‘Hobart Town Chain Gang’: colonial magistrates could punish convicts for breaches of the rules by sentencing them to work in chain gangs.
We left our country for our country’s good.
Attributed to George Barrington
The Man Who Invented Australia’s Beer
In folklore, the man who invented beer is sometimes known as ‘Charlie Mopps’, celebrated in a drinking song with the chorus:
He must have been an admiral, a sultan or a king,
And to his praises we shall always sing,
Look at what he’s done to us, filled us up with cheer,
Lord bless Charlie Mopps, the man who invented beer.
The man credited with inventing beer brewing in the colony of New South Wales is still remembered in the name of a popular modern brand of beer. James Squire (Squires) was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1754 or 1755. According to one version of his life, young James was a ‘Gypsy’ (Romani) who took to the criminal life from an early age. He was arrested for highway robbery in 1774 and sentenced to seven years transportation to the American colonies. As was sometimes the case, he was offered a choice of enlisting in the army rather than being sold off to the plantation owners of Maryland or Virginia. He took the offer and served some years in the British Army, returning to Kingston to manage a local hotel. The hotel became a notorious rendezvous for thieves and smugglers and James was eventually caught stealing. He received a sentence of seven years transportation, this time to New South Wales aboard the First Fleet.
In Sydney his experience in the hotel trade was put to good use in brewing the colony’s first beer, which he sold at 4 pence a quart. He also brewed privately from imported English malt for the Lieutenant-Governors Grose and Paterson. In 1789 he was flogged for stealing ingredients used in brewing. By 1792, or possibly earlier, he was free and received a grant of 30 acres near modern-day Ryde where he built a tavern known as ‘The Malting Shovel’. He also established a brewery and planted hops from 1806. His brewing business expanded rapidly, as did his interests in grazing and land acquisition.
James left a wife and children behind him in England but wasted no time in forming new partnerships, probably beginning aboard the First Fleet. He had more than one long-term relationship, most of which produced offspring. His son Francis (with Mary Spencer) was placed with the New South Wales Corps at an early age. Francis became a drummer boy, on pay, by the age of eight and went with the corps to England where he later served against Napoleon. He was posted back to Launceston base in 1803 then pensioned off at only seventeen years of age. Francis re-enlisted in 1810 and returned to Van Diemen’s Land where he grew barley for his father’s New South Wales brewery.
When James Squire died in 1822 he was wealthy and respectable. The former highway robber had served as a district constable in the colony, financially assisted other settlers and even befriended Aboriginal people. The Eora elder Bennelong was buried in an orchard on his property. James Squire’s funeral was the largest ever in the colony up to that time:
[He was] universally respected and beloved for his amiable and useful qualities as a member of society, and more especially as the friend and protector of the lower class of settlers. Had he been less liberal, he might have died more wealthy; but his assistance always accompanied his advice to the poor and unfortunate, and his name will long be pronounced with veneration by the grateful objects of his liberality.
At least that was how the artist, forger and alcoholic Joseph Lycett recalled James Squire, though there is no doubt that his astute industriousness made him a successful and popular figure. Like many transports he made a worthwhile new life in the penal colony. His grandson, James Squire Farnell, was the first Australian-born premier of New South Wales.
Transported to Point Puer on the Tasman Peninsula of Van Diemen’s Land at the age of fourteen, Samuel Holmes had already served time for small offences. With no mother and an alcoholic father, Samuel found lodgings in London’s crime-ridden East End. He paid the landlord rent each week and sold him whatever he stole. The landlord apparently lodged a number of other children on a similar arrangement. Young Samuel had fallen in with a shady character who may have even been the basis for fictional young thief, the ‘Artful Dodger’, in Charles Dickens’s famous novel Oliver Twist.
Samuel’s story certainly reflects elements of the novel: ‘[I] used to play about in the streets, [my] father tried to keep me at home—has stripped me, taken away my clothes and tied me to a bed post—because the Boys used to come round the House at night and whistle and entice me to go out thieving again with them.’
Two of the boys took Samuel to a house in Stepney:
[It was] kept by a Jew and he agreed to board and lodge me for 2’/6 a week provided I brought and sold to him all that I might steal—He has about 13 boys in the house on the same terms…The landlord has also the adjoining House and there is a communication into it from every room—The back kitchen is fitted up with a trap door to help escape—and in a corner of one of the back kitchens is a sliding floor underneath which property is hid.
A coat is hung up in the kitchen of public room and Boys practise how to pick the pockets, the men in the house show them how to manage.—I was about a fortnight in training and afterwards went out to assist and screen the boys where they picked pockets—In a short time I went out on my own account as I soon saw how they did it.
Dickens published Oliver Twist a couple of years later and may have come across Samuel’s story in his work as a court reporter. We will probably never know, but it seems that Samuel Holmes’s story of juvenile offending and learning the nefarious skills required was hardly unique. He was only one of many wild and wicked youths transported to Australia.
