5

The Voyage

i

“IT IS THEREFORE ordered and adjudged by this Court, that you be transported upon the seas, beyond the seas, to such place as His Majesty, by the advice of His Privy Council, shall think fit to direct and appoint, for the term of your natural life.” Or seven years, or fourteen—in any case, the shock of sentencing was dreadful. In law, seven years’ banishment meant what it said; but what man could be certain of returning to England at the end of it? For many people, the sentence of transportation—whatever its announced length—must have seemed like a one-way trip over the edge of the world.

A man could bear it with dignity in the dock, but despair followed soon after. Anguish shows in the few surviving letters, like this one from a Lancashire weaver named Thomas Holden, who in the course of struggling for his rights as an early trade-unionist was convicted in 1812 of “administering an illegal oath” to one Isaac Crompton in Bolton, Lancashire. It seems probable that Holden was a Luddite. He was also happily married. “Dear Wife,” he wrote from a cell in Lancaster Castle,

Its with sorrow that I have to acquaint you that I this day receiv’d my Tryal and has receiv’d the hard sentance of Seven Years Transportation beyond the seas. . . . If I was for any Time in prison I would try and content myself but to be sent from my Native Country perhaps never to see it again distresses me beyond comprehension and will Terminate with my life. . . . [T]o part with my dear Wife & Child, Parents and Friends, to be no more, cut off in the Bloom of my Youth without doing the least wrong to any person on earth—O my hard fate, may God have mercy on me. . . . Your affec. Husband until Death.¹

In April 1831 Peter Withers, the “Swing” protestor from Wiltshire, wrote from the convict ship Proteus at Spithead to his wife Mary Ann:

My Dear Wife belive me my Hark is almost broken to think I must lave you behind. O my dear what shall I do i am all Most destracted at the thoughts of parting from you whom I do love so dear. Believe me My Dear it Cuts me even to the hart and my dear Wife there is a ship Come into Portsmouth harber to take us to New Southweals.

Inconceivable distances loom before Withers, who has never even been as far from home as London; and he tries to explain them, to normalize them by promising a fidelity that will annihilate separation:

it is about 4 months sail to that country But we shall stop at several cuntreys before we gets there for fresh water I expects you will eare from me in the course of 9 months. . . . you may depend upon My keeping Myselfe from all other Woman for i shall Never Let No other run into my mind for tis onely you My Dear that can Ease me of my Desire. It is not Laving Auld england that grives me it is laving my dear and loving Wife and Children, May God be Mersyful to me.²

In December 1831 Richard Dillingham, a convict in the hulks at Woolwich, awaiting transportation, writes less tragically to the girl who had borne him a son out of wedlock, “my ever adorable Betsey Faine.” He casts it in the form of the sweet doggerel rhymes one could buy inscribed on favors at a market fair:

Dearest Betsey the first of human kind the thoughts of you will ever ease my mind for though we at a distance are I hope that God will be your leading star—

The first is B a letter bright

Which plenty doth afear,

The next is F in all women slight,

The surname of my dearest dear. Adieu.³

Tossing on his iron cot in the lockup, a convict would obsessively recall his life and its mistakes. So John Ward, sentenced to 10 years’ transportation in 1841 for theft:

A miserable object in truth, all my feelings and passions now rushed upon me at once. Remorse for an instant filled my breast with abandoned thoughts of plunging deeper into the depravity of heart, to which I had fallen a victim. . . . The many enemies there was to contend with all stood in dark array before my burning imagination.

Ward thinks, with bitter irony, of some lines of affectionate rhyme he once sent to his sweetheart:

Had I possessed candour enough to marry the girl, I sincerely believe I should have been one of the happiest of men!—but!—It occurred to my memory the words I wrote to Rose! some years before this, on a particular occasion—

Far beyond the seas

Unpittied I’ll remove,

And rather cease to live

E’er I will cease to love!

But I did not, at that time, ever dream of putting these words into practice, much less of being sent as a poor convict.⁴

Many prisoners hoped their wives would go into Australian exile with them, although few actually did; it was hard to get passage out there, and tickets were far beyond the means of a worker’s wife. “I hope you will strain your utmost to keep my Company,” Thomas Holden wrote to his wife Molly as he was leaving for the hulks, “and not let mee go without you for with your company I don’t mind where I go nor what I suffer, if I have your Company to chear my allmost Broken Hart.” And later, from the hulk: “My sorrow is greatly Encreased by parting with you, what Comfort can I enjoy when we are separate. . . . I could wish to know if you think you Could rise money to pay your passage & go with me.”⁵ She did not go. Neither did Mary Ann, Peter Withers’s wife, despite his heart-wringing pleas:

We [h]ears we shall get our freedom in that Country, but if I gets my freedom evenso i am shure I shall Never be happy except I can have the Pleshur of ending my days with you and my dear Children, for I dont think a man ever loved a woman so well as I love you.

My Dear I hope you will go to the gentlemen for they to pay your Passage over to me when I send for you. How happy I shall be to eare that you are a-coming after me. . . . Do you think I shall sent for you except i can get a Cumfortable place for you, do you think that I wants to get you into Troble, do you think as I want to punish my dear Children? No my dear but if I can get a cumfortsable place should you not like to follow your dear Husband who Lovs you so dear?⁶

There was no reply, and two years later Withers was writing to his brothers from Van Diemen’s Land: “I have sent 2 letters to My Wife an Cant get heny Answer from her Wich Causeth Me a great deal of unhapyness for i think she have quite forgotten me an I think she is got Marred to some other Man, if she is pray send me Word.” But there was still no word from her, and eleven years would pass before Mary Ann wrote in distress to her husband in Van Diemen’s Land, asking to be reconciled. She received the news that Peter had married again (there was no question of divorce for the lower classes; one simply relied on the inaccessibility of records and married bigamously) to a “staidy vertus Woman”:

I have no Property of my own but my Wife have Property wich she will have in the course of two years and then we have agreed to help you an the Children if God spares our lives.

I know that for to eare that I am married is a hard trial for you to bear, but it is no good to tell you a Lye.

I sent a great maney Leters before I took a Wife; so not earing from you, I being a young man, I thought it would be Proper thing to look [for] a partner which would be a Comfort to me in my Bondage. I sent for you to Come out to this country when I came first and if you had you would have got me out of Bondag for nothing, for a wife could get a release for her husband. So we must not think about Coming together again.⁷

Poor repentant Mary kept trying. The last news of her is a curt form letter from the colonial secretary’s office in Whitehall dated August 1847, telling her that he “was living on the 30 Septr. 1846” but that “no further information can be given respecting him.” There must have been many variations on this small colonial drama.

The Privy Council records contain hundreds of letters from wives asking to go into Australian exile with their husbands. Generally the authorities would not allow this, unless the convict had earned his ticket-of-leave and shown that he could support a family in Australia.^* Permission was only rarely given for a wife to accompany her man on the transport vessel. An intense pathos rises from some of these letters, written in the neat hand of a local curate or the labored scrawl of the petitioner herself. From Rochester in Kent, Deborah Taylor, whose husband James has been transported for life for stealing a lamb, encloses, for Peel’s perusal, a document infinitely precious to her: his letter exhorting her to join him in Australia. She beseeches Peel “most humbly and fervently”

that I may be sent out with my Remaining Children a boy 10 years of age and a girl 6 years, having buried two since my Application. My husband it will be seen by the enclosed letter is very anxious to be sent out. . . . I humbly hope that I may be favored with the return of my poor husband’s letter should I not be successful, pray God I may find favor.⁸

It seems she did get the letter back (at least it is not in the file) but her application was denied. “Usual answer,” Peel’s secretary minuted on the back of her petition, as on so many others.

