Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, in 1937, amongst Boswell’s possessions was found an envelope with the words in his handwriting: ‘Leaves from Botany Bay used as tea’. It was the same Smilax glyciphylla which Mary had taken on the cutter with her and which comforted the scurvy-ridden and debased citizens of New South Wales.
OH! SHAME, SHAME!
Old Harry Brewer, lucky to have any post at all and still working as provost-marshal and building supervisor without official confirmation from the British government, was conscientiously searching Pitt before it left to return to England and found a recently arrived convict woman stowed away, with the connivance of one of the mates, Mr Tate. Tate was brought ashore and tried for the offence and acquitted, so that whether it was to escape New South Wales or for the love of that sailor that the girl was secreted on Pitt, we do not know.
Why would she and others not want to flee? For the funerals continued, and the stores were still proving inadequate to sustain healthy lives. ‘The convicts dying very fast, merely through want of nourishment,’ wrote a newly arrived refugee from bankruptcy, Richard Atkins. ‘The Indian corn served out is of little use in point of nourishment, they have no mills to grind it and many are so weak they cannot pound it. At present there is not more than eight weeks ration of flour at two pound [0.9 kilos] per man at the store. Oh! Shame, shame!’ Collins expressed the nature of the scurvy in graphic terms—as a very want of sufficient strength in the constitution to digest nourishment.
By now, desperately hungry men and women crept into the maize fields and stole the cobs from the centre of the crops, and being caught were too weak to face punishment. The ration of salt provisions remained as before, but Gorgon’s flour was giving out. People looked askance at the two pounds of unmilled granite-like maize they were given instead of flour. Imperfectly ground, it could bring on diarrhoea of a near-fatal scale for the malnourished. So it became a byword for useless food, as it did also more than fifty years later during the Irish Famine when the Irish called it, for its dangerous impact on the digestive system, ‘Peel’s brimstone’.
By May 1792 Collins was grimly relieved so many had perished on and from Pitt: ‘Had not such numbers died, both in the passage and since the landing of those who survived the voyage, we should not at this moment have had any thing to receive from the public stores; thus strangely did we derive the benefits from the miseries of our fellow creatures!’
A fishery was set up at the South Head look-out station exclusively for the use of the sick. The bulk of game was directed towards the hospitals. The huntsmen were given a reward of two pounds (c 900 g) of flour and the head, one forequarter and ‘the pluck’ of any animal they brought in. Phillip now found himself issuing maize from the store to supplement shortfalls in other items. Yet the threat of capital and other punishments for food stealing could hardly have entirely prevented the strong stealing from the weak when the chance presented, particularly as the weak, from the time of the Second Fleet onwards, were so numerous. Camden, Calvert and King had a great deal they and their captains would never be called to answer for.
The law of diminishing returns had hit New South Wales. ‘Few, however, in comparison with the measure of our necessities,’ wrote Collins, ‘were the numbers daily brought into the field for the purpose of cultivation; and of those who could handle the hoe or the spade by far the greater part carried hunger in their countenances; independence of Great Britain was merely “a sanguine hope or visionary speculation”.’
Indeed, even the First Fleeters’ resistance to disease had been depleted by years of poor and reduced rations. Augustus Alt, the British surveyor and former Hessian soldier, was in too bad a condition to attend to surveying farms. A young man named David Burton, whose appointment as Superintendent of Convicts Sir Joseph Banks had recommended and who had come out on the Gorgon, took up the task, and Phillip came to like him. Since Phillip was concerned that New South Wales had acquired a bad reputation in the greater world, he asked Burton to prepare a report on the agricultural potential of the Sydney Basin, and Burton spent the summer of 1791-92 doing so. Phillip sent the result to Home Secretary Dundas with the note that Burton ‘may be supposed to be a much better judge of the good or bad qualities of the ground than any of those persons who have hitherto given their opinions’. Burton had already remitted sixty tubs of plants and sundry boxes of seeds and specimens to Sir Joseph Banks, his patron, via the Gorgon, then by the Pitt, and had many tubs ready to send on the Atlantic, whenever it should return to Sydney from Bengal.
