The very day we landed
upon the fatal shore,
The planters they stood round us
full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses
and sold us out of hand,
They roped us to the plough, brave boys,
to plough Van Diemen’s Land.
Convict Ballad
In the 1820s, a line of convict loggers was walking through the bush to work near the penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land. Without warning or provocation, one man in the middle of the line suddenly raised his axe and smashed it down on the head of the man ahead of him. He made no attempt to escape and was arrested. When asked why he had killed a man against whom he had no grudge, the killer stated simply that he had run out of tobacco. He knew that if he was to be hanged for murder it would be in Hobart and he would be given tobacco in the jail there. Such was the brutal irrationality bred in the convict hell of Van Diemen’s Land.
Van Diemen’s Land was a new colony, not even in existence when Franklin had passed that way with Flinders. Of the 42,000 European population when Franklin took over as governor, almost half were convicts transported there for a variety of crimes from petty theft to murder. Between 1831 and 1835, 133 vessels had brought 26,731 convicts to Australia, many to Van Diemen’s Land. Transport conditions had improved markedly after the Napoleonic Wars ended and the threat of starvation faced by the early colonists had faded, but often that merely meant that the individual lived longer in abject misery.
In Van Diemen’s Land, the convicts were not held in prison, but were scattered through the community on assignment as employees of the free settlers. Assignment provided the essential labour for the free farmers, but it was little more than slavery, and the prisoner was at the complete mercy of the settler. Franklin’s predecessor, George Arthur, even introduced rules forbidding the settlers to fraternize with, or even show kindness to, their assigned men and women. One settler lost his assignment privileges for inviting his labourers to sit down with his family for Christmas dinner.
Life was harsh and punishment brutal. For even minor offenses, convicts were flogged, forced to work in chains, or placed in solitary confinement. The hardness of life made the people – convicts and free settlers alike – hard too. Gambling, drinking, and theft were all prevalent. Escaped convicts roamed the bush, hunting, or robbing travellers and isolated farms. But by far the greatest sufferers as a result of the settlement of Van Diemen’s Land were the native inhabitants.
There were, perhaps, three to four thousand Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land when the first ships arrived. They had lived there for thirty thousand years. The convicts and first settlers regarded the indigenous inhabitants as animals. They saw no problem in deliberately poisoning, spreading disease, or resettling the Aborigines. They even hunted them for sport. By Franklin’s day, the Aboriginal population had been reduced to a mere 150 people, living in squalor on Flinders Island in Bass Strait. In 1876, Trucanini, the last Tasmanian Aborigine, died. Her death marked the end of the only case of true genocide in British history. Remembering the fate of her husband, whose body had been dismembered and distributed to scientific institutes, Trucanini’s last words were, “Don’t let them cut me, but bury me behind the mountains.” No one listened. Trucanini’s flesh was boiled off her bones and her skeleton exhibited in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. One hundred years later, in 1976, her bones were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea.
When Franklin stepped ashore with his family in January 1837, he took over a colony that had been run with an iron fist. Governor Arthur had seen his domain as a vast experiment in social engineering, on a smaller scale, but well in advance of the experiments of Hitler and Stalin. He had created a totalitarian state, with every aspect of the convicts’ and settlers’ lives catalogued and recorded. In 1826 he had drawn up the three-feet-thick, “Black Books” in which were recorded every detail of the lives of every one of the 12,305 convicts who had arrived since the colony’s founding. On arrival, convicts were interrogated to ensure that the books were kept up to date. Van Diemen’s Land had the most complete record of its inhabitants of any place on earth.
A prisoner was subject to seven levels of punishment between the extremes of freedom and hanging. He rose or fell through the levels depending upon his conduct. One historian has likened it to a vast game of human Snakes and Ladders.
The system was brutal, but the evangelical Arthur’s aim, however misguided, was to reform the convicts. It didn’t work and only increased the brutalizing effects of the harsh life in the colony. To console himself, Arthur used his power as governor to acquire a fortune. He left Van Diemen’s Land a rich man, was made lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1838 after William Lyon MacKenzie’s rebellion, and was knighted for his role in uniting Upper and Lower Canada in 1841.
Arthur was roundly detested by most of the free settlers who welcomed Franklin. Unfortunately, the system Franklin inherited was run by Arthur’s men, several of whose only qualifications were that they were intelligent enough to have married one of Arthur’s relatives. Yet Franklin had to rely on them for what the Colonial Office back in Britain saw as the smooth running of the colony. After all, Van Diemen’s Land was meant to be a convict settlement, not an earthly paradise, and the idea of prisoners’ rights was virtually unknown. The settlers soon developed a healthy dislike for Franklin. This was exacerbated by a strong dislike of Jane.
