The Girl From Botany Bay

Many of these marines were veterans of the American war, hardened survivors of exhausting campaigns, dispirited at the prospect of a long and difficult voyage and alert to the possibility of trouble. Only days earlier, hundreds of convicts aboard another prison ship off Portsmouth Harbor rebelled en masse and attempted to subdue their guards. The marines aboard that vessel, obeying the shouted commands of their officers, had stood their ground, fired their pistols into the yelling, frenzied mob and shot eight of the convicts dead, wounding several dozens more.

It had been a terrifying scene, berserk inmates attacking their guards with sticks of ship timber and lengths of iron from the blacksmith’s shop, officers running, guards pursuing fleeing convicts who were trying to escape over the side of the ship, the wounded screaming and the air thick with smoke from the fired weapons.

The recent rebellion had been only one of many. Convicts escaped in twos and threes, sometimes half a dozen, sometimes twenty or more at a time. They broke into the captain’s cabin and seized the arms chest, then, using the weapons to overpower the guards, escaped across the treacherous, quicksand-ridden mudflats or in boats brought alongside the hulks by accomplices on the outside. Some escapes were permanent, but many of the escapees were recaptured and hanged, or shot once they reached the shore. Hundreds managed to gain the safety of the forest, or to make their way to London, where they melted into the anonymity of the criminal underworld and evaded pursuit.

Once on board the Dunkirk Mary and her companions were warned by their warders that any attempt they might make to begin an uprising would meet with a swift and severe response, with no mercy shown. One look at the resident prisoners around them, many of whom bore terrible long red scars down their backs from floggings, or were marked by livid bruises or amputated limbs, told the newcomers that they dared not treat escape lightly.

The convict wretches who gathered to stare at the new arrivals and shout insults at them were a sorry sight indeed. Most of them had been living aboard the Dunkirk for many months, some for years. Their backs bent from the weight of their shackles, gaunt from malnourishment and pale as mushrooms from too little sun and air, the inhabitants of the Dunkirk were more like disembodied spirits than earthly creatures—though the red rash that discolored their skin and the green sputum they coughed up from their unhealthy lungs were corporeal enough. Certainly the fleas and lice that speckled their dirty shirts and narrow, emaciated chests found them worth preying upon.

The newcomers were hardly given time to take stock of their guards and their weakened companions before they were separated into two groups, the men on one side of the ship, the women on the other, and roughly stripped of every vestige of their clothing.

Mary was plunged naked into a large washtub and scrubbed. When she emerged she was handed her unwashed clothes to put on again (there being no prison garments available), her fetters were reattached and she was sent down into the dark and stinking hold of the ship.

A chorus of whistles and catcalls greeted Mary and the other newly arrived women as they descended into the murk of the hold, and saw for the first time the women with whom they were to share their captivity and make their journey.

They were filthy. The whites of their eyes were preternaturally bright against their dirt-grimed skin, their uncombed hair was stiff with dirt, their clothes were dingy and tattered. So rank was the stench that rose from their long-unwashed bodies that it threatened to overpower the odors from the overflowing slop buckets that served them as chamberpots.

They were noisy. Raucous laughter and foul oaths assaulted Mary as she made her way, bent over so as to avoid hitting her head, along the narrow path between the bunks built into the wall. The convict women were rough-spoken, challenging, full of verbal attacks. They swore at the newcomers, at one another, at the guards and at their fate. They cheered and booed one another when fights broke out. Taunts, mockery, sneering remarks were flung in Mary’s direction, the constant stridor of the women a thick wall of sound from which there seemed no escape.

They were shameless. Crammed cheek by jowl in their dozens into a space too small for half their number, they abandoned even the most rudimentary civility and modesty and undressed, relieved themselves, vomited, and engaged in coarse erotic play in public. Privacy was impossible: every act was observed, every conversation overheard. The most flamboyant of the women flaunted their thin bodies, the most aggressive of them shoved and slapped and elbowed and struck one another with energetic abandon. Every scrap of food was fought over, every inch of space contested. Emotions were raw and the worst of them elicited.

Finally, the convict women were savage. They cared only for self-preservation, or so it seemed to Mary in her first days and nights in the Dunkirk’s dim hold. To survive she would have to adopt their belligerent, feral behavior. She would have to become one of them, filth, noise, shamelessness and all.

The prevailing tone among the women aboard the Dunkirk, and prison hulks like her, was one of debased squalor. All were dragged down to the lowest level of behavior. Yet not all the prisoners were alike, either in their origins or their habits of life. In actuality, women apprehended for lawbreaking in Mary’s day varied greatly from one to another in background, personality and character.

Some, to be sure, were old lags, survivors of years of prison life, card sharpers, shoplifters, swindlers and jewel thieves. Some bragged that they came from families who had been swindlers and highwaymen for many generations. A small percentage were sociopaths, not a few were mentally ill, some retarded. Most had been brought to trial for theft or prostitution, and were single women from London.² A very few were elderly (the elderly tended to die soon after being incarcerated). Many were driven to crime by poverty, reduced, after selling everything they owned, to stealing small items to sell for money to buy food. Others were seduced and abandoned—following which, all respectable life paths being closed to them, they survived by prostitution.