But sadly the useful Burton was taken away from his grateful governor. He had been out with some soldiers of the New South Wales Corps to kill ducks on the Nepean River. He carried his gun awkwardly, said Collins, and the first time it went off, it ‘lodged its contents in the ground within a few inches of the feet of the person who immediately preceded him’. Then, by the river, resting the butt of his piece on the ground, he put his hand over the barrel to pull himself upright. The gun discharged, and the shot entered his wrist, forcing its way up between the two bones of his shattered right arm to the elbow. It took till five o’clock the next day before they got him back to Parramatta, and by then an inflammation had set up in the wound. In the opinion of the surgeons, amputation would have hastened his death, and so he was allowed to die in what could be called peace. Phillip approached young Burton as he lay the evening before his death, and found him very collected. ‘If I die, Sir Joseph Banks knows my family, and my intentions towards them—I have brothers, and a father and mother—I wish everything to be sent to Sir Joseph Banks, for my father and mother.’ In him, Phillip told Banks, ‘I lost one whom I cannot replace and whom I could ill spare.’
Burials of more replaceable people continued into May. On 3 May, three more convicts; the next day, two; on 5 May, three. On the next day, three more. All of them were men from the Irish ship Queen, or from Pitt. On 8 May, there were another three; on 9 May, four more. ‘This dreadful mortality was chiefly confined to the convicts who had arrived in the last year; of 122 male convicts who came out in the Queen, transported from Ireland, 50 only were living at the beginning of this month [May, 1792],’ noted Collins.
But then, on 20 June, ‘to the inexpressible joy of all ranks of people in the settlements’, the Atlantic store ship arrived, ‘with a cargo of rice, soujee [a form of semolina] and dholl [yellow split pea] from Calcutta’. She also brought two bulls and a cow with her, twenty sheep and twenty goats, which Collins thought of a very diminutive species. But the deliverance from hunger Atlantic seemed to offer was illusory. Since it had brought grain and dholl only, the ration of salt meat had now to be reduced. Richard Atkins said that in lieu of two pounds (c 900 grams) of pork per week, the stores now gave out one pound (c 450 grams) of Indian corn and one pound of dholl. All parties were united in a democracy of want.
Atkins and others were very cheered at the midwinter wheat crop in the Parramatta area, but there was need for more rain. Though the yearly rainfall in the Sydney Basin was approximately 48 inches (c 1220 mm) a year, it was subject to what we now know as the El Niño southern oscillation, which— from the frequent references to drought made in Sydney from 1790 onwards— seems to have had an impact on the first European settlers. The warm water of the eastern Australian currents stops the east-west trade winds across the Pacific, and there is a transfer of warm water to the coast of South and Central America, creating drought in New South Wales. The Eora were used to this phenomenon—it was one of the factors which inhibited their transition to what the Europeans, at least in theory, would have desired them to be: farmers. When it refused to rain in the winter of 1792, one pleasant blue-skied day succeeded another.
To free women for direct or indirect service to the production of crops, the governor suggested to Evan Nepean that ready-made clothing for the settlement should be purchased in Calcutta. The women of New South Wales had been employed until then making clothing out of slops. But there was full enough employment for a
ll the women as hut-keepers, mothers of small children, and at labour in the fields without the further task of making clothing, and in any case there were ‘many little abuses in the cutting out and making up of clothing’ that could not be wiped out without superintendents. Phillip suggested that frocks, trousers, shirts, shifts, gowns and petticoats be made up in India for the colony, but with a specific thread of a different colour being inserted into the convict provision, so that what was intended for the convicts could not be sold to the soldiers or free settlers.
What sales there were, legal and illegal, still occurred by barter or by bills of various kinds, cheques which were re-endorsed by one payee to a further one. Sometimes there was a list of crossed out payees’ names on the back of a bill, with the last legal recipient’s uncrossed. People did not always trust this sort of document. Bills could be forged. But the specie of various kinds and nations brought by the Second Fleet did not cover all the necessary transactions even of a modestly commercial place, and so bills had to do. But when the commissary John Palmer, former purser of Sirius, sent a subordinate aboard Atlantic with a money order for £5 to purchase articles, the purser aboard Atlantic devalued it to a mere £1 4 shillings. Thus were all bills discounted, and all New South Wales prices hugely inflated.
