The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  In April 1831 Peter Withers, the “Swing” protestor from Wiltshire, wrote from the convict ship Proteus at Spithead to his wife Mary Ann:

  My Dear Wife belive me my Hark is almost broken to think I must lave you behind. O my dear what shall I do i am all Most destracted at the thoughts of parting from you whom I do love so dear. Believe me My Dear it Cuts me even to the hart and my dear Wife there is a ship Come into Portsmouth harber to take us to New Southweals.

  Inconceivable distances loom before Withers, who has never even been as far from home as London; and he tries to explain them, to normalize them by promising a fidelity that will annihilate separation:

  it is about 4 months sail to that country But we shall stop at several cuntreys before we gets there for fresh water I expects you will eare from me in the course of 9 months.… you may depend upon My keeping Myselfe from all other Woman for i shall Never Let No other run into my mind for tis onely you My Dear that can Ease me of my Desire. It is not Laving Auld england that grives me it is laving my dear and loving Wife and Children, May God be Mersyful to me.2

  In December 1831 Richard Dillingham, a convict in the hulks at Woolwich, awaiting transportation, writes less tragically to the girl who had borne him a son out of wedlock, “my ever adorable Betsey Faine.” He casts it in the form of the sweet doggerel rhymes one could buy inscribed on favors at a market fair:

  Dearest Betsey the first of human kind the thoughts of you will ever ease my mind for though we at a distance are I hope that God will be your leading star—

  The first is B a letter bright

  Which plenty doth afear,

  The next is F in all women slight,

  The surname of my dearest dear. Adieu.3

  Tossing on his iron cot in the lockup, a convict would obsessively recall his life and its mistakes. So John Ward, sentenced to 10 years’ transportation in 1841 for theft:

  A miserable object in truth, all my feelings and passions now rushed upon me at once. Remorse for an instant filled my breast with abandoned thoughts of plunging deeper into the depravity of heart, to which I had fallen a victim.… The many enemies there was to contend with all stood in dark array before my burning imagination.

  Ward thinks, with bitter irony, of some lines of affectionate rhyme he once sent to his sweetheart:

  Had I possessed candour enough to marry the girl, I sincerely believe I should have been one of the happiest of men!—but!—It occurred to my memory the words I wrote to Rose! some years before this, on a particular occasion—

  Far beyond the seas

  Unpittied I’ll remove,

  And rather cease to live

  E’er I will cease to love!

  But I did not, at that time, ever dream of putting these words into practice, much less of being sent as a poor convict.4

  Many prisoners hoped their wives would go into Australian exile with them, although few actually did; it was hard to get passage out there, and tickets were far beyond the means of a worker’s wife. “I hope you will strain your utmost to keep my Company,” Thomas Holden wrote to his wife Molly as he was leaving for the hulks, “and not let mee go without you for with your company I don’t mind where I go nor what I suffer, if I have your Company to chear my allmost Broken Hart.” And later, from the hulk: “My sorrow is greatly Encreased by parting with you, what Comfort can I enjoy when we are separate.… I could wish to know if you think you Could rise money to pay your passage & go with me.”5 She did not go. Neither did Mary Ann, Peter Withers’s wife, despite his heart-wringing pleas:

  We [h]ears we shall get our freedom in that Country, but if I gets my freedom evenso i am shure I shall Never be happy except I can have the Pleshur of ending my days with you and my dear Children, for I dont think a man ever loved a woman so well as I love you.