Samuel arrived at his place of penance in August 1836. Almost immediately he was in trouble. His record shows an average of four punishments each year up to 1839. In the first year he spent thirteen days underground in the dark and cramped cell known as the ‘Black Hole’ on suspicion of pilfering buttons. In December he used blasphemous language on the Sabbath and was kept on bread and water for three days. The following January he was flogged for insolence to the superintendent and in April served another three days on bread and water. Three months later, for singing in his cell and other infractions, the boy was flogged again. Another twelve lashes were given in August for resisting his overseer. There were various other visits to the Black Hole and starvation diets over the two year period.
At the age of twenty-eight, Samuel Holmes at last gained his liberty. Where he went and what befell him after his poor start in life nobody knows.
Rosetta Terry ‘dressed in a simple, nay, coarse manner’. Every Saturday she got down on her knees and scrubbed the floors of the unpretentious house in Pitt Street she shared with her husband, Samuel. He spent many hours of most days up to his shirt sleeves salting beef for sale, one of his many businesses. The couple lived on a reasonable but not excessive 500–600 pounds a year, probably less than 100,000 dollars in today’s terms.
Lancashire labourer Samuel Terry was transported for seven years, arriving in 1801. He worked as a stonemason and soldier and when the opportunity presented itself, he seized it and started a sly grog and pawn-broking business. In the ever-expanding colony, these enterprises flourished. Although he sold grog and tobacco at absurdly high prices, Terry himself was ‘of the most perfectly sober and fruitful habits, he was active and industrious; and his whole philosophy consisted in having made up his mind, to never give value without obtaining value for it’. As early as 1818 he claimed to be worth a staggering 90,000 pounds, millions in today’s dollars.
The ex-convict entrepreneur was able to build up a portfolio of land and properties. Through the debts of those who pawned their goods to him and drank his spirits, assisted by some shady legal machinations, he eventually owned streets of Sydney properties as well as farms, the income from which was at least 60,000–70,000 pounds a year.
Terry kept a large portion of his cash in what was known to all as his ‘iron chest’. Unable to resist temptation, a young convict assigned to Terry stole 1000 sovereigns. He was apprehended and sentenced to hang, though would not reveal where he had hidden most of the loot. As he awaited trial, Terry visited the young man in his cell and promised to have him pardoned if he would reveal the secret. The youth told Terry where he had buried it in his master’s garden. But there was no pardon, the boy was hanged as sentenced. It was said that Terry was ‘ever haunted by the sight of the executed, and in moments of acrimony within his family circle, his relations often reproached him with the murder of the lad’.
The miser also defrauded friends and engaged in some dubious but profitable shipping investments. By fair means or foul, he was able to amass a fabled amount of wealth, though his parsimony and guilt eventually caught up with him. He suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side. This left him vulnerable to the mercenary aspirations of his sons and other family members as well as what would today be called ‘elder abuse’. He had to be carried around by two men and ‘in his open carriage, pale and bloated, he drove about the Domain of Sydney, a silent but impressive example for any one, showing how illusive and worthless, at times, wealth is, especially with a man like him, and if obtained in a low, and even questionable way’.
Terry’s health declined and he passed away in February 1838 at the age of sixty-two years. His legacy was ‘that of all vulgar misers’. His estate was valued at around 500,000 pounds. His wife received an annuity of 10,000 pounds, passing to his son and his heirs after Mrs Terry’s death: ‘There is not one word about charity or a house of refuge, or anything of a public bearing; the only provision approaching to such generosity is that all his benevolent subscriptions (perhaps 100 pounds a year), should be continued for ten years to come.’
Although Terry’s son died just a year later, Rosetta Terry lived on for another twenty years, long enough to see the family sell to the government the land on which Sydney’s Martin Place and the General Post Office now stand.
After his death Samuel Terry was called ‘the richest outlaw whom the Australian colonies yet possessed, and ever will possess’, and was known as ‘the Botany Bay Rothschild’.
This, at least, is some of the folklore of envy and distrust that dogged Terry and his colonial wealth. While he was a determined and tough businessman who was not shy in litigating in defence and expansion of his interests, he was considered to be of good character by Governor Macquarie. He also made significant contributions to the economic and financial development of the colony and to its public life. Even if these activities often furthered his business interests, he did contribute to many good causes and held many public and civic offices. In later life he was a prominent Mason.
Why the marked discrepancy between the official and unofficial records of the Botany Bay Rothschild? That question is answered in the reminiscences of the Reverend Thomas Atkins who arrived in the colony two years before Terry’s death: ‘On my first arrival at Sydney (1836), a person, who had acquired notoriety for his crimes, his vices, and his wealth, was brought to my notice; that person was named Sam Terry (original italics). Both he and his wife had been convicts, and had been whipped for colonial offences.’
Prejudice against ‘emancipists’, as ex-convicts were known, developed early in Sydney and beyond. Later in life Terry worked to improve the lot of ex-convicts, becoming a prominent representative for legal, political and social reform. His funeral was graced with a military band and Masonic honours and was reckoned the most spectacular such event up to then in the colony’s brief history.
