Tickets of leave and pardons

This is one of a series of pieces that may or may not ever see the light of day in a book: it is more likely than not that I will be self-publishing my Colonial Concerns, from which this is taken, as an e-book: it turned into a huge opus (a quarter of a million words of Australian history) that frightens print publishers. If and when the e-book happens, I will edit this to indicate where it can be obtained. In the interim, this is available to students of all ages, complete with sources. Some of this text also appears in my Five Mile Press book, Not Your Usual Bushrangers, (2015).

Convicts were given sentences of seven years, 14 years or life, but there were ways to get free before that time, and there were ways that a sentence could be extended. The well-behaved and obedient convict could hope for advancement and a degree of freedom.

On the other hand, the sulky, disobedient or lazy convict could expect punishment. It was the “carrot and stick” model. Sadly, convicts found the model more the sort of thing that donkeys encountered, where the carrot is dangled on a stick attached to the donkey. As it moved forward, so did the carrot, so the reward was always out of reach.

There were stages for an assigned convict. Step 1 was a ticket of leave, which gave the prisoner, while still technically a prisoner, the right to live free and earn wages, or to work in a trade or to start a farm, but only within a particular district. A format for a ticket of leave was published in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser in 1806, after this introduction:

THOSE Male and Female Prisoners who remain under Sentence of the Law, and have been indulged with Permission to get their own maintenance on Tickets of Leave, and who have not appeared according to the Order of the 8th instant, will be put to Government Labour if they do not give their Names in on or before the 31st instant, when Tickets of Leave, according to the following form, will be given to those whom the Governor may consider deserving a continuance of that indulgence:

Spaces to be filled in on the printed form included name, the English court the person was sentenced at, the ship he or she was transported in, the date on which the sentence expired, and the date of issue. The tickets were all numbered.

Over the years, the system evolved, but a set of proposed rules for granting a ticket-of-leave, published in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser in 1826 will give you a sense of the uphill battle that convicts faced, and how the struggle was used to set them against the bushrangers.

Basically, a prisoner sentenced to 7 years’ transportation had to serve four years with one master, or five years with two masters. A prisoner sentenced to 14 years must have served six years with one master; eight years with two; or ten years three masters. A lifer needed to have served eight years with one master; ten years with two; or twelve years with three.

There were safety nets of a sort. Where a change of service was not due to any fault of the convict (for example, the death or departure of the master from the colony), this first requirement could be worked around. Prisoners assigned to “government work” were treated as if they had been assigned to a master.

Informers and villain-catchers could jump the queue. A convict who caught two runaways who had been absent not less than forty-eight hours; or one recognised bushranger or felon; or one who turned in a receiver of stolen property, gained a credit of six months’ faithful service. Several captures might even be enough to produce an instant ticket.

Convicts seeking a ticket had to apply to the nearest Bench of Magistrates at stated periods. Character references were required, but only from the local magistrates If the prisoner’s master thought the prisoner undeserving, he could say so, but there was no longer requirement for a master to certify the prisoner as deserving.

Tickets applied to a single district, the one covered by the bench of magistrates granting it, and ticket holders were to be mustered, either quarterly or half-yearly by the nearest Magistrate. The Governor’s permission was required for any ticket holder wanting to move to another district. Magistrates could, however, give passes to allow travel out of the district for up to one month.

Ticket holders who caught runaways, or bushrangers, or gave information leading to the conviction of receivers of stolen property, or of persons harbouring prisoners, were to be rewarded by an extension of their tickets to two or more districts.

Ticket holders had to attend church every Sunday if they lived within four or five miles of a place of divine worship and offenders could lose their tickets. Even if you managed to win your ticket, there were many, many ways to lose it again, as we can see from a surviving list of cancellations.

 In one 1841 list of cancellations, there were eleven cases of drunkenness, two of drunk and immoral conduct and one each of being drunk and disorderly and being drunk and assaulting a constable. Another gave rum to a prisoner, while two forged letters saying that their wives had died in England, documents that would have allowed them to marry in Australia. Others stole horses, went missing, gave shelter to bushrangers or escaped prisoners, or were found to have been involved in assault, or improper or disorderly conduct.

