One prisoner named Joseph Mansbury had been flogged so often—some 2,000 lashes in three years—that his back appeared
quite bare of flesh, and his collarer [sic] bones were exposed looking very much like two Ivory Polished horns. It was with some difficulty that we could find another place to flog him. Tony [Chandler, the overseer] suggested to me that we had better [do it on] the soles of his feet next time.79
A sentence of 200 lashes was called a “feeler”; one did not forget it. All the medical treatment the convict received was a bucket of sea water on his back, an operation known as “getting salty back.” “Many were relieved by death from this treatment,” Jones wrote. “It would be impossible to detail the torture received … [from] the commandant, his servants and overseers. One of the favourite … punishments was to make the leg irons more small each month so that they would pinch the flesh.” There was also a black isolation cell, and a water pit below the ground where prisoners would be locked, alone, naked, and unable to sleep for fear of drowning, for forty-eight hours at a spell.
There were only two ways out of “the old hell,” as convict slang called the place. One was death; the other—as at Macquarie Harbor and Moreton Bay in decades to come—was by committing an offense that justified sending the convict to Sydney for trial. “Many murders,” Jones wrote, “most of them were committed for the purpose of getting to Sydney, it being their only way of seeing heaven [convict slang for the mainland] again.” Some men, including a convict named Thomas Carpenter whom Jones seems to have befriended, simply expired under the preliminary flogging:
His 250 killed him, died of heart-failure they said. God forgive them, and him too. For he was well liked on the Island. But feeling that he was ill, and thinking that his end was near, he struck his officer, with the hope that he would see his friends (in Sydney) once more, he did so but it was his last time. Considering the purpose for which these poor devils obtain justice their lot is all the worse for the manner in which they chose to obtain it.80
Foveaux’s main obstacle on Norfolk Island was its deputy judge-advocate, a dim but decent ex-Etonian lawyer named Thomas Hibbins (1762–1816), who had got the post through the patronage of an old school friend, the Earl of Morton. Hibbins was neither ambitious nor gifted (if he had been, he would hardly have considered such a post), but he did have a certain compassion for the convicts. Since it was his task to interpret the civil and criminal law there—and to decide which cases should be tried in Sydney, there being no criminal court on Norfolk Island—he was often in conflict with Foveaux, who saw him as a felon-loving drunk.
For his part, Hibbins seems to have made no secret of his dislike of the commandant and his methods—methods that Foveaux himself delicately described as “vigorous if not exactly conformable to law.” These had to do with Irish political prisoners, originally transported to Sydney for their part in the rebellion of 1798 and then, after appalling floggings of up to 1,000 lashes each for their supposed complicity in a rising that never took place at Parramatta in 1800, sent to Norfolk Island for life.
The Irish gave signs of mutiny almost as soon as they arrived. Most of the convicts already on Norfolk Island were Irish, too; and the insurgents from Sydney, with their tales of the ’98, must have catalyzed them. On the morning of December 14, 1800, an Irish convict named Henry Grady (whose crime was rape, not sedition) appeared at Foveaux’s quarters “apparently in much agitation.” There would be a rising that night, he blurted; a hundred pikes were already made. Foveaux sent a soldier to look for the pikes, and he found them just where Grady said they were—long, fire-hardened sticks, not tipped with iron, but indubitably weapons of a sort. The ringleaders, Grady claimed, were two “politicals”; John Wolloghan, twenty-four years old, of Munster, and Peter McClean, forty, of Ulster. Wolloghan had been in charge of making the pikes, and McClean had recruited the rebels and given them their oath to kill the English officers and guards.
