by Robin Adair
The glittering dreams of Grenville Newton (and, of course, the real Balcombes had no such ward) were always fool’s gold. A copy of surveyor McBrien’s notes and directions turned up years later in an office drawer, but they led only to a failed digging. Nuggets and dust eluded a rush of Australian picks and pans until 1851.
The incident of the ‘executed’ soldier mirrors the sentence actually carried out (but with no happy ending for the prisoner) on a Private Thomas Brennan, of the 39th Regiment.
Another key scene is a faithful recreation. The original Three Bees existed, a convict ship emptied of its cargo of 210 sick men, and it did blow up in Sydney Cove, much as I describe, though on 20 May 1814 and seemingly by accident. I have given the 1814 Gazette account to our 1828 reporter. There are still questions today as to why it had so many loaded cannons; there was talk of it having been armed to repel a French attack!
Napoleon Bonaparte, now as ever, takes centrestage…
There are as many conspiracy theories about his death as there are about JFK’s. And, for years, there were more ‘sightings’ than there are of Elvis today. Mine could well have happened.
Anyone who thinks that Napoleon would not have experimented with and sacrificed a street urchin is mistaken. He showed his ruthless disregard for life (at least that of others) from the start of his rise to military prominence. During Paris riots in 1795 he turned cannons onto civilians: his famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’ that killed 1400. Another prime example of his savagery was against the Ottomans at Jaffa in 1799, when, after Nelson had cut off the French Army of the Orient, Bonaparte had 3000 prisoners shot. And, of course, he abandoned his own lost armies both in Egypt and in Russia.
He certainly did receive a poison phial from a doctor and always carried it. I say it dated from 1798, although another version has him receiving the poison just before the Russian campaign in 1812. But…he is known to have taken the deadly draught on 12 April 1814, when he was consigned to his first exile, on Elba. It made him very ill, but didn’t kill him; its potency had weakened, suggesting it was sixteen years old, not just two. Why then, might he not have replenished his sachet with fresh contents – and put them to use fourteen years later, in 1828 Sydney town?
The body of the man buried as Bonaparte on St Helena in May 1821, was exhumed in 1840 for removal to Paris. It was not that of a person wasted by disease, and although it had not been fully embalmed, it was remarkably well preserved, a strong suggestion to many at the time that the appearance, and the death, were the result of arsenical poisoning.
In recent years, various samples of Bonaparte’s hair have been analysed. These hairs have been taken from authenticated mementoes of those later years of captivity, including a sample held by Dame Mabel Brookes, of Melbourne, a Balcombe descendant. These analyses showed traces of arsenic up to eighteen times the normal concentration. And FBI tests disproved theories that poisonous wallpaper had accidentally leached toxins into his drinking water (which all there drank, anyway). An aside to this reference to the FBI: a descendant of the Emperor, Charles Bonaparte (1851–1921), was an Attorney-General of the USA and a founder of the famous investigative unit.
Prosper Mendoza’s Sydney grave is long gone, lost somewhere during the vast redevelopment that swamped the Sandhills cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century, for the building of the sprawling Central Railway Station complex.
So, 170-odd years later, any remaining secrets of the body from St Helena are held fast beneath thirty-five tons of porphyry, in the Hôtel des Invalides, in Paris.
Horace Vernet’s tongue-in-cheek addition of Dr Owens’ face to his painting of Napoleon is credible. It would have become part of a long tradition in artistic trickery. Da Vinci did make such a threat, and a famous modern forger, Hans van Meegeren, even included in some of his Vermeer fakes the visages of Rudolf Valentino and Greta Garbo!
Among early Sydney’s colourful street vendors, there was always one called ‘Garden Honey’. Our rogue was a ring-in.
Britain did lose those September days in 1752, to bring it in line with the Gregorian calendar. What a fuss it caused – many rioted violently, sensing a papist plot.
As well as accusations of incest, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was widely blamed for the knifing murder of a valet. At odds with the evidence, the death was officially dismissed as suicide.
Whatever happened to those other lights of our tale?
Mr Barnett Levey finally won his theatre licence and Munito (or one of his progeny) was still starring into the 1840s. Captain Rossi’s question of identity was resolved in his favour and Mr Samuel Terry died in 1838, richer than ever. He left an estate of 500000 pounds.
Mr William Balcombe died in March, 1829, of dysentery. Jane and Betsy battled on, and his other sons (I slimmed his male offspring to Thomas) settled and succeeded. Several of their properties, all named The Briars after their childhood island home, survive here. Thomas, however, continued to be troubled, and in 1861 shot himself dead at his Paddington, Sydney, home – called Napoleon Cottage.
