| |
In which we see conditions aboard the First Fleet were so bad one convict couldn’t take it anymore
***
Our man Squire was one of the 71 people on the First Fleet who were done for highway robbery. That’s according to the figures Hughes gives in The Fatal Shore, and it seems that is the go-to source for early Australia (well, unless you’re historian Alan Frost, who describes Hughes as “the art critic whose historical research was inadequate”. Yes, even historians have their bitchy side).
The vast majority of convicts – 431 – were done for minor theft. While I couldn’t find any evidence of a convict being transported for that oft-cited crime of “stealing a loaf of bread”, there were plenty of souls on those ships whose theft was well and truly minor.
A West Indian named Thomas Chaddick stole some cucumber plants, William Francis stole a book (and not a very interesting one either – its title was A Summary Account of the Flourishing State of the Island of Tobago), William Holmes, perhaps not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, chose to make up for it by stealing 17 of them. Mary Turner stole a few items of clothing worth no more than £2. John Cross, whose path would cross with Squire’s in the Sydney Cove court system, nicked a sheep.
So we can see here that, in terms of the crime committed versus the sentence meted out, Squire’s seven years for chicken theft was by no means unusual.
His presence on the First Fleet seems almost an afterthought, a late move to fill a few vacancies on board. With the fleet’s departure just two months away and almost all the convicts already onboard, Squire was still in Southwark jail.
On March 10, 1787, he and fellow inmate James Bloodworth (about whom we will hear more of shortly) were mentioned in a dispatch from Evan Nepean, the undersecretary to Home Secretary Lord Sydney, to the Town Clerk at Kingston Upon Thames. “...James Squires and James Bloodworth should be taken to the coast of New South Wales for the times they are sentenced to be transported,” the letter reads.
It then goes on to talk about getting the contracts drawn up to allow the transfer of the prisoners from the jail to the master of the Friendship, the First Fleet ship that would take them to a strange new place. The letter closes with a sentence that suggests the pair’s addition was a last-minute decision.
“I must beg the favour of you to get the instruments prepared as soon as possible as no time is to be lost in getting the convicts put on board the ships being now upon the eve of their departure.”
Well, not quite. The letter was written in March and, as time would tell, the First Fleet wouldn’t see England in the rear view mirror until May 13. It would have been May 12 but there was a false start, which has been variously attributed to roaring hangovers or a captain who was a bit of a scammer.
On May 12, Captain Arthur Phillip said “we’re outta here” and began to sail off. But, when he looked back, he saw “several of the convoy not getting under way, through some irregularity in the seaman”, according to the diary of the fleet’s chief surgeon John White.
Phillip sent Lieutenant Philip Gidley King over to see why those ships were pissfarting about. In White’s telling, King “soon adjusted the difficulties that had arisen, as they were found to proceed more from intoxication than from any nautical causes.” In other words, the sailors’ heads were throbbing and they were in desperate need of some Berocca and a hamburger and chips.
It’s unclear where White got his information from as King himself would later claim the delay was due to a mini-mutiny. His story would be that the seamen hadn’t been paid for months and, not unreasonably, wanted some cash so they could buy things for the trip. The ships’ masters, on the other hand, wanted to pay them after they’d set sail so they’d have to buy goods from the ship store at rather inflated prices – which would have lined the pockets of the masters.
Either story could be true. Sailors may well be prone to tie one on the night before a big voyage, and the masters could have been looking at a way to wring a few bucks out of their crew. But King was the one on the ships dealing with the issue, so you’d have to accept his story. Even if the hangover tale is more fun.
The conditions on the First Fleet for Squire and the other convicts would have been quite cramped. To give an appreciation for how small the ships in the First Fleet were, you could pretty much pick any two of the 11 ships and they would fit side by side in an Olympic swimming pool – without touching the sides, or each other. Sirius, the widest ship in the fleet, was just nine metres wide. As for touching the ends of the swimming pool, forget it – the convict transport Alexander was the longest ship in the fleet and it was only 34 metres long.
