Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  By early December 1789, Undersecretary Evan Nepean had become anxious about reports of the conditions on board the Second Fleet, and told the naval agent that he was to ‘examine minutely into the manner of confining the convicts, as it has been represented that they are ironed in such a manner as must ultimately tend to their destruction’. Secretary of State Grenville sent Governor Phillip an ominous dispatch urging him to disembark the prisoners as early as possible when they arrived, ‘as from the length of the passage from hence and the nature of their food, there is every reason to expect that many of them will be reduced to so debilitated a state that immediate relief will be found expedient’. It is a letter which reflects some culpability, and indifference to Phillip’s problems by the Home Secretary.

  Further convicts were collected from the Lion and Fortune hulks in Portsmouth, as well as from the notorious Dunkirk at Plymouth. Male convicts were suddenly told that they could bring their wives on the voyage, if they chose, but only three women and three children had turned up in Portsmouth by 21 December. Three or four other free women embarked in the following days, interesting volunteers, lovers of various convicts willing to take the step, on the eve of Christmas, into the void.

  Amongst them was Harriet Hodgetts, wife of a 24-year-old blacksmith-cum-burglar from Staffordshire, Thomas Hodgetts. She had followed her husband down from Staffordshire to London, where she lived with their three small children in acute squalor in Whitechapel. It seems that the churchwardens and overseers of the parish of St Mary’s Whitechapel took an interest in the Hodgetts’s case and were anxious to get Harriet and her children aboard, since she had no other prospects. Her quarters on Neptune were hopelessly cramped—she lived with the convict women. Her revenge was to live till 1850 and give birth to nine colonial children.

  NEPTUNE’S MEN

  There were two young men aboard the Neptune who would have a large place in the story of New South Wales.

  One was a young man with a new rank, and a touch bumptious about it. John Macarthur was a little over twenty years of age, and a lieutenant in the 102nd Regiment, the newly created New South Wales Corps, a man of handsome features that must have satisfied the broad streak of narcissism in him. He was a devout duellist, because he was a man of edgy honour—his father was a Scots draper who lived at the back of his business in Plymouth in an era when trade was thought vulgar. His father had been able to ‘obtain’—that is, buy—an ensign’s commission for John for a regiment intended to be sent to fight the American colonists. In June 1789, when the formation of the New South Wales Corps was announced, John saw the chance of promotion and his father helped him buy a lieutenancy.

  He had married the previous year a robust-spirited and handsome girl named Elizabeth Veal, a Cornish woman who considered her ambitious and volatile husband ‘too proud and haughty for our humble fortune’. Indeed it was Macarthur and his fellow officers, not the convicts, who introduced turbulence into Captain Tom Gilbert’s Neptune.

  When the ship anchored in Plymouth in November 1789, Macarthur went up to the quarterdeck and upbraided the captain for his ‘ungentleman-like conduct,’ in crassly rebuffing Macarthur’s request for better quarters and called him a ‘great scoundrel’. Gilbert responded by saying ‘he had settled many a greater man’ than Macarthur. The two agreed to meet at four o’clock in the afternoon at the Fountain Tavern on Plymouth Dock, in order to fight a pistol duel. Macarthur faced Gilbert on the stones of the Old Gun Wharf. The two duellists fired, Macarthur’s ball sizzling through Gilbert’s greatcoat. Then Gilbert’s missed altogether. Their seconds came running in and stopped the confrontation, and both men decided that their honour had been satisfied.

  But enmity continued. Captain Nepean, commander of the troops on Neptune, and Lieutenant Macarthur complained to Evan Nepean, Undersecretary of State and Captain Nepean’s brother, that Gilbert would not hand over the keys to the convict deck. Evan Nepean declared, ‘I trust that both sides, when out of the smell of land, will find it in their interests to live quietly together.’

  As it happened, a decision was reached to remove Thomas Gilbert as master of Neptune. Macarthur and Captain Nepean and the New South Wales Corps would eventually bring down bigger fish than Gilbert, but they were pleased with themselves for their first triumph, though it brought to the quarterdeck of Neptune the catastrophic Donald Trail.

