First Fleet Graphic Journal: Betties bring trouble
PART 3: Becalmed on stifling oceans, officers record their low opinions of the female convicts and order hellish punishments for four of them.
Welcome to the suck. The wicked doldrums. The energy-sapping, life-draining low-pressure system beyond the equator where the First Fleet stagnates in hot and windless ocean, all but trapping Phillip’s 11 ships in a maddening vortex of slow movement as the equatorial atmosphere expands and turns once-billowing sails into stiff bed sheets.
In the bowels of the Prince of Wales convict transport ship, prisoners and marines alike fight a plague of bugs that has taken near-ownership of the vessel.
The ship bilges, where dank excess water collects in the lowest point of the vessel, have become so foul to the nose that it alters the prisoners’ sleep patterns. Lack of sleep equals impatience equals agitation equals violence. Some convicts harness an almost Zen-like patience to stomach the conditions; still themselves for hours, less movement means less heat. Movement equals realisations of confinement equals panic. The heat and humidity is causing the fleet’s female convicts to fall into convulsive fits.
“In the evening it became calm, with distant peals of thunder, and the most vivid flashes of lightning I ever remember,” writes surgeon John White aboard the Charlotte. “The weather was now so immoderately hot that the female convicts, perfectly overcome by it, frequently faded away; and these faintings generally terminated in fits. And yet, notwithstanding the enervating effects of the atmospheric heat, and the inconveniences they suffered from it, so predominant was the warmth of their constitutions, or the depravity of their hearts, that the hatches over the place where they were confined could not be suffered to lay off, during the night, without a promiscuous intercourse immediately taking place between them and the seamen and marines.”
Prostitution is rampant. Convict women are parting their legs for marines and seamen for as little as a sliver of salted beef or an extra cup of freshwater. Some women are “so uncontrollable that neither shame (but of this they had long lost sight) nor the fear of punishment could deter them from making their way through the bulkheads to the apartments assigned to the seamen”.
‘Never was there are a set of greater rascals together than they are’
The strange weather has brought strange dreams to the lovelorn Lieutenant Ralph Clark aboard the Friendship.
“Dreamt of being with my beloved Alicia,” he writes of his wife back home. “Oh, why did the dear sweet woman learn me to believe in dreams … Should not have been so unhappy as I am at this present moment from dreaming that my Alicia took a dead louse from herself and gave it me. Oh, unlucky dream, for have often heard her say that dreaming of lice was a certain sign of sickness.”
He stares nightly into a framed picture of his beloved Betsey Alicia while cursing the women aboard his ship.
“I never could have thought there were so many abandoned wenches in England,” he writes. “They are ten thousand times worse than the men convicts and I am afraid that we will have a great deal more trouble with them.”
He stays well clear of a 21-year-old convict woman, Sarah McCormick, when she’s called to the surgeon’s quarters.
The surgeon’s grim face tells Sarah McCormick exactly what he has on his mind. He punctures her skin with a rudimentary surgical instrument and blood gushes from her body. He’s bleeding her, attempting to drain diseased blood from her system.
“The doctor has been obliged to bleed her twice today and says that she will not live the night out,” writes Clark. “She is now quite speechless. I am apt to think (God forgive), if it is not so that she is eaten up with the pox. She is one of them that went through the bulkhead to the seamen. I hope she has given them something to remember her. Never was there are a set of greater rascals together than they are.”
Late July, 1787. The fleet is some 800km from the next major supply stop in Rio de Janeiro. Phillip assesses the water and food stocks. They’re running low. He cuts down the water rations, only further enhancing the agony of the languishing convicts. Three pints of water per person per day. Clothes washed in saltwater. Bodies washed in saltwater.
Sailors and marines fish for prized fresh sea beasts to supplement their low rations. Aboard the flagship Sirius, gifted cartographer William Bradley is captivated by the alien anatomy of a devil fish hauled on deck.
“Before he could be hoisted in, three very large sucking fish were soon on him, one of which was struck and got in and was the largest I ever saw; it was 2ft, 9in long,” Bradley writes. “It being dark when this monster was got in, he was kept on the quarter deck all night, but was dead as soon as out of the water from having had several harpoons stuck in him. In the morning, two sucking fish, seven inches long and quite white, were taken from within him out of his mouth perfectly alive.”
A brilliant and tragic fate awaits William Bradley beyond the Southern Ocean. Upon arriving at Botany Bay, he will join Captain John Hunter on multiple surveys of the Australian coastline. He will be a friend and champion of the indigenous inhabitants of Port Jackson. He will be one of the brave men Arthur Phillip will turn to when, in October 1788, the new colony runs dangerously low on supplies and Bradley joins a six-month supply-gathering mission to and from the treacherous Cape of Good Hope. He will return to Britain a naval hero. Raised high on Phillip’s recommendation, he’ll serve in the French Revolutionary Wars as a great master and commander of war ships until he suffers the first of several severe mental disturbances. He’ll be removed from service and his great naval reputation will be the only thing that will save him from a death sentence when, in a suspected period of mental illness, he’ll be arrested for attempting to defraud the British postal service.
