A Commonwealth of Thieves

by Thomas Keneally

  In June 1793, Boswell, still talking to Nepean and Dundas about the “unfortunate men,” Mary's companions, was mugged and left unconscious in the street on his way home after a night's drinking. But by August, he was well enough to visit the four men in Newgate to assure them that he was doing all in his power for them, and on 2 November, they were at last released. One of the four had already followed a stratagem of his own to seek freedom. In January 1793, John Butcher, alias Samuel Broome, had written from Newgate to Sir Henry Dundas offering to return to Botany Bay on the terms that “having been brought up in the thorough knowledge of all kinds of land” he was “capable of bringing indifferent lands to perfection.” His offer was not accepted, but when he was released through Boswell's generous offices, he enlisted in the New South Wales Corps anyhow and returned there, and received a land grant “in the district of Petersham Hill,” west of Sydney. Having spent so much effort getting away, he had now gone to lengths to return. He was an early instance of an ordinary man seeing New South Wales as quite habitable under conditions of freedom.

  Mary Bryant, meanwhile, left London for Fowey on 13 October, on the Anne and Elizabeth. The evening before, Boswell took a hackney coach to her room in Little Titchfield Street and collected her and her box. “I sat with her almost two hours,” wrote Boswell, “first in the kitchen and then in the bar of the public house at the wharf [where Mary was to embark], and had a bowl of punch, the landlord and the captain of the vessel having taken a glass with us at last. Mary was uneasy about going, and becoming a figure who would be pointed out in the limited society of Fowey.” She was frightened her relations would mistreat her.

  Boswell consoled Mary by assuring her he would send her a sum of £10 yearly as long as she behaved well. The annuity would be paid half on the first of May, and half on the first of November. Though she could not write very well, they rehearsed a particular form in which she would inscribe the letters MB, and affix them to any letter purporting to be from her, as a sign of its authenticity. The last known receipt from Mary, acknowledging the payment of £5, would be dated 1 November 1794.

  The poet William Parsons assumed that there had been an amorous connection between Boswell and Mary, and that Mary was sad to leave him. “Though every night,” Mary is depicted as saying, “the Strand's soft virgins prove / On bulks and thresholds thy Herculean love,” she nonetheless remains Boswell's inamorata, and asks him:

  Was it for this I braved the ocean's roar,

  And plied those thousands leagues the lab'ring oar?

  Mary is further depicted as being sure that

  Thou, relenting, shall consent at last,

  To feel more perfect joy than all the past;

  Great in our lives, and in our deaths as great

  Embracing and embraced, we'll meet our fate.

  And then, facing the rope together (since wits said Boswell deserved it):

  First let our weight the trembling scaffold bear,

  Till we consummate the last bliss in air.

  Nearly 150 years later, in 1937, amongst Boswell's possessions was found an envelope with the words in his handwriting: “Leaves from Botany Bay used as tea.” It was the same Smilax glyciphylla which Mary Bryant had taken on the cutter with her and which comforted the scurvy-ridden and debased citizens of New South Wales.

  twenty-nine

  OLD HARRY BREWER, lucky to have any post at all and still working as provost-marshal and building supervisor without official confirmation from the home government, was conscientiously searching Pitt before it left to return to England and found a recently arrived convict woman stowed away, with the connivance of one of the mates, Mr. Tate. Tate was brought ashore and tried for the offence and acquitted, so that whether it was to escape New South Wales or for the love of that sailor that the girl was secreted on Pitt, we do not know.

  Why would she and others not want to flee? For the funerals continued, and the stores were still proving inadequate to sustain healthy lives. “The convicts dying very fast, merely through want of nourishment,” wrote a newly arrived refugee from bankruptcy, Surgeon Richard Atkins. “The Indian corn served out is of little use in point of nourishment, they have no mills to grind it and many are so weak they cannot pound it. At present there is not more than eight weeks ration of flour at 3 pound per man at the store. Oh! Shame, shame!”

