Bolters, part 5 of many

Filling the First Fleet

Before you could have convicts escaping in Australia, you had to get them here. The British newspaper-reading public learned of their government’s plan to settle felons in Australia in 1786, but The Times’ location of Botany Bay on the west coast tells us that Australia was still an unknown land. (For readers outside Australia, Botany Bay is on the east coast.)

This settlement is to be formed at Botany Bay, on the west side of the island, where Captain Cook refreshed and staid some time on his voyage in 1770. As he first sailed around that side of the island, he called it New South Wales…[1]

It went on: there would be 680 male felons and 70 females, 12 marines and a corporal in every transport, a naval escort, and a few of the ships would remain to get the garrison of 300 men established. There would be provisions for two years and “implements for the culture of the earth, and hunting and fishing, and some slight buildings are to be run up immediately till a proper fort and town-house are erected.”[2] It took The Times another three weeks to decide that this was a good thing.

[It] must meet with the approbation of all moderate men. No measure has been yet devised, which so effectually combines the punishment and the security of the felons. [3]

After that, the Botany Bay plans were almost daily news. Some people talked about the place, others sang about it, but even if you hear it said on television or if you read the words in story books, no convict’s sentence featured the phrase “transported to Botany Bay” until June 1791. Botany Bay was occasionally mentioned in court before that, but only informally. [4]

Instead, they would be sentenced to be transported “to the Eastern coast of New South Wales, or some one or other of the islands adjacent” (or as ordinary folk understood it, to “Botany Bay”). The strange wording was a legal tactic to prevent appeals if the settlement planned for Botany Bay had to be located elsewhere.

Preparations to send the First Fleet began well before it sailed, as we can see if we take a close look at one day, early in 1787, when Elizabeth Hayward and Elizabeth Beckford, the oldest and youngest women convicts in the First Fleet, agreed to be sent to Australia for seven years. Later that day, another 26 men and women accepted transportation rather than hang but one prisoner firmly refused any offer of clemency. We will come to him later.

On that day, 10 January, 1787, the two Elizabeths faced separate theft charges at the Old Bailey. Elizabeth Hayward was 13 or 14 when she left England, so she must have been only 12 or 13, that day in court. She was the youngest female convict in the first fleet, sentenced to be transported for stealing a gown worth 4 shillings, a bonnet worth 2 shillings and a cloak worth 1 shilling. The Old Bailey records show that Hayward, an apprentice, was accused of taking these items from her master, Thomas Crofts, and pawning them. [5]

Elizabeth Beckford was charged with stealing twelve pounds weight of Gloucester cheese, value 4 shillings (40 cents today, but worth much more in 1787), the property of Henry Austen. The report says “The prisoner was taken instantly with the cheese”, meaning she was caught red-handed. She was sentenced to be transported for seven years. [6]

The convict transport Lady Penrhyn carried women convicts and a few children. At some time between 1 and 10 June 1787, Arthur Bowes Smyth, the transport’s assistant surgeon, wrote a list of his ship’s convicts in his journal. He wrote then that “Elizabeth Haward” was 13. Three pages before that, he had listed Elizabeth Beckford as 70, but a month afterwards, he gave her age as 82. At either of those ages, she was the oldest female convict. [7]

The two women were undoubtedly thieves, but before we judge them harshly, young people used to be apprenticed at about the age of 12. They got almost no pay, and usually, their families paid the master a fee called a premium. An apprenticeship lasted quite a few years, and for the first one or two, the apprentice did menial tasks like sweeping and cleaning, work only marginally related to the trade they were supposed to be learning. Apprentices lived in the master’s house, and were fed by the master, but there was little joy in the life of an apprentice.

There was no joy, not even a dim glimmer of hope for joy left for older people. There was no aged pension, and an old man or woman with no family or savings had to steal, or go into the workhouse. The inmates there would be fed horribly, treated worse, and exposed to terrible diseases. Remember those diseases, because they figure in the next story...

So perhaps we should not blame the two Elizabeths too much for stealing, though it was a risky choice, because being caught was also dangerous. If prisoners avoided hanging, the gaols of Britain were filled with deadly diseases like tuberculosis, spread by coughing, and “gaol fever” (we call it typhus today) which was spread by lice. Anyhow, the two Elizabeths gratefully accepted their fates and both left England in the transport ship Lady Penrhyn. Who knows, perhaps the idea of a new life in a new country gave them a shred of hope?

On 10 January 1787, a total of 96 people faced trial at the Old Bailey for various offences. By day’s end, 11 women and 19 men had been found not guilty, one woman and four men were sentenced to be whipped and gaoled, one woman and three men were merely gaoled, 17 men were sentenced to hang, while 12 women and 28 men were sentenced to transportation.

One year later, on 10 January 1788, the women convicts in Lady Penrhyn were cowering under the fury of a storm off the NSW coast, having been at sea since the previous May. Perhaps the survivors regretted their decision to accept transportation then, but they reached the calmer waters of Botany Bay some ten days later. By then, Elizabeth Beckford wasn’t there: she had died on the night of 11–12 July 1787, when Smyth gave her age as 82. [8]

Elizabeth Hayward was not the youngest person on board her ship. The convicts’ children listed by Smyth as being on board Lady Penrhyn were William Tilley (6 weeks), Mary Mullins (3), Mary Fowles (4), Jane Jones (8) and John Harrison, aged 15.

Elizabeth Hayward was flogged in Sydney for insolence, soon after arriving. She later went to Norfolk Island when John Hudson did, and she, too, was flogged there. (Norfolk Island was later a terrible place, where only the worst convicts were sent, but in the early days, the island was used to grow food for the main colony and it was slightly more pleasant then, though floggings were quite normal.)

Hayward left Norfolk Island in 1813 as the wife of Joseph Lowe, along with two of her children. A woman named Elizabeth Lowe died at Launceston, and was buried at St John’s, Launceston 29 October 1836, “aged 66”. That makes her about six years too young to be our Elizabeth, but such errors were not unusual, and that may be our last trace of the youngest woman convict. If so, she got a good life in the end.

At the end of the day, another 17 men and 2 women who had already been sentenced to hang, accepted transportation for life, while six men and a woman, also due to hang, felt transportation for seven years was a far better option, but as we saw earlier, one youth disagreed. He wanted only to escape his life.

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[1] News report, The Times (London, England), 14 September 1786, 3; Issue 529. The Times stories are located in a Gale database which is hard to access. I use it through the State Library of NSW: ask your librarian for help.

[2] Ibid.

[3] News report, The Times (London, England), 6 October 1786, 2; Issue 548.

[4] Search for “Botany Bay” (with the quote marks) at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ The first 40 entries will give the browser some curious insights.

[5] Old Bailey Records, ELIZABETH HAYWARD, SARAH PHILLIPS, Theft > grand larceny, Theft > receiving, 10 January 1787. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?ref=t17870110-60, Reference number t17870110-60

[6] Old Bailey Records, ELIZABETH BECKFORD, Theft > grand larceny, 10 January 1787. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?ref=t17870110-67 Reference Number: t17870110-67

[7] Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, 8 August 1787.

[8] Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, 9 July 1787, near the end of the page.