The determination of some of these women was heroic; they yearned for their men and they would not accept the common fate of abandonment. Jane Eastwood, the thirty-year-old wife of a transported Manchester bootmaker, told Peel in April 1830 that her husband “has written several letters to me from Sidney Island [sic] requesting me to apply to Government in order to be sent out there to him. . . . I am determined to go out to my Husband even at the risk of my life.” She implored the home secretary to “Put it in my power of becoming happy, by uniting me again to the Best of Husbands”:

Prevent me from the shame of casting myself & Child upon the Parish for Relief . . . as work is not only scarce but so ill paid for that it is utterly out of my Power to gain a living for myself & Child, and I have no other thing to depend upon except what I can earn by my needle in dress and stay making.⁹

She cannot wait for more letters, across the vast antipodean time lag; she will pay her own fare with whatever she has. “I know not how to get over the time until word come back from him, about 9 months at least. I would rather sell my household furniture which will amount to about six or eight Pounds, this sum I will most willingly give to Government to lessen their expenses of sending me out to Sidney, provided they would be graciously pleased to send me by the first Ship.” She knows her skills, joined to his, will keep them without government support once she is there. “I myself have been thoroughly bred to the Dressmaking business, and have wrought for years at the Umbrella Business, I can also bind Shoes & boots and can render him every assistance. . . . [T]here can scarcely remain a doubt that we would at all become a burden upon this Colony but rather a gain to them.”¹⁰ This time the government listened, and to Australia she went.

Local clergy, with their charitable concerns, would endorse such petitions. Thus in 1819 Charles Isherwood, the curate of Brotherton, collected signatures from ten colleagues on behalf of Elizabeth Rhodes, asking that she and her two small children “may be permitted to accompany her unfortunate husband to his place of Exile.” Sometimes whole groups, or part of an entire community, would intervene. “A man by the name of Mitchel has lately had the sentence of 21 yrs. transportation passed on him,” wrote a Stirling magistrate, Robert Downie, to Peel’s office. “The Stirling people are most anxious that he should be allowed to carry his wife and 3 children with him. Does Government ever allow of such shipments?” Parishioners would write, promising to raise a local subscription for a wife to join her husband; they offered clothes, food and bedding for her passage.¹¹

Husbands and lovers were also sons, and in an age when family ties across the generations were the very mortar of society the misery felt by the parents of a transported man—and the shame he felt for them—could be unbearable. Convicts’ letters to their parents were filled with promises of self-amendment. “I can assure you that since I have been here i have had plenty of leisure time to reflect on my past misconduct,” a weaver named Richard Boothman writes to his father in Lancashire, “and I can assure you most sincerely that if it pleases God to bestow my Liberty upon me once more, that my life will be one series of amendment, and I trust that i shall yet be able to close your eyes in peace and comfort and render the downhill part of your life happy.”¹² From his “unhappy situation” in York Castle, awaiting transfer to the hulks, Richard Taylor tells his father, “i wish i had taken your Advice. . . . I listen to my fellow Prisoners till my heart goes as Cold as Clay.” But no letter comes from his father, and Taylor, fearing that he has been spurned and forgotten, writes in agitation to his “Dear unkles”:

You must let him now I ham very well and he must think as little about me as he can for i ham quite innesent and I hope god will be mersful to me an I shall see you all agane but if not I must live for a beter world. For my part I [am] determined to lead a godley life.¹³

He invokes the future, trying to shore up the spirits of his parents. He writes from York in May 1840—this time with better spelling, through the medium of a scribe—that “the prayers of a sincere heart are as acceptable to God from the dreary Prison as from the splendid Palace. What a blessing that assurance is to a poor unfortunate mortal in my hapless condition.” He promises reunion:

When I have lived out my ten years in a far distant land how happy I shall be to return to my native home, and with how much more delight will I return home if God shall spare my dear Father until that time, that we may once more meet in the flesh, and convene together about heavenly things—why, my dear Parent, if he spare us both to enjoy that Happiness, it will be like a foretaste of Heaven itself.¹⁴

Such utterances were sincere but they hardly masked the deeper fear that transportation would sunder the family forever. Richard Boothman beseeches his father “not to forget me to my brother-in-law” and other relatives, “and tell them that I should like to see them before my leaving here, as it may be for the last time.” On leaving for the hulks in June 1841, he complains of being cast off by his kin: “I think it rather strange that you have not attended to my request but I certainly should have been glad to see some of my Friends before I left here, but alas now it is too late.” For every brave assertion that the writer will come back (“Dear Father I hope that you will not fret and Greeve And make yourself uncomfortable . . . I hope in a short time I shall see you again”), there are many expressions of despair. “My spiritts is low with thinking how I am sent from my Natiff Contrey, and I am inisent,” Thomas Holden writes in June 1812. “Dear mother I do not think of seeing you in this world any more.”¹⁵

That transportation inflicted social and filial death was a common theme of ballads and it occasionally percolated upward into literature: One finds George Crabbe, for instance, alluding to it in “The Borough” by evoking a pathetic still life meant as a vanitas:

On swinging shelf are things incongruous stored,—

Scraps of their food, the cards and cribbage-board,—

With pipes and pouches, while on peg below

Hang a lost member’s fiddle and his bow;

That still remind them how he’d dance and play

Ere cast untimely to the Convicts’ Bay.¹⁶

Some convicts clung to the hope of a last-minute pardon, usually in vain. The prerogative of the Royal Mercy was often extended to those sentenced to hang, especially if their crimes were political (more especially still, if they were committed after the death of Castlereagh in 1822 and seemed to represent a wave of popular opinion). Thus in 1831, at the height of agitation for reform, Peter Withers and his fellow protestor James Lush were snatched from the gallows on the very eve of their execution by a mass petition addressed to the king through the Home Office. However, once the machinery of transportation had begun to turn, one could not jump free. Yet English life was so enlaced with patronage, with lines of favor and gratitude running throughout the strata of the social pyramid from navvy to duke, that prisoners and their families would seize any chance of mitigation after sentencing. In 1798 a gentleman named C. M. Waller writes to his acquaintance in Sydney, the Irish dynast and assistant surgeon for the colony, D’Arcy Wentworth. He intercedes for an “Unfortunate young Man, who has been cast for Transportation, for the trifling sum of Half a Crown”:

His situation is so much more to be pittied as he not only bore a universal good Character [but] was the whole supporter of a Sickely old Father & a Aged Mother, who is now standing Wheeping before me, & laments the loss of a Son. . . . [T]he only favour she begs of you, Sir, is, that you will be so obliging as to render him any service which is in your power, that his Situation may be more comfortable.¹⁷

Thomas Holden, on the eve of his sailing in 1812, was still imploring his wife “to go to Mr Fletcher & Mr Watkin [and] tell them that I still Protest my inosentse”; while at sea, despite the “great deal of truble and difficklty to get to Right a letter,” he hopes “you will keep sending up Pertisions to Government to get me off or to get my Sentence mitigated.” In 1841 Richard Boothman wrote that “if a little trouble was taken by my friends . . . it might be of very great service to me. . . . [I]f ever I needed help I do now.”¹⁸ The convict and his family had to find as many character references among the respectable—landowners, local magistrates, merchants, clergy—as they could raise. Through a scribe with an educated hand, a woman wrote to the home secretary’s office from Salisbury in 1819:

I beg to inform you that Silas Harris, a transport on board the Laurel at Portsmouth, is my Husband & has left 6 children to lament his Loss, who are at present in the greatest distress, a Gentleman has promised me he would lay my case, together with my helpless Family, before Lord Sidmouth praying me to interfere for his Releasement, Should you think that his Character annex’d would be of Service I should feel myself Thankful.¹⁹

It was by no means unusual for the victim of the crime to petition on the prisoner’s behalf, once he or she had realized the terrible fate that lay in store for the convict in Australia and his abandoned family in England. Many Englishmen and Englishwomen were disturbed by the disproportion between crime and punishment and did not want to carry on their consciences the stigma of destroying a whole family over some relatively trivial possession, especially when it had been stolen in time of general need. William Tidman, a farmer at St. Albans, had lost some sacks of wheat to an agricultural laborer named Thomas Tate, “now lying at Wolledge [Woolwich] under sentence of Transportation for seven years.” He asked Viscount Sidmouth to remit Tate’s sentence on behalf of his wife and four small children, “as I freely forgive him myself.” In the same vein, Mrs. Lycot, wife of “a gentleman of considerable landed property,” wrote in May 1819 to the local magistrate in Minchin Hampton, Sir George Paul, begging clemency for Thomas Barker, an itinerant vendor of rabbit skins who had been sentenced to transportation for buying some silverware that a servant had stolen from her house. She asked for the sentence to be withdrawn, “in consequence of [Barker’s] age which is 57, and the improbability that he and his wife would ever meet again, which being in poor circumstances would render her situation one of great distress.” In forwarding her letter to Lord Sidmouth, the magistrate noted that “the man is already in the Hulk, it will not do to send him back to our Penitentiary, in which there are already three prisoners confined where there should be one.” Revealingly, he added: “These are times when the current of public opinion seems to disarm the law of all its terrors!” And so Barker left for the Fatal Shore, leaving his wife to fend for herself.²⁰

