13

Norfolk Island

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WHEN Lieutenant-Colonel Morisset left to take up his new duties, the Monitor in Sydney ran an editorial about his future on “Norfolk Island, late Gomorrah Island,” exhorting him to run it with mercy and restraint. To the powerless and passive convicts “he will be as a God,” and so

let him therefore put himself in the place of Deity, and let his mind become imbued with magnanimity, considering that his power was given him, not for his own pleasure and benefit, but for the benefit of the wretches under his sovereign control (for such is a Commandant’s will at penal settlements).

Let the biting scourge be inflicted seldom, and then in merciful quantities; and let no other part of an Englishman’s body be subjected to this ancient, though still brutal torture, but the back.¹

Morisset may or may not have read this advice; it hardly mattered, for he knew what his chief, Governor Darling, thought of the Monitor and its editor. People often suppose that penal systems recruit sadists. But cruelty is an appetite that grows with feeding, and few people receive an epiphany of their own sadism in the abstract; they must see their victims first. It is most unlikely that Morisset’s habits were known in advance and so ensured him the command of Norfolk Island. If anything, the authorities concluded from his conduct at Newcastle that he was conscientious, stern, but not unjust. Lachlan Macquarie, the Emancipists’ friend, had praised his work there (and even named a lagoon after him in 1821; 150 years later, more fittingly, a lunatic asylum would receive his name). The Sydney Gazette extolled him as an opponent of hanging.² Both Bathurst in London and Darling in Sydney thought they had found in Morisset a tough, reliable line officer who would run the settlement with a heavy hand but by the book. But this description also fits the men who have run the Gulags of our own time.

The essence of any sadistic relationship between a bad prison boss and his prisoners is that the latter should be (in the word so often used of Australian convicts) “objects.” The System’s distinction between “objects” (prisoners) and “subjects” (the free) was no mere grammatical quirk: It implied the convict’s expulsion from the domain of rights. “Felons on Norfolk Island have forfeited all claim to protection of the law,” wrote Governor Brisbane in 1825, meaning every word. “Port Macquarie for first grave offences; Moreton Bay for runaways from the former; and Norfolk Island as the ne plus ultra.”³ There was no point of exile beyond this island; its convicts were at their ultimate distance from reasoned legality and open transaction. The only refuge of their criminality was within their bodies, from whose inaccessible centers the meek silence craved by the System could be trumped by mute defiance. This was the silence of the “pebble,” the “stone man,” as prisoners of unusual endurance were called—a panting and glaring silence, that of a fox gone to earth. On Norfolk Island, that silence would be broken. On May 26, 1829, Morisset landed on Norfolk Island. A year and a half later, the only convict to leave a first-hand account of life under Morisset also arrived there. His name was Laurence Frayne.⁴

Frayne was sent to Norfolk Island in his sixth year of transportation. He was an Irishman, convicted of theft in Dublin in October 1825. He arrived in Sydney on the transport Regalia with 129 other Irish convicts at the end of 1826; he may have been implicated en route to Rio in an abortive mutiny plot that failed because—as a young officer on board recounted it—“an Old Man whom we favoured a little came & confessed all the plot. . . . [The soldiers] would have been so enraged they would have murdered every convict on board.”⁵ In 1828 Frayne was reconvicted for “repeatedly absconding” and was sent to Moreton Bay. There, he still kept trying to escape and his behavior was so untameable that he was sent down to Sydney in January 1830, reconvicted by the Supreme Court, sentenced to death, had his sentence commuted and was put on the Phoenixhulk, awaiting transportation to Norfolk Island.

The hulk, an unseaworthy old transport moored in Lavender Bay, had served as an antechamber to the far penal settlements since 1824. She was a stationary hellship, “that receptable of Filth and place of Cruelty and Starvation.”⁶ Prisoners on board were kept half-starved by the guards, who withheld their rations of flour and “salt horse” to sell on shore; the head warden was an alcoholic who later died in delirium tremens. Frayne tried to escape from the Phoenix, but he was caught slipping over the side and was given 50 lashes; then he cursed the overseer and received 150 more. Other convicts on the hulk fared just as ill. Thomas Cook, held there in May 1836 en route to Norfolk Island, was seized by the head keeper for sharing a pipe of tobacco with his nine cellmates. The ten men were stripped naked,

and after manacling each of our hands behind our backs, he reefed the legs, which were heavily Ironed, to the upper part of the Iron Stanchions of the Cell . . . with the whole weight of our chains and bodies pressing on our Shoulder Blades for the night, in a state of perfect nudity. By the following morning, and for two days afterward, I could scarcely regain the use of my arms.⁷

Prisoners were silenced with a gag, or by sluicing them down with sea water; in winter, this brought on pneumonia. On the voyage to Norfolk Island their ill-treatment continued. James Lawrence, the convict son of a London diamond broker who had been transported for fraud in 1836 and sent to Norfolk Island almost as soon as he arrived in Sydney, recalled that on this thousand-mile voyage in the brig Governor Phillip, there were “Seventy-Five of us in cross irons, our clothes taken from us with the exception of our Shirts, and then rove on a chain in a small prison scarce able to breathe, our passage was dreadful in the Extreme.”⁸ Frayne, cut to ribbons by the lash, had to make the voyage to Norfolk Island on the Lucy Ann in October 1830 with maggots crawling in his back and no chance of a wash or a bandage:

My shoulders were actually in a state of decomposition the stench of which I could not bear myself, how offensive then must I appear and smell to my companions in misery. In this state immediately after my landing I was sent to carry Salt Beef on my back with the Salt Brine as well as pressure stinging my mutilated & mortified flesh up to Longridge. I really longed for instant death.⁹

As soon as they landed at Kingston, the convicts went to work. Norfolk Island had no free settlers and no assignment system; hence, the convicts worked only for government, constructing buildings or growing food. Every structure on the island, from the sentry-boxes to the high stone security walls around the main compounds at Kingston, was convict-built. Few skilled masons were to be found among the twice-convicted “incorrigibles” in exile there, but the last drop of crude labor was wrung from them in iron gangs. They made bricks, burned coral into lime for mortar and ripped the Norfolk Island pines into planks. The jail gang, made up of some thirty-five multiple offenders crammed in a filthy hovel of a prison near the jetty, hewed stone in the quarry wearing double or even triple irons. As a special punishment, men were assigned to the “wet quarry,” a reef partly covered by the sea at the edge of the cemetery, to cut stone under water.

