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  It’s the small details that matter. He’d shaken his head when preparations for the Calcutta’s voyage were underway and all those bureaucrats in the naval office – the same men occupying the sort of comfortable, well-rewarded positions he so fully deserved – kept sending him a constant stream of orders and suggestions. Didn’t they understand he, of all people, knew the importance of looking after all those sacks of seeds destined for the new land? Of course those sacks of turnip and peas and lettuce seeds had to be regularly brought on deck and aired so damp did not set in.

  This is a man, after all, who, while stationed in Halifax in Nova Scotia as the war against the American colonies drew to an end, busily wooing Maria Proctor and keeping a close eye on the progress of his career, still had time to write to his mother regarding a recent letter he had received from his younger sister.

  ‘Nancy must mind her spelling, and not stick her letters too close together, nor too upright, but give them an easy inclination to the left,’ he’d said, before signing off with ‘Oh, how I long once more to clasp them all to my bosom.’

  The details are important because when Collins sailed with the First Fleet back in 1787 so many of them were overlooked. He’d gone to New Holland as an aide to its first Governor, Arthur Phillip. They had known, even then, that a new colony would need builders and engineers – and what had they been given by the admiralty? A horde of diseased and malnourished prisoners whose hatred of authority was ingrained after months and years of being flogged on the hulks. What incentive was there for them to help lay the foundations for the metropolis Phillip imagined might one day become a major trading and export hub for the Empire?

  Collins and Phillip were kindred souls. Phillip had made it his business to know the background of every one of the almost 1500 people who had undertaken one of the greatest mass sea journeys in history. He’d argued with the public servants over the number of razors they had requisitioned. And he had been just as angry and bitter as the convicts when they discovered Duncan Campbell had been up to his usual tricks and shortchanged the fleet when it came to food supplies for the prisoners.

  Duncan Campbell. Now there’s a name you might like to roll around your mouth before spitting it out, William. He was the Scottish merchant who had overseen the prison hulk system, appointing all those brutal overseers and presiding over all that misery. Campbell changed the meal allowance for the First Fleet’s 736 convicts without consulting anyone, substituting half a pound of rice each week for the previously agreed pound of flour per convict.

  Well here’s some good news. Campbell has just died at home in Kent. A little hard to hear the cheering on all those hulks back in Portsmouth and on the Thames when you are in the middle of the Atlantic … but good riddance to a man who had profited from so much misery.

  Collins had remained at that first settlement in Port Jackson for eight long years, many of them closely by Phillip’s side. He’d been there that day in Manly Cove when an Aboriginal had sent a 12-foot spear through the Governor’s shoulder. He’d been there that legendary evening in Sydney Cove when the female prisoners from the fleet were finally allowed onshore and a riotous orgy fuelled by rum and heat and relief at finally being on land went on all night.

  The next day it had been David Collins who had broken the seal of King George III and opened two leather cases to read aloud Phillip’s royal instructions. They had herded the convicts together and forced them to squat under the harsh sun as Collins, relaying the King’s wishes, told Phillip he could build as many ‘castles, cities, boroughs [and] towns’ as he deemed necessary. After that, and after Phillip had scolded the convicts and marines for the previous evening’s excesses, Collins had joined the rest of the senior officers under a shady tent for a lunch of cold mutton. The sheep had only been slaughtered the night before but already it was flyblown and crawling with maggots, a taste of what lay in store for the fledgling colony.

  See what happens when a man does not pay attention to details? The Calcutta’s journey will be different. Collins and the ship’s skipper, Daniel Woodriff, will allow the convicts on deck whenever conditions allow. Hammocks and bedding will be washed, the holds inspected daily and cleansed as often as possible. There will be no repeat of the nightmare that became the remnants of the Second Fleet that Collins watched limp ashore in Sydney Cove back in 1790. More than a quarter of the convicts perished during the journey and more than half were diseased when they arrived.

