A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  But it was not all a matter of Defenders and legend. When, in Dublin, the prisoners had been moved from the new gaol to the ship, “Rositer, the woman who had been condemned to die for robbing one of the rooms at the Linen Hall, called out to the soldiers, ‘Clear the way,’ 'til she mounted into the landau.” That air of defiance, arising out of a hope of a great Godgiven reversal of Irish fortunes, characterised many of the convicts of the Queen, and combined with their use of Irish language, brought a new level of complexity to the New South Wales equation.

  THE FORERUNNER OF THIS Third Fleet, the little Mary Ann with her female convicts aboard, appeared off Sydney on the morning of 9 July 1791. She had made the quickest passage yet—four months and sixteen days. But the captain, Mark Munro, not only had no private letters aboard, “but had not brought a single newspaper.” The officers on the Mary Ann could tell Tench—to his relief, since it meant his chances of ultimate promotion were not too severely inhibited by being under Ross's open arrest—that there was “No war; the fleet's dismantled.”

  “When I asked whether a new Parliament had been called, they stared at me in stupid wonder.”

  “Have the rebelliousness French settled on their form of government?” Tench wanted to know further.

  “As for that matter I can't say; I never heard; but d––n them, they were ready enough to join the Spaniards against us,” came the reply.

  The disembarking women were all very healthy and spoke highly of the treatment they had received from Munro. Phillip was pleased by the Mary Ann also in that only three, all of whom were already suffering from disorders when they were loaded aboard in England, had died on the passage. Tench, too, thought that Captain Munro should be praised. “The advocates of humanity are not yet become too numerous: but those who practise its divine precepts, however humble and unnoticed be their station, ought not to sink into obscurity, unrecorded and unpraised, with the vile monsters who deride misery, and fatten on calamity.” The Mary Ann, which carried sufficient stores to enable the rice ration to be increased at once by 2 pounds, also brought the happy news that the store ship Gorgon was definitely on the way. There had been a great deal of conjecture in Sydney Cove about the fate of the Gorgon, a forty-four-gun frigate converted into a store ship, which Phillip knew was on the way to Sydney. In fact Gorgon had been delayed in port and had only just left England that March of 1791.

  Mary Ann additionally carried instructions for the governor that were of unforeseen importance to an as yet unenvisaged southland nation named Australia. They confirmed the policy he had already been following since May 1791. From that time, too late for the escaped Bryant, allotments of ground were parcelled out by the governor even to selected well-behaved transportees, as well as to time-expired ones who voluntarily offered to become settlers in the country. If they continued to cultivate their land for five years, the conditional grant would become permanent in title. Many of the grants were in the hilly area to the south-west of the source of the Parramatta River.

  It was now also confirmed British policy that though those convicts who had served their period of transportation were not to be compelled to remain in the colony if they could somehow get home, “no temptation” should be offered to induce them to quit it. The desire to prevent the felons returning to Britain and their former practices was one of the principles which underpinned the New South Wales experiment. It was not simply a matter of being free that enabled a man or woman to transport themselves out of the country. They had to be able to deal with the needs of all encumbrances—dependants and families—and pay off all debts of a public nature. So the mere prison camp had already become a society which made its own demands of civil piety.

  And so the founding element of New South Wales, and of the embryo nation it would make, was the practical inability of most time-served convicts to leave. The more the population of convicts built up, the more limited the means became of working a passage back home. Thus, for most of the convicts, in no sense was New South Wales the chosen land. Though some did choose it, for many it was the country where people got stuck, and having served time became, willy-nilly, citizens of New South Wales. Watkin Tench would eventually visit such people and noted their attitudes to their new homeland. “Some I found tranquil and determined to persevere, provided encouragement should be given: others were in a state of despondency and predicted that they would starve, unless a period of eighteen months, during which they were to be fed and clothed, should be extended to three years.”