Occasionally a husband and wife would be convicted together and find themselves both sentenced to transportation. The fear of being exiled to different parts of the world would produce its own petitions. From Carlton Jail in Edinburgh, in 1830, Helen Guild begged not to be separated from her husband of six years, “to crave your sanction that he and I may be sent abroad to some place as near each other as we may with propriety be sent. Altho’ it has been our lot to meet with this visitation from both the laws of God & man . . . your sanction would be receiv’d with more sincere pleasure than even my liberation.”²¹

The hope of remission through influence, then, was a constant theme. So was the terror of losing touch. Men on the edge of transportation, about to slip off the social map into the void of the antipodes, were apt to construe every postal delay as a sign of rejection, like poor Thomas Holden writing to his mother:

Nothing in this life gives me such uneasiness as not hearing from you. . . . I have not received a letter but one and that was from my wife since i receiv’d my Tryal, surely you have not forgot me so soon, let me know if there is any hopes of my time being shortened. . . . I will expect to see you if not it will break my Heart that I may take my last farewell of you as I never shall think of seeing you after I leave.²²

But whether the letters and visitors came or not, the day of transfer to the hulks or the transport inevitably did. Holden was carted from Lancaster Castle, via London, to board the hulk Portland in Langston Harbor, where he would work a daily ten-hour shift in the shipyards while awaiting his final departure five months later. The journey, he reported, “has been very wett and uncomfortable and I have been eight days and nights without having my cloaths off my back, so dear wife I will leave you to judge what state I am in at present.” Most transportees were neglected and many brutalized on this stage of their journey. The parliamentarian Henry Bennett, in an indignant booklet addressed to the home secretary in 1819, wrote of convicts on the road to the hulks: “Among them were several children all heavily fettered, ragged and sickly. . . . The women too are brought up ironed together on the tops of coaches.” Hundreds of them went down from London “in an open caravan, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, to the gaze of the idle and the taunts and mockeries of the cruel, thus exciting . . . the shame and indignation of all those who feel what punishment ought to be.” John Ward, in 1841, went down to the Portsmouth hulks from Northampton Jail in a coach, leg-shackled to six other prisoners, treating them to gin and ale whenever the Black Maria stopped at a coaching-inn to change horses, “which seemed to shorten the night’s fatigue, and lessen our uneasiness.” But though he was well-clothed, his fellow prisoners “had scarcely clothing . . . to cover their nakedness, and could only raise 18 pence amongst them.”²³

ii

THE SIGHT OF the hulks at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich was deservedly famous. They lay anchored in files on the gray heaving water, bow to stern, a rookery of sea-isolated crime. As the longboat bearing its prisoners drew near, the bulbous oak walls of these pensioned-off warships rose sheer out of the sea, patched and queered with excrescences, deckhouses, platforms, lean-tos sticking at all angles from the original hull. They had the look of slum tenements, with lines of bedding strung out to air between the stumps of the masts, and the gunports barred with iron lattices. They wallowed to the slap of the waves, and dark fleeces of weed streamed in the current from the rotting waterlines. Some were French warships captured in battle, but most were obsolete first-raters that had once borne a hundred guns for England; now all that remained of their pride was a battered figurehead and the rusty chains, each link half the size of a man, that held them to their last anchorage. They were like floating Piranesi ruins, cramped and wet inside, dark and vile-smelling.

The reception never changed. The new convicts were mustered on the quarterdeck and ordered to give their money to the captain for safe-keeping. The old hulk hands would descend on the new like locusts:

When a party of men comes down . . . it is the hay-day for those who have grown old in the service . . . [The novice is] asked by those around you “if—if—if” twenty things at once, and at the same time “copping” (stealing) as it is called every little article, such as combs, knives, braces or thread and needles &c, you have been allowed by the Captain to keep, out of the few things you have had the luck to bring on board with you.²⁴

Mansfield Silverthorpe, an impecunious young actor who, having trod the boards in the 1830s as Iago, Edgar, the Ghost in Hamlet, Eugene Aram, and Bernard in Guy Mannering, stole a trunk from a Scottish officer and was sentenced to transportation, went in irons down the river to Woolwich on a public steamer, still in his frilly shirt and long tumbling locks. He found that, on the Ganymede hulk,

I was soon metamorphosed into a very different looking Animal, my long hair underwent the operation of clipping by the Barbarous Barber, I was then soaked in a cold bath & afterwards was arrayed in the Uniform of the Hulks. When the Quartermaster took our clothes from us I observed he thrust a knife through each article, and they are then considered to be the property of the Queen; however, when he came to Mine (which were of the best quality) he omitted this act, and as my new Shirt scraped me very much I asked him to let me wear the one I had brought down; but he threatened to flog me for what he called my impudence, and told me all my clothes would be burned. Next week I was not at all surprised to see my own Hat and Satin Scarf adorning his goodly person, and my Coat & Trowsers that of the Captain’s son, a young man about my own size.²⁵

Usually the captain had a deal with an old-clothes merchant: “An old Jew paid us several visits, for the purpose of buying up all the ordinary clothes of the men, and no matter how new a suit might be it was either a matter of take half-a-crown or throw it away.” In exchange, a prisoner got shirts “like coarse wrapping,” canvas trousers, a gray jacket and shoes that slopped or bit, “to remedy which you must give a couple of white loaves, a week’s allowance, to one of your shipmates to change for his and so get a good fit.”²⁶

Every kind of graft and corruption flourished in the hulks. George Lee, sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for having a forged banknote, wrote in January 1803 from his captivity on a hulk in Langston Harbor to denounce “the bad Police and the injudicious Government so prevalent in places of this kind, making them in reality seminaries not of penitence and reform . .  but of every vice which degrades human nature below the ferocious brute.” Of the 440 prisoners on his hulk, about half were “what they call Johnny Raws, i.e., country bumpkins in whose composition there is more of the fool than the rogue,” who were relentlessly preyed on and cheated by all officers from the captain down. Only the chaplain and surgeon, he thought, were honest. “Owing to the impositions on all hands by Contractors, Agents, Victuallers and Captains, nine at a time out of Four Hundred have lain dead on the shore, the pictures of raggedness, filth & starvation.”²⁷

A 14-pound iron was riveted to the felon’s right ankle—a practical discouragement to swimmers. Some were more heavily ironed, for no discernible reason: Bennett in 1817 saw a “very little boy 13 years of age” miserably creeping about the hulk Leviathan in double fetters, while adult men wore single ones; presumably the child had not been able to pay the warder’s bribe for “easement of irons,” and an example was made of him. (Months later, when the weight was removed for the voyage, the prisoner’s right leg would jerk up uncontrollably as he walked.) After a felon was put in irons, he was ready to go to work in the government dockyards. He was taken off the hulk at dawn and rowed back to it at dusk. Chained convicts working for the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, Deptford or Woolwich were a sight for tourists; gawking at them satisfied some of the impulses that had been denied the British public when English madhouses stopped letting them in to jeer at the lunatics. The chain gangs presented a moral spectacle, good not only for adults but for naughty children as well. Being stared at amplified the convicts’ shame, especially since many of them had chosen to embrace their social death, cutting off all contact with friends and family. James Grove, soon to sail for Van Diemen’s Land, wrote to a friend in 1803 that “I purposely delayed writing to you at Portsmouth, in order to avoid the continuance of your notice of me. . . . I shrank from being noticed by the world.” Mansfield Silverthorpe was glad to be in a coal gang; it rendered him black and unrecognizable, a toiling absence whom not even his mother would have known.²⁸ John Mortlock, a young Cambridge graduate and army officer who was soon to sail for Norfolk Island, glimpsed in the crowd of onlookers a fellow student from Cambridge, the son of a banker:

