Convict Colony: The remarkable story of the fledgling settlement that survived against the odds

by David Hill Narrated by Conrad Coleby

Overview

From the bestselling author of 1788.
The remarkable story of the fledgling settlement that survived against the odds.
Bestselling historian David Hill tells the story of the first three decades of Britain's earliest colony in Australia in a fresh and compelling way.
The British plan to settle Australia was a high-risk venture. We now take it for granted that the first colony was the basis of one of the most successful nations in the world today. But in truth, the New World of the 18th century was dotted with failed colonies, and New South Wales nearly joined them. The motley crew of unruly marines and bedraggled convicts who arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 in leaky boats nearly starved to death. They could easily have been murdered by hostile locals, been overwhelmed by an attack from French or Spanish expeditions, or brought undone by the Castle Hill uprising of 1804. Yet through fortunate decisions, a few remarkably good leaders, and most of all good luck, Sydney survived and thrived.
“David Hill captures Australia's past in a very readable way.” THE WEEKLY TIMES

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"David Hill captures Australia's past in a very readable way.'" —Weekly Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172485831
Publisher:	Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd
Publication date:	01/01/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Bound for Botany Bay

'... measures should immediately be pursued for sending out of this kingdom such of the convicts as are under sentence or order of transportation ... His Majesty has thought it advisable to fix upon Botany Bay.'

Lord Sydney

The British plan to settle Australia proved to be a high-risk venture and involved years of struggle to survive. For a start, very little was known about the original destination of Botany Bay, which had to be abandoned by the First Fleet as totally unsuitable for settlement only a few days after arriving in 1788.

The only Europeans to have visited this part of the southern landmass were members of the expedition led by Captain James Cook on HMS Endeavour, which had spent less than a week there a decade and a half earlier, in late April and early May of 1770.

Cook was far from the first foreigner to 'discover' Australia as more than 50 European ships had seen or landed on the continent over the preceding 200 years. The first recorded sighting of Australia by Europeans was believed to be in 1606, when both Dutch and Spanish seafarers separately reached the north-east extremities of what is now known as the Cape York Peninsula, although there may have been others before them. Around 1300, Marco Polo had mentioned the existence of a great southern continent but offered no firsthand knowledge of the place. Some archaeological evidence suggests that, from 1500 or so, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish ships may have touched on the western and southern coasts.

It has been argued that the Chinese explorer Admiral Zheng He reached part of the west coast in 1421. There is also evidence of other Asian ships regularly visiting the north of Australia from around 1600, including Indonesian and Malay traders who harvested bêche-de-mer, or sea slugs, which were regarded as a delicacy and an aphrodisiac by many in China.

The first Englishman known to have reached Australia was the pirate William Dampier, who landed on the north-west coast in 1688. When Cook charted a large part of the east coast more than 80 years later it was not known for sure that it was part of the same continent. Not until the explorer Matthew Flinders charted the remaining 'unknown coast' of what he would later name Australia more than 30 years after Cook in 1803 was it confirmed that there was no strait or sea separating the east and west coasts.

The British decision to establish a convict colony was largely because it needed a solution to the huge increase in the number of prisoners in its gaols in the second half of the eighteenth century. This was the Georgian era, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the British Empire was expanding at a time when the earlier European powers of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were in decline. In 1774 the British government took over the administration and control of India from the British East India Company and thus began 150 years of British rule over the subcontinent. In 1768 James Cook began his remarkable voyages of discovery in the Pacific, which resulted in more British possessions.

It was also the age known as the Enlightenment, which questioned traditional beliefs and authority and embraced the idea that humanity could be advanced through rational change. The Church was slipping from its central role in cultural and intellectual life and science was becoming increasingly emancipated from the restraints of theology. It was also a period that saw the flourishing of music, theatre, literature and art.

Britain's king at the time was George III. He was to sit on the throne for 50 years from 1760 — at the time the longest reign of any British monarch. He had come to the throne on the death of his grandfather George II and was the third German to become the British monarch but the first of those to be born in England and to speak English as his native language. The first two Georges took little interest in the politics of their realm and were quite content to let Britain's ministers govern on their behalf but George III became far more involved in the running of his governments. When the British established the convict colony in New South Wales, George took a strong interest in its progress and read each of the sixteen dispatches sent back in the first years of the colony by Governor Arthur Phillip.

George was first believed to have gone mad in 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived in Australia, and at that point the parliament debated whether he should continue as king but he then appeared to recover. However, in 1811, with a recurrence of his illness his son ruled as Prince Regent, later becoming King George IV when his father died in 1820.

