A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  And then there were the inland people of the western basin of the Sydney region, the Burramattagal, who would give their name to Parramatta; and the people north of Botany Bay, the Bediagal; and to the south of Botany Bay, the Gweagal: all Eora-speaking, if with their own dialects, and all of them people known to each other. West of Parramatta lay a language group named the Dharug who had many contacts with and similarities to the Eora, so that some experts count Dharug and Eora the same language. Later, for example, the Gweagal, Bediagal, and Dharug would fight guerrilla war in each other's territory (now Sydney's southern and western suburbs), against the Europeans.

  Apropos of clan borders, and the density of mystery or ritual sites, Phillip and King (the latter returned on leave from Norfolk Island) were accompanied by Bennelong to Parramatta, and walked to Prospect Hill through “a pleasant tract of country,” which, King remarked—as many an Englishman before and since have— “appeared like a vast park.” King was impressed by the fact that in this four-mile walk they crossed eight Aboriginal districts. Phillip would record them in a language notebook.

  In fact the authority system of the natives was like that of Freemasonry, but not even as pyramidal as that, for there was no overall grand master and there were many lodges with many masters. Carradhys, shamans, were other sources of power: healers and condemners, ritual punishment men, and binders and loosers of sins and curses.

  BY APRIL 1790, THE SHACKLE was removed from Bennelong's ankle. Arthur Phillip demonstrated his trust, as he could never do with a convict, by letting Bennelong wear a short sword and belt, Bennelong being “not a little pleased at this mark of confidence.” As well, in a time of great scarcity, Bennelong was still well supplied with rations. Phillip's stated motivation was the same as earlier, with Arabanoo: “Had he [Bennelong] penetrated our state, perhaps he might have given his countrymen such a description of our diminished numbers, and diminished strength, as would have emboldened them to become more troublesome.” But Phillip was indulgent as well. Bennelong's allowance was received each week from the commissary stores by the governor's steward, the Frenchman Bernard de Maliez, “but the ration of a week was insufficient to have kept him for a day.” The deficiency was made up with fish and Indian corn. For if he were hungry, Bennelong became furious or melancholy.

  He was also in love and had a woman to pursue. On 3 May, he pretended illness, and awakening the steward, Maliez, who lay in the room with him, “very artfully” begged to be taken downstairs, no doubt under apparent pressure of diarrhoea. Bennelong “no sooner found himself in a back-yard, than he nimbly leaped over a slight paling, and bid us adieu.”

  Along with his desire for Barangaroo, whom he probably knew Colby was trying to seduce, homesickness and hunger motivated Bennelong's escape. Collins was a little affronted that the governor's every indulgence had not delayed Bennelong's decamping. But Bennelong had agendas beyond Collins's imagining, including the necessity of performing ceremonials that were pending, and of reporting his experiences of the Europeans.

  John Hunter, hearing of Bennelong's escape, made the joke of the season by saying Bennelong had taken “French leave.” When boat crews, sent around to look for Bennelong, called his name in various coves and bays of Port Jackson, the native women laughed and mimicked them.

  seventeen

  WITH A SIGH OF RELIEF but some concern for his charges, in March 1790 Phillip consigned Ross from Parramatta to the command of Norfolk Island since Lieutenant King had been pleading for a return to England, and Phillip thought of King as the most reliable man he could send home to report to influential Britons on the parlous state of things in New South Wales.

  For the inhabitants of Sydney Cove, the ration at the time provided daily about 1,800 calories and 56 grams of protein, a minimum for survival. Tench, passing the provision store, saw a man who emerged with “a wild haggard countenance having received his daily pittance to carry home. His faltering gait, and eager devouring eye, led me to watch him; and he had not proceeded ten steps before he fell. I ordered him to be carried to the hospital where, when he arrived, he was found dead…. On opening the body, the cause of death was pronounced to be inanition.” Both soldiers and convicts found they were not able to fulfil tasks. The clothing store was near empty and some convicts lived in tatters and rags. In their camp the women were resourceful with needles and yarn Phillip had distributed, but many a guard detachment was mounted in which the majority of soldiers lacked shoes. Thefts of clothing increased and intense depression bred a thousand desperate pilferings.