I shrank within myself, but need not have been alarmed, for his eye passed unconsciously over the group of smudged, cadaverous-looking wretches, one of whom a few weeks before had cheered him riding in winner of the steeple-chase at Bythorn.²⁹

The idea that such public labor did anything but degrade the prisoners was, as Bennett pointed out, absurd: “Among men who are condemned to labor in public, exposed to the gaze and criticism of all around them, self-debasement and the loss of personal pride . . . are not instruments to work moral reform.” He claimed that within a few months the prisoner’s expression changed to “a furious cast of countenance, expressive of bad passions and suppressed rage. . . . This dreadful look is to be seen universally in the Presidii of Naples and Spain, in the Galleys of France, and the Hulks of England.”³⁰

The food was adequate if one got one’s whole ration, but that did not always happen. There were three meat days a week, on which the convicts were issued an “institutional pound” (14 ounces) of fresh raw meat. But as it passed down the line to the convict, first the steward took his cut, then the cook, then the inspectors, then the boat’s crew who rowed the food ashore, and lastly the dock overseer; at the end, the convict was lucky to receive 4 ounces, clapped on “a pound of stuff named bread.”

When the “new chums” went to their cells, they lay down in darkness and foul air. John Mortlock, on board the hulk Leviathan in Portsmouth—an old 90-gunner from Nelson’s Trafalgar fleet, jammed with 600 convicts rendered “tame as rabbits” by starvation and discipline—was reminded of a verse in Lamentations 4: “They that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.” They also had to put up with the damp, since to make life harder for the prisoners it was often the custom on hulks to sluice the upper decks with sea water instead of holystoning them with sand. And then there were the endless practical jokes the “old hands” played on the new, starting with lessons in how to tie up a hammock with running knots so that, when a man turned into it, he crashed to the deck in a tangle of canvas.³¹

Discipline was a foretaste of what the convicts were to expect on the “Bay side,” as Australia was called. The great emblem of desire and repression in hulk life, more than sex or food or (in some cases) even freedom itself, was tobacco. Possession of tobacco was severely punished, but the nicotine addict would go through any degradation to get his “quid.” Silverthorpe noted how this cycle of addiction and flogging broke prisoners down: “They grow indifferent . .  they go on from bad to worse until they have shaken off all moral restraint.” He described how this befell a quiet, harmless man named John Woolley, one of his hulkmates on the Ganymede. Woolley’s nicotine addiction was such that

he had been flogged and put in the Black Hole a dozen times but it was no use: “I cannot help it, sir,” he would say to the Captain. “Then I will cut the flesh off your back,” the Captain would reply, and indeed the Boatswain used to do his utmost, for stepping back a couple of Paces he would bound forward with his arm uplifted, take a jump and come down with the whole weight of his Body upon the unfortunate victim, at every Blow making a noise similar to a paviour when paving the streets. At length the poor fellow (as I often heard him say) became weary of his life. He found that his blameless conduct in every other respect could not save him from the consequences of this trifling breech of discipline . . . and from being one of the best he became the worst character in the Yard. When I left it, he was in the Black Hole for having bitten off the first joint of the finger of Mr. Gosling the Quartermaster, who had put it in his mouth to see if he could detect any Tobacco.³²

Each prisoner’s life was governed by a maze of rules, interpreted at the whim of the hulk’s quartermaster. “Sometimes my Iron was too dirty.—at other times too bright.—At one time my Hat was not properly poised on my head.—At another my neckerchief was not tied according to the rules of the Establishment.” These gave endless scope for extracting bribes, large and small, from prisoners or their families. Three gold sovereigns bought Silverthorpe a transfer from coal-heaving to easier labor for three months. The naval clerks would slip a name in or out of the “Bay drafts”—the lists of who was to be shipped to Australia—for a bribe that ranged between one and six pounds. Though prisoners could not carry money, the hulks (like all prisons) supported a labyrinthine and complicated underground economy, with convict bankers, moneylenders and even lobbyists. “A man that can get money on board, he can buy anything he wishes. . . . There are so many stratagems of the convenience, and so many schemes of barter and trade, that it would be tedious to particularize.” Even the doctors were on the take, Mortlock found; when a hulk prisoner died, his corpse would sometimes be sold for £5 or £6 to the dissectors’ agents who haunted the docks, instead of being buried on the cemetery mudbank in the Portsmouth estuary known as Rats’ Castle. And die they did, in numbers, because the naval doctors saw no harm in bleeding a sick prisoner a pint too much. Then the coffin would be rowed to Rat’s Castle, where a chaplain intoned his brief exequies over a box full of stones and sand. Thus, few prisoners looked forward to a spell in the hospital hulk.³³

But nearly all lived, and for them the day came eventually: Cast for transportation, they filed on board the Bay ship. Her sailing was always preceded by a flurry of requests for money, clothing, tobacco, combs, mementos; sometimes a convict’s family could get a trifle to him, but more usually not, for if they had money to spare, who would have turned thief? Some who had been “mechanics” or skilled craftsmen in their previous life brought their tools, against the day when they would win their emancipation and work for themselves again. When relatives came to say goodbye, pathetic scenes ensued. John Ward remembered how his mother “was ill able to support herself under such trying circumstances; we exchanged but few words; for grief choaked her utterance, and shame kept me silent.”³⁴ John Nicol, steward on the women’s transport Lady Julianafifty years earlier, described the reactions of the parents of a young convict, Sarah Dorset, who had been “ruined” by a London rake and then, like thousands of other girls, driven into prostitution and “taken up as a disorderly girl”:

The father, with a trembling step, mounted the ship’s side; but we were forced to leave the mother on board. I took them down to my berth, and went for Sarah Dorset; when I brought her, the father said, in a choking voice, “My lost child!” and turned his back, covering his face with his hands; the mother, sobbing, threw her hands around her. Poor Sarah fainted and fell at their feet; at length she recovered, and in the most heart-rending accents implored their pardon.³⁵

Some women had been subjected to terrible psychic cruelty, and would not soon recover:

A woman was sent up from Carlisle on the top of one of the coaches. . . . [S]he had been brought to bed of a child while in prison, which she was then suckling,—the child was torn from her breast, and deposited, probably to perish, in the parish poor-house: in this state of bodily pain and mental distraction she was brought to Newgate . . . and was then sent out to Botany Bay. . . . I saw her on board, and she could not speak of her child without an agony of tears.³⁶

There can hardly have been a soul among the 162,000 men and women transported to Australia who did not feel, as the transport weighed anchor and began the long voyage to its unimaginable destination, the sentiments that Simon Taylor tried to express in stumbling verse to his father:

The distant shore of England strikes from Sight

and all shores seem dark that once was pure and Bright,

But now a convict dooms me for a time

To suffer hardships in a forein clime

Farewell a long farewell to my own my native Land

O would to God that i was free upon thy Strugling Strand.³⁷

iii

WE NOW TURN to the mechanics of transportation. How did Britain get its outcasts to Australia? Like everything else in the System, the method was made up over the years. Its changes had direct consequences for the prisoners, affecting their health, their state of mind, and their chances of survival.

Between 1787, when the First Fleet sailed, and 1868, when the last convict transport Hougoumont deposited its load of Irish Fenians in Western Australia, the Crown sent 825 shiploads of prisoners from England and Ireland, an average loading of about 200 convicts per ship. This exodus began feebly: By the end of 1800 only 42 ships had gone to Australia. It continued to be weak and irregular for another fifteen years, because England was too hard-pressed in her war against France to expand her empire with Pacific thief-colonies. There was no year from 1801 to 1813 in which more than five convict transports anchored in Sydney, and not until 1814 would as many as a thousand convicts arrive in a single year.

