A Commonwealth of Thieves (5 page)

four

O
NLY ONE
B
RITISH SHIP
, the HMS
Endeavour,
captained by a maritime prodigy, James Cook, had spent time on the distant coast of New South Wales, in 1770. Now, under the vulgar urgings of domestic politics, Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Sydney of the Home Office were sending a reputable but not glittering fellow in command of many vessels stocked not with naturalists and artists but with Britain's sinners.

In his little office at the Admiralty, Phillip worked with his clerk, the unkempt Harry Brewer, and as if to focus his mind, wrote a cultivated and informed document which represented his philosophy of convict transportation and penal settlement. Not as a visionary, but merely as someone acknowledging the state of British law, he wrote: “The laws of this country will, of course, be introduced in New South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment His Majesty's forces take possession of the country—that there can be no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves.”

His determination that convicts not be seen as a slave caste would have important results for many of the felons marked down for his transports. For one thing, he had respect for their right to as safe and healthy a journey as he could provide. But he did not see their status as fully equal to that of the free. “As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundation of an Empire, I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison and other settlers that may come from Europe.”

Through secret caresses between free men and convict women, and other alliances forged on his ships, this would become a proposition already in doubt before the ships even sailed.

The Cabinet and the King made their decisions and signed off on them. The early sight of convict vessels disappearing down the Thames estuary with sails set was the chief point for the Home Office, not how they fared from the instant of disappearance onwards.

The successful tenderer for the overall contract for the fleet was William Richards Jr., a prominent ship-broker of south London. There is a legend that contractors dumped their worst produce on Phillip, knowing he could not very conveniently complain. But two reliable young officers of marines, Watkin Tench and David Collins, no strangers to salt rations, would both independently agree that the provisions on the First Fleet provided by Richards were “of a much superior quality to those usually supplied by contract.” We have no similar enthusiastic endorsement from any convict, though the low death rate during the flotilla's months of voyaging suggests that Phillip, when visiting the vessels down the Thames at Deptford, and Richards himself must have been careful during their inspections of barrels of salt beef and pork and flour.

He inspected and chartered five merchant vessels as transports—the
Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship,
the newly built
Lady Penrhyn
and
Scarborough
—and three store ships:
Borrowdale, Fishburn,
and
Golden Grove.
His contracts with the ship-owners detailed the form of accommodation, rations, cooking equipment, bedding, fetters, ventilation equipment, and so on to be supplied for the convicts, and the medicines and medical preventives to be aboard. Ultimately, as the numbers loaded aboard grew, Richards would need to contract for a sixth convict transport,
Prince of Wales
. The transports were all relatively young vessels but not purpose-built prison ships, and they all needed to be specially fitted out by carpenters at the Deptford dockyard in order to receive prisoners on their normal cargo decks. All were three-masted and over 300 tons, except the
Friendship,
a two-masted vessel of 278 tons generally described as either a brig or a snow.

For Richards and the individual ship-owners the cream from this expedition would come after the ships finished the business of taking the convicts into the void. Some hoped to receive further charter from the East India Company, authorising them to journey to China to load tea. Richards depended on Lord Sydney to apply pressure to the East India Company directors, who exercised monopoly over east Asian trade, but ultimately they would take up only three ships,
Charlotte, Scarborough,
and
Lady Penrhyn,
to bring a cargo of tea home from China.

Arthur Phillip could not be in Deptford all the time, but the navy had appointed an agent to represent him at the dock yards to see that the necessary carpentering was done, and that all arrangements were properly made for receiving prisoners. The convict prison on each ship was fitted out on the lowest cargo deck, where cradles—narrow sleeping bunks in sets of four or six—ran the length of the ship on either side of an aisle. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, Phillip's protégé from
Europe,
was down at Deptford and described the security being put in place on the transports. He observed that the carpenters were barricading an area on deck with a wooden barrier about 5 feet high, and topping it with pointed iron prongs, “to prevent any connection between the marines and ship's company, with the convicts. Sentinels are placed at the different hatchways and a guard always under arms on the quarter deck of each transport in order to prevent any improper behaviour of the convicts, as well as to guard against any surprise.” Below, to contain the prison deck, thick bulkheads had to be positioned, “fitted with nails and run across from side to side [port to starboard] in the between decks above the main mast, with loop holes to fire … in case of irregularities.” Forward of the prison space was the prison hospital, and the equally dark areas aft of the prison were often reserved for the marines, privates, non-commissioned officers, and their families. The hatches which gave onto the deck were “well secured down by cross bars, bolts and locks and are likewise nailed down from deck to deck with oak stanchions.”

The barricaded section on the open deck gave the authorities an area where even the most unruly convicts could be exercised, but many knew that in such close quarters the barriers might break down, and that there would be contact of various kinds, including sexual contact. For the transports were all very intimate in their dimensions. The largest of them was
Alexander,
114 feet in length and 31 feet in breadth, barely more than the width of a decent parlour, and a mere 450 tons burthen. The lower decks had limited head room—the prison deck of
Scarborough,
for example, was only 4 feet 5 inches high. That meant that in prison and in the seamen's and soldiers' quarters, no one but a child could stand upright.

Phillip's flag ship, a naval vessel part-victualler, part-frigate,
Sirius,
540 ton, named after “the bright star in the southern constellation of the Great Dog,” and with a crew of 160 men, was also at the Deptford dockyards, where an inadequate job was being done of fitting her up with what some called the “refuse of the yards.” She would prove a bad sailer. Twenty guns were being hoisted aboard to give her the appurtenances and force of a warship. Her armed tender, the
Supply,
was a mere sloop of 170 tons.