  The other fascinating passenger on board Neptune was a young Irishman, D’Arcy Wentworth, aged about 27, a highwayman-cum-surgeon: a voluntary passenger in one sense; a virtual convict in others. He was tall and good-looking and spoke English with an Ulster brogue. He had acquired notoriety in Britain throughout the 1780s as ‘a gentleman of the road’, whom the public and even magistrates distinguished from ‘the lower and more depraved part of the fraternity of thieves’.

  Wentworth was the son of an Ulster innkeeper, a relative of the noble Fitzwilliam clan of Portadown. Earl Fitzwilliam, though progressive and wealthy, had no interest in supporting the youngest son of a kinsman, so D’Arcy was left both with a sense of his own worth, confirmed by seven doting sisters, and no wealth to affirm it. In the mid-to-late 1780s he came to London, where the Court of Examiners of the Company of Surgeons certified him an assistant surgeon. He set himself to ‘walk the hospitals’, but the impoverished Irish medical student did not have the temperament to live quietly and carefully. In criminal society at the Dog and Duck Tavern in St George’s Field south of the river, he could pass as a real toff, live fairly cheaply, encounter raffish society, and attract women with his tall frame and his vigorous Irish banter. By November 1787 Wentworth had been arrested for holding up a man on Hounslow Heath. The victim described the perpetrator as a large, lusty man who wore a black silk mask and a drab-coloured greatcoat. The charges were dismissed. But four days later, a gentleman, his wife and a female friend were held up on Hounslow Heath by a solitary highwayman on a chestnut horse with a white blaze. Two Bow Street runners intercepted Wentworth as he returned to the city and brought him before a magistrate. Wentworth stood trial in the Old Bailey in December 1787. Though he inveighed against the press for swinging the jury against him, his victims seemed reluctant to identify him and he was acquitted. By now he was to some a glamorous figure, but one wonders what coercion was used by some of his Dog and Duck associates to prevent a definite identification.

  South-east of the Dog and Duck lay the plateau called Blackheath, with Shooters Hill rising from it. In January 1788, Wentworth was the so-called masked gentleman highwayman who rode out of the roadside heath and held up two travellers. In the same month on Shooters Hill, three highwaymen, one of them apparently Wentworth, held up Alderman William Curtis (who owned ships in the First Fleet), and two other gentlemen. These two hold-ups netted goods valued at over £50. One of D’Arcy’s accomplices, William Manning, was captured in Lewisham, and an address in his pocketbook led Bow Street runners to Wentworth’s London lodgings, where they arrested him again.

  Before the magistrates and later in Newgate, Wentworth pleaded his family’s good name and said that he had become degraded by the evil influence of the clientele of the Dog and Duck. This time, his trial was moved to Maidstone, where the Lent Assizes met, in the hope of finding a jury who would convict without fear or favour.

  That was the month the eleven ships of the First Fleet had gathered on the Motherbank, preparatory for departure, and there was a rumour Wentworth had been sent away on it. Acquitted in Maidstone, again because of uncertainty of identification, Wentworth met Earl Fitzwilliam, his rich young kinsman, in London for a solemn talk. But by the end of November 1788, D’Arcy had been arrested again for holding up a post-chaise carrying two barristers of Lincoln’s Inn across Finchley Common north of Hampstead Heath. Stripping the gentlemen of their valuables, one of the highwaymen whispered, ‘Good morrow’. One lawyer said to his companion, ‘If I was not sure that D’Arcy Wentworth was out of the kingdom, I should be sure it was him.’

  The following year, 1789, someone ide
ntified as Wentworth asked a surgeon to come and operate on a friend of his, ‘Jack Day’, suffering from a pistol wound. Wentworth’s associate had to be taken to hospital, was grilled by Bow Street officers, and the result was Wentworth’s own interrogation and arrest in November.

  This time his trial at the Old Bailey was such a cause célèbre that it was attended by members of the royal family, including the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland. On 9 December, Wentworth appeared before a lenient judge and his lawyer victims did not prosecute, having known him socially. The jury was pleased to come back with a verdict of Not Guilty, and the prosecuting parties were also pleased to announce that Mr Wentworth ‘has taken a passage to go in the fleet to Botany Bay; and has obtained an appointment in it, as Assistant Surgeon, and desires to be discharged immediately’. Earl Fitzwilliam had agreed to fit his kinsman out and pay his fare to New South Wales on the Neptune.