  In this emergency, Phillip “from a motive that did him immortal honour,” released to the general stores the 300-weight of flour which was his personal store, “wishing that if a convict complained, he might see that want was not unfelt even at government house.”

  In March 1790, the Sirius and Supply both set sail for Norfolk Island with about 350 people. Phillip was unloading some of Sydney Cove's hungry onto Norfolk's richer soil. Amongst those travelling to Norfolk were John Hudson, the child chimney-sweep, Major Robert Ross as new commandant, and Lieutenant Clark.

  John Hunter and Sirius had not been to Norfolk before, and on arriving could not land at Sydney Bay on the south side of the island. At Cascade Bay on the north shore Hunter was able to land convicts and marines, 275 people in all. But his ship was blown out to sea by a gale before it could land any supplies for them. When the wind shifted Hunter tried again for Sydney Bay, and when the signal flags flying ashore indicated that the surf was calm enough to allow longboats to land, the unloading of stores began. After much had been landed, another wind shift caused the Supply to make sail and get away from a reef on the west side of the bay. Despite Hunter's best efforts, and a complicated series of manoeuvres with sails and helm, Sirius was blown stern-first howling and creaking onto the reef, where the surf began to batter her to pieces. Sailors cut away the masts and rigging and throwing them over the side in the hope that the loss of weight might refloat her: “In less than ten minutes the masts were all over the side, the ship an entire wreck,” wrote Midship-man Newton Fowell. Provisions were brought up from the hold and stacked on the gun deck. If necessary, some of them could be floated ashore. Sailors were tied to ropes and hauled ashore through the surf.

  Male convicts already landed volunteered to swim to the wreck as the sea subsided, and liberate the livestock. Having done so, they also raided the ship's cellar. Ross would issue a proclamation against those who “in a most scandalous and infamous manner, robbed and plundered” items from the wreck. He declared martial law, fearing the pressure placed on resources not only by the newcomers but also by Sirius's crew, who would be stuck on Norfolk Island for ten months.

  Little Supply survived and left with King, also carrying to Sydney his convict mistress, Ann Innett, and their two small sons, Norfolk and Sydney, whom King intended to rear as his own, as a gentleman should.

  With his declaration of martial law, Ross decided it was not possible to administer a necessary oath of obedience one by one to convicts and private soldiers. He said that if they would pass under the King's colours at the flagstaff, and between the colours of the detachment, it would equal a voluntary oath. He himself led the procession, the rest of the population following with “chearfulness.”

  In April 1790, a cheerful phenomenon indeed occurred which Hunter, stuck on the island in a small hut, considered an act of divine intervention. Thousands of birds of a species of ground-nesting petrels arrived on the hills of the island, and continued to land each night for four months. “A little before sunset the air was thick with them as gnats are on a fine summer's evening in England,” noted Ralph Clark in wonder. They were of the mutton-bird species, and nested in particular on Mount Pitt, where they dug their ground nests like rabbit warrens. Settlers, free and bond, would climb the hill at night with lit pine-knots to search for the birds, who returned each evening to their burrows. The parties would arrive soon after dusk, light small fires to attract the attention of th
e birds, “and they drop down out of the air as fast as the people can take them up and kill them.” Unfortunately for the species, the mutton-bird did not easily rise from flat ground and could not escape the slaughter. Their eggs in the burrows were also easily plundered. Throughout mid-1790, 170,000 birds were taken, and their feathers must have blown hither and thither on the island and coated the surrounding sea. “They had a strong, fishy taste,” said Hunter. “But our keen appetites relished them very well; the eggs were excellent.” As on the mainland, people also boiled and ate the head of the cabbage tree palm.

  Ross seemed to feel freed from Phillip's influence and set up on Norfolk Island his own kind of commonwealth. He began to give allocations of land to groups of convicts, perhaps six people at a time, who were jointly responsible for growing what they needed on a particular, communally shared acreage. Thus the convicts would become their own motivators and regulators, and gang up on those who slacked off. As they produced their own food, the flour ration they got from the government would be successively reduced, it was initially proposed, but instead Ross decided to offer monetary and other prizes to those who put up for sale the most pork, fowls, and corn. In his “agrarian common wealth,” felons were exposed to the reforming impact of land of their own.

