Surgeon Harris, the military surgeon to the soldiers of the fleet, was concerned about their condition also. William Waters, surgeon of Surprize, reported thirty convicts suffering from scurvy. In the Scarborough ten soldiers were affected, five of them ‘very bad’.
But Shapcote was strangely unconcerned, and may himself have been suffering from the famous lethargy of scurvy or from some other incapacity. He died suddenly in mid May, after dining with Captain Trail and his wife. Between 3 and 4 a.m., a female convict ‘who had constantly attended Mr Shapcote’ came to the quarterdeck with news of his death.
At Cape Town on 19 February, after an argument with Captain Nepean, Macarthur and his wife, child and servant transferred to the Scarborough in protest. Her husband was incapacitated for five weeks by fever, during which time, Elizabeth Macarthur complained, the other New South Wales Corps officers did not make ‘the slightest offer of assistance’. He was beginning to walk again as Scarborough neared Port Jackson.
In the zone of storms, the empathic soldier Captain Hill felt pity for those ‘unhappy wretches, the convicts’, who often ‘were considerably above their waists in water, and the men of my company, whose berths were not so far forward, were nearly up to the middles’.
The cold, damp, hunger and continued shackling were slowly killing the young convict Robert Towers, and he was aware that when he died, as men were dying every day down on the convict deck of Neptune, his messmates would not tell anyone but go on drawing his rations as long as they could, till putrefaction made his condition clear.
CHAPTER 7
CONFIRMATION OF EXISTENCE
In the dispirited colony of New South Wales, June 1790 had opened rainy and hungry, and men and women wondered whether they existed at all any more in the minds of those who had transported or posted them to the ends of the earth. Then, on the evening of 3 June, there was a cry throughout Sydney Cove of ‘The flag’s up!’ It was the flag on the look-out station on the harbour’s southern headland, visible from Sydney Cove itself. Tench left a passionate account of what this meant to him and others. ‘I was sitting in my hut, musing on our fate, when a confused clamour in the street drew my attention. I opened my door and saw several women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other, kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness.’ Tench raced to the hill on which Government House stood and trained his pocket telescope on the look-out station. ‘My next door neighbour, a brother-officer, was with me; but we could not speak; we wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing.’
Watkin begged to join the governor in his boat which was going down-harbour to meet the ship. But a lusty wind, of the kind Sydney folk quickly came to call southerly busters, seemed to be blowing her onto the rocks at the base of the cliffs of North Head. ‘The tumultuous state of our minds represented her in danger; and we were in agony.’ She survived, however, and the governor sent out a boat to hail her, and when Phillip knew who she was, Lady Juliana with a cargo of women in good health, he crossed from the vice-regal boat to a fishing boat to return as fast as he could to Sydney, to prepare for the reception ashore of this new population. Meanwhile the seamen and officers in the governor’s cutter ‘pushed through wind and rain . . . At last we read the word “London” on her stern. “Pull away, my lads! She is from old England; a few strokes more and we shall be aboard! Hurrah for a belly-full and news from our friends!”—Such were our exhortations to the boat’s crew.’
Tench was still overwhelmed as they boarded, so that he saw the women on board this well-founded and well-run ship not so much as the fallen but as ‘two hundred and twenty-five of our own countrywomen, whom crime or misfortune had condemned to exile’. Letters were brought up from below, and those addressed to the officers who had boarded were ‘torn open in trembling agitation’.
When the Juliana came down-harbour and the women finally got ashore on 11 June 1790, they were better dressed than most of barefoot New South Wales, and made their way as strange paragons of health through mud to the huts of the women’s camp on the west side of the town. Sarah Whitelam left John Nicol, her sea-husband, aboard. The captain intended a brisk turn-around for the Juliana, so Nicol knew a sad parting was imminent.