The workday was sunrise to sunset, with an hour off for the midday meal. Every morning and evening, all irons were inspected for signs of tampering—nick-marks, ovalling of the leg-ring, a loose rivet. At unpredictable times, the convicts would be mustered, counted and given full body-searches with inspections of the mouth and anus. Their daily rations were 1½ pounds of cornmeal, 1 pound of salt beef, 1 ounce of sugar, ½ ounce of salt, and a tiny morsel of soap. At dinner, the superintendent was to issue each “mess” of six men a mess kit (knife, fork, spoon, pannikin) which they used in rotation and handed back. But there were never enough utensils to go round, so that they had to eat in a way “disgusting to any man possessing the slightest degree of decency. . . . The provisions were brought out to the various Gangs in wooden or large tin Dishes and set down as before a Hog or a Dog and [they had] to gnaugh it just the same.” If a man dared to make his own utensils, especially a knife, he would be flogged at once and jailed.¹⁰

The basis of prison discipline was the informer. On Norfolk the policy of splintering the convicts as a class, dissolving solidarity in mutual suspicion, was taken to extremes; the authorities felt, quite correctly, that if the prisoners were given the smallest chance to combine there could be a bloody uprising, even a general massacre. Thus not to inform became suspicious in itself, and hardly a week passed without the disclosure of elaborate plots, complete with lists of names, as convicts competed for trivial favors from Morisset and his officers by denouncing one another. “Indulgence,” Frayne noted, “was only got by such traffic in human blood.” The quality of the information mattered far less than its quantity. Informers had their quotas of denunciation to fill and were “capable of any act of purfidy or blood no matter how Black or horrifying such a deed might be.” Any Norfolk man could be flogged on suspicion, as long as he was charged; and since prisoners were tried summarily, by tribunal and not by jury, they had no effective defense. In this way the “normal” relations between guilt and punishment mutated into a continuous sadistic fiction, whose sole aim was to preserve terror.

Frayne described what these punishments could mean. He was brought before Morisset for breaking a flagstone in the quarry. “As usual I found my defence useless,” and thus was sentenced to 100 lashes:

After the sentence I plainly told the Commandant in the Court that he was a Tyrant. He replied that no man had ever said that about him before. I said they knew the consequences too well to tell him so.—But I tell you in stark naked blunt English that you are as great a tyrant as Nero ever was.

The moment I expressed these words I was sentenced to an additional 100 & to be kept ironed down in a cell for Life and never to see daylight again.¹¹

The floggings were spaced. Frayne got 50 lashes on his back. In four days, the cuts were partly scabbed over and he got 50 more. On the eighth day, he got 50 on the buttocks; and on the twelfth day, the last 50. Morisset supervised all this “specially to see the infliction . . . given as severe as the scourgers could possibly inflict it,” so that

new and heavier Cats were procured purposely for my punishment, & the flagellator threatened to be flogged himself if he did not give it me more severe. He replied that he did his utmost and really could do no more. . . . The Super[intendent] who witnessed the Punishment swore when I was taken down that i was a Brickmaker, meaning that I was like an Iron Man past all feelings of the punishment. Alas, delusive idea!—I felt too acutely the full weight scourge & sting of every lash but I had resolution enough accompanied by inflexible Obstinacy not to give any satisfaction. . . . I knew my real innocence and bore up against it.¹²

Morisset, insulted to his face, sought new pretexts to break this stiff-necked young Irishman. Nine or ten weeks later, Frayne was up before him again, charged with assaulting a convict informer named Harper. “What have you to say for yourself?” the Commandant asked, and Frayne began a tirade:

I replied that I would leave it to you to judge whether I am guilty or innocent; you know the character & conduct of the informer; you also know mine. It is useless for me to gainsay anything. . . . If you actually knew my innocence yourself I well know that you would punish me. . . . If you acquit me for the assault you will flog me for what I have now said to you, but I disreagard both you and all the punishment you can give me.

His very next expression was, “I will give you 300 at three different whippings, you damned Scoundrel.”

I said, “I am no Scoundrel no more than yourself, but I don’t think I can take that punishment.” This I said out of derision and ironically, with a sneer at the Colonel.

I and the other man was taken out and we received our first 100 in slow time and with heavy cats. The flagellators were almost as much besmeared with blood as even we. . . . When I was taken down an overseer who assisted to loosen the cords said, giving me a Fig of Tobacco, “You are a Steel Man not a Flesh-and-Blood Man at all, you can stand to be sawn asunder after all that skinning and mangling.”¹³

Frayne and his fellow convict were jailed for a week until their backs scabbed over; then Morisset sent the island surgeon, Dr. Gamack, to see if they could take their second hundred. Frayne begged the surgeon to get on with it: “I am ready to be scarified alive again,” as long as the other man (who “had tender flesh”) could take his flogging too.

Gamack says, “Do you wish to expire under the lash?” I said, “I want to get it over and have done with it & all thought of it, being here injures me more than the flogging.”¹⁴

He got his second 100 and went back into solitary, without any medical treatment. To alleviate the pain from his mangled back Frayne had to pour his water ration on the stone floor of the cell, piss in it to enlarge the puddle, and lie down

with my sore shoulders on the exact spot where the water lay. . . . I was literally alive with Maggots and Vermin, nor could I keep them down; to such a wretched and truly miserable state was I reduced, that I even hated the look & appearance of myself. . . . The trifle of soap allowed me to wash our persons & shirts was stopped from me, as I thought to spur me to abuse the Gaol authorities and thereby again subject myself to more cruelty . . . knowing as they all did my hasty temper.¹⁵

Before he could undergo the third part of his flogging, Frayne was reprieved; the colonial secretary in Sydney issued an executive order limiting all floggings to 100 lashes. Morisset then clapped him in the “dumb cell,” a totally dark, soundless stone isolation chamber, for two months. No sooner did he come out, disoriented and staggering in the sudden blaze of Pacific sunlight, than he got in trouble again.

There were two assigned convict women working as servants at Government House. They had been briefly jailed for some trivial offense. One of them was not only Irish but came from the same town as Frayne. “Strange to say (and equally true as strange) I purposely got into Gaol if possible to get to them, and while they were walking in the Yard for Air I shewed myself through the Bars. . . . I told them they might expect me to pay them a visit at all Hazard, & I would put up with the consequences if it was 300.” That night he did contrive to sneak into the women’s cell and hide under their bedding. “They knew too well the Colonel’s feelings towards me. . . . They were equally as anxious as myself to annoy the Colonel.” So Frayne and the two women had their night of sexual comfort, the only tenderness, perhaps, that any of them had received or given in years. He was found out, of course, and haled before Morisset once more:

I plainly told the Commandant that it was the only opportunity I had ever had or perhaps ever would have of spending a night in Womens company; it was a very natural offence in a twofold degree. “How do you mean twofold?” asked the Commandant. “The first,” I said, “is too obvious to need explanations, the second is that they are both your servants—now you can do as you please, that is all I have to say.”

“Well then,” said the Commandant, “I will give you 100 lashes in slow time so that you shall pay for your creeping into the women’s cell.”

I said, “I hope you will send me back to gaol right after it, and you can give me another 100 tomorrow for the same offence if that will gratify you or give you a pleasure.”¹⁶

Frayne got his hundred, in slow time. So it went on: “I am an oppressed convict,” he raves at Morisset, “oppressed by your Tyranny, & sacrificed by your base Informers & blood hunters, & my hunger and your cruel torture gives you the greatest pleasure & gratification.” But nothing changes; defiance calls forth the lash, torture demands resistance, each side defends its territory, neither will budge. How many men like Frayne were there among the seven hundred Norfolk prisoners under Morisset in 1834? How much implacable, hopeless courage was summoned up to confront the iron machinery of discipline? Frayne spent three years “loaded with French or exceedingly heavy Irons” in the jail gang, reefed to a chain cable every night. Certainly, few convicts can have been like him—otherwise the island would have been uncontrollable.