  Captain Hunter, who observed the scheme at work, thought that in reality convicts were driven by it to steal from each other's gardens. Under the Ross system, the birth of every piglet was to be reported to the deputy commissary and the death of every sow was to be followed by an enquiry. If the cause of death was found to be an accident or a disease, the government would make up the loss, but if not, the convicts given the care of the pig as a group “were to be considered responsible and were to be punished as criminals.”

  Ross did not seem to be personally a great punisher or flogger, and on Norfolk, his ideals, unsuspected in Sydney and Parramatta, emerged. He offered his charges the allurements of a far more intense cooperativism than Phillip had in Sydney.

  eighteen

  PHILLIP, IF SOMETIMES SEEN even by the convicts as well as by later imaginations of Australians as more an iconic than fully human figure, was reduced by gritty daily life by now, and fearing for the future; a man who may or may not have still loved his housekeeper, Deborah Brooks; who made jokes in French with his servant Maliez, patted his greyhounds whom he was reduced to feeding with kangaroo gristle and the inedible sections of the weekly rations; and who fed rice by the grain to his pet Sydney Cove fruit bat.

  This was the man who now summoned King and made him an emissary. It was as well that at the time, Phillip did not yet know what had happened to the store ship the British government had sent, the HMS Guardian. By 24 November 1789, the Guardian had been at Cape Town and its young captain, Lieutenant Riou, began the business of purchasing livestock for Sydney as fast as he could. He was an active and intelligent young man, and knew what joy and deliverance his cargo would bring to the population of New South Wales. He even carried a curate, the Reverend John Crowther, for the Reverend Johnson, although he wrote to his mother and sister, “Protect me from such parsons. He has never hinted at giving us a sermon, and if he did, I have too great a respect for the credit of the clergy and more for the forms of our religion than to suffer him.” Riou also had aboard seven free superintendents of convict labour, recruited in London, and the young daughter of one of them.

  The Dutch at Cape Town told Riou when he arrived that Captain John Hunter had been there earlier fetching supplies aboard the Sirius, issuing Admiralty bills of credit, and speaking of the harsh conditions of Sydney Cove, and that news increased Riou's determination to make all proper speed.

  By 11 December, Guardian was ready to reach south-east to pick up the roaring forties which would take it to Van Diemen's Land and the turn northwards for Sydney. Guardian and its captain would be Botany Bay's saviours, an attractive idea to an intelligent and motivated young officer.

  In this same December, the leisurely Lady Juliana was lying in Rio, and Mrs. Barnsley was accompanied ashore by officers to do her shopping. The voyage thus far gave some indication of the entrepreneurial spirit of some of the women. In Teneriffe in the Canarys, Mrs. Barnsley had treated her clique and followers to a cask of canary wine. At Santa Cruz, the capital of Teneriffe, the enterprising Sarah Sabola, alias Sarah Lyons, a young Jewish convict from the East End of London, having acquired lengths of black cloth, progressed with other convict women through the city barefoot and wan, bearing Catholic symbols such as crucifixes and rosaries, and attracted gifts of cash and goods from generous citizens.

  Neither Lieutenant Edgar nor Captain Aitken seemed to have punished such enterprises. Nor did they cast judgment on the convict girls who accommodated Spanish gentlemen aboard, as had not been permitted in the First Fleet. The former London madam Elizabeth Sully, who had run a lodging house at 45 Cable Street, East London, had been sentenced with three of her girls for robbing clients. (The watch of a client was found secreted in Sully's bed.) They and other former prostitutes welcomed visitors aboard, and after leaving St. Jago in the Cape Verde islands, the Lady Juliana was accompanied for some distance by two Yankee slavers making for the Gambia. The two ships stuck close for the sake of “the ladies,” sailors being rowed over to the Lady Juliana from the slavers for evening recreation. Naturally, not all convict women were involved in the prostitution, but the former prostitutes who serviced the visitors from the whalers seemed to have been happy to build up their resources for the uncertainty of what was coming. One historian of the Lady Juliana believes that Nicol, Surgeon Alley, Captain Aitken, and Lieutenant Edgar must have been in some way facilitators and profiteers of the flesh trade on the Lady Juliana, and it is hard to see how they could have been opposed to it. They certainly approached it all with a Georgian pragmatism unclouded by too much piety.