Foveaux put the two under close arrest and called in Thomas Hibbins, the judge-advocate. Hibbins opined that the men could not be tried for their lives by a panel of officers; and moreover, as there were no statute books on Norfolk Island, he did not know how an indictment could be framed against them. Enraged by this “pedantry,” Foveaux convened his officers to discuss “the fatal consequences that were likely to ensue if such daring & wicked designs were not checked in their earliest appearance.” There was no hesitation; the officers, as terrified of mutiny as Foveaux, unanimously agreed to hang Wolloghan and McClean summarily and without trial. They strung them up that night, by the light of flambeaux. Grady, the informer, got a free pardon. “Encouragement to such people,” Foveaux wrote to King, “is ever well bestowed.”81
At a perfunctory inquiry some months later, Foveaux was exonerated; in fact, his dispatch in hanging the Irish drew praise, not only from King but from Lord Hobart, the secretary of state for the colonies, and in 1802 he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. He summed up his own views on the matter in a note to Lord Portland:
The nature of this Place is so widely different from any other part of the World, the prisoners sent here, are of the worse Character & in general only those who have committed some fresh crime since their transportation to Port Jackson, in short most of them are a disgrace to human Nature.… [a]fter considering these circumstances, the very little support I receive from the Judge-Advocate and the situation of this Island, your grace will (I am persuaded) perceive that different Examples however vigorous if not exactly conformable to Law are on occasions indispensably necessary.82
Hibbins’s objections counted for nothing. If the Irish in Ireland needed martial law to keep them in order, why should their dregs in Australia be protected by civil statutes? The military must not be hampered with niceties. What it most feared was an alliance against this weak and remote English colony between United Irish prisoners and a French naval force. Thus, one finds Robert Jones, Foveaux’s jailer, quoting a fragment of some official address by his commandant—“His Majesty King George has been pleased to grant to all his subjects complete protection, in out of the way places …” Then he scribbles, “What a mockery to issue such a piece of information to chained convicts. Protection when we were the greatest enemy—as my orders were to murder all the prisoners under my care should any foreign nation bear down upon us. Protection be dam’d.”83
He was looking back to a moment in 1804, when a convoy of China traders escorted by a French warship, L’Athenienne, appeared off Norfolk Island. The garrison mistook them for an invasion fleet and prepared to do battle. Redcoats were sent scouring about for broken rum bottles, and the island’s two corroded six-pounders were crammed “with these fragments of glass, which (the Commandant swore) would cut the French to pieces.” Foveaux was not there. He had sailed for England two months before, leaving the island under the command of Captain John Piper. But he had also left standing orders about the Irish with his civilian staff, headed by Jones. Thus, when the ships were sighted, Jones and his chief constable Edward Kimberley herded some sixty-five Irish convicts into the settlement jail, barred the doors, closed the windows so that they could not signal to the French and then piled up masses of Norfolk Island pine brushwood around the walls on a hastily constructed scaffold, thus turning the whole building into a pyre for living men. “The soldiers,” Jones wrote, “were to set fire to the prison upon the signal from me.” If any of the “politicals” escaped being burned alive, they were to be shot. Captain Piper, who was supervising the cannon several miles away, knew nothing of these preparations for a mass burning of the Irish; and providentially, since the ships sailed on, the prisoners escaped the incineration Foveaux had prepared for them.
No record of Foveaux’s sadism, or of the torments he and his men visited on women at Norfolk Island, found its way into the official reports, although it is hard to believe that Governor King had no inkling of what his lieutenant-governor was up to. Foveaux censored all letters. “No person,” Jones noted, “was allowed to
write any information about the place or the work done here, they were only to write in reference to the state of our good conduct and friends.” Norfolk Island was a sealed universe and its reputation among the mainland convicts existed only by word of mouth; you could not officially threaten with what did not officially exist. In a society where the line between convictry and freedom was always being crossed—by emancipation or by reconviction—the stories of the convict subculture spread quickly through the lower class, but their rulers did nothing about them.