  Amongst the infant children of convicts who could now be found playing around the camps, a new identity would emerge, one to which Europe and Britain were a rumour—though such a new race did not figure in the Home Secretary's nor the Admiralty's intention. A later governor, William Bligh, would call the children born in New South Wales “National Children,” but it was an administrative, not a visionary, term. Now, with varying degrees of reluctance and acceptance, further time-served convicts moved out that July of 1791 to their land grants around Parramatta. Some former convicts did not need to take on the labour of such grants—Henry Kable, for example, who at this time had work as a supervisor and constable, and in whom an entrepreneurial spirit was being awoken by early contact with the highly entrepreneurial officers of the New South Wales Corps.

  THE SHIPS WHICH ARRIVED after Mary Ann did not maintain her high standards of care for prisoners. The 450-ton Matilda made a record passage of 127 days and yet Phillip was not as pleased to see her. She had buried two dozen convicts in the sea, and she needed extensive repairs from the hard driving her captain, Weatherhead, had given her.

  The convicts who were landed sick would have been interested to see Bennelong at the hospital, being treated for what he called tyibul, a form of scabies, which had struck the natives that winter. The surgeons were trying to heal him with applications of sulphur. Bennelong resembled, said Phillip, “a perfect Lazarus.” Though “he was easily persuaded to go to the hospital and rub himself, yet it was not possible to make him stay there till he was cured.” The presence of fretful souls of the dead made the hospital a perilous place to Bennelong. Collins guessed the scabies might be a dietary matter, based on the seasonal unavailability of fish, and perhaps it was a dietary matter in another sense: that Bennelong was taking in food with which the Eora had been for millennia unfamiliar—potatoes, pumpkins, melon, bread, coffee, salt beef, and pork from Bengal.

  The Atlantic came in on 20 August with its male convicts very weak, and soon forty of them were lying at the hospital. The Salamander, which anchored the day after, also delivered its 154 male convicts in an emaciated state, and complaining loudly that they had not had proper attention paid to them. The government had again sent Phillip a parlous gift. “Although the convicts landed from these ships were not so sickly as those brought out last year, the greatest part of them are so emaciated, so worn away by long confinement, or want of food, or from both these causes that it will be long before they recover their strength, and which many of them never will recover.” The master of Salamander was ordered to proceed to Norfolk Island with convicts, stores, and provisions. Phillip sent the majority of the convicts he retained on the mainland to Parramatta, employing them to open up new ground at a short distance from the settlement.

  The slow Admiral Barrington and her crew and convicts had suffered a hard time in the Southern Ocean and even off the New South Wales coast, where she was dragged out to sea by a ferocious southerly gale. She was 206 days on the ocean from Plymouth and had suffered thirty-six deaths when she reached Sydney on 16 October 1791.

  Mrs. Parker, the wife of Captain John Parker of the Gorgon, took the trouble when the store ship arrived in Sydney to visit the convicts of the Third Fleet then in hospital. She was shocked to find herself “surrounded by mere skeletons of men—in every bed, and on every side, lay the dying and the dead. Horrid spectacle! It makes me shudder when I reflect that it will not be the last exhibition of this kind of human misery that will take place in
this country, whilst the present method of transporting these miserable wretches is pursued.”

  Yet in these grim vessels two convicts arrived in New South Wales who would become notable entrepreneurs. Simeon Lord was a thief of linen who, once landed, acted as servant to a captain in the New South Wales Corps. It is not certain which of the vessels of the Third Fleet he arrived on. He would later become one of the former convict front men who would retail goods purchased by the officers of the corps. Another entrepreneur in the making, a young felon named James Underwood, came on the Admiral Barrington and would go into the shipping business. But their glory days were some time off yet.

