Wayfaring with fossils.

I have been writing a piece this weekend for younger readers. It's about how geology is everywhere, and I'll probably post it here as well, at some stage, but in the end, I decided not to discuss fossils, but to refer them to this blog, because, as a quick click on the fossils tag below will reveal, fossils are one of my longest-lasting temporary obsessions in and among these pages.

In particular, I decided to refer them to my tale of smuggling a fossil out of Britain. There was no crime in this, but for good and valid scientific reasons, I needed to hoodwink an idiot. When I looked, though, I realised that I have never told that story here, nor is it in my Australian Backyard Earth Scientist.

It is, however, in my Mistaken for Granite, and now, finally, it's here.

Ammonite, Morocco.

Fossils were once anything that was found buried, including archaeological material, and this confusion lives on in some quarters, as this true tale will reveal.

In 1993, I was working for the Australian Museum as an educator, but I had been seconded to an aid project in the Pacific (training science teachers), and I brought home a pickled Giant African Land Snail.

Knowing these snails ought to be a dubious import into Oz, I declared it, outlined the preservation methods used to ensure that it was sincerely dead, explained that it was destined to reside in the Australian Museum, and I was told “You know more about this than I do. Take it.”

Clearly, I had pre-empted the argument phase, but equally clearly, I act honestly. That had to change in late April that same year, when I was forced to get an export safely out of Britain.

A colleague at the museum, knowing I would be in Edinburgh, had asked me to courier home a type specimen of a Devonian fish that he had lodged with the Royal Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh some years earlier.

I agreed, took the right letters to effect the loan, collected the fossil in bubble wrap and cardboard and set off, with the appropriate documents saying what it was, and that it was a proper and legitimate loan.

All was well until I arrived at Heathrow on my way out. As I had all the papers, and worried that there might be questions if I did not show what I had, I declared the fish. The customs officer spoke impeccable English but let us just say that he was clearly of non-British parentage and culture. “You can’t take that,” he said.

I asked why not. “You don’t have the appropriate EU documentation, and you are stealing our heritage.” Now I might have said, “Mate, this is a Scottish fish, I’m a genetic Scot, and it’s being loaned by a Scottish museum to a Scot in Australia—and he found it in the first place—and you're no Scot. So just whose heritage are we talking about?”

I didn’t, because that is not my way. I could see the surreal aspect, but I was diplomatic. It availed me nothing. He still demanded that I surrender the object as yet uninspected, which lay in my carry-on bag. I argued, and explained that it was one of a kind. It was a type specimen, and special to science. He produced an alphabetical list of sciences on a sheet of paper. “Is this archaeology or zoology?”

“Neither,” I said. “It comes under palaeontology.”

He bristled, sensing that I was being smart or worse, and scrutinised his sheet of paper. Because I’m good at reading upside-down, I pointed to the word he was seeking. “It means ‘study of fossils’,” I said.

I had, however, recognised that this gentleman, for all that he was polite, well-informed on paperwork and probably well-meaning, was either untrained or as thick as two bricks—or both. I concluded that this was not somebody who could be trusted to look after a type specimen and treat it with due care.

A type specimen is very special to scientists: it is the original specimen from which a name was given. My colleague had found this fossil, described it and named it, but now it needed some further study, which is why he was borrowing it.

I had, in the same bag, a piece of partly metamorphosed shale from Wales, wrapped in newspaper, so as I was arguing, I brought that to the top of the bag. It was, after all, of no real value to me. Let me emphasise that I did not, at any time, imply that this was the fossil because I am, after all, a totally honest man. I spoke no lie. I cannot reasonably be held to account for the wild conclusions made by the Great Unwashed of Britain.

His hand darted out, seized the package, and tipped the stone out of the protective wrapping so it landed with a bang onto the counter (confirming my assessment of him), turned it over, dug at it with a grubby thumbnail (further confirmation), then handed it back. “I suppose you can take it,” he told me, somewhat reluctantly.

I thanked him nicely, wrapped the Welsh shale again, placed it protectively over the fossil fish in its bubble wrap, and walked off.

I said nothing until I was home, when I told an edited version of this story in a British weekly, New Scientist, as part of a discussion on rare fossils being sent through the mail, the risks they were put under, and the need to have customs officers examine them. The officers needed to be educated first, I said.

My colleague examined the fossil fish as necessary, and it was later couriered safely back to Edinburgh, though not by me. I was lying low, and having outed myself, I have avoided Heathrow ever since, because they may still be waiting for me.