  My Dear I hope you will go to the gentlemen for they to pay your Passage over to me when I send for you. How happy I shall be to eare that you are a-coming after me.… Do you think I shall sent for you except i can get a Cumfortable place for you, do you think that I wants to get you into Troble, do you think as I want to punish my dear Children? No my dear but if I can get a cumfortsable place should you not like to follow your dear Husband who Lovs you so dear?6

  There was no reply, and two years later Withers was writing to his brothers from Van Diemen’s Land: “I have sent 2 letters to My Wife an Cant get heny Answer from her Wich Causeth Me a great deal of unhapyness for i think she have quite forgotten me an I think she is got Marred to some other Man, if she is pray send me Word.” But there was still no word from her, and eleven years would pass before Mary Ann wrote in distress to her husband in Van Diemen’s Land, asking to be reconciled. She received the news that Peter had married again (there was no question of divorce for the lower classes; one simply relied on the inaccessibility of records and married bigamously) to a “staidy vertus Woman”:

  I have no Property of my own but my Wife have Property wich she will have in the course of two years and then we have agreed to help you an the Children if God spares our lives.

  I know that for to eare that I am married is a hard trial for you to bear, but it is no good to tell you a Lye.

  I sent a great maney Leters before I took a Wife; so not earing from you, I being a young man, I thought it would be Proper thing to look [for] a partner which would be a Comfort to me in my Bondage. I sent for you to Come out to this country when I came first and if you had you would have got me out of Bondag for nothing, for a wife could get a release for her husband. So we must not think about Coming together again.7

  Poor repentant Mary kept trying. The last news of her is a curt form letter from the colonial secretary’s office in Whitehall dated August 1847, telling her that he “was living on the 30 Septr. 1846” but that “no further information can be given respecting him.” There must have been many variations on this small colonial drama.

  The Privy Council records contain hundreds of letters from wives asking to go into Australian exile with their husbands. Generally the authorities would not allow this, unless the convict had earned his ticket-of-leave and shown that he could support a family in Australia.* Permission was only rarely given for a wife to accompany her man on the transport vessel. An intense pathos rises from some of these letters, written in the neat hand of a local curate or the labored scrawl of the petitioner herself. From Rochester in Kent, Deborah Taylor, whose husband James has been transported for life for stealing a lamb, encloses, for Peel’s perusal, a document infinitely precious to her: his letter exhorting her to join him in Australia. She beseeches Peel “most humbly and fervently”

  that I may be sent out with my Remaining Children a boy 10 years of age and a girl 6 years, having buried two since my Application. My husband it will be seen by the enclosed letter is very anxious to be sent out.… I humbly hope that I may be favored with the return of my poor husband’s letter should I not be successful, pray God I may find favor.8

  It seems she did get the letter back (at least it is not in the file) but her application was denied. “Usual answer,” Peel’s secretary minuted on the back of her petition, as on so many others.

  The determination of some of these women was heroic; they yearned for their men and they would not accept the common fate of abandonment. Jane Eastwood, the thirty-year-old wife of a transported Manchester bootmaker, told Peel in April 1830 that her husband “has written several letters to me from Sidney Island [sic] requesting me to apply to Government in order to be sent out there to him.… I am determined to go out to my Husband even at the risk of my life.” She implored the home secretary to “Put it in my power of becoming happy, by uniting me again to the Best of Husbands”:

  Prevent me from the shame of casting myself & Child upon the Parish for Relief … as work is not only scarce but so ill paid for that it is utterly out of my Power to gain a living for myself & Child, and I have no other thing to depend upon except what I can earn by my needle in dress and stay making.9

  She canno
t wait for more letters, across the vast antipodean time lag; she will pay her own fare with whatever she has. “I know not how to get over the time until word come back from him, about 9 months at least. I would rather sell my household furniture which will amount to about six or eight Pounds, this sum I will most willingly give to Government to lessen their expenses of sending me out to Sidney, provided they would be graciously pleased to send me by the first Ship.” She knows her skills, joined to his, will keep them without government support once she is there. “I myself have been thoroughly bred to the Dressmaking business, and have wrought for years at the Umbrella Business, I can also bind Shoes & boots and can render him every assistance.… [T]here can scarcely remain a doubt that we would at all become a burden upon this Colony but rather a gain to them.”10 This time the government listened, and to Australia she went.

