Chapter 2
Our dark story
‘I’m not dead! For God’s sake, don’t cover me up!’
‘As I passed along the road about eleven o’clock in the morning, there issued out of the prisoners’ barracks a party consisting of four men, who bore on their shoulders (two supporting the head and the two the feet) a miserable convict, writhing in an agony of pain – his voice piercing the air with terrific screams. Astonished at the sight, I inquired what this meant, and was told it was “only a prisoner who had been flogged, and was on his way to the hospital”!…I soon learned that what I had seen was at that period an ordinary occurrence.’
Few of us have ever seen a flogging. Once or twice a decade the newspapers carry a photograph and caption of a Middle Eastern or Pakistani man being caned. Video footage of the incident is almost never screened. It would shock and outrage adults, television channels know, and severely traumatise the young viewer.
A century ago, in Australia, floggings were administered not by a cane, but by the cat-o’-nine tails, and children were entirely at ease with it. A new arrival, Alexander Harris, was told, ‘Flogging in this country is such a common thing that nobody thinks anything about it. I have seen young children practising on a tree, as children in England play at horses.’
It may have been common, but for newcomers like Harris it was something that could never be erased from their memories. ‘I was sent to the Bathurst court house…I had to go past the triangles where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that ran from his lacerated flesh squashing out his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground.
Watercolour depiction of a Van Diemen’s Land convict
‘The scourger’s foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged and swollen. The infliction was a hundred lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the punishment through nearly an hour.’
Robert Jones, in Recollections of Thirteen Years on Norfolk Island described one such flagellator – a brute who took sadistic delight in his task. ‘The flogger was a County of Clare man a very powerful man and took great pleasure in inflicting as much bodily punishment as possible, using such expressions as, “Another half pound, mate, off the beggar’s ribs”. His face and clothes usually presented an appearance of a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim’s body.’
Sometimes there was no flesh to flog. One Norfolk island prisoner, Jones wrote, had 2000 lashes over three years and his back was ‘quite bare of flesh and his collarere [sic] bones were exposed looking very much like Ivory Polished horns. It was with some difficulty that we could find another place to flog him. Tony [Chandler, the overseer whose job it was to supervise the floggings] suggested to me that we had better [flog] the soles of his feet next time.’
An American lawyer, Lines W. Miller, watched floggings at the Hobart Town Prisoners Barrack.
‘A flagellator was appointed for the express purpose of inflicting corporeal punishment, and the scenes enacted at the triangles were most revolting. Two dozen lashes, which was considered a light sentence, always left the victim’s back a complete jelly of bruised flesh and congealed blood. A pool of blood and pieces of flesh are no uncommon sight at the triangles after a dozen have been flogged.
‘The cry of “Murder!” and “Oh, my God!” were not infrequently repeated by the sufferer during the infliction of the punishment, loud enough to have been heard a mile, while others of more nerve would clench their teeth and endure all without a groan.
‘Some idea of this inhuman punishment may be formed from the fact that the sound of the blows upon the naked back of the sufferer may be heard at the distance of one hundred rods. Many faint while undergoing the torture and some are carried from the triangles to the hospital.’
The torture, of course, was not confined to the flogging triangles. Prisoners condemned to work on the road gangs suffered appallingly. One of them, Joseph Smith, recounted years later, ‘I knew a man so weak, he was thrown into the grave, when he said, “Don’t cover me up. I’m not dead! for God’s sake don’t cover me up!” The overseer answered, “Damn your eyes, you’ll die tonight, and we shall have the trouble to come back again!”
‘They used to have a large hole for the dead; once a day men were sent down to collect the corpses of the prisoners, and throw them in without any ceremony or service. The native dogs used to come down at night and fight and howl in packs, gnawing at the poor dead bodies.’
Joseph Smith served seven years on the road gang. ‘We used to be taken in large parties to raise [lift] a tree; when the body of the tree was raised, Old Jones would call some of the men away – then more; the men were bent double – they could not bear it – they fell – the tree on one or two, killed on the spot…Many a time I have been yoked like a bullock with twenty or thirty others to drag along timber. About eight hundred died in six-months at a place called Toongabbie, or Constitution Hill.’
Black pearls and the butchered bishop
Sometimes you have to butcher a bishop to get attention. When in 1871 the body of Bishop J.C. Patteson was discovered, shot through with arrows and bludgeoned, it followed a few weeks after the slaughter of around 70 men, trapped below a ship’s decks. There was a common link in both killings and it forced governments in Australia and in England to look at that link: blackbirding, a whimsical name for a very nasty business.