Government intervention was essential to moderate prices. Harry Brewer was sent to the master of Atlantic with a writ to enquire into the massive, usurious discounting of bills. But the problem remained.
In mid July, as rain came and the last of the stores were being cleared from the Atlantic, another signal was made from the South Head look-out station, and the Britannia store ship, returned from India, came down the harbour and anchored in the cove. Aboard Britannia was twelve months’ clothing for the convicts, four months’ flour and eight months’ beef and pork, so that ‘every description of persons in the settlement’ could be put back on full issue. Suddenly, Sydney Cove was redolent with the baking of flapjacks and the frying of salt beef. Britannia also brought news that Captain Donald Trail of the Neptune was being prosecuted, and people were cheered by that and thought that justice and reform were possible.
The new ration situation gave Collins hope for the day when journal-keepers like himself need not ‘fill his page with comparisons between what we might have been and what we were; to lament the non-arrival of supplies; not to paint the miseries and wretchedness which ensued; but might adopt a language to which he might truly be said to have been hitherto a stranger, and paint the glowing prospects of a golden harvest, the triumph of a well-filled store, and the increasing and consequent prosperity of the settlements’.
But, as usual, the prospects weren’t as bright as they first appeared. Not all the supplies Commissary Palmer received were of high quality. Phillip came along to the storehouses with his dirk and began opening and peeping into a series of ration casks. He was reduced to shaking his head, and instructed Palmer that only such provisions considered ‘merchantable’ should be paid for. Many of the casks of beef were deficient in weight, and the meat lean, coarse and bony and ‘worse than they have ever been issued in His Majesty’s service’. Such a claim meant the product was near inedible. Further salt provisions for New South Wales, Phillip counselled, should only be acquired from Europe, since those from other sources, such as India, were appalling. ‘A deception of this nature would be more severely felt in this country,’ said Collins. ‘Every ounce lost here was of importance.’ Collins was reduced to considering this cargo from India as an experiment ‘to which it was true we were driven by necessity; and it had become the universal and earnest wish that no cause might ever again induce us to try it’.
The deficient food supplies from Atlantic and Britannia could not prevent some remarkable acts of food theft. In September, all hands were busy bringing in the Indian corn harvest, and even though the seed crop was steeped in tubs of urine to keep it from theft, ‘some of the convicts cannot refrain from stealing and eating it’. In a letter to Dundas on 2 October, Phillip wrote of the persistent need for so many articles of food and industry amongst a population which had not eaten amply for four years. They needed iron cooking pots nearly as much as they needed provisions, he said, and then all the cross-cut saws, axes and various tools of husbandry were in short supply or disrepair. And further hunger was inevitable. He went through the sort of weary figures he had been remitting to London since the start: ‘There remains at present in this colony, of rice and flour and bread, sufficient for 96 days at two pounds [c 900 g] of flour and five pounds [2.3 kilos] of rice per man for seven days, salt provisions sufficient for 70 days on a full ration, and of peas and dholl, sufficient for 156 days at three pounds [c 1.4 kilos] per week for each man.’ Even the unpopular maize was now stolen—‘Not less than 1500 bushels [c 55 m3] were stolen from the grounds, notwithstanding every possible precaution.’
Phillip himself remained a victim of the rations and an earth which was only gradually being persuaded to submit to European expectations. The newly arrived son of a merchant friend of Arthur Phillip wrote of the governor at this stage that his health ‘now is very bad. He fatigues himself so much he fairly knocks himself up and won’t rest till he is not able to walk.’
