In Tasmania (5 page)

‘Sir, I do not want any of your goods.'

‘You don't! … Begone, you damn mutinous scoundrel, or I'll send you to the guardhouse.'

Kemp's entry in the regiment's official history reads: ‘Renowned bully'.

He was not alone in his racketeering. (Beet-faced Judge Atkins, whom Kemp would one day succeed, wrote in a lucid interval: ‘Almost every article was monopolised by the officers for profit in a most scandalous manner.') But by most accounts, he was the most energetic and unscrupulous of the officer-traders. His special racket was rum. He and a ring of army cronies bought every incoming barrel for as little as seven shillings and six pence a gallon and resold it for up to £8, a mark-up of more than 2,000%. Soon rum was the currency of the colony. For half a pint of ‘Bengal', a desperate settler gave three bushels of wheat, a convict would chop 100 feet of timber, a woman offered her body. Not even the proud and stubborn Bennelong was immune. Two years after his return home, he had become, in the words of one witness, ‘so fond of drinking that he lost no opportunity of being intoxicated, and in that state was so savage and violent as to be capable of any mischief'. Kemp was chief supplier. His commerce earned the regiment its nickname: the Rum Corps.

 

In the same month that Kemp opened his emporium, Judith Simpson, a 25-year-old convict woman, became pregnant with his child.

Judith had worked as kitchen maid for a Mrs Silk in Westminster, in one week filching a moth-eaten bombazine gown and a linen apron. Missing these articles, Mrs Silk stormed round to her lodgings and was furious when Judith opened the door dressed in her employer's clothes. Mrs Silk recognised a red wine stain on the apron and some moth holes she herself had sewn up. Charged with the theft of objects worth 16 shillings and sixpence, Judith was transported for seven years to Port Jackson, where in due course she was employed at Kemp's store.

She had 18 months of her sentence left to serve when she gave birth to a daughter. Emily's arrival on June 4, 1800 stirred in Kemp unusual emotions. He put pressure on his friend the Governor who, the same day, granted Emily's mother an absolute pardon.

Five months later, Kemp sailed home on leave with his ‘concubine' – as Judith is called in the Female Muster – and their daughter. As a family unit they merited a rare berth. On board the
Buffalo
, Judith conceived again.

The return journey took eight months and for one man on board it was too much. On Christmas Eve, Kemp and Judith were warming themselves by a fire, when they heard a loud swearing coming from the main deck. A midshipman stood stripped to his trousers, his face flushed from drinking, his mouth foaming, threatening to destroy anyone who came one inch nearer.

Kemp shut the man in his cabin, but five minutes later he escaped, appearing stark naked on the gangway. As Kemp ran to stop him, he shouted: ‘Make haste, messmates, I'm going to drown myself' – and plunged overboard. Night had fallen and there was a swell. The
Buffalo
– another leaky, heavy ship – had no alternative but to plough on.

Once in London, Kemp moved to patch things up with his father, but his homecoming was less impressive than he might have hoped. Only one communication survives an eleven-year silence between them, a letter describing how Kemp has decided to marry the woman he decorously calls Miss Crawford. Perhaps ashamed to introduce his pregnant ‘moll' to Aldgate, he took lodgings at 15 Baker Street, from where he wrote to his father: ‘I feel my Happiness entirely depending on your acquiescence to accomplish my union with her, having Mr & Mrs Crawford's consent.' He was confident that his marriage to Miss Crawford would ‘add much to my prosperity in New South Wales'.

But Kemp's father sent a cousin around with a blunt message: his son was free to do what he liked.
²
Three weeks later Kemp did exactly that – abandoned Judith in London, dumped his 18-month-old illegitimate daughter Emily on the Potters and scarpered for a second time to the antipodes.

 

Tasmania – alone of Britain's former penal colonies – has a tendency to sit on its family secrets and be nervous about them. We had been settled in our new house for some weeks before I discovered that Emily's descendants owned a vineyard just ten miles from where I lived.

