The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  In a prolonged sadistic fury, Fyans and the soldiers of the 4th set out to make the mutineers wish they had never been born. It took the blacksmiths nine days to make new irons for the prisoners: they were double or triple weight, with the inside of the basils jagged to lacerate the flesh.35 Rebels locked in the jail awaiting trial were kept naked in a yard so crowded that not a third of them could sit at a time. For the next five months, while the reports went back to Sydney and arrangements were being made to send a judge to Norfolk Island, the rebels were kept locked to a chain cable and “disciplined in a state of nudity for four hours each day, with their arms up and fingers extended, and such of them as betrayed the slightest emotion of pain, were either stabbed by the Military or flogged on the spot.”36 One of the soldiers’ amusements, encouraged by Fyans, was to choose a prisoner at random and get one of the floggers, for a plug of tobacco, to thrust a stick into the cord that bound his arms, twisting it round and round until blood burst from his fingertips.

  The main torture, inevitably, was the lash. In these weeks after the mutiny, Fyans earned his enduring nickname among the convicts, “Flogger Fyans.” So many lashes were inflicted that the government cats were not equal to the task, and they kept unravelling; they were “ridiculous, and the flogger nearly as bad,” Fyans grimly complained. Besides, the prisoners took their usual pride in being “stone men” and endured the triangles in awesome silence. Fyans wanted new, special cats made “to strike terror into these hardened-minded fellows: prisoners of this description cannot be treated as a Gentleman’s Servant in Sydney.” The mass floggings went on into the evening by the light of flambeaux, until the “desperate lawless and listless mob” had been battered into submission. Some convicts, weary of their “acute and intolerable sufferings,” planned to commit group suicide: they would throw stones at the guards “and thus call forth the Fatal Ball.” But this came to nothing.37

  It took Fyans and his staff five months to interrogate all the witnesses and take their depositions for trial. There was, of course, a cataract of self-serving evidence from informers. The formal charge of mutiny was brought against 137 men, but only 55 came to trial because only known informers spoke against them, and the Crown solicitor considered them “characters … of the foulest description, upon whose uncorroborated testimony no conviction could take place.”38 The Supreme Court judge, a deeply religious Anglican named William Westbroke Burton, sailed with Chambers, the Crown solicitor, in June 1834 to hold his court on Norfolk Island. On arrival, Burton was puzzled by the discrepancy between the looks and the contents of the place. Why, he wondered, should its “soft beauty … not have its effect on hearts not wholly hardened by the searing effects of Vice”? Why should the convicts seem “to gather no heartening effect from the beauties of the Creation around them, but to make a Hell of that which else might be a Heaven”?39 Here, Romantic belief in the therapeutic power of landscape (which had become an idée reçue of educated men across the world in the 1830s) had to be suspended, a distressing anomaly to the judge.

  The trial went on through July 1834, and Burton’s dislike for the main source of prosecution evidence, the informers or “approvers,” mounted. He was moved by the evident honesty of the rebels, in contrast to the shiftiness of the witnesses—particularly of Knatchbull, who had tried to incriminate everyone else while saving his own skin. The Crown solicitor had wanted to indict Knatchbull, but “the jury rejected the evidence of the approvers and there being no other evidence against [him] I did not bring him to trial.”40 Burton gave Fyans a severe reprimand from the Bench for accepting any confession from Knatchbull: “He was the chief of the mutineers, the man you should have named first.… You have saved his life, or prolonged it. He never can do good.”*

  By contrast, some of the rebels on trial were praying to die. The oldest of them was only thirty-five years old, but after six months’ retribution from the 4th Regiment they came before Burton “grey, wizened and shrunken, their eyes dull and unseeing, the skin stretched taut on the cheeks; they spoke in whispers and were awful to behold.” One of them declared in the simplest terms that he and his friends had been condemned to death before and had been reprieved and sent to the island: “We wish we had been executed then. It was no mercy to send us to this place. I do not ask for life, I do not want to be spared.… [L]ife is not worth living on such terms.”41

  In the dock, Robert Douglas impressed Burton with his “singular ability and uncommon calmness and self-possession under circumstances so appalling to ordinary minds.” He turned his scarred face and blinded eyes to the judge, uttering the words that remain the final judgment on the ne plus ultra of the System: “Let a man’s heart be what it will when he comes here, his Man’s heart is taken from him, and he is given the heart of a Beast.”

