A Commonwealth of Thieves (6 page)

In Norwich Castle prison, he had fallen in love with a slightly older woman, Susannah Holmes, guilty of burglary. Their prison child, Henry, born in the pen of Norwich Castle, had not been allowed to accompany his parents down to the dismal
Dunkirk,
and was being cared for by the Norwich gaoler, John Simpson. Now that Henry was on
Friendship,
and Susannah aboard
Charlotte,
the young family was utterly broken up. The efforts of Simpson to get Lord Sydney to reunite the baby with his mother captured the public's imagination, which extended itself to romantic tales of doomed young felons but which, unlike the Victorian imagination, did not require that the lovers be virginal or married. Indeed, during their wait at Norwich Castle, Henry and Susannah had requested they be married but were refused permission. Soon, Simpson came down to Plymouth by coach with the infant. Baby Henry was presented to Susannah, and she and the child were transferred to
Friendship.
The family would not be broken up again by circumstance until late in the voyage.

Also boarded on the two ships were British marines from the Plymouth division. For the garrison in New South Wales, only eighty marines from Plymouth were wanted, though 130 had voluntarily offered their services under the incentive that a stint in the penal colony, should the fleet survive, would entail the option of honourable discharge and a land grant in New South Wales.

At the same time the
Sirius,
its tender the
Supply, Prince of Wales, Scarborough,
and the remainder of the ships were anchored on the robust tide of the Motherbank. Here further convicts and marines were rowed out to the transports from Portsmouth.
Scarborough
would receive over 200 male convicts, and cramped little
Prince of Wales
(318 tons) some forty-nine females and one male. A marine garrison of eighty-nine men came from the Portsmouth division, and about the same number from the Chatham division had already boarded
Lady Penrhyn
and
Alexander
in the Thames.

Phillip was concerned to hear, however, that some of his marines were going ashore sick, and some were even dying there. Part of the problem was that the marines were frequently quartered underneath the seamen's accommodation in the forecastle or aft of the prison, and were “excluded from all air.” Their quarters on the transports were appropriate, Phillip wrote, only for stowing away provisions, and he began to look into ways of better accommodating them.

Officers had better quarters but, for reasons unspecified but which everyone seemed to take for granted, were not permitted to bring their families on the fleet, though some wives of private soldiers, about ten per company, were allowed to travel. A total of 246 marine personnel have been positively identified as having sailed in the First Fleet, and thirty-two wives and fifteen children sailed with their marine husbands and fathers. Ten further children would be born to the families of marines at sea.

Movements of convicts from London to Portsmouth continued. One report of a gentleman's visit to Newgate showed convicts delighted to be slated for the fleet. Their merriment had a hint of the graveyard about it, of the vacancy yawning before them. One party left Newgate on the morning of 27 February, and a large contingent was moved in six heavily guarded wagons from a Woolwich hulk via Guildford. Following a night stop at Godalming, they reached Portsmouth in bitter weather. As the large body of felons was moved through the town, the windows and doors of houses and shops were closed, and the streets lined with troops “while the wagons, I think thirty in number, passed to Point Beach, where the boats were ready to receive them; as soon as they were embarked, they gave three tremendous cheers, and were rowed off to the transport ready for their reception at Spithead.” By the end of the loading process at Portsmouth and Plymouth, some 1,500 people were spread amongst the eleven vessels, including 759 convicts, 191 of whom were women.

Jolting around in the lee of the Isle of Wight, the convicts who had never sailed before became accustomed to the noises and motion of a ship and the claustrophobia of their low-beamed, cramped deck. The enterprising chief surgeon, John White, a veteran at thirty-one of a decade of surgical practice on naval vessels in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, approached Captain Hunter, the Scots skipper of
Sirius,
and told him, “I thought whitewashing with quicklime the parts of the ships where the

convicts were confined would be the means of correcting and preventing the unwholesome dampness which usually appeared on the beams and sides of the ships, and was occasioned by the breath of the people.” By late March some of the vessels were ordered back into dock at Portsmouth for the prison and soldiers' decks to be fumigated. The convicts were let up on the open deck, a mixed blessing in March weather, while the convict prison was whitewashed and gunpowder was exploded in small heaps to disperse the vapours associated with disease.

