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Honour and a Small victory
I took leave of my friends in London and accompanied by Mr McArthur, hired a Gravesend boat from Billinsgate, which conveyed us to the Neptune.
OPENING SENTENCE OF ELIZABETH MACARTHUR’S SHIPBOARD JOURNAL, UNDATED
Many sailors believed beginning a voyage on a Friday brought bad luck and they went to great pains to avoid doing so. The Macarthurs, with eight-month-old Edward and his nursemaid, stepped into their Gravesend boat on a cold and wet Friday, 13 November 1789. A Gravesend boat was a small sailing vessel, six metres long, used to carry passengers and cargo up and down the Thames. The rear half of the boat was covered in a large canvas tilt that was stretched over a curved frame, not unlike the covered wagons of the American west.1 Here Elizabeth sat, out of the rain and looking at riverside London, wondering if she would ever see it again.
From the bustle of the fish markets at Billingsgate to the Neptune’s anchorage downriver at Longreach was a trip of about twenty-eight kilometres. As the little river boat approached the Neptune, it was dwarfed by the ship’s bulk. While not nearly as large as His Royal Majesty’s ships-of-the-line or as considerable as some of the East India Company’s merchantmen, Neptune was still a substantial ship, the biggest of all the First and Second Fleet transports. As the waterman rattled his boathook and drew alongside the Neptune, the Macarthurs couldn’t help but notice the stench. Even with only some of the convicts as yet on board, and probably none of the livestock, the ship already housed upwards of a hundred people. Every day their refuse and bodily wastes were discarded overboard, to surround the anchored ship until the tide turned.
In a ship of the Neptune’s age the bilge (the lowest compartment of a ship) contained a ballast of sand and gravel. Neptune’s bilge, like that of every other ship, was also designed to be a collection point for water draining from the decks above. Water used to swab the decks, or which entered through small leaks in the hull, or which accumulated on deck during a storm—all was channelled to the bilge, and then manually removed via the bilge pumps. As the water travelled down through the ship, the shipboard detritus was carried with it: food scraps; cockroaches; dead cats, rats and mice; excrement; urine; vomit; blood. All slopping about in the bilge, captured in the ballast, for years at a time, the foul smell permeating the ship.
The smell was worst in the lowest, or orlop, deck. Here the bulk of the cargo, livestock and male convicts were housed. The Neptune’s orlop was about twenty-three metres long and about eleven metres at its widest point. Into this orlop were to be crammed hundreds of men. His Majesty’s Royal Navy officially allocated hammock space of a mere fourteen inches (thirty-five centimetres) width per sailor—convicts were probably not treated as generously.
The convicts slept shoulder to shoulder on wooden platforms in an airless partitioned space without portholes, and were shackled by the wrists or ankles, usually paired with and chained to another convict. According to many witnesses but denied by the Neptune’s captain, most of the male convicts remained shackled for the entire voyage and had little opportunity for exercise. Three large tubs on the orlop deck were used ‘to ease nature’ but crew would later testify that these were ‘frequently overset by accident or negligence’.2 In standard practice, the ship’s crew was housed in the forecastle, the area between the central mainmast and the bow. At the rear was the quarterdeck, raised above the rest and enclosed by a rail. This deck was for officers only, and their accommodation was built into the area below.3 On the Neptune, carrying some forty soldiers and two officers of the New South Wales Corps, additional accommodation was probably incorporated into the level immediately below the open deck.
The master of the Neptune, Thomas Gilbert, had already sailed out to New South Wales, as commander of the First Fleet transport Charlotte. A merchant seaman, Gilbert’s title as captain was only an honorary one. In the complex social hierarchy of Georgian England, before the Napoleonic Wars elevated the status of those serving in the English Navy, army officers generally had social precedence over their naval equivalents. In turn, officers of the Royal Navy had precedence over the often genteel captains of the East India Company.4 Merchant seamen like Gilbert—of dubious background and regardless of their maritime skills—had little or no social standing. These social nuances played themselves out, dangerously, during the first weeks that the Macarthurs were on board.
