Again, there was a curious reaction to these two deaths. John Hunter of the Sirius said of the deceased: “As they had hatchets and bill-hooks with them, it is believed they might have been rash enough to use violence with some of the natives.” There was also the sense, not shared by many convict males, however, that the murders of Oakey and Davis were payback killings. There was a story the two men had stolen a native canoe, an alternative form of an Eora man's soul, and the authorities tended to believe it. Surgeon White thought “that from the civility shewn on all occasions to the officers by the natives … I am strongly inclined to think that they must have been provoked and injured by the convicts.” (Typically, he then went on to describe a new bird, a yellow-eared flycatcher that had been caught that day.)
Nonetheless, Phillip felt that the killers needed to be identified so that there could be at least a parley and a mending of grievances. Phillip, White, some marine officers, six marines, and two armed convicts visited the murder site and then followed a native path running from there to the north-west arm of Botany Bay, where they found forty-nine canoes drawn up on a beach. Keeping an eye out for the murdered men's tools, they had a friendly meeting with more than 200 Eora men, women, and children gathered for some ritual occasion. Each man was armed with spear, woomera, shield, and hardwood club. When Phillip approached them, unarmed and offering fishhooks, beads, and other presents, one man stepped forward to show him a wound in his shoulder apparently caused by an axe, and another claimed by mime that the rush-cutters had killed a native by slashing him across the stomach. Returned to Sydney, Phillip gave an order that no group with less than six armed men was to go into the bush “on account of the natives being so numerous.” Phillip said of the Aborigines in a letter home to the Marquess of Lansdowne, the former British prime minister in whose honour he had named the western mountains beyond Rose Hill, “I think better of them having been among them.”
But one of the chief rilers of natives was the governor's own head huntsman, John McEntire. He came from amongst those Irish harvesters who sailed to England as deck cargo each year to work for the summer. During his time in Durham, McEntire had been found guilty of robbery and sentenced to death, the sentence being commuted to transportation. No one could predict how profoundly ran the rivers of loss and grievance in such a man, but he was a good shot and brought kangaroos and other marsupials to Phillip's table. He also had a certain charm and quickness, since many of the gentlemen were happy to include him in their parties of hunting and expeditions into the interior. He was also an essential aide to the naturalists of the fleet. For he shot birds, kangaroos, possums, and an emu as natural history items, supplying subjects, for example, for the excellent plates which would one day adorn Surgeon White's memoirs of his time here.
His rancour and bitterness would emerge full face in his dealings with the Eora, amongst whom he became, without Phillip's initial knowledge, a detested person. It may even have been in part as a vengeance against McEntire that Burn, his fellow Irishman, died, and Ayres was wounded so severely.
IN AUSTRALIA, APRIL is the beginning of autumn but a benign month, characterised in Sydney by daytime temperatures in the early to mid-twenties (20 degrees Celsius), with evening temperatures in the late teens. May brings little more threat of ice to the Sydney autumn, which found Henry Kable and his wife, Susannah, like McEntire, young convicts in a favoured position, dwelling in a hut on the east, less boisterous, side of the stream. Kable wrote, “I am, thank God, very easily situated, never worked one day since I have been here; some officers have been so pleased with my conduct that they continue me in the office of an overseer over the women.” The young couple lived in confidence that some £20 worth of clothes and personal goods bought for them by public subscription in England, and placed on Alexander, would be unloaded eventually and given to them. But repeated requests to Captain Duncan Sinclair of the Alexander throughout early 1788 failed to uncover anything of theirs except a few books. Though English law theoretically regarded felons as “already dead in law,” the handsome young couple were both great favourites of the officers and useful to the governance of the colony, and David Collins let Kable, the convict, take a civil case, the first in the history of the place, and an assertion of the equality of convicts before the law. Eventually, on 5 July 1788, before the Alexander left Sydney Cove, the case would be heard by a civil court summoned by Judge-Advocate Collins, and Provost-Marshal Harry Brewer now had sufficient eminence to ensure the appearance before it of Captain Sinclair. Sinclair being unable to produce the goods collected for the Kables, they received a judgment in their favour to the value of £15.
For young Henry, that court case was a new experience, the first time he saw the law as his lever, his weapon of equity, and it would never afterwards be far from his hand. Many years later, in 1807, Governor Bligh of New South Wales could claim that Kable and his partners ruined competitors in the nascent New South Wales shipping business “with constant litigation and infamous prosecutions in the courts.” That first of all civil actions in 1788 had given Henry ideas.
Another convict who lived in as privileged a position as the netherworld could offer a felon, in a society where there were not enough public officials to attend to all tasks, was Will Bryant, the former smuggler and attacker of excise men, and now government fisherman. Being a realist, Phillip knew that Bryant would be under pressure from other convicts to create a black market in fish. It was quite possible that one or other of the London convicts might see power and possibility for great leverage in unofficially cornering the fish market in a society where food was the ultimate commodity. To keep Bryant partially insulated from these pressures, a special hut was built for him and for his wife, Mary Broad, on the east side, away from the convict camp, and he was always presented with a portion of the fish he caught. In fact he may have become the first private employer of Sydney Cove, since he had a convict working in his vegetable garden in return for fish. Collins thought him fairly fortunate: “He wanted for nothing that was necessary, or that was suitable to a person of his description and situation.”