  In fact, D’Arcy Wentworth had no official position aboard the ship. The quality of Great Britain often got rid of their wild relatives by de facto, above-decks transportation, and Wentworth would be an early well-documented instance of what would become a habitual recourse for embarrassed British families. Now he was alone in a little hutch aboard, bouncing on the swell of the Motherbank, amongst pungent odours and people he did not know, and at 27 was still without a post in life.

  NEPTUNE: THE SECOND FACE OF SHAME

  Neptune’s Captain Trail, a 44-year-old Orkney Island Scot, at one time master to Captain Bligh, took over command of the vessel from the dismissed Captain Gilbert. The Neptune now held over five hundred—428 male and 78 female—of the thousand convicts to be shipped. Most of them were housed on the orlop deck, the third deck down, 75 feet by 35 (c 23 × 11 metres), with standing room below the beams of the ceiling only 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 metres). The convicts slept in four rows of sleeping trays, one row on either side of the ship and two down the middle. Lanterns burned on the convict deck till eight o’clock at night, and each ship had to carry the latest ventilating equipment in the hope that air would reach the convicts even in the tropics. In port, and for much of the journey, each convict was chained by the wrist or by the ankles, in many cases on Neptune two and two together, and indefinitely so. Trail must have known the impact this would have on individual cleanliness and health.

  As usual, each group of six men or women chose their mess steward, and the food these mess orderlies went up to collect morning and evening was cooked in communal coppers above deck. In bad weather the food had to be cooked below deck in the same oven and coppers that were used first for the rations of the crew and soldiers, and the result was that many of the convicts went without cooked food during wild weather; Trail was not concerned.

  The sanitary arrangements were very primitive—on the orlop deck large tubs were provided to ‘ease nature’. These would be knocked over by accident or carelessness or rough seas. Below decks was thus a damp, under-aired, overcrowded misery.

  Among those who came on board the huge Neptune from the hulk Dunkirk was a lusty young man in his mid twenties, Robert Towers, who had stolen silver tankards and a pint pot from an inn in north Lancashire and then tried to sell them to a silversmith in Preston. His health had gone down a little on the damp lower decks of Dunkirk, but on the crowded prison deck of Neptune, where he wore slaver shackles around his ankles and wrists, received short-weighted rations and got insufficient air and exercise, he began to feel really poorly. The Neptune, at anchor and at sea, would ultimately finish him, though it would take seven months until they brought his corpse up to deck and committed him to a distant ocean. The deck he was thrown from, and all the other decks of Neptune, were crowded with the captain’s private goods he intended to sell in Sydney Cove.

  The three ships now gathered in Portsmouth were joined by a store ship named the Justinian, loaded with flour, pork, beef, pease, oatmeal, vinegar, spirits, oil and sugar. There were also 162 bales of clothing and a quantity of coverlets, blankets and cloth, and a portable military hospital, prefabricated for assembly in New South Wales. Four hundred gallons (1820 litres) of vinegar were shipped for use as disinfectant and mouthwash. The three transports also carried supplies.

  The wind kept the new convict fleet shuttling between Portsmouth Harbour and the Isle of Wight, but on Sunday morning, 7 January, in the new year of 1790, a westerly allowed them to tack their way down the Channel. The store ship Justinian left Falmouth the same day as the other three ships left the Motherbank.

  Some of the awesome smells from the convict deck reached the Macarthurs in their little cabin by the women’s prison area on a higher deck. Mrs Macarthur found the malodour hard to bear: ‘together with the stench arising from the breath of such a number of persons confined in so small a spot, the smell of their provisions and other unwholesome things, made it almost unbearable’. But Elizabeth Macarthur did bear it. In British colonial history she would be recorded as a kindly, loyal and enduring woman, to the extent that she remained clear-eyed even amongst the miasmas of Neptune. Her as yet callow husband would be harder to admire so unconditionally.

  The seventy-eight female convicts of Neptune were housed in a section of the upper deck and were not chained. Unlike the captain of the Lady Juliana, Trail denied having made any promise to allow the crew sea-wives, and he punished men who had any unauthorised contact with convict women. Sailors got to women, and vice versa, in any case, through a break in the bulkhead between the carpenters’ shop and the women’s prison.

