10

FRUITS OF PEACE

1783–92

A DECADE of peace might not be thought the best preparation for twenty years of war. There is, indeed, no empirical evidence that it was. At the time, loss of the American colonies was actually seen as having cost Britain its place as a world power.1 Yet a surge in seafaring from 1783 tells its own story. British seamen – or more accurately seamen on her ships – simply went further and in greater numbers than those of their traditional foes. Mainly they sailed in pursuit of trade; but because they encountered more frequent challenges their skills were constantly being sharpened. They gained more than just experience. They learnt teamwork and confidence. It could be argued that the dominance which appeared to come so naturally to the Navy when war with France resumed was forged in a time of peace.

For once the Navy did not sign off all hands. On the contrary, it engaged in an arms race with France and Spain. The number of ships of the line – the great cathedrals of seventy-four guns and more – grew, from 137 to 145, while the peacetime establishment of men was increased from 10,000 to 18,000, and then again to 20,000.² Meanwhile the stricture that only those ‘who use the sea’ could be impressed gave way without fanfare to a new regime when in 1787 London’s mayor agreed to an Admiralty request to send out his constables ‘to apprehend all persons who have no visible means of obtaining a livelihood’ and establish whether they were fit to serve as sailors.3 A precedent for pressing Landsmen had been set.^*

Trade by sea exploded. The East India Company, the principal agent of mercantile traffic, developed into a maritime power all of its own. To meet the demand for new vessels, Indiamen started coming off the blocks not only at Blackwall but in Bombay. In the decade up to the peace, the Company’s ships had made 129 voyages to and from the Eastern Seas. In the decade after it, the number more than doubled to 272 voyages.⁴ Booming trade gave a consequent impetus to the coastal traffic of smaller vessels – brigs, snows and hoys.

It was a period of fresh imperial expansion too. The Pacific was turned from an ocean of exploration and discovery into a region of settlement. As a result of Cook’s voyages, two fleets transported convicts to colonize the territory he called New South Wales – somewhat bizarrely, for a small, green, wet protrusion of the British isles could scarcely have been more dissimilar to the continent that became Australia. Another consequence was the despatch of a small vessel to collect a plant from Tahiti that Sir Joseph Banks believed could feed the West Indies plantations; William Bligh’s mission in the Bounty would resonate in seafaring history. And all the while, more and more British ships were rounding the capes – the Horn of South America and the Good Hope of Africa – in a growing challenge to what has been called ‘the tyranny of distance’.

Peace meanwhile broadened the diversity, ethnic and national, that had become a feature of the lower deck. Gazing around him, one Jack observed ‘complexions of every hue and features of every cast, from the flat nose, thick lips and frizzled hair of the African, to the slender frame and milder features of the Asiatic’. Here were to be seen lascars, the Muslim sailors of Bengal. Over there were ‘the sun-burnt Portuguese, the kilted Highlander, the sons of Holland, the shirtless sons of the British prison-house, the haughty Spaniard’.⁵

There too were Jacob Nagle, the American, and John Nicol, the Scot.

The era found Nagle entering his thirties yet as ready for adventure as ever. Among the hands to sail with the First Fleet to Australia, he was shipwrecked in the Pacific, seized by a press gang on his return to England, and was just about to join the renewed war with France when he decided instead to desert, joined an Indiaman and sailed for Bengal.

For his part, Nicol returned home in time to join the Second Fleet. Of his voyage in the Lady Juliana, transporting women convicts, he would reflect: ‘I did not by any means like her cargo – yet to see the country I was resolved to submit to a great deal.’ In the event, it set him on the quest of his life.

Being a prime hand, Nagle was among those retained by the Navy. But without a war to fight, the 74-gun Ganges remained at her Spithead anchor for months while Nagle chaffed at a combination of inactivity and the regime of a tartar named Lieutenant Edward Riou, whom he thought ‘a villen and a terror to seamen’.6 Relief came in the form of the frigate Sirius, recruiting for an extraordinary voyage. ‘She was bound to Botnay [sic] Bay with a fleet of 11 sail of transports, full of men and wimen convicts,’ Nagle wrote. He was among the hands picked out in person for the flagship by Captain Arthur Phillip, governor-designate of the penal colony of New South Wales.