  By now, desperately hungry men and women crept into the maize fields and stole the cobs from the centre of the crops, and being caught, were too weak to face punishment. The ration of salt meat remained as before, but Gorgon's flour was giving out, and the ration was reduced to 11/2 pounds, though 3 pounds of unmilled maize would be given instead to each adult, and to every child ten years of age. In the absence of proper grinding facilities, maize would become a byword for useless food, as it also would more than fifty years later, during the Irish famine. To make enough meal for each person's survival, “hand mills and querns were set to work to grind it coarse for every person both at Sydney and at Parramatta; and at this latter place, wooden mortars, with a lever and a pestle, were also used to break the corn, and these pounded it much finer than it could be ground by the hand mills; but it was effected with great labour.”

  By May 1792, the flour Gorgon had brought, initially believed to be adequate for six months, was giving out, and could last the settlement only another twenty-four days at 11/2 pounds per week, and the salt meat provisions would be depleted within three months. “Had not such numbers died, both in the passage and since the landing of those who survived the voyage, we should not at this moment have had anything to receive from the public stores; thus strangely did we derive the benefits from the miseries of our fellow creatures!”

  It was “afflicting,” said Collins, to observe the emaciation of those who remained. A fishery was set up at the South Head look-out station exclusively for the use of the sick. The bulk of game was directed towards the hospitals. The huntsmen were given a reward of 2 pounds of flour and the head, one fore quarter, and “the pluck” of any animal they brought in. Collins expressed the nature of the scurvy beginning to prevail in graphic terms—a very want of sufficient strength in the constitution to digest nourishment.

  Phillip now found himself issuing maize from the store to supplement shortfalls in other items. Yet the threat of punishment for food theft could not prevent the strong inhabitants stealing from the more vulnerable when the chance presented, particularly since the weak, from the time of the Second Fleet onwards, had become so numerous.

  Richard Atkins, newly arrived surgeon and deputy judge-advocate of New South Wales, was characteristic of the personnel from which many colonial governors had to fill their bureaucracies. He was the fifth son of baronet, and such men would frequently find themselves employed, for want of something better, in some post along one of the further tendrils of empire. Fleeing insolvency by resigning a commission as adjutant of the Isle of Man Corps, and sailing for Sydney in the Pitt, he would retain in the colony a reputation as a toper, a libertine, and an unreliable borrower of money. Despite his drinking, Phillip made him magistrate at Parramatta and then appointed him registrar of the Vice-Admiralty Court, even though it soon became apparent that he could not be trusted to pay his bills. John Macarthur would ultimately describe Atkins as “a public cheater living in the most boundless dissipation.”

  Yet there is something extremely amiable in the way he writes. When he went to breakfast at the governor's house the first time, Atkins came amply supplied with contrary opinions of Phillip by a number of gentlemen in the colony. But he decided, “His situation is by no means a desirable one in point of duty, for except the civil and military departments he has nothing but a set of rascals to deal with who require a watchful eye…. The overseers for themselves are convicts and are not to be depended on. At Parramatta some of them are rigid to a degree, which proceeds from a fear of being thought too indulgent, and probably from what will almost universally operate upon weak minds, a thirst for power and dominion o
ver the rest of our fellow creatures. The lash is in their hands at present, they ought to use it with lenity, lest they themselves should fall under it. Their power here hangs by a thread.”

  Nevertheless, Atkins remained loyal to Phillip, impressed by the energy with which he visited his farmers. Atkins accompanied the governor on a tour of the settlers at the ponds along the Parramatta River, and Atkins found them comfortably lodged, with plenty of vegetables and Indian corn, and able to keep two or three pigs and a few acres under wheat. “In short, they are in every particular much better situated than they could possibly be in England. Indeed too much praise can't be given to the governor for (I may say) the paternal care and encouragement he gives to all and each of them who deserve it.”