Sir Hudson Lowe deserves more than a few good words said about him. I painted him as a villain because that was how the world saw him at the time. In truth, he was a fair man wherever duty took him. Far-sighted, he ended slavery on St Helena sixteen years before the rest of the Empire. It was the Bonaparte camp – and Boney’s many admirers in England (and there were many, just as there were of 1930s Fascism there) – that spread the propaganda about Lowe being petty and cruel. Lowe simply tried to hold to the ground rules established by the British Government. Sadly, the mud stuck then, and still does.
In this area, the Comte de Las Cases’ Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (it actually made two volumes, but I saved the Patterer’s back), though a huge commercial success (if not a critical one: it was criticised as hagiography and being based on false documents), was most influential in propagating the growing Bonaparte myth: that he was really a gentle giant with only the good of the world at heart; and the whopper that he had actually won Waterloo but had been denied victory by some malign interference.
The French eagle in St Phillip’s church was repatriated to the Chelsea Barracks in London, but disappeared from there again, this time forever, in 1852.
Macquarie’s Fort made way for a tram depot in 1901 and is now the site of the Sydney Opera House, where the gunners’ ghosts regularly enjoy the 1812 Overture.
The aria that the castrato Cesare Bello attempted to sing was, indeed, Napoleon’s favourite, truly written by Girolamo Crescentini. The hardbitten French soldier wept when he first heard it and, in 1805, made the musician the royal singing teacher. Crescentini lost his job when Napoleon first lost his, in 1814. The work disappeared from concert halls. In the mid-1950s, noted Australian conductor Richard Bonynge, then a student, found a copy in a Paris flea market. He finally recorded it – in 2007. Castrati are long gone – it was sung instead by a soprano, Deborah Riedel.
Macarthur’s ‘inquisition’ of the Patterer was inspired by an incident in Ben Abro’s 1963 thriller July 14 Assassination. His quiz questions came from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Of the 40000 Spanish dollars cannibalised in 1813 only about 1000 dumps and 300 holey dollars are known to survive today, much prized by numismatists who pay hundreds of thousands of modern dollars for prime specimens. In 2008 even a poor dump sold for 36000 dollars.
Oh, yes. What about Valentine Rourke?
Before the police net could close and aware that his name was not recorded in the census, he waltzed aboard a ship bound for Liverpool, just a spit away from his native Ireland.
I think it was really he who dug up Dingle’s floor and kept, at least, the negotiable takings – the coinage, even the eminently meltable holey dollars and dumps. This may have added up to more than 800 pounds: twenty years’ pay for the weaver and shoemaker he had once been.
Val Rourke’s Irish eyes may have been smiling, but he wasn’t joking that day in 1829 … when he took the good ship Mida
s, on April Fools’ Day.
Some Sources
Abro, Ben, July 14 Assassination, Jonathan Cape, London, 1963.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, sequential volumes in progress, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966–.
Barnett, Correlli, Bonaparte, Allen & Unwin, London, 1978.
Baxter, Carol, Breaking the Bank, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2008.
Blackburn, Julia, The Emperor’s Last Island, Martin Secker & Warburg, London, 1991.
Bowker, John, The Complete Bible Handbook, Dorling Kindersley, London, 1998.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised by Ivor H. Evans, 14th edition, Cassell, London, 1992.
Brookes, Dame Mabel, Saint Helena Story, Heinemann, London, 1960.
Coote, Stephen, Napoleon and the Hundred Days, Simon & Schuster, London, 2004.
Crowley, Frank, A Documentary History of Australia, Vol. 1: Colonial Australia, 1788–1840; Vol. 2: Colonial Australia, 1841–1874, Nelson, Melbourne, 1980.
Dyer, Colin, The French Explorers and Sydney, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2009.
Foreman, Laura & Ellen Blue Phillips, Napoleon’s Lost Fleet: Bonaparte, Nelson and the Battle of the Nile, Discovery Books, London, 1999.
Gallo, Max, The Immortal of St Helena, translated from the French by William Hobson, Macmillan, London, 2004.
Graeme, Bruce, The Story of Buckingham Palace, Howard Baker, London, 1970.
Johnson, Paul, Napoleon, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2002.
Joy, William, The Exiles, Shakespeare Head, Sydney, 1972.
Karskens, Grace, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997.
—— The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009.
Mansel, Philip, The Eagle in Splendour: Napoleon and His Court, George Philip, London, 1987.
‘Osric’ (Humphrey Hall & Alfred J. Cripps), The Romance of the Sydney Stage, edited by Nicholas Pounder, Currency Press/National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1996.
Poe, Edgar Allan, Various Works, edited & introduced by David Galloway, Penguin Books, London, 2003.
Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History … from Antiquity to the Present, Fontana, London, 1997.
Rees, Siân, The Floating Brothel, Hodder Headline, Sydney, 2001.