More normal was the experience of John Holyard, who had come to Norfolk Island on the same boat as Frayne in 1830. He, too, had had his sentence for a capital crime commuted, but he learned quite early that to truckle was to survive; and so he became an informer. In the miseries of the Phoenix hulk, he “learned a lesson which I trust will never be forgot, viz., Submission to the Authorities.” On Norfolk Island, “the exaggerated accounts told of the misery existing on the Island . . . wrung tears from me as I got out of the Boat.” Yet he found

to my great consolation, that to a well-conducted prisoner even on Norfolk Island there is kindness shewn; misery certainly stares the majority of them in the face, but their own doing is the true source of it. . . . I found that although it is a settlement of hardship and privation, yet not altogether so insupportable as I imagined.¹⁷

Holyard was writing to a clergyman who kept assigned servants and had given him a “character” to one of the Norfolk Island officers, so his tone is predictable. But anyone who rose above passive docility was pounced on, and Frayne was clearly not alone in feeling that the rules and those who applied them were meant “to harass and torture me in a manner repugnant to & not consistent with British Law.” Authority was absolute and capricious, lacking any proportion between the acts it forbade and the punishments it meted out. Frayne knew he had been singled out as a “bush lawyer”—“the leading man among my fellow prisoners particularly among the litigious & disaffected.” Despite his formidable inner resources he began to sink into despair, believing God himself was against him:

I began to think that the Almighty had decreed that my life should be made a life of infamy & turmoil & degradation, a life to be perpetually harrow’d up & goaded with such inhuman, barbarous and algerine brutality. This place I considered worse than the blackest dens and caverns of Hell. . . . I began to question in my own then-perverted mind the infinite mercy, nay the justice, of Deity itself.¹⁸

He recoiled from this idea, reminding himself that God “was shewing me as forcibly as possible the truth of holy Writ.” So he resorted to the Bible, particularly the 88th Psalm, which he knew by heart. Ironed down to the jail floor as the Pacific boomed without end on the Kingston reef, each percussion causing a faint shudder in the flagstones, he recited it over and over:

I am counted with them that go down into the pit:

I am as a man that hath no help:

Cast off among the dead,

Like the slain that lie in the grave,

Whom thou rememberest no more;

And they are cut off from thy hand.

Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit,

In the dark places, in the deeps.

The decisive way out of this misery was suicide. “If ever it once had entered my mind that a Self-Murderer could obtain salvation I would not have seen a 10th part of the misery I underwent.” But religious instruction was so basic to the rearing of many convicts, especially the Irish, that suicide was unthinkable. By killing themselves, they believed they would exchange the pains of the island for a real and eternal Hell, from which there would be no release. And so most of the prisoners who felt, like Frayne, “heartsick of my own existence,” still could not bring themselves to “that climax of human depravity, to take away my own life with my own hands.” They were caught between God and Commandant, condemned by their will to survive.

Yet in Morisset’s time, a remarkable usage emerged on the Island. It turned suicide into an act of solidarity, not of solipsism and despair. A group of convicts would choose two men by drawing straws: one to die, the other to kill him. Others would stand by as witnesses. There being no judge to try capital offenses on Norfolk Island, the killer and witnesses would have to be sent to Sydney for trial—an inconvenience for the authorities but a boon to the prisoners, who yearned for the meager relief of getting away from the “ocean hell,” if only to a gallows on the mainland. And in Sydney, there was some slight chance of escape. The victim could not choose himself; everyone in the group, apparently, had to be equally ready to die, and the benefits of his death had to be shared equally by all survivors. Suicide by lottery thus acquired a Roman tinge of disinterestedness.

There are several references to such suicides in the 1830s. Thus William Ullathorne, the Catholic vicar-general of Australia, visited the island in 1834 and remarked that

so indifferent had even life become, that murders were committed in cold blood; the murderer afterwards declaring that he had no ill-feeling against his victim, but that his sole object was to obtain his own release. Lots were even cast; the man on whom it fell committed the deed, his comrades being witnesses, with the sole view of being taken . . . to Sydney.¹⁹

But one full account of such a ritual survives. It was written by Captain Foster Fyans, Morisset’s second-in-command, who had questioned the survivors of the event.²⁰

One day in 1832 or 1833 a gang of 16 convicts was marched out from the Kingston barracks to labor on a road. At the site they seized and manacled their overseer to the only “outsider” in the gang, an unnamed Jewish prisoner, remarking that “Jews are not to be trusted.”²¹ The gang leader, Fitzgerald, produced a makeshift knife and harangued his mates:

“Now gentlemen to business. You all know the plot, is anyone against it? Nil. I have sixteen straws in my fist—the long straw will gain a prize, and the short will be his mate, and here is as good a piece of Hoop Iron as any on the island, and what is more it would shave a Bishop—fair play is a jewel, who draws for Lazarus?”

“Oh my Codd almighty, spare my life, Gentlemen,” cried the poor Jew.

“Fair play is a jewel, come Mr. Jew, you shall have first prize.”

“So help me Codd, spare me”—the Jew fainted, when all cried out for the overseer to choose for the Jew. With some difficulty he was forced by kicks and threats to draw; he did so, the others following, when Fitzgerald was left with the longest straw, and the other with the shortest; either were to suffer a cruel death on the spot.

The long straw now drew against the short “for who was to suffer.” Fitzgerald himself won, and made a brief speech to his comrades:

“I am sorry boys that I am leaving you, but I am not the man either to peach or tell a lie—you’ll have fine fun before you going to Sydney, and a chance of giving them the go-by. Think of me, boys, you’ll all get off alone. Tell old Dowling the judge that it’s my own free will, and that Pat Larkins sticks me. I am all ready now. Come on, my heartys . . . now quick, please yourself and give me as little pain as you can.”²²

At this, Pat Larkins drove the hoop-iron knife into Fitzgerald’s stomach “up to his fist” and disemboweled him, there in the dust of the road. The gang ran away; the Jew and the overseer found the key to their handcuffs in the dying man’s pocket and freed themselves; after two days of anguish Fitzgerald died in the hospital. Later, most of the gang “with some other aspiring youths for the gallows” were shipped back to Sydney for trial. Clearly, Fyans was impressed by the stoic courage of Fitzgerald’s death; he was a soldier and could respect the clan-bound toughness of such men.

We do not know how many such deaths were enacted on Norfolk Island. Fyans’s wording suggests that it was part of a pattern, as when he has Fitzgerald begin his speech with the words “You all know the plot.” Such rituals evolve through custom; they are not simply invented. But in cheating suicide of its stigma, they covered its traces. Officially, the victim had to be classified as murdered by other convicts. It may be that some other moments when a group of prisoners suddenly killed a convict who was not obviously an informer were, in fact, suicide pacts of this kind.