The farmhouse was at Coombend, in the middle of a small valley. It had once served as the district post office and belonged to a family from what I later learned was Tasmania's landed gentry. (‘You've really scored,' said Helen. ‘I lived there ten years and haven't been invited for coffee.') I fell into conversation with the proprietor, an agile man of 60 with blue stubborn eyes. Twenty minutes later I was sitting in his drawing room and examining what he claimed to be Anthony Fenn Kemp's christening mug – a pint-sized silver tankard which his wife had been using as a vase. They were clearly interested in my research, although their curiosity was hedged with anxiety about what discoveries I might have made in this new haul of letters. With a markedly casual air, the winemaker said: ‘It's very fashionable to be descended from convicts.'

I picked the flowers out of the tankard – it was more drinking bucket than christening mug and smelled of rancid stems. Stamped onto the side was the crest of a long-necked vulture standing on a wheatsheaf, and the words:
Sic copia campis
.

‘“Let there be plenty in the fields”,' said the winemaker's wife.

Her husband started to laugh. ‘The only thing I know, he was a bastard. It's stressful being a philanderer, but they live to a great age.' He shot me a look: ‘The genes, they come down.'

A fortnight later, I was buying some sausages in a Hobart delicatessen when a woman who introduced herself as the winemaker's sister darted round the counter and gripped my shoulder: ‘Welcome to the family.' She had red hair and direct eyes and gave me a discount. She glanced at my wife, conspiratorial: ‘Are you going to call him Fenn?'

We knew it was a boy thanks to a young nurse in Launceston. I had asked in a general way if it was possible to tell a child's sex at 14 weeks, whereupon she pointed at the ultrasound image: ‘Oh yes.' The fact of a son had overwhelmed me. Like his gender, which was already formed, his character was presumably out of my hands. I had started thinking that it was a good thing that there was no technology to tell you whether you were going to get a Potter or a Kemp; whether this child would lean towards the ledger or the rum.

 

While in London with Judith in 1801, Kemp had his portrait painted in enamel by the court painter to the Duke of York. I learned of a man in the north of Tasmania, a descendant of Kemp, who had a copy.

When I arrived at the weatherboard cottage in Hawley Beach where Paul Edwards lived, he showed me the picture straight away, with few preliminaries: Kemp in the scarlet tunic of a Rum Corps Lieutenant. He had the strong profile of a determined sensualist: large brown eyes, powdered white hair, a prominent nose.

Anthony Fenn Kemp

‘He's a very devious, interesting gentleman with a cruel mouth,' Paul said. ‘My children wonder how I can sit here with him looking at me.'

Paul, an amateur genealogist and retired papermaker, was a descendant of Kemp via his marriage to a 16-year-old girl called Elizabeth Riley. Kemp met her in Sydney soon after he sailed back from London; they had known each other, at most, for a month before they were married, but they remained so for 63 years and she gave birth to 16 of his children.

A miniature of Elizabeth showed a pale round face framed by telephone coils of chestnut hair. Kemp introduced her as the daughter of a prosperous London bookseller. Others believed that her father was a forger hanged for defrauding the East India Company. She never inspired much affection in Kemp's two sisters. Susanna describes her as ‘cool', writing tartly to Amy Potter: ‘so much childbearing must weaken the constitution'.

Paul Edwards said, gruffly, ‘Fancy siring 16 children on a woman. I reckon that's disgusting.'

And Judith? According to Edwards, she ran a series of pubs and boarding houses, was jailed for debt and died in Sydney in 1836 aged 61. I assumed that Kemp never gave her another thought, but then later I came across a poem he had published in a Hobart newspaper 22 years after abandoning her with their second child. Titled ‘The Contrast', it is a shockingly sentimental tribute to a distraught young woman who had relied on a man's promise:

AS KEMP EXPANDED, THE POTTER IN ME CONTRACTED. A MONSTER
and a rogue he may have been, and yet there was something satisfying about the repeated pattern of his life – one minute facing catastrophe, the next getting off scot free. And the next chapter in Kemp's story turned out to begin in the same way as the last: with him striking out at a father figure.

