by Peter Grose
It is all too easy to say ‘so what?’ about Sarah Island shipbuilding. But there were serious problems to overcome, and old fears and paranoias to be assuaged. If the Huon pine logs were to be shaped and trimmed for use as ships’ timbers, and if this work was to be carried out by convict labour, then that meant issuing convicts with heavy, sharp tools, which could be useful weapons if things turned ugly.
Hoy chose his workforce carefully. Obviously experience with ships was an advantage. So were intelligence, zeal and ingenuity. He wanted his workforce to be an elite, so he negotiated better conditions for them, including extra rations. So much did morale improve under Hoy’s regime that one convict, James Reeves, who had completed his sentence and was a free man, asked if he could stay on at Sarah Island for a couple of months to complete two ships then under construction.
That perceptive chronicler G.K. had arrived at Sarah Island with Hoy on the same ship, Prince Leopold, in October 1827. He returned to the island a year later, and wrote:
Mr Hoy has settled in marvellously, and he and Newton Gray are a force to be reckoned with! The shipyards are complete and now in full operation. There is a sense of purpose there, even the pot boys and sweepers are cheerful, and one extraordinary thing, they seemed to be chanting as they worked, like nursery rhymes, some strange incantation, till I realized they were spelling the letters of their tools, the bricks and stones, the timber and rope and pitch were being spelled out, a matter of delight for Mr Schofield [the chaplain]. One of his first tasks was to establish the schoolhouse.
Each new boat laid and built and launched creates a wave of new interest throughout the Settlement: launch days for the larger ships become a kind of holiday for all. The work in the yards continues long after muster, the extra gangs made up of volunteers and those few of the military who find such occupation preferable to the gambling games and hunting parties favoured by most of the regiments.
Clearly things had moved on dramatically since G.K. wrote about Sarah Island, in December 1823: ‘I have never experienced such misery and anger and sullen hatred as I find among these outcasts.’
Hoy’s record at Macquarie Harbour is astonishing. Cole and Gray had built 35 ships between 1824 and 1827, and most were light. Between 1829 and 1833 the Hoy shipyard built 96 ships, many of them large. (The brig Tamar was 134 tons.) Under Hoy’s direction, Sarah Island became the biggest and busiest shipbuilding yard in Australia at that time.
The year 1829 saw two major events in the life of the settlement. The far-sighted James Butler was recalled as superintendent, and replaced by Captain James Briggs. To put it mildly, Briggs’s appointment was not a step in the right direction. He was stuffy, dim, snobbish and a bit prickly. When, in a sermon, the chaplain William Schofield delivered a fairly regular Wesleyan call for humility, saying, ‘Not many win, not many noble are called,’ Briggs took this as an insult aimed at him. Relations between the chaplain and the superintendent remained frosty ever after. According to G.K., Briggs tried to restore the harsher discipline of earlier years: ‘For a while, The Cat rules again, and the solitary confinement cells are filled.’ Briggs was not popular, and his soldiers of the 63rd Regiment made no secret of their resentment at being posted to Macquarie Harbour. Although things did not revert to the worst days of Cuthbertson and Wright, there was no doubting that the arrival of Briggs and his 63rd Regiment was a turn for the worse.
The other major event originated three years earlier, in 1826, with the purchase by the government in Hobart of the brig Cyprus. The intention was to use the Cyprus to replace the supply vessel Duke of York, which shuttled between Hobart and Macquarie Harbour and leaked like a sieve.4
However, the Cyprus’s career as a supply vessel was cut short in August 1829. The brig was on its way from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour when bad weather forced it to shelter in Recherche Bay, on the southeast coast of Van Diemen’s Land. While the ship was under way in the bad weather, several of the convicts had had their irons struck off to help operate the ship. In Recherche Bay, under the leadership of William Swallow, they mutinied and seized it. Fortunately for them, the Cyprus was carrying enough food and equipment to supply the Sarah Island settlement for weeks, so the rebels were well set up for a long voyage. They used the paint in the store to change the ship’s name from Cyprus to Edward, and set off for New Zealand, then Japan, and finally China. They scuttled the Cyprus in the Pearl River near Canton.