Convict killings were common on Norfolk Island by the end of 1833, so common that Governor Richard Bourke realized he had to close the loophole. “There has appeared abundant reason to suspect,” he wrote to England,

that Capital crimes have been committed [on Norfolk Island] from a desperate determination to stake the chance of capital conviction and punishment in Sydney against the chances of escape, which the passage might afford to the accused and the Witnesses summoned to attend the trial. The number of the latter has been much augmented by the Sinister endeavour of convicts to procure themselves to be summoned.²³

He proposed that a session of the Supreme Court with hanging powers be held whenever it was needed on the island, the judge to be any barrister of three years’ standing and the jury composed of five military officers—a kangaroo court if ever there was one. This was not done, but from time to time a judge accompanied by a crown prosecutor, a defense solicitor and a hangman did visit the island to represent the Supreme Court. The first session of this kind was in September 1833; the judge was James Dowling, the second chief justice of New South Wales. He tried and hanged some convicts for murder. From then on, no Norfolk Island convicts were sent to Sydney for trial.

ii

THE CONVICTS’ only chance of relief from Morisset’s regime now lay in open rebellion. There can have been few who did not sometimes dream, like Laurence Frayne, of revenge:

I should certainly have taken his life . . . & many a time I prayed, if I knew what prayer was, that the heaviest curses that ever Almighty God let fall on blighted man might reach him, for blood will have blood, and in no depth of earth or sea can we bury it; and the blood of several of my fellow-Prisoners cryed aloud & often to Heaven to let fall its vengeance on this wholesale Murderer and despicable White Savage.²⁴

Through the summer of 1833–34, the prisoners’ barracks seethed with rumors of a coming outbreak. According to Frayne, Morisset was on the point of flogging confessions out of him and other convicts, as the Reverend Samuel Marsden had done thirty years before to the Irish at Parramatta. But the commander of the garrison, Captain Charles Sturt—whose deeds as an explorer of the Australian hinterland included the discovery of the continent’s largest river, the Murray, and who was known for his decency to convicts—dissuaded him.

By then, Morisset could barely handle the routines of his duty. He was prostrated by bouts of pain from his old head wound, which struck so fiercely that he could only lie in bed unable to speak, with his eye bulging like a hen’s egg. He stared at failure, a man of fifty-one with nothing to show but this remote post, a brood of unmarriageable daughters and a whistling mask of scar tissue that even the convicts sniggered at. He decided to sell his commission. He wrote to Sydney, announcing that he must remove his daughters from “an abode so unfit for them”; perhaps the colonial secretary could get him a better civil post?²⁵ Then he took to his bed again, glaring at the wooden ceiling and listening to the enveloping drone of the sea wind in the Norfolk Island pines.

The running of the island now devolved on his second-in-command, Foster Fyans, who had two main informants among the convicts: a prisoner named Bullock and an overseer, Constable Price. Fyans was worried, for something was brewing. An anonymous note was dropped in the soldiers’ barracks warning them to “beware of poison”; and Fyans held fresh in his memory a poison plot hatched two years before by one of the convicts on a ship to Norfolk Island. The man was John Knatchbull.²⁶ Knatchbull, alias Fitch (1792?-1844), was one of twenty children of a baronet in Kent who had married three times. With no inheritance coming, Knatchbull joined the navy and rose during the Napoleonic Wars to the rank of captain. Down on his luck in peacetime, he was arrested, tried and transported for fourteen years in 1824 for stealing a pocketbook with two sovereigns in it from a reveller in Vauxhall Gardens. By 1826, Knatchbull was a convict constable on the Western Road at Bathurst. He had his ticket-of-leave by 1829—won for bringing in eight runaways under the hated Bushranging Act—but two years later he forged a check and was caught. Knatchbull was sentenced to hang, but the sentence was commuted and he was shipped to Norfolk Island in 1832. Once on board, he conspired with fifteen other convicts to lace the crew’s and guards’ food with white arsenic, seize the ship and escape. An informer gave the plan away, and a whole pound of the deadly stuff was found hidden in their quarters. But because no one was actually poisoned, Knatchbull was not tried, as it was too much trouble to ship the conspirators back to Sydney for trial. So they remained on Norfolk Island, admired by their fellow convicts and known, collectively, as the “Tea-Sweeteners.”

Fyans was right to suspect Knatchbull. He was helping them make plans. The only way off the island was by ship, and only Knatchbull knew how to run one. On August 1, 1833, before lights-out in the prisoners’ barracks, Knatchbull was stretched on his mat when a convict named George Farrell “laid himself on the mat next to me, when he said I should shortly hear something.” Another lifer, an eighteen-year-old Irish lad named Dominick McCoy, joined them.

“What do you mean?” asked Knatchbull.

“Tell him,” said McCoy.

“The men outside,” Farrell began, “are all mad for their liberty; it is such a gift, especially after the last boat went.”²⁷

He explained the plan. At dawn muster in the convict barracks yard, they would rush Fyans and his soldiers and overpower them. If any of the guard managed to barricade themselves in the guardhouse, the prisoners would set fire to it and flush them out. Meanwhile the jail gang (made up of prisoners under special punishment in the rickety old calaboose 150 yards away) would likewise rush their own guard as they were being mustered for work in the stone quarry. They, too, were “ready at any time to do anything for their liberty.” Then the convicts would break for Government House, capture Morisset, seize the 18-pound cannon there, slew it around and blow the military barracks down. If the soldiers surrendered they would be spared; if not, they would hang, along with all the hated convict constables, overseers and informers. The convicts would force Morisset to hand over his code book of signals, so that they could flag false messages to the next ship that hove to off the reef. Thus, before the captain realized what was happening, they could get on board in the overseers’ blue jackets and seize the vessel. They could avenge themselves at leisure. Morisset and Fyans “should be put to a lingering death of torture.” Skinned alive by his own cat, the colonel would hang for three days, then be quartered, and the fragments of his carcass would dangle on four trees until the sea birds had stripped them. The women on the island were to be “taken and distributed” to the ringleaders, and Knatchbull wanted the colonel’s timid and neurasthenic wife Emily Vaux. After the orgies, the convicts meant to build a decked launch to hold forty or fifty people, which they would sail to New Caledonia. Knatchbull would pilot the hijacked ship to America, for “if he once got there, the Americans would not allow them to be given up again.”²⁸

So the plan grew, a poor unlikely project nourished by whispers and swollen by fantasies of vengeance. It linked convict to convict in the lumber yard and the sawpits, at the limeburners’ kiln and the stone quarry, where the convict Redmond Moss, who carried messages between the various gangs, begged Knatchbull to “learn him the compass” before they all sailed gloriously off into the blue. The very thought of escape, however farfetched, gave new hope to the Norfolk Island long-sentence men. (Of the 137 rebels eventually charged with mutiny, half were lifers and another third had sentences of fourteen years.) They devised a password and countersign: “You carry a load.” “Yes, but relief is at hand.”