Then, after 1815, the flood began. Its climactic period was 1831–35, in which no less than 133 vessels brought 26,731 convicts to Australia. The peak year was 1833: 36 ships and 6,779 prisoners, some 4,000 to New South Wales and the rest to Van Diemen’s Land. With this practice, the system of transportation, which had begun uncertainly and with great loss of life, became smooth-running. It was not only efficient and profitable (to the contracting shipowners), but quite safe, at least by the standards of nineteenth-century ocean travel. Nobody, however, could say it was pleasant.

The First Fleet had been entirely fitted out and provisioned by the commissioners of the navy; it had been a government affair from start to finish, although the vessels had been chartered through a shipbroker at a flat 10 shillings per ton. The results, as we have seen, were muddled and potentially disastrous, but they were better than what might have happened with private contract. In the long run, though, the navy did not want to be saddled with continuous responsibility for a system of human trash-disposal. Once the guidelines were laid down, every convict transport that sailed from England or Ireland after 1788 was fitted and victualled by private contract. It was said to be cheaper, and certainly it was easier, since it relieved the government of the letting and supervision of dozens of subcontracts. And why should firms of proven respectability not make a fair profit from ridding England of its thieves and scum? The only people the arrangement did not suit were the convicts themselves, since the contract system guaranteed their miseries and, often, their deaths.³⁸

By the end of the eighteenth century, as experience of the peculiar problems of shipping prisoners halfway around the world grew and was added to Britain’s knowledge of sending armies on long voyages and landing them in fighting shape, the private contractor faced an imposing list of government demands. From the number of lifeboats to the size of rations, all was laid down, along with the exact responsibilities to convicts borne by captain, surgeon and officers.

The rules would reduce (but never eliminate) suffering and death on board. People at sea always suffered and died, whether they were prisoners or not. During the Napoleonic Wars the British Navy simply assumed that one sailor in thirty would die of disease or accident at sea, apart from casualties in battle; one man in six was always ill. Even among free emigrants to America in the mid-nineteenth century, a much shorter crossing than the Australian voyage—one in thirty died.³⁹

By the standards of the time, then, the convicts did not do so badly once the system for getting them out to Australia was working smoothly. This happened after 1815, when the average death rate per voyage for male convicts in any five-year period varied between 1 in 85 and (by the end of transportation, in 1868) 1 in 180. At the peak of the System, the average death rate from illness on board was slightly more than 1 percent.⁴⁰

But before 1815 it was much larger, and in the 1790s, when the System was finding its sea legs, it was huge. The defects of the contract system appeared with the Second Fleet, which sailed from Portsmouth in January 1790. Apart from Lady Juliana, it consisted of only three transports: Surprize, Neptune and Scarborough. They were contracted from Camden, Calvert & King, whose agent on board was Thomas Shapcote. It undertook to transport, clothe and feed the convicts for a flat, inclusive fee of £17 7s. 6d. per head, whether they landed alive or not.

The voyage of the Second Fleet turned out to be the worst in the whole history of penal transportation. Out of 254 convicts on Surprize, 36 died at sea; out of 499 on Neptune, 158 died; and on Scarborough, which had finished her voyage in the First Fleet without losing a single life, 73 people perished out of 253. In sum, out of 1,006 prisoners who sailed from Portsmouth, 267 died at sea and at least another 150 after landing.

Camden, Calvert & King had been slaving contractors, and they had equipped the fleet with slave shackles designed for Africans on the infamous “Middle Passage”—not the chains and basils (ankle irons) that, cruel though they were, allowed a man’s legs some range of movement, but short rigid bolts between the ankles, about nine inches long, that incapacitated them. As William Hill, a second captain in the New South Wales Corps who sailed on Surprize, indignantly reported, “it was impossible for them to move but at the risk of both their legs being broken.”⁴¹ Surprizewas an old ship, and in a heavy sea the water sluiced through her. The starving prisoners lay chilled to the bone on soaked bedding, unexercised, crusted with salt, shit and vomit, festering with scurvy and boils. One convict, Thomas Milburn, would later describe the voyage in a letter to his parents, later printed as a broadsheet in England:

[We were] chained two and two together and confined in the hold during the whole course of our long voyage. . . . [W]e were scarcely allowed a sufficient quantity of victuals to keep us alive, and scarcely any water; for my own part I could have eaten three or four of our allowances, and you know very well that I was never a great eater. . . . [W]hen any of our comrades that were chained to us died, we kept it a secret as long as we could for the smell of the dead body, in order to get their allowance of provision, and many a time have I been glad to eat the poultice that was put to my leg for perfect hunger. I was chained to Humphrey Davies who died when we were about half way, and I lay beside his corpse about a week and got his allowance.⁴²

The horrors of the slave trade, Hill thought, were “merciful” beside this. He railed against the “villainy, oppression and shameful peculation” of Donald Traill, master of Neptune, and Nicholas Anstis of Scarborough. Traill was a demented sadist and Anstis not much better. But their interests coincided with the contractors’, as Hill indignantly noted:

The more they can withhold from the unhappy wretches, the more provisions they have to dispose of on a foreign market, and the earlier in the voyage they die the longer they can draw the deceased’s allowance to themselves; for I fear few of them are honest enough to make a just return of the dates of their deaths to their employers.⁴³

And in fact, when the Second Fleet reached Sydney and disgorged its cargo of the dead, the dying and the sick, the first thing Anstis and Traill did was to open a market on shore, selling the left-over food and clothing to the half-starved pioneers of the First Fleet.

The colony’s Anglican chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, counted the sick: 269 people on Neptune were incapacitated—which meant that, out of her 499 prisoners embarked, only 72 landed in fair health. The figures for Scarborough and Surprize were a little less terrible. Johnson braved the ’tween-decks stench of Surprize, but he could not face going below in Neptune. Mewing and groaning, scarcely able to gesture or roll over, monstrously infested with vermin (Johnson estimated that one man had ten thousand lice swarming on his body) the convicts were slung overboard

as they would sling a cask, a box, or anything of that nature. Upon their being brought up to the open air some fainted, some died upon deck, and others in the boat before they reached the shore. When come on shore, many were not able to walk, to stand or to stir themselves in the least, hence they were led by others. Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried on the backs of others.

Among the survivors who landed, all fellow-feeling was extinguished by the ferocity of their repression. Johnson was horrified to see that

When any of them were near dying, and had something given to them as bread or lillie-pie (flour and water boiled together) . . . the person next to him would catch the bread, &c., out of his hand and, with an oath, say he was going to die, and therefore it would be of no service to him. No sooner would the breath be out of their bodies than others would watch them and strip them entirely naked. Instead of alleviating the distresses of each other, the weakest were sure to go to the wall. In the night-time, which at this time [June, the Australian winter] is very cold, where they had nothing but grass to lay on and a blanket amongst the four of them, he that was the strongest of the four would take the whole blanket to himself and leave the rest quite naked.⁴⁴

While this was going on at Sydney Cove in 1790, the Lords of the Committee of Council were busy submitting the proposed Great Seal of New South Wales to their King. Its obverse depicted “Convicts landed at Botany-Bay; their fetters taken off and received by Industry sitting on a Bale of Goods with her attributes, the distaff, bee-hive, pickaxe and spade, pointing to oxen ploughing, the rising habitations, and a church on a hill at the distance, with a fort for their defence,” and the Virgilian motto Sic fortis Etruria crevit, “Thus Etruria grew strong.”⁴⁵

When the news of the Second Fleet reached England, through Phillip’s dispatches and Hill’s letters, there was a small official flap. Neither the government nor the public had expected so much death and misery, but memories were short and the victims, after all, were convicts. Nothing could be done about the wretched contractor’s agent, Thomas Shapcote, for—in the only Second Fleet death that tasted of justice—he had died soon after sailing from Cape Town. Although a strict inquiry was promised, it was never carried out. Voluminous evidence was taken at the Guildhall in London. But Captain Traill had prudently absconded and no one could find him until 1792; whereupon he and his ship’s mate were brought to trial for murdering a single convict. Both were acquitted and not prosecuted again. Three years later Traill was given a senior post at Cape Town. Anstis went scot-free, and the grim firm of Camden, Calvert & King was never indicted. In fact, it had already contracted with the government to prepare and victual the Third Fleet, which sailed in 1791. Once again its ships were old, crowded and barely seaworthy; there were inadequate medical supplies, and the treatment of prisoners was disgustingly abusive. The second mate of the Queen, whose duty it was to issue rations to the 150-odd men and women prisoners on board, used short weights to serve out 60 pounds of beef instead of the regulation 132 pounds at a sitting.⁴⁶ Conditions were such that 576 Third Fleet convicts needed medical attention when they got to Sydney. But out of a total of 1,869 men and 172 women embarked, only 173 men and 9 women died on the passage—a gross death rate of slightly under 9 percent, or one-third the death rate of the Second Fleet. After that, the government gave no more contracts to Camden, Calvert & King.