Sadie, Stanley (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Macmillan, London, 1992.
Standage, Tom, A History of the World in Six Glasses, Atlantic Books, London, 2005.
Travers, Robert, Rogues’ March: A Chronicle of Colonial Crime, Hutchinson, Sydney, 1973.
Viney, Nigel & Neil Grant, Illustrated History of Ball Games, William Heinemann, London, 1978.
Whipple, A. B. C. & consultants, Fighting Sail, Caxton, London, 1978.
Measures and Money
Imperial measures have been retained in this story, since use of the metric system would have been out of character. Some approximate equivalents are:
1 inch
2.54 centimetres
1 link
7.9 inches or 20 centimetres
1 foot
12 inches or 30.5 centimetres
1 yard
3 feet or 0.914 metres
1 fathom
6 feet or 1.83 metres
1 (surveyor’s) chain
66 feet or 20.12 metres
1 mile
1.61 kilometres
1 nautical mile
1.85 kilometres
1 acre
0.405 hectares
1 ounce
28.3 grams
1 pound
16 ounces or 454 grams [so 30 pounds gunpowder (see page 227) = 13.6 kilograms gunpowder]
1 stone
14 pounds or 6.36 kilograms
1 pint
0.568 litres
1 gallon
4.55 litres
65 degrees Fahrenheit
18.3 degrees Celsius (see page 109)
Money, unlike weights or measures, makes for more confusing conversions. It is difficult to accurately weigh and relate monetary values in the late 1820s with today’s. It helps to know, however, that there was one penny, twelve of which made a shilling. And twenty shillings made a pound. Now, consider that tobacco then cost three shillings to three and six a pound, eggs one and six to three shillings a dozen, bread two and a half to threepence a pound, and mutton six to seven pence a pound. A man’s good suit cost nine to ten pounds and a dozen bottles of claret thirty shillings.
A tradesman could earn about six shillings a day. A female servant, fed and clothed, cost ten to fifteen pounds a year. A farm labourer received twelve to twenty pounds a year, plus weekly rations of seven pounds of beef and a peck (fifteen pounds) of wheat.
And what price a human life? In Britain until 1827, even a child could be transported for life, even hanged, for grand larceny – which meant stealing personal property worth more than a shilling.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to a host of ghosts – of long-dead diarists, journalists and historians – and to as many modern students and researchers of Australian colonial roots and Napoleonic lore.
Prize-winning editor Nicola Young was midwife to the Patterer’s birth and attended assiduously again this time. As always, I appreciate her clear head, cool eye and gentle touch. My thanks, too, to Bridget Maidment, who carried on the good work.
Anne-Marie Reeves and Cathy Larsen’s design is a wonder, lifting the Patterer clear off the page. And Michelle Atkins’ picture research deftly helps bring the past to life. Women’s Weekly colleague Keith Barlow’s publicity shots made me feel young again. Almost.
The friendship and skills of my long-time physician Dr Starlette Isaacs sustain me. Typically, she took in her stride my sudden interest in mercury treatment for syphilis, and poisoning and stabbing. Dr Leslie Glen stirred in me an interest in Bonaparte. I’m grateful to Sue Kusko for her unflagging support.
I also salute my knowledgeable comrade Tony Chilton, an expert on the British military, who has marched with me on many a famous campaign (usually in the comfort and safety of a watering-hole).
To my patient wife, journalist Julie Kusko, always at the side of the Patterer, much thanks.
Picture credits: page 5 – by H. Heath, reproduced from C. Willett Cunnington & Phillis C. Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century, Plays Inc., Boston, 1970; pages 19 & 67 – by Harry Clow, reproduced from Anthony Livesey, Battles of the Great Commanders, Michael Joseph, London, 1987; page 79 – Hulton Archive, Getty Images; page 94 – by Jack Cassin-Scott, reproduced from his Costume and Fashion in Colour 1760–1920, Blandford Press, Poole, Dorset, 1971; page 116 – reproduced from Bryce Fraser (ed.), The Macquarie Book of Events, Macquarie Library, Sydney, 1983; page 169 – engraving of a drawing by Joseph Fowles, State Library of New South Wales; page 199 – reproduced from Sean Jennett, The Making of Books, Faber & Faber, London, 1973; page 216 – Dixson Collection, State Library of New South Wales; page 222 – by John Batchelor, reproduced from A. B. C. Whipple & consultants, Fighting Sail, Caxton, London, 1978; page 228 – lithograph, c. 1836, by Robert Russell, Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia; page 244 – miniature, c. 1785–90, Dixson Collection, State Library of New South Wales; page 279 – Dixson Collection, State Library of New South Wales.
MICHAEL JOSEPH
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2011
Text copyright © Robin Adair 2011
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* Recounted in Death and the Running Patterer