  Other convicts begged to be shriven: “Oh, your Honour, I have committed many crimes for which I ought to die, but do not send me out of this World without seeing my Priest.” But Norfolk Island had no Catholic priest, and later Burton would glimpse this Irishman in his cell “in miserable agony … embracing and beating himself upon a rudely constructed figure of the Cross.”

  By now, he was beginning to feel the System was worse than its “objects.” The trial had provoked a crisis of conscience in him, a “sad meditation,” a gush of pity to which “the Human Heart could not be insensible.” Who, under these conditions, would not rebel? The military jury found thirty of the thirty-five mutineers guilty, but Burton could not sentence them to death. In a wholly unprecedented step he reprieved them all until he could lay their case directly before the governor, Richard Bourke, and bring a Catholic priest to Norfolk Island so that the condemned could receive their last sacraments.

  Back in Sydney, Burton pleaded so eloquently to Governor Bourke and his Executive Council that sixteen of the thirty convicted mutineers had their sentences commuted to hard labor for life. The remaining fourteen, however, were to hang; and so two clergymen—one Catholic, the other Anglican—were dispatched there. This was to have far-reaching effects for the System, for the Catholic priest was the vicar-general of Australia, William Ullathorne, later to be a chief witness in the inquiry that helped abolish transportation to New South Wales.

  Arriving in September, Ullathorne went straight to the jail; he had five days to prepare the rebels for death. The turnkey told him to stand back, and he opened the first cell. “There came forth a yellow exhalation, the produce of the bodies confined therein,” Ullathorne later wrote.

  My unexpected appearance … came on them like a vision. I found them crowded in three cells, so small as barely to allow their lying down together—their garments thrown off for a little coolness. They had been six months looking at their fate. I had to announce life to all but thirteen*—to these, death. A few words of preparation, and then their fate. Those who were to live wept bitterly; whilst those doomed to die, without exception, dropped on their knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God that they were to be delivered from such a place. Who can describe their emotions?42

  Ullathorne baptized four more of them as Catholics; they prayed with him, and then prayed alone, as the vicar-general strolled lost in thought by the cemetery “closed in on three sides by thick, melancholy groves of the tear-dropping manchineel, while the fourth is open to the restless sea.”43

  The hangings took place in two sessions, on September 22 and 23. Each time, half the prison population was mustered in front of the gallows, while the rest looked on from the upper story of the barracks. The condemned men “manifested extraordinary fervour of repentance,” Ullathorne wrote. “They received on their knees the sentence as the will of God. Loosened from their chains, they fell down in the dust and, in the warmth of their gratitude, kissed the very feet that had brought them peace.” In a silence broken only by the cry of birds and the solemn concussion of surf on the Kingston reef, they mounted the scaffold, dressed in white like bridegrooms. The oldest, Henry Knowles, was twenty-nine. The youngest, William McCullough, had just tur
ned twenty-one. They gazed at the horizon, at the iron rocks of Phillip Island in the circling blue. The hoods went over their heads. “Their lives were brief,” wrote their priest, “and as agitated and restless as the waves which now break at their feet, and whose dying sound is their only requiem.”

  iii

  MORISSET WAS long gone. Months earlier, he had gone back to the mainland, convalescent and unofficially disgraced. He sold his army commission and invested the proceeds, all he had, in the newly formed Bank of Australia, which then collapsed, taking his money with it. He lived on in obscurity as a police magistrate in Bathurst, making £6 a week, part of which was garnished to satisfy his creditors. He died in 1852, leaving four sons, six daughters and his wife Emily totally unprovided for. He never wrote a line of reminiscence about Norfolk Island.44

