by Richard Cox
Although Commissioner Bigge wrote his report on the colony 20 years later, some of his observations about transportation are relevant. In his ‘Preface about the Condition and Treatment of Convicts during the Passage to New South Wales’ he considered that a berth of 18 inches for each convict was ‘sufficient’, but that the space allocated to seamen and military guards was ‘scarcely adequate to their accommodation for so long a voyage’. He commented on the captains and surgeons being ‘much interrupted by commercial speculations of their own’ and the ‘temptation for a fraudulent abduction of the Government provisions’. Bigge was referring to what captains did with the convicts’ food on arrival, rather than their selling it off en route, as Salkeld did. But the principle was the same.25 There is no indication that Price so profited, in fact he spent his own money on extra food for the prisoners.
When she finally did sail the Minerva carried 165 male and 26 female convicts, plus three convict children. Another child was born on the voyage and three men died. This extremely low death rate came at what proved to be a turning point in the death rate from conditions on transport ships. The ship’s complement included the Cox family and William’s personal servant, a marines detachment of two sergeants, a drummer and 17 privates, 7 soldiers’ wives, 6 soldiers’ children and several political exiles.26 Two of the exiles were to figure largely in William’s future life. Holt, who has been already been mentioned, had paid for his family’s passage – over which the Commander, Joseph Salkeld, attempted to defraud him – and was acutely conscious that he was not a convict. None the less Price listed him as one, with his wife and children as passengers.
A second exile was the Reverend Henry Fulton, with his wife and two children. A clergyman of the established church, Fulton had been accused of political crimes. Once in the colony, where there was a shortage of Protestant clergy, he was quickly appointed to Norfolk Island as chaplain and rehabilitated. William is thought to have later helped to secure him a living at Castlereagh. There was also a Mrs Davis, a returned ex-convict who was, in Price’s words, ‘now going out again, having got some property in the country’. She was an early example of a convict discovering that life in the colony was more promising than as an ex-convict in England. She and everyone else on the ship are meticulously listed in Price’s log.27
The Minerva’s five-ship convoy sailed in the year before the system of transportation was reviewed in 1801. Her voyage was therefore on the cusp of reform, underlining the ameliorations which William and the surgeon did achieve. It was a period of relatively few sailings. Between the Third Fleet and 1801 only 18 transports sailed and the death rate, despite the Hillsborough’s hideous percentage, fell to around 2 percent. Even so Minerva’s rate of 1.5 percent was notably low. In fact Price considered that two of the three men who did die would have done so anyway, being elderly and unfit, had they remained on land. This is not to suggest that conditions in the prison were anything other than squalid, despite the eight foot headroom. Convict ships were usually infested with lice and vermin. A stench of rot and excrement rose from the bilges. Yet Holt remembered the Minerva as being ‘well found and fitted for her voyage. Everything appeared clean, orderly and proper on board.’ Salkeld had ‘fitted up a little cabin for me, Mrs Holt and my son, off the steerage and we were most comfortable’.28 Price was less lucky, being once thrown out of his bunk during a storm. The Coxes’ cabin was not described.
The August sailing date meant that the hottest season was encountered in the tropics, with all the stifling discomfort which that entailed. On Saturday 8 September Price recorded: ‘All the convicts were crying and complaining of the excessive heat in the prison … those I found most distressed I ordered on deck’.29 William saw to it that the convicts were allowed up in turns for regular exercise and fresh air on deck, despite Salkeld’s opposition on the grounds that there was no quartermaster available to keep watch on them. At William’s request, Holt stood in for the quartermaster. It can only have been this fresh air and exercise that did the trick for the men’s survival. Even so, later on in the voyage, on 11 October, despite all precautions, a fever began to appear. It was typhus of a ‘putrid, malignant tendency’, Price wrote. He isolated the victims and had the prison ‘cleaned, washed and some parts of it rubbed over with oil of tar’.30
Curiously, William thought some convicts were being too leniently treated. When they were two weeks out, at Lat. 30.50N, he ordered the men to be put back into irons, ‘as they were all now in good health and spirits’.31 On 12 September Price recorded, in his neat handwriting: ‘We began putting in irons those whom illness and indulgence kept out of them these six months past … they were now all in good health and spirits, there were a few left without irons and a few in single irons to clean the prison and attend those who should be ill.’32 This seems, today, a perverse reaction on William’s part and is out of character with Holt’s descriptions of him. Life was not easy in the prison, with the fit men lying in irons on crowded bunks in sweltering heat. Nonetheless the sick list averaged only 27 to 30 per day, out of the 194, a tribute to Price. Their diet saved most from scurvy.