Bolters, part 9 of many

Clarke the Barber

A few convicts were accepted by the Indigenous people, but the original inhabitants were choosy. Watkin Tench wrote, probably about John Caesar, a man of African ancestry, who was one of the rejects:

One of the convicts, a negro, had twice eloped, with an intention of establishing himself in the society of the natives, with a wish to adopt their customs and to live with them: but he was always repulsed by them; and compelled to return to us from hunger and wretchedness. [1]

Watkin Tench interviewed the survivors of one group of escaped convicts known as Bryant’s party and reported that when they approached land, while sailing along the coast from Sydney to Timor, they often had to flee when threatened by locals. [2]

Against that, we have the more successful adoption cases of William Buckley in Port Phillip (said to be the original Buckley of “Buckley’s chance”), Eliza Fraser of Fraser Island, Barbara Thomson who was rescued from Torres Strait by the crew of HMS Rattlesnake and Tarwood’s party, taken in by the Indigenous people at Port Stephens, north of Newcastle (you will meet them in #11). Some whites were fitted in, and were able to fit in.

And that brings us to a runaway convict called George Clarke, otherwise known as ‘the barber’. Clarke escaped from the Hunter Valley and lived among the Kamilaroi people. He had the scars of an initiated man, but he had been stealing cattle.

Recaptured and questioned in 1831, he had a tale to tell. He said he had heard of a river called the Kindur, running to the north-west, and decided to follow it, hoping to reach another country. He claimed to have followed the Kindur, a fine broad river that flowed to the northwest all the way to the sea. Ernest Favenc argued plausibly that Clarke’s yarn was fabricated to save him from a flogging when he returned but, naturally enough, Clarke the barber claimed that it was all true.

The river was navigable, so ships could sail it, he said, and it flowed on. He was not sure how far it went, but it never flowed to the south of west. In other words, here was a perfect path to take people up into northern Australia, a marvellous river on which to progress toward great riches. He pitched a good yarn: see for yourself:

I always had a great desire to be free from all restraint, and the last time, which is the third that I took to the bush, I determined to proceed as far into the interior as I could get. I also thought, that by making important discoveries in the interior, I should have been pardoned, and have received encouragement from the Government.

I soon effected a junction with a tribe of blacks at Liverpool Plains, and by acquiring their language and assimilating to their manners, I also acquired their good-will. They treated me as one of themselves. I quitted my European costume a little at a time, and felt no inconvenience whatever from the loss. As remaining with this tribe, although attached to me, was not my object, for fear of being recognised by my countrymen, I joined another tribe, and went with them to a place called in the native language Bresa, about 30 miles to the north-west of Liverpool Plains.

I particularly remarked, that the natives, as soon as we got beyond the stations of the settlers, assumed a more active and cleanly appearance; indeed, the wild tribes in the interior are a much superior race to the blacks who frequent our stock stations. From Liverpool Plains I proceeded with a third tribe to Tuaubilla, about 200 miles north-west from that place without discerning any thing of note.

The country was remarkably rich in pasture, well supplied with water, and covered with many large plains. A river, the Numeva, runs from Liverpool Plains to Tuaubilla, which is well supplied with fish. Proceeding down the Numeva, a short distance beyond Tuaubilla, the ground became boggy, and at last presented one vast bog or morass, the river holding its course through the centre.

We crossed a range of mountains to the north, and after a few days, arrived at another river of some magnitude, named Keindooa. There I left the tribe I had come with, as they were returning, and I joined another who inhabited the country north-west of the river Keindooa. The country from this river, changed its aspect altogether. The land was low and level, with few mounts, and without any extended range of hills. The verdure was luxuriant, quite different to any I had before seen.

Grass herbs in abundance, and in clear parts, a multitude of enormous sow-thistles. The grass there produces a large seed, which is gathered by the natives, pounded between stones into a pulp, and baked in the ashes as food. It was palatable, and resembled bread made from grown wheat.

The Keindooa is divided from the Numeva which last is known to my countrymen) by a range of mountains difficult of access. There are few passes over the mountains, but one of them, if improved, would afford an easy ingress to the flat country for drays and horses. The difficulty in crossing the range, consists in the scarcity of water, which, unless the springs be known to the traveller, would leave him exhausted and oblige him to return.

