by Peter Grose
The intention had always been to make the Macquarie Harbour settlement self-sufficient. This never really worked. The forested land around the harbour needed backbreaking work to clear it by hand before it could be planted with crops. Then the results were disappointing: the land was rocky, and such soil as there was proved to be acidic. Wheat failed. Potatoes were more successful, but they were regularly stolen and attempts to fence them off proved ineffectual. A few pigs survived and even flourished, but the settlement never managed to grow enough food to feed itself, let alone export food to Hobart or Sydney.
Timber proved to be a better bet. The local Huon pines were much in demand, and sold for good prices when they could be shipped out. The trees were huge—some of them had been there since Julius Caesar was a lad—and rolling them down to the river or harbour was supremely hard work, as well as being dangerous. It was especially difficult for the large numbers of men wearing irons.
Timber felling was often assigned as a kind of further punishment for men who had already been sentenced to work in chains. The convicts were called on to move the felled trees, weighing anything up to 12 tons each, using only handspikes, a block and tackle and their brute strength. The logs were rolled along makeshift tracks built from trees, sometimes over distances of up to a mile. When the logs reached the river they were rolled into the water, then lashed together to form rafts. The lashing was done by convicts, usually in chains and standing up to their waists in the icy water. The rafts were then towed down the harbour by a team of launches operated by convict oarsmen.
Overseers were capable of singling out a convict in chains for ‘neglect of work’, knocking him to the ground with a handspike and thumping him with a stick while he lay there, then reporting him for insolence and thereby earning him 50 lashes. Because food might be used to aid an escape, prisoners in work parties were forbidden to bring supplies of any kind with them. Convicts on timber-cutting duty worked all day without a meal. Before they set off they were thoroughly searched to make sure they were not carrying provisions, knives, even fish hooks—anything an absconding convict might use to provide himself with food.
The very remoteness of Macquarie Harbour, which made it appealing as a virtually escape-proof holding pen for convicts, worked against it as a trading base. Timber needed to be shipped to Hobart before it could be marketed, and that meant a hazardous 27-day journey in a ship small enough to clear the bar at the entrance to the harbour, but large enough to carry a useful load of timber. The shuttle of ships between Hobart and Macquarie Harbour was never satisfactory. If a ship ran late, there was no way to find out how or why it had been delayed. Had it been lost at sea? Who knew? Yet it might be carrying food that everybody at Macquarie Harbour needed for survival. All anyone could do was sit and wait.
This dismal regime continued from 1821 until 1825. There is unanimity in the various descriptions of the penal settlement. Eyewitnesses report a sullen, mutinous, embittered, sickly convict population, brutalised, subject to arbitrary and sadistic cruelty, routinely and calculatingly denied even the smallest of comforts or glimpses of humanity. It was an ill-disciplined, cowed, rancorous mess. Abandon hope, indeed.
Then things took a turn for the better.
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7 G.K.’s recollections have been superbly edited by Richard Innes Davey and published in book form as The Sarah Island Conspiracies. G.K. made eleven actual voyages. As we shall see, the twelfth ‘voyage’ played a key role in the events that follow.
Chapter 6
HOY
With the death by drowning of the unloved Lieutenant Cuthbertson, command of the settlement passed to another soldier, Lieutenant Samuel Wright. Like Cuthbertson, Wright came from the 48th ‘Steelback’ Regiment. He proved to be every bit as bad as his predecessor, without, it was said, Cuthbertson’s one virtue, bravery. (Cuthbertson had fought with distinction in the Peninsular War of 1807–14 against Napoleon.) The brutal regime of daily floggings, occasional hangings, exhausting work, hunger, cold, disease and misery continued unchecked. Wright’s command began in January 1824 and ended in April 1825. His replacement was something else altogether.
On 21 April 1825 Captain James Butler assumed command of the settlement. He came from a different regiment, the 40th Regiment of Foot, and had recently been promoted from lieutenant. The 40th had distinguished itself in the Peninsular War, and then played a key role in the Battle of Waterloo. In 1823 the regiment was assigned to the task of guarding convicts, on the transport ships and subsequently in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.
Although the 40th had been raised in the West Country of England (it was also known as the 2nd Somerset Regiment), Captain Butler came from an entirely different background. He was a Catholic, born in Dublin. That set him apart from the mainstream of the British Army: by law, Catholics could not be commissioned officers outside Ireland itself. The law was widely flouted, but it remained on the statute books. There were other problems. Public office holders had to take what was known as a ‘sacramental test’, designed to exclude Catholics and dissenters. They were required to swear an oath rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, a key Catholic belief that the communal bread and wine, after suitable blessing and prayers, are genuinely the body and blood of Christ. Without this commitment, Butler could not be sworn in as a magistrate, so he could not legally dole out punishments. The authorities decided to work around the oath-swearing problem by waiting until he had arrived at Macquarie Harbour and then appointing him a magistrate by letter. That spared everybody the embarrassment of a mendacious swearing-in ceremony.