The women convicts did not lie in irons. Sixteen of the 26 lay with the soldiers or the crew. One area of the ship’s life over which neither Salkeld nor William exerted any more than minimal discipline, probably because in practical terms it would have been too difficult, was the sexual relationships of the women. Price wrote on 5 September: ‘the sailors were claiming a wife each from amongst the female convicts and in a little time sixteen of the women got husbands for the voyage amongst the sailors and soldiers, on the conditions that for the first offence they would be put down and confined for the remainder of the voyage [presumably on either William’s or Salkeld’s orders]’. Price continued wryly ‘It is singular that in all these matrimonial engagements, they dispensed with the usual ceremonies even to a man, they drank a good quantity of grog on the occasion’.33 It seems odd that they were able to obtain liquor, presumably from the crew.
Other commanders and Commissioner Bigge (later on) had plenty to say about this sexual activity. Captain Ralph Clark, writing about such conduct during an earlier voyage of the Friendship, said ‘These damned troublesome whores. I would rather have a hundred men than have a single woman’.34 Bigge was more analytical, also referring to the Friendship, and hitting the nail on the head so far as the Minerva was concerned as well: ‘No precautions were adopted by the captain or surgeon to prevent an improper intercourse between the crew and the convicts … In consequence of this neglect, a very general intercourse took place between the crew and the female convicts.’ Attempts to restore authority were ‘opposed by the vicious inclinations of the women themselves’.35 The worst punishment available was to cut off their hair, although a few were flogged on other voyages. This said, there is no hint in Price’s log that there was any unpleasantness involved. But without doubt, Salkeld, Cox and he never exerted control, or perhaps felt that the crew and soldiers had a right of access to the women. Many years later William’s evidence to Bigge showed that he regarded the primary function of women in colonial society was as wives, definitely not as whores.
The historian Joy Damousi has made some interesting points about this, observing that before 1816 women convicts did not have a rigidly supervised and structured routine on board. ‘Convict women [then] would certainly have had more opportunity to enter into sexual liaisons with their officers and seaman.’36 In the Minerva’s time the ships carried a mix of sexes, while her study is primarily about a later period. However, on female convict ships, ‘a concern with order and potential chaos was a concern with the interaction between the “public” and the “private” [space] on ships’. A private space, such as the crew enjoyed, became ‘the arena of chaos and disorder … through sexual promiscuity’.37 This gave the women power. At the same time, ‘domesticity was conflated with femininity’. It seems likely that a combination of these factors resulted in the Minerva’s ‘marriages’. But as the log est
ablishes, there is no hint of disorder in Price’s account, rather an air of tolerant detachment.
The voyage suffered numerous alarms en route, as already mentioned. On 26 September they had ‘repeated information of different plots by convicts to take the ship from us’ and kill an informant. The most treacherous were transferred to the strong room. Price commented that the information ‘would have hung many of them in a Court of Justice, yet we still wishing to bring them to Botany Bay without flogging any of them’.38 The actual mutiny attempt came to a head a few days later, curiously triggered by an encounter with hostile warships.
On 30 September they encountered ‘two strange sail’ at Lat 6.48N, and a charade of flying false colours ensued, in which each side attempted to bluff the other. This was in the same latitude as Recife (Pernambuco) in Brazil although, no longitude being given, it is not clear how far offshore they were. The strange ships apparently assumed the Minerva might be worth capturing, while Salkeld was rashly imprudent in preparing to fight, given the relative strengths of their armaments. He hoisted a Danish flag on the Minerva and fired a gun, whereupon the strangers ran up English colours and fired back, though at a distance. When within ‘gun and a half shot’ range Salkeld changed to the English flag and the strange ships took down their English colours and hoisted Portuguese. They were now close enough to each other for the Minerva’s crew to see that the two enemy ships were either Spanish or Portuguese and well armed. The larger had 30 guns and the other ship 14.