The Legend of Margaret Catchpole
The matter-of-fact notice appearing in an English newspaper of 1797 is the unlikely foundation of a story that endures in England and Australia:
Margaret Catchpole, for stealing a coach horse, belonging to John Cobbold, Esq., of Ipswich (with whom she formerly lived as a servant), which she rode from thence to London in about 10 hours, dressed in man’s apparel, and having there offered it for sale was detected.
Margaret Catchpole was then a 35-year-old Suffolk country woman whose employment by the Cobbold family came to an end a few years earlier. She had been a good servant, treated much as a family member and even receiving basic instruction in reading and writing. More than once she had saved the Cobbolds’ children from death. Why was she now stealing a valuable steed from her previous master and riding pell-mell for London dressed as a man?
The details are murky, but it seems that a much younger Margaret Catchpole fell in love with a sailor and smuggler named William Laud. In an argument with another suitor for Margaret’s affection, Laud shot his rival and became a wanted man. Laud was pressed into the navy. About four years later Margaret was told by a man named Cook that Laud was back in London. Cook persuaded her to steal the horse and ride it to London where he planned to have it sold for his own profit. But she was arrested almost as soon as she arrived.
Margaret pleaded guilty to the charge and was sentenced to death, later commuted to seven years transportation. While in Ipswich prison awaiting passage to New South Wales, Margaret distinguished herself by good conduct until she discovered that William Laud was in the same prison. The two were able to meet and hatch an escape plan. William showed Margaret how she could scale the walls. Then, using money he had given her earlier, she paid his fine. At the pre-arranged time, Margaret clambered over the walls and met her lover. They were waiting for a ship to take them to freedom when the authorities arrived. William was shot dead. Margaret went back to prison and another trial. Again she received a death sentence and again it was commuted to transportation, this time for life.
Margaret arrived in the colony aboard the Nile in December 1801. Her domestic skills were immediately put to good use by the commissary and she wrote home to her uncle in her individual spelling: ‘I am well Beloved By all that know me and that is a Comfort for I all wais Goo into Better Compeney then my self that is a monkest free peopell whear thay mak as much of me as if I was a Laday—Becaus I am the Commiseres Cook.’
By then, Margaret had found another ‘man that keep me Compeney and would marrey me if Lik But I am not for marriing’. The man was probably the botanist James Gordon and, true to her word, Margaret never did marry. Instead she worked for many of the leading families of the colony, becoming a respected and trusted manager. Her letters home reveal many small details of everyday life in early Sydney and along the Hawkesbury River.
Despite the dramatic events surrounding Mary’s horse stealing and transportation, she remained on corresponding terms with the Cobbold family in Suffolk. Her letters stress what an upstanding and honest life she led in the colony and are full of observations about the natural world, the state of the colony and the cost of living. In a letter to her previous mistress, Mrs Cobbold, written in January 1802 and beginning ‘honred madam’, Margaret described the many gardens, which she thought ‘very Butteful’. But, in capitals, she also wrote ‘I MUST SAY THIS IS THE WICKEDEST PLACE I EVER WAS IN ALL MY LIFE’, describing the convicts sent to the Coal River (Newcastle) with their heads shaved and half starved. Others she said were sent to Norfolk Island with a ‘steel Corler on thear poor neckes’.
Like most settlers, Margaret was afraid of the Aboriginal people, then waging a fierce resistance: ‘Thay are very saveg for thay all wais Carrey with them spears and tommeay horkes so when thay can meet with a wit man thay will rob them and speer them.’ She admitted that she did not like the Aborigines and ‘I do not know how to Look at them—thay are such poor naked Craturs’, though they were well behaved when visiting her house. She was especially afraid of the black snakes which she claimed were up to twelve feet in length and ‘will fly at you Lik a Dog and if thay Bit us wee dy at sun dowen’.
While Margaret served out her relatively uneventful sentence, finally receiving a pardon in 1814, she had not been forgotten back in England. Richard Cobbold, the son of the Suffolk farming family who employed and also helped her after her conviction, would write a best-selling book about her. It was a highly romantic version of reality that also inspired popular plays about Margaret. She remained in the public mind into the twentieth century, being the subject of an early Australian feature film directed by Raymond Longford and starring Lottie Lyell titled The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole. Today, you can enjoy a real ale at The Margaret Catchpole pub in Ipswich and read a recent novel, Scapegallows by Carol Birch, based on her life and legend.
In the year 1819 the real Margaret Catchpole, adventurer, convict, servant, midwife and carer, was nursing an elderly shepherd suffering from influenza at Richmond in New South Wales. She caught the disease and died.
Along the convict-built bridge at Ross in Tasmania are a series of carvings. One of these represents perhaps the most extraordinary character ever transported to Australia. His name was Jorgen Jorgenson, one-time King of Iceland.
