Читать книгу Botany Bay - James Norman Hall - Страница 7

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It was late in December, 1786, when Mrs. Garth, Oakley, and I entered Newgate prison. On the fifth of May in the year following, we left the forbidding place as convicted felons bound for Botany Bay, in New South Wales.

Botany Bay—how the name rang in my ears! It became more and more familiar to all Newgate prisoners as the weeks and months passed. We heard it from the lips of officers of the Court, of keepers and turnkeys, of visitors from the outside who came to see friends and relatives in the gaol; for, at about the time we had been taken into custody, His Majesty’s Government, after years of delay, had decided to establish a penal colony in New South Wales. Botany Bay was the place fixed upon. For more than a century and a half, England had emptied her gaols into the American Colonies, but the outbreak of the Revolution had put an end for all time to this practice: America wanted no more settlers of this kind. And so, for ten years, from the beginning of the war until 1786, England’s convicted felons had been accumulating throughout the country. Conditions in the gaols and hulks had become so desperate, from overcrowding and disease, that the Government was at last forced to take action, and in the summer of ’86, orders were given for the outfitting of a fleet of transports which were to carry to an unknown continent more than halfway around the world as many convicts as could be crowded aboard. I understood now why His Majesty’s Home Office had ignored Mr. James Matra’s petition for colonizing American Loyalists at Botany Bay. They had New South Wales in mind as a penal settlement and, as the need to empty the gaols and hulks was greater than their sense of obligation to the Loyalists, the decision was made. It was, to me, a bitter reflection that, of all the American refugees in London who had dreamed of New South Wales as a future home, I alone was to have that dream fulfilled, and with a vengeance.

Thanks to Nick Sabb, Oakley and I had been spared the greater miseries of Newgate life, and he had opened his wallet as generously for Nellie Garth. In comparison with the friendless, penniless convicts, we lived like nabobs, and when our turn came, Sabb, Mortimer Thynne, Oakley, Ned Inching, and I, in a coach of Nick’s hiring, made the journey to Portsmouth, where the transports lay, ready for their cargo. We had hoped that Garth and Mrs. Thynne could go with us, but women were kept separate from the men on these journeys, and all the influence of Messrs. Sabb and Thynne had not succeeded in gaining for these two the privacy of our coach. They were compelled to go in a great wagon drawn by four horses, and filled with Newgate’s worst—shameless creatures who hooted and yelled as they set out for Portsmouth, whilst some of the more brazen lay in the straw and waved their shackled legs in the air. It was a wagonful of bawdiness and no mistake.

Our own party set out like so many respectable citizens off for a day of pleasure in the country. To be sure, we were in shackles and under guard, but folk in the streets could not see the irons. We left the women’s wagon far behind before we had reached the open country. Every mile put between us and the miseries of Newgate was like a load lifted from the heart. It was glorious spring weather, with the birds singing, the trees in new leaf, and the meadows so fresh and green that I could have looked at them forever. Merely to draw in the clean rain-washed air was a joy past measuring; it was worth all we had suffered to have this heightened pleasure in the simple act of breathing. Tom was as lighthearted as myself; he sang, he whistled, and thrust his head out the window every other moment to call or wave to countryfolk in the lanes and fields. Ned Inching sat glum in his corner, and Sabb seemed in no better spirits.

“Aye, Tom,” Nick remarked presently, “it’s well enough for a pair of country louts like yourself and Tallant to take joy in the fields, but what about us?”

“Why, ye moon-faced gallows-load,” said Tom, “d’ye mean to say ye’re not glad to be quit of Newgate? God’s truth! Here’s the greatest rogue in London that’s missed dangling in the sheriff’s picture frame by the width of an eyebrow, and he finds nothing to be merry about!”

“Be damned to ye,” said Sabb. “I was never in finger-post distance of the gallows, but I’d take the risk willing enough to bide in London.” He shook his head with a heavy sigh. “When will I ever see it again?”

“When? Why, seven years from now, old guts-and-garbage! What’s seven years to a man can live on his own fat the whole of the time if it comes to that? Shame to ye, Nick! Here’s Hugh and me as lively as new fleas, and we’ve got life to serve. Cheer up, old cock! And ye too, Ned Inching, else I’ll give ye a footing! Ye look as doleful as a pair of Scotch alley cats! ... Look yonder,” he added, as a handsome carriage drawn by four horses approached down the drive of a great park we were passing. “I’ll take oath there’s one of His Majesty’s privy councillors inside that coach, and if he had his deserts he’d be riding with us.