The affair had the colony agog. Ballads were written. Newspapers carried full accounts of the seizure and escape. There was no getting away from the gloating, triumphant tone of the articles. In the words of the ballad ‘Cyprus Brig’:
First we landed the soldiers, the captain and his crew.
We gave three cheers for Liberty and soon bid them adieu.
William Swallows he was chosen our commander for to be.
We gave three cheers for Liberty and boldly put to sea.
Play on your golden trumpets, boys, and sound your cheerful notes,
The Cyprus brig’s on the ocean, boys, by justice does she float.
It was enough to give people ideas.
Jimmy Porter arrived at Macquarie Harbour sometime in early 1830, aboard the brig Prince Leopold. He says he was the only prisoner on the voyage, which had taken sixteen days in dreadful weather. Although by 1830 the Sarah Island settlement had improved out of all recognition from the dark days of Cuthbertson and Wright, Jimmy was not the sort of chap to miss an opportunity for a bit of self-pity. According to his journal, he was not impressed by what he saw on arrival, nor by those who greeted him. He was presumably brought before Captain Briggs. They did not hit it off.
I was landed and taken before the Commandant. I found him every thing but a gentleman—a complete Tyrant. He ordered what clothes I had on to be burned and gave me a suit of yellow to be sent to work, and at night to be sent to an Island where there was upward of 200 of what he called out and outers—men who would strain every point to get away.
It was a most wretched place for the most common necessaries of comfort—hours before daybreak we were roused and a pint of thin miserable gruel was allowed each man. Into the boats was the word, and then we had to remain in a bleak wind and all weathers till daylight, when we were mustered, led to our work and getting nothing to eat until we again returned to the Island which would be very likely dark, wet through and not a spark of fire to dry our clothes before we were again drove out. Nothing but misery, flogging and starvation—murders were frequently committed, twice or three times a month,5 with a view to ridding themselves of a wretched existence. Out of every 100 young men, 96 would have sore backs. In fact, so bad was the treatment that death was preferable.
Most of this complaining may well have been rooted in reality. After all, Sarah Island remained a penal settlement, not a holiday camp, or even a shipyard. But it is only fair to point out that Jimmy came too late for the worst of it, and in nice time to benefit from the best of it.
_____________
1 A follower of Jeremy Bentham, the English prison reformer.
2 The July 1827 list of those awarded extra rations makes for extraordinary reading. As well as various shipwrights, carpenters, constables and boat crews, extra rations were awarded to convict John Flynn, whose ‘designation or employment’ is given as ‘flagellator’. He was the colony’s flogger.
3 In non-nautical language, a flat-bottomed, one-masted sailing ship used to transport small loads in shallow water.
4 The saga of the purchase of the Cyprus, and its major refit in the Sarah Island shipyard, is told in detail by G.K. in his account of his October 1827 voyage to Macquarie Harbour.
5 This is simply not true. Murders were comparatively rare.
Chapter 7
PLOT
Jimmy Porter does not go into much detail in his journals about his life on Sarah Island, other than to continue his complaints: ‘I was labouring under this dreadful state of things for 12 months.’ We know, bizarrely, that he had an excellent
singing voice and sang in the choir set up by the chaplain William Schofield, so it seems likely that he at least put on a show of becoming a model prisoner. In fact, he seems to have stayed out of trouble for more than two years. He arrived on Sarah Island early in 1830, and his conduct record remained clean until 11 July 1832. Then he was accused of ‘neglect of duty in not taking care of some Tobacco in his charge’ and sentenced to 25 lashes. He resumed his pattern of good behaviour for the next four months. Then, on 7 November, he was charged with ‘leaving his work contrary to Orders’ and sentenced to three weeks on bread and water, later reduced to twelve days. He mentions none of these clashes with authority in either of his journals.
He had barely completed the last punishment when he was in much more serious trouble. On 18 December he was tried for ‘absconding into the Woods on the 11th inst [11 December]’. In his Norfolk Island journal Jimmy gives a long and elaborate account of this escape. He names his fellow absconders as convicts James Sheedy and William Holt. As Jimmy tells it: ‘We had to take to the mountains without a bit of food, being closely pursued, and we would rather famish than go back.’ After less than a week of freedom, the three were captured and brought back to Sarah Island.