The son of a high-class Danish watchmaker, Jorgenson took to a roving life of adventure. At the age of sixteen he went to sea and spent the next thirteen or so years sailing the world. His voyages took him to Port Jackson and to Van Diemen’s Land and eventually back home by 1807. With the British attacking Copenhagen, Jorgenson was given a hasty commission into the Danish navy. He was captured and became a prisoner of war.
By 1809 he was the interpreter for an English trading expedition to Iceland. At that time it was still possible for merchants to operate as privateers, basically legalised pirates. The man financing the trade expedition managed to take over the government of Iceland and installed Jorgenson as ruler. After a couple of months in which Jorgenson showed himself to be quite good at the business of kingship, a Royal Navy ship arrived and convinced the privateering merchant to relinquish control of the country. Jorgenson was removed from his throne and was taken back to England.
Despite displaying considerable bravery and skill in rescuing all the passengers from a burning ship, Jorgenson went straight into captivity on a hulk for Danish prisoners of war. He was eventually released but took to drink and gambling with enthusiasm. The British employed him as a spy for a while, but he was in constant debt and in and out of prison until he finally received a death sentence after ignoring an order to quit the country. Through the influence of botanist William Hooker, one of the passengers Jorgenson rescued from the burning ship, the sentence was commuted to transportation. In April 1826, he once again arrived on the shores of Van Diemen’s Land, twenty-two years after his first visit.
During the voyage aboard the transport Woodman, the multi-skilled Jorgenson had taken on and performed the duties of doctor to crew, passengers and convicts. He had hopes of a reward from the government for this service. But Lieutenant-Governor Arthur was a strict disciplinarian and it was much harder to obtain a pardon under his rule. And Jorgenson’s internationally colourful career and escapades had preceded him, as he described in his memoirs:
Strange rumours were afloat which tended to make the Governor somewhat circumspect in his dealings with me. Some said I had been punished for having written pamphlets against the British Government and for having been a spy in England. Others reversed this story and declared that the British Government had employed me as a spy in foreign countries, and Heaven knows what else equally ridiculous and void of truth. The effect of such stupid irresponsible stories was to create a prejudice against me in official quarters. I was told by Mr. O’Farrell that when an application was made to Colonel Arthur on my behalf, the Governor replied: ‘I can do nothing for Jorgenson, as he is a violent political character, and a dangerous man in any country.’
Assisted by letters of introduction from his network of influential contacts, it did not take Jorgenson long to distinguish himself. Now free of drink and gambling after discovering Christianity, he worked as a clerk. In this role he exposed a forgery and received the reward of working for the Van Diemen’s Land Company as an explorer. He and another convict were the first white men to find a way across the Central Plateau in the rugged Central Highlands of Tasmania. Jorgenson then received a conditional pardon and was made a police officer. In this and related roles he played a part in the inglorious ‘Black Wars’ in which the government sought to rid the island of its indigenous people. He received 100 acres of land for his work.
Fully pardoned in 1831, Jorgenson married an illiterate and alcoholic Irish convict named Norah Corbett. She was nearly half his age and, by all accounts, made his later life in Oatlands, 84 kilometres north of Hobart, mostly a misery. Jorgenson worked as a police constable and also pursued his interest in writing. He contributed articles to the Hobart press and authored several books, including his frequently unreliable memoirs. Always in debt and harried by Norah, he was regarded with some amusement as the ‘Viking of Van Diemen’s Land’ and the ‘Convict King’, his story well known to convicts and settlers alike.
In 1840 the grog and neglect carried Norah away. Jorgenson died the following year from pneumonia. There was no money to bury him. After sixty-one remarkable years, his legend persists. His short reign is remembered in Iceland. Some books and a few articles have been published about his life. And his likeness can still be seen, crown and all, in crumbling stone on the Ross bridge. Norah is there too, a local tribute to their troubled relationship.
On 9 November 1843, solicitor William Barber ‘was then enjoying a large income, with the brightest prospects’. The following year on the same day he was standing on a beach in New South Wales with a group of transported convicts waiting for the ship to bear them to the torments of Norfolk Island.
‘What a catalogue of ills I had suffered in those twelve months!,’ he wrote. ‘The wreck of all that I possessed in the world; the estrangement of friends, the severance from those I dearly loved, imprisonment in three different dungeons, branded with all but a capital crime, transported for life to the worst of all penal settlements.’
Barber had been found guilty of complicity in a case of fraud and forgery and transported for life. He found himself among men whose lives and customs were dramatically different to his own. Surviving dysentery and the notorious Norfolk Island prison gangs: ‘Many of the most daring of the convicts have wrung a kind of respect from those over them by the terror of their vengeance, some ruffians indeed, to my knowledge, have even struck those high in command, and been suffered to go unpunished.’
But the sick and helpless could expect little consideration. To make matters worse, Barber was innocent:
There were those in England for whose sakes, and on account of the sorrow and shame which my conviction had brought upon them, I prayed fervently to be spared for that day when I could make my innocence clear. For although with my last breath I had asserted the injustice of my sentence, in language so strong that any doubts which they might hold would have been dispelled, who was there to communicate the last words of a dying convict to his friends the other side of the globe?