The Macarthurs settled with their baggage into the cabin they were to share with Captain Nicholas Nepean. The nursemaid and baby Edward may well have bunked in with them too, while John’s personal servant, who would have been a private soldier, quartered with his regimental colleagues. Here was a valuable opportunity for the Macarthurs to establish a strong relationship with Captain Nepean. He and John were the only officers of the New South Wales Corps on board the Neptune; each of the Second Fleet vessels Surprize and Scarborough carried another two officers. In total, the officers on the Second Fleet were in charge of nearly a hundred soldiers (seven of whom had embarked with their wives and children) and about a thousand convicts.5 Seventy-eight female convicts (plus their dozen children and babies) were all accommodated on the Neptune, as were some 420 convict men.6 Three women married to convicted men also gamely accompanied their husbands on the Neptune. In total, the Neptune would carry about 650 people—convicts, soldiers, and crew—to New South Wales.
The Macarthurs found themselves in influential company on the largest ship of the Second Fleet, in their small berth beneath the raised cabins of the quarterdeck. Perhaps they congratulated each other on their good fortune. John’s formal duties were relatively light and involved supervising the soldiers—he was to have little direct interaction with the convicts.7 The day after the Macarthurs boarded, the Neptune moved downriver to Gravesend, where she took on stores, before sailing into the English Channel.8 Elizabeth played sightseer, being ‘much struck with the formidable & romantick appearance of the Cliffs of Deal & of Dover’.9 But it would be only a few days before her troubles began.
Captain Nicholas Nepean very quickly concluded that sharing a cabin with Lieutenant John Macarthur (and his wife, his infant and the nursemaid) was not going to make for a pleasant voyage. Nepean moved to the upper cabin in the raised area beneath the quarterdeck, leaving Elizabeth to note sarcastically in her journal that he had adopted ‘the truly generous maxim “every man for himself ”’. Nepean gave permission for his half of their cabin to be sectioned off and used as additional space for ‘female Convicts, leaving the other half to us’.
John Macarthur’s protestations to Nepean fell upon deaf ears and Elizabeth wrote that ‘a slight partition was erected which was thought fully sufficient to separate us from the set of abandoned creatures that were to inhabit the other part’.10 The Macarthurs, landlubbers both, were unaware that the practice of rearranging cabins, partitioning off areas as required, was commonplace within ocean-going ships, particularly on overcrowded vessels like the Neptune. And in light of the carpenter’s need to erect and dismantle partitions quickly and as required, the thinness of the partitions was similarly commonplace. Privacy at sea was a very rare commodity. John Macarthur, however, continued to complain about the cabin—this time to the first mate, Nicholas Anstis. When the message was passed on to Neptune’s master, Captain Gilbert, he was furious—about the complaint itself and that it hadn’t been made to him directly.
On the Saturday that Elizabeth was admiring the Dover cliffs, Macarthur ducked into the upper cabin to raise the partition problem with Nepean again. The stench and noise of the convict women were unbearable. Captain Gilbert happened to come in at that instant, so Nepean raised the matter with him then and there. Gilbert, every bit the cantankerous old Jack Tar, flew into a passionate rage. John Harris, an Irishman in his early thirties and the Corps’ surgeon’s assistant, had befriended John Macarthur and was witness to the ensuing altercation.
Harris later produced a statement detailing Gilbert’s behaviour. ‘Rome was not built in a day
,’ fumed Captain Gilbert to Macarthur, nor did he understand people ‘making mountains out of molehills.’ He was sure Macarthur meant to be troublesome and he threatened to write to the War Office and have him turned out of the ship.11 Macarthur recklessly stood his ground, calling the Captain an ‘insolent fellow’ and pointing out that he’d spoken to Nepean, not Captain Gilbert. Again, Macarthur’s inexperience told. By long custom a captain was, in his little wooden world, second only to God. The soldiers and convicts were to Gilbert no more than passengers and cargo. With all the grizzled contempt of an experienced mariner for a callow army lieutenant, Gilbert shoved Macarthur aside and strode off. Nepean was forced to restrain a livid Macarthur, urging him not to do anything extreme now that the ship was underway to Plymouth.12 Seething, Macarthur managed to hold his peace for the next few days. Elizabeth’s views on the matter are not recorded.