Nervous of publicizing the defects of transportation, it held no public inquiry either. But some improvements were made. The government put restrictions on “these low-lifed barbarous masters, to keep them honest.” It set up deferred payments—so much per convict embarked, the rest (usually about 25 percent) when he or she landed in decent health. Masters and surgeons had to get a certificate by the governor when they arrived in Sydney, rating their performance; if this paper commended their “Assiduity and Humanity,” there would be a bonus from the transport committee when they got back to England.⁴⁷

Some captains were beyond such inducements. In 1798 the contractors of the transport Hillsborough were to get a bonus of £4 10s. 6d. for every convict landed alive, over and above the £18 per head paid on embarkation. But her master, William Hingston, starved the prisoners, kept them so heavily chained that they could not walk on deck and kept them below in double irons at night. Typhus also raged through the vessel soon after she left Langston Harbor, and one convict in three died. No action was taken against Hingston.⁴⁸

The commissioners tried but usually failed to stop contractors filling their ships with goods to be sold in Sydney at huge markups. However, they put a naval surgeon aboard each vessel who was answerable to them and not the contractors; his job was to supervise convict health, correct the abusive conduct of the ships’ officers and keep an eye on lax or incompetent contractors’ surgeons. No mere medical officer could tell a master what to do on his own ship. Still, their presence was felt. The first transport to sail under this arrangement was the Royal Admiral in May 1792, followed in 1793 by three more shiploads of English and Irish prisoners. All had supervisors on board, and out of 670 prisoners only 14 died.⁴⁹

The moral was clear, but by 1795 the Napoleonic Wars had begun and England had no naval surgeons (and few ships) to spare for Botany Bay. In the next twenty years only one privately contracted transport sailed with a naval surgeon on board. Between 1792 and 1800, eighteen convict ships went to Australia from Britain. The first six (from 1792 to 1794) all had supervising agents. Their death rate was one man in 55, one woman in 45. Of the next six ships, only two carried naval agents or surgeons, and their death rate was one man in 19 and one woman in 68. The last group of six had no naval supervision of any kind, and one man in 6 died, and one woman in 34.⁵⁰

Most of the dead were Irish convicts. Many had been sent out for political offenses and they were especially ill-treated because the captains feared mutiny. Thus on Britannia, which sailed from Cork late in 1796 with 144 male and 44 female Irish on board, the master Thomas Dennott went on a sadistic rampage. He had a supposed ringleader, William Trimball, flogged until he gave a list of 31 names of convicts who had allegedly taken an oath to mutiny. He then had the ship searched for weapons; the guards found home-made saws, half-a-dozen improvised knives, some lengths of hoop iron and a pair of scissors. This was enough. One convict, James Brannon, received the appalling total of 800 lashes on two successive days, the second session with pieces of fresh horse-skin braided to the cat-o’-nine-tails. “Damn your eyes, this will open your carcase,” Dennott bellowed at him, and it did, although he took several days to die. In all, Dennott meted out 7,900 lashes to the suspects and killed six of them. The surgeon, a half-mad incompetent named Augustus Beyer, refused to dress their wounds and, being terrified of Captain Dennott, would not supervise the floggings; he cowered in his cabin, listening to the whistling lash and the screams of the Irish. A poor female convict named Jenny Blake tried to commit suicide, for which Dennott cropped her hair, slashed her repeatedly across the face and neck with a cane and had her double-ironed.⁵¹ The government held an inquiry into the conduct of Dennott and Beyer but took no action against either. It found Dennott had “bordered on too great a degree of severity” and Beyer had been “negligent.” However, neither sailed on a transport ship again.

Although this nightmarish voyage was an exception, it would be some years before Irish convicts were decently treated. Sir Jerome Fitzpatrick, a frequent agitator for reform on the hulks and in the transports, was able to get the rigid slave leg-bolts struck off prisoners on two vessels waiting to sail from Cork in 1801, Hercules and her sister ship Atlas; they were replaced by lighter chain-fetters, “preferable as well in the Political as the Humane sense.” but he was appalled by the treatment meted out to convicts waiting for transportation in the hulks, both in Ireland and in England. “Prisoners are sent to the Hulks . . . infirm and diseased, completely Blind, crippled and so advanced in Age that no sort of profit can be made from their labour . . . [They] cannot in justice to the cause of Humanity or to the profit of the Colony be sent to New South Wales.”⁵²Writing to Lord Pelham in 1801, he described

their bad and filthy bedding; some not having half the covering of their bodies; the privation of the nutritious part of their diet, by scumming the Fat off their Brooths, the defect of their Cloathing in the most intense cold; the indiscriminate application of their Labour . .  with complete and painful Testicular Ruptures hanging towards their knees—without Trusses, yet in common yoked in the Carts; the asthmatic and swelled or ulcerated legg’d subjects equally employed; the tender and painful-eyed at Lime Burning;—on the whole I seldom could discover a rational system in respect either to a profit arising from their labor, or the exercise of reason & humanity in its application.⁵³

After Hercules sailed from Cork late in 1801, the convicts mutinied. Fourteen were shot out of hand and thirty more died from disease and exhaustion, a death rate of one in four. Conditions on Atlas were even worse; sixty-five died on the voyage, largely because they had to make way for 2,166 gallons of rum, which her master, Captain Brooks, planned to sell in Sydney. Governor King very properly refused to let him land it, but Brooks was never punished. He captained several more convict voyages and died, a respectable old salt, as a justice of the peace in Sydney.

It was hard to bring these men to book. To prosecute a cruel or corrupt master in England, the Crown would have had to ship convicts back as witnesses; the alternative was a trial in Australia, which would entail giving a New South Wales court criminal jurisdiction over visiting English ships’ captains. In either case, a lot of public money would be spent on a trial, and no one wanted that. Only once were convicts returned to England to testify against a captain. This was in 1817, and on the orders of the relatively liberal, pro-Emancipist governor Lachlan Macquarie, who wanted to arraign the master and officers of the Chapman for killing three and wounding twenty-two unarmed convicts with fusillades of gunfire after rumors of a possible mutiny. Although Macquarie did not expect convictions (and did not get them: all were acquitted) he hoped the case might “protect the persons of the convicts in future on their passage from the cruelties and violence to which they have heretofore been exposed.” All he got was a stiff rebuke from the government.⁵⁴

Fitzpatrick summed up the convicts’ predicament in a letter to Pelham’s secretary. “I entreat you again and again to impress [on Pelham] the Idea that in these days of venality, of selfishness and design, you are not to expect just reports to be made by Persons . . . immediately connected with those who have concern with either the Prison or the Contract Departments,” he wrote. One must not expect

that the Doctor will ever state his own neglect or mismanagement of his patients, or that Keepers will state the exercise of cruelties . . . that those who supply Diet or Cloathing should . . . report these Matters, other than of good Quality, or that the General Managers should criminate the persons who may deserve it but are more or less within their own Appointments.⁵⁵