The First Fleet made seafaring history. This was not the first time Britain had emptied prison hulks of misbegotten souls and sent them to an alien and distant exile. Never, though, had a fleet been used to transport so large a group of civilian convicts to a destination so far off that it was almost unthinkable they would ever return. Indiamen carried between twenty and thirty passengers at a time on voyages of four to six months. Estimates were that the First Fleet would be eight months in taking 736 men and women prisoners almost 16,000 miles across the world in eleven transports.

This ‘Noah’s Ark of small-time criminality’, as it has been called, sailed in May 1787, and to start with the convicts were noted to be ‘humble and submissive’, probably as much thanks to seasickness as anything else. However, the enormity of their fate, ‘the fearful prospect of a distant and barbarous country’, and the realization that they would never return, gave rise first to misery, then turbulence. The four female transports turned into varieties of bedlam: ‘The desire of the women to be with the men was so uncontrollable,’ wrote the Charlotte’s surgeon, ‘that neither shame nor the fear of punishment could deter them from making their way through the bulkheads to the seamen’.7 On the Lady Penrhyn liaisons with convict women made fathers of three Jacks, including Joshua Bentley, whose child was christened at Botany Bay and has been counted the first white Australian.⁸

The novel pleasures of sex at sea and a constant female presence threatened to destabilize normal order. A lieutenant on the Sirius, alarmed by what he saw as a threat to discipline, started to hand out random floggings, which only added to the turmoil below. Finally, officers across the fleet were summoned by Phillip and told that anyone striking a sailor would be broken. As Nagle put it, the governor had said:

Those men are all we have to depend upon and if we abuse those men, the convicts will rise and massecree us all. Those men are our support . . . We cannot expect to return in less than five years. If they are ill treated by their own officers, what support can you expect of them?⁹

Nagle was well informed about the officers’ circle, being a member of Phillip’s barge crew with a position of trust and permitted therefore a degree of forthrightness. He spoke and behaved towards officers in a manner that was respectful, but that defined him as worthy of respect himself. While at Rio he was allowed ashore, overdid the roistering, and got left behind by the barge. Coming back on board, he expected to be thrown in irons; instead, Phillip ‘said he was glad to hear we ware alive and desired we should be sent to our hammocks to get a sleep, as we would be wanted in the barge at nine o’clock’. Nagle was that asset all good captains recognized, a prime hand.

As predicted, the voyage took eight months. On every ship, on every day, a record was kept of longitude and latitude, of weather and sea conditions. We can still scan these daily records – meticulous in details of wind direction, parsimonious as to human conduct – for signs of the lives going on in the background of daily routines, decks being scrubbed, meals served. We can see the sea passing through its various manifestations, from an immense calm of almost oily flatness, to white caps whipped by the breeze and to high, rolling blue mountains. We can imagine the frustration as the fleet had continually to shorten sail, enabling two slow dogs – which happened to be those dens of vice, the Lady Penrhyn and the Charlotte – to close up. Once monotony had subdued the convicts there was little real drama apart from a failed uprising on the Alexander, for which the ringleaders were brought across to the Sirius and flogged.

Nagle had meantime survived an accident of a kind fatal to many topmen. They had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and were sweeping due east on latitudes between 30° and 40° S when:

We ware struck with a sudent [sudden] white squall which laid us down on our beam ends. Taking in sail, she rightined. The main topmast staysail being hall’d down, I run up to pass a gasket round the sail. I gumped on it to ride it down. The wind blew so powerful it blew me off like a feather, but ketching one of the leastings of the foresail that blew out, it brought me upright, and I fell with my backside on the bit head without being hurt. The officers seeing me fall came runing forward, expecting I was kill’d, but recovering myself I run up the lee rigging and furled the sail.10

The last of the laggards came in at Botany Bay on 21 January. Given their cramped quarters, infestations of various vermin and the risks of scurvy, the convicts had come through in reasonable shape. In all, forty-five had died, about 6 per cent, including five children and a woman, Jane Bonner, transported for stealing a coat, who suffered another familiar shipboard hazard, being killed by a falling longboat while on deck.¹¹

A few days later Nagle was among a party that set out in three longboats, rowing up the coast beside sandstone cliffs until they reached the twin heads of a spot that Cook had named Port Jackson. Entering what is known today as Sydney Cove, Phillips exulted at finding ‘the finest harbour in the world’.

Sydney Cove. The settlements of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land had a darker aspect than most other Pacific destinations.

