The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The First Fleet had been entirely fitted out and provisioned by the commissioners of the navy; it had been a government affair from start to finish, although the vessels had been chartered through a shipbroker at a flat 10 shillings per ton. The results, as we have seen, were muddled and potentially disastrous, but they were better than what might have happened with private contract. In the long run, though, the navy did not want to be saddled with continuous responsibility for a system of human trash-disposal. Once the guidelines were laid down, every convict transport that sailed from England or Ireland after 1788 was fitted and victualled by private contract. It was said to be cheaper, and certainly it was easier, since it relieved the government of the letting and supervision of dozens of subcontracts. And why should firms of proven respectability not make a fair profit from ridding England of its thieves and scum? The only people the arrangement did not suit were the convicts themselves, since the contract system guaranteed their miseries and, often, their deaths.38

  By the end of the eighteenth century, as experience of the peculiar problems of shipping prisoners halfway around the world grew and was added to Britain’s knowledge of sending armies on long voyages and landing them in fighting shape, the private contractor faced an imposing list of government demands. From the number of lifeboats to the size of rations, all was laid down, along with the exact responsibilities to convicts borne by captain, surgeon and officers.

  The rules would reduce (but never eliminate) suffering and death on board. People at sea always suffered and died, whether they were prisoners or not. During the Napoleonic Wars the British Navy simply assumed that one sailor in thirty would die of disease or accident at sea, apart from casualties in battle; one man in six was always ill. Even among free emigrants to America in the mid-nineteenth century, a much shorter crossing than the Australian voyage—one in thirty died.39

  By the standards of the time, then, the convicts did not do so badly once the system for getting them out to Australia was working smoothly. This happened after 1815, when the average death rate per voyage for male convicts in any five-year period varied between 1 in 85 and (by the end of transportation, in 1868) 1 in 180. At the peak of the System, the average death rate from illness on board was slightly more than 1 percent.40

  But before 1815 it was much larger, and in the 1790s, when the System was finding its sea legs, it was huge. The defects of the contract system appeared with the Second Fleet, which sailed from Portsmouth in January 1790. Apart from Lady Juliana, it consisted of only three transports: Surprize, Neptune and Scarborough. They were contracted from Camden, Calvert & King, whose agent on board was Thomas Shapcote. It undertook to transport, clothe and feed the convicts for a flat, inclusive fee of £17 7s. 6d. per head, whether they landed alive or not.

  The voyage of the Second Fleet turned out to be the worst in the whole history of penal transportation. Out of 254 convicts on Surprize, 36 died at sea; out of 499 on Neptune, 158 died; and on Scarborough, which had finished her voyage in the First Fleet without losing a single life, 73 people perished out of 253. In sum, out of 1,006 prisoners who sailed from Portsmouth, 267 died at sea and at least another 150 after landing.

  Camden, Calvert & King had been slaving contractors, and they had equipped the fleet with slave shackles designed for Africans on the infamous “Middle Passage”—not the chains and basils (ankle irons) that, cruel though they were, allowed a man’s legs some range of movement, but short rigid bolts between the ankles, about nine inches long, that incapacitated them. As William Hill, a second captain in the New South Wales Corps who sailed on Surprize, indignantly reported, “it was impossible for them to move but at the risk of both their legs being broken.”41 Surprize was an old ship, and in a heavy sea the water sluiced through her. The starving prisoners lay chilled to the bone on soaked bedding, unexercised, crusted with salt, shit and vomit, festering with scurvy and boils. One convict, Thomas Milburn, would later describe the voyage in a letter to his parents, later printed as a broadsheet in England:

  [We were] chained two and two together and confined in the hold during the whole course of our long voyage.… [W]e were scarcely allowed a sufficient quantity of victuals to keep us alive, and scarcely any water; for my own part I could have eaten three or four of our allowances, and you know very well that I was never a great eater.… [W]hen any of our comrades that were chained to us died, we kept it a secret as long as we could for the smell of the dead body, in order to get their allowance of provision, and many a time have I been glad to eat the poultice that was put to my leg for perfect hunger. I was chained to Humphrey Davies who died when we were about half way, and I lay beside his corpse about a week and got his allowance.42