With a fine wind driving them down the channel, all expected to be in Plymouth by Tuesday morning. However Gilbert mistakenly sailed much further west than he’d planned and spent the rest of the week beating back against a headwind. Finally, on the morning of Friday 27 November, the Neptune moored safely in Plymouth Sound. No sooner had the fore and aft anchors settled in the seabed when Macarthur (having kept his promise not to do anything while the ship was underway) mounted the quarterdeck and, in front of everyone, called Gilbert ‘a great scoundrel’, rebuking him for his ‘ungentleman-like conduct.’13 Gilbert barked that he ‘had settled many a greater man’ and that he would see Macarthur ashore. As John had no doubt intended, Gilbert challenged him to a duel.
At four o’clock that afternoon, the duel combatants met on shore at Plymouth Docks, at the Fountain Tavern on Fore Street. The Dock was then a separate town from Plymouth itself, situated about three kilometres further north towards the mouth of the Tamar. Like many a thriving port city in the late eighteenth century, Plymouth and its surrounds was a mix of squalor and new buildings, of poverty and prosperity, with a transient population that wouldn’t have looked twice at the pistol-carrying soldiers and sailors from the Neptune.
It was John Macarthur who had named the tavern as their meeting place—it was in the same street as his family’s drapery business14 and presumably he stepped in to say goodbye. Surgeon Harris seconded Macarthur; a Plymouth man did for Gilbert. From the tavern the men moved to the Old Gun Wharf, about a kilometre away. Gilbert and Macarthur stood back to back, before they stepped out the regulation number of paces, turned, raised their pistols and fired. They both missed, although John’s bullet left a hole in Gilbert’s coat. The seconds conferred and reloaded the guns. The protagonists fired again—and missed again. Although none of Macarthur’s problems was resolved, honour was satisfied and the business was considered done.15
The duel was reported in several London and provincial newspapers.16 Duelling was illegal but widely accepted, and it was not successfully banned in the British army until the 1840s. A gentleman’s career progression, credit risk, social standing and character all depended upon his honourable reputation: many were prepared to fight to the death to maintain it. The formalised choreography of the duel allowed a public demonstration of bravery, which usually resulted in a bloodless outcome. With each man taking ten measured paces, the combatants finally stood about twenty metres apart. They stood side-on to reduce the size of the available target and the smooth-bored duelling pistols themselves were notoriously inaccurate. Thus no one was surprised when John Macarthur and Thomas Gilbert, honour fully restored, lived to fight another day.17
Elizabeth didn’t find out about the duel until the men returned to the Neptune that evening. She wrote in her journal that the more she thought about it over the next months, the stronger her feelings became to the point where she trembled to consider the ‘unhappy consequences that might have arisen’—death for John, and a penniless widowhood for herself and her fatherless infant. But that particular evening Elizabeth notes that she had ‘many disagreeable circumstances then pressing on my mind’ and she didn’t consider the duel as seriously as she later would.18 One such circumstance was probably her recent discovery that she was pregnant again, though it was not something she ever mentioned in her journal.
Elizabeth’s journal is almost the only record of the Second Fleet voyage to survive, although the last pages of the manuscript are torn and some of the text is illegible. Even the ships’ logs are lost to us. One of the sailors on the Lady Juliana wrote a memoir of his travels thirty years later but his ship had left well before Elizabeth sailed on the Neptune. Elizabeth’s journal is regularly derided for its narrow focus. She completely ignored the plight of the convicts, except as their presence discomforted her. She discussed little of shipboard life, or the other soldiers, sailors and passengers on board. Her focus is exclusively on her family and she leaves out the monotony and the worst of the horrors. The journal was not a personal diary for Elizabeth’s eyes only, but an artefact clearly meant for her children, her friends and family. In fact, the journal was discovered, in 1888, among the papers of Elizabeth’s youngest daughter. The invisible convicts and servants, the absence of detail about her own squalid shipboard living conditions, her failure to mention her own pregnancy are all absolutely in keeping with Elizabeth’s sense of the demands of propriety.
