All the food was stored below decks in conditions that were either cold and damp or, in the tropics, hot and damp. Mould and decomposition were inevitable. As well, it was not uncommon for provisions to be up to several years old before they were even loaded onto a ship. Surgeon Lind wrote that in his experience naval food consisted of ‘putrid beef, rancid pork, mouldy biscuits and flour’.18 A surgeon on board Captain James Cook’s second voyage remarked that ‘our bread was…both musty and mouldy, and at the same time swarming with two different sorts of little brown grubs…Their larvae, or maggots, were found in such quantities in the pease-soup…that we could not avoid swallowing some of them in every spoonful we took.’19 And this was on board the ship of a captain known to take great care of his crew.
The salt beef and pork, after months at sea, stank ferociously when removed from the brine. It too was riddled with maggots—unless it had dried and hardened beyond the point where it could be reconstituted by a saltwater soaking. Even the barrels of fresh drinking water quickly became putrid or briny, hence the need for rations of beer (at the start of the voyage, before it could spoil) and later rum.20 If Elizabeth was breastfeeding, her diet would have immediately affected the baby’s health. And if the baby was weaned to solids, or was receiving a mix of solids and breast milk, the available food remained eminently unsuitable. Even an otherwise healthy baby would suffer under such conditions as well as from the continual chafing discomfort of napkins and swaddling cloths washed only in salt water. The Neptune was no place for a growing baby—or for a pregnant woman.
The inadequate rations were made worse by the fact that the crew, convicts and soldiers (and presumably their wives) were being short served. Trail’s orders from Camden, Calvert and King were that he should provide the contractually stipulated rations, while being very careful to ensure ‘there is not greater consumption than we have agreed for, including all allowance whatever’.21 On the face of it, this seems reasonable advice. In reality, though, the captains of the three transports were free to sell any leftover rations. The more rations they withheld, the more they had to gain upon reaching their destination. The convicts slowly began to starve. Their complaints were ignored.
The soldiers complained about their rations and Lieutenant Macarthur, conscientiously enough, reported his soldiers’ concerns to Captain Nepean. Elizabeth recorded the result. ‘“Trail does every thing to oblige me,” responded Nepean “and I must give up some points to him.”’22 The soldiers continued to receive less than their full allowance of food, and Macarthur continued to report their complaints. ‘“I will see into it,” said Nepean’.23 Elizabeth had every reason to believe that Nepean did indeed follow up the complaints—largely because of the ‘monstrous and unprovoked insults that always issued’ from Trail. The worst insult of all arrived on Saturday 30 January. After barely two weeks at sea, Trail ordered the door from the Macarthurs’ cabin to the upper gallery be nailed shut.
Elizabeth and John were outraged. Such behaviour towards an officer and his wife was preposterous in the extreme. Even Trail’s reason for his actions—supposedly ‘to prevent Mr M from listening’ to discussions in the upper cabin—was insulting.24 Elizabeth suspected the listening suggestion to be Nepean’s and was doubly hurt. The Macarthurs could now only get in and out of their cabin via the passage through the convict quarters which, just to add to the general foulness, Nepean had recently ordered be made a hospital for the sick.
John Macarthur, true to form, complained. Nepean, equally in character, did nothing while noting that ‘the Master of the Ship had a right to do as he pleased’.25 It seems Nepean had learnt something from his earlier disputes with Gilbert after all. Agent Shapcote responded to Macarthur with both admirable frankness and shameful timidity, saying ‘he should not quarrel with Trail for any man’.26 Meanwhile Elizabeth refused to use the common passage and remained confined ‘within the narrow limits of a wretched cabin’.27
Elizabeth was pregnant and utterly miserable, surrounded by ‘wretches whose dreadful imprecations and shocking discourses ever rang in my distracted ears: a sickly infant claiming constant maternal cares: my spirits failing: my health forsaking me’.28 She was free to go up on deck at any time via the convict passageway, but she maintained her defiant refusal to budge, under any circumstance. By this time the Neptune was approaching the equator and the temperature, night and day, was stifling. Outside, there was at least a chance to catch a breath of sea air, but to voluntarily remain below decks was an act of either extreme foolishness or utter heroism. Perhaps as an unmarried girl Elizabeth had been a little more carefree, but young matron Elizabeth was stalwart in her application of the rules of propriety, in maintaining her feminine honour. And perhaps she hoped to shame Nepean and Trail by her example.
