Attentive at the hospital, however, Johnson found many of the ill unable to move and “covered over almost with their own nastiness, their heads, bodies, clothes, blankets all full of filth and lice. Scurvy was not the only nor the worst disease that prevailed among them.” The convicts had not lost sufficient craftiness to beg clothing from Johnson and then sell it almost at once for food, but when it came to food, those who were stronger stole from the weak, as was the case with the blankets as well.
Parties of convicts were sent out collecting the acid berry, also known as the native currant, to combat the widespread scurvy. Since White found the quantity available was insufficient to treat everyone, he also made use of a plant growing on the seashore greatly resembling sage, and a kind of “wild spinage” (samphire) as well as “a small shrub which we distinguished by the name of the vegetable tree.”
By early August, the Reverend Johnson wrote that he had buried eighty-four of the convicts, one child, and one soldier, nearly all of them from the Second Fleet. People would afterwards remember the dingoes howling and fighting over the bodies in a sandy pit over the hills above the Tank Stream. By 6 August, Phillip reported an improvement in convict health, with the sick list down to 220, but deaths continued.
Captain Hill, landed from Surprize, suffered the normal shock of arrival but was pleased in some respects with his landfall. “It is now our winter quarters, and had I superior abilities to any man that ever wrote, it would be possible for me to convey to your mind a just idea of this beautiful heavenly clime; suffer your imagination to enter the regions of fiction; and let fancy in her loveliest moment paint an Elysium; it will fall far short of this delightful weather. It is well we have something to keep up our spirits, everything else is unpromising. And did the gloomy months prevail here as in England, it is more than probable that the next reinforcement on arrival would find a desolated colony.”
But he was not happy with the amenities of his life. “Here I am, living in a miserable thatched hut, without kitchen, without a garden, with an acrimonious blood by my having been nearly six months at sea, and tho' little better than a leper, obliged to live on a scanty pittance of salt provision, without a vegetable, except when a good-natured neighbour robs his own stomach in compassion to me.” Fresh meat cost 18 pence a pound, fish was not abundant (for it was winter), and “should one be offered for sale, 'tis by far too dear for an officer's pocket.”
All the healthy male convicts from the Second Fleet were sent to the farming settlement at Parramatta. Captain Hill began surveying and laying out an enlargement of that township, “in which the principal street will be occupied by the convicts; the huts are building at the distance of 100 feet from each other, and each hut is to contain ten convicts … and having good gardens which they cultivate, and frequently having it in their power to exchange vegetables for little necessaries, which the stores do not furnish, makes them begin to feel the benefits they may draw from their industry.” He found that people who had lived in huts with their own gardens for some time rarely abused the confidence that was placed in them, and if they did it was to plunder some other convict's garden.
Women convicts were put to work making clothes out of the slops, the raw cloth brought out on sundry ships. The population had by now quadrupled, and so when on 1 August the Surprize left for China, Phillip leased it to drop off 157 female and thirty-seven male convicts at Norfolk Island on the way.
D'Arcy Wentworth had been working on a voluntary arrangement with Surgeon White, but was now sent to Norfolk Island with his convict paramour, Catherine Crowley, with the provisional post of assistant surgeon, based on the help he had given in the grounds of the Sydney hospital. His sense of exile and of being neither bond nor free threw him more and more into the company of pregnant Catherine, and it seemed to have been adequate for him.
When the Justinian turned up at Norfolk on 7 August, the ration on the island was down to 2 pounds of flour and 1 pint of tea per person weekly, and only fish and cabbage tree palms and mutton birds and their eggs had saved the population. The Surprize joined her late that afternoon, with D'Arcy Wentworth and his eighteen-year-old convict woman aboard, but the Wentworths did not have a high priority for landing, so when the ship had to back off again and go to Cascade Bay on the north side of the island to shelter from a gale, Catherine Crowley gave premature shipboard birth to a son who was to be named William Charles Wentworth. D'Arcy Wentworth helped his son from his mother's womb, cut the cord, and washed him, noticed an inturned eye, but wrapped, warmed, and caressed the baby. It took some weeks of tenderness and care to ensure his survival.
