The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Port McQuarrie Toweringabbie Norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyranny and condemnation many a blooming Irish man rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains.

  Of all the Australian camp commandants, it was Logan who had the worse reputation for cruelty. The convicts regarded him as an ogre and his subordinates as grotesque monsters. Stories—almost certainly untrue—were told about his chief flogger, a man with deformed legs named Old Bumble (because he staggered along like a bee walking), who would wash off the bloody thongs of his cat-o’-nine-tails in a can of water and drink the contents. Logan was said to have flogged men to death for the pleasure of it and driven “hundreds” into the grave by working them in chains until they dropped. The convict resister, wrote a former Moreton Bay prisoner named William Ross in a pamphlet written after Logan’s death,

  would be tortured with flogging and slavery until the spark of life had fled, when he would be buried like a dog.… Such conduct is horrid, and ought not to have been permitted; but unfortunately, Logan had the greatest interest with the never-to-be-forgotten Governor D[arling], who backed him in every tyrannical work.43

  Such was the Logan to frighten children, the infamous Beast of Brisbane. In later years, efforts would be made to exonerate him as a capable explorer who battled against shocking conditions. The best likeness of Logan offers few clues to him. What is one to read in Logan’s stern face with its pale, high cheekbones, level stare and slightly twisted mouth, raised on its formal Georgian plinth of white linen? Only that he looks as authoritarian as any other man of his day, rank and calling. Soldiers liked to be depicted like that—and Logan, before he was anything else, was a soldier.

  He had been born in Scotland in 1792, and he joined the 57th Regiment at the age of eighteen. For the next fifteen years he served his King all over the world: against Napoleon in Spain and France, in the American War, on garrison duty in Ireland, and finally in Australia, where he arrived in 1825. Because his whole life had been shaped by the army, Logan—like almost any other career officer—took for granted the army’s assumptions about human nature; and the chief of these, in the early nineteenth century, was that the motley rabble who comprised the rank and file could only be turned into soldiers by unremitting discipline backed up by summary flagellation and the threat of the firing squad. Drill and the cat, not mercy or appeals to esprit de corps, had made the machine that defeated Napoleon. Logan’s own regiment was noted for its severity. Why soften this proven system for worse scum, the convicts? “A little severity,” Logan wrote a year after taking command at Moreton Bay, “was absolutely necessary to convert the settlement into anything like a place of punishment.”44

  On paper the commandant’s powers were strictly limited. Logan could inflict summary punishments to 50 lashes, but standing orders warned that extra labor and solitary confinement should be preferred to the lash. However, the more detailed instructions he received from Governor Darling in 1829 made “every person, whether free or bond … subject to his orders” and gave official sanction to an inescapable fact: At distant places like Moreton Bay there was no way to keep an eye on the commandant, and therefore he could rule his small kingdom of pain as an absolute despot. He was the only magistrate, and through him all justice—other than trial for new felonies, which had to be held in a full Sydney court—was interpreted. His officers would stand behind him whenever questions were asked; so, as a rule, would free settlers (especially since Logan had absolute and summary power over their movements and could expel any one at will). Convicts, of course, had no voice. No convict could hope to persuade a Sydney court of the commandant’s tyrannies; most of them were illiterate, and in any case all affidavits had to be sworn before Logan.45

  When Logan arrived, he had a labor force of about one hundred convicts. By the end of 1826, it had doubled; in 1828 he had 415; and by February 1829, he had 772. The peak convict population was 1,020, in 183146 Thus, although the labor supply grew steeply during Logan’s reign, it was never large enough for ambitious building programs—a problem compounded by Darling’s vacillations about the nature of the settlement and whether it should have free settlers or not. Under these conditions, Logan found it hard to make long-range plans. Yet by mid-1827, he had 120 acres under wheat and another 300 prepared for maize, while on the bank of the Brisbane River a town was shaping up, with a grid of beaten-earth streets, compacted by the soldiers’ boot and the dragging of the prisoners’ irons, and with a hospital, barracks, stores, and even a few stone cottages among the warped timber hovels.