The part where we made the river Keindooa (after crossing the range) was called Curribingee. Thence we proceeded down the river about west. About 250 miles to the north-west of Curribingee, there is a burning mountain called Coorala. The flame and smoke emitted from the mountain can be seen a great distance. I did not ascend the mountain. Round the base is a quantity of red stone, resembling pumice stone; also a substance resembling allum, which, dissolved in water, had the same taste. The natives say, it is to be had in large quantities. It is called by them Boullau.

We proceeded down the river and at last made the sea, into which the Keindooa discharges itself with a broad mouth. The coast was rather low as far as we could see, and just in sight to the south-west we saw an island; but no other land to sea-ward Along the coast, trees, the wood of which is of a deep red colour, had been felled apparently with a small blunt axe; the barrel of each tree (of a good length) had been cut out by a similar instrument, but was gone.

The natives informed me, that people of a light colour came there with large boats, and took the wood away to the northward. I determined to keep with this tribe, until the return of the adventurers, and then to join them; but in the mean time, we again proceeded into the interior. The coast presents a low bleak appearance, and about mile and a half from the sea, the strand is bounded by a low range of mountains, which run along the coast.

When this range is crossed, the country is fertile in the extreme, and very beautiful, as I have before described. There is another species of wood there, which I never saw before, milk white, with a very fine grain, but so hard, that it is difficult to cut it, The natives make their bumbarines and other instruments of war out of this wood, which never breaks; the leaf is in shape like that of the oak, but very rough.

The trees cut by the strangers and removed, were low and very umbrageous; the leaf of a dark blue colour. The pine tree grows in abundance in this country, and is very tall and straight. The natives are remarkably cleanly, kind, and industrious; in nowise like the blacks about the settlements of the Colony. They are provided with tomahawks and knives made from a blue transparent stone, of uncommon hardness, seldom or never breaking.

They grind them to a fine edge by means of other stones. The river Keindooa abounds with fish; one in particular being very fine, resembling a cod-fish, only having very large sharp fins. In the country at the upper part of the river is found stones of beautiful appearance, but what to call them I know not. There are no kangaroos in that country, but there is a small species of bush wallaby, very small; plenty of emu however and black swans, geese, ducks, and birds of fine plumage.

In hopes of being able to provide myself with a few necessaries from my countrymen at Bathurst, I returned by another route to Mullala (250 miles from Bathurst), where I was captured by Serjeant Wilcox. As I never committed any crimes beyond those of theft; I was in hopes my sufferings and my discoveries would have induced the Governor to extend a pardon to me at once, when I would willingly have conducted a party to the places I now describe, and I would also have made other discoveries, which might have proved of service to my country.

GEORGE CLARK

H. M. Gaol, Sydney, Jan. 1832. [3]

The government fell for it, as governments will, because they wanted to believe. A navigable river would be better than an inland sea, and the acting governor of New South Wales, Sir Patrick Lindesay, sent Major Thomas Mitchell out to investigate in November 1831. He went across the Peel, over the Hardwicke Range, and reached the Namoi River about three weeks later.

Expecting a navigable waterway, the party had come equipped with canvas boats, but these snagged in the river, so the party reverted to horseback. They reached the Gwydir, turned west along it for 80 miles (128 kilometres), then struck north to a grand river known locally as Karaula. Mitchell followed this down till the Gwydir joined it and, given that it was heading south, deduced that this was Sturt’s Darling River.

Some of the early explorers who were born and raised in Europe had problems when it came to travelling in Australia. They followed river valleys, because they were used to glaciated landforms where the valleys were broad and easy to walk along. In the old Australian geology, where chasms had been carved by millennia of rare floods, that was not a good move.

Australian valleys were often steep-sided and hard to get out of, and the narrow defile at the bottom was usually blocked by rock fragments that had tumbled down at some point after the valley was carved. Worst of all, there was usually no crystal stream gurgling along, as there would be in any decent European valley.

In the same way, based on what was known of other continents, Major Mitchell, like Banks, Grey and others, was willing to believe in the myth of a great river, stretching across the continent, even though careful mapping of the coast had failed to reveal the mouth of any such river. He had been told by a liar that the river existed, and that was enough.

All the same, if the Kindur River was a non-starter, the rivers had to flow somewhere, so the prospect of an inland sea remained good. Just as the Greek and Roman originators of the European culture once saw their world as surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, so the new Australians dreamed of a continent surrounding an inland sea, hopefully with snow-capped alps somewhere about the Gibson Desert—but not everybody was convinced. Eyre certainly was doubtful.