Rumors of rebellion filtered back to Fyans through his informants. They were vague about time and strategy, and so Morisset contemptuously dismissed them as a pack of lies. Fyans believed them, however, and slept badly. He pored over the uselessly long list of two hundred names his informers had given him, men they had seen whispering together, whom they had grudges against, or who were merely Irish. But there was no sign from the convicts until January 15.

That day, a Wednesday, dawned in fog and pale gray light. Soon after the 5 a.m. reveille bell, a downpour swept Kingston. Through the rain, Fyans and his men in the military barracks heard a distant clinking of iron fetters from the seaward side of the jail. They could see nothing. There were shouts and the flat bang of a musket, followed by a ragged volley. The mutiny had begun.

The timing was nearly right. At the dawn muster in the prisoners’ barracks, an unusually large number of men—thirty-eight in all—had reported sick and were marched off to hospital by a warder, John Higgins. Once inside the hospital lockup, the men turned on Higgins, overpowered him and locked him in a sickroom. The prisoners burst into other wards; one convict named William Groves found the camp constable from Longridge lying ill in bed. “Here’s old Howley the dog,” Groves cried, “and we ought to settle with him now.” The leaders of the hospital revolt, Dominick McCoy, Lawrence Duggan and Henry Drummond, told Groves to leave the sick man alone.

Soon they struck off one another’s irons and armed themselves with makeshift weapons, from chair legs to scalpels and a poker; some found axes. They massed in the entrance of the hospital, ready to fall on the jail guard when it came by, and waited in silence.

A hundred yards away this guard was mustering the jail gang—about thirty convicts under the eye of a corporal and twelve privates of the 4th Regiment. The soldiers formed them up in a column by the jail gate, under the gallows. At this moment the jail wardsman looked toward the beach and saw Laurence Frayne helping a guard empty a night-tub of urine into the sea. Frayne looked toward the sawpits and cried, “Are you ready?” At that moment, the guard corporal ordered the prisoners to march. They would not budge. They stood there, rattling their chains: a signal. Seconds later, a gang of convicts from the sawpits—another forty or fifty men—ran yelling at the rear of the guards around the corner of the jail, while the hospital gang burst from hiding and attacked their front. Suddenly, the dozen guards were trapped in a melee of some 120 convicts. Taken utterly by surprise, they could not get their weapons to their shoulders; the convicts, one of the soldiers recalled, “were within the bayonets of the Guard, before they were aware of them.”²⁹ Their muskets, nearly six feet from buttplate to bayonet tip, were not designed for hand-to-hand combat, and for a few moments the convicts and guards stood locked, grappling for the guns. Two convicts knocked Private William Ramsay down and tried to wrench the musket from his hands. In a daze he heard one of them, Patrick Glenny, shouting “Kill the bugger!” while another named Snell cried that he acted “like a bloody dog over the gang.” Ramsay begged for his life, and Snell, kneeling on the soldier’s arm, said he would spare him if he surrendered his gun; he did, and he lived to testify. Snell stood up but was immediately shot and bayoneted by Private James Oppenshaw. Private Pearson lost his musket to Robert Douglas. “Shoot the bugger, shoot him!” other prisoners yelled. But the gun missed fire; Douglas wheeled on a hated free overseer named Phipps and snapped the hammer six or seven times at him without result. Clutching the musket, Douglas fled into the sugar cane with Phipps in hot pursuit. Henry Drummond, another ringleader, grabbed the musket of Private William Parham, going for his throat with a knife as he did so. The gun was smashed in the struggle, but Parham wrenched free, swung its heavy barrel and brained another convict named Wilson.³⁰

The guards began shooting, and their shots alerted the barracks far away across the swamp. They backed into the gateway of the jail, frantically loading and firing while their comrades kept the lunging convicts back at saber-point. The rebel Henry Drummond fell, under the gallows at the jail gate. Several others went down and, as suddenly as it began, the melee broke up. Dazed by the firing and the sudden red spouts where the balls struck home, they scrambled back into the refuge of the jailyard: James Shields, the jailer, guessed that ten or fifteen of them “who would not have anything to do with the soldiers” rushed by him to temporary safety. Later, the rebel George Farrell would bitterly complain that their cowardice lost the mutiny. The rest of the convicts, driven back by the guard, started retreating in the direction of Longridge, away from the sea.

The clash had only lasted a few minutes. Half a mile away in Quality Row, where the barracks and officers’ houses stood, Foster Fyans and his soldiers had come scrambling out in cap and shirts, buckling on their cartridge-belts as they ran; they had not even had time to lace up their boots. They double-timed down the road to intercept the mutineers and formed up panting breathlessly on a small rise, probably where the Norfolk Island war memorial now stands. The convicts came on, but they faltered when they saw the long barrels levelled at them. Fyans gave the order to fire, and when the black-powder smoke cleared, fifteen rebels were seen stretched on the ground while most of the others had plunged into the sugar cane that grew beside the road; only the remnants of the jail gang stood dumbly in surrender, hampered by their irons. Any rebel who tried to head uphill to Longridge was shot. Soldiers followed the escapees into the vegetable gardens and sugar cane. “The men were very keen after these ruffians,” Fyans recalled with some relish. “It was really game and sport to these soldiers . . . ‘Come on out, my Honey’—with a prick of the Bayonet through both thighs or a little above.” Leaving them to this work he led a detachment up the hill to deal with the convicts at the agricultural station at Longridge.

Up there, the morning had begun casually. The convicts had lookouts planted where they could see the Kingston jail buildings and signal the start of the mutiny. Walter Bourke, the leader of the Longridge rebels, was in the toolhouse sharpening hoes when these “cockatoos” burst through the door, shouting “Turn out, my lads—now is the time for Liberty.” Convicts came crowding exultantly around, and with a swing of his hoe Bourke smashed the lock on the main toolchest and started passing out axes and pitchforks to the men. “Come on, my boys, follow me,” he shouted. “I do not value my life more than I do that piece of dirt —if you think you can do any good follow me.”³¹ Crying “Death or glory!” “Liberty or death!” and “Huzza for liberty!” about eighty convicts followed him down the road to Flagstaff Hill, pausing only to crack off one another’s irons with their axes.

Foster Fyans and his men heard them coming, as a thin straggle of cheers carried over the crest of the hill in the wind. The Longridge men expected to see a victorious crowd of their fellow rebels surging to meet them. Instead they saw two men stumbling up the hill, one of them wounded, and behind them, the redcoats in pursuit. The huzzahs died away, and the surge of adrenaline turned to panic. The soldiers fired a few rounds, but the range was too great. Soon, they closed in and beat the rebels back to Longridge, taking twenty-eight prisoners on the way; with difficulty, Fyans kept the soldiers from bayonetting them to death on the spot, and felt later that “perhaps such lenity is ill bestowed.”³² Nevertheless the soldiers kicked, stabbed and beat the rebels so hard that Fyans himself broke his sword in pieces hitting them with the flat of it.