  It was done at a certain cost, which the convicts paid. Many of them worked as naked as Aborigines in the sun, except for their irons, and had to eat “Snakes, Pigs that have died of disease, Cabbage leaves … and every filth that was thrown into the streets.”47 An older hand, who escaped so often that he served a total of 26 years on a 7-year sentence for petty larceny, spent 7 years at Moreton Bay alone:

  I lost one of my eyes and the use of one of my hands. I suffered a great deal of hardship because I was unable to do the work allotted to me, and the punishment was very severe … [M]ost of the men at the Settlement were in irons … I had chains on my leg for four years … [I]t was through being ill-treated by the overseers that I lost the use of my hand—they struck me with whatever was handiest.48

  Although the punishment registers for Moreton Bay in Logan’s time are lost, its seems clear that Logan habitually worked prisoners in irons, whatever their sentences.49 He was also a relentless flogger. One sample record of the floggings he handed out has survived; they were noted in a journal kept by some convict clerk for Peter Spicer, the superintendent of convicts, and show that from February to October 1828, Logan ordered 200 floggings, for a total of 11,100 lashes.

  The flogging cannot have abated much after October 1828, because Logan was facing an explosive situation in his settlement. The crops failed in the summer of 1828–29. And there were epidemics of trachoma and dysentery. The crude death rate at Moreton Bay shot up to 35 per 1,000 per month, and Logan chose this of all moments to put the settlement on half rations. In the midst of this social catastrophe, there was a great rise in the number of convicts hospitalized for the special affliction of Moreton Bay, coyly Latinized in the records as “flagellatio.”50

  Logan’s subordinates, to be sure, were not much help. Peter Spicer was a ludicrous incompetent, while Henry Cowper, the settlement’s surgeon, appeared to his newly arrived assistant in 1830 as

  a most uncouth individual, an excessive grog-drinker and smoker, and the most ill-tempered and quarrelsome man I ever saw … I really think he is half insane. However, he is aware of his dreadful temper, for he speaks about it and says he is quite sure he will yet be confined in a madhouse.51

  No wonder, then, that the prisoners tried to run away. Any chance of escape, no matter how thin, was preferable to life in this Georgian snake pit where even their turds were inspected for undigested kernels of stolen corn. In 1828–29, 126 prisoners (about one in ten) bolted into the bush and headed south, clutching what pitiful supplies of flour, fat and corn they had managed to steal and save, prepared to risk being killed (and, most of them believed, eaten) by Aborigines. Sixty-nine of them walked or were dragged back to the settlement, half-dead from exhaustion, to face 100, 200 or even 300 clawing strokes of the cat and be loaded with 20-pound irons for the rest of their sentences, to which Logan (as magistrate) would usually add another three years. (This was illegal and fell outside his powers as magistrate; but it drew no rebuke from Darling.) The fate of the rest is unknown. Most died. No prisoner was ever officially said to have reached freedom from Moreton Bay. Some may have done it, for several actually got as far down the coast as Port Macquarie before they were taken.

  Meanwhile relations got worse with the Aborigines, whose stance toward the colonials by the late 1820s had changed from curiosity to open hostility. Convicts were ready to kill any black they met in the bush, if they cou
ld; the spiral of violence grew, and by early 1828 Logan had to report that armed bands of Aborigines, sometimes fifty men at a time, were attacking the maize fields.52 However, the convict tradition that Logan retaliated for these crop raids by shooting an Aborigine and hanging up his stuffed skin in the maize fields as a warning may be unfounded—although similar things were done in New South Wales.53

  Governor Darling countenanced what Logan was doing at Moreton Bay, but word of it leaked out into the community. Almost certainly it was meant to: the settlement needed a terrible reputation among convicts if it was to become a deterrent. The problem was not so much Logan’s severity as his rumored capriciousness. By 1830, voices in Sydney were asking what was really going on at Moreton Bay. The leading voice was that of Edward Smith Hall (1786–1860).