Some of the women brought to justice were victimized by unscrupulous opportunists who used the courts to destroy them. A contemporary wrote down the story of one “timid, modest” sixteen-year-old prisoner brought before the magistrate for theft at about the same time as Mary Broad was apprehended. The sixteen-year-old’s name was Mary Rose, and she was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. Seduced by an officer who promised to marry her, Mary eloped with him to Lincoln, still unmarried, where the officer received word (or so he told his fiancée) that he had been posted abroad. Before leaving her, however, he gave the landlady of their boardinghouse a sum of money to cover the cost of Mary’s lodging and meals in his absence. Whereupon the landlady, seeing a way to keep the money without having to actually provide room and board for the girl, accused Mary of stealing from her. On the strength of the criminous landlady’s perjured testimony, Mary was condemned—though her family was eventually able to uncover the villainy of the landlady and bring her to justice.³

It was the girls from the country, like Mary Rose, who suffered most when put into prison. Many were relative innocents, vulnerable and trusting, “countrywomen in misfortune,” as one observer called them. Sent aboard the prison hulks, thrown in among vulpine companions, they often failed to adapt. They kept to themselves, “pale as death,” eyes red from weeping, refusing whatever meager solace might be offered by a well-meaning stranger. Before long they succumbed to their melancholy and died.

Had Mary Broad been such a girl, rather than a forest-dwelling highwaywoman, she too might have died. Instead she made a place for herself within the hulk community, adjusting as best she could to the daily regimen and falling in with the prevailing norms.

As with the other convicts, food became Mary’s constant preoccupation. Like the others she was always hungry, her stomach growling and hurting. The skimpy portions of stringy beef, ox cheek, herring and cheese served to the prisoners were often inedible, the meat or fish rotting and putrid, the bread moldy and half baked. Barley was added to the meat broth to make a much-hated dish called “smiggins,” served on meatless days. The food was prepared on shore and brought out to the hulk in a boat. Waiting convicts watched the provision boat approach, smelled the food as it was hoisted aboard the Dunkirk, and, if it reeked, sometimes threw it back overboard—for which they were all severely flogged.⁴

One prisoner spoke for all when he summarized his reaction to the terrible rations. “Half the time they give us provisions which the very dogs refuse,” he wrote. “Half the time the bread is not baked, and is only good to bang against a wall. The meat looks as though it had been dragged in the mud for miles. Twice a week we get putrid salt fish, that is to say, herrings on Wednesday and cod on Friday.”⁵

Hunger drove Mary and her fellow prisoners to eat what they were served—less a bite or two set aside to share with those unfortunates who, having tried to escape, were put on two-thirds rations. But some of the food they simply could not bring themselves to swallow, and it was thrown onto the refuse heap on the mudflat or given to the pigs.

Constant hunger made the prisoners highly susceptible to disease, and they succumbed, in large numbers, to typhus, pneumonia, dysentery, smallpox and tuberculosis. Infection bred in the ship’s clogged drains ahead and astern, and in the stagnant ponds, and in the mounds of garbage that heaped higher and higher the longer the Dunkirk lay moored in the mudbank.

Every night more convicts died of disease—causing an immediate scramble for the deceased’s clothes and other meager possessions. Corpses were tossed out of their bunks so that the narrow space belonging to them could be ransacked. In the morning the dead bodies were wheeled to the dead house on deck, then buried in shallow graves in the marshes near the ship.⁶ Besides disease, murder and suicide, the major cause of death was the “universal depression of spirits” noticed by one visitor to the hulks, a depression that attacked even the hardiest inmates from time to time. Overall, one in every three prisoners died aboard the Dunkirk—but every evening new prisoners arrived to take the places of those who had passed away.⁷

So many died—but Mary survived, despite the scant food and epidemics, the nights of broken sleep, the lack of fresh air (the portholes and hatches on the shore side of the Dunkirk were kept closed, lest the rank odor from the ship offend the citizens of Plymouth) and the shortage of water. She became accustomed to the noise of the creaking timbers, the clank and rattle of chains, the din and uproar of shouted oaths and harsh orders, the sharp pain of being elbowed in the ribs and the habit of elbowing back. She adjusted to the brutality of the guards, who beat recalcitrant prisoners insensible with heavy sticks, and to the carousing officers, many of whom were very drunk by ten in the morning, and some of whom were sadists. She even grew used to the casual public sodomy among the men, and to the rough lovemaking that went on between the men and women—lovemaking in which she joined—the iron screen meant to keep the genders apart being ineffectual.

Much furtive sex went on, along with fighting, gambling, and the plotting of escapes, during the long nights when the guards left the convicts on their own, locked belowdecks. The hatches were closed, mob rule prevailed. Some of the men occupied themselves in hammering crowns and half crowns into counterfeit sixpences. Others carved inkstands out of pieces of ox bone to sell in the nearby town. A few tried to read, or improve their minds by learning mathematics or languages. But these were the ridiculed minority: most of the convicts lounged, swore, played cards and dice, fought, and seduced or raped one another.