“The little rogue the Law’s last tribute pays,

While crowns around the great one’s chariot blaze ...

Call me cut if that ain’t sober truth, though who wrote the lines I couldn’t say.”

“Never call me a little rogue,” said Sabb.

“Haven’t I said ye was the greatest in London,” said Tom with a grin, “save fellows like His Lordship yonder?”

“I can enlighten you as to the author of the quotation, Mr. Oakley,” said Thynne. “It is no other than our distinguished poet laureate, Mr. Whitehead.”

“Is it so, Mr. Thynne? Well, here’s another to cap the first, and damme if I don’t think it’s the better of the two:—

“The law doth punish man or woman

That steals a goose from off the common,

But lets the greater villain loose

That steals the common from off the goose.”

“Excellent, Tom, excellent!” said Thynne, with a chuckle. “More truth than poetry there.”

“Aye, it holds a mort of truth,” said Oakley. “The greatest villains in the Kingdom are the nabobs that go to His Majesty’s levees. They’ve stole nine tenths of the country from the rest of us, and they covet the other tenth. It’s them that take the people’s commons and they do it by acts of Parliament. And if some poor lad poaches a rabbit in His Lordship’s park, where does he land? ... Hugh, d’ye mind the redhaired boy sent along to the transports last week? What was his name ... Dugan, if I recollect.”

“What of him?” asked Thynne.

“The lad might be fifteen, though he looked younger. He stole a goose, or was it a hen? What does he get? Seven years’ transportation! There’s the King’s justice for ye! I mind another sample of it I saw when passing through Covent Garden Market, not a fortnight before Tallant and me was caught: there was two men being flogged through the streets, taking their air and exercise at the same cart’s tail. For what, would ye say?”

“Misdemeanours, certainly, else we might have had the pleasure of their company to Botany Bay,” said Thynne.

“So they call ’em, Thynne, and one was a small thing. The man had stole a bunch of radishes, valued at sixpence. But the fellow beside him, taking the same punishment, had raped a girl of fifteen, his own niece. Is that justice?”

“I know a pair of brisk young highwaymen with no call to complain on the score of justice,” said Sabb.

“Aye, we was lucky,” said Oakley. “I’ll warrant Tallant’s neck is as sore as me own at thinking how close we was to wearing a hempen stock.... Ned Inching, brisk up, me lad! Look at him, Nick! He’s got the pride of Satan and thought never to be nabbed.”

This was, indeed, a sore point with Ned Inching, alias Tim Sidewise, and I don’t know how many others, though Inching was the handle he went by in Newgate. He was as proud of his trade as though it had been the most honourable, as it was among the most ancient, in the land. According to Sabb, Inching had started picking pockets as soon as he was tall enough to reach them, and in forty years he had been caught but once before. Now he was for seven years’ transportation.

He gave Oakley a sour look. “How far will it be, this Botany Bay?” he asked.

“Hugh, you’re a scholar,” said Oakley. “Where is the bloody place?”

“A matter of halfway around the world,” I replied.

“Right, Mr. Tallant,” said Thynne. “According to my computations, we will cover on the voyage a distance in the very near neighbourhood of fourteen thousand miles.”

“Fourteen thousand miles!” Sabb exclaimed. Oakley laughed heartily at his doleful expression.

“So it is, Nick. Trust Mr. Thynne to know his geography, for he’s been to Oxford, and Cambridge too, I shouldn’t wonder. Now tell us, Thynne, what like of a land is it?”

“A very unpromising one, I fear, Tom.”

“With naught but rocks and sand and the bush filled with wild beasts and naked savages?”

“Something of the kind, certainly.”

“Good! Hugh and me will thrive there. But poor Nick! His guts will cry cupboard from morn till night; and what Ned will do is more than I can guess, for the wild men will have never a pocket amongst ’em. Never mind—hearts of oak, lads, hearts of oak!”