Within a couple of hours, all of the Longridge rebels were subdued and bound together with cord in a line, which the soldiers marched down the hill to Kingston. At the foot of Flagstaff Hill, they found the youngest ringleader, Dominick McCoy, dying on the ground; cut down by musket-balls, he had been repeatedly bayonetted in the lungs, liver and diaphragm. Now Fyans gave the order to drag him by his chains to the Police Office; and when Dr. Gamack protested and demanded McCoy be carried to the hospital, Fyans told his men to wheel right and drag him there, his head bumping across another 200 yards of stones and mud. Other soldiers, with blood in their eyes, came up and threatened to shoot the doctor.³³

By noon, Fyans had the mutineers behind walls in the main prison barracks—“nearly one thousand Ruffians,” he wrote later, although it was more like two hundred.³⁴ A few were still missing, among them Robert Douglas, who was found later on the other side of the Island at Anson’s Bay, groping along but still carrying a musket with ninety rounds of ammunition wrapped in a palm leaf. A bayonet thrust had destroyed his left eye, and infection blinded the other a few days later. Fyans interrogated him daily in the hospital, but Douglas refused to say a word about the rebellion. The final tally of casualties was light: five rebels dead, and about fifty crippled. No guard was killed until the night after the mutiny, when two military search parties met in a cornfield while looking for rebels still at large and, each believing the other to be convicts, opened fire. One fluke shot killed both a civilian constable and a young private of the 4th Regiment, Thomas York.

So ended the Norfolk Island mutiny of 1834. It had been the only mass convict uprising in the history of transportation to Australia since Castle Hill in 1804. It was ill-planned, badly coordinated, and a failure. It was over in seven hours, but the vengeance of the prison authorities lasted for months. When Captain Fyans, a sweaty, dishevelled figure with his double-barrelled gun on one shoulder and an old rusty dragoon sabre in his hand, reported to Colonel Morisset (who was still in bed from his migraine attack), Morisset gave him carte blanche, saying—as Fyans remembered it—“Glad I am that I am not responsible. Do as you like.”

In a prolonged sadistic fury, Fyans and the soldiers of the 4th set out to make the mutineers wish they had never been born. It took the blacksmiths nine days to make new irons for the prisoners: they were double or triple weight, with the inside of the basils jagged to lacerate the flesh.³⁵Rebels locked in the jail awaiting trial were kept naked in a yard so crowded that not a third of them could sit at a time. For the next five months, while the reports went back to Sydney and arrangements were being made to send a judge to Norfolk Island, the rebels were kept locked to a chain cable and “disciplined in a state of nudity for four hours each day, with their arms up and fingers extended, and such of them as betrayed the slightest emotion of pain, were either stabbed by the Military or flogged on the spot.”³⁶ One of the soldiers’ amusements, encouraged by Fyans, was to choose a prisoner at random and get one of the floggers, for a plug of tobacco, to thrust a stick into the cord that bound his arms, twisting it round and round until blood burst from his fingertips.

The main torture, inevitably, was the lash. In these weeks after the mutiny, Fyans earned his enduring nickname among the convicts, “Flogger Fyans.” So many lashes were inflicted that the government cats were not equal to the task, and they kept unravelling; they were “ridiculous, and the flogger nearly as bad,” Fyans grimly complained. Besides, the prisoners took their usual pride in being “stone men” and endured the triangles in awesome silence. Fyans wanted new, special cats made “to strike terror into these hardened-minded fellows: prisoners of this description cannot be treated as a Gentleman’s Servant in Sydney.” The mass floggings went on into the evening by the light of flambeaux, until the “desperate lawless and listless mob” had been battered into submission. Some convicts, weary of their “acute and intolerable sufferings,” planned to commit group suicide: they would throw stones at the guards “and thus call forth the Fatal Ball.” But this came to nothing.³⁷

It took Fyans and his staff five months to interrogate all the witnesses and take their depositions for trial. There was, of course, a cataract of self-serving evidence from informers. The formal charge of mutiny was brought against 137 men, but only 55 came to trial because only known informers spoke against them, and the Crown solicitor considered them “characters . . . of the foulest description, upon whose uncorroborated testimony no conviction could take place.”³⁸ The Supreme Court judge, a deeply religious Anglican named William Westbroke Burton, sailed with Chambers, the Crown solicitor, in June 1834 to hold his court on Norfolk Island. On arrival, Burton was puzzled by the discrepancy between the looks and the contents of the place. Why, he wondered, should its “soft beauty . . . not have its effect on hearts not wholly hardened by the searing effects of Vice”? Why should the convicts seem “to gather no heartening effect from the beauties of the Creation around them, but to make a Hell of that which else might be a Heaven”?³⁹ Here, Romantic belief in the therapeutic power of landscape (which had become an idée reçue of educated men across the world in the 1830s) had to be suspended, a distressing anomaly to the judge.

The trial went on through July 1834, and Burton’s dislike for the main source of prosecution evidence, the informers or “approvers,” mounted. He was moved by the evident honesty of the rebels, in contrast to the shiftiness of the witnesses—particularly of Knatchbull, who had tried to incriminate everyone else while saving his own skin. The Crown solicitor had wanted to indict Knatchbull, but “the jury rejected the evidence of the approvers and there being no other evidence against [him] I did not bring him to trial.”⁴⁰ Burton gave Fyans a severe reprimand from the Bench for accepting any confession from Knatchbull: “He was the chief of the mutineers, the man you should have named first. . . . You have saved his life, or prolonged it. He never can do good.”^*

By contrast, some of the rebels on trial were praying to die. The oldest of them was only thirty-five years old, but after six months’ retribution from the 4th Regiment they came before Burton “grey, wizened and shrunken, their eyes dull and unseeing, the skin stretched taut on the cheeks; they spoke in whispers and were awful to behold.” One of them declared in the simplest terms that he and his friends had been condemned to death before and had been reprieved and sent to the island: “We wish we had been executed then. It was no mercy to send us to this place. I do not ask for life, I do not want to be spared. . . . [L]ife is not worth living on such terms.”⁴¹

In the dock, Robert Douglas impressed Burton with his “singular ability and uncommon calmness and self-possession under circumstances so appalling to ordinary minds.” He turned his scarred face and blinded eyes to the judge, uttering the words that remain the final judgment on the ne plus ultra of the System: “Let a man’s heart be what it will when he comes here, his Man’s heart is taken from him, and he is given the heart of a Beast.”

Other convicts begged to be shriven: “Oh, your Honour, I have committed many crimes for which I ought to die, but do not send me out of this World without seeing my Priest.” But Norfolk Island had no Catholic priest, and later Burton would glimpse this Irishman in his cell “in miserable agony . . . embracing and beating himself upon a rudely constructed figure of the Cross.”

