My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury in the highest degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the dir’st degree—
All several sins, all us’d in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, “Guilty! Guilty!”
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die, no soul will pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in my heart no pity to myself?
In the afternoon the show was moved up the hill to Longridge and repeated for the New Hands (who were kept segregated from the old, in strict deference to orders). Down at Kingston there were more amusements and sports, lasting into the evening. When night fell, fireworks—paid for, like the rum, by Maconochie himself—banged and glittered over the prison compounds; and by the time the last spark had trailed away in the blackness, Maconochie noted that “not a single irregularity, or even anything approaching an irregularity, took place.… [E]very man quietly returned to his ward; some even anticipated the hour.”
When the good colonists of Sydney heard news of this extraordinary day, so utterly unlike any other in the past fifty years of the colony’s history, a wave of execration broke on Maconochie’s head. The scum of the System were parading free, with rum, dances and fireworks, on the Isle of the Damned. What further revolutions might this not presage? What would the mainland convicts do when they heard about the felon’s picnic? How soon could this rosewater liberal of a Scot be recalled? Not soon enough, was the answer. Gipps was embarrassed by Maconochie’s disregard of orders, but he was a principled man and had given his word to the reformer. “My desire to see Capt. Maconochie’s system tried in a fair and proper manner remains undiminished,” he wrote to Lord Russell in June 1840, enclosing copies of his protégé’s “rather voluminous” reports, but Gipps expressed his “surprise”
that [he] had, within a week after his arrival in Norfolk Island, abolished all distinctions between the two classes; that he had extended equally to all a system of extreme indulgence, and held out hopes, almost indiscriminately, to them of being speedily restored to freedom.… [T]hough my disapproval of Capt. Maconochie’s proceedings … was received by him on the 20th May, no attention whatever was paid by him to my communications.… [O]n the contrary, within a few days after the receipt of them the whole Convict population of the Island was regaled with Punch, and entertained with the performance of a Play.32
In the meantime, Russell had written to Gipps, having second thoughts about Maconochie and giving the governor authority to recall the reformer if he thought proper:
Notwithstanding the Objections which I entertain … to the Theory of Captain Maconochie, that Reformation is to be the sole Object of the Convict System, I still wish the Experiment to be tried under his immediate Supervision; but with the clear understanding that you shall remove him, if you should find Mischief ensue … from his Management.33
But when Gipps’s account of the Queen’s Birthday celebrations on Norfolk Island reached him, Russell’s next letter took on a sharper note of alarm:
I see no Alternative but to direct that Captain Maconochie should not be intrusted with the management of any Convicts who have more than three years’ time to serve before … they may obtain a Ticket of Leave. The rest of the Convicts at Norfolk Island should be gradually removed from under his Control.… Make the necessary arrangements with Sir John Franklin for the Reception of such Convicts in Tasman’s Peninsula.
I have already authorised you to remove Captain Maconochie from Norfolk Island.… [I am convinced of] the necessity of leaving you full Discretion to supersede that Officer.34
Maconochie, however, cared not a fig for the colonists’ prejudices. He pressed ahead with his plans for cultural and moral reform. The first are summed up in a shopping list he forwarded to Gipps.35 By past penal standards, it was outlandish. He wanted books, for instance—an encyclopedia, magazines on engineering, craft and farming, cookbooks for brewers and bakers; these would help teach the men trades they had never learned, or else forgotten. He asked for a copy of Robinson Crusoe, to instill “energy, hopefulness in difficulty, regard & affection for our brethren in savage life, &c.” He wanted the convicts to read travel and exploration books, starting with Cook’s Voyages, because “the whole white race in this hemisphere wants softening towards its aboriginal inhabitants.” Hoping “to invest country and home with agreeable images and recollections [which] are too much wanting in the individual experience of our lower and criminal classes,” he sent for books on English history and popular national poetry—Robert Burns, George Crabbe, the sentimental sketches of English village life by Mary Mitford, a set of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels to encourage national pride in Scottish convicts, and the works of the Rousseau-tinged woman novelist Maria Edgeworth, such as the satirical Castle Rackrent (1800), to do the same for Irish ones. He also stocked this prisoners’ library with moral and religious works, some, as he put it himself, of “controversial divinity,” for he wanted the prisoners to think and argue together, not rot in their cells:
Polemical discussions are sometimes inconvenient; but I do not dread them, for they are nearly always, I think, improving. Wherever a taste for them prevails, as in Scotland, Switzerland &Ca, it is always found accompanied by other good qualities; while on the contrary, where they are despised, as in France, or crushed, as in Spain, the national character seems to suffer.… I would have no fear [of controversies], even in a prison.
He included the works of Shakespeare in his island library, for their nobility; had his doubts about the reformative power of theater (“the English drama is often licentious, but substantially its tendency is moral”); and felt that theatrical training could help convicts overcome their passions. Such had been his purpose on the Queen’s Birthday.
