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  The Prisoners

  The Australians 2 – The Prisoners

  © Vivian Stuart, 1979

  © eBook in English: Jentas ehf. 2021

  Series: The Australians

  Title: The Prisoners

  Title number: 2

  ISBN: 978-9979-64-227-5

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  All contracts and agreements regarding the work, editing, and layout are owned by Jentas ehf.

  The Australians

  The Exiles

  The Prisoners

  The Settlers

  The Newcomers

  The Traitors

  The Rebels

  The Explorers

  The Travellers

  The Adventurers

  The Warriors

  The Colonists

  The Pioneers

  The Gold Seekers

  The Opportunists

  The Patriots

  The Partisans

  The Empire Builders

  The Road Builders

  The Seafarers

  The Mariners

  The Nationalists

  The Loyalists

  The Imperialists

  The Expansionists

  Chapter I

  During the next ten days the work of setting up the new settlement went on apace. More male convicts were landed from the transports and formed into working parties under guard.

  A blacksmith’s forge was erected; stores, tents, and supplies of dockyard canvas brought ashore; the construction of a wharf begun; and pits dug for cooking ovens and fires. Work started at first light and went on until dark, with a short break at midday.

  The ground was staked out according to the plan Captain Phillip had prepared, with the marines under canvas on the west side of the freshwater creek, the convicts in newly built huts on its eastern bank. A hospital, initially of canvas, was to be set up on the headland at the cove’s western extremity between the marines’ encampment and the point designated as the site for an observatory, when Lieutenant Dawes should bring the admiralty telescope and other scientific instruments ashore.

  On the eastern extremity the plan called for a small fort, mounting two of the Sirius’s guns for defensive purposes, with the Government House – at present a large canvas marquee – erected a short distance to the rear of the landing wharf and flagstaff. Parties were sent to clear the land of trees in the area behind the governor’s marquee in preparation for the construction of a government garden and fenced enclosures for the various livestock brought, with seed and young fruit trees and plants, from Capetown.

  Inevitably there were setbacks, and Captain Phillip, while careful to preserve an outwardly confident and unruffled appearance, fumed inwardly when the home government’s parsimony was again revealed in the poor quality of the tools provided for the settlement’s use.

  “The axes and spades,” he complained to Hunter, “are the worst I have ever set eyes on – inferior even to those used as barter with the natives of the Pacific Islands!”

  The convicts, with one or two notable exceptions, drove him close to despair. Mainly city dwellers untrained in manual labor, they displayed a sullen unwillingness to exert themselves in its performance. The primitive huts they built – four posts, with walls of tree branches roughly interlaced and smeared with clay and a thatch of palm leaves – were too flimsy to stand up to wind and weather, and the native timber, which burned so well, proved useless for building purposes.

  Fresh meat was virtually unobtainable. Organized hunting parties were sent out daily, but they returned, weary and dispirited, to report a lack of edible game. A few of the native marsupials – called kangaroos by the Aboriginals – were shot, with an occasional crow, but for the most part the salt beef and pork, on which they had been compelled to subsist for the past eight months, remained perforce a major part of their diet. The livestock was required for breeding and could not be slaughtered, so that the only fresh food available was fish, and some spinachlike plants and berries, which Dr. White had declared of some use in the treatment of scurvy.

  The government garden – still only half cleared and littered with the stumps of the trees that had been felled – must be brought into production as quickly as was humanly possible, Captain Phillip decided. He put his servant, Edward Dodd, in charge and allotted him a large convict working party in the hope of hastening the initial planting, and since most of the officers had purchased livestock, fruit trees, and seed for their own use, he began allocating individual plots of land to any of them who asked for it.

  It was a beginning and a very necessary one, for a great many of the male convicts landed to make up the settlement’s labor force were suffering from the ravages of dysentery and scurvy and quite incapable of prolonged work. The marines, who were younger and fitter, were forbidden by their commandant to do more than provide guards, and Phillip had his first serious clash with Major Ross on this account, within a few days of landing.

  “My men are soldiers, Captain Phillip,” the marine officer informed him with icy dignity. “They are here to do duty as garrison troops and for the protection of the settlement. They will confine themselves to this duty. On no account will I permit them to act as superintendents of convict labor, and they cannot be expected to perform manual labor either – save when they are off duty. Then – since you have not seen fit to assign any convict working parties to my officers – I have given them leave to assist in the clearing and cultivation of land taken up by their officers. It will be on a strictly voluntary basis, of course, and their labor will be rewarded. That, sir, is my final word on this subject. I give you good day.”

  Without waiting for Phillip’s reply, he stalked off, a stiff, unyielding figure, attended as always by his son and Lieutenant Leach.

  “What in God’s name can I do with the infernal fellow, John?” the new governor asked helplessly of his second-in-command. “Our seamen are working harder than the convicts, without a word of complaint, but Ross forbids his damned jollies to do the same! And we need every man we’ve got.”