By now, he was beginning to feel the System was worse than its “objects.” The trial had provoked a crisis of conscience in him, a “sad meditation,” a gush of pity to which “the Human Heart could not be insensible.” Who, under these conditions, would not rebel? The military jury found thirty of the thirty-five mutineers guilty, but Burton could not sentence them to death. In a wholly unprecedented step he reprieved them all until he could lay their case directly before the governor, Richard Bourke, and bring a Catholic priest to Norfolk Island so that the condemned could receive their last sacraments.

Back in Sydney, Burton pleaded so eloquently to Governor Bourke and his Executive Council that sixteen of the thirty convicted mutineers had their sentences commuted to hard labor for life. The remaining fourteen, however, were to hang; and so two clergymen—one Catholic, the other Anglican—were dispatched there. This was to have far-reaching effects for the System, for the Catholic priest was the vicar-general of Australia, William Ullathorne, later to be a chief witness in the inquiry that helped abolish transportation to New South Wales.

Arriving in September, Ullathorne went straight to the jail; he had five days to prepare the rebels for death. The turnkey told him to stand back, and he opened the first cell. “There came forth a yellow exhalation, the produce of the bodies confined therein,” Ullathorne later wrote.

My unexpected appearance . . . came on them like a vision. I found them crowded in three cells, so small as barely to allow their lying down together—their garments thrown off for a little coolness. They had been six months looking at their fate. I had to announce life to all but thirteen^*—to these, death. A few words of preparation, and then their fate. Those who were to live wept bitterly; whilst those doomed to die, without exception, dropped on their knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God that they were to be delivered from such a place. Who can describe their emotions?⁴²

Ullathorne baptized four more of them as Catholics; they prayed with him, and then prayed alone, as the vicar-general strolled lost in thought by the cemetery “closed in on three sides by thick, melancholy groves of the tear-dropping manchineel, while the fourth is open to the restless sea.”⁴³

The hangings took place in two sessions, on September 22 and 23. Each time, half the prison population was mustered in front of the gallows, while the rest looked on from the upper story of the barracks. The condemned men “manifested extraordinary fervour of repentance,” Ullathorne wrote. “They received on their knees the sentence as the will of God. Loosened from their chains, they fell down in the dust and, in the warmth of their gratitude, kissed the very feet that had brought them peace.” In a silence broken only by the cry of birds and the solemn concussion of surf on the Kingston reef, they mounted the scaffold, dressed in white like bridegrooms. The oldest, Henry Knowles, was twenty-nine. The youngest, William McCullough, had just turned twenty-one. They gazed at the horizon, at the iron rocks of Phillip Island in the circling blue. The hoods went over their heads. “Their lives were brief,” wrote their priest, “and as agitated and restless as the waves which now break at their feet, and whose dying sound is their only requiem.”

iii

MORISSET WAS long gone. Months earlier, he had gone back to the mainland, convalescent and unofficially disgraced. He sold his army commission and invested the proceeds, all he had, in the newly formed Bank of Australia, which then collapsed, taking his money with it. He lived on in obscurity as a police magistrate in Bathurst, making £6 a week, part of which was garnished to satisfy his creditors. He died in 1852, leaving four sons, six daughters and his wife Emily totally unprovided for. He never wrote a line of reminiscence about Norfolk Island.⁴⁴

His successor there was Major Joseph Anderson (1790–1877) of the 50th Regiment, another career veteran of the Peninsular War, a grasping, vigilant and pious Scot, with a face like an irritable osprey—bleak sunken eyes, a blade of a nose, a wiry bush of white whiskers. “Potato Joe” Anderson’s command of Norfolk Island lasted from March 1834 to February 1839. Opinions about him were divided. Ullathorne, no friend to cruelty, praised his “prudence and solicitude” in encouraging good prisoners, in contrast to the “wanton tyranny” of Morisset. In his own memoirs, Anderson claimed to have reduced floggings from Morisset’s 1,000 sentences a year to a mere 70 or 75.⁴⁵ This might have surprised the convicts themselves. Thomas Cook, who arrived on Norfolk Island in 1836 and lived through most of Anderson’s regime, thought that

his measures were of a most severe and harassing description. . . . [T]he tide of Informing had uninterrupted scope, and anything beyond an expressed suspicion . . . was not required by his System. . . . It drew no distinction between the well-behaved and the notoriously bad-disposed prisoner.⁴⁶

Anderson once gave five men 1,500 lashes before breakfast. He punished two loafing prisoners who neglected to sow corn properly with 300 lashes each for the Biblical-sounding offense of “robbing the Earth of its seed,” as though their crime was vegetable contraception. Prisoners could run up heavy punishment records, like William Riley’s during two years in heavy irons after the mutiny:

100 lashes	For saying “O My God” while on the Chain for Mutiny.
100 lashes	Smiling while on the Chain.
50 lashes	Getting a light to smoke.
200 lashes	Insolence to a soldier.
100 lashes	Striking an overseer who pushed him.
8 months’ solitary confinement, on the chain	Refusing to work.
3 months ditto	Disobedience of Orders.
3 months’ Gaol	Being a short distance from the Settlement.
100 lashes before all hands in the Gaol	Insolence to the Sentry.
100 lashes	Singing a Song.
50 lashes	Asking Gaoler for a Chew of Tobacco.
100 lashes	Neglect of work.

In all, this came to 1,000 lashes, eleven months’ solitary and three months’ jail in two years. Another prisoner, Michael Burns, got the stupendous total of 2,000 lashes in less than three years from Anderson: his crimes, like Riley’s, included “Singing a Song”—presumably one of the Irish “treason songs.”

Anderson exacted harsh extremes of labor from the prisoners. Thus, when a field was to be hoed, a line of convicts began hacking across it and the strongest workers were picked to be the pacesetters at either end; those in the middle would be punished if they lagged and made to work after hours until they dropped.

Anderson was a builder, too, and his architectural memorial is the Commissariat Store (since converted to a church), a massive, coarsely detailed three-story building surrounded by a tall security wall. It draws its peculiarly dogmatic character from the exaggerated rhyme between its pediment and the ziggurat-like flight of steps that leads up to the entrance. In a plaque on that pediment, and in a cartouche above the main building of the New Military Barracks (1837) next door, he had a convict mason chisel his name: Major Anderson, 50th Regt., Commandant.