Most of what we know about the Neptune’s voyage is the result of a campaign, launched in London upon the return of the Second Fleet, and the subsequent murder trial of the Neptune’s master, that brought to public awareness the onboard treatment of the convicts. The First and Second Fleets were early examples of government outsourcing. Nine of the eleven ships of the First Fleet were provided by a contractor, William Richards junior. From the point of view of the Home Office, equipping the First Fleet had been outrageously expensive. Contractor Richards, despite the success of the first voyage, was largely overlooked for the Second Fleet (he did, however, provide the Lady Juliana). Instead Camden, Calvert and King, also private shipping contractors, were engaged by Treasury and the Navy Board to transport convicts, soldiers and stores to New South Wales. Specialists in the African slave trade, they offered three ships and their crews at a bargain price.
The contractors were paid £17.7.6 for each convict embarked. Crucially (and unlike the slave trade) there was no financial incentive to ensure those convicts arrived safe and healthy at their destination. A convict who died en route in fact offered the contractors a better profit margin than did a convict who had to be fed all the way to New South Wales. The Navy’s per-head payment method gave the contractors reason to squeeze on board as many convicts as possible. And their contract provided only vague instructions (‘as you shall find necessary, in which you will be guided by circumstances’19) about stopping along the way for rest and fresh food. In selecting convicts for transportation, little or no effort was made to identify and dispatch the skilled artisans or labourers Governor Phillip had asked for. Many were already infirm or unwell. The vast majority of the Second Fleet convicts came from the floating hulks, and were selected only on the basis of time served.
The Neptune was scheduled to remain at least several days in Plymouth Sound. The day after the duel, Saturday 28 November, saw the embarkation of a further three hundred or so convicts. Livestock (to provide the officers with fresh meat during the voyage) and other provisions were also probably hoisted aboard at this stage. Captain Cook’s Endeavour—two-thirds the size of the Neptune and carrying only ninety-four people—had sailed twenty years earlier with a menagerie that included two greyhounds, three cats, seventeen sheep, four pigs, twenty-four chickens, hens and other birds and a milking goat. Given that the Neptune was also carrying cargo destined for the colony, her menagerie was likely to have been at least as big and possibly also included cattle. Every inch of space on and within the ship was spoken for.
Rather than remain on board among the cacophony of loading, Elizabeth decided to take the sixty-five kilometre trip north to her family’s home in Bridgerule. On Sunday 29 November Elizabeth, ba
by Edward and the nursemaid ‘took a Post Chaise & reached Launceston that night—& the next morning about eleven O’Clock I arrived at my Mother’s’.20 It was a visit tempered with sadness, with Elizabeth’s impending departure for New South Wales casting a pall over the short reunion. Elizabeth must have divided her brief visiting time between her mother, her half-sister Isabella and her dearest friend Bridget Kingdon. Elizabeth wrote that she was ‘not much enlivened by the short interview I had had with my friends, & considerably depressed with the Idea of parting with my only surviving parent, perhaps, for ever’.21 She could only stay in Bridgerule for two nights, as the Neptune was due to sail early on the morning of Thursday 3 December.
During Elizabeth’s absence, more trouble brewed on the Neptune. A dispute arose over who had ultimate authority over the convicts: Nepean, the army officer ordered to guard them, or Gilbert, the master of the ship ordered to convey them to New South Wales. On Saturday 28 November, Nepean decided to take charge of the convicts, ‘as Capt’n Gilbert has usurp’d too much power over him and his soldiers without right’.22 The same problem had already arisen aboard the Surprize, with Captain Hill of the New South Wales Corps complaining to the Home Office that while his instructions were to guard the convicts, to prevent them from gaining possession of the ship or from escaping, the master of the Surprize ‘does not think my power extends so far as to be in possession of the Keys, or ordering just as many up daily as I think I can guard.’23
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