  Several of the ships had been so ancient and in need of repair that during the journey sea water regularly seeped into the convict hold as the prisoners lay shackled, shivering from the cold, their bodies festering with sores from scurvy and the abominable food the private contractors dished out in miserly portions. One convict who managed to survive wrote home to tell his family of the ordeal: ‘When any of our comrades that were chained to us died, we kept it a secret as long as we could for the smell of the dead body, in order to get their allowance … and many a time have I been glad to eat the poultice that was put to my leg for perfect hunger. I was chained to Humphrey Davies who died when we were about halfway, and I lay beside his corpse about a week and got his allowance.’

  ‘The misery I saw amongst them is indescribable,’ recalled a witness who watched the survivors – boat loads of living dead with hollowed cheeks and clumps of missing hair – rowed ashore after they finally arrived. ‘Their heads, bodies, clothes, blankets, were all full of lice. They were wretched, naked, filthy, dirty, lousy and many of them utterly unable to stand, to creep, or even to stir hand or foot.’

  All those years of hardship hardened David Collins. Eight years away from the asthmatic Maria, who had lost their only child shortly after birth. At least there was some consolation – he could momentarily put aside all those wretched images and bury his head in the bosom of Ann Yates, a convicted burglar with whom he fathered two children.

  But all those years away from home, money always a problem, watching his career ambitions slowly vanish as he became just another figure in a forgotten backwater of the Empire … no wonder a man became despondent. ‘I find that I am spending the prime of my life at the farthest part of the world,’ he’d written to Tooker Collins, ‘… without credit, without … profit, secluded from my family … my connections … under constant apprehensions of being starved.’

  All those years in that land of thin soil and poisonous snakes and hostile Aboriginals and recalcitrant convicts saw a callus develop over that tender heart. As Judge Advocate of the colony, Collins ruled over civil and military trials and liked to consider himself a fair man. But he rarely thought twice about using the rope.

  James Bennett, an 18-year-old transported for highway robbery, was one of those who had to appear before Magistrate Collins after being charged with stealing biscuits and sugar from the transport ship Friendship.

  On a cold autumn morning at Sydney Cove, Collins informed Bennett he was to be hanged immediately. The young man, who had pleaded guilty to some but not all of the charges, was led to a tall eucalyptus tree nearby, blindfolded with a handkerchief and helped up a ladder where a noose was then placed around his neck.

  Once tightened, the ladder was kicked away. Bennett jerked and died quickly. Collins had made sure a large group of convicts was gathered to watch. These were the lean famine years in the colony and it was time a lesson for stealing supplies was handed out for all to see. But there was more to come. As it began to rain heavily another group of thieves Collins had found guilty of lesser offences were tied to the old gum tree and flogged. Bennett’s body dangled slowly above them, a puddle of rainwater forming below his feet.

  Good thing your grandfather sent you off all those years ago to learn the art of bricklaying. Without that you might still be stewing on those hulks and not here on the Calcutta. At least you get to suck in the fresh salty air and put that big body to good use. ‘The treatment I received on the passage was very good,’ you will remember, ‘and, as I endeavored to make myself useful on board
, I was permitted to be the greater part of my time on deck, assisting the crew in working the ship.’

  You and Marmon were selected by the ship’s surgeon, Edward Bromley, from a list of 400 convicts to make the trip. There will be some who will become suspicious about Bromley and whether he has the best interests of this mission to Port Phillip at heart; he receives a 10 pound bounty for every convict he lands in the new country, so naturally he has gone looking for the healthiest and least damaged specimens he can find. But they have you listed as a bricklayer – one of six – and there are carpenters and cabinetmakers and butchers and ropemakers also making the journey. Huge improvement on the First Fleet and another example of how so many of the small details were overlooked, despite Phillip’s best intentions. London had expected that fish would supply a significant amount of food for the new colony – but no-one had thought to give a berth to a single fisherman.