George III typified the enlightenment of the era. He founded and paid for the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts, started a collection of royal books and later gave the 65,000 volumes to the British Museum. He was keenly interested in agriculture, which earned him the nickname 'Farmer George', and was an enthusiastic student of science. Many of his scientific instruments survive and are now in the British Science Museum.

The remarkable advances of the age did not benefit everyone of course. While the rich got richer the overwhelming majority of people continued to live and die poor. The industrial changes brought a huge number of people from the country into the increasingly overcrowded towns and cities. This overcrowding was compounded by the 'enclosures' of the commons, whereby landowners fenced off land that had previously been used by everyone. Hand in hand with the growing numbers of displaced and out-of-work citizens came an increase in crime as many resorted to stealing to survive.

By the second half of the eighteenth century crime rates had spiralled as the number of property thefts increased and it was estimated that in London 115,000, or one in eight, people were living off crime. Historian and politician Horace Walpole said at the time that robbery in broad daylight had become so common that 'one is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going into battle'.

To combat the rise in crime, the British Parliament increased the number of laws protecting property. At the beginning of the 1700s criminal offences that attracted the death penalty had been limited to the most serious acts such as murder or treason. By the end of the century more than 100 additional crimes — almost all of them involving offences against property — had been made capital offences. Thirty-three were added during the reign of George II and a further 63 during the first decades of the reign of George III.

The new crimes that warranted execution included smuggling, selling a forged stamp, burglary, extortion, blackmail, larceny by servants, arson, wilful destruction of property, petty theft and stealing horses. Most of the new capital offences were created by a 'placid and uninterested' parliament, where in nine cases out of ten there was 'no debate or opposition'. So great was the increase in the number of capital offences that by 1800 Sir Samuel Riley could observe that 'there is probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable by loss of life than in England'.

However, despite the dramatic rise in the number of convicts sentenced to death, fewer were actually being executed. The judges in the courts of England were increasingly reluctant to send offenders to the gallows and more and more death sentences were being commuted to transportation to America — even after such shipments had been suspended. As a consequence of this judicial leniency the proportion of those executed fell dramatically over the second half of the eighteenth century. In the 1750s about 70 per cent of those convicted were actually hanged but, by the time the First Fleet set sail, barely a quarter of the condemned reached the gallows. By the end of the century the figure would drop to less than 20 per cent. Accordingly, throughout the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the gaols and the prison hulks overflowed as the prison population increased by more than a thousand people every year.

James Hardy Vaux was eighteen years old when he was convicted at the Old Bailey for stealing a handkerchief valued at eleven pence and sentenced to seven years' transportation. Before being sent to New South Wales he spent time both at Newgate and on the prison hulk Retribution on the Thames. At Newgate, he later wrote, he was lucky to survive an outbreak of contagious disease that killed many others:

... being unusually crowded with prisoners, a most dreadful contagion, called the gaol fever, made its appearance, and spread so universally, throughout every ward and division of the prison, that very few escaped its attack. I was one of the first to contract it, and was immediately carried to the infirmary, or sick-ward of the prison, where I only remember having my irons taken off ... I became delirious, and was so dreadfully affected, as to continue insensible for three weeks, during which time, I had no knowledge of my parents, or of any other person who approached me; and the fever raged to such a degree, that I was obliged to be bound in my bed.

Vaux described his time on the hulk as 'miserable', 'distressing' and 'shocking':

There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed; and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants ... All former friendships or connexions are dissolved, and a man here will rob his best benefactor, or even mess-mate, of an article worth one halfpenny.

Vaux wrote of how each day the men would be taken ashore to work supervised by brutal overseers:

Every morning, at seven o'clock, all the convicts capable of work, or, in fact, all who are capable of getting into the boats, are taken ashore ... and are there employed at various kinds of labour, some of them very fatiguing; and while so employed, each gang of sixteen, or twenty men, is watched and directed by a fellow called a guard. These guards are most commonly of the lowest class of human beings; wretches devoid of all feeling; ignorant in the extreme, brutal by nature, and rendered tyrannical and cruel by the consciousness of the power they possess ... They invariably carry a large and ponderous stick, with which, without the smallest provocation, they will fell an unfortunate convict to the ground, and frequently repeat their blows long after the poor sufferer is insensible.

In another written account of life on prison ships and hulks, Thomas Watling, convict and artist, said they were worse than the French Bastille or the Spanish dungeons during the Inquisition:

When I have seen so much wanton cruelty practised on board the English hulks, on poor wretches, without the least colour of justice, what may I not reasonably infer? — French Bastille, nor Spanish Inquisition, could not centre more of horrors.