The second step was a conditional pardon, which made the convict free, but not allowed to return to England or Ireland. A ticket of leave holder could get a conditional pardon after six years, but only after furnishing “… the most satisfactory testimonials of uninterrupted good conduct for a period of six years …” from the date of his ticket.

Absolute pardons allowed the former prisoner to leave Australia, though these pardons were usually only granted after an act that their fellow prisoners would regard as treachery. There were all sorts of requirements in the way of gaining that reward.

By 1813, the demand for conditional pardons was so high that Governor Macquarie announced in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser that applications for pardons would only be accepted on the first Monday in December. Each application had to be accompanied by certificates of good character from the local clergyman and principal magistrates.

That wasn’t the end of the story: in 1816, Governor Macquarie wanted a lot of public works completed: the colony needed roads, bridges, churches and public buildings, so he announced that there would be no tickets of leave granted that year, because all the convicts were needed for public service.

Of course, if the governor decided to reward a convict who delivered up one or more bushrangers, that was still a choice he was free to make, but there was only one way out of the penal system — obedience. Life as a convict was far from pleasant.

Grog and tucker

This is the intro to chapter 5 in the same large project.

Some people think tucker is an Indigenous word, but its first recorded appearance in Australia (in the food sense) was in early 1856, on the Bendigo goldfields.

There are a number working on Sydney Flat, some very successfully, but the majority are just making what they call ‘tucker.’ [1]

The tucker-bag itself showed up in print in May 1865, but it was probably in use before that. On the other hand, grog is a venerable English word. It comes in a roundabout way from a cloth known as grosgrain or grogram, a coarse cloth, favoured by Edward Vernon as a boat cloak. He was a Royal Navy captain at 21, and a rear-admiral at 24, and the men called him ‘Old Grog’, on account of his cloak.

Vernon served successfully for many years until (according to his admirers) he was forced out because he was right too often. By then he had won many famous battles, but none so famous as his battle against sailors’ rum. He said too many Jack Tars went aloft with too much good Jamaica rum under their belts, lost their footings, and fell to their deaths.

In 1740, drunkenness was still killing sailors, so Vernon ordered that the rum be watered before it was issued. The daily allowance of one pint of rum per man was mixed with a quart of water in a scuttled butt, a barrel with one end removed and kept for that purpose.

This mixing was done on deck, supervised by the lieutenant of the watch, to make sure no man was cheated of his proper allowance. The sailors said Old Grog was depriving them of a life’s essential, and called the watered rum “grog”. The word came to Australia, where Bowes Smyth heard it used in the earliest days of the colony. The storm he refers to below is the one that produced the animal-killing lightning bolt mentioned at the start of this book.

The Sailors in our Ship requested to have some Grog to make merry wt. upon the Women quitting the Ship indeed the Capt. himself had no small reason to rejoice upon their being all safely landed & given into the Care of the Governor…The Scene wh. presented itself at this time & during the greater part of the night, beggars every discription; some swearing, others quarrelling others singing, not in the least regarding the Tempest…. [2]

This was the way the colony would go, and the nation followed in the footsteps of the colony. At first, people just wanted the oblivion rum brought, to shut out the harshness that surrounded them, as Reverend Johnson observed on November 15, 1788, looking on his flock with disappointment.

They prefer their Lust before their Souls, yea, most of them will sell their souls for a Glass of Grogg, so blind, so foolish, so hardened are they. [3]

Seven years on, things had improved very little, Johnson said on 27 November 1795.

