From the Neptune to the Scarborough
I wrote to you from Portsmouth that we had a Lady going out with us; the wife of Captain Trail; she appeared a very agreeable woman, but her husband proved himself a perfect sea monster.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO HER MOTHER, 20 APRIL 1790
In Elizabeth’s journal of the voyage she names only those who, in her eyes, were at the top of the ship’s hierarchy. Neptune’s new master, Donald Trail, a Scotsman aged forty-four, was an experienced mariner and navigator. He had been an officer in the Royal Navy, at one stage serving under Nelson. Nelson would later describe Trail as the ‘the best Master I ever saw since I went to sea’.1
The differences between the blustering Gilbert and hard man Trail were, as Elizabeth noted, at the level of character. Gilbert, although in a position of authority, received very little respect from the officers of the New South Wales Corps. They challenged him at every turn. Few men were as keen to take on Trail. He was a stern disciplinarian, and his shipboard authority was absolute. Trail’s willing contribution to the culture of systematic cruelty and avarice of each of Camden, Calvert and King’s Second Fleet transports ensured they were places of brutishness and savagery. Upon the eventual return of the Neptune to England, Trail and his first mate, William Ellerington were brought to trial for the murder of the Neptune’s Portuguese cook, John Joseph.
The murder allegedly took place off the coast of China, where the Neptune sailed after leaving New South Wales. During the 1792 trial, witnesses told how the cook was beaten by Ellerington with a lump of wood and with rope. Trail then ordered that the cook be flogged, using a lash unusually and cruelly knotted and ‘too severe for anybody but a Sodomite’. After two strokes Trail complained the work was not being done properly by the boatswain’s mate and ordered another man to take over the flogging. When the cook’s back was ‘all over blood and mangled’ he was cut down and lay on the deck, unable to walk. Ellerington walked over and kicked him ‘as hard as he could’ in the side. Then he threw him down a ‘ladder and struck him several times with his fist and put him in Irons for three or four hours’.2 The man died three weeks later. The judge and jury were unconvinced of a connection between the beating and Joseph’s death and both Trail and Ellerington were acquitted. Trail went on to have a long and prosperous maritime career.
Accompanying Trail on the Neptune was his wife, who Elizabeth thought ‘appeared a very agreeable woman’.3 Fifty-year-old naval agent Lieutenant John Shapcote joined the ship while the Neptune was anchored at Portsmouth, to ensure that the convicts were transported in accordance with Camden, Calvert and King’s government contract. Subsequent events would, however, show him to be at best unwell and distracted from his duties and at worst an ineffective lackey. Trail, his wife and Shapcote, along with Captain Nepean, ‘lived together’ in the upper cabins and, to Elizabeth’s dismay, she and John ‘seldom benefited by their society’.4
Elizabeth herself pinpoints the true reason for her and John’s exclusion. With the new master on board, John continued to complain about the partitioning of their cabin and the unsavoury presence of the convict women. The Macarthurs’ cabin had two means of accessing the open deck. One passage led straight through the upper cabin and onto the quarterdeck, while the other common passage to the deck was now rendered totally dark and was, wrote Elizabeth, ‘always filled with Convicts & their constant attendants, filth and Vermin’.5 The only concession that John Macarthur could eventually obtain was an assurance that the passage through the upper cabin to the quarterdeck would always be open for his family and their servants to use. The outcome of this dispute was, explained Elizabeth, a studied ‘coldness between Capt’n Nepean, the Master of the Ship & Mr McArthur’.6 Macarthur stopped speaking to Nepean and Trail, and they to him, except when forced to in the performance of their duties.
Excluded from polite society, such as it was, Elizabeth and John appear to have made no effort to find friends elsewhere. The ship’s surgeon and mates, employees of Camden, Calvert and King, may have been likely candidates but they don’t rate a mention in Elizabeth’s journal. Nor, more surprisingly, does the assistant surgeon, D’Arcy Wentworth—a genteel, handsome and popular young man who had become something of a London celebrity. The twenty-seven-year-old Irishman boarded the
Neptune at Portsmouth, having come straight from the Old Bailey where for the fourth time he had been tried and acquitted of highway robbery.7 Wentworth’s well-connected relations seem to have arranged his passage on the Neptune, perhaps deciding that some time on the other side of the world might do him (and them) some good.