  Hall, the son of a minor English banker, had emigrated to New South Wales in 1811. Even in England he had involved himself in religious and social work, and he was a friend of the Abolitionist William Wilberforce. This recommended him to Lachlan Macquarie, who granted him more than 2,000 acres of pastoral land over the years. Hall failed utterly as a farmer, and his record as an officer of the fledgling Bank of New South Wales was not much better. But to a man of hot conscience and philanthropic instincts, penal Australia—especially after Macquarie left it—offered a vast acreage to rake muck in. Hall found his vocation as a newspaper editor. In 1826 he and a partner in Sydney founded the Monitor. Its broad political aims were like those of Wentworth’s Australian: trial by jury, government by representative assembly, and the defense of civil liberties against Darling the martinet. More than the Australian, whose constituency was the Emancipists, the Monitor was concerned (or seditiously obsessed, some officials thought) with the plight of convicts under sentence whether privately mistreated as assigned servants or officially ground down on the chain gangs and at the penal stations.

  Darling was Hall’s bête noire. His leaden autocracy, Hall editorialized, had made New South Wales “singularly prone to espionage, suspicion, and a servile dread of offending the higher authorities.” Through the Monitor and in a series of open letters to the colonial secretary in England, he accused him of negligence, unconstitutional disregard for the “ancient mild Laws of England,” graft, favoritism to rich colonists, jury-packing, indifference to “proven” cases of official torture, and “prostituting his Authority and influence as Governor to feelings of private resentment.”54

  Hall’s first big clash with Darling on events, rather than policies, came in 1826 over the Sudds-Thompson case. Joseph Sudds and Patrick Thompson, privates in the 57th Regiment, had come to believe (like many of their comrades in New South Wales) that the life of a serving convict, bad as it was, was still easier than a rank-and-file soldier’s. A soldier who committed a crime in Australia faced transportation to a penal settlement. To get out of the army, Sudds and Thompson robbed a Sydney shop and made no effort to escape arrest. They were tried and sentenced to 7 years in a penal settlement.

  This enraged Darling, who felt the news that His Majesty’s soldiers preferred the life of a condemned convict would make either the army seem brutal (and discourage enlistment) or transportation mild (thus encouraging crime). He took it on himself, quite illegally, to cancel their prison sentences and send them to the iron gangs for 7 years. This was preceded by a ceremony of disgrace: dressed in the convicts’ “canaries” (the yellow and gray uniform of felonry) and wearing massive spiked collars linked to their leg-fetters by 13-pound chains, Sudds and Thompson were drummed out of their regiment and into jail, where they languished in their irons. But to Darling’s great embarrassment, Sudds—who had suffered from “dropsy”—fell ill from this treatment and died a few days later. Darling had not known Sudds’s medical history, if only because he had not asked about it; certainly he did not mean to kill the man. But the results of his “exemplary” punishment made such measures seem Draconian and provoked a wave of revulsion among all Emancipists. From the Australian and the Monitor, Wentworth and Hall accused the governor of murder, torture and Nero-like perversions of justice.

  Darling fought back stiffly but as best he could against Wentworth (“a vulgar, ill-bred fellow”) and Hall (“a fellow without principles, an apostate missionary”). From that point on; all criticism was sedition. “The opposition papers,” he complained to Bathurst, “must destroy that Confidence which the people generally ought to place in the Government, and in a Colony composed as this is produce, if not checked, anarchy and revolt.”55 He saw, as anyone could, that the Sudds-Thompson case was a heaven-sent lever for the “democrats” to press their claims for trial by open jury and a representative assembly. So he made a clumsy lunge against the opposition press. He tried to muzzle the Australian and the Monitor by imposing newspaper licenses, which would be withdrawn if they printed a “blasphemous or seditious libel.” John Macarthur also urged him to kill their circulation with a stamp duty of 4d. per copy. Both measures had already been proposed by the autocrat of Van Diemen’s Land, George Arthur. But all legislative bills had to be reviewed by the chief justice of the colony, Sir Francis Forbes.

  Forbes thought his narrow-minded zealot of a governor had “less knowledge of the laws of his country than any gentleman filling his high official station whom it was ever my fortune to meet.” He took most of the bite out of Darling’s acts, until they could no longer silence the press—although they could certainly harass it. Hall, in return, kept up his invective against Darling and the Merinos and suffered seven prosecutions for criminal libel. In 1829 Darling at last managed to imprison him, but Hall continued to edit the Monitor from his cell and send long diatribes against the governor to officials in England. And it was in the Sydney jail, in March 1830, that Hall was handed the document that he believed would topple Captain Logan, disgrace Darling and force reform at Moreton Bay.

