of the Aborigines in a letter home to the Marquess of Lansdowne, the former British prime minister in whose honour he had named the western mountains beyond Rose Hill, “I think better of them having been among them.”

But one of the chief rilers of natives was the governor's own head huntsman, John McEntire. He came from amongst those Irish harvesters who sailed to England as deck cargo each year to work for the summer. During his time in Durham, McEntire had been found guilty of robbery and sentenced to death, the sentence being commuted to transportation. No one could predict how profoundly ran the rivers of loss and grievance in such a man, but he was a good shot and brought kangaroos and other marsupials to Phillip's table. He also had a certain charm and quickness, since many of the gentlemen were happy to include him in their parties of hunting and expeditions into the interior. He was also an essential aide to the naturalists of the fleet. For he shot birds, kangaroos, possums, and an emu as natural history items, supplying subjects, for example, for the excellent plates which would one day adorn Surgeon White's memoirs of his time here.

His rancour and bitterness would emerge full face in his dealings with the Eora, amongst whom he became, without Phillip's initial knowledge, a detested person. It may even have been in part as a vengeance against McEntire that Burn, his fellow Irishman, died, and Ayres was wounded so severely.