After 1815, however, hell-ships were few; conditions improved on convict transports because of a further change in supervision. Naval doctors had learned more about their craft from the Napoleonic Wars, although military medicine was still a hideously primitive business by modern standards. The man who did most for Australia-bound convicts was William Redfern (1774?–1833), a transported convict himself, and the most skilled and popular surgeon in Sydney. Redfem was family doctor to Governor Macquarie. As such, the “father of Australian medicine” was ideally placed to reform the System. Macquarie ordered him to investigate conditions on three calamitously bad ships that arrived in 1814, Surry, Three Bees and General Hewitt. Redfern’s report was the turning point, for it impressed not only Macquarie but the authorities in England. He stressed the need for ventilation, swabbing, clean heads, disinfection with lime and “oil of tar,” fumigation and exercise. He also insisted that naval surgeons go in every ship as both medical officers and government agents, “as Officers with full power to exercise their Judgment, without being liable to the Control of the Masters of the Transports.”⁵⁶

The benefits of this plan showed as soon as it was adopted. After 1815, the volume of convict shipping to Australia more than trebled—78 ships carrying 13,221 souls from 1816 to 1820, as compared to 23 carrying 3,847 in the preceding five years. From 1811 to 1815, the gross average death rate on the voyage had been I in 31. After Redfern’s plan went into force it plummeted to I in 122. Thereafter it seldom rose above I in 100, and never beyond I in 85.⁵⁷

Besides, the voyage was now faster and the vessels roomier, although these are very relative terms. No modern traveller can really imagine the tedium and social friction of this voyage. Down the map the transports dropped, sometimes escorted by naval convoys bound for Africa or India. But soon each was on its own in the blue immensity, a socially infected speck flying the red-and-white “whip” (pennant) that proclaimed the convict vessel. Its route would depend on its supplies of food and water. The First Fleet took 252 days to reach Botany Bay, spending nearly ten weeks in ports along the way. It had to carry several years’ supplies of provisions, and so the rations for the voyage had to be constantly replenished. But by 1810 the ships no longer needed to carry everything for the convicts’ future survival; and by 1820 most captains sailed to Rio and then “ran down their easting” straight to the southern coast of Australia, either dropping their convicts at Hobart or sailing north to Sydney. Sometimes they went out non-stop. By the 1830s, most transports did the passage in less than 110 days, but only four vessels took less than 100: Eliza I in 1820, Guildford in 1822, Norfolk in 1829 and Emma Eugenia, the fastest of all, with a 95-day passage, in 1838.

No ship was ever custom-built to be a convict transport. They were all (except for a few naval vessels) converted merchant ships, fitted out with the necessary berths and security devices.⁵⁸ The prisoners’ berths were usually ranged in two rows, each double-height (a berth above and one below) against the hull, with a walkway down the center. Peter Cunningham, who made five voyages to Australia as surgeon-superintendent on convict transports (and lost only three of the 747 convicts under his care), noted that “ample space” was four convicts in a wooden berth six feet square. There was rarely as much as six feet of headroom, and the only air came from the hatchways, which were kept closed with thick grilles and heavily padlocked. Hence ventilation was always poor; and even though the naval surgeons urged masters to fit wind-sails over the hatches, these primitive airscoops failed to work just when air was most needed—as the ship lay becalmed in the suffocating heat of the doldrums. The Irish “political” John Boyle O’Reilly, transported to Western Australia with other Fenians in 1868 in the Hougoumont, the last of all the convict transports, described the miseries of its hold:

The air was stifling . . . [T]here was no draught through the barred hatches. The sun above them was blazing hot. The pitch dropped from the seams, and burnt their flesh as it fell. There was only one word spoken or thought—one yearning idea in every mind—water. . . . Two pints of water a day were served out to each convict—a quart of putrid and blood-warm liquid. It was a woeful sight to see the thirsty souls devour this allowance.⁵⁹

In bad weather everyone suffered, but the convicts worst of all. George Prideaux Harris, who sailed with David Collins’s expedition to colonize Port Phillip Bay in 1803, wrote that after leaving Rio,

we were constantly meeting with squalls of wind, rain, lightning and heavy rolling seas, so that for many days we could not sit at table, but were obliged to hold fast to boxes &c. on the floor & had all our crockery ware almost broken to pieces, besides shipping many seas into the Cabin and living in a state of Darkness from the Cabin windows being stopped up by the deadlights.—I never was so melancholy in my life before.—Not a single comfort either for the body or the mind—the provisions, infamous—the water, stinking—our livestock destroyed by the cold & wet, and every person with a gloomy countenance.⁶⁰

The security had to be formidable. Captain Alfred Tetens, a German master who spent many years traversing the Pacific, took a shipload of 300 convicts on the Norwood to Fremantle in the last phase of transportation in 1861. Her ’tween-decks were “enclosed in a shotproof wall of heavy timbers,” and

the main and forward hatchways were furnished with three-inch iron bars; through the small door remaining, only one person at a time could squeeze with some difficulty. . . . [A] barricade was erected across the width of the ship on deck behind the mainmast. This also had a narrow door. A watch of ten soldiers with loaded guns was stationed night and day at the rear of the quarterdeck. Four cannon loaded with grapeshot were aimed forward and a multitude of weapons were piled here. This gave the whole warlike picture an imposing aspect that had a calming effect not only on the prisoners but on their warders as well.⁶¹

The prisoners’ food was coarse but sufficient, except for the lack of greens. Its staple was still brined beef, known to passengers as “salt horse”—which, no doubt, some of it was. An officer of the 50th Regiment, John Gorman, sailing to Australia on the transport Minden in 1851, wrote down the words of a sailor’s verse about it:

Salt horse! Salt horse! What brought you here?

I have been carrying turf for many a year

From Limerick going to Ballyhack

I fell down and broke my back.

Cut up was I for sailors’ use,

Now even they do me despise—

They turn me over and they Damn my Eyes.⁶²

Peter Cunningham adjudged the rations “both good and abundant,” about two-thirds of the standard navy allowance. The convict Mellish, sailing to Australia at about the same time (the early 1820s), found

not much reason to find fault; on Sundays, plum pudding with suet in it, about a pound to each man, likewise a pound of beef; Monday, pork (a pound with peas in it); Tuesday, beef and rice; Wednesday, same as Sunday; Thursday, same as Monday; Friday, beef and rice and pudding; Saturday, pork only.⁶³

Against scurvy, the convicts got lime juice, sugar and vinegar. For a bonus, they received a nightly half-pint of port wine to keep their spirits up. This was considered a great luxury and on some ships, like the Wood-bridge when she sailed in 1840 with the convict diarist Charles Cozens on board, its distribution was a ritual:

for the purpose of exercising the men, and as preventive to disease, each man entered at one door on the quarter-deck, danced to the cask, drank his allowance, and then danced off again, round by the opposite doorway. . . . [T]he steps, as various as the performers, formed altogether a most amusing “ballet.”⁶⁴

The prisoners’ irons were struck off when the ship was in blue water, though their bunks usually carried chains and basils so that the refractory could be fettered down in an emergency. The surgeon-superintendent got the convicts on deck for fresh air and exercise as often as possible. They holystoned the decks, swabbed and scrubbed and laundered, and took as much menial work off the crew’s shoulders as discipline would allow. They could not carry knives—all eating-irons except spoons were issued with each meal and collected after it—but they could get needles, and bones from “salt horse.” So they passed the long weeks making scrimshaw, “manufacturing seals, toothpicks, tobacco-stoppers, and other ornaments out of bones; and likewise a few ingenious and experienced ones, in making rings, brooches &c. out of common buttons, at which they were very expert.”⁶⁵

They fished, trolling hooks with strips of canvas greased with fat. Bonitos would grab them and be hauled like silvery finned melons, shuddering and tail-tapping, into the scuppers; they were eagerly eaten, as were the sharks, the ominous “sea-lawyers” that followed patiently at the vessel’s stern. These “were pronounced excellent; the most trifling change of circumstance in so long and wearisome a voyage being greedily grasped at and joyfully entertained.” Now and then sailors would catch albatrosses with baited hook and a sounding-line, drag them screaming on board, slaughter them, and skin them, there being a market for their stuffed carcasses.⁶⁶

The convicts’ efforts to amuse themselves were noted by various surgeons and free passengers. They danced and (when in irons) managed a clinking beat with their chains. On Christmas Day, one ship’s carpenter observed, “the greatest joviality prevailed among the Convicts, who celebrated the anniversary of the Christian era by the execution (in a masterly style) of an abundance of vocal music in the shape of glees, trios, duets &c., probably the result of their double allowance of wine.”⁶⁷

They gambled for anything from tobacco to clothes, and if no one had cards they would dismember Bibles and prayer-books to make them, as a clergyman found to his distress on a transport in 1819. Sometimes they staged amateur plays, or held mock trials on deck—cathartic parodies in which the “judge,” robed in a patchwork quilt with a swab combed over his head for a wig, his face made up with red-lead, chalk and stove-backing, would volley denunciations at the cowering “prisoner.”