Jack was intimately engaged in the saga of Australia’s founding.12 What makes Nagle’s observations particularly noteworthy is how they reflect troubled dealings with the Aboriginal population from the outset. ‘The natives came down to us and apeared as though they did not aprove of our viset,’ he wrote. The fact was, of course, this was no visit but an armed occupation. Barely had they landed than ‘the convicts ware employed in cutting down timber and clearing to build log houses and the wimen employed in carreing the stones away’. The intruders had come to stay.

Phillip used his best endeavours to reassure the Aboriginals. ‘He gave them clothes and trinkets, though he run many risks of his life . . . [and] would not allow us arms to defend ourselves for fear we would kill them.’¹³ Firearms were used instead to demonstrate how unwise resistance would be; when the Aboriginals became ‘mischievous’ a pistol was fired to blast a hole in a bark shield. Hostility persisted. Nagle had formed a close friendship with a messmate, Terence Burne, and the two of them would fish at night, make a fire on the beach, then

. . . cook our supper, and take our grog, lay down in the sand and go to sleep till morning, though we would be often disturbed by the natives heaving there spears at us at a distance.14

Jack’s usual avenues for congress – trade and sex – did not apply in New South Wales. Male Aboriginals had nothing to sell and the women were thought undesirable thanks to ‘the stinking fish-oil and soot with which they besmear their bodies’.¹⁵ The easy-going if rough fraternizing with Pacific islanders never found a place here. On one excursion Phillip was speared in the breast by a warrior and as Nagle and his crew rowed him back to the Sirius at top speed the governor ‘made his will, not expecting to live’. Survive he did, and by persisting with his non-confrontational policy he ensured the natives suffered no retribution.

The new colony’s birth was painful, and not just for the natives and convicts. When the first plantings failed, exposing the newcomers to a threat of mass starvation, the Sirius was despatched to the Cape of Good Hope for provisions. This was a voyage that epitomized ‘the tyranny of distance’, for to reach Africa in the shortest time Captain John Hunter gambled on the prevailing westerlies to take the far longer passage via the Horn – in effect sailing right round the world to obtain food for the settlers. Though the weather was not contrary, all the men suffered from scurvy as well as the brutal cold. Nagle had to be carried below three times in one night but recalled with pride, ‘I done my duty the next day.’

Another little trial, revealing of both his own self-respect and the esteem in which good men were held by their officers, occurred after they reached the Cape. Nagle and the boat crew were rowing ashore when a midshipman started laying into them with a rattan:

[He] being a striplin not more than 15 years of age, I told him we would not be treated in such a way by a boy. When we got on shore, five of us left the boat, not intending to return.

On hearing of their desertion, Captain Hunter sent Nagle’s good friend Burne ashore with a master’s mate to ask him to return. So, having run, Nagle went back; and when he explained himself to Hunter, it was the abusive midshipman who was confined for three weeks.16

But the mission had turned into a test of endurance. Returning to New South Wales, they ran into a tempest off what Nagle referred to in his phonetic style as ‘Vandemons Land’. Demons, indeed, seemed to dance atop the waves as furies drove the Sirius through an inky haze out of which they glimpsed, every now and again, ‘surf beating over rocks higher than our mast heads . . . I don’t suppose their was a living soul on bd that expected to see daylight’. Small wonder that their arrival at Sydney Cove with food brought rejoicing – especially ashore, where the convicts were by now facing famine. Still, the passage around the entire southern latitudes of the globe had taken seven months.

Next Sirius was despatched with a brig to take a third of the convicts to Norfolk Island, which lay 1,000 miles to the east of the mainland but, because of its soil, had better potential to sustain them. Barely had the island been sighted than Sirius was swept onto a reef.

What followed had distinctly Crusoe-esque echoes. Although they all came safely ashore, crew and convicts were turned into castaways, and while the brig sailed for Sydney to raise the alarm, Nagle and a few other hands went out to salvage provisions from the wreck – he being among that small number of Jacks who could not only stay afloat but were powerful swimmers. (Mostly, Jack took the logical view that in the event of a shipwreck, the swimmer was only prolonging his own agony and that it made far more sense to break into the liquor store for one last carouse.) Nagle it was who churned his way to and fro through the surf with ropes and messages over the next two weeks, so that by the time the Sirius went to pieces, casks had been hauled ashore and copper salvaged to fashion cooking vessels. Coming ashore for the last time, Nagle may have been aggrieved to find his shipmates had built ‘huts near the beach, which was call’d Irish Town, and most of them had wimin to live with them’.¹⁷

Another five months passed before help arrived. They survived thanks largely to the presence during the most critical spell of migrant mutton birds, Pterodroma melanopus, which had not previously seen humankind and in their nesting tunnels were the easiest of game, as well as ‘very fine eating, very fat and firm’. The creatures did not long survive on Norfolk Island but while they did were known as Birds of Providence.18 Even so, Nagle noted, it was remarkable that for all the castaways’ hardships there had been just one death and she an elderly woman.