  Atkins found that hunger was the general convict plea against accusations of theft, “but unfortunately in this country it cannot be admitted, for was it, no private property could be secure. Indeed, to act as a magis trate here with efficacy, you must in a great degree lay aside that philanthropy and goodwill towards men that adorns human nature.”

  He noted that, just as earlier in the colony's history ships had been passionately waited for, now people were desperately hoping for the early arrival of the Atlantic and the Britannia, convict ships of the Third Fleet, which Phillip had sent on to Bengal for provisions.

  By now the law of diminishing returns had hit New South Wales. “Few, however, in comparison with the measure of our necessities,” wrote Collins, “were the numbers daily brought into the field for the purpose of cultivation; and of those who could handle the hoe or the spade by far the greater part carried hunger in their countenances; independence of Great Britain was merely ‘a sanguine hope or visionary speculation.’”

  Indeed, even the First Fleeters' resistance to disease had been depleted by years of poor and reduced rations. Augustus Alt, the settlement's surveyor, was in too bad a condition to attend to surveying farms. A young man named David Burton, whose appointment as superintendent of convicts Sir Joseph Banks had recommended and who had come out on the Gorgon, took up the task, and Phillip came to like him. Since Phillip was concerned that New South Wales had acquired a bad reputation internationally, he asked Burton to prepare a report on the agricultural potential of the Sydney basin, and Burton spent the summer of 1791–92 attending to this task. Phillip sent the result to Dundas with the note that Burton “may be supposed to be a much better judge of the good or bad qualities of the ground than any of those persons who have hitherto given their opinions.” Burton had already remitted sixty tubs of plants and sundry boxes of seeds and specimens to Sir Joseph Banks, his patron, via the Gorgon and the Pitt, and had many tubs ready to send on the Atlantic, whenever it should return to Sydney from Bengal.

  But sadly the useful Burton was taken away from his grateful governor. He had been out with some soldiers of the New South Wales Corps to kill ducks on the Nepean River. He carried his gun awkwardly, Collins wrote, and the first time it went off, it “lodged its contents in the ground within a few inches of the feet of the person who immediately preceded him.” Then, on the river, resting the butt of his piece on the ground, he put his hand over the barrel to pull himself upright. The gun discharged,and the shot entered his wrist and forced its way up between the two bones of his shattered right arm to the elbow. It took till five o'clock the next day before his companions got him back to Parramatta, and by then there was an inflammation in the wound. In the opinion of the surgeons, amputation would have hastened his death, so he was allowed to die in what could be called peace. Phillip approached young Burton as he lay the evening before his death, and found him very collected. “If I die, Sir Joseph Banks knows my family, and my intentions towards them—I have brothers, and a father and mother—I wish everything to be sent to Sir Joseph Banks, for my father and mother.” In him, Phillip told Banks, “I lost one whom I cannot replace and whom I could ill spare.”

  At last, on 20 June, “to the inexpressible joy of all ranks of people in the settlements,” the Atlantic store ship arrived, “with a cargo of rice, soujee and dholl from Calcutta.” She also brought two bulls and a cow with her, and twenty sheep and twenty goats, which Collins thought a very diminutive species. By way of the Atlantic news of the wreck of the Pandora and the recapture of William and Mary Bryant and their party reached Sydney Cove, as if to prove to its inhabitants that even an escape was no guarantee of freedom.

  But the deliverance from hunger Atlantic seemed to offer was illusory. It had brought only grain and dholl—a species of split pea—and so the ration of salt meat had now to be reduced. Phillip had promised both soldiers and convicts that back rations “being the same as are allowed His Majesty's troops serving in the West-India Islands, excepting only the allowance of spirits,” would be made up to everyone once adequate provisions arrived. Atkins said that in lieu of 2 pounds of pork per week, the stores now gave out 1 pound of Indian corn and 1 pound of dholl. “The convicts dissatisfied with their ration, not thinking it adequate to what they had before; 'tis hard.”