Numbers of people have become settlers. The careful & industrious do well, but by far the greatest part spend in drinking, their crops, as or even before they become ripe. Hope this abominable Traffic will be checked, if not abolished by the present change of Govt. [4]

Part of the problem in the early days came from the sailors. According to David Collins, there was a lack of supervision as well, but grog was the worst part:

Petty thefts among themselves began soon to be complained of; the sailors from the transports, although repeatedly forbidden, and frequently punished, still persisted in bringing spirits on shore by night, and drunkenness was often the consequence. [5]

In the 1840s, Louisa Meredith found that drunkenness was all too common among the servants, especially at Christmas:

I have heard of a Christmas-day party being assembled, and awaiting the announcement of dinner as long as patience would endure; then ringing the bell, but without reply; and on the hostess proceeding to the kitchen, finding every servant either gone out or rendered incapable of moving, the intended feast being meanwhile burned to ashes. Nor is this by any means a rare occurrence; as the crowded police-office can bear ample testimony. [6]

It wasn’t just the convicts, either, as she had seen the same thing among free people, like the wife of a turnpike-keeper near Homebush, who collected the tolls on the Parramatta road.

One day Mr. Meredith was driving a friend to the races at Parramatta, and on reaching the turnpike, this engaging female was discovered seated at a table by the door, with a cup and a half-gallon bottle of rum beside her, the effect of which was already evident; she offered Mr. Meredith a ticket, which he told her was not required, as she knew him so well from his passing constantly—“Oh, sir, you’d better take it, for I shan’t know anybody by the time you come back!” [7]

Australians learned early to make Christmas dinner an outdoor picnic.

William Westgarth saw drunkenness on the way to the diggings in 1852: two men “transferring the weight and contents of a bottle or two of their baggage from the outward to the inward man”. [8]

---

[1] The Age, 18 January 1856, 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/154859885

[2] Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, 1787 – 9, 6 February.

[3] George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, 1954, part 1, 24.

[4] George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, 1954, part 2, 11.

[5] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798, 7.

[6] Louisa Ann Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 128.

[7] Louisa Ann Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 58.

[8] William Westgarth, Victoria, Late Australia Felix, 213.

Australian accents

This is the start of chapter 4 in the new book that I have been working on. No hints as to the subject matter, not just yet.

Until about 1945, many Australians talked of Home. In My Country, Dorothea Mackellar contrasted their love of field and coppice with her love for a sunburnt country. Home (pronounced with a capital H) was Britain, and most of them wanted to go there, or go back there. Whether they ever got there or not, much of the white population had been half-way around the world at least once, or their parents had. Australians were travellers and we still are.

Sit in a coffee shop in Riga, a wine bar near Rome’s Spanish Steps, a restaurant in Bergen, a Greek café in Banff, a chippie in Glasgow, a tapas bar in Cuzco or a bangers and mash restaurant in Reykjavik, and when you hear Australian tones (and you will), project your voice and say “G’day!” with your mouth hardly moving, and your vowels as flat as a roadkill goanna after a road train convoy has passed by.

Then, from the corner of your eye, watch the Australian heads turn, seeking their unseen compatriot who may have news from back home. That’s the news we want now, not news from Home, and that single “G’day!” reminds us of where our home really is.

One thing is certain: wherever you go, Australians will always be there, somewhere in the crowd, because Australians love to travel—and that travel habit began with the convicts.

Shipwrecks

Recapping what I said in a recent essay, every ship has to be a compromise. Sailing vessels must trade off a reduction in strength from thinner hulls in order to float higher and sail faster—or to carry more cargo. A broad-beamed vessel would carry more cargo, but it would wallow along, losing time. The tea clippers were lean, narrow and beautiful, and carried a light cargo, the new season’s tea, from China to a waiting world, eager to pay a high price for fresh tea.

The wreck of the Admella in Australian waters was a colonial scandal and cause for concern, but the loss of the Royal Charter in late 1859 was a far greater concern in Britain. Charles Dickens visited the site of the wreck and wrote about it in The Uncommercial Traveller, while every British man and his dog held an opinion on the cause.

Royal Charter was a famous iron ship which had gone from Liverpool to Melbourne in 59 days. The Reverend Captain William Scoresby FRS had travelled to and from Australia in the ship in 1856, studying how the compasses behaved, because compass adjustment was still an inexact art at best. 