Bryant was, however, proud, and considered himself no criminal. He cherished freedom not just as a concept but as a reality, and was aggrieved he did not possess it. Thus he had a raw political sense, and the darkness in Bryant probably reduced the extent to which he was willing to consider himself lucky.
Through another relatively trusted convict, the first European cattle were about to go wild and become strays on the thin topsoils of New South Wales. The convict cow-herder, Edward Corbett, had confessed to a sailor that he had staved off hunger by stealing goods and giving them to another sailor, Kelly, in return for food. Collins committed Kelly in a hearing to trial by a criminal court. Corbett now knew his turn would be next, and ran away into the bush. The same day Corbett ran away, the cattle—four cows and two bulls—strayed from the government farm, a far more grievous loss in the eyes of the administration than was Corbett himself.
Amongst the ark of the First Fleet, these were the first European creatures to go loose in Australia, the first of the hard-hoofed, hard-mouthed beasts in which Europe measured wealth to go out pawing at the ancient Gondwana soil. Corbett similarly was one of the first Europeans to attempt to live off the land and with the Aborigines, but though the Aboriginal groups he ran in with did not treat him with hostility, they did not welcome him either. While wandering in one of the bays near Sydney Cove, looking for his place amongst the Eora, he saw a convict's head which seemed to have been burned, but which he identified as that of Burn, the young man who had run away on the day Ayres was speared while picking native tea and berries. Absconding convicts often made discoveries, horrid or useful, which they stored away to present to the gentlemen if they should have to return.
The worrying disappearance of the cattle occurred on the eve of George III's birthday, 4 June. It would be celebrated that year in places both distant and tenuously retained by the Crown—in Martinique, for example, a
t Cape Castle in southern Africa, in Canada and in remote princedoms in India. But Phillip, being such an enthusiast for the constitutional monarchy, ensured that nowhere would it be better celebrated than in this most unsubstantial and grotesque of all the King's possessions. At Phillip's canvas house on the day, healths were drunk to the person of the King, certainly, but above all to the Protestant liberties of mind and property for which he stood. Phillip's housekeeper, Mrs. Deborah Brooks, staged a dinner during which the marines' band played patriotic tunes. It was a feast by Sydney Cove standards—Surgeon Worgan lists mutton, pork, ducks, kangaroo, fish, salads, and pies, Portuguese and Spanish wines and English porter. The extended Royal Family was toasted, as well as Pitt's Cabinet, “who, it was observed, may be Pitted against any that ever conducted the affairs of Great Britain.” There did not seem any concern in Phillip's big Antipodean marquee that these paragons of British statesmanship to which the officers were drinking might forget to resupply New South Wales, but the thought must have been there in some minds.
The day “was a little damped by our perceiving that the governor was in great pain,” though “he took every method to conceal it.” He explained that he had intended to lay the first stone and name the town Albion that day, but the lack of progress in breaking the ground and the lack of skilled hands made naming a premature act. But to honour the Royal Family he named the Sydney area the County of Cumberland, the “boundaries of which is Broken Bay to the northward and Botany Bay to the southward as far inland as a range of mountains seen from Port Jackson from the westward.”
The soldiers were given a pint of porter each, on top of their regular ration of grog, and men who had been surviving on the rock named Pinchgut near the east side of the cove were pardoned and brought filthy, scrawny, and haggard back to the cove. About five in the evening an immense bonfire was lit. Convicts had been gathering wood for two days and the eucalypt trees in particular contributed by being great shedders of bark and branches. Worgan thought the bonfire a noble sight, bigger than the one traditionally set that day on Tower Hill in London. A number of convicts formed ranks on the far side of the flames and greeted Phillip with a verse of “God Save the King.”
But the Tawny Prince again took some of the honours that night. The next morning everyone was astonished by the number of thefts that had occurred, in particular from the huts or tents of officers whose servants had been told to keep watch but had wandered away to nearby convict fires for companionable talk and drink. Passionate Captain Meredith of the marines, coming back from the bonfire, found a convict in mid-theft and struck him on the head with a club, disabling him and sending him to hospital. The convict caught so by Meredith, Sam Payton, was a type for which the British public had a lot of time—the gentleman convict, well-dressed and well-spoken. Earlier in the night of the King's birthday, before being stupefied by Captain Meredith's blow, he had stolen shirts, stockings, and combs from Lieutenant Furzer's tent or hut, and had them with him in the swag he was carrying.
Payton spent his time awaiting trial under the care of Surgeon White at the hospital. “I frequently admonished him to think of the perilous circumstances he then stood in.” White suspected he had accomplices and urged him to come up with their names rather than be hung and find oblivion in New South Wales at the age of twenty. With some credibility, Payton claimed that because of his head injury he could not remember robbing Lieutenant Furzer's place, let alone entering Captain Meredith's—though he would suddenly admit to both once sentenced.
