Angel Meadow Asylum, 18th September 1852
‘It is therefore ordered and adjudged by this Court that you be transported upon the seas, beyond the seas, to such a place as Her Majesty shall think fit to direct and appoint for the term of your natural life . . . ’ I have never forgotten those words. How can any who have been sentenced thus ever forget them? For my ordeal was set to continue: I was not hanged again – my escape was deemed providential – instead I was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. My gaoler said the judge had refused to hang me for fear of the mob.
‘Hundreds out of work,’ he said, ‘and they say we are the greatest manufacturing nation the world has ever seen!’ He snorted. ‘Hanging a pretty girl like you in front of that lot?’ He shook his head. ‘Your friends’d never stand for it.’
‘I have no friends,’ I said. ‘They would gladly watch me die, thankful that it wasn’t their own necks that were being stretched.’
‘Pretty girl like you,’ he said again, and he stroked my cheek. I bit his finger then, and he cursed me for being a hell-cat and slapped my face. ‘A month in solitary and three months on a transport?’ he said. ‘You’ll be glad of any kindness before long.’
At first I feared we were to be quartered on the hulks moored at Woolwich or Deptford. Once, when we were young, Goblin and I had gone out to see the prisoners from the hulks toiling on the docks. They were rowed ashore every day, to labour in full view of passers-by and spectators. I have never forgotten the stony countenances of the men as they worked breaking rocks and digging the earth. I knew men just like them in the Rents, had known them all my life, and yet I had never seen anyone in the Rents wear an expression of such suppressed rage and humiliation as I saw on those prisoners. I’d looked over at the hulks, huge rotten structures moored stern to prow. Even from the shore I could see that their barrelled sides were mottled with mould and slime. Their masts were cut to stumps and flapped with lines of washing, their hulls blighted with makeshift structures – platforms, galleries, and additional rooms – giving them a diseased appearance, like a row of bloated carcasses bobbing in the dirty waters. What horrors might lie within? I would, never find out, for in the event I was taken to the Surrey House of Correction instead, as were all women condemned to transportation. I knew Goblin would not be so lucky.
At the House of Correction we were put in solitary cells so that we would have time to contemplate our sins. At mealtimes we were brought out, but we were made to wear a closed bonnet, the sides of which covered our faces so that we might not see our neighbour, nor talk to anyone. I had been told by the magistrate that I would have to endure three months of this, but we had hardly to wait three weeks before we learned we were to be taken aboard the Norfolk, a transport ship bound for Botany Bay.
I had never been on a ship before, had never been further than Prior’s Rents, Mr Day’s Blacking Factory or the House of Correction, and the prospect of leaving everything I was familiar with to travel to the other side of the world filled me with dread. I was used to dirt and meanness and vice, and yet I knew another world existed – one of light and order and safety. I had dreamed I might one day escape to it — could I not read and write and keep accounts? Could I not speak like a lady and ape their fancy way? I had only ever known London, and as bad as the Rents had been I had always had some hope. What hope might there be once I was trapped in the belly of a transport ship? I imagined a cramped and crowded space, pestilent and cruel, echoing with misery as it crossed the clamorous seas. What I was to find was a thousand times worse.