  His successor there was Major Joseph Anderson (1790–1877) of the 50th Regiment, another career veteran of the Peninsular War, a grasping, vigilant and pious Scot, with a face like an irritable osprey—bleak sunken eyes, a blade of a nose, a wiry bush of white whiskers. “Potato Joe” Anderson’s command of Norfolk Island lasted from March 1834 to February 1839. Opinions about him were divided. Ullathorne, no friend to cruelty, praised his “prudence and solicitude” in encouraging good prisoners, in contrast to the “wanton tyranny” of Morisset. In his own memoirs, Anderson claimed to have reduced floggings from Morisset’s 1,000 sentences a year to a mere 70 or 75.45 This might have surprised the convicts themselves. Thomas Cook, who arrived on Norfolk Island in 1836 and lived through most of Anderson’s regime, thought that

  his measures were of a most severe and harassing description.… [T]he tide of Informing had uninterrupted scope, and anything beyond an expressed suspicion … was not required by his System.… It drew no distinction between the well-behaved and the notoriously bad-disposed prisoner.46

  Anderson once gave five men 1,500 lashes before breakfast. He punished two loafing prisoners who neglected to sow corn properly with 300 lashes each for the Biblical-sounding offense of “robbing the Earth of its seed,” as though their crime was vegetable contraception. Prisoners could run up heavy punishment records, like William Riley’s during two years in heavy irons after the mutiny:

  100 lashes For saying “O My God” while on the Chain

  for Mutiny.

  100 lashes Smiling while on the Chain.

  50 lashes Getting a light to smoke.

  200 lashes Insolence to a soldier.

  100 lashes Striking an overseer who pushed him.

  8 months’ solitary Refusing to work.

  confinement,

  on the chain

  3 months ditto Disobedience of Orders.

  3 months’ Gaol Being a short distance from the Settlement.

  100 lashes before all Insolence to the Sentry.

  hands in the Gaol

  100 lashes Singing a Song.

  50 lashes Asking Gaoler for a Chew of Tobacco.

  100 lashes Neglect of work.

  In all, this came to 1,000 lashes, eleven months’ solitary and three months’ jail in two years. Another prisoner, Michael Burns, got the stupendous total of 2,000 lashes in less than three years from Anderson: his crimes, like Riley’s, included “Singing a Song”—presumably one of the Irish “treason songs.”

  Anderson exacted harsh extremes of labor from the prisoners. Thus, when a field was to be hoed, a line of convicts began hacking across it and the strongest workers were picked to be the pacesetters at either end; those in the middle would be punished if they lagged and made to work after hours until they dropped.

  Anderson was a builder, too, and his architectural memorial is the Commissariat Store (since converted to a church), a massive, coarsely detailed three-story building surrounded by a tall security wall. It draws its peculiarly dogmatic character from the exaggerated rhyme between its pediment and the ziggurat-like flight of steps that leads up to the entrance. In a plaque on that pediment, and in a cartouche above the main building of the New Military Barracks (1837) next door, he had a convict mason chisel his name: Major Anderson, 50th Regt., Commandant.

  He also planned a new jail, to replace the foul, rickety structure in which the mutineers had been crammed. To get its foundations up above the swampland that lay between the sea and Military Row (where the administrative buildings, barracks and officers’ quarters stood), he had all the landfill from the excavations for the Commissariat Store and New Military Barracks moved to the new gaol site, dumped and levelled. Thus the convicts, having hacked a slice off the flank of a hill 300 feet deep, 40 feet high and 700 feet long, now had to carry some 150,000 cubic yards of earth nearly a quarter of a mile in handcarts. Apart from some stretches of the Blue Mountain roads, this must have been the toughest building job in the history of the Australian convict system.47

  Labor was aimed at punishment, not production; the conditions robbed exertion of its meaning. No ploughs were allowed on Norfolk Island “under the idea of making the work of the prisoners laborious”; so all the convicts responded with the “Government stroke.” Everything went at a snail’s pace, despite the threat of the lash, and the result was an almost parodical inefficiency. The harder the overseers and guards pushed, the more the convicts malingered. They feigned sickness or induced it, poisoning themselves with lye and nightshade berries; they raised ulcers with manchineel juice or got friends to cut their toes off with a hoe. Anderson had such malingerers flogged, but sometimes sick men came up for a flogging, too, and died. Thus, in October 1836 a prisoner named Barrett, gravely weakened by dysentery, was taken for a malingerer and sentenced to 200 lashes; he collapsed and died after the first 50.48