---

[1] Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, 144.

[2] Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, 147.

[3] The Sydney Monitor, 15 February 1832, 4, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/32076934?#pstart4294645

John Conway's 'Game of Life'.

I have been silent for a week or two, locked down by covid-19, and getting two e-books ready for release, one of these, Playwiths, is STEAM activities suitable for young minds, retired engineers and parents looking for stuff to enlighten minds.

A goodly part of that is recreational mathematics, so when I heard this morning that John Conway had fallen victim to the nasty virus, I felt ashamed that I had never written anything about his delightful Game of Life.

That involves higher mathematics and I mainly do lower mathematics, so this is just to get you started.

John Conway’s Game of Life

In October 1970, fans of recreational mathematics encountered The Game of Life in Scientific American. In those days, before personal computing, we either had programmable calculators or we used pen and paper to amuse ourselves. The calculators couldn’t do Life for us, so it was done on paper. A few, a very few, were able to play it on university computers, but I was a paper player.

All you needed was a grid with some coloured in squares, and a set of rules for generating a new set. A cell that was filled in was live, one that was empty was dead. In the next generation:

any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours died;
any live cell with two or three live neighbours lived on;
any live cell with more than three live neighbours died;
any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours became live.

The simplest starters or seeds were called Still Lifes, because they never altered

 Four still life forms: block, beehive, loaf and tub

Some seeds alternated between two types, and these were called Oscillators. To find out why they get their name, you will need to take up pencil and paper, or look up <“game of life” oscillators> Here are some oscillator seeds, named blinker, toad and beacon:

From left to right, blinker, toad and beacon.

To see how you analyse these shapes, here are marked-up versions of the two stages of the beacon:

  Beacon stage 1        and        Beacon stage 2

This is one to research for yourself, because there isn’t room for any more here, except to note that this shape, known as the r-pentomino, is a methuselah.

The r-pentomino.

And the other e-book? It's called Looking at Small Things, and it's about wee beasties, small bits on plants and animals and other fine detail, using all member of lenses and microscopes. I'm still tidying up around the edges for Small Things, but if you look in the links, you can see how to buy the book from Amazon Kindle, or get it for free.

Henry Handel Murphy (dates unknown) and Murphy’s Law

As we don't know when Murphy was born or died, his admirers celebrate the anniversary of his leaving Sydney on March 29.

* * *

While Murphy’s Law is commonly quoted in laboratories all over the English-speaking world, few have heard of the tragic life of the original Murphy, a man whose life makes one of the saddest stories in the history of science.

The disasters and near-disasters began surrounding him almost as soon as he was born, and dogged him all of his days. For example, Murphy was to be named after the novelist Charlotte Bronte, and was only saved the ignominy of being called Charlotte because the registry clerk who handled the case was cross-eyed.

As an adult, Murphy began to study the mathematical theory of disasters, parallelling the much later ‘catastrophe theory’ almost exactly. Failing to get recognition for his work in Europe, Murphy packed his belongings into a large crate, together with some of his new patent magnets, and sailed for Australia in the sailing vessel Dunbar.

His magnets were another failure, as they tended to change their polarisation without warning, and sometimes even to develop identical poles at both ends, at which point the magnets would repel themselves into a small heap of iron filings.

There are those who maintain it was Murphy’s magnets (the ones which survived the long trip) that caused the Dunbar to be wrecked at the Gap near Sydney, when they affected the ship’s compass. We will never know now: but we do know his records of his disaster theory were all destroyed in the wreck, save for a few tantalising scraps which he painstakingly wrote out in his old age, only to see them eaten almost immediately by a passing rat.

Soon after his arrival in Sydney, Murphy married, and soon the union was blessed with several children, causing the strongly religious and ecstatic Murphy to make his often-misquoted comment “Thank Heavens for small Murphies”.

Murphy's shovel refurbisher

Needing to earn money to keep his family, and unable to hold down permanent employment, Murphy began work on his classic text on agricultural instruments, The Book of Shovels, although most extant editions incorporate his other two works in this genre, the slim volumes entitled Westward Hoe and The Rake’s Progress. “I believe in calling a spud a spud,” said Murphy of this work.

He also worked briefly as a mender of implements, but his "refurbisher" was ahead of its time, requiring electricity which was, at that time, not available in Australia.