Little any of us knew about New South Wales, but Thynne had a copy of the Morning Chronicle of the day before, in which was a brief account of transports which were to take us there. He drew out the paper and read us the following:—

“It is now expected that the fleet for Botany Bay will sail within the week. The expedition is under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, R. N., who will remain in New South Wales as first Governor of the colony. He will sail in H.M.S. Sirius, with H.M. armed tender Supply as an auxiliary vessel. The following transports will carry the felons:

1.	Alexander—213 male convicts
2.	Scarborough—208 male convicts
3.	Friendship—77 male and 20 female convicts
4.	Charlotte—88 male and 20 female convicts
5.	Prince of Wales—100 female convicts
6.	Lady Penrhyn—102 female convicts

Three store-ships, the Golden Grove, Fishburn, and Borrowdale, will carry most of the supplies for the colony. A company of marines, under command of Major Robert Ross, to form the military establishment, is already at Portsmouth, and it is expected that the last of the convicts will be embarked by Saturday next.”

This notice, bald and dry as it was, gave us matter for discussion during the next hour; then we fell silent, and one by one my companions dropped off to sleep. As I looked from one to another of them, I thought of the strangeness of my fortunes in being of that company. Inching alone excepted, none of them bore the stamp of the underworld upon him. For all that he was a highwayman, Tom Oakley did not belong to that world, though he knew it well enough. Sabb knew no other, but he would have passed anywhere as a respectable merchant, rather too fond of good living. As for Mortimer Thynne, he might have been a schoolmaster, a parson, a barrister, a banker, for he could have fitted himself to any of these professions insofar as appearance went. Of all the convicts I had met in Newgate, Mr. and Mrs. Thynne had most interested and puzzled me. To see them in fetters was a shock to one’s sense of probability; indeed, of possibility. Mrs. Thynne was a handsome woman of forty, half a head taller than her husband, with fine dark eyes and thick brown hair, and a complexion that needed no aid from art. Her manners were most correct, and her speech as genteel as though she had graced in her youth one of the most elegant of young ladies’ finishing schools. She gave an appearance of delicacy in constitution, and yet she had borne the unspeakable conditions of Newgate with no appearance of sinking under them. To be sure, she had enjoyed there, with her husband, the best quarters and all the comforts that money could procure, for Mr. Thynne was as well provided with funds as Nick Sabb himself. Even so, it was a horrible place, and there was no paying for a single breath of pure air. I admired Mrs. Thynne’s courage, and her gift for carrying her gentility with her. She was always handsomely dressed, and spent most of her time in Newgate in making her toilet for the appearance in the State Side court, late in the afternoon, and a veritable triumph she made of it. Thynne’s own costume was always of the best materials, though more sober in taste, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were not designed to set off to greater advantage the elegance of his wife. He looked like an Oxford don who had married a comfortable fortune, and for all I know that may have been the case. Husband and wife were, by profession, what is known as “gate-crashers.” With spurious cards of admission to routs, balls, masquerades, and other assemblies of the fashionable world, they would lift jewelry, silverware, watches, diamond-studded snuffboxes, whatever of value came to hand. They were such accomplished thieves that they had practised their profession successfully for years, in both London and provincial towns. Aiming at ever higher game, they had finally been caught at one of the King’s levees. Their case at the Old Bailey Sessions House caused a stir and there was a great deal about it in the newspapers. Upon conviction, both were sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. They were completely lacking in any appearance of hurt pride and accepted their changed condition with as much ease and self-possession as though they were going to New South Wales as free and prosperous settlers. As I looked at Mr. Thynne, opposite me in the coach, and sleeping like an honest gentleman bound to Portsmouth on business, it was hard to believe in our forlorn condition and the fate in store for the five of us.

To distract my thoughts I took up the newspaper and read again the item about Botany Bay. If the figures given were correct, 586 men were being sent out and but 242 women. Some Grub Street wag had noticed these figures, for there was a bit of verse below the news item, with one stanza reading:—

Three husbands at once, Mr. Gaoler, you say,

We females shall have when at Botany Bay?

Punishment, this, to be sought after, courted?

Before they transport us we’re more than transported!

Oakley, who had been snoring loudly, awoke.

“What are ye about, Hugh?” he asked.

“There’s eight hundred and twenty-eight of us for New South Wales if this tally is right,” I said. “Have you thought of it? Except for a few stout fellows like ourselves, here’s a cargo of misery that will be as helpless where we’re going as babes in the wood.”

“You’re right; I was thinking the same thing myself. There never was such a crackbrained expedition as this sent out since England was a nation. But they get rid of us, and that’s the main thing. I shouldn’t wonder if the hope is they’ll never see hide nor hair of us again. We’re none so lucky, but I’d sooner be in my own shoes than in his that’s to govern us. What’s his name again?”