But the presence of Juliana, and ambiguous news of the Guardian, was at least a sign that the settlement had not been forgotten by Whitehall. Above all, so was the appearance of the store ship Justinian, a few weeks later. ‘Our rapture,’ wrote Watkin Tench, ‘was doubled on finding she was laden entirely with provisions for our use. Full allowance, and general congratulation, immediately took place.’ The Justinian had taken only five months to make its trans-planetary journey. Profound gratitude and almost personal affection was now directed at Justinian’s young captain, Benjamin Maitland, for his ship carried the bulk of the stores Phillip needed, including nearly 500 000 pounds (227 000 kilos) of flour and 50 000 pounds (22 700 kilos) of beef and pork, as well as sugar, oil, oatmeal, pease, spirits and vinegar. Here was the end of famine, and the return to full and varied rations! And from what the Justinian told them, the settlement knew to look out for three more convict ships.
The first of the new ships, the Surprize, under jury masts from damage in a Southern Ocean storm, was seen from the look-out on South Head on 25 June. By the next day it was anchored in Sydney Cove. The officers from Sydney Cove who boarded it might have expected the degree of health found in the Lady Juliana. In fact, the peculiar disorders of the Camden, Calvert and King ships could be smelled a hundred metres off. Phillip found the ill health of the New South Wales Corps soldiers in stark contrast to the women of Lady Juliana, and the contrast with the convicts even more marked, for many of them were dying. Upwards of one hundred were now on the sick list on board, and forty-two had been buried at sea during the journey.
The portable hospital which had arrived by the Justinian was assembled to take some of the spillage from White’s timber-and-shingle hospital building, for two days later the signal was flying at South Head for the other transports, ‘and we were led to expect them in as unhealthy a state as that which had just arrived’.
On Neptune, Lieutenant John Macarthur’s fever caught at the Cape had spread throughout the ship. In the mad southern seas men and women had expired amongst the jolting, incessant swell, and beneath the scream of canvas and wind. Aboard Neptune in particular, according to later witnesses, a black market had broken out for lack of proper supplies. It might cost one shilling and sixpence for an additional pint (about half a litre) of water, a pair of new shoes for a quart (around one litre) of tea or three biscuits, a new shirt for four biscuits, two pairs of trousers for six. Crew members would later sign a statement swearing that they sold food and drink to convicts on board at these elevated prices.
Entering the heads, Trail swung Neptune into the northern wing of the harbour, and had his men fetch up the dead from the prison deck and throw them into the water, from which many were later retrieved or observed by convicts and natives. A visit by White and others to Neptune showed them that the condition of the people aboard was much worse even than those on Surprize. Phillip looked with outraged judgment at masters like Captain Trail but got back the unembarrassed stare of self-justified men with goods for sale. With all Phillip’s power, he lacked the capacity to try them before his Admiralty court, so he was reduced to condemning them in dispatches.
No sooner were the convicts unloaded than the masters of the transports, including Trail, opened tent stores on shore and offered goods for sale which ‘though at the most extortionate prices, were eagerly bought up’. Since cash was broadly lacking, the goods were in part sold to those amongst the population who had money orders and bills of credit, and even to the commissary for bills drawn on the Admiralty.
Extra tents had to be pitched on the west side of the cove by the hospital to take in the two hundred sick of Neptune, carried ashore in their own waste, seriously ill with scurvy, dyse
ntery or infectious fever. Several died in the boats as they were being rowed ashore, or on the wharf as they were lifted out of the boats, ‘both the living and the dead exhibiting more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed in this country’.
Much of it was attributed, said Collins, to severe confinement, such as had not occurred on the First Fleet. In many cases, convicts had been ironed together for the duration of the voyage. Collins thought, however, that Captain Marshall of the Scarborough had done a reasonably good job, even though sixty-eight men had been lost on his ship.
Reverend Johnson, who had entered the below-decks of the first of the three scandalous ships to arrive, the Surprize, was galvanised by what he saw. ‘A great number of them lying, some half, others nearly quite naked, without either bed nor bedding, unable to turn or help themselves. I spoke to them as I passed along, but the smell was so offensive that I could scarcely bear it . . . Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried upon the backs of others.’