As for the missing Corbett, during his nineteen days out of the settlement, he lived chiefly by what he could get by creeping down to the edges of the fledgling town by darkness. When food went missing from the houses of convicts and marines, Corbett was declared an outlaw, a further distinction for him.
On the afternoon of 22 June, while Payton awaited his trial, a brief earth tremor ran through the settlement. It came, said young David Blackburn, master of the Supply, living ashore as so many of the ships' company did at that stage to build up their health, “from the south-west like the wave of the sea, accompanied by a noise like a distant cannon. The trees shook their tops as if a gale of wind was blowing.” It was the decisive experience for the wandering Corbett, for he presented himself on the edge of the settlement again and was captured by the governor's perhaps most trusted servant, Henry Dodd, a free man who was already showing considerable skill as an agricultural supervisor of convicts.
The returnee Edward Corbett and gentlemanly Sam Payton appeared before the criminal court and were both condemned to death. They were to be hanged the next day at 11:30 a.m. by the executioner convict, Freeman. Samuel Payton took the time to dictate a florid letter to his mother, wife of a well-respected stonemason in London. He no doubt had half an eye to the poignant impact such a letter would have on the London public, to whom, via inevitable publication, he may have been chiefly speaking. “My dear mother! With what agony of soul do I dedicate the few last moments of my life to bid you an eternal adieu! My doom has been irrevocably fixed, and ere this hour tomorrow I shall have quitted this vale of wretchedness, to enter into an unknown and endless eternity. I will not distress your tender maternal feelings by any long comment on the cause of my present misfortune. Let it therefore suffice to say, that impelled by that strong propensity to evil, which neither the virtuous precepts nor example of the best of parents could eradicate, I have at length fallen an unhappy, though just, victim to my own follies.”
Both Payton and young Corbett “died penaten,” noted Sergeant Scott, Payton in particular addressing the convicts “in a pathetic, eloquent and well-directed speech.” Indeed, Reverend Johnson may well have reached his maximum efficacy at the gallows tree that day, 25 June, since both men prayed fervently, “begging forgiveness of an offended God.” They expressed the hope too that those they had injured would not only forgive them, as they themselves already did all mankind, but would offer up their prayers to a merciful Redeemer. Then they were both turned off by Freeman, the steps taken from beneath first one and then the other, “and in the agonising moments of the separation of the soul from the body,” dangling and jerking, they “seemed to embrace each other.” The execution of these two young men, said White, had a powerful impact on the convicts who watched. The big fig tree of Sydney Cove had become a regular Tyburn.
thirteen
IN MID-JULY THE Alexander, Friendship, Borrowdale, and Prince of Wales all sailed down the harbour and made ready for the journey home under the direction of Lieutenant Shortland, agent for the transports.
Phillip knew that on these vessels, and those already departed, Major Ross and Captain Campbell had sent off letters of complaint on every aspect of his administration, on every issue of hypocrisy. They were directed to people of influence in Britain, especially to Lord Sydney and Evan Nepean. To Evan Nepean, Ross wrote, “Take my word for it, there is not a man in this place but wishes to return home, and we have no less than cause, for I believe that never was a set of people so much upon the parish as this garrison, and what little we want, even to a single nail, we must not send to the Commissary for it but must apply to His Excellency, and when we do he always says there is but little come out [from England], and of course it is but little we get.” To Lord Ducie, Campbell complained, “This man will be everything himself—Never that I have heard of communicates any part of his plan for establishing a colony or carrying on his work to anyone—much less, consult them.” What men like David Collins and Watkin Tench saw as Phillip's admirable composure and prudence, Campbell and Ross saw as selfish and pettifogging remoteness.
There must have been some genuine desperation and stress behind the officially framed pleadings in the dispatches Phillip sent off to Lord Sydney on different returning transports. He hoped, he had told the Secretary of State by the same ships which had carried the complaints of Ross and Campbell, that few convicts would be sent out that year or the next unless they “should have at least two years provisions on
board to land with them.” He suggested that putting provisions on one ship and convicts on another “must be fatal if the ship carrying the provisions had been lost.”.
All the provisions, Phillip told Nepean in a private letter, were now in two wooden buildings, which were thatched. Bloodworth had not yet made enough bricks to undertake the building of more substantial storehouses. “I am sensible of the risk,” Phillip had confessed, “but we have no remedy … if fifty farmers were sent out with their families, they would do more in one year in rendering this colony independent of the mother country, as to provisions, than a thousand convicts.” He confided to Nepean also that the masters of the ships had departed with whatever bonds and papers they had received on boarding their convicts in England. Surely this was a mistake not only on the part of the masters but on that of Phillip's office, of what might be called his secretariat, which consisted, after Mr. Commissary Miller gave up his temporary post as the governor's secretary, of David Collins and other occasional auxiliaries like Harry Brewer.