John used the dark passage when called to duty, tripping over boxes or lumber or people and ‘frequently contracting heaps of the Vermin with which it was infested’.29 Within the cabin, hourly effusions of oil of tar (a volatile, strong-smelling liquid) did little or nothing to relive the constant stench. The heat was cruel and the water ration of five quarts (five and a half litres), ‘our whole allowance for every purpose’, barely sufficed.30 Elizabeth recorded that their servant, dispatched to the water barrel for the daily allowance, was constantly watched and once was stopped to have the ration examined ‘lest the Seaman who had the serving [of] it (knowing our situation) should be induced by motives of humanity, to make some small addition to the scanty pittance’.31
Rationing water while traversing the doldrums was, in fact, a sensible and commonplace practice. Trade winds converging at the equator produce no steady surface winds—often just heated, rising air. As a result, sailing ships could be becalmed for alarmingly long periods. Whether Elizabeth’s five quarts of water were for the family only, or for the servants as well, is unclear. The crew, accustomed to washing in sea water and drinking their rum ration, seem to have scorned Elizabeth’s concerns. Water wasn’t her only problem, though. The food rations also continued to be served up short and the family was ‘insultingly told we should have less, if they thought proper’.32
Ten days passed before John found a way to break the impasse. Just as he came on duty, one of his sergeants made a now-familiar complaint about the short rations. This time several pounds of meat were missing. The Neptune’s chief mate, overhearing the sergeant’s complaint, exclaimed that the man was a damned rascal. Macarthur told the mate, in no uncertain terms, that the sergeant ‘would do well to punish him for his insolence’.33 At that, the mate turned on Macarthur, heaping him with ‘every kind of abuse that can be supposed to flow from ignorance and brutality’.34 Macarthur was livid, but honour (and the safety of all on the vessel) precluded him from immediate redress. Instead, he sent for Captain Nepean and related the incident. Nepean was unimpressed. Fed up with Macarthur’s constant carping, Nepean dressed him down for interfering between the men in the first place and made it clear that he was tired of being called upon to arbitrate. When it came to remedying any wrongs offered to the men, Macarthur was on his own. John grasped at the only straw left to him and requested to swap duties with an officer from one of the other transports. Nepean was more than happy to oblige.
In her journal Elizabeth writes that Nepean’s final insult combined with ‘the knowledge of what we were hourly suffering & the contemplation of what we had to expect in future, determined Mr M to apply for a remove on board the Scarborough’.35 Elizabeth hints at the discussion she and John must have had about their predicament. She does not say that John was determined to ask for a transfer, but implies that the facts and options were laid out for him (presumably by Elizabeth) and these pushed him to act. The reasons for her literary convolutions are found in a letter she wrote to her mother. Posted from Cape Town and written well in advance of the journal, Elizabeth artlessly writes that Trail was ‘a perfect sea monster; so much so that I requested Mr Macarthur to exchange duties with one of the Officers in one of the other ships’.36 Al
though the journal circumspectly attributes the decision to John, in reality the call was made by Elizabeth. The young couple was beginning to operate as a partnership.
The next calm day presented itself on 19 February and, at the searing latitude of six degrees north, the Macarthurs and their anonymous servants were rowed over to the Scarborough. Elizabeth wrote that baby ‘Edward and I suffered greatly from the heat, but this was an inconvenience I thought lightly of—after what I had been taught to bear’.37 Elizabeth is silent as to the sufferings of those forced to row in the heat. John Macarthur had swapped places with a Lieutenant Townson. Townson, in moving to the Neptune, gained his own cabin and the proximity of women. Less fortunate, perhaps, was Townson’s former cabin mate Lieutenant Edward Abbott, a Canadian in his early twenties with whom the Macarthurs would now share. Poor Abbott doesn’t get a mention in Elizabeth’s journal.