In a unique twist of fate, the former officer in charge of sentenced transportees will himself be sentenced to transportation, before having that sentence reduced, once again, under the condition he exile himself from Britain. He will spend any remaining clear-headed days of his life as a recluse in the city of Le Havre by the Seine in France, where he will tinker away privately on ambitious maritime inventions he hopes will revolutionise all-important naval calculations of longitude.
Some 213 years from now, in the year 2000 — the year William Bradley’s charted Sydney coastline welcomes people from across the world to the Olympics — an American filmstar named Tom Cruise will shoot movie scenes on Bradleys Head, in the Mosman headland of Sydney Harbour. They’ll call that movie Mission: Impossible, a fitting title for the grand experiment William Bradley finds himself a part of here and now on the rising seas carrying the fleet toward South America.
Over on the Friendship, the ship’s master Captain Francis Walton has a gift for Ralph Clark he hopes might lift the lovesick officer’s spirits. Clark writes of the gift in the same breath he speaks of delighting in the punishment of a troublesome convict, Elizabeth Dudgeon.
“Capt. Walton has given me a puppy,” he writes. “Have called it Efford after the dear sweet place where first I came acquainted with my Alicia, my virtuous wife. Capt. Meredith ordered one of the Corporals to flog with a rope Elizh. Dudgeon for being impertinent to Capt. Meredith. The Corporal did not play with her, but laid it home which I was very glad to see. Then ordered her to be tied to the pump. She has been long-fishing for it which she has at last got until her heart’s content.”
Since departing Portsmouth, Captain James Meredith has been plagued by the ill behaviour of four women aboard the Friendship. If these women wanted a gang name then “The Betties” would have been an obvious choice. Elizabeth Dudgeon was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for robbing a drunk. Elizabeth Pulley is a thief about 24 years of age. Records say she burgled the home of another Elizabeth — Elizabeth Minns — and stole 10 pounds of cheese, three pounds of bacon, 24 ounces of butter, three pounds of raisins, and 12 pounds of flour for which a jury said she was “to be hanged by the neck until she be dead”. She got a trip to Botany Bay with James Meredith and Ralph Clark instead, and there have been times below the Friendship she wished the jury’s original sentencing stuck.
This moment, right here in the doldrums, in the heart of the ocean’s tropical suck, is the lowest point of Elizabeth Pulley’s life. In the fledgling Sydney Cove settlement she will meet Anthony Rope, a skilled carpenter and brickmaker sent aboard transport Alexander for theft. They will be married by Reverend Richard Johnson in May 1788, and have eight children, the oldest of whom will possibly be the first child conceived and born in the new settlement.
Elizabeth “Betty” Thackery is a feisty 20-year-old who some say will be the first female convict to walk on Australian soil when, on February 6, 1788, during the bulk unloading of women convicts, she impulsively jumps from her longboat and makes a bolt for the beach at what is now Sydney’s Rocks precinct, where she skips joyously before a crowd of cheering male convicts and guards.
‘I would rather have a hundred more men than to have a single woman’
Elizabeth Barber is the incorrigible ringleader figure currently furiously arguing with Captain Meredith, asking him, without a hint of seduction, to “kiss my c..t”.
“Elizabeth Barber abused the doctor in a most terrible manner and said that he wanted her and called him all the names that she could think of,” writes Ralph Clark. “After dinner Capt. Meredith enquired into the matter and asked her how she could raise such a report and abuse Mr. Arundell so. She still insisted that it was true. She was very much in liquor. She was ordered on a pair of leg irons. When she was getting them on she began to abuse Capt. Meredith in a much worse manner than she had done the doctor. She called him everything but a gentleman and said she was no more a whore than his wife. She then abused (Lieutenant William) Faddy and I wonder how she come to forget me amongst the number. In all the course of my days I never heard such aspersions come from the mouth of a human being. The Capt ordered her hands tied behind her back and to be gagged to prevent her from making noise. She hoped and she was certain that she should see us all thrown overboard before we got to Botany Bay. From the bottom of my heart I don’t think that the doctor, Mr. Arundell, ever offered any such thing to that brute. She desired Meredith to come and kiss her c..t, for he was nothing but a lousy rascal as we were all. I wish to God she was out of the ship.”
Captain Meredith shackles Elizabeth Barber and Elizabeth Thackery together in irons. He shackles Elizabeth Dudgeon and Elizabeth Pulley together in irons. “The damned whores,” writes Clark. “The moment that they got below, fell a fighting amongst one another and Capt Meredith ordered the Sergt. not to part them but to let them fight it out.
“I would rather have a hundred more men than to have a single woman. I hope in the ships that ever I may go in hereafter there may not be a single woman.”
Lieutenant Ralph Clark’s holier-than-thou journalising about the wicked ways of women and his endless scribbled messages to his beloved Betsey Alicia contrast the truth of his destiny. “From the bottom of my heart I don’t believe there is a single woman in all the place so handsome as my beloved Betsey,” he scribbles artfully. “If she was here they would steal her from me but that must take first the last drop of my blood before they should have her.”