The combination of the death of the godly – the bishop – and the killings by the ungodly – blackbirders – brought things to a head and the British Government passed a Kidnapping Act which gave its navy greatly increased legal powers to clamp down on the trade as it had successfully done on the slave trade. Three years before, the Queensland Government had made some attempt to control things with the regulations intended to improve the conditions of Kanakas working in the State, and laws that required recruiters to be licensed.
The law that most blackbirders respected, however, was the law of the gun. The men who lived and often died by it, or by war clubs or spears, kidnapped and lured Pacific island natives to work for fixed terms and low wages in the sugar cane fields of Queensland (usually at a wage of £18 for three years), the cotton plantations of Fiji, and the notorious nickel mines of Noumea. ‘An islander decoyed to Noumea has a harder lot than his brother in Queensland,’ ‘Chinese’ Morrison wrote in his exposé of blackbirding for the Melbourne Age. ‘He is set to work in the nickel mines, he is badly paid and poorly fed; indeed his condition is a bad form of slavery. A Noumea schooner cannot get boys except by kidnapping them and by representing herself to be in the Queensland labour trade.’
Germans, Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen and Australians, the slavers – as most of them were – included men such as Henry Ross Lewin who recruited the first Kanakas (the word meant boy) for the Queensland cane fields, lived in a fortress-like house in the New Hebrides and went everywhere with an armed guard because of his habit of killing out of hand. Lewin’s habit eventually caught up with him when he shot a native dead for stealing a bunch of bananas and three days later a relative of the man ambushed and shot him when his back was turned and his armed guard was occupied.
Lewin was loathed and feared almost as much as the infamous American, Bully Hayes, a hulking brute; a murderer, pirate, bigamist and blackbirder. Hayes smuggled cargoes of Chinese into Australia during the 1850s gold rushes and co-owned a blackbirding brig the Water Lily, armed with 14 guns and with holes in the bulkhead so that troublesome natives below could be fired on. Bully didn’t let sentiment stand in the way when it came to killing. Ben Pease, Bully’s partner, disappeared – believed killed and eaten by cannibals. Bully had sent him ashore on a dangerous kidnapping mission, but had taken fright and sailed away without him.
Whichever hell Pease found himself in, Bully followed. In 1876, the cook of his yacht Lotus settled an argument by crashing a belaying pin down on Bully’s head while his back was turned. Stunned, Bully reeled unbalanced and the cook quickly upended him overboard.
Blackbirding was a risky business. The captain of the Melbourne-owned schooner Anna would lure natives aboard, suddenly surround them with armed sailors, compel them to go below and then batten the hatches. This was a common tactic, but when he sold a cargo of 130 Kanakas to the captain of the Moorea, things went badly wrong. The islanders rose, killed the captain, the supercargo and the deckhands and barricaded the rest of the crew below. They cut the cable, planning to let the Moorea drift on to a reef where they would deal with the remainder of the crew and plunder its cargo. The mate of the Moorea, however, made a hasty bomb from a cask and gunpowder. The explosion blew a way out for the crew and killed and wounded the Kanakas on deck.
Attempted revolts by Kanakas, trapped below with little food and water, were not unusual. In 1871 HMS Basilisk found the Peri drifting out of control inside the Great Barrier Reef. Thirteen Kanakas were on board, the survivors of an original complement of 80 Solomon Islanders who had killed the European and Fiji crew, and then looted the ship. Without a navigator they drifted for about five weeks until, when the water ran out, they began to fight. The survivors lived off the flesh of those who died in the fighting. The thirteen found on the Peri, the captain of the Basilisk wrote, were ‘living skeletons, creatures dazed with fear’.
A few months later Dr James Murray, part-owner of the brig Carl, sailed from Melbourne allegedly to trade its cargo of goods in Fiji. This, too, was a common ruse. Once in Fiji the skippers of the cargo vessels would sell their goods, change the name of the ship, and go blackbirding. Murray and the ship’s mate Armstrong, dressed as missionaries (another old favourite) and lured natives aboard the Carl or rammed their canoes and dragged dazed and half drowned men on board. They had 70 men from the New Hebrides and 80 from the Solomons together in the hold when tribal fighting started a riot. To quell it, Murray and his crew fired on them for several hours until almost half had been killed. Those badly wounded were thrown overboard, bound at the wrists and ankles.
HMS Rosario stopped the Carl for inspection and found the hold cleaned of all signs of the slaughter but Murray, fearing the inevitable – it’s impossible to keep secret the slaughter of 70 men – decided to save his neck by turning Queen’s Evidence. At the trial in Sydney, Armstrong and another were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, and five others were given two years.