On his return to Sydney, Kemp found himself at loggerheads with the new Governor. Philip King was a pious, gout-afflicted anti-Republican, with a mission to tidy up Kemp's cartel of army racketeers who controlled the colony. He cut both the price and consumption of spirits and when the supply ship
Atlas
sailed into port with a cargo of rum, he refused permission to unload. Kemp hated King ‘abominably'. While the
Atlas
lay uselessly at anchor, he began to plot against him.

In June 1802, a French corvette appeared off the Heads with only four men visible on deck. British ‘tars' who climbed aboard the
Géographe
found a crew sick with scurvy; even the animals were affected. The ship was part of a French scientific force which had been mapping Van Diemen's Land during a lull in the Napoleonic wars, and in the days ahead it alarmed King to discover that the affable French commander, Nicolas Baudin, had baptised the coast after members of his expedition. On the south tip of Maria Island at the far end of our bay, Cape Péron commemorated a one-eyed zoologist who used a contraption known as Régnier's Dynamometer to measure the handclasp of Tasmanian Aborigines (he concluded they had a weak one); while the Freycinet Peninsula opposite our home was named after Baudin's cartographer.

At the time relations between Britain and France were delicate. The thought of Lieutenant Freycinet unrolling charts and possibly marking regions of Australia ‘Terre Napoléon' unsurprisingly panicked King. Nonetheless, he gave the sailors safe passage ashore to treat their blackened gums. And he allowed them to buy 800 gallons of rum from the
Atlas
– on Baudin's strict word that the spirits would be consumed on his ship.

King's kindness outraged Kemp. Smarting over the loss of his potential profits, he fanned a rumour that Freycinet and one other officer had secretly rowed the rum ashore and sold it. King summoned the accused in order to investigate this ‘inflaming report'. They swore that the charge was false. French officers demanded a duel. Baudin pointed his finger at the man responsible – ‘Monsieur Kemp' – and added that he had never experienced such dishonesty from an English officer.

The crisis was eventually averted – anticlimactically – after Kemp sent a written apology to both men. But the strangest part of the affair was the identity of the second French officer, Jacques St Cricq. Kemp had accused a fellow mason.

Freemasonry is a guarantee of clannishness, but in 1802 it had seditious connotations as well. It was particularly strong among French revolutionaries. The latest treaty between Britain and the French Republic was not expected to last and many of Baudin's crewmen were enthusiastic to see the British colony in Republican hands. On the voyage out, Baudin had told his men that their expedition had ‘a political purpose … a more thoroughly utilitarian aim than the mere gathering of objects of curiosity or passing fancy', and the one-eyed Péron would later write a report entitled: ‘The conquest of New Holland [Australia] as indispensable for our political relations'.

On the evening of September 17, 1802 – a fortnight before he made his apology – Kemp boarded Baudin's sister ship the
Naturaliste
to participate in what was the first Masonic meeting in Australia. His certificate, written in French on almost transparent paper, elevated ‘le chère frère AFK' to the position of Master Mason and was signed J. St Cricq.

What was going on? Was Kemp preparing the spadework for an insurrection of his own? One contemporary said of Kemp: ‘He is anybody's body.' Or did his Masonic loyalty prove as flimsy as the certificate once his monopoly was threatened?

At any rate, the French were so outraged by his behaviour that an artist on the
Géographe
drew a caricature of Kemp that ridiculed his courage, his boastfulness and the rampaging sexual appetite of his young wife. Kemp was shown with a padlock on his sword, a pair of stag's horns sprouting from his head and two bubbles containing remarks that he had made about the size of his house. The caricature is lost, but it was passed around town. Kemp saw it – and said nothing. But it gave him an idea.

In November, Baudin's expedition left port. No one knew his destination, but that did not prevent Kemp from starting another rumour just hours after the topsails vanished over the horizon. He implied that French officers had been overheard speaking of their intention to establish a settlement on Van Diemen's Land. Indeed, he had heard that one of them had even marked the proposed site on a map. Kemp's understanding was shared by a young Danish sailor on the
Lady Nelson
, an armed brigantine which had recently surveyed Bass Strait. A decade later, Jorgen Jorgenson claimed in a letter to the Colonial Office that Baudin had sailed ‘under a pretence of making Discoveries, but in reality to espy the Situation of the English Colonies in New South Wales'.