5
The Tempestuous Southern Ocean
Our passage to the South [could] truly be called a tempestuous one.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR’S SHIPBOARD JOURNAL, UNDATED
Elizabeth was much happier aboard the Scarborough. The master, John Marshall, she described as ‘a plain, honest man, and disposed to make things as comfortable to me as was in his power’.1 Marshall, like Gilbert, had commanded one of the First Fleet transports and he amused Elizabeth with his flattering accounts of the colony. He further endeared himself to her by speaking ‘in the tenderest terms’ of his wife and three children in England.2 The convicts aboard the Scarborough were not so enamoured of the master. Only days before Elizabeth’s transfer a scheme to mutiny was discovered, and the convict ringleaders were flogged and chained to the open deck. The rest of the Scarborough convicts were being kept in the same conditions as those aboard the Neptune—tightly ironed, poorly fed, inadequately exercised—and they were dying at a similar rate. For eight weeks, the three transports—Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize—sailed down the African coast. The weather turned nasty and it was with relief that, on 14 April 1790, they anchored in False Bay, some twenty miles from Cape Town, on the southern, more protected side of the peninsula. As keen as the voyagers were for fresh food and water, it’s most likely they received fresh news first.
With dismay, they learned of the wreck of HMS Guardian, the forty-four-gun ship laden with provisions and valuable stores for the New South Wales colony. Holed by Antarctic ice in the Southern Ocean on Christmas Eve and struggling to keep the pumps operating at capacity, the ship’s captain was forced to throw overboard most of the livestock, plants and stores in order to stay afloat. Two days later the Guardian’s captain, Edward Riou, allowed more than sixty men, about half of those on board, to flee in the ship’s boats. At that stage no one was clear as to who was abandoning whom. However a valiant (and extraordinarily lucky) Riou managed to nurse the damaged Guardian back to Cape Town, arriving in February 1790. Of the men in the boats only fifteen were ever seen again, rescued after nine days by a French ship.3 The Guardian was beyond repair and was eventually beached and abandoned.
News just as interesting, although of less immediate concern to the Macarthurs, was the miraculous escape of Lieutenant Bligh after losing his ship, HMS Bounty, to Fletcher Christian’s mutineers. No one could possibly then have guessed how John Macarthur would one day himself engineer another mutinous uprising against Bligh. The mutiny on the Bounty had occurred near Tahiti a year earlier—on 28 April 1789—and Bligh had endured forty-seven days and 3618 nautical miles in an overcrowded open boat before he was able to land at Timor, in June 1789.4 From there it took him nine months to get back to England and report the matter to Admiralty. Bligh spent Christmas at the Cape and had left for London in January, only a few months before Elizabeth and John arrived. He left letters for Governor Phillip (who at Sydney Cove was nearest the scene of the crime) appraising him of the mutiny, and describing each of the ‘pirates’. Conscientious and expert mariner that he was, Bligh’s dispatches to Phillip also included detailed descriptions of the best sea roads through the Endeavour Straits to Timor—sea roads that Bligh had traversed in that leaking, open boat. Bounty’s Master, John Fryer, had accompanied Bligh in the open boat and was still in Cape Town with a handful of other survivors, helping Riou with the Guardian’s salvage operation.5
The Macarthurs’ ship Scarborough and the other transports remained at False Bay for only sixteen days. The longer the fleet tarried in port, the longer the voyage overall and the more the contractors’ profit dwindled. The other reason to make haste lay in the weather. Due to the delays in leaving England, the three transports now faced crossing the dangerous Southern Ocean on the brink of winter. The sooner they got going, the better.
Captain Riou, forced to pay exorbitant storage fees for what remained of HMS Guardian’s cargo, was keen to transfer as much of it as he could to the Scarborough and the other Second Fleet transports. Much had already been transferred into the Lady Juliana when she had anchored at the Cape in March.6 However, the masters of the Second Fleet transports complained: the large quantity of additional stores was not covered by contract and they were not permitted to impose freight charges. Naval agent Shapcote, as usual, sided with the masters and was adamant that their sailing date was fixed, effectively precluding the loading of stores beyond that day. Captain Riou, who had sailed as a teenage midshipman under Cook, was considered by his peers to be an outstanding seaman and he would rise to become one of Nelson’s captains at the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen.7 In a private letter dispatched during the month following the Second Fleet’s departure, Riou was exasperated and scathing: ‘If ever the navy make another contract like that of the last three ships they ought to be shot and as for their agent Mr Shapcote he behaved here just as foolishly as a man could well do.’8 Riou would never encounter Shapcote again—within a few weeks of leaving the Cape colony Shapcote would die of natural causes.