  Still, it’s nowhere near what Collins had wanted and as he looks out at the convicts shuffling about on deck there is little that might change his judgement about this collection of ‘old, worn out, useless men, or children equally as useless’.

  It’s certainly no place for a nine-year-old boy. What was Bromley thinking? William Appleton is barely four feet tall, his face so pasty he looks jaundiced and in desperate need of a good feed and a warm, comforting arm. In June last year he was taken from his father’s care in Westminster and shackled and hauled before Justice Conant at a hearing in Middlesex. Been pinching money from a milkman – six shillings and a bloody apron. That’s all. Kid should have been kicked up the arse and told some sphincter-tightening stories about what happens to little boys in jail before they sent him home. Instead, Conant sentenced him to seven years’ transportation and they had taken little Will to the infamous Newgate prison before sending him down to the hulks at Woolwich until the Calcutta was ready. God knows what he saw and suffered through in that hell hole but at least now he might finally catch a break. Collins and Woodriff will let him go without irons for the entire trip and one of the marines – the very decent Sergeant Thorne – will effectively adopt him once they settle in the new world.

  There you go. A happy ending just when you were thinking this bleak world had run out of them. Young Will, once he’s grown up, will actually make his way back to England.

  There’s another nine-year-old convict on board – William Steel.

  Steel was sent down the same day in Middlesex as Appleton. Justice Conant was having a decent outing with badly behaved children that day. Steel was convicted for the same crime as you – stealing Irish cloth. No rosy outcome here, however. Steel is never going to make it to adulthood. In a little over a decade he will be executed for exchanging stolen goods and assisting bushrangers in Van Diemen’s Land. His body will be hanged in chains to serve as a warning to others.

  Three hundred and eight convicts, sharing this ship with officers and seamen – and just behind the Calcutta sails its supply ship, the Ocean, with dozens of settlers on board. So many of you, some with no birth date, no idea who their parents really were, and who will soon vanish back into the wash of history, leaving little trace they were ever here. Some are destined to rise up and leave their mark – perhaps not as famously as you – finding wealth and even, on rare occasions, greatness. Others, already bludgeoned and beaten down by life’s vicissitudes, will keep surviving the only way they know – by stealing and forging, then feeling the lash once more on their backs. Some of the world’s first bushrangers are on this ship; others will become pirates and at least a couple will undergo such a reformation they will be appointed police constables.

  By far the smallest of the convicts is 12-year-old William Jones. Another cloth stealer. Another William. He has a dark complexion and a pair of legs so crooked that even if you straightened them he still wouldn’t reach four foot. They have already marked him out as a servant for the officers’ mess – see, David Collins hasn’t run out of empathy yet – and in the years to come Jones will overcome his handicap to become a fine hunter of kangaroo and emu before embarking on a career as a sailor.

  The oldest convict – and he must seem ancient to you – is 57-year-old gypsy Robert Cooper. He’s come from the Captivity hulk in Portsmouth after being sentenced to seven years on suspicion of stealing seven donkeys. Cooper won’t be seeing the wife again. Despite his years he still has a full head of black hair. But a nice cut above his left eyebrow and another on his forehead has him marked as one to watch by the guards, who have listed him as ‘lusty’. Some gypsy he will turn out to be. He will survive well into his 90s in Hobart Town, running a handful of cattle on a 30-acre land grant.

  You will form friendships with some of these fellow convicts. Men like Joseph Johnson, a 26-year-old labourer from Derbyshire, transported for life for horse stealing. You won’t see him for almost 35 years but when you do – both of you well into your 50s with so many stories to tell – Johnson will extend a hand when you need it most. Hard to believe but the man will own thousands of acres and have servants of his own.

  George Lee is on board somewhere, too – the well-educated passer of forged bank notes who wrote all those letters complaining about the buggery going on in the hulks. Probably not your type, though, constantly spouting quotations from the Classics and impersonating the officers of the Calcutta just to draw a few laughs.

