The Convicts (18 page)

He had never told me any of this. But now I knew why I'd always feared the water.

“You were born feetfirst,” he said. “I pulled you out and…” His fingers touched the window ledge. “Tom, it was terrible. I thought you had two heads. The water ran with blood, and your mother let out such a shriek of pain. Then two heads suddenly appeared, one turned up and one turned down.”

“My twin,” I said. “We were joined together, weren't we? We were joined at the shoulder.”

He settled onto a bench, as though his knees had buckled. “There was a bit of skin; that was all. I took out my knife and cut you apart.” His face was pale now. “I couldn't hold the both of you, Tom. God knows I tried, but I couldn't. In the wind, in those seas, with the boat full of water…”

He sat quietly, his shoulders hunched. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. “If I live to be a hundred, I'll never forget it. That little pink baby—my son—tumbling away into the storm. He was kicking, Tom. His feet, they were kicking. And the last thing—he opened his eyes. He looked right at me, and then he was gone.”

At last I knew it all. We had been more than brothers, I and my mysterious twin. We had once been one person, sharing our blood and very essence. By what chance had my father saved me and lost my twin? If his hands had clutched the other baby instead of me, would I have lived the Smasher's life?

I saw that I would spend tihe rest of my days wrestling with those questions, and others. Was the wickedness that was in my brother in me $s well? Were we fated all along to be joined again?

I leaned my weight on my father's shoulder. I felt his heart beating in his chest. “What about Mother? Is she …” I couldn't say it. The heartbeats suddenly quickened, “Does she still breathe?”

“Yes” he said. “But barely. She scarcely knows who she is.”

“Then I won't ever see her again,” I said. “I'll be gone seven years.”

“No, you won't,” he said. “I'd sooner leave you in hell than in New South Wales.”

His heartbeats came so loud and fast that I turned my head away, not wanting to hear their desperate drumming. “What else can you do?” I said.

“We'll think of something, Tom “ My father put his hand on the back of my neck and pressed his fingers there. It was an old, familiar gesture, but I realized it had been many years since he'd made it. “I'm an old sailor, and you're a dab hand with the planning, so together we can do it. But we'll do our thinking here in my cabin.”

“No, I have to go back below,” I said. “I've got a friend there who needs me. He's half blind and—”

“We'll bring him up!” cried Father. “The two of you can—”

“But we'd be noseys then,” I said. “We can't be noseys.”

“Of course not,” said Father, with a smile that warmed my heart. “You're a fine lad, Tom. But I don't think I have it in my heart to send you below.”

“Idon't mind,” I said. “I'm important now.”

“Are you?” he said, still smiling. “Because of your diamond?”

“No. Because my father's Redman Tin.”

It was still strange to see my father blush. He was embarrassed, but pleased. “Well, never mind that/’ he said. “We've got thinking to do.”

The ship heeled in a gust of wind. I heard a creak of wood and a slap of canvas, and felt that funny lurch of the masts at work. Everything Midge had taught me came together, and I
saw
the masts and sails as though the deck weren't there. The wind was rising, the ship hard pressed.

“Father,” I said, “I think it's time to reef the topgallant.”

First of all, there was never a hulk called
iheLachesis.
Had Tom Tin been a real boy, he would have gone to a ship called
Euryalus:

She was a frigate, a fifth-riter of thirty-six guns. She served as a warship for twenty-two years, and fought at Trafalg§r, where the British navy clashed with the fleets of the French and the Spanish. She was the eyes of Lord Nelson, shadowing the enemy fleet and signaling its actions. When the battle was over, she bore the news of the great victory, and the death of Nelson, home to England,

In 1825,
Euryalus
was stripped of her masts and her guns, of all that had made her a warship, and her bare hulk was chained to the riverbed not far from the Chatham dockyard. She became a prison for boys. For eighteen years the hulk sat there, settling into its own waste and filth as the boys came and went on their way to Australia.

But in all that time, it seems, no one recorded even the most basic details of the ship. Today, historians can't agree whether rows of barred cells divided the decks, or whether the boys were sorted into any divisions of age or character. They don't know where the workroom was, or what the chapel was like, or just where the boys ate and slept. The only thing that's certain is that the real
Euryalus
was more terrible than my
Lachesis.