Early in May two late wagon loads arrived from Newgate, the prison decks were filled up, and the six months of the fleet's being in preparation were nearly over. But there was now trouble with the sailors of
Sirius.
Lieutenant Bradley, the first mate, who was going with the convict fleet chiefly for the chance to survey harbours in New South Wales, said that when he came aboard in early spring, the seamen of the
Sirius
had been in employment upwards of seven months, during which time they had received no compensation “except their river pay and one month's advance.” Now they refused to work. Lieutenant King, no radical by nature, thought that in striking, “the seamen had a little reason on their side.” A similar strike by some of the sailors in the
Alexander
transport led to able seamen from HMS
Hyena,
the naval vessel assigned to escort Phillip's fleet down-Channel, volunteering to take their place. For pay or a willingness to gamble with life, these men put up their hands on short notice to swap a Channel escort excursion for a voyage exponentially different.

Other personnel, such as a competent surgeon for the
Lady Penrhyn,
Arthur Bowes Smyth, did not join the fleet until late March 1787, coming to Portsmouth by mail coach. Bowes Smyth gives us a picture of the perils and shocks of being a journeyer in a changeable season. “A corpse sewed 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.” When in a storm at the end of April the
Lady Penrhyn
dragged her anchors, Bowes Smyth noted: “the women very sick with the motion of the ship.” He filled in his time waiting for the fleet to sail by landing and taking hikes, a luxury the convicts did not have. But at the insistence of Phillip and the surgeons, they
were
regularly permitted on deck to exercise, and officers and men, seamen and soldiers spied on the pretty convict women, and developed plans to associate with them.

Indeed, despite the guarded companionways and gates to the prison decks, and the lack of privacy, prostitution was a reality on
Lady Penrhyn, Friendship,
and
Prince of Wales.
An unexpected roll-call on the night of 19 April revealed five of the
Penrhyn
's women were in the crew's quarters. The women were put in heavy irons for it; three members of the crew were flogged.

On
Alexander,
eleven convict men, sick on loading, had worsened and died, and as April progressed morale was low even amongst officers of the fleet. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, a rather prim, neurotic officer who had volunteered in hope of promotion, said, “I am exceedingly sorry to say that the detachment on board here, and more so on board the other transports, do not go out with the spirit that was expected they would when they turned and volunteered for this service.” Private Easty, a Thames River marine attached to the
Scarborough,
who had watched the convicts come aboard, be inspected by a surgeon, go below, and be chained up, had time to record such small things as the convict who was punished with a dozen lashes for secreting a knife in his shoe, the surgeon who “left the ship for drunk,” his own confinement to the brig in March for dropping his cutlass, and that of his fellow marine Luke Haines for disobedience.

The fleet was expected to leave in April but was still delayed both by contrary winds and Phillip's refusal to leave London until satisfied his ships were adequately provisioned. A Portsmouth local newspaper complained that the longer the sailing was delayed the more the port was thronged with thieves and robbers. By now the idea of the departing fleet no longer attracted universal applause from Londoners. One citizen complained, “Botany Bay has made the shoplifters and pickpockets more daring than ever. To be rewarded with the settlement in so fertile a country cannot fail of inducing every idle person to commit some depredation that may amount to a crime sufficient to send him there at the expense of the public.” A Tory declared, “I beg leave to ask the advocates of colonisation whether the consequences of sending people to America were not eventually ruinous? And whether we have any rational prospect of more gratitude from the posterity of the transports we are about to settle in Botany Bay?” Moralists still liked to remind the criminal classes, however, that in Botany Bay, “no ale houses, no gin shops are to be found there. To work or starve will be the only alternative.”