Butler’s reign hardly got off to an enlightened start. Realising that, until his formal appointment as a magistrate, any punishments he handed out were illegal, he simply sat on his hands for a month while awaiting developments. A few prisoners spent a few days in solitary confinement on his orders, but there were no formal trials, no witnesses were sworn in, and no floggings were ordered. The convict population could hardly be expected not to notice the sudden disappearance of the lash, and on 27 May they tested their luck by going on strike. A gang of twenty men downed tools and refused to work. Butler threatened them, to no avail. Finally one of the convicts shouted to the others that the commandant ‘could not flog them but merely confine them’, and confinement ‘they could well bear’.
Butler snapped. He ordered the mutinous convict into his office, where he sentenced him to 25 lashes. Knowing what he was doing was illegal, he made a particular point of not swearing in witnesses or otherwise imitating court procedures This produced a profound effect: Butler had heard loud and clear that the convicts feared the lash more than they feared solitary confinement (one day’s ‘solitary’ was generally regarded as the equivalent of five lashes). From that point onwards, he seldom used solitary confinement as a punishment. In his time as commandant he ordered no fewer than 612 floggings totalling 23,696 lashes, an average of 39 strokes per flogging. So he was clearly no dewy-eyed liberal.
However, Butler’s arrival coincided with a subtle change in the attitude of the authorities towards their convict charges. What use were these convicts? people asked. The answer was obvious: they could work. And wasn’t this a win–win? If the convicts could be trained to do much-needed and useful work, they might be kept out of mischief while actually redeeming themselves and contributing to society. Previously work had been mindless and at times pointless. Convicts were punished with a spell on the treadmill, grinding grain into flour. That was at least some use. At other times they were simply confined to a cell equipped with a handwheel and told to turn the wheel through a certain number of revolutions a day. The handwheels were connected to nothing, produced nothing, and served no useful purpose. The original Sarah Island regulations posted by Governor Arthur put it succinctly:
Never lose sight of a continued, rigid, unrelaxing discipline; and you must find work and labour, if it consists only of opening up cavities and filling them up again. As far as possible do not lose sight
of the importance of combining utility with labour, [but] hard labour is the main objective.
Unlike his unloved predecessors, and to his great credit, Butler began a program of improvement on Sarah Island. Solid buildings sprang up: a brick gaol (1826), a bakehouse and a solid stone penitentiary (both in 1828). Prisoners were no longer confined in leaking, drafty conditions. Thomas Lempriere, the settlement’s commissariat officer, wrote: ‘Captain Butler had, after recovering a considerable area from the sea, formed a spacious dockyard, fronted by substantial log-built quays, and protected from the north-west gales by a high lath fence.’
The clerk G.K., who wrote so touchingly about his voyages to Macquarie Harbour, was sceptical. He wrote:
I hold out no great hope that Butler will succeed in his plan to make the Settlement a place of reformation, for all his energy and his determined character. He is a Benthamite:1 despite the regular floggings he orders he believes they have no good effect and he seems keen to construct a prison along the lines that Jeremy Bentham has promoted in the tracts that Captain Butler thrusts upon all and sundry.
G.K.’s understandable doubts proved to be ill-founded. Butler’s new regime succeeded. Little industries sprang up on Sarah Island, offering the convicts genuine work. These included tanning, shoemaking and brickmaking. As the convicts’ lives steadily improved, so did morale and discipline. The soldiers and supervisors were forced to acknowledge that men who had just been flogged couldn’t and wouldn’t work effectively. Something had to change, and it did: as morale improved, floggings fell by some 90 per cent, as did other, less draconian punishments. Those who worked on the gangs were offered extra rations.2 Morale soared higher.
As we have already seen, the sea journey between Hobart and Sarah Island was no picnic. Right from the earliest days of the settlement, one of the tasks required of convicts, along with clearing the land and constructing buildings, was to repair ships that had been damaged on the voyage. So the convicts built a slipway to allow ships to be dragged out of the water for repairs. At some point there must have been a light-bulb moment when somebody realised the blindingly obvious: given that the timber being felled on the banks of the Gordon River was intended for shipbuilding, and given the difficulty of transporting the heavy logs in light ships across the bar at the entrance to Macquarie Harbour, why not build the ships on Sarah Island instead? That would provide useful work for the convicts, and at the same time solve the problem of transporting the logs, which would instead be sawn up and hewn on Sarah Island before being converted into sturdy ships.
According to Tasmanian government archives, the first major ship constructed on Sarah Island was a 35-ton two-mast schooner called the Governor Sorell, which later played a central role in the death of Commandant Cuthbertson. The records show that the ship was completed in February 1824, over a year before the arrival of Captain Butler. The next major ship was the James Lucas, a sloop-rigged lighter3 of unknown tonnage, launched sometime in 1825. This time we have the name of the supervising shipbuilder, a convict named Newton Gray.
The official records tell a contradictory story. They show that a convict named Newton Gray arrived in Tasmania in 1823 on the ship Asia (the same ship that brought Jimmy Porter to Hobart). The ship’s records show that he had been convicted at Durham and Sadberge Assizes on what looks like 6 March 1823. According to his conduct record, Gray had been sentenced to transportation for life for ‘breach of contract’. There is no reference to any new offence committed in Hobart that might have led to his ‘retransportation’ to Sarah Island, so it is difficult to work out how or why he got there. His conduct record says he was granted a conditional pardon on 25 November 1829. He was charged again with breach of contract on 12 April 1830, but he seems to have been released after promising to do the work for which he had signed up. So far, so good.