Refusing to be hustled, Arthur Phillip would not budge from his small London office, unless it was to visit the expedition's ships in the Thames, until he was satisfied that the fleet was reasonably equipped in everything from scythes to undergarments. He had many requirements which he presented in letters to Nepean, Sydney, Sir George Rose, the Navy Board, and Richards, the contracted broker. Phillip typically wrote to Undersecretary Nepean on 4 January 1787: “I likewise beg leave to observe that the number of scythes (only 6), or razors (only 5 dozen), and the quantity of buck and small shot (only 200 pounds) now ordered is very insufficient.”

Already, in Whitehall in dismal winter, nameless clerks had begun work on the issue of who would be Botany Bay's first British inhabitants. Since there were no selection criteria for transportees based on health, suitability, trade, or sturdiness, a convict of whatever age, strength, and skill could go to Botany Bay. Time already served meant nothing, so convicts who had served five years of a seven-year sentence were included in the clerks' lists.

The first convicts were rowed down the river to the
Alexander
and
Lady Penrhyn
on 6 January 1787, by which time the basic fitting-out of the transports was finished. Many were sick and clothed in rags when received on board, and on the lower decks the cold and damp were intense. In the dimness of the prison decks, the convicts were often secured in place by chains which ran through an ankle shackle on each convict, and some masters wanted the prisoners wristleted as well. Sometimes groups of convicts were shackled thus in lots of four or six, though sometimes it was more. As yet the convict decks had empty spaces, but the allotted area per felon once a ship was fully loaded was eighteen inches in width by six feet in length. Questions of elbow room would create many unrecorded conflicts. So did the waste arrangements—a series of buckets aft, topped by a plank with holes cut in it.

On the
Alexander
's prison deck, somehow, 195 male convicts would ultimately be placed, and elsewhere crew and marines, and marines' wives and children, and an extraordinary assortment of stores, beggaring modern belief that such modest space could accommodate so much human and maritime material. On
Lady Penrhyn,
reserved for women, the master kept the prisoners handcuffed and chained and below decks in those first days, purely out of fear. The poor country girl Sarah Bellamy, from Worcestershire, would most likely have found the cramped head room and narrow sleeping space claustrophobic. In the midst of her prison deck rose the great, groaning mainmast and the trunk of the foremast, like malign and barren trees. Security was uppermost in the masters' minds, and so ventilation was poor. On these lower decks oxygen could become so scarce that a candle would not light. Added to that was the noise of timbers and tide, and the raucousness and bullying of worldly, rebellious Newgate girls, their voices bouncing off the low head room. For young Bellamy the convict deck of the little
Lady Penrhyn
must have been a perfect hell, and when Joe Downey, a sweet-talking sailor soon to be appointed quartermaster, offered his attentions and protection, how grateful she must have been for what he could do to relieve the situation.

Phillip came aboard his ships on 11 January to see the recently loaded men and women, and what impressed him most was their marginal health and their need of clothing and blankets. Clothing would always be a problem and was not standardised in quality or quantity. The navy did not want sailors and transportees to wear heavy wool—wool was worn on the hulks and in Newgate and infallibly attracted lice and typhus. So while the male convicts were given woollen caps, the jackets issued on board were of blue cotton cloth or the light, compacted woollen cloth called kersey. Shirts were of linen, trousers of duck, and stockings were of yarn.

Phillip complained to Evan Nepean that the clothes the women were sent down to the ships in “stamp the magistrates with infamy.” He ordered that they be supplied with clothing from the naval stores of
Sirius,
and hoped the Navy Board would make up the loss. For “nothing but clothing them would have prevented them from perishing, and which could not be done in time to prevent a fever, which is still on board that ship, and where there are many venereal complaints, that must spread in spite of every precaution.”

Phillip asked the authorities that the ships be moved out of the Thames and down the English coast to Spithead off Portsmouth, where, in the lee of the Isle of Wight, they could anchor on the broad Motherbank. Because of its distance from shore, the inmates could be unchained there and allowed fresh air. Indeed, the fleet would begin assembling there from mid-March.

Phillip knew very well that the transports' masters wanted the convicts secured and immobilised for as long as possible, to keep the ships safe. But he also knew that for the sake of their health, the felons would need to be unchained once the transports were at sea if their elected mess orderlies were to come on deck to collect their rations, and that all of them should be freely exercised on deck in good weather. As it was, with seasickness and diarrhoea, with dampness and the stink of bilges, with waves sloshing below and streams of water penetrating between ill-sealed timbers onto the sleeping platforms during storms, it would be hard enough to maintain the health of the felons half as well as an enlightened man of conscience would wish.

Charlotte
and
Friendship
headed off for Plymouth to collect prisoners from the hulks and gaols there. The two little vessels boarded between them 164 males and 41 females. One of the prisoners loaded from the hulk
Dunkirk
onto
Friendship
was a young, athletically built redheaded Norfolk man named Henry Kable. At the time of his sentencing to death in 1783 for burglary, he had been a lad of sixteen. Like his father and an accomplice, he was to be hanged on a gibbet outside Norwich Castle. At the scaffold, he was pardoned on condition of transportation, but saw his father and the accomplice executed.