When the Siriuses embarked again for Sydney almost a year had passed since the wreck and, Nagle noted, ‘a great many of the seamen would rather have staid on the island than come away’. In the event, it was fortunate that they did not: with a population of around 950, mainly convicts but with soldier-guards, Norfolk Island became arguably the worst place in the English-speaking world. Tyranny, brutality and murder were marks of a colony that, before it was abandoned in 1814, echoed conditions on the worst naval hells afloat.

Whatever its drawbacks, the land that became Australia always had potential and here too many Jacks wanted to settle. When the governor invited hands on the Sirius to come forward if they were interested in becoming farmers, all but a handful did so. Nagle was not among them. His was the true seaman’s temperament – unflappable, living in the moment, aware that his fortune might change for better or worse in an instant, and, above all, restless.

Instead, he and his old messmate Terence Burne, with the remaining Siriuses, were put in a snow, the Waaksamheyd, bought at Batavia to carry them home. That took another year, as their listless vessel crawled back across two oceans, putting in at St Helena – a pinprick of an island in the south Atlantic which in these times was the principal refuelling station for British ships en route to the Indian and Pacific oceans – before reaching Spithead in April 1792. Five years had passed and Nagle was among just 37 of the 160 officers and men who sailed in the Sirius to have returned. Terence Burne had not, dying on the final leg home. He and Nagle had spent nine years together in two ships and, as was common when messmates were close friends and neither had family, each had made a will naming the other as beneficiary.19 When Nagle was paid off he received Burne’s wages too.²⁰

It was spring and he and a few shipmates set off ‘to go amayin, as is custamery, to gather flowers and drink punch . . . [and] we fel in with two hansome young ladies’. Nagle was happy to escort one of them home, and even happier to spend the night with her – but had to make himself scarce on discovering that her husband was an officer in a 74 at anchor.²¹ That survival instinct had guided him through scrapes before. Plenty more lay ahead.

In the meantime colonization had moved on. Two years after the First Fleet, another batch of petty criminals was rounded up and loaded aboard transports for New South Wales. Among the Second Fleet was the Lady Juliana, carrying 226 women – and John Nicol.

Nicol may have said that he did not like her cargo and only signed on to see a distant part of the Pacific, but he could just as easily have joined the Guardian, a frigate carrying supplies to relieve the hard-pressed convict settlers. With her freight of strumpets, sharpers and shoplifters, the Lady Juliana was always likely to have a volatile passage, as the female transports in the First Fleet had demonstrated.

Nicol remained a caring soul. He witnessed the procession of women brought to Dartford as ‘the jails in England were emptied to clear our cargo’ and was moved by their plight. Skilled as a cooper, he was employed in striking off their irons as they came on board, and was haunted by the memory of how one Scottish girl retreated below in despair, where she died even before they sailed. ‘I have never yet got her out of my mind . . . young and beautiful even in the convict dress, but pale as death, and her eyes red with weeping.’²²

Most of the others were hardier types and some even saw their fate as a chance. ‘We are not ill-treated or at the mercy of every drunken ruffian as we were before,’ one woman told Nicol. But it was a Lincolnshire lass named Sarah Whitlam who caught his eye:

From the moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon my anvil . . . I fixed my fancy on her . . . and resolved to bring her back to England when her time was out, my lawful wedded wife.23

The Lady Juliana was one of four transports privately contracted from a company that usually transported slaves and the only one to escape the horrors that marked the Second Fleet – which had an overall mortality rate among the convicts of 21 per cent. Yet there was no shortage of misery on any ship starting for Australia in those days, and the yearning verse of one prisoner setting off into the unknown spoke for all:

The distant shore of England strikes from sight

And all shores seem dark that once was pure and bright,

But now a convict dooms me for a time

To suffer hardships in a forein clime

Farewell a long farewell to my own my native land

O would to God that I was free upon thy strugling strand.²⁴

Whatever the crimes of the Lady Juliana’s women – and Nicol thought most to be harmless, ‘victims of the basest seduction’ – they did not lack shrewdness. One, Nelly Kirwin, had an intimate knowledge of Jack and his ways, having run a bawdy house in Gosport before her horizons broadened into forging seamen’s wills. Hard-eyed pay clerks were used to sizing up women who presented themselves to claim wages due to a deceased husband and Nelly was fortunate to be pregnant because it saved her from the gallows.²⁵