He also planned a new jail, to replace the foul, rickety structure in which the mutineers had been crammed. To get its foundations up above the swampland that lay between the sea and Military Row (where the administrative buildings, barracks and officers’ quarters stood), he had all the landfill from the excavations for the Commissariat Store and New Military Barracks moved to the new gaol site, dumped and levelled. Thus the convicts, having hacked a slice off the flank of a hill 300 feet deep, 40 feet high and 700 feet long, now had to carry some 150,000 cubic yards of earth nearly a quarter of a mile in handcarts. Apart from some stretches of the Blue Mountain roads, this must have been the toughest building job in the history of the Australian convict system.⁴⁷

Labor was aimed at punishment, not production; the conditions robbed exertion of its meaning. No ploughs were allowed on Norfolk Island “under the idea of making the work of the prisoners laborious”; so all the convicts responded with the “Government stroke.” Everything went at a snail’s pace, despite the threat of the lash, and the result was an almost parodical inefficiency. The harder the overseers and guards pushed, the more the convicts malingered. They feigned sickness or induced it, poisoning themselves with lye and nightshade berries; they raised ulcers with manchineel juice or got friends to cut their toes off with a hoe. Anderson had such malingerers flogged, but sometimes sick men came up for a flogging, too, and died. Thus, in October 1836 a prisoner named Barrett, gravely weakened by dysentery, was taken for a malingerer and sentenced to 200 lashes; he collapsed and died after the first 50.⁴⁸

Deranged by cruelty and misery, some men would opt for a lifetime at the bottom of the carceral heap by blinding themselves; thus, they reasoned, they would be left alone. This was the passive end of the moral anarchy that pervaded Norfolk Island; its active end was the “demonizing” of prisoners by an authority whose own capricious brutality could offer no road back from their abasement. For, as Laurence Frayne put it,

If you endeavour to take out of [a prisoner] that manly confidence which ought to be cherished in every civilized human being, you then begin the work of demoralization; and it will end in the very Dreggs of debasement & an insensibility to every species of integrity & decency, and eradicate every right feeling in the human breast. You make him regardless of himself, and fearless as to the consequences of doing wrong to others. . . . There is a certain pitch to which you can work upon man to bring him to fear . . . but exceed that and you make him reckless. Begin to treat him as beneath [your] care and notice, and they then think that you put God, his laws, his omniscience, his providence, as though they were mere nominal attributes and not virtual & real.⁴⁹

Norfolk Island, Frayne argues, wrecked the social contract. Authority was supposed, by sinner and saint alike, to draw its value from its mirroring power—its role as a reflected sign of God’s mercy as well as His justice. Bad authority strips all men of hope by showing them a cracked glass, a different truth about hierarchies:

They at once throw off all restraint & regard for either God or man, and consider everyone over them as acting under the influence of Hypocrisy and Imposture, usurping a power never delegated or sanctioned by the Almighty. They say you make man the slave of man. They resist and cavil at every trifle, and multiply every little departure from rectitude as a premeditated scheme to bilk & gull them into submission . . . because they are under the operation of the LAW, and cannot seek or obtain redress.⁵⁰

Missionaries on Norfolk Island were struck by the state of mind that oppression bred in the convicts. Judge Burton had praised the beauty of the place, and Ullathorne was enraptured by it as he watched the evening sun on the pines “like the bronzed spires of some vast cathedral, flooded in golden light.” Like Burton, he wondered why such beauty did not reform the soul, on this island where “man wanders, the demoniac of the scene”:

The devout man, like David, will muse on these His works, until he kindles like a fire; but perverse hearts will never see fine days. . . . [W]e find the foulest crimes always staining the fairest lands. Those five criminal cities, on whom the Lord rained down his fire and his fury, were placed in a very beautiful country, and Norfolk Island is the modern representative of these guilty cities.⁵¹

Norfolk Island resembled Sodom sexually, but the likeness went deeper. It seemed to have become the epitome of all inversions, to breed that final hopelessness held by theologians to be the worst torment of Hell: a place where—in those words of Milton used by Edmund Burke in an early Commons debate on transportation—“all life dies and all death lives.” It completed the myth of the antipodean inversion of nature by projecting it onto human society. Within its unspeakable microcosm language itself was reversed:

So corrupt was their most ordinary language . . . that, in their dialect, evil was literally called good, and good, evil—the well-disposed man was branded wicked, whilst the leader in monstrous vice was styled virtuous. The human heart seemed inverted, and the very conscience reversed.⁵²

Ullathorne had never heard this kind of argot on the mainland. Who could help such men as would use it? The Catholics (about a third of the prisoners at the time of Ullathorne’s second visit there in 1835) were desperately grateful for any priest’s visit, for only a priest could hear their confessions and so enable them to die in a state of grace. But the Protestants no longer kept up their religious observances; there was no chaplain on Norfolk Island until 1836, because no respectable clergyman would sacrifice his career on such a remote altar. The first one was an unordained missionary, the Reverend Thomas Atkins, an erratic young man of twenty-eight with a burning sense of indignation at official cruelty, who took the convicts’ side from the start, quarrelled sharply with Major Anderson, accused him of sadism and graft, and was stigmatized by Governor Bourke as “highly indiscreet and improper.” The convict Thomas Cook, by contrast, called him “the brightest star that ever shone on this depraved island.” He lasted less than three months. The more normal view of God and religion among the prisoners on Norfolk Island was described by James Backhouse, writing in horror of a prisoner of “great recklessness,” “chafed in his mind,” who “doubted the being of a Deity, but wished, if there was a God in Heaven, that he would deprive him of life.” Such men had one obsession: escape. “Their passions, severed from their usual objects, centred in one intense thirst for liberty, to be gained at whatever cost. Their faces were like those of demons.”⁵³

None of them did escape. Some tried to capture boats and row them across the Kingston Reef to the open sea; they broached to, were sunk by musket fire, or were chased and caught. Others tried to build escape vessels in secret, with stolen lumber, working at night in caves of theisland; they were always betrayed by informers. The “demonization” of the prisoners continued under Anderson’s successors, Major Bunbury of the 80th Regiment and Major Ryan of the 50th. They eased some of Anderson’s more gratuitous punishments—Bunbury, for instance, replaced the hoe with the plough, which almost doubled farm production in the first year—and the pace of building slowed. But for all that, the System ground on; it was too deeply moored in the habits and appetites of guard, overseer and officer to be fundamentally changed by a few leniencies.

In any case, its reputation had to be kept up. Norfolk Island held a thousand convicts, but its real use was the intimidation of tens of thousands more. If it was not “demonic,” it would have been as useless a deterrent as a gallows with no rope. Mercy on the mainland needed the background of terror elsewhere. Such was the official position. It had no lack of sanction from those who might have been preaching mercy. The Reverend Sydney Smith of the Edinburgh Review, so clubbable and so jolly, had gone on record for himself and thousands of like minds with the view that a prison should be “a place of punishment from which men recoil with horror—a place of real suffering painful to the memory, terrible to the imagination . . . a place of sorrow and wailing, which should be entered with horror.”⁵⁴

But in England, opinion was changing, especially among the Whigs. From 1835 on, such voices as Ullathorne’s, resonant with moral outrage, were added to a growing chorus of liberal indignation against the transportation system. Any system that could create a Norfolk Island—no matter how small a percentage of the mainland convicts were actually sent there—seemed iniquitous and fit to be abolished. But while the upper-class reformers were promoting their belief that transportation should cease, the opinion of the lower classes kept drifting the other way. The belief, or hope, that a convict could make his or her fortune in Australia (or at least, a better living than could be scratched from England) had become fixed in the popular imagination. Meanwhile, little by little, the reformers gained ground. It was in 1840 that transportation to New South Wales ceased; and in that year, a new commandant also found himself in charge of Norfolk Island, a prophetic reformer, a noble anomaly in the theater of antipodean terror and punishment: Alexander Maconochie.