  The horrors of the slave trade, Hill thought, were “merciful” beside this. He railed against the “villainy, oppression and shameful peculation” of Donald Traill, master of Neptune, and Nicholas Anstis of Scarborough. Traill was a demented sadist and Anstis not much better. But their interests coincided with the contractors’, as Hill indignantly noted:

  The more they can withhold from the unhappy wretches, the more provisions they have to dispose of on a foreign market, and the earlier in the voyage they die the longer they can draw the deceased’s allowance to themselves; for I fear few of them are honest enough to make a just return of the dates of their deaths to their employers.43

  And in fact, when the Second Fleet reached Sydney and disgorged its cargo of the dead, the dying and the sick, the first thing Anstis and Traill did was to open a market on shore, selling the left-over food and clothing to the half-starved pioneers of the First Fleet.

  The colony’s Anglican chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, counted the sick: 269 people on Neptune were incapacitated—which meant that, out of her 499 prisoners embarked, only 72 landed in fair health. The figures for Scarborough and Surprize were a little less terrible. Johnson braved the ’tween-decks stench of Surprize, but he could not face going below in Neptune. Mewing and groaning, scarcely able to gesture or roll over, monstrously infested with vermin (Johnson estimated that one man had ten thousand lice swarming on his body) the convicts were slung overboard

  as they would sling a cask, a box, or anything of that nature. Upon their being brought up to the open air some fainted, some died upon deck, and others in the boat before they reached the shore. When come on shore, many were not able to walk, to stand or to stir themselves in the least, hence they were led by others. Some creeped upon their hands and knees, and some were carried on the backs of others.

  Among the survivors who landed, all fellow-feeling was extinguished by the ferocity of their repression. Johnson was horrified to see that

  When any of them were near dying, and had something given to them as bread or lillie-pie (flour and water boiled together) … the person next to him would catch the bread, &c., out of his hand and, with an oath, say he was going to die, and therefore it would be of no service to him. No sooner would the breath be out of their bodies than others would watch them and strip them entirely naked. Instead of alleviating the distresses of each other, the weakest were sure to go to the wall. In the night-time, which at this time [June, the Australian winter] is very cold, where they had nothing but grass to lay on and a blanket amongst the four of them, he that was the strongest of the four would take the whole blanket to himself and leave the rest quite naked.44

  While this was going on at Sydney Cove in 1790, the Lords of the Committee of Council were busy submitting the proposed Great Seal of New South Wales to their King. Its obverse depicted “Convicts landed at Botany-Bay; their fetters taken off and received by Industry sitting on a Bale of Goods with her attributes, the distaff, bee-hive, pickaxe and spade, pointing to oxen ploughing, the rising habitations, and a church on a hill at the distance, with a fort for their defence,” and the Virgilian motto Sic fortis Etruria crevit, “Thus Etruria grew strong.”45

  When the news of the Second Fleet reached England, through Phillip’s dispatches and Hill’s letters, th
ere was a small official flap. Neither the government nor the public had expected so much death and misery, but memories were short and the victims, after all, were convicts. Nothing could be done about the wretched contractor’s agent, Thomas Shapcote, for—in the only Second Fleet death that tasted of justice—he had died soon after sailing from Cape Town. Although a strict inquiry was promised, it was never carried out. Voluminous evidence was taken at the Guildhall in London. But Captain Traill had prudently absconded and no one could find him until 1792; whereupon he and his ship’s mate were brought to trial for murdering a single convict. Both were acquitted and not prosecuted again. Three years later Traill was given a senior post at Cape Town. Anstis went scot-free, and the grim firm of Camden, Calvert & King was never indicted. In fact, it had already contracted with the government to prepare and victual the Third Fleet, which sailed in 1791. Once again its ships were old, crowded and barely seaworthy; there were inadequate medical supplies, and the treatment of prisoners was disgustingly abusive. The second mate of the Queen, whose duty it was to issue rations to the 150-odd men and women prisoners on board, used short weights to serve out 60 pounds of beef instead of the regulation 132 pounds at a sitting.46 Conditions were such that 576 Third Fleet convicts needed medical attention when they got to Sydney. But out of a total of 1,869 men and 172 women embarked, only 173 men and 9 women died on the passage—a gross death rate of slightly under 9 percent, or one-third the death rate of the Second Fleet. After that, the government gave no more contracts to Camden, Calvert & King.