Wentworth landed into a turbulent scene, every human's negative passion enhanced by hunger and isolation and the limits of a small island set in consistently dangerous seas. He saw that the officers of the Sirius snubbed Major Ross and would not pay him the normal respects. Appointed quartermaster-general, Ralph Clark was now seen as Ross's favourite, even though Clark's opinion of the man had not previously been high. Clark's new posting gave him a tin-pot power, but it was also power of life and death over those who served time on Norfolk. D'Arcy Wentworth, fortunate to be free of all that, found five other surgeons and assistant surgeons on the island, and liked most of them: the fellow Irishmen Thomas Jamison and Dennis Considen, then Surgeon Altree, and the former convict John Irving. Irving, sentenced in Lincoln, had served as assistant surgeon on his own ship in the First Fleet, Lady Penrhyn, and after the arrival of the portable hospital in the Second Fleet had done such conspicuous work there that Phillip granted him an absolute pardon and appointed him to assist Considen. Back in Sydney, he had a grant of 30 acres awaiting him.
Dennis Considen befriended Wentworth at once and began to instruct him in the use of native plants for treating disease, an area of practice in which he had been a leader in Sydney. Indeed, in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks he had written, “If there is any merit in applying these and other simples to the benefit of the poor wretches here, I certainly claim it.” As well as promoting the use of native sarsaparilla and spinach, red gum from angophora trees, yellow from grass trees, and oil from the peppermint eucalyptus tree, he found that the native myrtle would serve as a mild and safe astringent in cases of dysentery.
Wentworth was appointed surgeon to the little inland hamlet of Charlotte's Field, soon to be known as Queensborough, in the interior of the island, to which he walked each day. Wentworth had to treat, above all, diarrhoea and dysentery. He also had to attend lashings. Clark seemed to think flogging increasingly appropriate, and for some time, Wentworth was a mediator between the lash and convicts. There had been the case of John Howard, former highway robber, already lashed early in 1790 for stealing potatoes and selling his clothes in return for food and drink. Later in the year, he would be ordered to receive 500 strokes for selling the slops issued to him by the public store and for telling a lie about it to Major Ross. Wentworth humanely called off the punishment when he had received eighty strokes—though Howard was still, in theory, to receive the remainder when he had recovered. Wentworth also attended when a man of almost seventy was given 100 lashes for stealing wheat and neglecting his work; and a young convict boy received thirteen strokes on the buttocks for robbing his master.
Ralph Clark, the Norfolk Island punisher, gave later Australian feminist historians every opportunity of accusing him of rancour against the women convicts. He said of First Fleeter Rachel Early that she was “the most abandoned woman that I ever knew or heard of,” but that seemed to be a definition Clark applied to whichever woman he had last been required to punish. He was embarked on an affair with Mary Brenham, a First Fleet woman of about nineteen years of age with a son who had been born to one of the Lady Penrhyn sailors. She would soon be carrying Clark's child. He seemed to take the relationship seriously—ultimately he would call the girl-child born of Brenham “Alicia,” to honour his wife, irrespective of whether she would ever find out or not.
As claustrophobic as the cheek-by-jowl societ
y of Sydney and Parramatta were, the even narrower tensions of Norfolk Island sometimes made men like Clark sound nearly unhinged. He wrote, for instance, of a fellow officer, Lieutenant Creswell: “I am a damned thorn in his side as he thinks I will get some thing by my volunteering this business of building a town out at Charlotte's Field [Queensborough]. I don't care how much he grins but by God, he must not attempt to bite for if he does this world will be too small for both of us to live in.”