Jane Franklin was strong-willed, intelligent, curious, and restless. The settlers interpreted these characteristics as bossy, pretentious, nosy, and interfering. She certainly felt she should have a role in the colony. Influenced by Elizabeth Fry, who was working for prison reform in Britain, Jane formed the “Tasmanian Ladies’ Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners.” It was not welcomed and was short-lived.
In emulation of St. Patrick in Ireland, Jane also tried to rid Van Diemen’s Land of snakes. Prisoners were offered a shilling for each dead snake. Unfortunately, since there were a lot more snakes on the island than there were shillings in the governor’s budget, the scheme failed.
Jane had more luck encouraging the arts. She supported learned societies, established a botanical garden and museum of Natural History, and founded a college. She was also an avid traveller, being the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney, to ascend Mount Wellington, and to travel overland from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour. In the parochial, uncultured society of Hobart, none of this carried any weight, and Jane was detested for what was perceived as gross interference in her husband’s affairs. Her husband was also condemned for allowing her so much apparent power.
Franklin’s gentleness was not an advantage in Van Diemen’s Land. Jane wrote that to live in the colony, “people should have hearts of stone and frames of steel.” Franklin, the man who had trembled when he witnessed a sailor flogged aboard ship, did not have a heart of stone. In addition, he was politically naive, even timid according to some sources. In the dog-eat-dog world of isolated colonial politics and infighting, Franklin was out of his depth. He could be astute politically, as he had proved on his Mediterranean posting, but there he had been in charge of a rigid naval structure that had obeyed him unquestioningly. In Van Diemen’s Land he was powerless amidst opposing factions who felt no loyalty other than to their own narrow interests and who would use any means to achieve their ends. The local press was their vehicle. Almost every edition of the Hobart papers contained something which, if published today, would land its author in court for libel. In the broad journey of Franklin’s life, the six years in Van Diemen’s Land were not a happy experience. However, Franklin did manage brief journeys that were more to his liking.
After four years of difficult and disagreeable life in Hobart, Franklin was given a sharp reminder of his previous life and, perhaps, a pang of regret at the glimpse of what might have been his had he not become stuck in this unpleasant place.
In 1839, James Ross had sailed south from London. He had two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, and orders to explore and circumnavigate the little-known Antarctic Continent. His second-in-command, captain of the Terror, and in charge of the important magnetic work, was also an old Arctic hand, the Irishman, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier.
In August 1840, the expedition arrived in Hobart. Franklin was overjoyed. He invited Ross and Crozier to stay at Government House. Ross was charged with examining magnetism as close to the South Pole as possible. Franklin supplied convict labour to build Ross’s magnetic observatory on a hill outside Hobart. He attended a ball Ross threw in his honour on board the Erebus, and when Ross briefly returned to Hobart in 1841, Franklin went out aboard his barge to meet the ships as soon as they were sighted. His spirits picked up and the colonists saw a different side of their governor. Jane described him as, “bustling and frisky and merry with his new companions.”
Looking at his portraits, it is a little difficult to imagine Franklin as “frisky,” but he was certainly in good spirits. To have the company of people with the same interests and a broad view of the world was gratifying. There was even a romantic interlude played out in the drawing rooms of Government House. Sophia Cracroft, daughter of Franklin’s favourite sister, Isabella, and companion to Jane, fell head-over-heels in love with James Ross. Ross however, remained faithful to his fiancee back in England. To complicate the situation, Crozier fell for Sophia, to the degree that he actually proposed marriage to her. She turned him down.
Franklin watched sadly as Ross sailed away. Had he stayed in Britain, could that have been him leading the expedition? He yearned to sit where Ross was, in the Great Cabin of the Erebus. Ironically, he would get his chance in a few years’ time.
Meanwhile, although Franklin was stuck in this impossible and thankless job, governing the unruly population of Van Diemen’s Land, perhaps there was something active he could do? There was – he could go exploring. Large tracts of Van Diemen’s Land were unknown, and there was a need to open up more land for the increasing population of settlers and convicts. Franklin decided to examine the harsh landscape between Hobart and Macquarie Harbour.