  Local clergy, with their charitable concerns, would endorse such petitions. Thus in 1819 Charles Isherwood, the curate of Brotherton, collected signatures from ten colleagues on behalf of Elizabeth Rhodes, asking that she and her two small children “may be permitted to accompany her unfortunate husband to his place of Exile.” Sometimes whole groups, or part of an entire community, would intervene. “A man by the name of Mitchel has lately had the sentence of 21 yrs. transportation passed on him,” wrote a Stirling magistrate, Robert Downie, to Peel’s office. “The Stirling people are most anxious that he should be allowed to carry his wife and 3 children with him. Does Government ever allow of such shipments?” Parishioners would write, promising to raise a local subscription for a wife to join her husband; they offered clothes, food and bedding for her passage.11

  Husbands and lovers were also sons, and in an age when family ties across the generations were the very mortar of society the misery felt by the parents of a transported man—and the shame he felt for them—could be unbearable. Convicts’ letters to their parents were filled with promises of self-amendment. “I can assure you that since I have been here i have had plenty of leisure time to reflect on my past misconduct,” a weaver named Richard Boothman writes to his father in Lancashire, “and I can assure you most sincerely that if it pleases God to bestow my Liberty upon me once more, that my life will be one series of amendment, and I trust that i shall yet be able to close your eyes in peace and comfort and render the downhill part of your life happy.”12 From his “unhappy situation” in York Castle, awaiting transfer to the hulks, Richard Taylor tells his father, “i wish i had taken your Advice.… I listen to my fellow Prisoners till my heart goes as Cold as Clay.” But no letter comes from his father, and Taylor, fearing that he has been spurned and forgotten, writes in agitation to his “Dear unkles”:

  You must let him now I ham very well and he must think as little about me as he can for i ham quite innesent and I hope god will be mersful to me an I shall see you all agane but if not I must live for a beter world. For my part I [am] determined to lead a godley life.13

  He invokes the future, trying to shore up the spirits of his parents. He writes from York in May 1840—this time with better spelling, through the medium of a scribe—that “the prayers of a sincere heart are as acceptable to God from the dreary Prison as from the splendid Palace. What a blessing that assurance is to a poor unfortunate mortal in my hapless condition.” He promises reunion:

  When I have lived out my ten years in a far distant land how happy I shall be to return to my native home, and with how much more delight will I return home if God shall spare my dear Father until that time, that we may once more meet in the flesh, and convene together about heavenly things—why, my dear Parent, if he spare us both to enjoy that Happiness, it will be like a foretaste of Heaven itself.14

  Such utterances were sincere but they hardly masked the deeper fear that transportation would sunder the family forever. Richard Boothman beseeches his father “not to forget me to my brother-in-law” and other relatives, “and tell them that I should like to see them before my leaving here, as it may be for the last time.” On leaving for the hulks in June 1841, he complains of being cast off by his kin: “I think it rather strange that you have not attended to my request but I certainly should have been glad to see some of my Friends before I left here, but alas now it is too late.” For every brave assertion that the writer will come back (“Dear Father I hope that you will not fret and Greeve And make yourself uncomfortable … I hope in a short time I shall see you again”), there are many expressions of despair. “My spiritts is low with thinking how I am sent from my Natiff Contrey, and I am inisent,” Thomas Holden writes in June 1812. “Dear mother I do not think of seeing you in this world any more.”15

  That transportation inflicted social and filial death was a common theme of ballads and it occasionally percolated upward into literature: One finds George Crabbe, for instance, alluding to it in “The Borough” by evoking a pathetic still life meant as a vanitas:

  On swinging shelf are things incongruous stored,—

  Scraps of their food, the cards and cribbage-board,—

  With pipes and pouches, while on peg below

  Hang a lost member’s fiddle and his bow;