  “Have your commission read, sir,” Captain Hunter answered uncompromisingly. “It appoints you as governor and captain general and places Major Ross and his corps unequivocally under your command.”

  “I will,” Arthur Phillip agreed. “But we must land all our people – including the women – before I can do so. And we’re not ready for them, heaven help us!”

  There were tents for the marines’ families – twentyeight wives and a score of children – but the hospital was, as yet, a mere shelter, contrived of green timber and interlaced branches plastered with clay, like the huts, with a thatch of cabbage palm, reinforced with old sailcloth. It let in the rain, and there were few blankets to cover the shivering sick, who huddled there in abject misery. The huts planned for the women were only half completed, their latrines not even begun ... Phillip sighed.

  His own marquee, which had cost £125 and had been specially designed to provide both living and official quarters, was not weatherproof, he reflected wryly, and the slightest breeze disturbed its stability. But until, by their own labor, the settlers could improve on all these things, discomfort and even hard ship could not be avoided. It would mean, in the end, the survival only of the fittest and would apply to them all – officers, garrison troops, and convicts alike – when the ships and the seamen sailed away. And somehow he must bring this bitter and unpalatable truth home to them ... again he expelled his breath in a long-drawn sigh and reached for pen and paper.

  His brow deeply furrowed, he started to compose the address he would make to them after his commission as governor was read. It took him until well past midnight, working by the light of a spluttering candle, as sheets of rain beat against the leaking canvas of his marquee...

  On February 5, a fresh issue of clothing from the ships’ slop chests was made to the women convicts and their disembarkation ordered for the following day.

  First to be rowed ashore were the wives and families of the marines, most of whom had been given passage in the Prince of Wales, and they were followed by the fifty convict women from her hold. The Lady Penrhyn’s women – the largest contingent of female convicts, numbering close to a hundred, with half a dozen children and as many babes in arms – were kept waiting on deck for two hours before the boats were hoisted out and the first mate bawled an order to them to start loading.

  Jenny held back at the end of a long, straggling line with Melia, Polly, Eliza, and Charlotte, and a trifle to her surprise, she recognized Auld Meg’s once-devoted crony Hannah Jones come sidling across to join them.

  “Reckon as I’ll tag along of you,” she said, not waiting for any of them to raise objections. “It don’t look much o’ a place, do it?” she added in a querulous tone, jerking her head in the direction of the shore and addressing no one in particular.

  Jenny, who had been drinking in the beauty of the wooded shoreline, eagerly awaiting her release from the confines of the ship, eyed her reproachfully but made no reply. This cove – now called Sydney – was to be their home for the
foreseeable future, and it would be as well to make the best of it and the comparative liberty they would enjoy once they landed. But ... she bit back a sigh. They presented a strange picture of womanhood, she thought wryly – her in a seaman’s striped jersey and ticking trousers; Eliza and Charlotte in much the same garb, but with the incongruous addition of ragged shawls; Polly in a dress, but bare of foot; and Melia’s slim, shapely body half-buried in a sailcloth tunic.

  Yet, Hannah apart, all were in an optimistic mood, eager to get ashore and set about the task of homemaking, which, as the first mate had been at pains to warn them, would constitute their first task.

  “There aren’t enough huts to accommodate you all,” he had told them as they stood huddled on the deck watching the boats of the Prince of Wales pull toward the landing beach. “Not by a long chalk there aren’t. So if you want ‘em, I reckon you’ll have to set to and build your own. And that means,” he had added waspishly, “that you’ll have to keep sober!”

  The warning was lost on most of them, however. As she followed Melia into one of the overcrowded longboats Jenny saw that Mattie Denver and a number of others were very far from sober, although, for once, the effect of the liquor they had consumed had been to dampen, rather than raise, their spirits.

  “I’d as soon ‘ave stopped in me saltbox at the bleedin’ Newgate as come ‘ere,” the gaunt-faced mother of one of the infants claimed bitterly as the boat neared the landing stage. Several of the others voiced noisy agreement.

  “Them’s palm trees, for Gawd’s sake! I reckon they’ve brought us to India, not New South Wales!”

  “It’s hot enough ter be flamin’ India. An’ them black critters we seen paddlin’ their canoes over in Botany Bay – they was Aboriginals, wasn’t they?”

  “Aye ... the kind that’ll cut our throats whiles we’re asleep. I wish we’d stayed in the ship.”

  “They’ll try to make us work once they get us on dry land,” Mattie Denver complained. She took a bottle from beneath the folds of her once elegant velvet gown and, ignoring the envious glances it attracted, sipped its contents thirstily. “Well, I for one won’t build any huts, whatever they say. That’s men’s work.”

  Polly sniffed disgustedly. “Listen to them, Jenny,” she invited. “They make me puke! Anywhere’s better than Newgate, and dry land’s better and safer than any plaguey ship.”

  The boat grounded, and the women splashed reluctantly ashore, to be lined up by one of the ship’s officers, who counted them before handing them over to the marine guard.

  “Fifty-two females, eight infants, Sergeant. Sign for ‘em, will you?”

