The Fatal Shore Read online

  Inside Newgate one simply rotted away, staring through the bars (or, as the phrase went, “polishing the King’s iron with your eyebrows”). No work was done there. The central idea of the Victorian penitentiary, as proposed by Bentham and his Panopticon and first tried in Philadelphia—that prison should be a place of isolation, discipline and systematically graded punishment alleviated by precise injections of hope—was quite new and untried in the reign of George III. It affected neither the way judges thought about sentences, nor the manner in which prisons were run. The project of creating a captive society within the state, populated by convicts fed and housed at public expense and repaying an offended world (however nominally) with forced labor—in short, the idea of the penitentiary as it developed after 1820—would have struck the rules of Georgian England as utterly chimerical. Jails were simply lockups, and no one was “improved” by a spell in one. They were holes in which prisoners could be forgotten for a while. Their purpose was not reform, but terror and sublimation. But they were also meant to turn a profit.

  About half the jails of England were privately owned and run. Chesterfield Jail belonged to the Duke of Portland, who sublet it to a keeper for 18 guineas a year. The Bishop of Ely owned a prison, the Bishop of Durham had the Durham County Jail, and Halifax Jail belonged to the Duke of Leeds. Their jailers were not State employees but small businessmen—malignant landlords—who made their profits by extorting money from prisoners. On entering the Bishop of Ely’s lockup, a prisoner was chained down to the floor with a spiked collar riveted round his neck until he disgorged a fee for “easement of irons.” Any jailer could load any prisoner with as many fetters as he pleased and charge for their removal one at a time. The “trade of chains” though often denounced as a national disgrace, survived well into the 1790s.

  One paid for food, for drink—the prison tap room, dispensing gin, was a prime source of income for jailers—for bedding, water and even air. A well-off prisoner could live in some ease (although nothing could buy him immunity from typhus, the endemic disease of eighteenth-century prisons). For poorer men, the system was crushing. The entrance fee at Newgate was 3s., the weekly “rent” 2s. 6d., the charge for sharing a straw mattress with another prisoner is 6d a week. These sums sound small, but they often represented the full amount for which a debtor or thief had been clapped in prison, and there was little or no hope of earning them inside. “The prisoners have neither tools nor materials of any kind,” wrote John Howard, the pioneer of penal reform, in the 1770s,

  but spend their time in sloth, profaneness and debauchery … Some keepers of these houses, who have represented to magistrates the wants of their prisoners, and desired for them necessary food, have been silenced with the inconsiderate words, Let them work or starve. When these gentlemen know the former is impossible, do they not by that sentence inevitably doom poor creatures to the latter?33

  Howard travelled all over collecting material for his monumental report, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777). He drew a detailed picture of this hidden world, of which the respectable and literate knew nothing—its crowding, darkness and scant rations, the cruel indifference of the Bench and the venal favoritism of wardens, the garnish and chummage and easement fees, the cell floors awash with sewage, the utter lack of medical care, the fatal epidemics. Even the air was unbreathable. Howard discovered that

  my cloaths were in my first journeys so offensive, that in a post-chaise I could not bear the windows drawn up: and was therefore obliged to travel on horseback. The leaves of my memorandum-book were often so tainted, that I could not use it till after spreading it an hour or two before the fire: and even my antidote, a vial of vinegar, has after using it in a few prisons, become intolerably disagreeable.34

  The idea that prisons could not reform criminals but were incubators of crime was the merest commonplace in the 1780s; everyone, magistrates included, took it for granted. There was no attempt to classify or segregate prisoners by age, sex or gravity of crime. Women were thrown in the same common ward as men, first offenders with hardened recidivists, inoffensive civil debtors with muggers, clerkly forgers with murderers, ten-year-old boys with homosexual rapists. All prisoners, authority thought, were united by the common fact of their malignant otherness. They had crime in common, and that was enough. There was no need for fine distinctions in the black hole.