A GOVERNOR LONGS FOR HOME
By October 1792, Phillip was still waiting to return home. He was anxious now to be relieved, and there had never been any idea that he, the uncondemned, would choose to remain in this temperate, beguiling but harsh garden. He was enlivened when on 7 October the largest ship to enter Port Jackson up to that hour, the 914-ton (932-tonne) Royal Admiral, arrived with a large cargo of convicts. The ship also brought one of the last detachments of the New South Wales Corps, as well as an agricultural expert, a master miller and a master carpenter and close to two hundred and fifty convicts. The ship, owned by a London ‘husband’ who frequently contracted his ships to the East India Company, Thomas Larkins, was the antithesis of some of the appallingly run transports of the past few years. The Royal Admiral had embarked fewer convicts than the overcrowded Pitt which had arrived earlier in the year and whose men had died in such numbers throughout the New South Wales autumn. The naval agent for Royal Admiral was the former surgeon of the notorious but healthy Lady Juliana, Richard Alley, and the master and the ship’s surgeon collaborated well with him in matters of convict health. There had been a conspiracy of some type on board, but it had been aborted and mildly punished, with one prisoner receiving three dozen lashes and seven others two dozen each. The Royal Admiral had made a very fast passage of one hundred and thirty days from Torbay, even though she had spent twenty-one of those days in Simons Bay at the Cape. Then, south of Africa, with the Roaring Forties in her sails, she had made over 4800 kilometres in just sixteen days.
‘She brought in with her a fever, which had much abated by the extreme attention paid by Captain Bond and his officers to cleanliness,’ Collins recorded. The officers had also supplied the prisoners ‘with comforts and necessities beyond what were allowed for their use during the voyage’. The master and officers were speculators nonetheless—they had freighted out over £4000 worth of their own goods to sell ashore.
By this time, the governor judged it necessary to send most arriving convicts straight up the river to Parramatta where work was to be done, since Sydney possessed ‘all the evils and allurements of a seaport of some standing’. Phillip felt there would be difficulties in removing prisoners from Sydney once they settled in there. Even within a penal universe, under conditions of hunger, Sydney was already taking on what it would never lose, the allure of a city of pleasures and vices.
The Royal Admiral had brought also an important new talent to the colony, a convict who for his special gifts was allowed to stay in Sydney. A Scots artist, Thomas Watling had been amongst the more than four hundred convicts who sailed in the Pitt, and had escaped in Cape Town. He had been arrested by the Dutch after the Pitt’s departure, put in gaol, and then taken aboard Royal Admiral by Captain Bond. Well-educated, and having worked for
a time in Glasgow as a coach and chaise painter, he would become the most important artist of early New South Wales. He had been transported in the first place via the temptations of artistry. In Dumfries in November 1788 he had been charged with making forged Bank of Scotland guinea notes. Rather than risk conviction and execution, he pleaded guilty, asked to be transported, and was sentenced to fourteen years.
Upon landing, almost at once he was snatched up by and assigned to Surgeon General John White, who as a naturalist made great use of Watling’s artistic skills, especially for drawing rare animals. Watling would find White an exacting master, and would sometimes feel overworked.
Another arrival on Royal Admiral, this one significant only in retrospect, was Mary Haydock, aged thirteen when put aboard the transport. She had been convicted of stealing a horse, but her crime seems to have been the Georgian equivalent of joy-riding. She became nursemaid to the family of Major Grose. She had already been courted on Royal Admiral by a young agent of the East India Company, an Irishman named Thomas Reibey, who was making his way to India via Port Jackson. He would ultimately return to marry her, and the Reibeys would become wealthy, beginning as civilian associates of the emergent trading force of the New South Wales Corps.
For the newly arrived officers of the New South Wales Corps were quick to sense the advantages of the place and dealt with their state of want by themselves chartering the Britannia to travel to Cape Town or Rio for supplies, including boots for the soldiers. Phillip was not easy about it, since it was an interruption to the duty the Britannia had in relation to collecting her cargo under East India Company charter. The officers also expected land grants, but Phillip feared that in giving them any, he ‘will increase the number of those who do not labour for the public, and lessen those who are to furnish the colony with the necessaries of life’. Collectivist New South Wales was under pressure from these new men, men like the earlier arriving Lieutenant John Macarthur, who was already dreaming of being an importer as a means of becoming a landowner.
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