They felt no need to. Civil law was sketchy; England had not equipped its colony with a normal judicial framework and would not do so until after 1810. The general attitude was that one did not need full civil courts in a jail. Not one judge-advocate appointed by England in these early years was properly trained. The first, David Collins, was a marine officer with no prior experience of the law. The next in office, Richard Dore (1749–1800), was a blundering and cantankerous incompetent, much given to petty graft. His successor, Richard Atkins, was even worse: The drunken fifth son of a baronet, he had run through his legacy, bought and then sold a military commission and skipped from England in order to elude his creditors. Arriving in the colony in 1791, Atkins managed, by assiduous name-dropping and currying of favor with the officials (especially with Governor Hunter), to get himself appointed judge-advocate. His professional conduct was enough to disgust the next governor, Bligh, who called him “the ridicule of the community: sentences of death have been pronounced in moments of intoxication; his determination is weak, his opinion floating and infirm; his knowledge of the law is insignificant and subservient to private inclination.” The measure of his detachment from the interests of the military may perhaps be gauged from the fact that the wife of this pathetic drunk (“She wears the breeches completely,” noted the convict John Grant, who lived for a time in their household) raised two of the six bastard children whom Major George Johnston of the New South Wales Corps had sired on various women.84
Such men could not defy the junta. The corps, therefore, was virtually immune from civil law; and military law was exercised by its own officers to protect the interests of their own group. One sees why a Foveaux could flog and kill without restraint on Norfolk Island and yet have no word breathed against him by his brother officers. The question of the “rights” of convicts was barely worth raising in New South Wales between the departure of Arthur Phillip in 1792 and the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810.
By then, the English colony in Australia had spread and solidified. It was no longer a tiny outpost, racked with hunger and scurvy, clinging to the edge of the continent. Sydney was a fortified town and the country behind it, the Cumberland Plain, was fast becoming a patchwork of cleared, productive fields, self-sufficient and worked with varying degrees of efficiency by convict slave labor. The hoped-for economic importance of Norfolk Island had not materialized. But it had been bound up with the idea that New South Wales was a naval outpost, and that was beginning to change. In the early 1800s, a few last efforts were made to utilize the pines and flax that had been the colony’s naval raison d’être.85
Thus in 1802, the government tried the experiment of sending forth to Australia a few batches of convicts in Royal Navy vessels; and rather than waste space on the return voyage—for Navy ships, unlike the contracted ones that carried most of the convicts out, could not fill up with Oriental trade goods on the return run—the Admiralty sent with them drawings for major frame timbers of three classes of ships, to be cut and rough-shaped in New South Wales and brought back to England. The order was partly filled by King, but the practice lapsed. In 1805, King also had a small naval vessel, the Buffalo, rigged with a suit of sails woven from Norfolk Island flax by the women convicts in the Female Factory at Parramatta. She was the only ship to sail under such canvas. Up to 1810, sporadic efforts continued to be made to supply the Royal Navy with Australian timber.86 But they were never more than a footnote to the main economic life of the colony, which was shifting decisively to agriculture—to the land and its owners, rather than the sea and its captains. So Norfolk Island, with its dark pinnacles and stands of now strategically useless pines, was allowed to fall into decay. By March 1810, its population had sunk to 117 people, and one of Lachlan Macquarie’s first actions in assuming his governorship of New South Wales was to recall the mild officer who had succeeded Foveaux as commandant, Captain Piper, and order the abandonment of the island. “The impolicy of the original settlement,” the colonial secretary, Lord Liverpool, had told him, “has been fully demonstrated.”87
In 1813, the breaking-up began. The frame huts were torn down and burnt (the nails frugally saved), the stone houses demolished, and every last animal except a few pigs that got away was slaughtered, skinned, butchered and packed down in casks of brine. There must be nothing left to catch the eye of a passing ship, no base from which another settlement could be made. They even left behind a dozen dogs to run wild and breed into a hunting pack to discourage visitors from landing. The last salvage from the settlement was loaded into the brig Kangaroo in February 1814, and when she sailed, the island was as empty as it had been before the arrival of Cook. It would stay so for a decade; the new abode of misery was Van Diemen’s Land, far in the south.