Scoresby wanted to study the interplay of terrestrial magnetism and compass deviation on board an iron-hulled ship, but achieved little before he died in 1857. The meagre results of his researches were published posthumously in 1859.

Scoresby was a famous whaling captain who later became a parson and scientist. Aside from the link to Scoresby, the ship’s owners also made her famous, advertising her speed. Royal Charter was 2719 tons, and had 200 hp auxiliary engines, so the ship was 8 times the weight of Admella, but she only had twice the engine power. Royal Charter also had sails, which became part of the problem.

Late in August, the ship left Hobson’s Bay in Victoria with half a million pounds (around $100 million today) worth of gold and 400 passengers, bound for Liverpool. Reaching Ireland in late October, she anchored off the Cove of Cork, and some of the passengers sent letters and telegrams by the Petrel pilot-boat to their family and friends, then the captain pushed on for Liverpool as the weather closed in.

A wild storm on October 25 wrecked more than 200 vessels, but one ship grabbed people’s attention later. Off the Skerries, the Royal Charter signalled for a pilot, but no pilot could put out. The ship anchored, but both cables parted in quick succession. Wind pressure on the masts and rigging probably added to the strain, but the skipper may have avoided getting rid of the masts, fearing that the stern screw might be fouled by some of the lines that would still be attached– or perhaps he thought the masts would not go over the side cleanly.

The ship struck and the masts were then cut away, but it was too late. Guns of distress were fired, blue lights were sent up, and a line was put ashore. The captain sent 16 crew members ashore to work the line, but before anybody could be landed, the ship broke up and only 39 of the 498 passengers and crew survived.

A writer styling himself ‘Amicus’ wrote to The Times on December 6, arguing that iron ships were made of poor quality iron called ‘boat iron’. The writer wondered why a ship, a mere 50 yards offshore with a hawser in place saw so many deaths. The Great Britain had stayed aground for a whole winter without breaking up, and ‘Amicus’ said other examples showed that a well-built iron ship was safe, but Royal Charter was made of materials as wrong as a Yankee trader’s wooden nutmegs, a grocer’s sanded sugar or a petty swindler’s sewing cotton that is shorter than advertised.

Three days before the ‘Amicus’ letter, The Times reported that the plates had been tested earlier, and had then been found to be “above standard”. The view now is that the captain of an ordinary sailing ship might have dropped anchor, but the proud skipper of a famous fast ship felt impelled to rely on a drastically underpowered engine which could only drive the ship at eight knots per hour (“knots per hour” was the common usage in 1859) in dead water, according to The Times. It was a learning experience, but a harsh one.

H. Hallock and Isaac Smith announced in Scientific American that they had designed a state-room, self-contained and sheltered below a deck that might open, a room able to be sealed and equipped with food and water for those within. In an accident, the state-room would be detached and allowed to float free of the ship. It had a pump to keep waters at bay and lamps that could be lit at night. The idea sank without trace.

Other inventors were determined that warships, which by definition carried explosives, would be safer. In France, La Gloire was launched in 1859, described as the world’s first iron-clad, though Korea had iron-clad ships in the late 1500s. A ship of the line in the early 19th century used 3500 oaks, the product of 900 acres, timber which needed to be seasoned fir up to 25 years, but saving trees was not La Gloire’s inspiration, because she was timber beneath the plating. The ship was a response to the burning of the wooden Turkish fleet at Sinope in 1853 by the Russian navy’s explosive shells.

The launching of La Gloire signalled the end of the wooden warship, because where one nation led, others had to follow. In 1860, the Royal Navy’s HMS Warrior had guns mounted on a single deck, running 380 feet, displacing 9000 tons. The last wooden British ship-of-the-line was a three-decker launched in 1859, but by the end of the century, timber ships had been replaced by iron and steel dreadnoughts weighing 20,000 tons.