  That still remind them how he’d dance and play

  Ere cast untimely to the Convicts’ Bay.16

  Some convicts clung to the hope of a last-minute pardon, usually in vain. The prerogative of the Royal Mercy was often extended to those sentenced to hang, especially if their crimes were political (more especially still, if they were committed after the death of Castlereagh in 1822 and seemed to represent a wave of popular opinion). Thus in 1831, at the height of agitation for reform, Peter Withers and his fellow protestor James Lush were snatched from the gallows on the very eve of their execution by a mass petition addressed to the king through the Home Office. However, once the machinery of transportation had begun to turn, one could not jump free. Yet English life was so enlaced with patronage, with lines of favor and gratitude running throughout the strata of the social pyramid from navvy to duke, that prisoners and their families would seize any chance of mitigation after sentencing. In 1798 a gentleman named C. M. Waller writes to his acquaintance in Sydney, the Irish dynast and assistant surgeon for the colony, D’Arcy Wentworth. He intercedes for an “Unfortunate young Man, who has been cast for Transportation, for the trifling sum of Half a Crown”:

  His situation is so much more to be pittied as he not only bore a universal good Character [but] was the whole supporter of a Sickely old Father & a Aged Mother, who is now standing Wheeping before me, & laments the loss of a Son.… [T]he only favour she begs of you, Sir, is, that you will be so obliging as to render him any service which is in your power, that his Situation may be more comfortable.17

  Thomas Holden, on the eve of his sailing in 1812, was still imploring his wife “to go to Mr Fletcher & Mr Watkin [and] tell them that I still Protest my inosentse”; while at sea, despite the “great deal of truble and difficklty to get to Right a letter,” he hopes “you will keep sending up Pertisions to Government to get me off or to get my Sentence mitigated.” In 1841 Richard Boothman wrote that “if a little trouble was taken by my friends … it might be of very great service to me.… [I]f ever I needed help I do now.”18 The convict and his family had to find as many character references among the respectable—landowners, local magistrates, merchants, clergy—as they could raise. Through a scribe with an educated hand, a woman wrote to the home secretary’s office from Salisbury in 1819:

  I beg to inform you that Silas Harris, a transport on board the Laurel at Portsmouth, is my Husband & has left 6 children to lament his Loss, who are at present in the greatest distress, a Gentleman has promised me he would lay my case, together with my helpless Family, before Lord Sidmouth praying me to interfere for his Releasement, Should you think that his Character annex’d would be of Service I should feel myself Thankful.19

  It was by no means unusual for the victim of the crime to petition on the prisoner’s behalf, once he or she had realized the terrible fate that lay in store for t
he convict in Australia and his abandoned family in England. Many Englishmen and Englishwomen were disturbed by the disproportion between crime and punishment and did not want to carry on their consciences the stigma of destroying a whole family over some relatively trivial possession, especially when it had been stolen in time of general need. William Tidman, a farmer at St. Albans, had lost some sacks of wheat to an agricultural laborer named Thomas Tate, “now lying at Wolledge [Woolwich] under sentence of Transportation for seven years.” He asked Viscount Sidmouth to remit Tate’s sentence on behalf of his wife and four small children, “as I freely forgive him myself.” In the same vein, Mrs. Lycot, wife of “a gentleman of considerable landed property,” wrote in May 1819 to the local magistrate in Minchin Hampton, Sir George Paul, begging clemency for Thomas Barker, an itinerant vendor of rabbit skins who had been sentenced to transportation for buying some silverware that a servant had stolen from her house. She asked for the sentence to be withdrawn, “in consequence of [Barker’s] age which is 57, and the improbability that he and his wife would ever meet again, which being in poor circumstances would render her situation one of great distress.” In forwarding her letter to Lord Sidmouth, the magistrate noted that “the man is already in the Hulk, it will not do to send him back to our Penitentiary, in which there are already three prisoners confined where there should be one.” Revealingly, he added: “These are times when the current of public opinion seems to disarm the law of all its terrors!” And so Barker left for the Fatal Shore, leaving his wife to fend for herself.20