The seminal influence of Murphy on the old cobblers of Sydney who worked in chamois leather will be apparent to anybody who has read the chapter entitled ‘The Soft Shoe Shovel’, while the recovery of Australia’s film industry shows the influences he had on the interpretation of the work of that fine cinematographer, Charles Shovel.

But Murphy’s finest influential hour comes in his definitive interpretation of the explorers X. Hume and Shovell. These two fine examples of the sun-bronzed pre-Anzac gave rise to the expression digger and browned which many years earlier had been expressed in the music of Bach, according to some commentators.

This of course, is totally wrong, for Bach’s music was notably contrapuntal, and, in spite of the claims of his more strident critics, Murphy was admirably unopposed to puns. His critics even offer quotations to prove their case, but we now know that what Murphy actually said was that the bun was the lowest form of wheat. Regrettably, it seems that the agricultural reporter to whom he spoke had been keeping an ear to the ground, and still had mud in his ears.

That said, his music was very modern and most of his works were destroyed by outraged music lovers. For example, the illustration on the left shows the only surviving portion of his Coffee Can't Hurt Her, scored for prepare lagerphones and unprepared soprano.

It is believes that this fragment represents the moment when the trap door opened under the lagerphone players. It seems that they were less prepared than they should have been.

In the end, Murphy turned from rural themes to the study of suburban agriculture, and he wrote a short treatise (To the Victa Belongs the Soils) on what he mistakenly took to be a New Zealand invention, the Rotorua moa. Shortly after, Murphy left Sydney on the brig Hesperus, and was never seen again.

* * *

Post script : If you are going to make your way in the world of science, you need to be able to recognise nonsense when you run across it. I suggest that you analyse the strange tale of Henry Handel Murphy, and identify the key points that you believe to be true facts, and the key points that are complete nonsense.

Much of the pseudo-science you encounter will be like this: a mixture of easily checked facts, and a great deal of rubbish. If you were fooled, perhaps you should read the section on pseudo-science in other places. Or come and talk to me about the swamp land I have for sale . . .

Bolters, part 8 of many

The secret city.

Let us begin with three comments from original sources. The first two accounts cover a mass departure in 1791, the third reveals that 12 years later, the lesson of the first party’s suffering was yet to be learned.

The first party that essayed this undertaking consisted of twenty persons, who set out on the journey in August, 1791; but through want of signposts, or some other essential, on the way, they became bewildered in the woods, and returned to the settlement so squalid and lean, that the very crows would have declined the proffer of their carcases. [1]

Three of these miserable people were some time after met by some officers who were on an excursion to the lagoon between this harbour and Broken Bay [Narrabeen Lake?]; but, notwithstanding their situation, they did not readily give themselves up, and, when questioned, said they wanted nothing more than to live free from labour. These people were sent up to Parramatta, whence, regardless of what they had experienced, and might again suffer, they a second time absconded in a few days after they had been returned. Parties were immediately dispatched from that settlement, and thirteen of those who first absconded were brought in, in a state of deplorable wretchedness, naked, and nearly worn out with hunger. Some of them had subsisted chiefly by sucking the flowering shrubs and wild berries of the woods; and the whole exhibited a picture of misery, that seemed sufficient to deter others from the like extravagant folly. [2]

It has been reported, by persons who were careless whether, they asserted facts or falsehoods, that the natives of the interior have made mention of a set of people whose manners and customs strongly resembled our own; and others, willing to give a still more improbable colour to the imposture, asserted in addition that these distant inhabitants were possessed of bells, churches, masted vessels, a sterling specie, and every other requisite that might seem calculated to convey the idea of civilization. [3]

When the convicts of the First Fleet came ashore, they had little idea of where they were in the world, and for a short while, those who ran away thought China was nearby — or at least within walking distance. Just a few hills away, and they would be in another country, they told each other.

Perhaps they believed it for a while, but then they switched to a more promising tale. This concerned a mythical colony of white people, vaguely located “three or four hundred miles south-west of Sydney”. There were even written travel instructions circulating, complete with a compass rose to make them appear absolutely genuine.

Nobody had been there, so the “route” was drawn with no knowledge of the country. We know now that a south-west path running that far would take escapers through the rugged Snowy Mountains and down into eastern Victoria, somewhere between Albury, Shepparton, Sale and Mallacoota. The country on the way is not for the faint-hearted, but nobody knew that.