Charles Atherton wrote to The Times in January from Woolwich Dockyard to share his idea for making vessels with an interior of light material up to the waterline. Gunboats, floating-batteries and mortars could benefit, he said. The solids might consist of “cork shavings, light wood sawdust, rush stems, cotton waste, flocks, hemp, and other lightweight material, which, by the aid of a solution of gutta percha or other chemical process, would form a solidifying mass, so tough that it could not be knocked to pieces by shot, and so light that it would only be one half the specific gravity of water, and therefore, unsinkable, however perforated by shot…”

Atherton had previously offered a similar idea for treasure ships, so they would float, allowing recovery of the riches. It took until the end of the year for Scientific American to mention the idea, when a writer said that cork would not suit because heated shot could set fire to it, but a suitable material ought to be able to be found. Half a century on, most lifeboats were fitted with sealed cork-filled compartments and self-draining seacocks to keep them afloat under the worst of conditions.

The unsung heroes of SARS

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On February 28, 2003, the Vietnam French Hospital of Hanoi, a private hospital of about 60 beds, contacted the Hanoi office of the World Health Organisation. They reported a patient with an unusual influenza-like virus, and hospital officials suspected an avian influenza virus.

They asked if someone from the WHO could take a closer look at the case, and Dr Carlo Urbani, a specialist in infectious diseases, answered that call. In 1999, Dr Urbani was president of MSF-Italy (the Italian branch of Médecins sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders, usually referred to as MSF) and he was a member of the delegation in Oslo, Norway that accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

Urbani’s courage in dealing with the new disease seems not to have been given proper recognition, but I would like to list him here as one of the heroes of 21^st century medicine.

The patient he was asked to look at was the first case of the first recorded outbreak of SARS, and due to the actions that were taken by the MSF volunteers, quite deliberately and selflessly, Urbani and several other unnamed health workers died.

That was the cost: the benefit was that the outbreak in Vietnam was the first to be brought under control, after just 63 cases and five deaths.

Urbani concluded that the small private hospital was facing something unusual, and for the next several days, he worked at the hospital, documenting findings, arranging for samples to be sent for testing, and reinforcing infection control.

The hospital established an isolation ward that was kept under guard. Urbani worked directly with the medical staff of the hospital to strengthen morale and to keep fear in check as SARS revealed itself to be both contagious and virulent. Of the first 60 patients with SARS, more than half were health care workers.

The heroism came when many of the staff members made the difficult decision to quarantine themselves. To protect their families and community, some health care workers put themselves at great personal risk, deciding to sleep in the hospital and effectively sealing themselves off from the outside world.

In some ways, say MSF people who briefed me on this at the time, the SARS outbreak in Hanoi is a story of what can go right, of public health coming before politics. First-line health care providers quickly alerted the WHO of an atypical pneumonia.

Dr Urbani recognised the severity of the public health threat. Immediately, the WHO requested an emergency meeting on Sunday, March 9, with the Vice Minister of Health of Vietnam.

By March 19, a team of MSF workers was in place. Additional specialists from the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) arrived on the scene, and MSF provided staff members as well as infection-control suits and kits that were previously stocked for outbreaks of Ebola virus.

On March 11, Urbani began to experience symptoms during a flight to Bangkok. On his arrival, he told a colleague from the CDC who greeted him at the airport not to approach him.

They sat down at a distance from each other, in silence, waiting for an ambulance to assemble protective gear. He fought SARS for the next 18 days in a makeshift isolation room in a Bangkok hospital. Carlo Urbani died on March 29, 2003.

His decisive and determined intervention bought precious time and saved lives. Although he would be gratified that so much was accomplished to beat SARS in such a short time, he would certainly point out that the other diseases he worked with—such as the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, which kill millions of people each year—deserve to be treated with similar urgency. Such a man would undoubtedly have pointed to his colleagues who also died in the battle.

The MSF is a volunteer organisation, but needs funds to operate, and welcomes donations. Yes, that’s a hint.