  Some were cheered at the mid-winter wheat crop in the Parramatta area, but there was need for more rain if the next harvest were to succeed. Though the yearly rainfall in the Sydney basin was approximately 48 inches, it was subject to what we now know as the El Niño southern oscillation, which, from the frequent references to drought made in Sydney from 1790 onwards, had an impact on the first European settlers. The Eora were used to this phenomenon: it was one of the factors which inhibited their transition to what the Europeans, at least in theory, would have desired them to be—farmers. When it rained in Sydney, as it did in the first days of the settlement, it rained torrentially and with massive energy, with the pyrotechnics of electricity thrown in. When it refused to rain, as in the winter of 1792, one pleasant blue-skied day succeeded another.

  The women of New South Wales had been employed until now making clothes out of slops. But there was full enough employment for all the women as hut-keepers, mothers of small children, and at labour in the fields without the further task of manufacturing clothing, and in any case there were “many little abuses in the cutting out and making up of clothing” that could not be wiped out without superintendents. To free women for direct or indirect service to the production of crops, Phillip suggested to Evan Nepean that frocks, trousers, shirts, shifts, gowns, and petticoats be made in Calcutta, India, for the colony, but with a specific thread of a different colour being inserted into the convict provision, so that what was intended for the prisoners could not readily be sold to the soldiers or free settlers.

  What sales there were, legal and illegal, still occurred by barter or by bills of various kinds—cheques or written orders which were re-endorsed by one payee to a further one. Sometimes there was a list of crossed-out payees' names on the back of a bill, with only the last legal recipient's name uncrossed. People did not always trust this sort of document as bills could be forged. Yet the specie of various kinds and nations brought to New South Wales by the Second Fleet did not cover all the necessary transactions even of a modestly commercial place, and so bills had to do. Then when the commissary, John Palmer, sent a subordinate aboard Atlantic with a money order for £5 to purchase articles, the purser devalued it to a mere 1 pound 4 shillings. Thus were all bills discounted, and all New South Wales prices hugely inflated.

  Government intervention was clearly essential and Harry Brewer was sent to the master of Atlantic with a writ to enquire into the massive, usurious discounting of bills. But the problem remained.

  • • •

  IN MID-JULY, AS RAIN came and the last of the stores were being cleared from the Atlantic, another signal was made from the South Head look-out station, and the Britannia store ship, returning from India, came down the harbour and anchored in the cove. Even though Britannia sailed alone, aboard was twelve months' clothing for the convicts, four months of flour, and eight months' beef and pork, so that “every description of persons in the settlement” could be put back on full issue
. Suddenly, Sydney Cove was redolent with the baking of flapjacks and the frying of salt beef. Britannia also brought news that Captain Donald Trail of the Neptune was being prosecuted, and people were cheered by that and thought that justice and reform were possible.

  The restored rations gave Collins hope for the day when journal-keepers like himself would not need to “fill his page with comparisons between what we might have been and what we were; to lament the non-arrival of supplies … to paint the miseries and wretchedness which ensued; but might adopt a language to which he might truly be said to have been hitherto a stranger, and paint the glowing prospects of a golden harvest, the triumph of a well-filled store, and the increasing and consequent prosperity of the settlements.”

  But, as usual, the prospects weren't as bright as they initially appeared. Not all the supplies Commissary Palmer received were of high quality. Phillip visited the storehouses and peeped into a series of casks. He was reduced to shaking his head, and told Palmer that only those provisions considered “merchantable” should be paid for. Many of the casks of beef were deficient in weight, and the meat lean, coarse and bony and “worse than they have ever been issued in His Majesty's service.” Such a claim meant the product was near inedible. “A deception of this nature would be more severely felt in this country … every ounce lost here was of importance.” Collins was reduced to considering this cargo from India as an experiment “to which it was true we were driven by necessity; and it had become the universal and earnest wish that no cause might ever again induce us to try it.”