  The common simile for the prison was a monastery or seminary, a closed order of people who studied vice, not holiness—an appealing figure in its perfect inversion. To Henry Fielding in 1751, prisons were “no other than … seminaries of idleness, and common sewers of nastiness and disease.”35 Howard, echoing him, saw them as “seats and seminaries (as they have very properly been called) of idleness and every vice.”36 The line continued to Australia in the 1820s, where one finds Governor Thomas Brisbane complaining that “The Convict-Barracks of New South Wales remind me of the Monasteries of Spain. They contain a population of consumers who produce nothing.”37

  However, it was Dr. Johnson who most pithily set forth the vision of Georgian jails as anti-monasteries:

  The misery of gaols is not half their evil … In a prison the awe of publick eye is lost, and the power of the law is spent; there are few fears, there are no blushes. The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious. Everyone fortifies himself as he can against his own sensibility, endeavours to practice on others the arts which are practised on himself, and gains the kindness of his associates by similitude of manners. Thus some sink amidst their misery, and others survive only to propagate villainy.38

  Such passages indicate how far apart modern and Georgian penal ideas are. In practice, high-security prisons are still human zoos. But the liberal view is that a jail is a sad but necessary expedient, harsh but susceptible of reform, which, if decently run, can keep a criminal out of social circulation without making him or her much worse. No such opinions were held two hundred years ago. Then it was clear that prisons, before they are institutions, are concentrations of criminals: Their institutional definition began with the fact of criminality, not the hope of reform, and their essential nature was to degrade all their occupants by the relentless moral pressure of the group. The prison pickled the felon in evil, hardened him, perfused him with the hard salt of sin. Hence the loathing in which English jails were held by those who would never see the inside of one. They were the republics of a sublimated criminal class; they belonged to the antipodes of crime, not to the bright world of authority, which they represented only in a nominal way. In due course, this train of thought would provide the underlying logic of transportation to Australia. For transportation made sublimation literal: It conveyed evil to another world.

  Howard’s The State of the Prisons had an immediate effect on thought and the drafting of law. But practical reforms were slow in coming. The English authorities talked incessantly about the need for new jails, legislated for their urgent construction, but did not actually build them. Within two years of the publication of Howard’s report, an act of 1779 called for two large prisons in London, designed along the lines Howard advocated, with provision for work, segregation of the sexes, and confinement in single cells rather than common wards. They were not even started. In 1786 the prime minister, William Pitt, wrote to William Wilberforce, the great liberal abolitionist who was pressing him for prison reform, that “the multitude of things depending, has made the Penitentiary House long in deciding upon. But I still think,” he added vaguely, “a beginning will be made on it before the season for building is over.” Again, no beginning was made, but in the summer of 1788 Pitt reassured Wilberforce that penitentiaries “shall not be forgotten.”39 Forgotten they were, because by then the Government could only see one remedy for the increase of crime and the apparent ineffectiveness of prisons: transportation “beyond the seas.”

  Transportation—forced exile, in plain English—had undeniable merits. It preserved the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, as the felon was left alive. At the s
ame time he was removed from the realm as completely, if not as permanently, as any hanged man. Transportation got rid of the prison as well as the prisoners. It supplied Britain with a large labor force, consisting entirely of people who, having forfeited their rights, could be sent to distant colonies of a growing Empire to work at jobs that no free settler would do. Free-born Englishmen had always disliked the idea of laboring bands of convicts engaged on public works at home. A bill of 1752 introducing public chain-gang labor as punishment for criminals was rejected by the Lords partly because security was too great a problem but mainly because the sight of chain gangs in public places was felt to be degrading. How could onlookers distinguish such a punishment from outright slavery? In the New World, there would be no such problem.

