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In which we get a very quick – and hopefully accurate – explanation as to why London seemed to be locking everyone up
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When Squire committed his crimes – both those that we know about and the ones in between that, let’s face it, are very bloody plausible – he was far from the only one running foul of the law. Back in the mid to late 1700s, just about everyone was doing it. Well, everyone who didn’t already have lots of money to start with, that is.
Hedges and fences were in no small part to blame for London becoming an apparent hotbed of petty crime. The mid-1700s brought in something called the Enclosures Act, where the government chose to fence in what had previously been common ground in rural villages. That sucked if you were a poor farmer because you used that land to do things like grow crops or graze your animals. But when those fences or hedgerows went up and your access was gone, well, so was your livelihood.
And there was nothing else for it but to go to the city and try your luck there. Just like the shit-heeled farmers from every other village around. You may not be surprised to know that there weren’t many well-paying jobs for a rural farmer in the city, and so many of these country hicks who moved to the big smoke would turn to crime to survive. And, perhaps because they were not all that good at it, would find themselves caught and jailed.
Another part of the problem was the end of the war with America. According to Alan Frost in Botany Bay: The Real Story, England didn’t have a standing army “as prevailing wisdom held that this would be inimical to true English liberty, for it would give a tyrant the means to impose his dictatorship”. Yes, far better to unleash a mass of suddenly jobless soldiers and sailors onto England. Yes, that seems like such a better idea.
In fact, Frost says having the army and navy at war in another country helped to curb the crime rate in England.
“During conflict, as rogues were absorbed into the army and navy, the incidence of assaults and property crimes diminished; after it, it rose sharply. Put ashore at the Channel ports, far away from family and friends and with no other means of support, many of the demobilised men soon squandered their pay on women, alcohol and gambling; for such men, the temptation to turn their martial skills to assault and robbery could be irresistible.”
And of course there were also those dodgy types that saw population centres as full of potential marks and chose to move there purely for the rich pickings.
Suffice to say, there was no shortage of human cargo that could be shunted onto those First Fleet ships and flung out to some country on the other side of the world.
In fact there were so many convicts it seems the government didn’t feel the need to pay close attention to just how many they were sending to Australia. It’s almost as though they took the attitude of “well, let’s just keep throwing them on board until we run out of room”.
Robert Hughes in his book The Fatal Shore puts the number of convicts on the First Fleet at 736. Alan Frost reckons there were 750. Tom Keneally in The Commonwealth of Thieves says 759 convicts were bound for Botany Bay. I think the lack of care in counting heads and keeping accurate records says something about the purpose of the voyage – to load them in as quickly as possible and get them the hell away from England.
By the way, there is a school of thought that says using Australia as a great big jail a long way away wasn’t the sole aim here. That school suggests there was also the idea of beating those pesky French to Australia, taking advantage of the pine trees and flax to make masts and sails for ships (turned out the pine and flax were both rubbish for use on ships) and even seeing it as getting the English foot in the door in terms of trade in the region.
This last one would apparently get the noses of the Dutch out of joint, who liked to keep the trade routes down that part of the world to themselves. So this is why, the school of thought goes, the official government papers on Australia only mention its use as a place to store England’s naughty people. It was the Brits being sneaky.
Now, whatever the reason for the settlement of Australia, that doesn’t really concern us here (though I reckon it had to be more than just a jail, because sending convicts there was ridiculously expensive. The government would have surely wanted some sort of return on that outlay). Really, all that matters for our purposes is that they sent a bunch of crims to Australia. And some guy named James Squire was one of them.