The Neptune remained anchored at Portsmouth for more than three weeks. During this time a formal search of the convicts’ quarters revealed almost one hundred knives and other metal items, such as tin pots, that could potentially be crafted into knives. This, as well as a fear of gaol fever contagion, was considered reason enough for many of the convicts’ personal boxes, bags and belongings to be tossed overboard. Any meagre store of clothes or mementos of home were gone in an instant. Trail would later claim that Shapcote had ordered the property overboard, while Neptune seamen attested to Trail giving the order.8 Who it was that gave the order hardly mattered to the convicts. The conditions of their new internment were rapidly becoming clear.
If the convicts hadn’t already learnt survival skills while on the hulks, they were forced to pick them up fast. Those that made it to New South Wales were observed on arrival by the Reverend Johnson:
When any of them were near dying, and had something given to them as bread or lillipie (flour and water boiled together), or any other necessaries, the person next to him or others would catch the bread &c. out of his hand and, with an oath, say that he was going to die, and therefore it would be of no service to him. No sooner would the breath be out of any of their bodies than others would watch them and strip them entirely naked. Instead of alleviating the distresses of each other, the weakest were sure to go the wall.9
It seems safe to assume that the convicts’ behaviour on board each of the Second Fleet transports differed little from the behaviour Johnson recorded.
The Macarthurs’ shipboard Christmas—little Edward’s first—was likely cold, cramped and lonely. Elizabeth doesn’t mention it in her journal. She does note, though, that she ‘made it a practice every fine Evening to…walk or sit with Mr M’ on the stern gallery, a small balcony at the rear of the ship opening off the upper cabin.10 The fresh air, the ocean view and the company of her husband made for a pleasant interlude from the stale confines of their partitioned cabin. Elizabeth was ‘much pleased with the variety of different Fish & seabirds which every day presented themselves.’11 Unfavourable winds delayed the fleet’s sailing until 5 January, but again the weather was against them and they didn’t truly get underway until Sunday 17 January 1790. By then Elizabeth had been on board the damp and dismal Neptune for two months, without leaving English waters.
As soon as they were at sea, the crew demanded access to the female convicts. The men claimed that Trail had promised in Portsmouth that ‘they should have the Women among us’.12 Trail denied having made any such promise. Subsequently, each time a crew member was found to have had illicit contact with the women (and at one stage Trail found that a partition between the carpenter’s berth and the women’s compartment had been secretly removed), Trail had the man flogged. Such floggings occurred with sickening regularity. To a large extent the seamen were used to such treatment—floggings were a standard method of exerting discipline at sea—but Trail seems to have been particularly brutal. In 1791 ten Neptune crew members, a mix of senior and ordinary seamen, made sworn statements before the London Guildhall in which they complained of frequent beatings and inhuman cruelty.
While Trail denied his crew contact with the convict women, he was far more lenient with his officers. Naval agent Shapcote was ‘constantly attended’ by a convict woman and it was she who, many months into the voyage, would report his sudden, late-night death. D’Arcy Wentworth too had a convict companion, who would much later become his wife. She conceived a child on the voyage and the baby grew up to be the well-known explorer, colonist and society figure William Charles Wentworth.13
The fine weather that had carried the Second Fleet down the English Channel and south past the French coast lasted only a few days. Near the Bay of Biscay, Elizabeth records, the wind shifted and ‘it blew exceedingly hard, and now for the first time I began to be a coward. I could not be persuaded that the Ship could possibly long resist the violence of the Sea which ran mountains high.’14 By the following night the storm abated and morning dawned a perfect calm.
At about this time Elizabeth notes that her ‘poor little Boy was taken very ill’ and that her unnamed servant ‘was attack’d with a Fever that reigned among the Women Convicts’.15 Baby Edward’s illness could be attributable to almost anything but the servant probably had typhus. Spread by infected lice, typhus was common in the cramped environments of ships and gaols. The ship’s surgeon, William Gray, had very little to offer. Medical qualifications (or even rudimentary expertise) were unnecessary for the role, and his supply kit included so-called medicines: oil of tar, essence of malt, spice, barley, oatmeal, sugar and wine. And neither invalid was likely to have been helped in any way by the shipboard diet.
A surviving copy of the contract of transportation lists the rations to be provided for each soldier and convict. Over a period of seven days each soldier was to receive seven pounds of bread (equivalent to a small loaf each day); four pounds of beef; two pints of pease (a form of split pea soup or porridge); six ounces of butter; seven pints of beer or three and a half pints of rum; two pounds of pork; three pints of oatmeal and twelve ounces of cheese. The male convicts received substantially less (and no cheese or alcohol); the women less again.