Governor John Hunter was a decent sort of person. As an educated man, he knew there could be no mysterious white civilisation out in the wilderness. He worried that many gullible convicts would die in agony or end up returning to an almost equally agonising punishment after pointless travels.

He wrote to a magistrate at Parramatta, instructing him to go to Toongabbie, where most of the believers were working. As it would be impossible to reason the convicts out of their beliefs, the magistrate was to tell them that four picked men would be allowed to start out and satisfy themselves of the impossibility of escape in that direction.

More importantly, three experienced men would be sent with them as guides, to make certain that they returned safely. On the day, a large mob turned up, all agitating to be allowed to go, but in the end, they selected four of their number.

The convicts were determined not to be fooled by the governor. They had hatched a cunning plan to hijack the expedition, with a larger body absconding, meeting the explorers at a pre-arranged spot, murdering the guides and then proceeding to the safety of the fabled white colony.

Luckily for them, this scheme was discovered and four soldiers were added to the party, scotching the plot. One of the guides was a former convict named John (or James, according to some accounts) Wilson, who had spent much of his time with the first inhabitants.

Wilson was a bushranger in the old sense of the word. He had served his time, but then largely turned his back on those of his own nation and learned to live in the bush, taught by his new friends.

His friends gave him an Indigenous name and people said his body was ‘marked and scarred after their fashion’, which, taken together with his being named, suggests that he was an initiated man. Wilson came back to visit the whites from time to time and told tales of wonders he had seen in the bush, but the settlers in Sydney all thought he was a liar.

It didn’t matter: Wilson knew his way around the bush, so he went with the party when they set out on 14 January 1798. Ten days later, the soldiers returned with three of the convicts.

The soldiers had been instructed to return when they reached the foot of the mountains, but the three convicts said they had seen and suffered enough, and begged to be allowed to return with them.

The rest of the party arrived back at Prospect Hill, on the outskirts of the settlement, on 9 February, praising Wilson for keeping them alive. They said they had seen creeks and a large river, but like Wilson’s yarns, some of their tales must now be taken with a grain of salt.

They claimed to have met few natives, but those they saw were dressed in skins from head to foot (unlikely in summer), and they reported seeing a fat mountain wallaroo. They returned with a specimen of a lyrebird and reported dining on ‘a kind of mole’, apparently a wombat, but that was the limit of their achievements.

Wilson died soon after, speared by men of his adopted tribe for breaking one of their customs in attempting to take possession of a woman. (As an accepted member of the Indigenous community, he was expected to know and obey these customs, but it seems that even if he knew, he did not obey.) In Wilson, Australia lost either a good bush wanderer or an excellent storyteller, or maybe both. He remains as a good example of what the early bushrangers (in the original sense of the term) could do.

---

[1] Peter Cunningham, Two Years In New South Wales, vol. 2, 1827, 196 – 7.

[2] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume 1, 1798, 154 – 5.

[3] The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 3 July 1803, 2 – 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/625655

Bolters, part 7 of many

An escapee in Cape Town.

When surgeon John White first landed, he wanted to examine the local wildlife, but he was busy at first, setting up sick-tents. For a while, the only natural history work he could do was by looking at what others caught or shot.

In the course of the last week, all the marines, their wives and children, together with all the convicts, male and female, were landed. The laboratory and sick tents were erected, and, I am sorry to say, were soon filled with patients afflicted with the true camp dysentery and the scurvy. [1]

Later on, White acquired an artist, but only because Thomas Watling was charged with forgery in Scotland. He was, to be blunt, less enthusiastic about being in Australia, even if the authorities were keen to send him there. He was a competent artist, and he probably used his skills to forge guinea notes.

After denying the charge and then considering the evidence and knowing that the punishment for being found guilty was death, Watling asked to be allowed to submit voluntarily to transportation. This was a plea bargain of sorts: it guaranteed him some world travel, but ensured that he would not hang, as he might have done if he had gone to trial and been found guilty.

The authorities agreed, he made his plea and he was sentenced. He and other prisoners were being moved on a small ship to a Plymouth hulk, but when the others plotted to take over the ship, he informed on them.

This was risky, because he would be known as an informant. He got away with informing, but the act of tattling failed to pay a dividend, because he failed to win the remission he asked for. It was denied by Hay Campbell, the Lord Advocate, who wrote to Evan Nepean in about 1789:

As to Watling…his crime was deeper, viz., forgery. He will be an acquisition to the new Colony at Botany Bay, tho’ perhaps it may be right to recommend him to the attention of those in Command there on acct. of the merit he had in this late affair. [2]

In other words, Watling was a criminal who might make good in the new colony, and he was sent to Sydney in the transport Pitt in July 1791. Then he escaped at Cape Town, which was a Dutch colony back then, though he was soon recaptured by “the mercenary Dutch”, as he called them.