The marine garrison showed they suffered obsessions of their own, to match those of the convicts and gentlemen, by refusing to take their provisions, alleging that the convicts were better off through getting preferential treatment and extra greens. Their hunger was no doubt sincere, but Clark was convinced that what they wanted was to test whether they or Major Ross were to be the masters here. He believed that the air of revolution, let loose in France, had reached even this remotest post.
Captain Johnston and his officers called the roll of the two companies, parading without arms in front of the barracks preparatory to implementing orders from Ross to march them disarmed to the store with their supply bags. The authority of the Crown felt tenuous here, and yet, haunted by the possibility of severe punishment, the ranks broke and left their muskets in place and marched to the store to take their rations. “This day has been near one of the most critical days in my life,” Clark sighed. “Never was club law near taking place in any part of the world than it was in this—I wish that we were fairly away from this island, for I am afraid if we stay much longer we will not get away without a great deal of bloodshed, for our men here are the most mutinous set I ever was amongst and are ripe for rising against any authority.”
On Monday, 2 May 1791, Clark “went out to Queensborough to take Richardson with me (which is the man that flogs the people), and give them as many lashes as I think they deserved.” The flogger in question was James Richardson, a young man sentenced at eighteen for highway robbery and sent out on the First Fleet. Richardson was very muscular and had been the public flogger for some months. The previous May, he had been required to lash five members of a boat crew who had concealed part of their catch, but had found himself subjected to fifty “for neglect of duty for not flogging the above five men as he ought to have done.” That is, he had not lashed them with sufficient vigour.
At Queensborough, Clark found that Katherine White and Mary Higgins had stolen corn out of the public fields. A woman in her early twenties, Katherine White had once lifted £65 in bank notes from an office in Woolwich, but the jury had soft-heartedly valued them at only 39 shillings to save her from the gallows. “When I ordered Katherine White and Mary Higgins 50 each, White could only bear 15 when she fainted away. The doctor [Wentworth] wished I would order her to be taken down which I did.”
Clark then records that Mary Tute received twenty-two of her twenty-five lashes “when she fainted away when I ordered her to be cast loose—I hope this will be a warning to the ladies out at Queensborough.” The pattern continued. Later in Ross's reign, Clark ordered another young woman to receive fifty lashes for abusing Mr. Wentworth, but she received only sixteen, “as Mr. Wentworth begged that she might be forgiven the other 34.” Clark considered the girl in question—one Sarah Lyons—a “D/B,” his code for “damned bitch.” Wentworth's tenderheartedness would not save Sarah Lyons from further floggings.
As much as these punishments were countenanced in the eighteenth century, and indeed administered to members of the armed forces with equal mercilessness, there is a growing coarseness of sensibility in Clark's journal which is an index of the effects of flogging on the entire society. What was occasional in the Royal Navy was close to daily on Norfolk Island, and obviously Wentworth did not like it. Clark's voice is the voice of a small-minded and savage authoritarianism, and there were days when Wentworth thought highway robbery was honest work beside this.
BACK ON THE MAINLAND, something promising was happening. James Ruse, the governor's agricultural Adam, was fulfilling his symbolic significance on his farm in the Rose Hill area. He was no stranger to rage at what had befallen him, and liked to soften the edges of his life as a probationary felon-yeoman with gambling, talk, and drink. Phillip was willing to live with those realities. What he wanted were signs of agricultural hardihood and industry, and Ruse gave him that.
Ruse's 1790 harvest would produce a token 171/2 bushels of wheat from 11/2 acres, but by February 1791, Ruse would draw his last ration from the government store, an event of great psychological potency for Phillip, Ruse, and all the critics. By then Ruse had met and married a convict woman from the Lady Juliana named Elizabeth Perry. Elizabeth at twenty-one had stolen items of clothing, including a bombazine gown and shoes, from her employer, a milk vendor's wife, to whom Perry had represented herself as “a country girl just come to town.” She had been sick for the week before absconding with the goods. She claimed innocence, and argued that the clothes she was arrested in were her own, and given the shaky nature of the criminal justice system, she might indeed have been right.