However, other historians point to a shipbuilding convict called Austen Gray, also sentenced to transportation for life at Durham and Sadberge Assizes and sent to Van Diemen’s Land in 1823 aboard the Asia. The same sources say this Gray was a convicted highwayman, which makes more sense of the sentence of transportation for life, which would be pretty stiff for the white-collar crime of ‘breach of contract’. To add to the confusion, the official records show no trace of a convict called ‘Austen Gray’, while G.K. refers to Newton Gray as a ‘highwayman’.
Whatever the facts, Newton Gray was the first named shipbuilder on Sarah Island. After the launch of the James Lucas in 1825, he is credited with overseeing the construction of the two-masted schooner Despatch, launched in December 1825. The Despatch seems to have lasted a mere four months. It went missing in March 1826 on the short trip from Hobart to Maria Island, and was never heard of again. Meanwhile, his first ship, James Lucas, was wrecked off Bruny Island in May 1829.
By 1827 a new shipbuilding name had entered the lists, that of Thomas Cole. Unlike Gray, Cole was not a convict but a civilian officer who arrived at Macquarie Harbour with his wife and large family. He was given the title of master shipbuilder, but he seems to have been no more competent than Gray. His first ship, the Derwent, a two-masted brig of 81 tons, went into government service sometime around May 1827 and appears to have been abandoned (‘hulked’) by the government in 1831. His second ship, the Opossum, a one-masted cutter, was started by him and completed by Newton Gray in October 1827. It might be that the blame for the demise of the James Lucas, Despatch and Derwent should lie squarely with their captains and crew and not with the builders, Gray and Cole. Not so the Opossum. A survey report said of it: ‘Unsafe when laden, can carry but a small cargo, sails very indifferently and will not work but in smooth water.’ To be fair, the Opossum survived longer than its predecessors. It was not wrecked until 1853.
What of the first major ship built at Sarah Island, the Governor Sorell, you might well ask? Answer: wrecked in October 1827 at Hope Beach, not far from Hobart. So shipbuilding got off to a shaky start at Sarah Island. Then David Hoy arrived, and the shipbuilding business was transformed out of sight.
David Hoy is a difficult man to pin down. We know he was a Scot, that he was born in 1792, and that he died a very wealthy man in Hobart in 1862. Given his contribution to both convict reform and the Australian shipbuilding industry, his face ought to be familiar from banknotes, postage stamps and art gallery walls throughout the land. Instead the only likeness I could find of him is a pen-and-ink sketch of a man with a round face adorned by long sideburns and strong eyebrows, puffing on a small pipe, and with a pork-pie hat perched uneasily on his head. He was reputedly more than a little pleased with himself, to the point where the convicts referred to him as Old Hooey or, more respectfully, The Admiral.
He first learned the craft of shipbuilding in his native Scotland, then moved to Boston in the United States and worked in shipyards there. His American experience shaped his design ideas: the Boston shipbuilders were interested in only one thing—speed. If that meant the ship became hard to handle at sea, so be it. Speed was everything. While Hoy’s designs were sound and had no difficulty passing surveys and inspections, ships’ masters complained that they were a bit of a handful on the open ocean. No matter … they were fast.
Hoy had been aboard the American ship Chesapeake during the 1812–15 war between Britain and the United States. Chesapeake was captured by the British frigate Shannon on 1 June 1813 just outside Boston Harbor. We can take a pretty good guess at what happened next. The British were in the habit of telling any British seamen captured in this way that they had just joined the Royal Navy. So, after being nabbed aboard the Chesapeake, Hoy very likely spent the next few years as a Royal Navy sailor, at least until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
What he did between his spell in the Royal Navy and his arrival in Hobart in 1824 is anybody’s guess. He told others that he had been ‘repatriated’ to Scotland, where he presumably set about resuming his career as a shipbuilder. If that is what happened, then it is at least likely that he heard of the wonderful new shipb
uilding timber Huon pine, and decided to set off to Van Diemen’s Land to make full use of it. When he arrived in Hobart he discovered to his dismay that nobody wanted to employ him as a ship designer. Yet that was all he ever wanted to do—design and build his own ships.
As we’ve seen, the shipbuilding industry on Sarah Island was not exactly running smoothly. The combined efforts of Thomas Cole and Newton Gray were producing ships that were dismissed as ‘unsafe when laden’, while the trail of shipwrecks and other disasters involving the convict shipbuilders’ output suggested that luck was not on the side of the Sarah Island construction team. It was clearly time for a new man with new ideas.
Like Cole, Hoy was a free man and not a convict. He was unmarried, with no family, so he would only be one extra mouth to feed. Cole had been afforded the title master shipbuilder from day one. The same courtesy was offered to Hoy. He arrived at Macquarie Harbour in October 1827 as the new master shipbuilder. The reform-minded Captain Butler was still commandant of the settlement, and Hoy set out to make the best of his new situation.