Governor King had learned to trust the wayward, sympathetic Baudin. But what if the Frenchman's ambition extended beyond measuring handclasps? Van Diemen's Land offered vital access to southern waters, and yet it dawned on the puzzled administrator that the island had not been claimed by anyone. Alarmed by the spectre of a hostile French colony, and without waiting for London's reaction, King seized the initiative. He fitted out a schooner with three marines and launched them after Baudin ‘to make the French commander acquainted with my intention of settling Van Diemen's Land'. His party found the French scientists peacefully netting insects on an island in Bass Strait. The marines hastily tied a Union Jack to a tree, fired a volley over the tents and gave three aggressive hurrahs. Insulted once again, Baudin complained to Governor King about this ‘childish ceremony'. (The flag, he noted acidly, was hoisted upside down and resembled a dish-rag hung out to dry, and he had had to lend the English dry gunpowder to make their salute.) He assured King he had no intention of claiming a territory that had in any case been discovered in 1642 by a Dutchman and was, in his opinion, already inhabited by Aborigines. Once again he identified the culprit. ‘The story you have heard, of which I suspect Mr Kemp, captain in the NSW Corps, to be the author, is without foundation.'

By now, King's illness had advanced into his chest, and he had been forced to take to his bed. But Kemp's vendetta continued. Somehow a tightly rolled piece of paper found its way to the bed-bound Governor. On it were ‘seditious drawings' of King and two short poems: ‘Extempore Allegro', a brisk assault on the Governor's character (‘for infamous acts from my birth I'd an itch'), and ‘Epitaph', which cheerfully anticipated his demise (‘A wretch to whom all pity is bereft').

This anonymous doggerel enraged King. He arrested Kemp – who had been appointed the Corps's paymaster – and prosecuted him. The trial was a farce. King, a naval man, had to draw the members of the court martial from Kemp's army cronies such as the Rum Corps commander, Lieutenant Colonel ‘Phlegmatic' Paterson, an inebriate botanist with failing eyesight who had been witness at Kemp's marriage; and Major Johnston, Paterson's no less alcoholic second-in-command, who had been the first officer to step ashore at Port Jackson. This was a tribunal that protected its interests.

On February 25, 1803, the trial was suspended and Kemp acquitted. A startling dispatch from the Colonial Office advised King to forget the whole business and ‘consign to oblivion' all that had passed. He was urged to proceed with his plan to colonise the virgin territory of Van Diemen's Land.

The idea of founding a colony had been pretty vague until Kemp started circulating rumours about the French. King now blundered in to fill the empty vortex. In August 1803, he chartered two ships – the
Lady Nelson
and the
Albion
, captained by the whaler Ebor Bunker – to unload a party on the Derwent estuary. The 49 passengers included a surgeon, a storekeeper, 21 male and three female convicts, seven free settlers, and a lance corporal and seven privates from the New South Wales Corps. A few months later, King assembled a second and larger force to take control of Bass Strait. He asked Colonel Paterson to lead it. Paterson, as commander-in-chief of the New South Wales Corps, wanted to be in full charge of his own area and refused to answer to a junior officer in the settlement on the Derwent. King agreed to divide the island in two, with Paterson in charge of the northern half. In London, knowledge of the island's geography was so hazy that Paterson was given the go-ahead to establish a settlement at Port Dalrymple with its ‘advantageous position … upon the Southern Coast of Van Diemen's Land'. King had to point out that Port Dalrymple lay on the north coast.

In October 1804, King left his sick bed to wave off Colonel Paterson on board the
Buffalo
, with Kemp as second-in-command. The four vessels carried 181 soldiers, convicts and settlers, including Kemp's brother-in-law Alexander Riley, who was to act as storekeeper. The Governor's relief at seeing the back of Kemp – his ‘concealed assassin' – must have cheered him at least a little; at any rate, he provided an eleven-gun salute for the expedition's departure.

At 7 a.m. on Sunday, October 14, the
Buffalo
edged away from Government Wharf to the tune of ‘Rule, Britannia!' and the hearty cheers of a ‘delirious' population – and sailed smack into a tempest.