Camden, Calvert and King’s directions to Captain Trail stipulated that Shapcote and Nepean were ‘to be accommodated in a respectable and comfortable manner at your table, without any expense to themselves whatever’, but these contractual niceties were not extended to junior officers and their wives.16 Customarily, the junior army officers and the ship’s senior crew would buy in their own stores and so eat moderately well: better than the ordinary soldiers and seamen but not as well as the captain, but only for as long as the extra purchases lasted. The problem facing Elizabeth at each meal was not, however, the nutritional value of the food or even the quantity (although that was an issue too). It was the quality. Food at sea was always poor but on the Neptune it was abysmal. Even crew members, well-accustomed to a poor diet at sea, found cause to complain, later claiming they were kept on a very ‘short allowance of bad provisions’.17
All the food was stored below decks in conditions that were either cold and damp or, in the tropics, hot and damp. Mould and decomposition were inevitable. As well, it was not uncommon for provisions to be up to several years old before they were even loaded onto a ship. Surgeon Lind wrote that in his experience naval food consisted of ‘putrid beef, rancid pork, mouldy biscuits and flour’.18 A surgeon on board Captain James Cook’s second voyage remarked that ‘our bread was…both musty and mouldy, and at the same time swarming with two different sorts of little brown grubs…Their larvae, or maggots, were found in such quantities in the pease-soup…that we could not avoid swallowing some of them in every spoonful we took.’19 And this was on board the ship of a captain known to take great care of his crew.
The salt beef and pork, after months at sea, stank ferociously when removed from the brine. It too was riddled with maggots—unless it had dried and hardened beyond the point where it could be reconstituted by a saltwater soaking. Even the barrels of fresh drinking water quickly became putrid or briny, hence the need for rations of beer (at the start of the voyage, before it could spoil) and later rum.20 If Elizabeth was breastfeeding, her diet would have immediately affected the baby’s health. And if the baby was weaned to solids, or was receiving a mix of solids and breast milk, the available food remained eminently unsuitable. Even an otherwise healthy baby would suffer under such conditions as well as from the continual chafing discomfort of napkins and swaddling cloths washed only in salt water. The Neptune was no place for a growing baby—or for a pregnant woman.
The inadequate rations were made worse by the fact that the crew, convicts and soldiers (and presumably their wives) were being short served. Trail’s orders from Camden, Calvert and King were that he should provide the contractually stipulated rations, while being very careful to ensure ‘there is not greater consumption than we have agreed for, including all allowance whatever’.21 On the face of it, this seems reasonable advice. In reality, though, the captains of the three transports were free to sell any leftover rations. The more rations they withheld, the more they had to gain upon reaching their destination. The convicts slowly began to starve. Their complaints were ignored.
The soldiers complained about their rations and Lieutenant Macarthur, conscientiously enough, reported his soldiers’ concerns to Captain Nepean. Elizabeth recorded the result. ‘“Trail does every thing to oblige me,” responded Nepean “and I must give up some points to him.”’22 The soldiers continued to receive less than their full allowance of food, and Macarthur continued to report their complaints. ‘“I will see into it,” said Nepean’.23 Elizabeth had every reason to believe that Nepean did indeed follow up the complaints—largely because of the ‘monstrous and unprovoked insults that always issued’ from Trail. The worst insult of all arrived on Saturday 30 January. After barely two weeks at sea, Trail ordered the door from the Macarthurs’ cabin to the upper gallery be nailed shut.
Elizabeth and John were outraged. Such behaviour towards an officer and his wife was preposterous in the extreme. Even Trail’s reason for his actions—supposedly ‘to prevent Mr M from listening’ to discussions in the upper cabin—was insulting.24 Elizabeth suspected the listening suggestion to be Nepean’s and was doubly hurt. The Macarthurs could now only get in and out of their cabin via the passage through the convict quarters which, just to add to the general foulness, Nepean had recently ordered be made a hospital for the sick.