  Nervous of publicizing the defects of transportation, it held no public inquiry either. But some improvements were made. The government put restrictions on “these low-lifed barbarous masters, to keep them honest.” It set up deferred payments—so much per convict embarked, the rest (usually about 25 percent) when he or she landed in decent health. Masters and surgeons had to get a certificate by the governor when they arrived in Sydney, rating their performance; if this paper commended their “Assiduity and Humanity,” there would be a bonus from the transport committee when they got back to England.47

  Some captains were beyond such inducements. In 1798 the contractors of the transport Hillsborough were to get a bonus of £4 10s. 6d. for every convict landed alive, over and above the £18 per head paid on embarkation. But her master, William Hingston, starved the prisoners, kept them so heavily chained that they could not walk on deck and kept them below in double irons at night. Typhus also raged through the vessel soon after she left Langston Harbor, and one convict in three died. No action was taken against Hingston.48

  The commissioners tried but usually failed to stop contractors filling their ships with goods to be sold in Sydney at huge markups. However, they put a naval surgeon aboard each vessel who was answerable to them and not the contractors; his job was to supervise convict health, correct the abusive conduct of the ships’ officers and keep an eye on lax or incompetent contractors’ surgeons. No mere medical officer could tell a master what to do on his own ship. Still, their presence was felt. The first transport to sail under this arrangement was the Royal Admiral in May 1792, followed in 1793 by three more shiploads of English and Irish prisoners. All had supervisors on board, and out of 670 prisoners only 14 died.49

  The moral was clear, but by 1795 the Napoleonic Wars had begun and England had no naval surgeons (and few ships) to spare for Botany Bay. In the next twenty years only one privately contracted transport sailed with a naval surgeon on board. Between 1792 and 1800, eighteen convict ships went to Australia from Britain. The first six (from 1792 to 1794) all had supervising agents. Their death rate was one man in 55, one woman in 45. Of the next six ships, only two carried naval agents or surgeons, and their death rate was one man in 19 and one woman in 68. The last group of six had no naval supervision of any kind, and one man in 6 died, and one woman in 34.50

  Most of the dead were Irish convicts. Many had been sent out for political offenses and they were especially ill-treated because the captains feared mutiny. Thus on Britannia, which sailed from Cork late in 1796 with 144 male and 44 female Irish on board, the master Thomas Dennott went on a sadistic rampage. He had a supposed ringleader, William Trimball, flogged until he gave a list of 31 names of convicts who had allegedly taken an oath to mutiny. He then had the ship searched for weapons; the guards found home-made saws, half-a-dozen improvised knives, some lengths of hoop iron and a pair of scissors. This was enough. One convict, James Brannon, received the appalling total of 800 lashes on two successive days, the second session with pieces of fresh horse-skin braided to the cat-o’-nine-tails. “Damn your eyes, this will open your carcase,” Dennott bellowed at him, and it did, although he took several days to die. In all, Dennott meted out 7,900 lashes to the suspects and killed six of them. The surgeon, a half-mad incompetent named Augustus Beyer, refused to dress their wounds and, being terrified of Captain Dennott, would not supervise the floggings; he cowered in his cabin, listening to the whistling lash and the screams of the Irish. A poor female convict named Jenny Blake tried to commit suicide, for which Dennott cropped her hair, slashed her repeatedly across the face and neck with a cane and had her double-ironed.51 The government held an inquiry into the conduct of Dennott and Beyer but took no action against either. It found Dennott had “bordered on too great a degree of severity” and Beyer had been “negligent.” However, neither sailed on a transport ship again.