During the long wait rumours arose that the Dutch had sent squadrons to Botany Bay to resist the landing of the British. Though named New South Wales by Cook, the country was still widely known as New Holland. The French had also made a gesture at claiming it; Captain Kerguelen, after whom the sub-Antarctic island is named, inscribed the French coat of arms on a piece of paper, put it in a bottle, and then cast it in the sea off the western Australian coast in the early 1770s, hoping it would wash ashore and create a title in law. A journey to the Pacific had also been undertaken by a French nobleman, the Comte de La Pérouse. There were rumours that a race was on to claim the region, though no surmise about ownership of the place by its indigenous people broke the surface of this discourse.

The decks of Phillip's fleet were by now crowded with water casks and shacks and pens for animals. Phillip himself would bring pet greyhounds aboard
Sirius
to add to the noise and clutter. On the crew deck the new Brodie stoves, big brick affairs, kept alight and guarded twenty-four hours a day, produced cooked food for sailors and marines, and if there were time or bad weather, for convicts as well. Often the prisoners' breakfast of gruel or pease porridge and their main midday meal—stews of bread and biscuit, pease and beef—were less satisfactorily cooked in coppers in a shack-galley on deck.

When on 7 May Arthur Phillip at last was able to reach Portsmouth from London with his servants, Henry Dodd and the Frenchman Bernard de Maliez, and his clerk, Harry Brewer, he brought with him the Kendall timekeeper which would be used on board
Sirius
to calculate longitude.

During a final inspection of his fleet, Phillip looked into the availability of caps, porter, women's clothing, and sauerkraut (which the convicts and sailors called “sour grout” and were not keen on eating). Despite his earlier letters, not enough ammunition had arrived on board, so Phillip would need to buy from the Portuguese authorities some 10,000 rounds when the fleet reached Rio.

On board
Sirius,
Phillip met a marine officer who would become a staunch friend of his, Captain David Collins, a stalwart fellow of not much more than thirty who was assigned to be the new colony's judge-advocate. In an age when boy officers sometimes commanded grown men, Collins had been a fifteen-year-old officer in command of the marines aboard HMS
Southampton
when in 1772 it was sent to rescue Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark. Collins had also served on land, climbing the slope against defended American positions at the fierce battle at Bunker Hill, at which American sharpshooters caused great casualties amongst British officers. In Nova Scotia in 1777, he married Maria Proctor, the daughter of a marine captain. At the end of the American War, he was placed on half-pay and settled uneasily at Rochester in Kent, for he hated being in reserve as much as Phillip had in his half-pay days. He was pleased to go back on full wages in December 1786, and willing for the sake of employment to be separated from Maria, who filled his absence by writing romances to enlarge their income. He would never put on record the same naked longing for Maria which Lieutenant Clark would express for his wife ashore in Portsmouth.

Collins's military superior, the leader of all the fleet's marines and Arthur Phillip's lieutenant-governor, was Major Robert Ross, a Scot who to his credit did not seem too shocked, mustering London convicts on board the transports at the Motherbank in March 1787, when some of them gave their names as “Major,” “Dash Bone,” and “Blackjack.” Yet he was a prickly fellow, jealous of his dignity and not liked by most of his officers. He quickly grew aggrieved that Phillip did not discuss the project with him or discuss policy with him. Anxious for promotion, he wondered why, apart from extra pay, he got himself into this expedition. On
Sirius,
in his tiny closet of a cabin, which he shared with his eight-year-old son, John, he fretted and fumed. Of him, Lieutenant Ralph Clark would express a commonly held opinion that Ross was “without exception the most disagreeable commanding officer I ever knew.” Ross was feverishly worried about the family he was leaving behind, whom he described as “very small, tho' numerous.”

And so the dispatch of the convict fleet was imminent. A Portsmouth verse expressed the compendium of anxieties and hopes which attended the event.

Old England farewell, since our tears are in vain,
The seas shall divide us and hear us complain;
… Our forfeited lives we accept at your hands,
And bless the condition, to till distant lands;
With a wish for our country we banish all sorrow,
For the wretched today may be happy tomorrow.