  You don’t want to upset the officers. This journey is going to be long and hard enough without them all over your back.

  8

  A STOPOVER; THE WOMEN OF RIO; THE DEAD THROWN OVERBOARD

  Another one dead. The corpse, wrapped in canvas and weighted with a cannonball, lies on the deck of the Calcutta as the good Reverend Robert Knopwood prepares to send it over the side and down into the black depths. It is late Saturday morning, 7 May. A northerly wind carries showers and gloom. This is the third death in four days and Knopwood is becoming a dab hand at this.

  ‘Unto Almighty God,’ he says, as the ship sways and heaves through a north-easterly swell. ‘We commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the deep, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world the sea shall give up her dead …’

  The body under that shroud is Stephen Byrne, a 36-year-old silk weaver and thief. The Calcutta’s third lieutenant, Nicholas Pateshall, is about to scribble in his diary that Byrne has died from ‘mere disability brought on by seasickness’. Yesterday it was John Thomas, a butcher sentenced to seven years for stealing seeds. The day before, Knopwood had sent Ann Stocker into the deep. That had been an upsetting afternoon for everyone. The first death of the journey, little more than a week from home, and a heavily pregnant woman at that. Ann had decided to make this trip with her husband while he served 14 years for possessing forged bank notes. But she had fallen sick immediately after leaving Portsmouth and her deterioration had been swift.

  She is not the only one to fall prey to the roiling seas. It has been rough and wild and even experienced sailors have been looking a touch green. A few nights ago the officers were forced to sleep in the wardroom. You’ve experienced conditions like this before – that ocean crossing to the Netherlands was almost as bad as the battles that followed. But there are hundreds of convicts here who have never been to sea before and that smell rising up out of the decks below … it no longer carries with it the strong scent of tar and turpentine, does it?

  You’re going to meet more than your share of reverends and priests and other servants of God in the years to come. But none of them will come close to good old Bobby Knopwood. That nosey kid scampering around on deck – little Johnny Fawkner – will regard Knopwood as a fraud in the years to come, a man who can never look you straight in the face, who always tilts his head to the side and peers elsewhere while you’re talking to him, as if he has a dark secret that someone might see by looking deep into his eyes. Might be one of the kid’s more accurate character assessments.
Could be that Knopwood is hiding something. He’s certainly one of those old school reverends, a sermoniser who will invoke the wrath of God from the pulpit, then that night reach for a second bottle of wine as a busty woman reclines in his lap.

  The man has a daughter back in England he has hardly seen. He’s the third and only surviving child of a well-off family from Norfolk who blew much of his inheritance gambling and drinking with a crowd of royals and had to become a naval chaplain to make ends meet. He knows how to cosy up to power, does Bobby. In his cabin is a copy of David Collins’ book. What better way to win a seat most nights at the Lieutenant-Governor’s table?

  When he is not carousing into the night – ‘Where I dine I sleep,’ he likes to say – Knopwood is a fastidious diarist with a maddening habit of misspelling names and obsessively recording weather conditions he crimps from the ship’s log. When the Calcutta and Ocean arrive at Tenerife in the Canary Islands off Africa’s west coast for a brief stay, he accompanies Collins and Captain Woodriff on land to meet a British shipping agent. They make their way into the centre of town when Knopwood realises they are treading on ground reeking of history. ‘We landed on the very place where Lord Nelson lost his arm … Here it was that British seamen and Marines were repulsed when they attached [sic] Santa Cruz …’

  Is there anyone in Britain who is not familiar with what happened six years earlier? In a battle with the Spaniards for control of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Horatio Nelson had stepped ashore to personally take charge after several British attacks had been fought off by the Spanish. Nelson was immediately hit by a musket ball in his right arm. Bleeding heavily, the rear admiral was taken back to his ship where he refused to be helped aboard.