  Although this nightmarish voyage was an exception, it would be some years before Irish convicts were decently treated. Sir Jerome Fitzpatrick, a frequent agitator for reform on the hulks and in the transports, was able to get the rigid slave leg-bolts struck off prisoners on two vessels waiting to sail from Cork in 1801, Hercules and her sister ship Atlas; they were replaced by lighter chain-fetters, “preferable as well in the Political as the Humane sense.” but he was appalled by the treatment meted out to convicts waiting for transportation in the hulks, both in Ireland and in England. “Prisoners are sent to the Hulks … infirm and diseased, completely Blind, crippled and so advanced in Age that no sort of profit can be made from their labour … [They] cannot in justice to the cause of Humanity or to the profit of the Colony be sent to New South Wales.”52 Writing to Lord Pelham in 1801, he described

  their bad and filthy bedding; some not having half the covering of their bodies; the privation of the nutritious part of their diet, by scumming the Fat off their Brooths; the defect of their Cloathing in the most intense cold; the indiscriminate application of their Labour … with complete and painful Testicular Ruptures hanging towards their knees—without Trusses, yet in common yoked in the Carts; the asthmatic and swelled or ulcerated legg’d subjects equally employed; the tender and painful-eyed at Lime Burning;—on the whole I seldom could discover a rational system in respect either to a profit arising from their labor, or the exercise of reason & humanity in its application.53

  After Hercules sailed from Cork late in 1801, the convicts mutinied. Fourteen were shot out of hand and thirty more died from disease and exhaustion, a death rate of one in four. Conditions on Atlas were even worse; sixty-five died on the voyage, largely because they had to make way for 2,166 gallons of rum, which her master, Captain Brooks, planned to sell in Sydney. Governor King very properly refused to let him land it, but Brooks was never punished. He captained several more convict voyages and died, a respectable old salt, as a justice of the peace in Sydney.

  It was hard to bring these men to book. To prosecute a cruel or corrupt master in England, the Crown would have had to ship convicts back as witnesses; the alternative was a trial in Australia, which would entail giving a New South Wales court criminal jurisdiction over visiting English ships’ captains. In either case, a lot of public money would be spent on a trial, and no one wanted that. Only once were convicts returned to England to testify against a captain. This was in 1817, and on the orders of the relatively liberal, pro-Emancipist governor Lachlan Macquarie, who wanted to arraign the master and officers of the Chapman for killing thre
e and wounding twenty-two unarmed convicts with fusillades of gunfire after rumors of a possible mutiny. Although Macquarie did not expect convictions (and did not get them: all were acquitted) he hoped the case might “protect the persons of the convicts in future on their passage from the cruelties and violence to which they have heretofore been exposed.” All he got was a stiff rebuke from the government.54

  Fitzpatrick summed up the convicts’ predicament in a letter to Pelham’s secretary. “I entreat you again and again to impress [on Pelham] the Idea that in these days of venality, of selfishness and design, you are not to expect just reports to be made by Persons … immediately connected with those who have concern with either the Prison or the Contract Departments,” he wrote. One must not expect

  that the Doctor will ever state his own neglect or mismanagement of his patients, or that Keepers will state the exercise of cruelties … that those who supply Diet or Cloathing should … report these Matters, other than of good Quality, or that the General Managers should criminate the persons who may deserve it but are more or less within their own Appointments.55

  After 1815, however, hell-ships were few; conditions improved on convict transports because of a further change in supervision. Naval doctors had learned more about their craft from the Napoleonic Wars, although military medicine was still a hideously primitive business by modern standards. The man who did most for Australia-bound convicts was William Redfern (1774?–1833), a transported convict himself, and the most skilled and popular surgeon in Sydney. Redfern was family doctor to Governor Macquarie. As such, the “father of Australian medicine” was ideally placed to reform the System. Macquarie ordered him to investigate conditions on three calamitously bad ships that arrived in 1814, Surry, Three Bees and General Hewitt. Redfern’s report was the turning point, for it impressed not only Macquarie but the authorities in England. He stressed the need for ventilation, swabbing, clean heads, disinfection with lime and “oil of tar,” fumigation and exercise. He also insisted that naval surgeons go in every ship as both medical officers and government agents, “as Officers with full power to exercise their Judgment, without being liable to the Control of the Masters of the Transports.”56