A short time later Bishop Patteson and another missionary were murdered when they went ashore seeking missionary volunteers on one of the Swallow Islands. It was not uncommon for missionaries to be murdered. In the New Hebrides ‘Chinese’ Morrison had visited ‘the only island in the South Seas where the complete Bible has been given to the natives in their own tongue…a more delightful home for a missionary lies not under heaven.’ He quickly learned of his error. On a nearby island he discovered that two missionaries had recently been murdered, that the Minister who succeeded them had also been ‘brutally butchered’ and that his brother, who came from England to bring back the body had suffered the same fate. Bishop Patteson and his colleague, however, were murdered in revenge for kidnappings by blackbirders and it’s to be hoped that they died in the spirit of Christian forgiveness and understanding.
The man King Lash couldn’t tame
The whistle of the cat-o’-nine-tails and the awful thwack as it hacked pieces from a man’s back was, Alexander Harris wrote in the 1820s, ‘such a common thing [in Australia] that nobody thinks anything of it’.
Well, nobody, perhaps, except the wretch being flogged.
Laurence Frayne was such a wretch. But what a man!
Frayne was an Irishman sentenced to transportation for theft who came to Sydney in 1829. His Memoir of Norfolk Island, a handwritten account held in the Mitchell Library tells a riveting story of the private war he waged with one of the most frightful of all the monsters who ruled Australia’s penal settlements.
Read today, the punishment Frayne suffered defies belief. Yet there are many instances of men like Frayne who were flogged, literally, to within an inch of their lives – men like Charles Maher whose back, after a flogging on Norfolk Island ‘was quite bare of skin and flesh’, and who yet refused to bow.
The man Frayne refused to kowtow to was James Thomas Morisset, Lieutenant Colonel of the 80th Regiment.
An army man from his late teens, Morisset had been promoted through the ranks in Spain and Egypt until, as a captain during the Napoleonic Wars, he was hideously wounded in Spain. A mine explosion left him, Robert Hughes writes in The Fatal Shore, ‘with the mask of an ogre. His mouth ran diagonally upward and made peculiar whistling noises when he spoke. One eye was normal. But the other protruded like a staring pebble and seemed never to move. The cheekbone and jaw on one side had been smashed to fragments and, without cosmetic surgery, had re-knit to form a swollen mass like “a large yellow over-ripe melon”; he would thrust this cheek forward in conversation as though daring his interlocutor to look away.’
Painted before his hideous disfigurement, Morisset’s portrait belies his monstrous nature. He once had six men in a line, each flogging the man in front. Morisset was last in line
Morisset was 37 when, in 1817, he was posted to New South Wales and given command of the Newcastle penal settlement. The settlement had grown from its beginnings in 1804 when 37 convicts, Irish insurgents from the failed uprising at Castle Hill, were sent there to work in the mines. By the time Morisset arrived there were 1000 convicts enslaved in the settlement. Deep underground, working naked, miners hewed the coal and carried it back in baskets. At Fullarton Cove, across the river, more convicts burned oyster shells for lime and humped sacks of them to barges moored a hundred metres out.
He quickly won a nickname: King Lash. His practice was to order the convicts to be lined up and for every second or third man to be given 50 lashes for the sake of concentrating the minds of all on parade.
Men found guilty of the slightest ‘offence’ were marched with double leg-irons to the triangle where, to the beat of a kettledrum, and while convicts and the regiment looked on, two floggers, alternating, scourged the man.
King Lash would not stomach a flagellator giving less than his all. In those cases the cat was brought out for the slacker. One bizarre day a soldier was flogging a boy for stealing milk when Morisset, unhappy at the man’s enthusiasm, ordered another flogger to lash the soldier. The second flogger also failed Morisset’s high standards, and a third man stepped up to flog him. Finally there were six men flogging and being flogged with Morisset, at the rear, thrashing the back of the sixth man with his riding crop.
Raw lime and bleeding backs are a fearsome combination. Exacerbated by salt water – as it was when the limeburners waded to the barges with their bags – the effect was too painful for some. They would sink into the water and deliberately drown themselves, gulping water deep into their lungs, cutting off oxygen and accumulating carbon dioxide so that they sank in a mist of unconsciousness.
Morisset, you would suspect, derived some satisfaction from the suicides of these men who could take no more, some ghastly pleasure from the power he had over the life and death of the convicts. But in Laurence Frayne he met his match.