If they were Spaniards, and enemies, they were too powerful to take on. If they were Portuguese and allies, in Price’s phrase: ‘we had nothing to do with them’. The Minerva therefore made all sail to escape, the enemy’s shots fell far short, and ‘night coming on we never saw them again’. Price commented: ‘we showed more courage then wisdom’ and stood to gain nothing, because if the Minerva had taken them, she lacked letters of marque to be a privateer and would not have been able to profit.39 It had been a risky confrontation, probably motivated by Salkeld’s greed.
This appears to be the incident related by Holt in his Memoirs, when he was requested by the chief mate, Harrison, to man a swivel gun on the poop and asked if he would fight. ‘I answered “yes”,’ said Holt, ‘but I answered with mental reservation.’ His plan was to turn the gun on the ship’s crew, had they been boarded, in the hope of freeing his fellow Irish prisoners. Harrison became suspicious afterwards, but Holt managed to talk his way out of it, even though he had chosen those who should mutiny and ‘they knew my mind by a secret signal’.40
Holt had a more convoluted character than William may have realized. One of the curiosities of the voyage was the warm relationship which blossomed between them. One of the Irish rebel’s numerous tributes to William’s humanity was followed after 8 October when a further conspiracy by nine convicts to seize the ship and murder the officers was discovered by Price. ‘We have had very great hopes,’ Price wrote, ‘that in no instance during the voyage … we should have any occasion to punish these too unfortunate men.’ The ‘we’ can only mean William, at whose discretion convicts would be punished. He ordered four of the plotters to be tied to the capstan and given six lashes each by the boatswain – an extraordinarily modest sentence for actions that might have earned them the yardarm on other ships. Price commented: ‘it was but a slight punishment, but we hope it will have the effect.’41
With these dangerous events behind them, the Minerva reached Rio de Janeiro on 19 October, staying to obtain provisions until 7 November. Here was revealed a commercially exploitative side to William’s activities, recorded by Holt but not remarked on by Price. ‘Captain Cox brought with him,’ Holt says, ‘watches, beaver hats, calicoes, shawls, glass of various kinds, cutlery etc.’ During the voyage he had had the watches, which were cheap ‘London’ ones, embellished by a jeweller convict on board. This was a craft William knew all about. He sold the various goods ‘at an incredible profit … one day his servant was so loaded with dollars, the produce of Capt Cox’s dealings on shore, that it was with difficulty we brought him into the ship’. In this account Holt interjected the caveat ‘but this gentleman’s traffic was fair and honourable’.42 It might have been more truthful to say that officers of the New South Wales Corps were renowned for their commercial dealings on the side and that William must have already absorbed the tradition. Whilst in Rio he bought a heifer and a calf to take to the colony. This could be an indication of his farming plans, although it was not an uncommon thing for officers to do.43
The purchase could also be held to substantiate the unproven family correspondence, which states that William had visited the colony in 1797. The possibility is supported by such circumstantial evidence as his being sufficiently knowledgeable to take that stock of cheap goods with him on the Minerva to trade in Rio de Janeiro, as could the rapidity with which he offered Holt as job as farm manager on their arrival in Port Jackson. 44 Equally, he might have been given a few tips on how to exploit the voyage out by other officers.