  An army chaplain, the second minister of religion in New South Wales (the Reverend Crowther having turned back when Guardian sank), arrived also on the Third Fleet. It was not necessarily the relief Johnson had been yearning for, though the Reverend James Bain seemed a practical young man, who brought with him a promise from the Archbishop of Canterbury to support any schoolteacher Bain could find to start a school for the young of New South Wales. Johnson reflected on Bain that “as yet he seems to be greatly caressed by our great ones, and I fancy, is not suspected of being a Methodist,” the suspicion under which Johnson laboured. Johnson's tone was more ironic than bitter, and despite all he seemed to like New South Wales life. He and his wife had recently moved “out of our little cabbage tree cottage, and are now in a house as comfortable and convenient as I can wish—my garden too is in a flourishing state.” In Parramatta, when on duty there, he was able to find a room to stay on Saturday and Sunday evenings, “which gives me an opportunity of visiting the convicts in their huts, and I declare to you that I've found more pleasure at times in doing this, than in preaching etc.”

  Phillip chartered two of the convict ships, Britannia and Atlantic, to go to India for supplies for the settlement. Five of the transports were to go whaling off the Australian coast. The remaining four merchantmen went to India, where the East India Company had given them sanction to load with cotton. It was all shaking down into a pattern. After the delivery of convicts, it was a matter of cotton and tea, and now whaling.

  twenty-five

  THE STORE SHIP Gorgon had arrived in the midst of all the questionable ships of the Third Fleet. “I will not say that we contemplated its approach with mingled sensations,” wrote Tench, by now a veteran of such arrivals. “We hailed it with rapture and exultation.” Gorgon contained six months' full provisions for about 900 people, with stores for His Majesty's armed tender the Supply and for the marine detachment as well. Lieutenant King, having returned to England to be married, arrived back on the Gorgon with the new rank of commander, accompanied by his wife, Anna Josepha Coombe, a generous-spirited woman who would look to the welfare of his children by the convict Ann Innett as well as to that of the child she herself was carrying. King had been frank about them before marrying Anna Josepha at St. Martin-in-the-Fields between successful conferences with Sir Joseph Banks, Grenville, and Nepean. He had returned with assurances about ongoing support for New South Wales. These verbal guarantees must have been crucial in convincing Phillip that the settlement was now, for all its hungry times and desperate internal pressures, assured, and fixed in the map of the Britannic world.

  Indeed, an extraordinary validating device had arrived on the Gorgon and been delivered to Phillip's office at Government House. It was the Great Seal of New South Wales. On the obverse, the King's arms with the royal titles in the margin; on the reverse, an image of convicts landing at Botany Bay, greeted by the goddess Industry. Surrounded by her symbols, a bale of merchandise, a beehive, a pick-axe, and a shovel, she releases them from their fetters and points to oxen ploughing, and to a town rising on the summit of a hill with a fort for its protection. In the bay, the masts of a ship are to be seen. In the margin lie the words Sigillum Nov. Camb. Aust. ( “Seal of New South Wales”); and for a motto, Sic Fortis Etruria Crevit, “In this way Etruria grew strong”—a reference to Etruria having once received the criminals of other places.

  King would go back to administering Norfolk Island, and took his young son Norfolk and the infant, Sydney (and perhaps even their mother), with him to raise them alongside the son borne by Anna Josepha, Phillip. He would ultimately have the three of them educated in England. Having made the dangerous island landfall in November 1791 and relieved Major Ross of his post, King received a group of convicts who brought a petition which claimed that they had been “forced into independent habits” they could not sustain, and that they would never meet the major's harvest targets. Though this petition was signed by less than half of the people in allotments, King would order the pigs returned to government ownership, and abandoned the socialist project, applying Phillip's style of governance from then on.

  In his review of the island administration, he would find the superintendent of convicts at Queensborough, the little inland settlement, unsatisfactory, and would appoint the Irish surgeon D'Arcy Wentworth in his place. Wentworth, said Phillip, “had behaved with the greatest attention and propriety as assistant-surgeon, which duty he still continued to discharge.” The Irish tearaway had become a minor imperial official.

  But enduring exile in his little house at Queensborough, Wentworth still felt uncertain about his situation. He had earlier written to Governor Phillip to seek a clarification of when his posts might become official. The governor replied through David Collins, saying that both Hunter and Jamison had praised him, and that he would finalise his future residence and employment as soon as he received directions from England. The frustration for Wentworth was that both his positions were described as “acting,” and carried no salary except as a prospect. He privately despaired of ever being a man of substance, and thought that the people at home on whom he had relied to advance his interests either had been lazy about arguing on his behalf or had been rebuffed by the government.