It's hard to imagine how crowded life was on the hulk. Though the number of boys varied greatly, at the time of Tom Tin there were nearly four hundred housed in a hull about the same length and width of two tennis courts laid end to end. Take a pair of ships the size of
Euryalus,
chop off their bowsprits, and you could sit them side by side in an Olympic-size swimming pool.

Sickness spread quickly among boys not properly fed. The strong ones preyed on the weak, and the weak simply withered away.

There was a hospital to care for them—a ship called
Canada,
or a facility on shore—but it was dreadfully hard for the boys to get there. At a time when there were three hundred convicts on
Euryalus,
there were only seven in the hospital. Yet the boys deliberately broke their arms, or scalded their skin and encouraged infection, or tumbled themselves down the ladders, just for a chance to get there. Among them was a boy of six and a half, whose story was told to a government inquiry by Thomas Dexter, a longtime convict and, at the time, a nurse at the Chatham hospital.

“I believe he was sentenced at Birmingham, from the Warwick assizes, and the judge asked his mother would she take him home again provided a lenient sentence was passed, and she refused to do it,” said Dexter. “He was consequently sentenced to transportation, that he might be taken care of.”

Dexter met the boy in the hospital. “He died very shortly after he came in,’, he said.

This wasn't unusual. According to Dexter, many boys died in the hospital. “I have had patients …who have declared they have not tasted meat for three weeks together;” he said, “but they have been obliged to give their portions to those nobs, and they have been feeding themselves upon gruel and the parings of potatoes.”

He had nothing but contempt for a system that sent boys to the hulks.

“Frequently when I have seen it in a newspaper that a judge has sentenced a boy out of mercy to the hulks,” he said, “I have made the observation that was it a child of mine I would rather see him dead at my feet than see him sent to that place.”

For the boys, the best hope was to be transported. Very few were pardoned, and though many tried to escape, even fewer did that. Apart from serving out his sentence, a boy's only release from the ship was transportation.

Tom Tin is sentenced to seven years’ transportation for killing a man. Oten Acres receives the same sentence for stealing a sheep, but this isn't out of line. Sentences of transportation were set at seven years, at fourteen years, or for life. Boys under thirteen—and later fifteen—were rarely transported. The youngest ones, like Midgely, were kept on the hulk until they reached that age. On
Euryalus
were boys as young asJfive, who would not reach the age for transportation before their sentences were finished. But the rules were loose, and boys were sometimes sent beyond the seas at the age of nine.

Britain began transporting her convicts in the seventeenth century. Many went to America, until the War of Independence brought an enci to that. Others went to Canada. But it was the settlement of Australia that opened a floodgate for transports. In the famous First Fleet of 1787, almost eight hundred convicts were sent from England to New South Wales. Others followed every year afterward, until transportation ended in 1857.

Samuel Ogilby was a boy convict in 1835. He was ten years old, sentenced to seven years’ transportation for the theft of a jacket and a waistcoat. He told the government inquiry that he was hoping to be transported, though he had little idea of what awaited him in Botany Bay. “I might like it or I might not,” he said. “I have heard that they used to work in chains, but that those who had good characters were sold to masters.” He didn't mind which it would be; he wanted only to leave the hulk. “I do not like this place,” he said.

I was disappointed that I couldn't put Tom Tin on that real ship. But to suggest that I knew what it must have been like to be on it seemed an injustice both to the hulk and to the boys who passed through it.

More than the name is different. I combined three hulks into one, hoping to find at least a fair representation of conditions for the convict boys. From
Euryalus
come the details of Tom Tin's numbing routine, his silent work and silent meals and silent trudging round the deck. His nobs and noseys, his sea of hammocks and fears of the locked-down ship, are also drawn from accounts of
Euryalus.