An altogether more light-hearted version of this story is given by the government clerk G.K. in his account of his eleventh and final sea voyage to Sarah Island. As they entered Macquarie Harbour via Hell’s Gates, he writes, they picked up two new passengers, an escaped convict and his captor John Little. The convict was Jimmy Porter. He had been on the loose for four days.
The story of Jimmy’s captor John Little is almost as interesting as Jimmy himself. John Little was neither a soldier nor a constable but a fellow convict sentenced to transportation for life to Sarah Island. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Caledonia on 24 September 1819, having been sentenced to a mere seven years’ transportation. His conduct record shows that he was in trouble most of the time. On 17 April 1827 his sentence was increased to transportation for life, and he was subsequently ‘retransported’ from Hobart to Sarah Island.
Little’s status as a fellow convict probably explains the next development. According to G.K., ‘the two of them came aboard, hard to tell which the hunter and which the hunted, laughing and joking together’. They behaved rather as two children might, victor and vanquished in a game of hide and seek. In G.K.’s version, Jimmy had absconded for a bet. If he could stay on the run for more than three days, he would win a month’s spirits rations, a seriously valuable prize. Jimmy being Jimmy, he also arranged to take a slice of the side bets placed by the soldiers on the length of his time on the run, and in G.K.’s words, ‘he stands to make a tidy sum on the exercise’.
Why did a fellow convict put an end to Jimmy’s freedom? The answer can be found in John Little’s convict conduct record. An entry reads: ‘N.B.: a recommendation of this man by the Commandant of Macquarie Harbour for his conduct in the apprehension of Runaways ordered to be recorded on the books in his favour.’
G.K. reports that Jimmy expected to receive ten to twenty days’ solitary confinement as punishment. However, to Jimmy’s dismay, David Hoy was furious with him for absconding and insisted on a punishment of 25 lashes. As Hoy cheerfully pointed out to Jimmy: ‘You’ll be over the worst of that in a day or two and I can have you back at the yards instead of inside that ridiculous prison.’
The final outcome was a great deal more savage than Hoy’s off-handed suggestion. In Jimmy’s Norfolk Island journal, he reports that he and his two fellow escapees were each sentenced to 300 lashes, the sentence to be carried out 100 lashes at a time on three successive Mondays. However, again according to Jimmy, after the first 100 had been administered, the commandant changed his mind and ordered that the remaining 200 be administered the next day. This was done, leaving Jimmy and his two companions ‘more dead than alive’.
The only thing wrong with this terrible tale is that it is almost certainly untrue. According to Jimmy’s official conduct record, he was sentenced to 100 lashes, six months in chains and two years’ gaol at night, for absconding. Two other convicts, James Sheedy and William Holt, were sentenced at Sarah Island on the same day for the same offence, and awarded the same punishment. Without in any way diminishing the severity of the sentence—100 lashes is a fearsome ordeal—the plain fact is that Jimmy, not for the first time, is exaggerating. Still, it is fair to say that by mid-December 1832 convict P324 did not have much to look forward to on Sarah Island.
As we have seen, George Arthur, the governor of Van Diemen’s Land, was a believer in the civilising benefits of stern punishment. It was he who had decreed that there should be no comforts or rewards on Sarah Island, only zero tolerance and piled-on misery. By 1826, during the period of James Butler’s command, Arthur became uneasy over rumours that the settlement had softened to the point where it might lose its capacity to terrorise the convict population.
The other concern was escape. When Sarah Island was established in 1822, it was so remote and cut off that escape seemed impossible. However, with the steady stream of free settlers arriving in the colony, not to mention convicts who had completed their sentence and were now free, the boundaries of the settled area of Van Diemen’s Land had steadily expanded. There was a real danger that the ‘free’ areas would eventually get uncomfortably close to previously remote penal settlements, which would mean that escaping convicts would not have far to go to find civilisation. Furthermore, the convicts on Sarah Island had become adroit at slipping their leg-irons, which meant they could make a run for it into the bush with some chance of getting away.