But Australia does funny things to a person. Once planted in the strange new natural wonderland of New Holland, Clark’s clean and pure heart will fall for a 17-year-old convict mistress named Mary Branham who was 13 years old when she was sentenced to transportation for stealing two petticoats. She will give birth to Clark’s child on July 23, 1791. That child, a girl, will be christened the following December in the colony of Sydney Cove. That baby girl — that young Australian — will be named Alicia.
But those events are far from this moment right here, where we find Clark scurrying across the deck of the Friendship in search of his beloved dog, Efford.
“Efford?” he hollers.
“Efford?” he hollers.
But he knows what’s happened to Efford. “Lost my dog, Efford, overboard,” he writes. “I am apt to think that he was thrown overboard by the first mate. If I was certain I would make some of the men give him a good thrashing. I am sorry that I lost him, poor dog, for he began to be very fond of me.”
A softer, more reserved Elizabeth rests in the corner of the Lady Penrhyn’s prison deck, sucking on a slice of salted beef. Elizabeth Hayward is the youngest of the fleet’s female convicts, aged 13. Transported for stealing clothes from a master to whom she was apprenticed, Elizabeth has learned to stay invisible among 101 fellow female convicts, fall into the background, not fall prey to the older women, and sailors and marines, who might choose to exploit a teenage girl on her way to an unknown land. Her low spirits are buoyed by descriptions of a pod of whales the ship passes, one “as long as a ship”, writes surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth. If Elizabeth can make it all the way to Sydney Cove alive, she will find some semblance of a life again, she will be cared for and valued as a household servant to Reverend Richard Johnson and his wife, Mary.
Lady Penrhyn is a poor sailing ship, always lagging behind the rest of the fleet that often reduces sails to let her catch up.
“At three o’clock in the afternoon of the 2nd of August, the Supply, which had been previously sent ahead on purpose, made the signal for seeing land, which was visible to the whole fleet before sunset,” writes Watkin Tench on the transport ship Charlotte.
Rio de Janeiro. To surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth’s eye, this natural paradise appears to glow. “Beautiful in the extreme,” he writes. “So much so that I find myself inadequate to the task of doing it justice.”
On the deck of the Sirius, even Arthur Phillip allows himself a smile. Rio means replenishment. Rio means survival. His crew can’t see it beneath his commander’s coat, but, for the briefest moment, the invisible weight on Phillip’s shoulders eases.
“The port is one of the finest in the world, very narrow at the entrance, and within capacious enough to contain more ships than ever were assembled at one station,” Phillip writes in the State Library of NSW manuscript, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay.
“In the narrative of Captain Cook’s Voyage in 1768, we find, on his arrival at this place, great appearance of suspicion on the part of the Viceroy, harsh prohibitions of landing, even to the gentlemen employed in philosophical researches, and some proceedings rather of a violent nature. The reception given by the present Viceroy to Governor Philip and his officers was very different: it was polite and flattering to a great degree, and free from every tincture of jealous caution.
“Provisions were here so cheap, that notwithstanding the allowance of meat was fixed by Governor Phillip at twenty ounces a day, the men were victualled completely, rice, fresh vegetables, and firing included, at three-pence three-farthings a head. Wine was not at this season to be had, except from the retail dealers, less was therefore purchased than would otherwise have been taken. Rum, however, was laid in; and all such seeds and plants procured as were thought likely to flourish on the coast of New South Wales, particularly coffee, indigo, cotton, and the cochineal fig. As a substitute for bread, if it should become scarce, one hundred sacks of cassada were purchased at a very advantageous price. Cassada, the bread of thousands in the tropical climates, affords one of those instances in which the ingenuity of man might be said to triumph over the intentions of nature, were it not evidently the design of Providence that we should in all ways exert our invention and sagacity to the utmost, for our own security and support.”
Providence. It’s a notion Phillip has been reading about in the writings of Cook and the brave British men who sailed into this vivid port almost two decades before him. Phillip knows the colony he’s been tasked with constructing will succeed on good fortune as much as hard work and order and intelligence. The protective care of God. Good luck and bad luck. The whole fleet looks for warning signs of success and failure. Portents and charms. Omens and harbingers.
In the port of Rioro, deep in the still prison deck of the Charlotte, convict Mary Braund rests two hands over her starving belly. She’s a thief born into a penniless Cornwall fishing family.
The world will one day know Mary Braund as Mary Bryant, the most famous escapee from Arthur Phillip’s fledgling penal colony. For now, she’s just another female convict searching for signs. Running her hands desperately over her belly in the hope she’ll feel her baby’s kick, or just some sign that says her child is still alive.
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PART 1: Told through the eyes of Australia’s youngest convict, eight-year-old John Hudson, this is the First Fleet as you’ve never seen it.
PART 2: The fleet sets sail from England, a young child, would-be mutineers and a convict planning escape aboard.
PART 4: After a hellish, storm-tossed voyage, Arthur Phillip brings his ships into Botany Bay.
PART 5: Confronted by the limitations of Botany Bay, the First Fleet leader rowed north and discovered a body of water beyond his dreams.
PART 6: Arthur Phillip had a brilliantly simple idea for turning the colony from a prison to a community.