Recovering from dysentery, Barber was deemed unfit for hard labour and appointed wardsman in the hospital: ‘This was by far the most loathsome, perilous, and unhealthy occupation on the Island. Its duties were to preserve order in a dormitory of two hundred criminals, many of whom, as subsequent events showed, would not scruple to take the life of an individual who, like my-self, was at once their drudge and their overseer.’
The well-bred and educated lawyer now had to empty bedpans and clean the wards: ‘The disgusting details of the labour thus selected for me, I will not go into.’ To add to his unjust punishment, the ex-solicitor had to endure the presence of one of the fraudsters whose crimes had sent him to Norfolk Island. As this man had some previous medical training, he was appointed the doctor of the hospital and so was effectively Barber’s boss.
Barber spent sixteen months in the hospital until his frequent illnesses became so bad that the chaplain had him moved to the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, ‘a more salubrious part of the Island’. He had to do the same work but conditions were better and his health improved. But he was now well enough to work and was sent to field labour in a heavy gang with a notoriously harsh overseer: ‘Covered with dirt, weakened from insufficient food; sometimes drenched with rain, at others, standing up to my knees in slush, and under a broiling sun that made the mud steam around me, I continued at this horrible labour for three months.’
Barber then went to work as a clerk. After two and a half years on Norfolk Island, the penal station was closed down and the convicts transferred to Van Diemen’s Land. A week later, the ex-solicitor received wonderful news. A conditional pardon was granted. He needed to get to Hobart, 90 miles away, ‘through an almost untrodden region, a gum tree wilderness without for the greater part any roads, except a slight kind of sheep track’. He had to return his prison uniform to the authorities and might have been forced to make the trek naked if not for the willingness of his less fortunate companions to provide him with an assortment of ill-fitting garments and some food.
The sun served as my compass by day, and the stars by night. My course sometimes lay along the sea-coast; but oftener deep in the woods, on emerging from which, the scenery was often extremely beautiful. After crossing mountains and fording streams, and sleeping occasionally in the shade of a tree, in three days and three nights I reached my destination. Had a stage harlequin suddenly made his appearance, he could scarcely have attracted more attention than I did, in my motley, ill-fitting suit.
From Hobart, Barber travelled to Sydney, then via Canton, Madras, Suez and Germany to Paris. Still unable to return to Britain because his pardon was only conditional, Barber made contact with the British ambassador and six months later, ‘I received a free pardon, with a letter from the Secretary of State acknowledging my innocence’.
His troubles were not over yet. After his conviction Barber had been barred from the legal profession. It was some years before he was re-admitted in late 1855. He did receive compensation but there could be no real restitution for his wrongful sentence and his lost years inside the brutalities of ‘the system’.
A popular British street ballad of the early nineteenth century, or even earlier, traded on the image of the fallen young woman transported to the wilds of Australia. Printed and reprinted many times, this version is prefaced with the almost certainly concocted personal story of ‘Charlotte W—’, giving its primarily British audience confirmation of their moral and practical fears of transportation. As was often the case with these early examples of ‘fake news’ about Australia produced in Britain, there is confusion about the geography of Tasmania and New South Wales:
Charlotte W—, the subject of this narrative, is a native of London, born of honest parents, she was early taught the value and importance of honesty and virtue; but unhappily ere her attaining the age of maturity, her youthful affections were placed on a young Tradesman, and to raise money to marry her lover, she yielded to the temptation to rob her master, and his property being found in her possession, she was immediately apprehended, tried at the Old Bailey Sessions, convicted, and sentenced to seven years transportation. On her arrival at Hobart Town, she sent her mother a very affecting and pathetic letter, from which the following verses have been composed, and they are here published by particular desire, in the confident hope that this account of her sufferings will serve as an example to deter other females from similar practices.
Ye London maids attend to me,
While I relate my misery,
Through London streets I oft have strayed,
But now I am a Convict Maid.
In innocence I once did live,
In all the joy that peace could give,
But sin my youthful heart betrayed,
And now I am a Convict Maid.
To wed my lover I did try,
To take my master’s property,
So all my guilt was soon displayed,
And I became a Convict Maid.
Then I was soon to prison sent,
To wait in fear my punishment,
When at the bar I stood dismayed,
Since doomed to be a Convict Maid.
At length the Judge did me address,
Which filled with pain my aching breast,
To Botany Bay you will be conveyed,
For seven years a Convict Maid.
For seven long years oh how I sighed,
While my poor mother loudly cried,
My lover wept and thus he said,
May God be with my Convict Maid.
To you that hear my mournful tale,
I cannot half my grief reveal,
No sorrow yet has been portrayed,
Like that of the poor Convict Maid.
Far from my friends and home so dear,
My punishment is most severe,
My woe is great and I’m afraid,
That I shall die a Convict Maid.
I toil each day in grief and pain,
And sleepless through the night remain,
My constant toils are unrepaid,
And wretched is the Convict Maid.