  As some of the Lady Juliana women disported themselves in Rio, a city decked for an exuberant Christmas, the Guardian had left Cape Town and was at 42 degrees 15 minutes, a latitude generally too far north for icebergs. Nonetheless, the sailor of the masthead sighted ice. On Christmas Eve an extended ice pack stretched ahead. Riou brought the Guardian close in to one outcrop and two boats were hauled off to allow sailors to chop off lumps of ice to serve as water for the cattle. By the time the boats got back to the ship with their ice blocks, visibility had diminished. Guardian crept along, its captain looking for a safe passage, but a semisubmerged ice spur raked open the ship's keel. She tore free, but her rudder was left stuck in the ice. Water flooded into her hull.

  Two days of frenzied endeavour began. Riou fothered his ship, that is, wrapped up the hull in a bandage of two layers of sail. After hours at the pump, some men found the liquor store and drank themselves stupid as a means of facing death. The day after Christmas, Riou gave those who chose, including the specialist artisan convicts, permission to give up the ship and take to the sea in the boats. Most of the seamen left, but the convict artificers stayed. It would turn out that theirs was the right choice. Only fifteen of those who took to the boats would survive.

  Seven weeks later, covered in dirt and rags and with long beards, the group who stayed on Guardian sighted some whalers who led them back to the Cape of Good Hope. The Lady Juliana, fifty days from Rio, came into Cape Town to find the ruin of the Guardian low in the water and its masts and rigging in disarray. Most of the livestock Riou had bought on his first visit to Cape Town had been drowned or trampled in the ship's wreckage. Riou and Lieutenant Edgar of the Lady Juliana went ashore to search out an old friend also unexpectedly in Cape Town: Captain Bligh and the part of his crew of Bounty who had stuck with him following the mutiny led by Fletcher Christian. Bligh and his loyalists had sailed a cutter all the way from where the mutiny had occurred in the Pacific to Dutch Timor, and then had been conveyed to Batavia and Cape Town.

  The Lady Juliana suffered its own emergency in port. “While we lay at the Cape,” said Nicol, “we had a narrow escape from destruction by fire. The carpe
nter allowed the pitch-pot to boil over upon the deck, and the flames rose in an amazing manner. The shrieks of the women were dreadful, and the confusion they made running about drove everyone stupid. I ran to my berth, seized a pair of blankets to keep it down till the others drowned it with water. Captain Aitken gave me a handsome present for my exertions.”

  Riou had the sad duty of beaching the Guardian for careening, and ultimately of abandoning it. He had saved a flock of sheep and two Cape stallions, and these were transshipped to the Lady Juliana with wine, a small number of barrels of flour, and some Admiralty dispatches. Five agricultural work superintendents were also put on the Lady Juliana.

  All twenty-five of the convict artificers of Guardian would need eventually to be delivered to Sydney Cove too. Riou had to find quarters for them ashore, and intended to petition the authorities to pardon them for their brave work in the saving of the Guardian. It would indeed happen after they reached Sydney, but not before Phillip first emancipated his brickmaker, Bloodworth.

  Had the Guardian been able to continue to Sydney, it would have arrived in March 1790 and saved Phillip from the further reductions to the rations made in April 1790. By that time, weekly, 21/2 pounds of flour, 2 pounds of pork, and 2 of rice were the limit for each British soul in New South Wales. Because of the energy needed to fish and hunt, an extra measure of rations was set aside for gamekeepers and fishermen. At the cooking fires in the men's and women's camps, prisoners looked covetously at each other's shares, and in the marines' huts wives asked their husbands how they were expected to keep children healthy on a few flapjacks a week, insect-infected rice, and pork that shrunk to half its weight as the brine cooked out. In late April it became apparent that the pork in the storehouse would last only until 26 August at the current low rate of consumption, and the beef similarly.