As it was, the Macquarie Harbour settlement still presented all sorts of problems. It was both difficult and expensive to supply. The harbour entrance remained a hazard for ships. There were endless shortages of drinking water. The soil was poor and agriculture suffered as a result. Last but not least, Sarah Island could not hold more than about 500 prisoners. Yet convicts continued to arrive in the colony by the boatload from Britain. Arthur decided to look elsewhere, and finally settled on Port Arthur. A former timber station, Port Arthur was first settled in 1830. At 60 miles (97 kilometres) southeast of Hobart it was still remote, and its geography made escape difficult. The prison would be built just beyond a narrow neck of land with sea on both sides. Thick forest beyond the narrow neck would make any overland escape difficult. It had plenty of fresh water and promising agricultural land nearby. Arthur made his decision: Sarah Island was to be closed down, and its convict population moved to Port Arthur.
At first Port Arthur was used as a kind of halfway house between normal convict life and the harsh world of secondary penal settlements like Sarah Island. Some of the more favoured convicts on Sarah Island were moved early to Port Arthur to share some of their skills. Records show that as early as April 1831 the hospital at Port Arthur was staffed largely by former Sarah Island prisoners. Shipbuilders, carpenters and blacksmiths from Macquarie Harbour were relocated to Port Arthur, not only to continue their work but also to train Port Arthur prisoners. This naturally depleted the workforce and skill pool on Sarah Island.
The order to abandon the Macquarie Harbour settlement was issued by the British colonial secretary on 27 December 1832. It called on the commandant to ‘make immediate preparatory arrangements for abandoning the Settlement at Macquarie Harbour, consequently no new works of any description should be commenced, but any vessels now building will of course be completed’ (my emphasis).
By the end of 1833, Sarah Island and Macquarie Harbour had been more or less cleared of civilians, convicts and soldiers. The last official shipment of convicts sailed in October 1833. Ships under construction had been completed and had already been put into service. There was one ship not quite finished, a 140-ton brig to be named Frederick. The intention had been to finish the Frederick at Sarah Island, pack it with the settlement’s remaining provisions, and sail it to Hobart. Ten convicts were chosen to remain behind: Jimmy Porter, John Barker, William Cheshire,
John Dady, John Fair, John Jones, James Leslie, Charles Lyon, Benjamin Russen and William Shiers. They were a mix of sailors and shipyard workers. Jimmy was coxswain of the pilot boat and knew his way through the treacherous entrance to Macquarie Harbour. John Fair was a former ship’s officer (he had been captain of the forecastle of a ship named Genoa 74). On arrival in Van Diemen’s Land, John Barker had given his occupation as watchmaker. He prudently failed to mention that he was also a skilled gunsmith. All in all, the ten convicts had the makings of a competent crew.
David Hoy naturally remained behind to supervise the final days of construction. So did Charles Taw (a notorious drunk), who had been the civilian pilot guiding ships through the tricky Macquarie Harbour entrance, and who would captain the Frederick on its journey to Hobart. His crew would also include a steward (Nichols), a first mate (James Tait), plus the ten convicts. Finally, he would also have aboard a free man (McFarlane), who appears to have arrived at Sarah Island as a convict but who had served his sentence. Four soldiers stayed behind at Macquarie Harbour to act as guards both during the construction and during the voyage.
It was not Governor Arthur’s wish. To his reported fury, he was forced to accept that, rather than empty Sarah Island totally and move everything to Port Arthur, a handful of convicts6 needed to remain behind to finish building the Frederick and help sail it to Hobart.
At this point, it is probably worth looking in detail at the size and appearance of the Frederick. We know that in the language of the sea she ‘drew’ about 140 tons, which means that when afloat she displaced 140 tons of water. This sounds a lot until you consider that Sydney Harbour’s famous Manly ferry draws 1122 tons, making it about eight times the size of Frederick. We also know that Frederick was a brig, with two masts of about equal size, and at least one of the masts (usually the slightly shorter foremast) square-rigged. The second main mast may have carried a mainsail and a foresail, or it may have been square-rigged also.