The big ceremony of the voyage was always the Crossing of the Line, a boisterous rite of passage in which Neptune would come aboard and initiate those who had never crossed the equator before. Fearsome in swab-wig and iron trident, shells and dried starfish entangled in his oakum beard, sewn into the flayed skin of a dolphin and stinking to heaven under the vertical sun, the sea-god would bear down on the neophytes flanked by grinning Jack-tar “mermaids” holding buckets of soap and gunk. The initiates were clipped with scissors and lathered with a mop, “shaved” and then ducked in a tub of seawater. No wonder the tradition has since been much attenuated by mass tourism. “Neptune was on board for two nights shaving the soldiers & People,” Lieutenant William Coke reported to his father from the transport Regalia in 1826,

he was a sulky Old Fellow & covered his new born sons over with Tar from head to foot, each night after having finished shaving he & his Constables came into my cabin to know if I was pleased with the Lenity he had treated my men, but His Majesty was such a drunkard that he & his Constables drank three gallons of my Whiskey & made my head ache terribly by obliging me to drink raw spirits with him.⁶⁸

By the 1820s discipline ran smoothly, almost automatically, in most ships. Captains kept a vigilant eye on their human cargo, and rumors of mutiny brought down summary punishment—though not, as a rule, with the flagellatory orgies staged on early hell-ships like the Britannia. Four dozen lashes was usually enough; the convict would be triced to a grating, and the ceremony of his pain watched by the mustered prisoners and the ship’s company. Minor offenders were ironed, or put in a cramping-box for a few hours.

Dreams of mutiny, however, were rarely absent. Lieutenant Coke mentioned that the Irish prisoners he was guarding on Regalia “had formed a scheme to seize & carry the ship to South America. I and my men were all to have been murdered. The Doctor, Captain & sailors were to have been saved . . . [I]t was lucky they did not attempt it or else they would have been most of them shot, and had any of the Soldiers been killed the rest would have been so enraged they would have murdered every convict on board.”⁶⁹

If there was a rising, the ship’s master had to act fast and shrewdly, like Captain Tetens facing rebels on the Norwood:

Hardly had I told the nearest soldiers what was going on when with revolvers cocked, I stormed into the midst of the startled gang. In spite of the stinging wound which the ringleader gave my arm with some sharp instrument, I did not let go [of him]. I kept both hands around the criminal’s neck so that he had no little trouble in breathing. . . . I should not have shot him except in the greatest need, so as not to make the others needlessly embittered.⁷⁰

But such mutiny attempts were few. The Norwood’s was fomented by a group of “former captains and pilots who scuttled their ships,” but no ordinary convicts could navigate. Generally they would remain passive and mutter threats, rather than go up against overwhelming odds of firepower. In the whole period of transportation (1788-1868), more than eight hundred outward voyages produced only one successful mutiny—on a female transport, the Lady Shore, in 1797. The insurgents were not female convicts, but their guard—a detachment of the New South Wales Corps who rose “in the name of the French Republic,” seized the ship without much bloodshed, sailed her to Montevideo and were eventually accepted by France as political refugees, after they had disposed of the bewildered women prisoners as servants to Spanish colonial ladies of quality.

A captain who treated his prisoners well—as Tetens did, by making the regulations “markedly more lenient” and having long individual chats with his charges so that they could unburden their minds—was certain to be shown gratitude and even affection. At the end of the voyage “the exiles prepared a surprise for me which I remember today with deep emotion. . . . [H]atred and bitterness seemed to have vanished.” Before they filed ashore the prisoners lined themselves up in ordered ranks, clasped Tetens’s hand one by one, “all looking very serious,” and presented him with a letter of thanks signed by 270 out of 300 men:

HONORED SIR!

It is our deep regret that we are not able to give you a greater proof of our thankfulness and respect. We can only ask you to receive our sincere thanks for the kindness, generosity and liberal treatment which you have always shown us on the long voyage to Western Australia. To this earnest request we add the sincere wish that Heaven may grant you every earthly joy, that you may succeed in all your future enterprises, and while we must follow our unknown fate in an inhospitable land far from home and family, may the hand of the Almighty protect you and bring you back to a happy home.⁷¹

However, the usual representative of humanity was the surgeon-superintendent, who was not only a healer but the closest thing to an ombudsman the convicts had. Most captains were not like Tetens; they were not sadists by nature, but they were tough unlettered men risen from the foc’s’le in the harsh school of the sea, and they placed scant value on convict comfort. On a ship with no surgeon-superintendent, Thomas Holden (the political exile from Bolton) complained in 1812 that “we have been three weeks without Clean Shorts and we asked the Captain for Shorts and he said they could not be Durty yet, and I wear Irons on both legs . . . Dear honored Father and Mother if you cannot do nothing for me and very soon I am sure you will never see me alive again.”⁷²That, in essence, was what the surgeon-superintendent was on board to prevent, and when he did so, showing a constant level of “firmness alleviated by compassion,” the convicts trusted him.

The surgeon’s logs had to be kept in duplicate and turned in at the end of the voyage. The duller reading they make, the better the voyage for the prisoners. The log of Surgeon-Superintendent John Smith on the Clyde, carrying 215 men from Ireland to Sydney in 1838, is typical. It is a record of cleaning and scraping, sprinkling chloride of lime by the water-closets, supervising the laundry, lancing abscesses; blankets become lousy and are soaked all night in the urine-tubs in the hope of killing the accursed insects; the coarse trousers give some convicts “excoriations of the scrotum and thigh”; prisoners squabble and are put in the cramping-box, a lad whispers about mutiny and spends the night handcuffed on deck; the soldiers and their women fight like Kilkenny cats—“a more undisciplined, quarrelsome, noisy set have seldom come together, yet the behavior of the Prisoners is quiet and orderly with little exception.” Surgeon Smith dispenses advice, purges, blisters and bleedings; he buries the dead (but very few men die); and there is a note of quiet gratification at the end, when Clyde warps into Sydney Cove and an official from the colonial secretary’s office asks the customary question of the mustered prisoners: Is there any complaint about the Surgeon? “No, no, God bless him, was the universal cry.”⁷³

Individual convicts also poured forth their gratitude and hoped that Surgeon Smith would commend them to the authorities in Sydney, as in this letter from a middle-aged man of some education, Bernard Murray, protesting his innocence:

Money turned the scales of Justice and unfortunate Murray was cast—yes Sir, cast out of Society, and banished from his home—his friends & his Country—but in you, Sir, I have found the tender & feeling Gentleman,—you have done more to meliorate my unhappy condition than I, in any manner, deserved,—you knew nothing of me, I was a stranger, but your humanity for an injured man—now nearly in the decline of his life—Sir, your masterly and very impressive discourse delivered to us last Sunday week, will be long remembered and, please God, strictly followed by me. Altho’ a convict, Sir, I hope to bring my grey hair unsullied by Crime to the Grave.—Should you, Sir, still think of recommending me here to notice—rest assured, Kind Sir, that sobriety, steadiness & honesty with the strictest attention will not be wanting on my part.⁷⁴

A good surgeon-superintendent represented whatever was best in the System; he might not be a great doctor, but his decency made him exceptional in the netherworld of transportation. Once ashore, few convicts could expect as much fair play. The society into which they now came, as they were mustered at the side of Sydney Cove or the Hobart dock, feeling the beaten clay heave beneath their feet after those months at sea, was more punitive in its conventions, more capricious in its workings: a lottery, whose winners went on to found Australia but whose losers were no better off than slaves.