  The sergeant did as he had been requested. “All right,” he said briskly, motioning to two of his men. “Take ‘em along to the camp quick as you can and get back here.”

  The women had to run the gauntlet of cheers and catcalls from the various working parties of male convicts they passed on their way to the camp, which had been prepared for their reception, and Jenny’s heart sank as she took in the scene about her.

  Everywhere stores were piled up, spilling out of their containers; cooking, she saw, was being done in the open, and the roughly cleared, sandy ground was covered by a layer of ash from the burned trunks of felled trees, some of which were still smoldering. The stumps and roots were being grubbed up by hand and without enthusiasm by gangs of half-naked convict laborers.

  There had been a deluge of rain the previous day, and all the huts and shelters had sustained damage. In one of the animal pens the entire fence on one side had collapsed, and two sullen convicts, instead of attempting to repair it, were standing, arms akimbo, watching the cattle it was supposed to contain make an unhurried escape. A marine sentry, posted to guard both convicts and animals, yelled for help, but the men ignored him and came grinning to meet the party from the Lady Penrhyn with obscene suggestions and complete indifference to the fate of the cattle.

  Memory stirred. Many had been the time, in her childhood, that she had aided her father to turn back his young horses when they had broken out of the paddock at Long Wrekin ... and these poor creatures, Jenny told herself, would almost certainly die if they were not brought back to their pen.

  “Come on!” she said to Polly. “If we haven’t lost the use of our legs, let’s turn them before they go too far.”

  Polly giggled, and the two of them ran, barefoot, across the sandy ground in pursuit of the straying cattle. They had rounded up all but two of them when, driven by contemptuous shouts from the other women, the convict herdsmen reluctantly joined the chase and the fugitives were herded back into the pen.

  “Why not mend your fence?” Jenny flung at them as they halted, mopping their heated faces and cursing. “It’d be less trouble, surely, than having to run after the poor things.”

  She returned to the cheers of the women.

  “Well done!” Eliza acclaimed sarcastically. “Perhaps things will improve now they’ve brought us ashore to show them how.”

  By evening, however, the majority were bitter and disillusioned by the conditions prevailing on shore. The shelters and huts provided for them were primitive in the extreme, and fighting broke out as the possession of the more advantageous dwelling places was contested and bickered over, the enforced discipline of shipboard life forgotten within hours of coming ashore. At dusk, when the day’s work was over, some seamen entered the women’s camp with casks of liquor, but scarcely had they set these down than they were engulfed by an army of male convicts who drove them back to their ships and seized the liquor they had brought with yells of unholy glee.

  A great bonfire was built; more liquor appeared; and heavily outnumbered, the marine sentries were powerless to stem the tide, even had they desired to do so. Jenny, sitting with her companions in a corner of the canvas-covered shelter, was thankful to recognize Sergeant Jenkins in charge of a file of men with loaded muskets, advancing to the relief of the sentries.

  “Thank heaven I’ve found you, lass!” The old sergeant greeted her tensely. “Things are getting out of hand and our orders are to evacuate the camp and take no further action. The governor offers protection to any women who want it, and they’re to come with us now. Help me find any you think wish out of here, and we’ll escort the lot of them to our lines. But hurry, Jenny my girl – there’ll be murder done before long, you mark my words!”

  “The children,” Jenny said. “And the babies – I’ll get them first, Sergeant.”

  To her astonishment it was not only the children, most of them without their mothers, but also some of the more hard-bitten of the Lady Penrhyn’s women who elected to come with her. In all about twenty of them snatched up the bawling infants and frightened toddlers and, behind a screen of marines with bayonets fixed, made their escape from the mob.

  Her last sight of the women’s camp was of a huge fire, fed with the timber of which the shelter had been constructed and surrounded by a drink-crazed mass of men and women, many of them naked, embracing, dancing, screaming, and fighting, lost to all reason and all restraint. Jenny shivered, scarcely able to believe the evidence of her own eyes and ears, and beside her a tough young marine let out his breath in a long sigh.

  “We had the breaks for eight months, I suppose,” he said softly, “when they was battened down below hatches and in chains. Now it’s their turn, and they’ve waited long enough for it – I don’t reckon the Angel Gabriel hisself could stop ‘em. Certain sure we couldn’t—they’re like animals; they’d tear us limb from limb if we tried!”

  They passed Captain Phillip and some of his officers on the way to the marine guard post, and Jenny, looking back, saw that the new governor’s face was deathly pale and his shoulders despairingly hunched, as if the scene he was witnessing passed even his comprehension.

  The next day, Thursday, February 7, 1788, Governor Phillip inaugurated the new colony. The convicts, subdued after their night-long orgy, were mustered on a freshly cleared patch of ground in front of the flagpole at an early hour, and a roll was called. Then the marine battalion paraded under its officers and marched, with colors flying and the band playing, to take post opposite them, the third side of the hollow square being formed by a naval contingent from the Sirius and Supply and parties of seamen from the transports.