They held him for seven months before handing him over to the next suitable British ship, and he finally arrived in Sydney on 7 October, 1792 in the transport Royal Admiral. Then he got lucky, because he was assigned almost immediately to Surgeon John White, who badly needed a skilled artist.

As chief surgeon of the First Fleet, White’s had first to treat the colony’s sick, but in his spare time, he was naturalist to Arthur Phillip when the governor went exploring. By April in 1788, most of the First Fleet’s ill were out of danger, and White travelled with Phillip, several officers, three soldiers and two seamen, to Manly Cove. Heading north, their path was blocked by swamps and thick bush.

This is my home territory, so I can assert that the swamps must have been where Manly Golf Club is now. Going along the coast they went north to a “small salt-water lagoon, about two miles [3 km] away”, where they saw black swans. This was probably Curl Curl Lagoon, now usually called Queenscliff Lagoon.

They saw a kookaburra (which White correctly recognised as a kingfisher) and White admired Aboriginal rock engravings, but that was about it. Until Sir Joseph Banks sent out some of his chosen young men, collecting would be haphazard. White sent many drawings and specimens back to England, and in late 1788, he sent back the journal he had been keeping since he joined the First Fleet.

It was edited and published in 1790 as Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, with 65 engravings, apparently created in Britain from sketches and preserved specimens. White may also have been responsible for the specimens and drawings used in Arthur Phillip’s The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay. That came out in 1789, and both books sold well.

Until White left Sydney at the end of 1794, Thomas Watling was his convict servant. In a letter to his aunt, Watling said his work involved painting the “non-descript productions of the country”, meaning he was painting the undescribed species, as and when they were found.

There is a puzzle, though. White’s book came out in 1790, and Watling only arrived in Sydney in 1792, yet some of the book’s engravings have matching paintings in the “Watling Collection” which now rests in the zoological library of the British Museum (Natural History).

Watling’s task was to deal with the way dried herbarium specimens change or lose their colour. Before photography was invented, painters would prepare a nice water-colour picture, with accurate colours. An engraver would copy the painting onto a metal plate that could be used to print black-and-white images. Then young women and girls would set to work with water-colours, adding the same colours, referring to the original painting. [3]

However it happened, the painting always came first, but many of the paintings in the collection have been extensively annotated in John White’s hand-writing, so White probably gathered up the collection and took it to England in 1794.

But how could Watling have created the paintings before he reached Australia? The answer, said Rex and Thea Rienits [4], is easy: they argued that Watling was no use as a natural history painter when he arrived, so White would have set him to work, copying the plates as paintings.

When White returned to Britain, he wanted to stay there, but he was told either to return to Sydney or resign his colonial post. He chose to resign and planned a second book, for which he probably wrote a manuscript, since lost. Probably today’s “Watling collection” would have become the drawings in that book.

White served as a surgeon in the Sheerness and Chatham shipyards until 1820, but back in Sydney, Watling was still a convict, at first assigned to David Collins, the Judge-Advocate. In September 1795, Governor John Hunter became the second governor of the young colony, and Watling’s prospects looked up, because Hunter, also an able artist, took him over.

After a year of service to the governor, Watling had a conditional pardon which was made absolute seven months later. He was free to go, and so he left, taking with him a child whose mother is unknown. He probably went to Calcutta, where there was a miniature painter called Thomas Watling for a while.

He was certainly in Scotland in about 1804, where he was charged with forging seven five-pound notes in 1806, but he got off with the Scots verdict of ‘not proven’. He later went to London, where he sought assistance from the former Governor Hunter, by now an admiral.

You have to wonder what his life might have been, had he, on escaping in Capetown, fallen in with a Dutch naturalist who needed a painter?

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[1] John White, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, 1790, entry for January 29, 1788, available as http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00092.pdf, on page 70.

[2] Ilay Campbell, in a letter to Evan Nepean. (It was in my files with no source.)

[3] For an excellent free example, see John White, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, 1790, available as http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00092.pdf

[4] Rex and Thea Rienits, Early artists of Australia, 47.