  Deranged by cruelty and misery, some men would opt for a lifetime at the bottom of the carceral heap by blinding themselves; thus, they reasoned, they would be left alone. This was the passive end of the moral anarchy that pervaded Norfolk Island; its active end was the “demonizing” of prisoners by an authority whose own capricious brutality could offer no road back from their abasement. For, as Laurence Frayne put it,

  If you endeavour to take out of [a prisoner] that manly confidence which ought to be cherished in every civilized human being, you then begin the work of demoralization; and it will end in the very Dreggs of debasement & an insensibility to every species of integrity & decency, and eradicate every right feeling in the human breast. You make him regardless of himself, and fearless as to the consequences of doing wrong to others.… There is a certain pitch to which you can work upon man to bring him to fear … but exceed that and you make him reckless. Begin to treat him as beneath [your] care and notice, and they then think that you put God, his laws, his omniscience, his providence, as though they were mere nominal attributes and not virtual & real.49

  Norfolk Island, Frayne argues, wrecked the social contract. Authority was supposed, by sinner and saint alike, to draw its value from its mirroring power—its role as a reflected sign of God’s mercy as well as His justice. Bad authority strips all men of hope by showing them a cracked glass, a different truth about hierarchies:

  They at once throw off all restraint & regard for either God or man, and consider everyone over them as acting under the influence of Hypocrisy and Imposture, usurping a power never delegated or sanctioned by the Almighty. They say you make man the slave of man. They resist and cavil at every trifle, and multiply every little departure from rectitude as a premeditated scheme to bilk & gull them into submission … because they are under the operation of the LAW, and cannot seek or obtain redress.50

  Missionaries on Norfolk Island were struck by the state of mind that oppression bred in the convicts. Judge Burton had praised the beauty of the place, and Ullathorne was enraptured by it as he watched the evening sun on the pines “like the bronzed spires of some vast cathedral, flooded in golden light.” Like Burton, he wondered why such beauty did not reform the soul, on this island where “man wanders, the demoniac of the scene”:

  The devout man, like David, will muse on these Hi
s works, until he kindles like a fire; but perverse hearts will never see fine days.… [W]e find the foulest crimes always staining the fairest lands. Those five criminal cities, on whom the Lord rained down his fire and his fury, were placed in a very beautiful country, and Norfolk Island is the modern representative of these guilty cities.51

  Norfolk Island resembled Sodom sexually, but the likeness went deeper. It seemed to have become the epitome of all inversions, to breed that final hopelessness held by theologians to be the worst torment of Hell: a place where—in those words of Milton used by Edmund Burke in an early Commons debate on transportation—“all life dies and all death lives.” It completed the myth of the antipodean inversion of nature by projecting it onto human society. Within its unspeakable microcosm language itself was reversed:

  So corrupt was their most ordinary language … that, in their dialect, evil was literally called good, and good, evil—the well-disposed man was branded wicked, whilst the leader in monstrous vice was styled virtuous. The human heart seemed inverted, and the very conscience reversed.52

  Ullathorne had never heard this kind of argot on the mainland. Who could help such men as would use it? The Catholics (about a third of the prisoners at the time of Ullathorne’s second visit there in 1835) were desperately grateful for any priest’s visit, for only a priest could hear their confessions and so enable them to die in a state of grace. But the Protestants no longer kept up their religious observances; there was no chaplain on Norfolk Island until 1836, because no respectable clergyman would sacrifice his career on such a remote altar. The first one was an unordained missionary, the Reverend Thomas Atkins, an erratic young man of twenty-eight with a burning sense of indignation at official cruelty, who took the convicts’ side from the start, quarrelled sharply with Major Anderson, accused him of sadism and graft, and was stigmatized by Governor Bourke as “highly indiscreet and improper.” The convict Thomas Cook, by contrast, called him “the brightest star that ever shone on this depraved island.” He lasted less than three months. The more normal view of God and religion among the prisoners on Norfolk Island was described by James Backhouse, writing in horror of a prisoner of “great recklessness,” “chafed in his mind,” who “doubted the being of a Deity, but wished, if there was a God in Heaven, that he would deprive him of life.” Such men had one obsession: escape. “Their passions, severed from their usual objects, centred in one intense thirst for liberty, to be gained at whatever cost. Their faces were like those of demons.”53