Mary Rose, a petty thief, had a talent for beguiling men. To Nicol she appeared ‘a timid modest girl’, a victim of various villains and tricksters, but her true history was rather more complex and Nicol was far from the only one to be taken in. He was equally trusting of Mary’s friend and fellow thief. Sarah Whitlam was not only the object of his passion but ‘as kind and true a creature as ever lived’ – like Mary an innocent who had done no more than borrow a cloak from a friend. In reality, Sarah had stolen enough clothing to stock a small shop. It would have made no difference to Nicol who, had there been a clergyman on board, would have married her on the spot.

What the women experienced upon sailing was a sensation known to Jack on first going to sea – recognition that here was an alternative state, a separation not only from the land but a new dimension in which nothing was familiar. To these worldly creatures, suddenly vulnerable on this strange and terrifying element, the men who had their destinies in hand were bulwark and saviour. As for Jack, surrounded by femininity, he felt a rare sense of command. It was not therefore surprising that such ships, like those of the First Fleet, became so many floating bordellos.

The women were supposed to be battened down in their own quarters at night to prevent ‘a promiscuous intercourse taking place’, but the officer in charge of them, Lieutenant Thomas Edgar, was a hard-drinking pragmatist who could see a line between discipline and common sense, and evidently allowed free movement around the ship. By Nicol’s own account, they were barely out to sea before ‘every man on board took a wife from among the convicts – they nothing loath’.26 Thus they proceeded, to Tenerife and across to Rio. By that time Sarah and Nicol were not only lovers; she had fallen pregnant.

Details are scant. The ship’s log was lost and Nicol’s is the sole surviving account of this fascinating passage which enclosed more than 200 women and some 40 men on a vessel less than 100 feet in length for a year. Yet given the volatility of the company and the crude closeness of their quarters, which required men and women to share the heads – the platform extending over the sea through which they pissed and defecated – along with all the other routines revolving around cleaning and taking meals, it seems to have been remarkably trouble-free. It was certainly a frolic by comparison with the nightmarish voyages of three other Second Fleet transports.^*

The only real emergency on the Lady Juliana was a fire on board while at the Cape of Good Hope, which caused a shrieking stampede before it was doused.

It helped that the female roost was ruled by a strong personality: Lizzie Barnsley, ‘a noted sharper and shoplifter’, came from a family of highwaymen, retained a flashy wardrobe and her own money, and could have run a gin palace in her sleep. At Tenerife and again at Rio she led excursions ashore to shop and take wine, and, having installed herself as a queen who dispensed gifts and favours among her fellow convicts, was probably in charge of negotiations when sailors from two American slavers came aboard midway across the Atlantic for some female company.27 Mrs Barnsley also had experience as a midwife, which proved handy towards the end of the voyage.

It also helped that there was a preponderance of women, and that along with the younger, street-wise prostitutes and thieves, were some older, maternal figures; those who paired off with seamen appear to have formed stable partnerships, at least for the voyage.

Among them were Sarah Dorset and Edward Powell. Sarah was young and pretty, a true innocent driven into prostitution, whose harrowing parting from her parents had been observed by Nicol. Taken to his hammock by Powell, rated Able, she was among at least nine women to give birth on the Lady Juliana before they reached the Cape.²⁸ (How many more children were born between Africa and Australia is not recorded.) Both Sarah Dorset and Edward Powell married on reaching Sydney – but to different partners.²⁹

For Nicol, however, there was only ever Sarah Whitlam, especially after she bore his son. His unworldliness is painfully apparent in the one great love affair of his life.

Sarah had fallen pregnant early in the voyage and after giving birth to John – under a tarpaulin set up on deck by the women, to escape the broiling heat below – was helped with washing and other chores by her friend Mary Rose, who was now also seen by Nicol as being ‘under my protection’. Their little circle was the closest he had come to domesticity and having so long searched for love, he was happy. It was ‘almost to our sorrow’, as he saw it, that they reached their destination, anchoring in Sydney Cove on 3 June 1790, a day short of a year since sailing. Now ‘the days flew on eagles’ wings, for we dreaded the hour of separation which at length arrived’.