  The germ of the transportation system lay in a law of 1597, 39 Eliz. c. 4, “An Acte for Punyshment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars.” In essence, it declared that obdurate idlers “shall … be banished out of this Realm … and shall be conveyed to such parts beyond the seas as shall be … assigned by the Privy Council.” If a “Rogue so banished” returned to England without permission, he would be hanged.

  It was through this act that in the seventeenth century, convicts under commuted death sentences were sent across the Atlantic to labor on the plantations of the Virginia Company. Sir Thomas Dale, Marshal of Virginia, took three hundred “disorderly persons” with him in 1611, but they turned out so “profane and mutinous,… diseased and crazed that not sixty of them may be employed.”40 Still, bad labor was better than none in the New World; the Indians could not be enslaved, while the English gentlemen of the Virginia Company had an extreme distaste for manual work. Soon Dale was asking for two thousand more convicts. “All offenders out of the common gaols condemned to die should be sent for three years to the Colony; so do the Spaniards people the Indies.”41 And from 1618 onward, a steady infusion of felons came to England’s embryo settlements in the New World, to Puritan Massachusetts as well as to the tidewater settlements of the South. Most of them were common criminals. Some were Scots and English prisoners-of-war taken by Cromwell at the battles of Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651); others—mostly shipped to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Barbados in the 1650s—were Irishmen who had been so unwise as to resist the invasion of the Lord Protector.

  After 1717, transportation was stepped up and rendered fully official by a new act, 4 Geo. I, c. 11, which provided that minor offenders could be transported for seven years to America instead of being flogged and branded, while men on commuted capital sentences (recipients of the King’s Mercy) might be sent for fourteen. English jailers did excellent business by selling these luckless colonists to shipping contractors, who in turn sold them (or, to be legally precise, the rights to their labor during their seven or fourteen years) to plantation-owners in the Caribbean and America. For the next sixty years, about 40,000 people suffered this thinly disguised form of slavery: 30,000 men and women from Great Britain, 10,000 from Ireland. This steady drainage of felons, averaging fewer than 700 people a year, kept the crowded jails of England from crisis.

  But after 1775, the crisis could no longer be postponed. The American colonies rebelled. One result of the revolution was that the British could no longer send its convicts there. The American air filled with nobly turned resolutions against accepting criminals from England, for a new republic must not be polluted with the Crown’s offal. This was cant, since the American economy was already heavily dependent on slavery. The real point was that the trade in black slaves had turned white convict labor into an economic irrelevance. On the eve of the American Revolution, 47,000 African slaves were arriving in America every year—more than English jails had sent across the Atlantic in the preceding half-century. Beside this labor force, the work of white indentured convicts was inconsequential; the Republic did not need it.

  As soon as the American outlet was stopped up, English prisons began to overflow. At first, the Crown did nothing about this. The Americans would surrender sooner or later, and then the convict transports could ply the Atlantic again. In July 1783, only a month before Britain was forced to recognize the United States at Versailles, George III wrote to Lord North: “Undoubtedly the Americans cannot expect nor ever will receive any favour from Me, but the permitting them to obtain Men unworthy to remain in this Island I shall certainly consent to.”42

  So the English did not enlarge their prisons and in 1776 they found a compromise. The idea of forced convict labor on public works no longer seemed so tainted with slavery. It was dusted off and Lord North drew it up as 16 Geo. III, c. 43, known as the Hulks Act, a stopgap meant to last only until the American insurgents were crushed.

  The Thames and the southern naval ports of England were dotted with hulks—old troop transports and men-o’-war, their masts and rigging gone, rotting at anchor, but still afloat and theoretically habitable. Convicts sentenced to be transported would now be kept on them until the government decided where to send them; this would relieve the bursting land prisons. Tactfully, the Hulks Act did not mention the revolt of the American colonists. It made a virtue of necessity by noting that transportation had deprived England of people “whose labour might be useful to the Community.” These men would now be set “to Hard Labour … cleansing the River Thames.” Thus the felons “might be reclaimed.”