Some of the other details of the boys’ lives come from the hulk
Bellerophon.
In her day, she had been another famous fighting ship. Launched in 1786, she was a ship of the line, a seventy-four. Known fondly by her crew as the
Billy Ruffian,
she fought at the Glorious First of June and at the Nile and Trafalgar, and carried Napoleon from France after his surrender in 1815. But the followifrg year,
Bellerophon
was hulked, and sat at Sheerness for nearly a decade. From 1824 to 1825, her great hull was the first prison ship to be set aside solely for boys. Before then
_r
boys and men had been lumped together, and there were boys scattered through all of the hulks.

Bellerophon
was much larger than
Euryalus.
The boys lived in big, barred cells. From dark to dawn, guards patrolled the corridors between themv It might have been a better place, but
Bellerophon
lacked something special for the boys—a workroom. When one was built into
Euryalus,
the boys moved to a new home.

Tom Tin's lavish chapel comes from the hulk
Defence.
It's shown clearly in one of the few etchings that illustrate real life aboard the hulks. Higher than two decks, lit by skylight and chandelier, it was large enough to seat every convict and officer. The altar was enormous, but there was no crucified figure atop it.

The kindly chaplain in this story is based very loosely on the first chaplain
of Euryalus.
Horrified by the conditions on the hulk, he did everything he could to better things for the boys. All he accomplished was to have himself moved swiftly to another hulk. His place was taken by a man who measured success by the silence of the boys at chapel, and by the number who learned by heart long passages from the Bible.

When I've told parts of this story to people, I've sometimes been asked, “What about girls? What happened to them?”

Only men and boys were sent to the hulks. Girls who strayed into crime fared better. For them were reformatory schools, and instruction in reading and writing, ciphering, and needlework, The girls were kept hard at work, doing laundry and all the industrial chores of a household. After their time in reformatory, it was hoped, girls would be capable of finding positions in any sort of domestic work.

The boys had no training. One witness at the 1835 inquiry said it wasn't fair to send untrained boys to Australia. But it wasn't the boys he worried about; it was Australia.

“To transport them immediately,” he said, “without having previously trained them to labor and endeavored to instil into them habits of industry, is to burthen a colony with a worthless and a useless set of vagabonds.”

I would like to thank the following people for their help with this story and the historical information within it. They led me through a huge range of puzzling subjects, from nineteenth-century crime and the English prison system to naval architecture and the speed of three-legged horses.

Kathleen Larkin, research librarian at the Prince Rupert Public Library in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada.

Dr. Heather Shore, lecturer in social and cultural history at the University of Portsmouth, England, and author of
Artful Dodgers,
a study of youth and crime in nineteenth-century London.

Professor David Taylor, dean of the School of Music and Humanities at the University of Huddersfield, England, and author of
Crime, Policing and Punishment in England.

Jeremy Mitchell, curator of historic photographs and ship plans at the National Maritime Museum in London, England.

J. Kevin Ash, coroner in Prince Rupert, BC, Canada, and world traveler.

Allison Wareham, librarian at the Royal Naval Museum at HM Naval Base (PP66), Portsmouth, England.

Robert Gardiner, British naval historian at Chatham Publishing in London, England, and author of numerous books on historic ships.

Miss E. M. Worby of HM Prison Service Museum in Rugby, England.

Stephen Nye, assistant curator of Guildhall Museum in Rochester, England.

Jean Lear of the Archives and Local Studies Centre in Strood, Rochester, England.

The staff of the Humanities Enquiries Service at the British Library in London, England.

Sarah Perry of the Bradbourne Carriage Driving Club in London, England,

Lucy McCann, archivist at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies, at Rhodes House, Oxford, England.

Alison Marsh, curator of the Historic Dockyard at Chatham, England.

Michael Carter from the Centre for Kentish Studies in Maidstone, England.

Dr. Peter Reid from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Peter Davis of Zeist, the Netherlands.

Andrea Ryce of the BC Children's Hospital Family Resource Library in Vancouver, Canada.

Pat Murray, Matt Cooper, and Nigel Tkachuk of the Prince Rupert Public Library, Prince Rupert, Canada.

Cheryl Morrison and Tim MacDonald of Northwest Community College in Prince Rupert, Canada.

Raymond Lawrence of Nanaimo, Canada, a storehouse of knowledge, and my dad.