Bolters, part 6 of many

The curious tale of Samuel Burt

Burt had been found guilty of forgery, and forgery was a hanging offence, a capital crime, as the lawyers say. Mysteriously (until you know the background), the government wanted Burt to accept a reprieve and a sentence of seven years as a prisoner.

Equally mysteriously (again, until you know the background), the prisoner asked to be hanged, and here is how the discussion went in court, at the end of a long day’s proceedings. Notice how politely but firmly, Samuel Burt told the Court (that means the judge) that he wanted to die. [1]

The judge was probably weary after hearing cases and sentencing the guilty all day, but he had this one more task. He needed to persuade this young man to choose going to Botany Bay over being hanged. The youth had already refused one offer of the King’s mercy.

Prisoner:        My Lord, I thank your Lordship; but in the present case, I have an unquestionable right to my own opinion, and as death would be preferable to me, I am determined to persevere in applying for the execution of my sentence.

Court:             You should be aware that if the King’s mercy is rejected and abused, when you come to a better temper of mind, which the fear of death will certainly produce, you may have then no opportunity of applying for that mercy which you now refuse.

Prisoner:        I am still determined to persevere in the same opinion.

Court:             I shall remand you to prison, and give you till the first day of next session to consider of it, and if you then refuse his Majesty’s pardon, you may expect immediate execution.

Prisoner.        Very well my Lord.

Now here is the background: Samuel loved a young lady, but she did not love him enough to agree to marry him. Perhaps this was because he was an apprentice gold-beater, and apprentices were not allowed to marry until they had “served their time” and completed their apprenticeships.

Whatever the reason, Samuel decided that he would sooner die, but he must have felt it was wrong to commit suicide. He was clearly an educated young man who found another way to become dead, a cunning scheme, which as cunning schemes often do, back-fired.

He forged a bank draft for 100 pounds, which was a great deal of money in those days. He then went to a bank where he was well-known, and cashed the draft. The bank suspected that the document was forged, but gave him the money because they knew him. He then sent his master the following letter:

“Sir, I take this opportunity of informing you, that I have this morning forged on your banker, for the sum of an hundred pounds; I am ready and willing to resign myself into the hands of justice, life is a burden to me, and as I have forfeited it to the laws of my country, I am ready and willing to resign into the hands of him that gave it me.” S. Burt, July 17th, 1786.

Later, the full story came out in The Times on 19 October 1790:

The circumstances of Burt’s case were rather remarkable; being rejected by a woman whom he wished to marry, he committed a forgery, and immediately afterwards surrendered himself at Bow-street, declaring to his friends that he had done it for the purpose of getting hanged. Being considered as an object of compassion, he was offered his Majesty’s most gracious pardon, which he twice or thrice refused. The lady at length consented to marry him; he then became as solicitous to live as he had before been for death; but during her repeated visits to him in Newgate, she caught the gaol fever and died. [2]

By the time she died, Samuel’s case had been settled, and he had to go to New South Wales. The transport Scarborough had carried convicts as part of the First Fleet, and now the ship was ready to go again, with Burt among the inmates. During the voyage, a plot was hatched by some of the convicts to over-power the guards, take control of the ship and escape. Burt gathered the details and reported it to the ship’s officers who squashed the plan.

Arriving in Sydney, he became a storeman, and was so reliable that on 31 January 1794, he was given an unconditional pardon, When the colony’s Judge-Advocate, David Collins noted this, he mentioned that Burt’s actions on the Scarborough were “at the risk of his own life”. [3]

I have to wonder: did Burt take that risk deliberately, hoping once again, that he might die? We will never know, but he reached Sydney, he lived, he worked hard, and he was pardoned. He received a grant of 16 acres of land at Bulanaming (near Newtown in Sydney’s inner western suburbs today) on 8 January 1794, but after that, he seems to have disappeared. If he has descendants today, they probably regret not being able to claim descent from a “First Fleeter”. [4]

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[1] Samuel Burt’s tale can be found at ‘Old Bailey Online’, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org. The original trial reference number is t17860719-31, his refusal has the reference number o17870110-3 and his pardon is at o17870221-2.

[2] The Times, 19 October, 1790, 4, column 1.

[3] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in NSW, volume 1, 286.

[4] One source for information says that Burt’s grant was recorded on Fiche 3267 of the Colonial Secretary’s papers. These are now generally on microfilm and in many libraries. I found the entry in my local library, on the first page of the B’s, on Roll 2560.

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.