Frayne had come to Norfolk Island in 1830, less than a year after Morisset’s arrival as Commandant. He had been sent there from Moreton Bay, his punishment for ‘repeatedly absconding’. Five years before, Governor Brisbane had dictated: Port Macquarie for first grave offences; Moreton Bay for runaways from the former; and Norfolk Island as the ne plus ultra, the ultimate.
When Frayne again tried repeatedly to escape from Moreton Bay he was sent to Sydney, sentenced to hang and then, with his sentence commuted, was sent to the ne plus ultra.
Waiting for transportation to Norfolk Island on the Lucy Ann, he was put on the Phoenix, a hulk, where he almost succeeded in breaking out. He was discovered as he slipped over the rails of the Phoenix and given 200 lashes.
In October the Lucy Ann set sail with Frayne, his back in ribbons, crawling with maggots. ‘My shoulders were actually in a state of decomposition, the stench of which I could not bear myself, how offensive then must I appear and smell to my companions in misery. In this state immediately after my landing I was sent to carry Salt Beef on my back with the Salt Brine as well as pressure stinging my mutilated & mortified flesh up to Longridge. I really longed for instant death.’
In this state he arrived in the kingdom of King Lash.
In the quarry Frayne broke a flagstone – a flogging offence that earned him 100 lashes. He began the first of a series of exchanges with Morisset that are breathtaking in their audacity and courage.
‘After the sentence I plainly told the Commandant in the Court that he was a Tyrant. He replied that no man had ever said that about him before. I said they knew the consequences too well to tell him so. But I tell you in stark naked plain English that you are as great a tyrant as Nero ever was.
‘The moment I expressed these words I was sentenced to an additional 100 & to be kept in irons down in a cell for Life and never to see daylight again.’
Morisset ruled that the flagellation be made as drawn out and as painful as possible. First, he was given 50 lashes on his back. He was given four days for the wounds to form scabs and then was given another 50. Four days later he was given 50 on the buttocks and finally, four days later, the remaining 50.
Morisset oversaw the lashings and as usual took pains to ensure that every effort was made to get maximum efficiency.
‘New and heavier Cats were procured purposely for my punishment,’ Frayne wrote, ‘& the flagellator threatened to be flogged himself if he did not give it to me more severe. He replied that he did his utmost and really could do no more…The Super[intendent] who witnessed the Punishment swore when I was taken down that I was a Brickmaster, meaning that I was like an Iron man past all feelings of the punishment. Alas, delusive idea! – I felt all too acutely the full weight, scourge and sting of every lash but I had resolution enough accompanied by inflexible Obstinacy not to give any satisfaction…I knew my real innocence and bore up against it.’
Less than three months later the two met again. This time Frayne was charged with assaulting a convict named Harper, an informant. Morisset used informers as Stalin did, to ensure that no man felt safe conspiring to mutiny or escape, and as a way of keeping the convicts dehumanised and isolated. The Norfolk Island convicts constantly denounced one another to curry favour with the Commandant – and to avoid suspicion themselves, for once denounced, a man could be flogged merely on suspicion.
When Morisset, no doubt thrusting his gruesome cheek at Frayne, asked, ‘What have you to say for yourself?’ Frayne replied ‘that I would leave it to you to judge whether I am guilty or innocent, you know the character & conduct of the informer; you also know mine. It is useless for me to gainsay anything…If you actually knew my innocence yourself I well know that you would punish me…If you acquit me for assault you will flog me for what I have now said to you, but I disregard both you and all the punishment you can give me.
‘His very next expression was, ‘I will give you 300 at different whippings, you damned Scoundrel.’
‘I said, ‘I am no Scoundrel no more than yourself, but I don’t think I can take that punishment.’ This I said out of derision and ironically, with a sneer at the Colonel.
‘I and the other man was taken out and we received our first 100 in slow time and with heavy cats. The flagellators were almost as much besmeared with blood as even we were…When I was taken down an overseer who assisted to loosen the cords said, giving me a Fig of tobacco, ‘You are a Steel man not a Flesh-and-Blood Man at all, you can stand to be sawn asunder after all that skinning and mangling.’
Once again Morisset ordered that Frayne and his fellow convict be given time for their wounds to scab over and after a week had them sent to the surgeon to see if they were ready for their next 100. Frayne told Gamack, ‘I am ready to be scarified alive again.’
Gamack said, ‘Do you wish to expire under the lash?’ I said, ‘I want to get it over and have done with it & all thought of it, being here injures me more than the flogging.’
He was sent to solitary after his second flogging. There, he poured his ration of water on the stone floor of his cell, pissed in the pool and lay in it to alleviate his agony.