Throughout their stay at the Cape, the convicts remained on board and securely ironed. Trail much later argued that ‘the ship lay so near the Shore that it was necessary to take every precaution’ to prevent an escape. As a result, the lower decks were not properly cleaned out. Trail and his employers would later state that the convicts’ deck was ‘daily scraped, swabbed or mopped, and Twice a week sprinkled with Oil of Tar or Vinegar’.9 But by this stage the male convicts had endured six or more months below decks (the women had greater freedom of movement). The men were suffering from scurvy, covered in lice, and prone to vomiting and diarrhoea.10 The orlop deck was far beyond being cleaned by a sprinkle of vinegar and the wave of a swab.
The surgeons on each of the three transports used their time in port to write to naval agent Shapcote. None queried the below-decks living conditions but each articulated the seriousness of the scurvy situation. ‘I am sorry to inform you’, wrote Surgeon Beyer of the Scarborough, ‘that the scurvy is making a rapid progress, both amongst the soldiers and the convicts.’11 Crucially missing from the convicts’ stipulated ration was any source of vitamin C. Scurvy was the inevitable result, with symptoms manifesting within about four weeks and continuing worse. The early symptoms are flu-like and include nausea, diarrhoea, fever and painful joints and muscles. Later symptoms include swollen and abscessed gums leading to loose teeth (and foul-smelling breath), severe and easy bruising, bulging eyes, the opening of previously healed scars, bleeding into the joints and muscles and, eventually, fatal internal haemorrhages. In babies and children, scurvy stunts bone growth. Royal Navy surgeon James Lind had proved that scurvy could be treated with citrus fruit and published his findings in 1753, but his suggestions were not widely implemented until the early nineteenth century. Across the three ships, about a third of the soldiers and convicts were afflicted. At the surgeons’ urging, Shapcote authorised the daily provision of fresh beef and vegetables while they lay at anchor—whether his orders were carried out is not known.
Elizabeth remained aboard Scarborough for the first eight days in port. In a letter sent from the Cape to her mother, her
first words express her deep concerns for her ‘poor little Boy…He has been very sickly throughout the Passage, & unless a very speedy change take place I am well convinced he will shortly cease to be an inhabitant of this world’.12 Elizabeth goes on to detail Edward’s size, providing further evidence of his malnourishment. ‘He is not near so large as children generally are at four months old, altho’ he is now upwards of twelve.’ There is also a hint that Elizabeth was not finding motherhood easy. ‘He is very sensible, very lively, & affords us much pleasure; but the trouble we have had with so delicate a little creature is indescribable, & I wonder my own health hath not suffered more from the attention I have been obliged to pay him.’ Elizabeth then seems to think of the effect of her letter on its reader and hastens to reassure her mother that she is now very well. ‘I was nearly tired with the length of the Passage before we got into Port, & stood in need of refreshments very much; but now with the benefit of fresh meat, plenty of fruits & vegetables, I am quite recovered; & assure my beloved Mother that I never was in better health, & am in very good Spirits which are only dampened by poor Edward’s illness.’13
Elizabeth continues the letter in this happier vein, claiming to ‘have but little spare time, being busy in seeing all our Linen washed & got up, & laying in stock & refreshment to take with us to Botany Bay’. Clearly Elizabeth was determined not to have to rely solely on the ship’s steward for her family’s rations. She did manage, though, to squeeze in a visit to the governor, where she was ‘met by his Daughter, who was dressed after our mode; but as she could not speak English, nor I Dutch, we could only exchange dumb civilities’. Presumably language continued to be a problem as Elizabeth found the locals to be ‘unfriendly & Rude’. She conceded, though, that the ‘Dutch live very well at their own tables—I like their houses, they are spacious & airy & their Slaves keep them remarkably clean. A Man’s riches are here determined by the number of his Slaves. If you go to a genteel House you will see a dozen of them attending in the Hall.’ Elizabeth offers no opinion about slavery, but appears to accept it—she presents it merely as an item of interest. Public interest in Britain about the issue was growing, and abolitionist William Wilberforce’s campaign had formally begun just before Elizabeth left England, but the British slave trade would not be abolished until the passing of The Slave Trade Act 1807. Elizabeth does, however, make a passing comment on the local indigenous people. ‘I have not yet seen any of the original inhabitants of this Coast—the Hottentots. There are some, I am told, who reside in the Mountains; they are a harmless set of Beings & hurt no one.’14
Elizabeth Macarthur Page 5