In late March of 1842 he set out, accompanied by Jane, five settlers, and twenty convicts. The schooner Breeze would meet them at the mouth of the Gordon River. Almost as soon as they left Hobart, the weather turned nasty. Buffeted by storms, delayed by swollen streams, and increasingly wet and miserable, the party struggled on through the almost impenetrable wilderness. On one occasion, they camped at the foot of a mountain, on the only piece of solid ground around. The rain was so violent that they could not leave their tiny island of dry security for a week. Food began to run low and Franklin introduced rationing. With his sense of fairness, Franklin insisted that the larger rations be given to the convicts who were doing all the work.
Eventually, the struggling party came to halt at a river in flood. To Franklin it was a echo of the horrible delay on the Coppermine River twenty years before. The Breeze was due to sail in two days. She wouldn’t wait, and if Franklin’s party couldn’t reach her before she sailed, they would starve. Two convicts volunteered to cross the river on a makeshift raft. The violent, swirling waters swept them downstream through some rapids, but they gained the other bank and reached the Breeze just as she was setting sail. They persuaded the ship’s Captain to wait until Franklin’s slower party crossed the river and joined them. It appeared as if Franklin had been saved in the nick of time once more, but the expedition’s trials were not over. Storms prevented the Breeze from sailing, and the spectre of starvation raised its head again.
When at last the storms abated, Franklin returned to Hobart to discover that the entire party was assumed dead. He was discouraged to find that, even in death he was given no leeway by the hostile press. “Pity is out of the question,” was the comment of one local newspaper.
Franklin’s explorations in Van Diemen’s Land threatened him with starvation and left him at the mercy of the elements. It was an unpleasant experience, yet Franklin remembered it as one of the few times he was happy. To Franklin the man of action, starving or freezing to death appeared preferable to the political infighting of governing the colony.
Franklin was unlucky in Van Diemen’s Land. Through no fault of his own, the economy was in a slump and his tenure happened to coincide with a change of policy by the British government that threatened the settlers’ beloved assignment system. Nevertheless, his main problem was his own Colonial Secretary, the ex-Arthur man, John Montagu. Montagu was intelligent but conniving, insidious, and totally unscrupulous. Franklin’s right-hand man was a part owner of one of the local papers into which he poured insults and innuendo aimed at discrediting his boss and his wife. Such was the nature of politics in Van Diemen’s Land.
Franklin allowed Montagu to carry on this way for years. Perhaps Franklin believed the man capable of reform. If so he was seriously mistaken. Despite obvious kindness towards him on Franklin’s part, Montagu kept up his attacks relentlessly, even going to Britain for two years to spread poisonous lies behind the governor’s back. Eventually, he went too far even for Franklin’s tolerance. In reply to a memorandum from Franklin, Montagu responded insultingly that while his own memory was “remarkably accurate,” even Franklin’s officers had learned that they “could not always place implicit confidence” in their superior’s memory. Montagu often implied Franklin was feebleminded, but now he had put it in writing. This was Franklin’s opportunity. He suspended Montagu and wrote explaining his case to the Secretary for the Colonies in London.
Montagu hastened back to Britain to defend himself. There he was presented with an extraordinary piece of luck. The new Secretary for the Colonies was Lord Stanley, who would become famous for being Prime Minister three times without managing to accomplish anything of any note whatsoever. Incredibly, Stanley believed every word Montagu told him, entirely discounted Franklin’s letter, and refused even to give his own governor an opportunity to defend himself.
Stanley wrote a dispatch to Franklin defending Montagu. He then gave a copy to Montagu and delayed sending the original to Franklin. Thus, the contents of the dispatch were well known in Hobart gossip circles before Franklin heard of them. Franklin responded to Stanley, remarkably mildly given the circumstances, and was rewarded by being immediately recalled.
The recall lifted a burden from Franklin’s shoulders. His spirits improved and he ironically wished his successor joy in “what he has in store for him.” Even the local populace appeared to have a change of heart, and a large cheering crowd turned out to see the Franklins off.
The years in Van Diemen’s Land were both a trial and a career disaster for Franklin. He did not do anything wrong and was poorly served both by his subordinates and his superiors; nevertheless, he failed in the brutal arena of colonial politics. It was unlikely he would be given another posting of any significance.
When Franklin returned to Britain in 1844, he was fifty-eight years old. He had not led an expedition for seventeen years, yet he still regarded himself as an explorer. He could have retired comfortably and been regarded as a competent man of his time who had filled in useful pieces of the map of the Canadian Arctic. But Franklin felt he had missed opportunities for true greatness. As it turned out, fate was to give him one more chance. He failed again. This time it was a failure of such monumental proportions that John Franklin’s fame would eclipse that of his contemporaries and secure him a place in our cultural memory achieved by very few.