Oh could I but once more be free,
I’d never again a captive be,
But I would seek some honest trade,
And never become a Convict Maid.
When John Mortlock received a sentence of twenty-one years transportation, he told the judge, ‘My lord, it will save me from starvation.’ Attempting to regain the family inheritance he believed to be his by right, Mortlock fired a pistol at his uncle one night in November 1842. The gun was loaded only with a blank but the charge was still attempted murder, ‘shooting with intent’. Conducting his own defence the 32-year-old with a ‘remarkably handsome profile’ and ‘easy, gentlemanly appearance’ spoke movingly of his dire situation. He had no trade or profession and times were hard. He asked the jury: ‘What would you have done in the same condition? With no friends to give you a penny? What would you do but starve, or commit suicide, or have fallen into the path of crime?’ He said that he had lived in poverty and ‘absolute destitution’ for much of the last four years and been the object of derision at his humble lodgings at the Blue Boar, ‘not, as many of you know, a first-rate inn’.
Mortlock’s pathetic tale brought many in the court to tears and the citizens of Cambridge later petitioned on his behalf, unsuccessfully. The ex–Indian Army officer then embarked on an extraordinary experience of the transportation system, from the hulks to Norfolk Island to Van Diemen’s Land. While this journey was not especially unusual, Mortlock would also experience another sentence of transportation, this time to the Swan River in Western Australia. Through it all he would persist in his claims against the family members who he was convinced had defrauded his father and himself.
Reduced to ‘the condition of a galley slave’, as he put it, Mortlock served over four months in irons on a Portsmouth hulk left over from the Battle of Trafalgar. His 600 companions included an elderly butler caught stealing silver, a foreign traveller and a London solicitor. These ‘Knights of the Iron Chain’ shared poorly ventilated and damp quarters with twenty-seven other ‘degraded objects’. There was not enough food and the men were made to work at hard manual labour. Many died and it was rumoured that the head surgeon of the hospital hulk supplied bodies to doctors in Portsmouth for dissection at 6 guineas each. Flogging was restricted to no more than three dozen stripes, though the flagellator was an enthusiastic practitioner of his trade.
Mortlock was transferred from the hulk to the Maitland and sailed in September 1843. The voyage was a welcome relief from the hulk. Although there were no fresh vegetables available until the ship reached Cape Town, the doctor was conscientious (motivated by a 10-shilling bonus for every convict delivered alive). Floggings were few and light. Only eight died, one having fallen overboard. Four months later Mortlock arrived at Port Jackson and from there to hard labour on the dreaded Norfolk Island. It did not take long for the island to confirm its evil reputation.
The inmates were fed on a meagre diet of ‘insipid hominy’, salt junk ‘very like old saddle’ and a maize bread that tasted like sawdust. Within the first fortnight, eight of the group arriving with Mortlock were dead. Dysentery was common and treated only with boiled tree bark. ‘Sea water did duty for Epsom Salts.’ Each morning cross-ironed men were flogged to heavy labour beneath a scorching sun in the stone quarry or fields. Floggings of up to 300 lashes could be, and often were, inflicted. Solitary confinement, sometimes in dark holes for thirty, sixty or ninety days was feared far more. ‘Such treatments, with starvation, rendered life valueless: four would cast lots—who should be murdered—who should do the deed—who should be the two witnesses—for a “spell” to Sydney, where the trial took place.’
Escapes were frequent, but success rare. Those who eluded the guards usually died of exposure, hunger and thirst. Or worse. One of the hardened ‘old hands’ was known as the ‘man-eater’. He had escaped with another from Moreton Bay and survived by killing and eating him.
Mortlock diplomatically aimed to navigate his existence between the punishments of those in charge and the desperate violence of his fellow convicts. The daily sounds of ‘the “cats” upon the naked flesh (like the crack of a cart whip) tortured my ears’. His social standing as a gentlemen shielded him to some extent from the horrors of Norfolk Island and his education provided a relatively soft job of tutoring the children of administrators and guards.
He was able to appreciate the natural beauty of the island and the seascapes around it. Whales were commonly sighted, turtles less so. Tropical fruits flourished, as did fowl and fish in the sea. A ‘desecrated Paradise’, Mortlock called it. In February 1846 he left the privations of Norfolk Island for those of Van Diemen’s Land with sixty or seventy other convicts ‘stowed away more like pigs than human beings’ aboard the barque Lady Franklin. Nineteen days later he was landed in Hobart.
In Van Diemen’s Land Mortlock was required to perform a year’s hard labour before gaining a ‘pass’ that would allow him to work for wages. He felled trees until the following April, suffering part of the harsh winter without shoes. But even when he became free to pursue his own employment, there was little work to be had in the colony’s depressed economy. Mortlock got by through odd-jobbing and short-term appointments—labouring, a constable (or ‘trap’) in the island force made up almost entirely of transportees, a school master, a private tutor and clerk to a road gang.