  At least at Queensborough, Wentworth was some miles away from the centre of turbulence down at Kingston, the main settlement on the coast. His home was idyllically located. Ten acres of wheat and thirty of Indian corn grew there, and all those who occupied the place were concerned that it should ripen and come to harvest without ground grubs or caterpillars inflicting damage on it. The convict women of Queensborough were cutting reeds for thatching roofs; the men were widening the road between the inland and the coast. There must sometimes have been a not unpleasant atmosphere of combined endeavour, but if so, there were many discontents and much malice close to the Arcadian surface. Queensborough had its own gaol and stocks to accommodate the imperfections of its inhabitants, and Clark, so quick to detect fault in the convicts, was stationed now at nearby Phillipsburgh.

  In narrow Norfolk, where Wentworth continued to cohabit with Catherine Crowley, there were rumours that he was already married in England, and doubts must have been muttered about her child's paternity, given that D'Arcy did not come aboard the Surprize until December 1789. Nonetheless, D'Arcy remained devoted to the boy, and his generous spirit extended to his relationships with others on the island. Authority had not made him a martinet, and he was well liked by gentlemen and convicts both, because of his democratic manner. Without being a philosopher, he had imbibed some of the spirit of democracy driving the American and French Revolutions and the coming transsectarian rebellion of United Irishmen, many of them of his class and higher, which would break out in Ireland in 1798. He had also had many lessons in the fragility of life, and of the thin filament that lay between respectable and criminal society. Norfolk Island was his purgatory, and during it, as superintendent at Queensborough, he developed a gift for supervising agricultural work and for breeding livestock.

  * * *

  FROM THE MODEST BRIG Active, which arrived in Sydney Cove on 26 September 1791, came Sydney's first genuine celebrity criminal, an Irishman named George Barrington. D'Arcy Wentworth had been a considerable gentleman of the road, but Barrington was a brand name of crime, like Jesse James or Al Capone. His origins
were, as people said then, mysterious. He was sent to Dublin Grammar School at the instigation of people in authority, and a rumour was spread that he was of royal descent. At Dublin Grammar he stabbed another school boy in a fight, was flogged, and in response stole money and a watch and ran away. He joined a band of strolling players, and was taught by an expert actor-pickpocket, who took him to London as his young protégé. In 1773, his senior partner was transported to America.

  As his own operator, George Barrington achieved the status of prince of pickpockets, living splendidly despite having to spend a year in the hulks. The victims of his confidence tricks and lifting skills included the Russian Prince Orlov, from whose pocket he extracted at Covent Garden Theatre a snuff-box inlaid with diamonds and said to be worth £30,000. Various peers of the realm were caught out by Barrington, and some of “the brightest luminaries in the globe of London.” Tried at the Old Bailey in September 1790 for stealing a gold watch and chain at the Enfield racecourse, he was sentenced to transportation for the light term of seven years. The press reported that he had attempted to escape from Newgate in his wife's clothes, and that he had commiserated with other rogues in the general wards about the fact that they were all to be sent to a country where the natives had no pockets to pick.

  After his transportation, his name still remained in use in British truecrime pamphlets and chapbooks. Having been the generic gentleman pickpocket, he now became the generic redeemed thief, and the idea of New South Wales as a place of redemption for deficient Britons gained great currency. In 1793 a small but popular tract named An Impartial and Circumstantial Narrative of the Present State of Botany Bay, and in 1802, The History of New South Wales, would be published under his name, but may or may not have come from his hand. In the second, more credible, book, he is quoted as saying that the appearance of the convicts at the time his ship arrived was truly deplorable, “the generality of them being emaciated by disease, foul air, etc., and those who laboured under no bodily disorder, from the scantiness of their allowance, were in a bitter plight.”