“Phillip.”

Tom shook his head. “God help him! A merry time he’ll have trying to make a settlement on the ends of the earth with eight hundred convicts! There’ll not be above a score that knows any trade save that of knavery. But let him and them that’s sent him worry about that.” He glanced cautiously at the coachmen on the box and the guard beside him; then he added, in a low voice: “I’m thinking of ourselves. Transportation for life—it’s just beginning to come in to me what that means. ’Tis a huge land, ain’t it, this New South Wales?”

“No one knows the extent of it, but you could put a score of Englands in it, that’s certain.”

Tom stretched out his legs, regarding his shackles with a mingled air of disgust and contempt; then he gave me a hearty smack on the knee. “Man, it’s good to be alive and fit for anything!”

I felt the same way about it, and as the coach rolled and jolted on its way to Portsmouth, we talked of the future as though we were free men and Botany Bay a promised bed of roses rather than a penal settlement.

We reached Portsmouth too late to be taken aboard one of the transports. Instead, we were carried to the town gaol for the night, and found it crowded to suffocation with others waiting to be embarked. It was an ancient three-story building of brick, more foul than Newgate itself. The keeper, a sergeant-at-mace, was one of those gaolers who serve without pay for the sake of the perquisites extorted from the inmates, but what he had provided in return for his fees I couldn’t see, for the room into which he attempted to squeeze us had neither beds nor bedding; there was scarcely space to set foot between the men lying or sitting on the bare floor. The guards who had brought us from London were a pair of typical Newgate flunkeys, accustomed, for a suitable reward, to looking out for the welfare of their “gentlemen lodgers.” Judging by their indignation as they peered into this crowded ward, you might have thought that they and not ourselves were to sleep there.

“Look ye, Master,” said one, “this ’ere’s a genteel party we’ve brought, and we’ll not have ’em pigged in the like o’ this. Have ye no better quarters?”

“I might have,” said the warden.

“And what d’ye ask?” said Sabb.

“Ten shillings the night, gentlemen, with hot food at five shillings, and good ale at ninepence the quart.”

“Then take us there,” said Sabb.

“Ye must pay on the nail,” said the warden. He led us to a dingy narrow room lighted by two small windows, and stood with his hands on his hips while Sabb drew out the great leather pouch I knew well by this time. I will not venture to say how many guineas, half crowns, and shilling pieces I had seen paid out of it, but there seemed to be no bottom to the pouch, the reason being that Sabb’s nephew, in London, his right-hand man in business, kept him well supplied.

“Nick,” said Oakley, when the money had been paid and the door locked behind the guards, “d’ye know how deep Tallant and me are in your debt?”

“Shut up or I’ll wring your necks,” said Sabb. “What’s that to me?”

“Nothing, I know it well, but we’re not the men to forget an obligation. Hugh, ye’ve kept tally. What’s it come to?”

I consulted my pocketbook. “Not counting to-night, the total is forty-one pounds, seven and fourpence,” I replied; “and how we’re ever to get square with you, Nick, is more than I can see.”

“Hush, now,” said Sabb. “Who’s said anything about payments? I’ve done naught ye wouldn’t do for me in the same pinch, and where’ll be the good of money in the place we’re going?”

“Ha, ha, ha! Just so,” laughed Thynne. “We shall be true children of nature in Botany Bay.”

“It’s good coin, Nick?” Tom asked, with a wink at me, as Sabb was about to return the pouch to his pocket.

“Good!” said Sabb, bristling up. He drew forth a half crown and dropped it to the stone floor. “Is that the ring of true sweet silver? Is it, Tom Oakley?”

“Aye, Nick—sweet as a bell’s tone. I was wrong to question it.”

Sabb’s great belly shook with a silent chuckle.

“Lads, as ye know, I’m all but master of one of the King’s mints, but since His Majesty don’t know it, I take heed to carry with me none but coin that has his own approval.”

“And a very sound practice that is,” said Thynne.

Then, over a gallon of ale ordered up by our two benefactors, we fell to discussing our immediate prospects, and our chances of being embarked together, on the same transport. Thynne surprised us all by saying that he had two daughters, one of whom was to accompany her parents to Botany Bay.

“Thynne, I’ve known ye, off and on, these five years,” said Sabb, “but this is the first I’ve heard of the daughters.”