There was also at this time growing pressure from prison reformers who were campaigning against the appalling conditions in the gaols and the prison hulks. Foremost among them was John Howard, the wealthy son of a successful merchant, who became a well-known advocate and campaigner. In 1777, after studying incarceration in England, he wrote a book that painted a devastating picture of the reality of prisons and brought into the open much of what for those in genteel society had been out of sight and thus out of mind. Howard wrote that healthy men who entered the system were often reduced to illness and death. He said that disease was so rife that more prisoners were killed by ill health than 'were put to death by all public executions in the kingdom'.

In some prisons, he wrote, there was no food allowance, and in others no fresh water and no sewerage. In most gaols there was a shortage of fresh air and ventilation, and of beds and bedding, with the result that many prisoners were forced to sleep 'upon rags, others on bare floors'.

Largely as a result of the agitation of Howard and other reformers legislation was passed in parliament for the building of two new prisons but funding was not made available and construction never began. To reduce the numbers of prisoners incarcerated in England parliament legislated in 1777 for the reintroduction of the overseas transportation of convicts, although the bill did not prescribe to which countries the prisoners would be sent.

* * *

The idea of transporting convicts to some faraway country was not new. Legislation had been introduced in Elizabethan England to banish certain criminals to 'lands beyond the seas', but the practice took on a new dimension in the eighteenth century.

It was during the early 1700s that the British began sending significant numbers of felons to America. In 1717 parliament had passed the Act for the Further Preventing Robbery, Burglary, and Other Felonies and for the More Effective Transportation of Felons and Unlawful Exporters of Wool; and For the Declaring the Law upon Some Points Relating to Pirates — better known as the Transportation Act. This marked the beginning of the large-scale removal of criminals to foreign shores. Over the next 60 years or so about 40,000 convicts were sent to America.

Unlike the later transportation to Australia the transporting of convicts to America was privately run. Convicts were sold by their gaolers to shipping contractors, who took them across the Atlantic and sold them to plantation owners for the duration of their sentences.

America ceased to be a convenient dumping ground for convicts following the War of Independence. The revolt that began in the 1760s turned into a full-blown war, triggered by resentment in the colonies about the unfair taxes the British government was extracting from them. In December 1773 a number of Boston radicals dumped a large quantity of British-owned tea into the harbour in what became known as the Boston Tea Party. During the following years a number of colonial delegates, including George Washington and John Adams, met in Philadelphia and famously denounced 'taxation without representation'. The year 1775 saw the first serious outbreak of hostilities, at the Battle of Bunker Hill, in Massachusetts, which the British won, but they also incurred heavy losses. In 1776 the American colonies issued their Declaration of Independence and the British dispatched their biggest ever force to fight overseas.

A number of major battles were won by either side. The Americans were supported by France, which joined the war on their side in 1777. The decisive battle was the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia in May 1781, where British General Cornwallis surrendered and more than 6000 of his soldiers were taken prisoner.

When news of Yorktown reached London, the parliament moved to end the war, despite the opposition of George III, who wanted to continue the British military commitment until the insurrection was crushed. His prime minister Lord North duly continued fighting but was forced to resign in March 1782, in the face of declining parliamentary support for the war. After three short-lived prime ministerships, 24-year-old William Pitt ('the Younger') came to power in December 1783, and it was he who was head of the government when the decision was made to establish a convict colony in Australia.

The loss of the American colonies was a crushing blow to the prestige of the British Empire, and meant that the British no longer had a convenient dumping ground for their surplus convicts. The selection of the site to establish the new convict colony took many years, and Botany Bay was only chosen as a last resort when all the other options had been eliminated.

In 1779 the House of Commons had established a committee to find a workable solution to the escalating prison problem. The committee heard from a number of witnesses who argued for the establishment of a convict colony in a number of overseas locations, including Gibraltar and sites along the west African coast. The committee noted that because of the American War of Independence it 'was not in the power of the executive government at present to dispose of convicted felons in North America'.

When asked by the parliamentary committee which location he thought was best for the establishment of a penal colony eminent botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who had sailed with Cook on the Endeavour a decade before, praised Botany Bay's fertile soil and plentiful water and food.

Joseph Banks Esq. being requested, in the case it should be thought expedient to establish a colony of convicted felons in any distant part of the Globe, from whence escape might be difficult. And where, from the fertility of the soil, they might be able to maintain themselves, after the fifth year, with little or no aid from the mother country, to give his opinion what place would be the most eligible for such settlement, informed your committee that the place that appeared to him adapted for such purpose, was Botany Bay.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Convict Colony"
by .
Copyright © 2019 David Hill.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Videos