‘With my sore shoulders on the exact spot where the water lay…I was literally alive with Maggots and Vermin, nor could I keep them down; to such a wretched and truly miserable state was I reduced, that I even hated the look & appearance of myself…The trifle of soap allowed me to wash out persons & shirts was stopped from me, as I thought to spur me to abuse the Gaol authorities and thereby again subject myself to more cruelty…knowing as they all did my hasty temper.’
Now Frayne had two pieces of ‘luck’. Before he could have his final 100 lashes, the colonial secretary ordered that henceforth no flogging could exceed 100 lashes. Morisset responded to this irksome executive order by putting Frayne in the dumb cell: total isolation, light and sound deprivation of the type still popular in today’s torture manuals.
On his release Frayne saw through jail bars two convict women, servants at Morisset’s house, walking in the yard. One of them came from the same town as Frayne. He had contrived to be put in the jail for the purpose of meeting and, possibly, sleeping with them.
‘I showed myself through the bars…I told them they might expect me to pay them a visit at all hazard, & I would put up with the consequences if it was 300.’
That night he slept with them both.
When Morisset found out, Frayne was as brazen and defiant as ever:
I plainly told the Commandant that it was the only opportunity I had ever had or perhaps ever would have of spending a night in Womens company; it was a very natural offence in a twofold degree. ‘How do you mean twofold?’ asked the Commandant. ‘The first,’ I said, ‘is too obvious to need explanation, the second is that they are both your servants – now you can do as you please, that is all I have to say.’
‘Well then,’ said the Commandant, ‘I will give you 100 lashes in slow time so that you shall pay for your creeping into the women’s cell.’
I said, ‘I hope you will send me back to gaol right after it, and you can give me another 100 tomorrow for the same offence if that will gratify you or give you pleasure.’
Frayne dreamed of revenge, of course: ‘I should certainly have taken his life…& many a time I prayed, if I knew what prayer was, that the heaviest curses that ever Almighty God let fall on blighted men might reach him, for blood will have blood, and in no depth of earth or sea can we bury it, and the blood of several of my fellow-Prisoners cryed aloud & often to heaven to let fall its vengeance on this wholesale Murderer and despicable White Savage.’
Vengeance – almost – came on 15 January 1834.
Laurence Frayne, soon after the reveille bell rang at 5 a.m., was helping empty a night tub of urine when he called out to the convicts in the sawpits, ‘Are you ready?’ and, as a downpour of rain swept the settlement, the rebellion broke out.
The 1835 mutiny on Norfolk Island lasted seven hours before it was put down. It was not well planned and, when it was over, five convicts were dead and 50 wounded. Two soldiers died, mistakenly shot by their fellows.
The retribution was appalling. Morisset was too ill to deal it out. He had been sinking for some time, in increasing pain from his head wound and praying, like the men he ruled, to get off the island. For weeks he had dismissed the fears of his underling, Foster ‘Flogger’ Fyans that a mutiny was brewing.
When it was over, the Master’s Apprentice proved every bit as cruel. The floggings literally wore out the cats – and they stopped only when Judge William Burton came to dispense justice. He gave the death sentence to 13 men and spared 16 – one of whom complained: ‘We thought we should have been executed, and prepared to die, and wish we had been executed then…I do not want to be spared on condition of remaining here: life is not worth having on such terms.’
Three months later a Catholic priest, Father Ullathorne, visited the condemned in their last week.
‘I have to record the most heart-rending scene that I ever witnessed. The turnkey unlocked the cell door and said, “Stand aside, Sir.” Then came fourth a yellow exhalation, the produce of the bodies of the men confined therein…I announced to them who were reprieved from death and which of them were to die…
‘It is a literal fact that each man who heard of his reprieve wept bitterly, and each man who heard his condemnation of death went down on his knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God they were to be delivered from this horrid place.’
By then, six months after the mutiny, Morisset had gone. He went back to the mainland, sold his commission and invested it in a bank that collapsed. Forced to take a position as a police magistrate in Bathurst, his salary garnisheed to pay his creditors, he died in obscurity in 1852 leaving his 10 children and his wife penniless.
Laurence Frayne’s end is not known. It is believed, however, that he wrote his memoirs after the arrival of the remarkable Alexander Maconochie as Commandant of Norfolk Island. Maconochie’s vision was to change the focus on the island from punishment to reform and culturally and morally he transformed the island and the men on it. Frayne and other men were encouraged to write their memoirs and his is one of at least nine that survive today.
Whatever his end, however, we can be certain that Frayne faced it with courage.