The nineteen convicts on the gang were ‘housed in two wooden moveable huts resembling the cages of wild animals’. Threatened with a stint in the dreaded Port Arthur penitentiary by the corrupt officer in charge of the gang, Mortlock decided to abscond. He walked to Hobart and handed himself in, receiving a four-month sentence quarrying stone. During this time and after, he survived several misadventures while lost in the island’s impenetrable bush as he sought to earn a living by whatever work was available.
In late 1852 Mortlock received a ticket-of-leave and was recommended for a conditional pardon in 1854. Effectively free, he took up the occupation of pedlar, his already extensive travels around the island giving him useful knowledge of the transport routes and the people who lived along them. Humping 70 to 80 pounds of hawkers’ wares, his opossum rug, cover sheet of oiled calico, a knapsack full of supplies and, eventually, a rifle, he often stumbled for up to 20 miles to reach a hut or other human habitation clinging to the Tasmanian bush. He tramped the tracks for weeks, carrying his bundle of wares, living rough and often in peril from misadventure or bushrangers.
His efforts were rewarded. John Mortlock the pedlar became a successful colonial businessman, buying cheap and selling dear to the isolated farms and small settlements across the island. He eventually accumulated enough money to take advantage of the freedom he had now richly earned. With enough cash to fund his travels, he left the island for an extended holiday in 1855, visiting Sydney, the Turon goldfields near Bathurst and Melbourne.
The following year Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania, partly to remove the taint of convictism. This made little impact on John Mortlock or any other transportees, but in 1857 what seemed a stroke of luck turned out to be the cause of further misery. An uncle left Mortlock an inheritance of 46 pounds. Not a vast sum, but a substantial amount at that time. Unfortunately, the funds tempted him to return to England to pursue the claims that had seen him transported in the first place. He was in Cambridge less than a month before being arrested. Transported convicts were forbidden to return before their original sentence had expired, regardless of their ticket-of-leave or pardoned status. The citizens of Cambridge raised a petition of 1200 signatures, but their protest was in vain.
Sporting a light moustache and a ‘military and dignified’ appearance, Mortlock pleaded not guilty at the dock in March 1858. The jury disagreed, but strongly recommended mercy. It was not given. The returned convict was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment—followed by transportation for a further five years. The law required him to finish out the term of his original sentence.
A year in the Cambridge County Goal awaiting retransportation allowed Mortlock to draft his memoirs and pursue his inheritance claims. He was then taken in chains to London’s Millbank Prison. After nine weeks in the gloomy institution, he was manacled and escorted by train to Portsmouth and once again taken aboard the convict ship Sultana. He arrived at Western Australia’s Swan River colony in 1859. Fremantle Prison, he thought, ‘by no means so repulsive as Millbank’.
Now fifty years of age and an experienced ‘old hand’, he was soon granted a ticket-of-leave and enjoyed a relatively congenial existence. He received a pardon in 1862, allowing him, eventually, to return to Tasmania via Sydney with 40 pounds in his pocket. From Tasmania, Mortlock took passage to Melbourne, rambled through the goldfields, wrote a letter to the Argus regarding the topical debate over transportation and then headed back to England where he landed in late 1864. Free.
And free to once again pursue his claims, which he did—unsuccessfully—for the rest of his life. He supported himself and his many litigations by writing, publishing and selling pamphlets, mainly telling his life story and airing his financial grievances. With only 154 pounds to his name, John Mortlock, ex-convict and likeable but deluded eccentric, died on 21 June 1882. He had suffered the hulks, two voyages of transportation, several jails and three Australian penal establishments. None of these experiences dampened his strong sense of injustice or his long determination to set things right. Whether he was right or wrong, John Mortlock’s extraordinary story suggests that transportation did not necessarily lead to repentance, rehabilitation or resignation.
William Sykes—just ‘Bill’ to his mates and wife, Myra—made a very big mistake one moonlit October night in 1865. With a few accomplices he went out poaching in Silver Wood near Rotherham, as they had often done before. But this time was different. The local gamekeepers were lying in wait. Heavily armed and with a personal score or two to settle, the keepers waited until the poachers came close by their hiding place. With a yell they loosed their dogs on the poachers’ beasts and attacked the surprised men. The fight that followed was savage, with no quarter given to man or beast. When it was over, the keeper Edward Lilley lay unconscious and bleeding on the cold Yorkshire ground. The poachers fled and the keepers carried their wounded companion to medical attention. He died a few days later.
The police were fairly quickly on the trail and eventually caught up with one of the poachers who they frightened into a confession and identification of his accomplices. When they came for Bill Sykes he went quietly, telling Myra and the children not to worry. But of course she did. She would worry for the next twenty-five years, her fears, troubles and hopes expressed in a series of irregular letters to Bill, transported to Western Australia. After two complicated and sensational trials, he had borne the brunt of the case against the poachers for the murder of the keeper. Eventually he was convicted only of manslaughter and paid the price of a life sentence.