  As for D’Arcy Wentworth, he seems to have fallen quite passionately in love, passion being his forte, with a pretty Irish convict of seventeen years named Catherine Crowley. She had been sentenced in Staffordshire for one of the usual offences, stealing clothing—although in her case it was a considerable amount of clothing. Catherine was sent down from Stafford gaol to London on the outside of a coach with three other girls, and boarded the Neptune. With Captain Donald Trail’s at least tacit consent, D’Arcy made her his mistress soon after he joined the ship.

  So in close quarters on Neptune could be found two furiously ambitious young men: one a reclusive, prickly officer, John Macarthur, with his wife, Elizabeth, pregnant; the other the founding social outcast of penal New South Wales, D’Arcy Wentworth, with Catherine Crowley, pregnant. In reality, D’Arcy may have been a more lonely figure aboard Neptune than Crowley was. And he remained so, not interfering, not being invited to interfere as a physician in what befell Catherine’s convict brethren. Catherine Crowley would have been as surprised as the politer Macarthurs to find out that the child she carried on Neptune would one day become Australia’s first great constitutional statesman. But all that future was mired in shipboard squalor, stink and dimness, and they sailed towards a place whose survival was unguaranteed in any case.

  Twenty-two year old Elizabeth Macarthur kept herself absorbed by writing a stylish journal of the voyage. In the Bay of Biscay the sea ‘ran mountains high,’ she wrote. Down the coast of West Africa, windsails operated over the deck to keep the lower areas of the ship refreshed, but the terrible heat, particularly in the men’s prison deck, could not be dealt with very well. Here was Georgian Hades, the convict deck of an eighteenth-century ship, the Sutton pumps on deck having no air to pump, and men and women locked up with their complex screams and groans and surrenders.

  After sailing, the soldiers complained to Lieutenant Macarthur that they were receiving short rations, that they were victims of purloining; that is, short weighting. Captain Nepean did not seem to want to attend to the matter. As Elizabeth sprinkled their little hutch of a cabin with oil of roses, the Macarthurs’ rations were also cut by Captain Trail, without resistance by the incapable Lieutenant Shapcote or by Captain Nepean. Nepean dined in Captain Trail’s cabin and the two had become cronies, but the Macarthurs ‘seldom benefited by their society’.

  Captain William Hill, a cultivated and sympathetic young member of the New South Wales Corps, who would make friends of the more intellectual of the officers al
ready in New South Wales, particularly Tench and Dawes, was sailing on Surprize, where he did himself great honour by being a critic of the contractors from the start. ‘The irons used upon these unhappy wretches were barbarous; the contractors had been in the Guinea trade, and had put on board the same shackles used by them in that trade; which are made with a short bolt, instead of chains that drop between the legs and fasten with a bandage around the waist; like those at the different gaols, these bolts were not more than three-quarters of a foot [c 23 cm] in length, so they [the convicts] could not extend either leg from the other more than an inch or two [c 2.5-5 cm] at most; thus fettered, it was impossible for them to move, but at the risk of both their legs being broken.’ Forced inactivity on this scale, Hill feared, was an invitation to scurvy, ‘equal to, if not more than salt provisions’.

  Even when disease struck, there were no extra comforts offered. ‘The slave trade is merciful, compared with what I have seen in this fleet; in that it is the interest of the [slaver] master to preserve the healths and lives of their captives, they having a joint benefit, with the owners. In this [fleet], the more they can withhold from the unhappy wretches, the more provisions they have to dispose of in a foreign market; and the earlier in the voyage they die, the longer they [the masters] can draw the deceased’s allowance for themselves . . . it therefore highly concerns government, to lodge in future, a controlling power in each ship over these low-life barbarous masters, to keep them honest.’ The beached captain of the Guardian had seen the condition of the fleet in Cape Town and bluntly wrote to Evan Nepean: ‘If ever the navy make another contract like that of the last three ships, they ought to be shot, and as for their agent Mr Shapcote, he behaved here just as foolishly as a man could well do.’

  All four surgeons employed aboard the fleet had already written to Shapcote about the potential seriousness of the convicts’ conditions. They urged him to get fresh supplies of beef and vegetables aboard. Surgeon Grey of the Neptune wrote that ‘without they have fresh provisions and greens every day, numbers of them will fall a sacrifice to that dreadful disease’. Yet at the Cape, Trail made sure his prisoners were securely ironed, which did not contribute to their rehabilitation through whatever fresh fruit and vegetables were acquired ashore.