Desperate to stay with his new family, Nicol went to the captain, offering to sacrifice his wages if he could be released. No, came the answer, they were short-handed as it was. Most other Jacks – a Nagle for one – would not have hesitated before deserting. Nicol, however, retained even now some of the rectitude of his youth:

I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true, and I promised to return when her time expired and bring her back to England.30

He would fail, though not for want of effort. The Lady Juliana sailed on to China and home, where he made immediate enquiries about further expeditions to New South Wales. None being scheduled he signed on the Amelia, a south-sea whaler with the intention of using her to find another way to Sydney. While hunting south of the Horn, and after making a record haul of ambergris, she fell in with another vessel, the Venus. As was the way, men from the Venus came aboard the Amelia and in the exchange of accounts it emerged that they had recently been in New South Wales – that moreover one of their number was an escaped convict. With a mixture of excitement and apprehension, Nicol began to question him: ‘I feared, yet wished, to hear of Sarah’:

How shall I express my grief when informed she had left the colony for Bombay. Thus were my worst fears realised. Unconstant woman! Why doubt my faith?

Grief was mixed with confusion. At the time of their parting, Sarah had three years of her term to serve and these had still not expired. How then could she have gone to lndia? His informant was unable to say. Nor did he know what had become of Nicol’s son; most children were taken from unwed convict mothers and put into institutions, but there was some suggestion that the boy John had accompanied Sarah.

Once the initial shock had passed Nicol tried to reassure himself. It was right and proper for her to have left Sydney Cove. She had done it to escape ‘bad company’. His romantic instinct thus revived, he determined to resume his quest, following her to Bombay. Finding a passage on an Indiaman would at least be easier than a ship for Australia.

First, though, he had to get back to England. When the Amelia came to off Rio he was taken on a Portuguese vessel bound for Lisbon – a passage he soon came to regret in the company of these ‘execrable, superstitious sailors’. The great days of Portuguese seafaring were past and when a blow came on, Nicol and three other British hands watched dumbfounded as their fellows threw themselves at the feet of a priest dispensing holy water, ‘while we were left to steer the vessel and hand the sails’. Finally, picking up a brig in Lisbon, he started on the last leg home ‘with a joyful heart, to look out for an Indiaman that I might get to Bombay to inquire for Sarah’.

But the world had moved on. During his homeward passage, Nicol was told by a Spaniard that the king of France had been decapitated by his subjects. ‘I understood what he meant but did not believe the information.’31 Still less comprehension did he have of what it heralded. The land to which he was returning was at war, the Navy was preparing itself for what would turn into more than twenty years of conflict, and press gangs were once more hunting the streets for Jack.

Nicol never did get to India. He would not forget Sarah though, and – disguised as a civilian, in a cocked hat, a wig and a cane purchased for a guinea from a customs officer – set out for her home town of Lincoln, a journey of almost 200 miles, in the hope that ‘she had reached her father’s house and there was pining at my absence’. On arriving, it was to find that her parents had heard nothing from her either – which he thought ‘very neglectful’. Perhaps it was at this stage that he started to think he had been too trusting. However, destined as he was to rejoin the Navy and be swept up in the great events ahead, Nicol was spared full knowledge of Sarah’s infidelity.

When they parted on 25 July 1790 he left his Bible with her, their names inscribed together inside, certain that they would be reunited. The very next day, on 26 July, Sarah married John Walsh, a convict of the First Fleet. Seven weeks had passed since her arrival at Sydney Cove and though the circumstances of how or when she met Walsh are not known, it is plain she had only been waiting for Nicol’s departure to move on. Six years later she and Walsh, their terms served, sailed with two children for India. Walsh would return to Australia alone in 1801. What became of Sarah, and her son by John Nicol, is a mystery.32

* Restrictions on impressment appear to have been eroded during the 1770s when the American War of Independence and the war with France led to early violations. In 1776 a lamp-lighter named Tony Tearney was seized in London, leaving the mother of his two children destitute; eighteen months later a lace-maker with a wife and two children living near the Strand suffered the same fate. Rogers, The Press Gang, pp. 2–3.

* The Lady Juliana departed with the frigate Guardian, some months ahead of the Neptune, the Surprise and the Scarborough, on which the convicts suffered appallingly thanks to profiteering by the contractors. Out of 1,006 transportees, 267 died at sea and 150 more soon after arriving.