Price, on the other hand, bought tea, sugar and portable soup to help keep the sick alive on the second leg of the voyage to Port Jackson – presumably at his own expense. This again emphasizes the 22-year-old surgeon’s concern for his convict charges. This second leg was uneventful, apart from stormy weather, which pitched Price out of his berth four times. The third death took place on 2 December, of a 67-year-old of ‘decay of nature’. Price had noted on 16 November that ‘the old men among the convicts, some of which are 70, 80 and 85 years old continue very weak and languid’.45
When they reached Port Jackson on 11 January 1800, after an overall voyage of 139 days, Price’s sick return was minimal. No soldiers were ill, one was convalescent, one wife was convalescent. Nine convicts were sick and eight convalescent. Only the three male convicts had died, while one convict child had been born. The eulogistic references to this voyage by William’s grand-daughters in the Memoirs are justified, which say that the health of the prisoners ‘was due beyond a doubt to the influence of Captain William Cox’.46 The only incident to mar the ship’s arrival happened when a small boat came alongside and its occupant, taking no notice of a sentry’s warning, was shot through the heart. Interestingly, even though some convicts had plotted to run him through with his own sword in the mutiny, Price had got to know the others well enough to be aware that they expected to get farms and lodgings on arrival. ‘I did not distress them, by contradicting them,’ he wrote.47
Three days after their arrival, William made an offer to Holt. ‘The Governor has promised me six men’, Holt quotes him as saying, ‘and you may be one of them, if you please, not to labour, but to superintend.’ Holt angrily rejected the offer, since he was not a convict. He had lodged his family with another Irish exile friend, Maurice Margarot, but rapidly realized that he needed a job and a house or he was likely to be homeless and unemployed. He acquiesced a week later when on 22 January William said he ‘was in treaty for the purchase of a farm of one hundred acres from Mr John Macarthur’. Would Holt (who had been a farmer) look it over? 48
In summary, William had arrived at his chosen destination for a new life. He had successfully brought his wife and children with him. He may have shipped out the family portraits, now at Clarendon, as testimony to his lineage, in the way that a twentieth-century age of settlers shipped their antiques to African colonies when the Great War was over. He had also, though he probably did not yet realize it, made a reputation for himself for both humanity and ability. Next he had to acquire a farm: and from Holt’s account, wasted no time doing so, if it was not already arranged.
One of the last New South Wales entries in Price’s log, while he was waiting for the Minerva to leave again for India, describes a trip to Parramatta and ‘the plantations and inclosures [sic] belonging to a few houses on each side the river’. Among them was ‘a little box belonging to Mr Cox, a small distance from the water’.49 There can only have been one ‘Mr Cox’ in Price’s mind. This ‘box’ appears to have
been Brush Farm, where the original farmhouse, although some way from Parramatta at Ryde, was close to the river, suggesting that William was already either the owner or the prospective one. Of his future military duties, he does not seem to have spoken. A paymastership was not a career move, but it was a financial one.
3 The Second Largest Landowner in Two Years, Bankrupt in Three
After William bought Brush Farm from John Macarthur in January 1800 he launched into a land buying spree which would make him the second largest landholder New South Wales within two years – and bankrupt him in three. The view he had of Port Jackson when the Minerva dropped anchor on 11 January 1800 is worth conjuring up for its differences from the Sydney landscape of today. The Circular Quay did not exist. The Tank Stream flowed down into Sydney Cove with its cargo of detritus, the indigenous vegetation of its valley already gone, while on the right was the jumble of primitive housing on the Rocks, where there was a disregarded midden of the remains of the Eora peoples’ fish meals. As Grace Karskens points out, the houses on the Rocks, one- or two-roomed huts of wattle and clay with thatched roofs, were possibly introduced by rural convicts in a vernacular style. ‘Convicts and soldiers chose sites in their respective zones, built houses and soon regarded them as their own.’1 The main street was the High Street (later George Street). Governor Macquarie’s regimented town planning was more than a decade ahead.
William and his family, one may assume, were met and probably taken direct by boat to Parramatta. The river was the preferred means of getting to the settlement, partly because of the danger of attacks by Aborigines, partly because of dangers from gangs of escaped convicts. The entrance to the Parramatta River passed the tip of the Rocks and the Dawes Point battery, where the harbour bridge spans it today. A painting of the landing place as it was in 1809, now in the Mitchell Library, helps to give an idea of the landscape. Major Grose had built a store on the south bank and there were early houses on the right. The mangroves which now line so much of the river bank had not yet grown. At Parramatta itself the Corps had a barracks, close by the original military redoubt, where Macarthur had established the paymaster’s office. Parramatta was an Aboriginal word meaning ‘head of a river’, which Governor Phillip had adopted after he recognized it was a more promising place for a settlement than Sydney Cove.