The Ruse-Perry marriage rounded out the idyll. Phillip's land grant to Ruse was confirmed when in April 1791 the young convict received title to his land, the first grant issued in New South Wales. His place near the Parramatta River would become known appropriately as Experiment Farm. Elizabeth Ruse often heard her husband complain of the unsuitability of his ground at Parramatta, and he comforted himself for the smallish returns for his excessive labour and agricultural cleverness by drinking and gambling with other Parramatta convicts.
twenty-one
IN LATE JULY 1790, the Lady Juliana was due to sail for China and home via Norfolk Island, and ship's steward Nicol faced being immediately separated from Sarah Whitelam, his convict woman, and the child they shared. Amidst his grief at separation, Nicol had time to observe impressionistically the high fertility of New South Wales's convict women and attribute it to the sweet tea herb Smilax glyciphylla. “There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had borne in the colony…. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea.” It had been a busy time for Nicol: “I saw but little of the colony, as my time was fully occupied in my duties as steward, and any moments I could spare I gave them to Sarah. The days flew on eagles' wings, for we dreaded the hour of separation which at length arrived.” Marines and soldiers were sent around Sydney Cove to bring the love-struck crew of the Lady Juliana from the township on board. “I offered to lose my wages, but we were short of hands … the captain could not spare a man and requested the aid of the governor. I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true, and I promised to return when her time expired and bring her to England.” He wanted to stow her away, but the convicts were strictly guarded by the marines, and repeated searches were made of departing ships.
As Lady Juliana made ready to leave, a leviathan came to Port Jackson, a huge sperm whale which entered and became embayed within the harbour on its yearly migration from Antarctica to Hawaii. Some boat crews from the various transports went trying to hunt it, and threw harpoons its way without success. Then on a July morning it rose from the harbour deeps to smash a punt occupied by three marines and a midship-man from the look-out station on South Head. “In vain they thro' out their hats, the bags of our provisions, and the fish they had caught, in hopes to satisfy him or turn his attention. Twice the whale rose out of the deep buffeting the punt with its back.” Only one marine survived, swimming ashore to Rose Bay.
By late August, however, the whale, still trapped in the harbour, ran itself aground at Manly. The beaching of a whale was a significant event for the Eora, who gathered together on the beach from various clan areas to participate in the great meat and blubber feast. They used the sharpened shell on their woomeras, spear-throwers, to cut the whale flesh.
In the middle of the Eora whale-meat feast at Manly, an expeditionary party from Sydney Cove landed there. It included Surgeon
John White; Captain Nicholas Nepean; the governor's shooter, John McEntire; and White's young native companion, Nanbaree. They planned to head north overland for Broken Bay to hunt. The feasters, cooking blubber and flesh at their fires, scattered at the first sight of the party, but Nanbaree got up in the boat and reassured them. Bennelong and Colby stepped down the beach to meet the group. Other natives followed. The Europeans thought Bennelong was much changed, was “so greatly emaciated, and so far disfigured by a long beard.” Colby proudly showed them that he had got rid of the iron shackle from his leg. Bennelong asked whether the visitors could provide a hatchet, which would be very helpful in speeding up the butchering of the dead whale, but Surgeon White said there were no hatchets. He gave him a shirt, and when Bennelong seemed awkward in putting it on, Surgeon White directed McEntire, the Irish huntsman, to help him. But Bennelong forbade McEntire to come near, “eyeing him ferociously and with every mark of horror and resentment.” To the Aboriginals, McEntire was one of Phillip's chief avatars of malice.
Nonetheless, Bennelong kept enquiring after Phillip, and expressing a desire to see the governor, with whom, after all, he had exchanged names. At Bennelong's request, White fetched him a pair of clippers, and Bennelong began to trim himself. Looking at the women who would not come any closer, White asked Bennelong which was his old favourite, Barangaroo, “of whom you used to speak so often? ”