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THE ENGLISH invasion of Van Diemen’s Land was by higher imperial standards a muddled and squalid affair. It produced no setpiece battles, no benevolent occupation, no heroes, profits or cultural loot. It merely opened another pit within the antipodean darkness, a small hole in the world about the size of Ireland, which would in due time swallow more than 65,000 men and women convicts—four out of every ten people transported to Australia. How many Tasmanian Aborigines died while the invading whites readied this cavity is not known, because no one knew how many there were to begin with. Probably not very many: The best guess at present is 3,000 to 4,000 people, hunting and gathering in small bands of 30 to 80—a population density roughly equal to that of the Aborigines of coastal New South Wales.88
But die they did—shot like kangaroos and poisoned like dogs, ravaged by European diseases and addictions, hunted by laymen and pestered by missionaries, “brought in” from their ancestral territories to languish in camps. It took less than seventy-five years of white settlement to wipe out most of the people who had occupied Tasmania for some thirty thousand years; it was the only true genocide in English colonial history. By the standards of Pol Pot, let alone Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler, this was a small slaughter. But not to the Tasmanian Aborigines.
Between convict and black, much blood is mingled in the soil of this green, lovely, lugubrious island—so much, in fact, that parts of it seem to be emblematic spots, places where ordinary nature is permanently corrupted by the leaching of history, a salt that nothing can extract from the earth. Except that, in Tasmania, it is hard at first to sense the violence of the implanted culture. Its relics are so modest: an earnestly detailed stone bridge spanning the river at Ross, overseen by a convict mason who once worked for Beau Nash; the squat, authoritarian Doric columns of a Hobart government building. Yet when the first white invaders reached the shores of the Derwent River, the idea that they would last long was much in doubt.
Van Diemen’s Land had been occupied to forestall the French who, to the alarm of New South Wales’s tarpaulin Governor King,89 had been nosing about in the ill-charted waters of southeastern Australia. Bass Strait, which separates Van Diemen’s Land from the mainland, was discovered in 1797–98. Its weather was bad and its waters were strewn with islands whose vast colonies of wildlife would support the future seal trade of Australia, but which were a peril to ships—King Island to the west, the Furneaux group in the east, and a nasty prickle of rocks and reefs athwart the strait. But to go through the Bass Strait, avoiding the long southern route below Van Diemen’s Land, clipped weeks off the passage from England to Sydney.
The strategic importance of this sea lane was obvious, and King strongly felt there had to be
a settlement to secure it. In January 1802 Lieutenant John Murray, surveying the southern coast in the Lady Nelson, discovered a great bay on the mainland near the head of the strait, which in due course was named Port Phillip Bay: the harbor of modern Melbourne.
The following April, another coastal explorer, Matthew Flinders, was working eastward along the coast when he ran into two westbound French ships at an anchorage near the present site of Adelaide, which he named Encounter Bay. They were Le Géographe and Le Naturaliste, on a cartographic mission for the French Navy under Captain Nicolas Baudin. Baudin’s expedition seems to have had no direct military purpose, despite the Napoleonic Wars. Like Flinders, he was trying to find out whether the western part of Australia was all of a piece with its eastern, British-occupied flank, New South Wales. He had spent more than a month mapping the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land and had bestowed a number of French names on his rough charts of Terre Napoléon, as he called the south coast of mainland Australia. Baudin and his exhausted, sick crew put into Sydney Harbor in June 1802; he stayed there for several months refitting, and he showed Governor King his survey charts.
King thought he smelled a rat. The mere presence of French ships in these waters was bad enough, but French names tacked on the British coast—albeit an unoccupied, unclaimed one—were worse. The idea of having to share this continent with “Boney,” no matter how large it might be, was intolerable. And when Baudin sailed south again, King was sure he was going to start claiming territory and hoisting the tricolore.
The Fatal Shore Page 18