Arriving at Fremantle aboard the Norwood, Bill Sykes went straight into Fremantle Prison for processing. Once inside he was washed, barbered and issued with uniforms, including the parti-coloured work gang uniforms that ensured the convicts stood out among the colonial population whenever they were labouring outside the prison walls. His rations were basic but adequate, including bread, meat, potatoes, salt and pepper, tea, sugar, milk and rice or oatmeal on Mondays and Fridays. He was also given regular issues of soap and soda for cleaning his clothes and body. William was sent to work on the road gangs in the Bunbury area south of Perth.
Bill Sykes the poacher was a man of few words, one of life’s survivors and probably typical of the thousands of convicts transported to the Swan River between 1850 and 1868. He worked on road gangs, as an assigned servant, tried to escape, was punished for this, as well as for minor and major infractions later on, mostly associated with a weakness for the grog.
Back in Yorkshire, Myra had to provide for herself and five children. She heard no word of or from her husband for more than a year and even then only indirectly through a letter he wrote to his family. Undeterred, Myra wrote to William, asking him how his passage had been and giving news of his children:
All send their kind love to you and Edward Huttley and his wife sends their kind love also and your daughter Ann is in place and doing well and Alfread is working in [the mill] and he gets 10 pence per day.
Ann Thurza Alf William(s) sends their kind love to you but William has got long white curly hair and he was not called William for nothing for he is a little rip right.
The rough and irregular correspondence between William and Myra Sykes wound on over the next few years, mainly from Myra’s hand rather than William’s. Some time in 1874 she wrote: ‘It harte breaks me to write like this if the prodigal son cud come Buck to his home wons more tahre woold be a rejoicing.’
A few lines further on Myra recalls her last sight of William at the Leeds Assizes: ‘and you mencend about Lucking young I thort you did when I saw you at leeds my hart broke neley wenn I felt your hand bing so soft.’
On 12 January 1875, William wrote to Myra. Although this letter is lost, the gist of it is clear from Myra’s reply of April 11. She begins in her usual, slightly formal manner, and, as she often did, Myra mentions the lack of letters from him. Then she tells of the terrible news she had received: ‘Your relations said that you was Dead I went to Rotherham townshall and asked if they knew wheather you was dead or not one of the police sade he heard you was dead.’ Poor Myra was now convinced that her William was dead, the family news casually confirmed by the authority figure of the policeman: ‘I put the chealdren and my self in black for you my little Tirza went to the first place in deap black.’
After dressing herself and the children in mourning clothes, Myra is at once devastated and relieved to discover, through William’s favoured sister, that she has been misinformed.
By now William and Myra’s son, also named William, is old enough to write to his exiled father. A letter on 20 October 1875 begins with bad news: ‘Dear father I write these few lines hopeing to find you better than it leaves us at present my mother as been very ill and me my self and I am a bit better.’ Soon the letter becomes a young man’s cry of pain for the father he barely knew: ‘Dear father we think you have quite forgot us all my sister Ann takes it hard at you not writing oftener.’ And later: ‘Dear father you never name me in you letters but I can sit down and write a letter to you now.’ The letter ends: ‘We all send kindest and dearest love to you and God bless you and 1,000 kisses for our Dear father from your Dear son William.’
In the same envelope as young William’s letter came a hasty note from Myra. The near-indecipherable handwriting indicates that she was not well in body or in mind and very worried about Ann’s domestic problems. It seems that Ann was pregnant for the third time and Myra is not looking forward to having to look after her during the pregnancy: ‘Dear husban I am grvd to my hart A bout my Ann I have had her Both times of her confindments and Ly shee gating on gain.’ Then Myra scribbles what were possibly the last words to pass between herself and William Sykes: ‘We hall [all] send our nearst and dearst Love to you with A 1000 kiss Dear Husband you must excuse writing.’
In 1877 William received his ticket-of-leave, allowing him to work for himself within the colony, and began sinking wells for a living. Later he would work for the railway department, an old ex-convict living an isolated life in the bush.
While his father was living out an exile’s life, young William and the family back in Yorkshire had been busy seeking a pardon for him. With the help of the local vicar, they managed to get the bureaucracy to address their petition. A letter was sent with the official details from the Colonial Secretary’s Office to the Swan River colony, suggesting that William be allowed to return to England as his age, around sixty-three years, meant he would be unlikely to offend again.
By the time the letter reached Western Australia it was too late. William was found sick in his hut shortly after Christmas 1890. He died at Toodyay hospital a few days later. His only possessions were a few pounds, an old rifle, a dog and a kangaroo-skin pouch in which were the fragile letters of Myra and William Sykes, her son. The resident magistrate at Toodyay replied to the request from the colonial secretary: ‘The Superintendent of Poor Relief conveys the information that Sykes died in the hospital at Newcastle [as Toodyay was then known] on or about the 4th, or 5th, January last and that his effects are but of trifling value.’
Myra eventually remarried in 1892. She had a brief but happy marriage but was widowed again the following year. She lived until 1894, long enough to see her children grow up and make their way in the world and have children of their own. Some of her and William’s descendants now live in New Zealand and Australia.