Below decks there wasn’t a lot of room, with many convicts not being able to stand up straight. On the transport Scarborough the headroom was just 1.3 metres in some places.
“The areas below decks normally assigned to cargo were divided up into cells with the placement of temporary bulkheads and iron grilles,” Rob Mundle writes in The First Fleet. “Some cells were so small that four men, some of whom wore chains or irons, could barely lie on the floor to sleep, and the toilets were buckets.”
The portholes and hatchways were covered, making convict holds as dark as night even in the middle of the day and fresh air was hard to come by. One bright side for the convicts was that Phillip would order the removal of their shackles once the fleet had left England.
There is some confusion as to which ship in the fleet Squire would be found in. That letter from Nepean says he was destined for the Friendship, yet other sources state that when the fleet arrived at Sydney Cove Squire disembarked from the Charlotte.
There is the possibility that both are right. During the journey, the fleet stopped in at the Cape of Good Hope to pick up supplies. Marine and famed First Fleet diarist Watkin Tench lists the purchases made as “...two bulls, three cows, three horses, forty-four sheep and thirty-two hogs, besides goats and a very large quantity of poultry of every kind.” On top of that were the animals bought by the soldiers and “a considerable quantity of flour”.
Space for supplies was needed in the already-cramped conditions of the ships, and so they played Convict Tetris and moved them around – from the Friendship to the Charlotte. It seems to have been mainly the female convicts, but Squire too could have been part of the reshuffle.
The Squire beer brand gave its IPA the name of Stowaway and likes to tell the story that Squire managed to sneak aboard the women’s ship and had a very enjoyable voyage – nudge-nudge wink-wink. Reality doesn’t support that story. Firstly, how would Squire, a convict, have managed to leave one ship in the fleet and sneak aboard another without anybody noticing? Are we expected to believe he dove into the water from the deck of the Friendship and managed to swim across to the “women’s ship”, somehow climb aboard and hide among the ladyfolk without anyone seeing any of his exploits? Oh please, give it a rest.
Secondly, the ship Squire was on already had women on board. Yep, the Friendship had 21 female prisoners among its human cargo – which was more than the Charlotte when they left England. So Squire had been in close proximity to women for the entirety of his voyage.
Thirdly, there was just one ship that had only female convicts; that was the Lady Penrhyn. And there is simply no evidence from anyone to suggest Squire was anywhere near that ship.
So Squire never stowed away on any female ship. He was likely moved from one ship carrying some female convicts to another ship that also carried some female convicts.
While Squire didn’t dive into the water and swim from one ship to another, the idea of escaping from the First Fleet while in transit really isn’t totally implausible. We know this because one convict actually attempted it. John Power got a seven-year sentence to Australia for stealing a tonne of wood. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, it was 52 kilograms short of a tonne. Yep, Power and his partner in crime Charles Young swiped 948 kilograms of wood – red sandalwood, to be specific.
Power was on the convict transport Alexander and decided to make his bid for freedom after less than a month at sea. The fleet docked at Tenerife for supplies on June 3 but he didn’t chance his arm until June 8 – maybe he needed to build up the courage for the escape. In his diary surgeon John White says Power used the cover of taking water on board “to drop himself unperceived into a small boat that lay alongside and, under cover of night ... cast her off without discovery”.
He first floated to a nearby ship from the Dutch East India Company, spun them a tale and begged to be taken on board. They mustn’t have believed him; despite being in need of crew members, they turned him away.
“Having committed himself again to the waves, he was driven by the wind and the current,” White wrote in his diary, “in the course of the night, to a small island lying to leeward of the ships, where he was the next morning taken.”
White reckons he would have been free and clear but for the inability to hide the escape boat and oars, which led to his discovery. Once back on board Phillip put him in chains for a time before an “artful petition” written on his behalf so tugged at the captain’s heartstrings that he set Powers free from his chains.