Music would be the main therapy; the Orphean lyre, once heard on Norfolk Island, would charm and soothe the savage beasts of the Old System. Music was an “eminently social occupation.” It taught collaboration and disciplined obedience. It rested on strict order and subordination, and, if “national and plaintive” in character, kept its hearers affable and patriotic. “It is sometimes thought to lead to drinking,” wrote this earnest Scot, anticipating objections from on high, “but this, when true at all, applies to rude rather than scientific music.… The most musical people, as the Italians or Germans, are thus sober rather than drunken.” (Maconochie had never visited either country.) He put in a request for trumpet, fifes, horns, drums, cymbals and two “seraphines” (reed accordions with keyboard and bellows, invented in the 1830s and popular in small parishes that could not afford full organs). He spent £46 of the government’s money on a large stock of music-paper: old, infirm and crippled prisoners would be set to copy the scores out.
Gipps worried that there was little he could do, short of recalling Maconochie altogether, to stop him running Norfolk Island as he pleased. The island was too far from the mainland. But he had his colonial secretary, E. Deas Thomson, write a blistering rebuke:
[Your] Errors … appear to have been the consequence of Your own too sanguine temperament.… Deeply impressed with the Truth of your own Principles, and elated, it is not unreasonable to suppose with the Notice which your Writings had attracted in England, you appear to his Excellency to have set to work with the Idea that everything was to give way before you.36
He also reported to Russell, a week later, that although he could not yet
be justified in declaring Captain Maconochie’s System of Management has failed, I doubt whether he will be ever able himself to work it out, as the Nonfulfilment of the Expectations which he has encouraged the Prisoners to entertain must … diminish his Influence over them.37
Maconochie replied, with annoying airiness, that he had ignored his orders to submit all new convicts to
a time of punishment labor before putting them under the Mark System because “it can scarcely be doubted that this Act [2 & 3 William IV, c. 62] will be repealed.… I never thought of these rules as a guide; I thought them a dead letter.”38
But Gipps’s reply, through Thomson, put the politics of the matter quite flatly. The issue was not how well Maconochie’s measures were working on Norfolk Island, but their effects on the mainland:
Whether [the Old System] was good or bad is not the question; it was a system which caused transportation to that settlement to be held in great and salutary dread by the convict population of New South Wales, and to destroy that dread before even any substitute for transportation to Norfolk Island had been devised, would be to expose this colony to risks for which [Gipps] cannot make himself responsible. I am therefore to inform you that the instructions … are now repeated.39
Gipps was pincered between his hope that Maconochie’s system would succeed and his fear of the majority of influential colonists—irascible, bigoted men, haunted by the threat of a “slave rebellion,” who believed that convicts should be kept in iron constraint and not given an inch. Pressed to make a public statement, he reluctantly criticized Maconochie in a speech to the New South Wales Legislative Council. This whipped the criticisms of the conservative press into a firestorm. Before long, as Gipps himself recounted it,
every man was against him, every man derided his System.… The feeling in fact against him, though not so intense, and far more justifiable, was analogous to that which, a dozen years ago, manifested itself in the West Indies against any attempt to ameliorate the condition of slavery.40
But Maconochie, a thousand miles away, pressed indefatigably on. He argued vehemently against Russell’s wish, as transmitted to him by Gipps, that “my Men” who had won their tickets-of-leave should be sent down to Van Diemen’s Land to complete their sentences:
Nothing would, I think, be more unfair to them, or more certainly tend to their second Fall. Dropping, as it were, from the Clouds, without Friends or Experience, or the Habits of Evasion and Suspicion which in existing Circumstances must and do characterize the mass of the Convict Population there,—likely to be regarded with dislike by the inferior Authorities as having been trained on with different Maxims from their own,—indifferently supported thus by their Superiors when they do get into difficulty,—and jeered and tempted, if but for the Fun of it, by their Equals,—I can see but one fate for them, and that is too melancholy to be further dwelt on.41
Maconochie continued to lobby Gipps for more money, more power, an absolute scope for his Mark System. His long-winded, theory-stuffed dispatches soon palled in Sydney. Gipps’s patience frayed. “His Excellency cannot lay the public Purse open to your Hands,” snapped Thomson in July 1842.