  But the convicts jammed on the hulks were no more reclaimed than the Thames was cleansed. By 1790 their number was rising by about one thousand a year. Not only had the problem of security become acute, but typhus was by then endemic and the prospect of general infection terrified free citizens outside. The authorities would have done almost anything to get rid of the criminals their laws had created. Clearly, transportation must begin again—but to where? They chose the least imaginable spot on earth, which had been visited only once by white men. It was Australia, their new, vast, lonely possession, a useless continent at the rim of the world, whose eastern coast had been mapped by Captain Cook in 1770. From there, the convicts would never return. The names of Newgate and Tyburn, arch-symbols of the vengeance of property, were now joined by a third: Botany Bay.

  * In English currency, d. stands for pence (one penny used to be equivalent to 1/240 of a pound; it is now 1/100 of a pound); s. stands for shilling (one shilling is equivalent to 1/20 pound, or 12 pence).

  3

  The Geographical Unconscious

  i

  TO GRASP what exile to such a place meant, one must think of the size of the world in the late eighteenth century, so much vaster than it is today.

  In the 1780s, most of the world was still unknown to Europeans. The outlines of all the continents but two, Australia and Antarctica, had been traced. In profile, it had today’s shape, but immense blanks lay behind the coasts. North America was a populated eastern fringe tacked onto millions of square miles of wilderness. The interiors of South America, Asia and Africa were scarcely explored. No European had ever visited the high Himalaya, the fountains of the Nile or the poles; while the Pacific basin, to all except the most educated Englishmen in 1780, was the least imaginable of all.

  The social strata from which the convicts would be drawn knew little about the remoter facts of geography. Perhaps seven Englishmen in ten still lived in the countryside; the urban population of England would not outnumber the rural until 1851. Fixed to the soil and its demands, such people did not travel; their world had a radius of ten miles or so. Because they did not read, news came to them erratically and no English newspaper, in any case, sold more than 7,000 copies.1

  For most people, the Pacific remained as obscure and unimaginable after Captain James Cook’s death as it had been before his birth, and as monstrous: an oceanic hell. Nevertheless there was a deposit of rumor and legend about it, a myth that filtered into popular culture. This was the idea of a Southern Continent, set in the antipodes. It was first raised by two late classical geographers, Pomponius Mela and Ptolemy. Symmetry, Pomponius Mela argued in A.D. 50, demanded suc
h a continent. The northern continents must be balanced by an equal land mass below the equator. In this land, terra australis incognita, Pomponius placed the source of the Nile. Supported by the prestige of Ptolemy, the father of Renaissance geography, this Southern Continent survived the flat-earth doctrines of the medieval scholars, and Marco Polo seemed to confirm it. The Venetian wanderer described how, coming home from the kingdom of Cathay, he had sailed south to “Chamba” (modern Vietnam) and thence southwest for 1,200 miles, to a place named Locac.

  Locac was the Malay Peninsula, but an ambiguity in the text anchored it somewhere between the East Indies and the South Pole, far below the equator, thus turning it into the Southern Continent. As such, with its name corrupted to Luchach, Locach or Beach, it appeared in the maps of influential sixteenth-century cartographers such as Mercator and Ortelius. Without the colossal mass of Locac, Mercator wondered, what would stop the world toppling from its axis?

  By the end of the sixteenth century, Locac was encysted with fable. To some, it was the golden country, filled with every kind of wealth—jewels, sandalwood, spices—and inhabited by angelic beings: an embellishment upon the myth of the Terrestrial Paradise. To others it was the land of deformity. Legends of the freaks and wonders of India had proliferated since Alexander the Great’s Indian expedition (327–325 B.C.)—dog-headed men, basilisks, people whose faces grew on their chests or who had a single huge foot which, during siestas, shaded them from the equatorial sun. These creatures infested medieval books and Romanesque tympana; they were invoked in sermons, in glosses on the Bible, in romances and epics, and by Shakespeare.