  It was a manuscript left in the condemned cell of Sydney Jail by a convict named Thomas Matthew; he had left it hidden when he was taken out to be hanged. Matthew had been a “troublesome” convict. On the way from Sydney to Moreton Bay, he plotted a mutiny on the transport City of Edinburgh; the plan failed, because a prisoner named John Carrol ratted on the ringleaders. Matthew bided his time and smashed Carrol’s skull with a pickax at Moreton Bay. He was brought down to Sydney, tried and cast to die.

  His death-cell letter explained that his own life was of no value to him. It told of life at Moreton Bay under “such a herd of tyrants that never met together in one place before.” The convict overseers “murder many a bright man,” but the prisoners could bring no charges against them, because they had to be made to Logan. The jail gang overseer, named Trenand, killed a prisoner with a spade in front of ten convict witnesses, “but such was their terror [that] none of them dared to mention it, for fear of being flogged to death.” Overseers stole the prisoners’ bread; men died in the fields and the cells “from want of attention and food” and were flogged to death “for stealing a cob of corn.” Some convicts were so weak that they had to crawl out to field labor. And Logan in one of his “mad fits” had all the cripples dragged from hospital and flogged “in their crutches.” Matthew claimed he had seen men so broken by the first half of a flogging that they had to be brought back to the triangles the next day in a wheelbarrow to be strung up for the second half.

  Hall published this letter in the Monitor on March 27, 1830. He also declared, from jail, that he would prosecute Captain Logan for the murder of a convict named William Swann, who (Hall alleged] had died of ill-treatment at Moreton Bay in 1827. But here he was wrong, for Swann had died of dysentery in the hospital—or so surgeon Cowper swore in an affidavit.56 Captain Logan now wrote a stiff note to the colonial secretary demanding Hall’s prosecution for criminal libel. In June, the Executive Council questioned both Reverend Vincent, the former Moreton Bay chaplain, and Surgeon Cowper. Cowper denied outright that there had ever been any cruelty, let alone murder, at Moreton Bay, and said nobody named Trenand had ever been an overseer there. The
clergyman did remember Trenand, “who was said to be of a cruel disposition, and in the habit of beating and abusing the prisoners,” but denied that he had heard of him killing a prisoner with a spade. Asked whether men were killed unofficially by guards there, he hedged. “Certainly not to justify the statement in the paper,” was his strange reply.57 Neither man remembered seeing cripples flogged or confirmed the more lurid accusations of arbitrary torture in Matthew’s gallows document. Prompted by Darling, the Executive Council advised the attorney-general to issue yet another writ for criminal libel against Edward Hall, that spreader of “sedition and levelling.”

  The case never came to trial. Logan was about to leave for India—a posting now made necessary by the terrible reputation his regime at Moreton Bay had earned from the Emancipist press. By October 1830, his successor as commandant, Captain James Clunie of the 17th Regiment, was already learning the ropes at Moreton Bay. But Logan was not to leave Australia until he had given his sworn testimony in the trial of Hall and the Monitor, and while awaiting this call to Sydney he filled in time making exploratory sorties into the Brisbane Valley, upriver from Moreton Bay. On October 17, during one of these rides, his party lost him in the labyrinth of scrub.

  Four days later a search-party found his saddle, its stirrup-leathers cut with a stone ax. Bands of convicts, led by Cowper and others, combed the bush for another week. In a clearing that bore the marks of many aboriginal feet, as though a wild dance had been held there, they found some pages of his notebook trampled in the dry grasses, along with a bloodstained tatter of his waistcoat and a part of his compass, broken and discarded by prying stone-age fingers. The next morning, about a mile away, the searchers found Logan’s horse dead and swollen in a creek-bed, with sticks incomprehensibly strewn over it. Up the steep bank of the stream was a shallow grave. Logan’s bare feet, partly eaten, protruded from the earth and his boots lay to one side. The blacks had speared him to death and buried him facedown, but the wild dogs had begun to dig him up; now he was black with flies and beyond eating. When his body was brought back to Moreton Bay, the convicts “manifested insane joy at the news of his murder, and sang and hoorayed all night, in defiance of the warders.”58