He cannot make you what, in one of your own Letters, you expressed a Desire to be,—a Dictator.… After a Correspondence of more than Two Years his Excellency feels he is sufficiently acquainted with your System to render unnecessary any Discussion on the first Principles of it; and he cannot help remarking, although he does it with great Reluctance, that your frequent Practice of introducing Theoretical Reasoning into your Despatches causes the Public Correspondence to be both tedious and unsatisfactory.42
Maconochie obviously had grave problems. He could not promise the convicts freedom under his system and be sure that the government would honor his word; his powers were ill-defined; money was short; and to keep two separate systems for two groups of prisoners on a small island was an administrative nightmare. But he kept at it, and he described his general relations with the prisoners in optimistic terms. “I deliberately claim the Merit of almost complete Success,” he exulted in a lengthy dispatch to Gipps in June 1842. “I have almost made black white.” He expatiated on his day-to-day relations with the convicts:
I showed the greatest Confidence in all; walking familiarly among them; taking my Wife and Family with me to every Corner of the Island, without Protection; removing the iron bars from my House Windows …
I bade them stand up like Men, whomsoever they addressed … [A]t one time, if a Prisoner contradicted a Free Witness against him, he was punished for Insolence.…
I even frequently tried Offenders in the open Barrack Yard, and engaged the [prisoners] to act as Jurors, Pleaders, Accusers, or otherwise, as the Case might be; I derived extraordinary Advantage from this, in at once suppressing false Testimony … and in interesting the Body of the Men in the Administration of Justice. Their sole Object on all occasions had been to defeat it, but now they began to sympathise with it.…
I told them repeatedly that I could work no miracles with them, that I had not come to be their Gaoler, but if possible their Reformer, that I could do much in this if they would assist me, but nothing without.… I thus omitted nothing which I thought could touch their Hearts and Feelings, and thus give them an elevated direction.43
Maconochie dismantled the gallows, which had stood as a permanent emblem of dread outside the gate of the prisoners’ barracks. He threw away the special double-loaded cats used by the floggers. The island had never had a church, but now Maconochie built two, one for the Catholics and the other for Protestants, each accommodating 450 men. For the dozen or so Jewish prisoners, who suffered badly from the anti-Semitism of other convicts and the lack of any means to conduct their own religious ceremonies, he set aside a room in the barracks as a makeshift synagogue. He gave every man a plot of the rich soil, set up classes in vegetable and fruit gardening—“a boon to the industrious, none at all to the idle”—and encouraged them to sell their surplus produce to the officers. “I thus sought to distribute property among them, and from its possession inculcate a sense and value for its rights.” It greatly reduced petty theft. He let them grow and use their own tobacco “to legalize an indulgence which it was impossible to prevent, and in which, unless forbidden, there was no moral evil.”44
He even instituted a new policy on death and commemoration. Few convicts had ever been given headstones. The exceptions were usually rebels, such as the men executed in the 1834 rising; some of their tablets can still be read in the Norfolk Island cemetery, their inscriptions a pointed reminder to other convicts of what disobedience deserved. But to be commemorated after death, however simply, was of great importance to ordinary men; and so Maconochie authorized the placing of “headstones, or rather painted boards” on the graves of convicts.
a privilege previously confined exclusively to the free; and our burying-ground being a somewhat romantic spot … near the sea, it was eventually seldom without one or more visitors reading and meditating on its stern and touching lessons and recollections.
These wooden markers are gone. But some convict headstones from Maconochie’s years do remain, testifying in their elaboration to Maconochie’s scrupulous refusal to deny the dead their dignity—even when they were killed in a mutiny. The gravestones of men shot in the abortive piracy of the brig Governor Phillip in 1842, the work of skilled but anonymous convict hands, are among the finest in the cemetery. That of James Saye bears a severe reminder:
Stop Christian stop and meditate
On this man’s sad & awfull fate
On Earth no more he breathes again
He lied [lived?] in hope but died in pain.
But the stone of Bartholomew Kelly (an Irish convict from Kilmurray in Cork who had been transported as a mere child of twelve in 1831 and had suffered on the island since March 1834 before turning pirate at twenty-six in 1842) is adorned with emblems of mercy, two turtledoves bearing olive twigs in their beaks, between the cherub’s head on top and the skull and crossbones below. And Samuel Jones, transported as a boy from Warwick for stealing rabbits eleven years before he was shot on the Governor Phillip, has a stone of strict and simple beauty, with an angel blowing the trumpet of resurrection while stony, leafing tendrils—shoots that promise renewal of life beyond the grave—twine upward from the ground. No convict since 1788 had been granted such exequies. Even a
simple stone meant a lot. Thus Laurence Frayne, who had suffered so terribly under Morisset’s regime, was allowed to set up a monument to his fellow Dubliner William Storey, officially listed as “a troublesome mutinous character,” who had been shot in 1838, a year before Maconochie’s arrival, after escaping into the bush. “This stone was erected by Lau[ren]ce Frayne to comemmorate his memory,” the plain worn inscription reads, testifying to the solidarity between the Irish convict and his mate, a bond whose public expression only Maconochie would permit.45
Trusted at last, reprieved from the incessant torment of the cat-o’-nine-tails, treated like human beings instead of caged beasts, some convicts poured forth their gratitude to the man they saw as their savior. The last hundred pages of Cook’s Exile’s Lamentations are given over to describing and praising Maconochie’s Mark System. Other prisoners were briefer but no less intense in their feelings. “We were relieved by an Angell and Family,” wrote James Lawrence, “the well known and respected Captain Maconochie, Humane, Kind, religious and now Justice stares us in the Face, the Almighty has now sent us a deliverance—no gaol, no Flogging.…”46
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