“Mrs. Thynne and I make no parade of the domestic affections, Mr. Sabb. They are charming girls, both, though I do say it. It is Phoebe, our baby, who is to go with us.”

Barbarous as England’s treatment was of her convicts, it was made somewhat less so by the provision that a father, or mother, or both, sentenced to transportation, could apply to have one or more of their free children sent with them. Permission was granted or not, according to circumstances, and whether or no room could be found in the transports. Thynne told us that permission for his daughter Phoebe had already been granted and that she and her elder sister, Doris, were to meet their parents in Portsmouth. Garth, as I knew, had applied for permission to take Nat and had been refused.

“And your eldest is not to go?” Sabb was saying.

“Doris? No, no,” said Thynne. “She is adequately—I might say, splendidly provided for.”

Sabb gave him a shrewd look. “There’s a blessing,” he said.

“Is it not? Dear Doris! She is Mrs.... ah ... Mrs. Livingstone now. We had hoped to have our chick, our Phoebe, as well settled, and she might have been, there’s no doubt of it. But ... dear me, when it came to the thought of separation, it was not to be borne. Phoebe wished to come with us, and I can’t say that we regret the decision. She’ll be a great comfort to us.... My poor wife! What a day she will have had in the wagon, and Mrs. Garth as well!”

The women arrived at about eight in the evening. Somewhere on the way the more abandoned females had laid in a supply of gin, and the half of them were now howling drunk. Some stood in the wagon, clinging to one another for support while they yelled and jeered at the townsfolk and exchanged obscenities with bystanders no better than themselves. We first heard them from afar and stood at our upstairs windows overlooking the street to watch the arrival. The clear cold light of the May evening brought out every detail of the scene: the mean houses, for it was a wretched quarter of the town, crowded with drabs and slatterns; the shackled women, some with faces that seemed scarcely human, their hair hanging in tangled mops about their shoulders, posturing in lewd attitudes to the delight of the mob of hoodlums that followed them. It was a picture that Hogarth might have painted, and even he would not have dared to present it in its naked truth; only the well-fed, sweating horses could have been depicted as they were. We caught sight of Nellie Garth and Mrs. Thynne seated in one corner of the wagon, gazing straight before them, with stony faces.

“God help ’em!” Oakley exclaimed. “Sabb, we must get ’em out of that company if we have to wreck the gaol!”

A request was sent to the warden, and in return for a handsome fee he consented that Garth and Mrs. Thynne should come into our room. It was a long narrow chamber, and a piece of dirty sailcloth was stretched across one end to make an apartment for them. They were brought in a few moments later. Garth halted at the door and looked about her with a glint of humour in her eyes.

“What’s this?” said she. “Mrs. Thynne, do they take us for a pair of trollops that they put us amongst the men?”

“God love ye, Nellie!” said Tom. “Ye look as happy as Hunt’s dog! The beast of a time ye and Mrs. Thynne will have had since the morning!”

“Nothing of the sort, Mr. Oakley,” said Mrs. Thynne. “Mrs. Garth and I did very well.”

“My love,” said her husband, “you’re a woman of courage: I’ve always said it. But ... dear me, this goes beyond my expectations. Mrs. Garth, my compliments and respects. You both look as cool and fresh as Roman matrons at the blush of a new day.”

“And why not?” said Garth. “ ’Twas a lovely day indeed as to weather, and we took the full good of it.”

“But how could ye, with such shameless creatures for company?” asked Oakley.

Mrs. Thynne laughed. “They sang the most shocking songs!”

“There, my love, we’ll speak of them no more. We’ll hear songs and to spare, no doubt, before the night is done.”

Mr. Thynne’s prediction was more than fulfilled, for the women were lodged directly below us, and they made night hideous until the small hours. But Newgate experiences had inured us all to bedlam, and the Thynnes, with Sabb and Inching, played cribbage with as much pleasure and as strict attention to the game as though they were in some quiet country tavern. Nellie Garth sat apart, by the window, speaking to no one. She was thinking of Nat, of course. A bitter prospect it was to her, setting off without him. Oakley and I made no attempt to comfort her. We talked of the long voyage ahead, trying to form some picture of the land of our exile, and wondering where we would be that day ten years hence.

Some time after midnight Mrs. Thynne joined Nellie in their apartment behind the canvas curtain, and the rest of us prepared for bed by the simple act of taking off our shoes.