John Macarthur, true to form, complained. Nepean, equally in character, did nothing while noting that ‘the Master of the Ship had a right to do as he pleased’.25 It seems Nepean had learnt something from his earlier disputes with Gilbert after all. Agent Shapcote responded to Macarthur with both admirable frankness and shameful timidity, saying ‘he should not quarrel with Trail for any man’.26 Meanwhile Elizabeth refused to use the common passage and remained confined ‘within the narrow limits of a wretched cabin’.27
Elizabeth was pregnant and utterly miserable, surrounded by ‘wretches whose dreadful imprecations and shocking discourses ever rang in my distracted ears: a sickly infant claiming constant maternal cares: my spirits failing: my health forsaking me’.28 She was free to go up on deck at any time via the convict passageway, but she maintained her defiant refusal to budge, under any circumstance. By this time the Neptune was approaching the equator and the temperature, night and day, was stifling. Outside, there was at least a chance to catch a breath of sea air, but to voluntarily remain below decks was an act of either extreme foolishness or utter heroism. Perhaps as an unmarried girl Elizabeth had been a little more carefree, but young matron Elizabeth was stalwart in her application of the rules of propriety, in maintaining her feminine honour. And perhaps she hoped to shame Nepean and Trail by her example.
John used the dark passage when called to duty, tripping over boxes or lumber or people and ‘frequently contracting heaps of the Vermin with which it was infested’.29 Within the cabin, hourly effusions of oil of tar (a volatile, strong-smelling liquid) did little or nothing to relive the constant stench. The heat was cruel and the water ration of five quarts (five and a half litres), ‘our whole allowance for every purpose’, barely sufficed.30 Elizabeth recorded that their servant, dispatched to the water barrel for the daily allowance, was constantly watched and once was stopped to have the ration examined ‘lest the Seaman who had the serving [of] it (knowing our situation) should be induced by motives of humanity, to make some small addition to the scanty pittance’.31
Rationing water while traversing the doldrums was, in fact, a sensible and commonplace practice. Trade winds converging at the equator produce no steady surface winds—often just heated, rising air. As a result, sailing ships could be becalmed for alarmingly long periods. Whether Elizabeth’s five quarts of water were for the family only, or for the servants as well, is unclear. The crew, accustomed to washing in sea water and drinking their rum ration, seem to have scorned Elizabeth’s concerns. Water wasn’t her only problem, though. The food rations also continued to be served up short and the family was ‘insultingly told we should have less, if they thought proper’.32
Ten days passed before John found a way to break the impasse. Just as he came on duty, one of his sergeants made a now-familiar complaint about the short rations. This time several pounds of meat were missing. The Neptune’s chief mate, overhearing the sergeant’s complaint, exclaimed that the man was a damned rascal. Macarthur told the mate, in no uncertain terms, that the sergeant ‘would do well to punish him for his insolence’.33 At that, the mate turned on Macarthur, heaping him with ‘every kind of abuse that can be supposed to flow from ignorance and brutality’.34 Macarthur was livid, but honour (and the safety of all on the vessel) precluded him from immediate redress. Instead, he sent for Captain Nepean and related the incident. Nepean was unimpressed. Fed up with Macarthur’s constant carping, Nepean dressed him down for interfering between the men in the first place and made it clear that he was tired of being called upon to arbitrate. When it came to remedying any wrongs offered to the men, Macarthur was on his own. John grasped at the only straw left to him and requested to swap duties with an officer from one of the other transports. Nepean was more than happy to oblige.
In her journal Elizabeth writes that Nepean’s final insult combined with ‘the knowledge of what we were hourly suffering & the contemplation of what we had to expect in future, determined Mr M to apply for a remove on board the Scarborough’.35 Elizabeth hints at the discussion she and John must have had about their predicament. She does not say that John was determined to ask for a transfer, but implies that the facts and options were laid out for him (presumably by Elizabeth) and these pushed him to act. The reasons for her literary convolutions are found in a letter she wrote to her mother. Posted from Cape Town and written well in advance of the journal, Elizabeth artlessly writes that Trail was ‘a perfect sea monster; so much so that I requested Mr Macarthur to exchange duties with one of the Officers in one of the other ships’.36 Although the journal circumspectly attributes the decision to John, in reality the call was made by Elizabeth. The young couple was beginning to operate as a partnership.
The next calm day presented itself on 19 February and, at the searing latitude of six degrees north, the Macarthurs and their anonymous servants were rowed over to the Scarborough. Elizabeth wrote that baby ‘Edward and I suffered greatly from the heat, but this was an inconvenience I thought lightly of—after what I had been taught to bear’.37 Elizabeth is silent as to the sufferings of those forced to row in the heat. John Macarthur had swapped places with a Lieutenant Townson. Townson, in moving to the Neptune, gained his own cabin and the proximity of women. Less fortunate, perhaps, was Townson’s former cabin mate Lieutenant Edward Abbott, a Canadian in his early twenties with whom the Macarthurs would now share. Poor Abbott doesn’t get a mention in Elizabeth’s journal.