Later, visiting the hospital, Johnson found many of the ill still unable to move and ‘covered over almost with their own nastiness, their heads, bodies, clothes, blankets all full of filth and lice. Scurvy was not the only nor the worst disease that prevailed among them.’ Johnson was a little shocked that even in such parlous condition some convicts had not lost sufficient craftiness to beg clothing from him and then sell it almost at once for food, as if their journey had equipped them to act differently.
So many burials took place that people would afterwards remember the dingoes howling and fighting over the bodies in a sandy pit over the hills above the Tank Stream.
Genial Captain Hill, landed from Surprize, suffered the normal shock of arrival but was pleased in some respects with his landfall. ‘It is now our winter quarters, and had I superior abilities to any man that ever wrote, it would be possible for me to convey to your mind a just idea of this beautiful heavenly clime; suffer your imagination to enter the regions of fiction; and let fancy in her loveliest moment paint an Elysium; it will fall far short of this delightful weather . . . did the gloomy months prevail here as in England, it is more than probable that the next reinforcement on arrival would find a desolated colony.’
But he was not happy with the amenities. ‘Here I am, living in a miserable thatched hut, without kitchen, without a garden, with an acrimonious blood by my having been nearly six months at sea, and tho’ little better than a leper, obliged to live on a scanty pittance of salt provision, without a vegetable, except when a good-natured neighbour robs his own stomach in compassion to me.’ Hill found that people who had lived in huts with their own gardens for some time rarely abused the confidence that was placed in them, and if they did it was to plunder some other convict’s garden.
All the healthy male convicts from the Second Fleet were sent to the farming settlement at Rose Hill/Parramatta. Women convicts were put to work making clothes out of the slops, the raw cloth brought out on sundry ships. Allowing for deaths, the population had by now quadrupled to nearly 3000, and so when on 1 August the Surprize left for China, Phillip leased it to drop off 157 female and 37 male convicts at Norfolk Island on the way. D’Arcy Wentworth had been working on a voluntary arrangement with Surgeon White, but was now sent to Norfolk Island with his convict paramour, Catherine Crowley, with the provisional post of Assistant Surgeon, based on the help he had given in the grounds of the Sydney hospital. There is no record of how he felt, but perhaps there was angry pride at being on probation and therefore not receiving wages.
When the store ship Justinian turned up at Norfolk on 7 August, the ration on the island was down to 2 pounds (c 1 kilo) of flour and 1 pint (c ½ litre) of tea per person weekly, and only fish and cabbage-tree palms and mutton birds and their eggs had saved the population. The Surprize joined Justinian late that afternoon, but Wentworth and Crowley did not have a high priority for landing, so when the ship had to back off again and go to Cascade Bay on the north side of the island to shelter from a gale, Catherine Crowley gave premature shipboard birth to a son who was to be named William Charles Wentworth. D’Arcy Wentworth helped his son from his mother’s womb, cut the cord and washed him, noticed an in-turned eye, but wrapped, warmed and caressed the baby. It took some weeks of tenderness and care to ensure his survival.
Wentworth landed into a turbulent scene, every human’s negative passion enhanced by hunger and isolation and the limits of a small island set in consistently dangerous seas. He saw that the officers of Sirius, still stranded on the island, snubbed Major Ross and would not pay him the normal respects. There were four other surgeons and assistant surgeons already on the island, and D’Arcy liked most of them: his fellow Irishmen—Thomas Jamison, Dennis Considen and Surgeon Altree—and the former convict John Irving. Irving, sentenced in Lincoln, had served as assistant surgeon on his own ship in the First Fleet, Lady Penrhyn. Back in Sydney, he had a grant of 30 acres awaiting him.
Dennis Considen befriended Wentworth at once and began to instruct him in the use of native plants for treating disease, an area of practice in which Considen had been a leader in Sydney. As well as promoting the use of native sarsaparilla and spinach, red gum from angophora trees, yellow from grass-trees, and oil from the peppermint eucalyptus tree, he had found that native myrtle had properties which would serve as a mild and safe astringent in cases of dysentery.
Wentworth was appointed surgeon to the little hamlet of Queensborough, in the interior of the island, to which at first he walked each day. His task was to treat, above all, diarrhoea and dysentery. He also had to attend lashings. Lieutenant Clark seemed to think flogging increasingly appropriate. For some time, Wentworth was a mediator between the lash and convicts. John Howard, a former highway robber, was ordered to receive 500 strokes for selling the slops issued to him by the public store and for telling a lie about it to Major Ross. Wentworth humanely called off the punishment when Howard had received 80 strokes. Wentworth also attended when a man of almost seventy was given 100 lashes for stealing wheat and neglecting his work, and when a young convict boy received thirteen strokes on the buttocks for robbing his master.
When Clark ordered that a young woman receive 50 lashes for abusing Mr Wentworth, she received only sixteen, ‘as Mr Wentworth begged that she might be forgiven the other 34’. Clark considered the girl in question—one Sarah Lyons—a ‘D/B’, his code for ‘damned bitch’. Wentworth’s tender-heartedness would not save Sarah Lyons from further floggings, but it demonstrated his sentiments.
SELF-SUFFICIENT ADAM
Back on the mainland, something promising was happening. James Ruse, the governor’s agricultural Adam, would produce a token 17 bushels of wheat from one and a half acres (0.6 hectares), and by February 1791, Ruse would draw his last ration from the government store, an event of great psychological potency for Phillip, Ruse and all the critics. By then Ruse had met and married a convict woman from the Lady Juliana named Elizabeth Perry, convicted of stealing. Elizabeth claimed innocence, and argued that the clothes she was arrested in were her own, and given the shaky nature of the criminal justice system, she might indeed have been right.
The Ruse-Perry marriage rounded out the idyll. Phillip’s provisional land grant to Ruse was confirmed in April 1791, the first grant issued in New South Wales. Ruse’s place near the Parramatta River would become known appropriately as Experiment Farm. Elizabeth Ruse often heard her husband complain of the unsuitability of this land for farming, and he comforted himself for the smallish returns for his excessive labour and agricultural cleverness by drinking and gambling with other Parramatta convicts, notably Christopher Magee, who had spent part of his adolescence in America and seems to have had republican ideas and to have been a good companion for irreverent conversations.
In late July, another association was about to end. Lady Juliana was due to sail for China and home via Norfolk Island, and ship’s steward Nicol faced being immediately separated from Sarah Whitelam, his convict woman, and the child they shar
ed. It had been a busy time for John Nicol: ‘The days flew on eagles’ wings, for we dreaded the hour of separation which at length arrived.’ Marines and soldiers were sent around Sydney Cove to bring the love-struck crew of the Lady Juliana back on board. ‘I offered to lose my wages, but we were short of hands,’ said Nicol. ‘The captain could not spare a man and requested the aid of the governor. I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true, and I promised to return when her time expired and bring her to England.’ He wanted to stow her away, but at times of sailing the convicts were strictly guarded by the marines, and repeated searches were made of departing ships.
Sarah quickly recovered from the disappointment by marrying a First Fleet convict, John Walsh, the day after Nicol’s departure, and then being settled on Norfolk Island with him. Nicol remained a seaman, never finding a ship that brought him back to Sydney.
THE WHALE AND THE SPEAR
In July 1790, as Juliana made ready to leave, a leviathan came to Port Jackson, a huge sperm whale which entered and became embayed within the harbour. Some boat crews from the various transports went trying to hunt it, and threw harpoons its way without success. Then one morning it rose from the harbour deeps to smash a punt occupied by three marines and a midshipman from the look-out station on South Head. ‘In vain they thro’ out their hats, the bags of our provisions, and the fish they had caught, in hopes to satisfy him or turn his attention.’ Only one marine survived, swimming ashore to Rose Bay.
By late August, however, the whale, still trapped in the harbour, ran itself aground at Manly. The beaching of a whale was a significant event for all Eora people, who gathered together from various clan areas to participate in a great meat and blubber feast.
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