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.

Bolters, part 4 of many

The youngest convict.

The convict transport Friendship carried the youngest male felon, a lad named John Hudson. Born about 1774, he was an orphan and chimney sweep, who was sentenced to seven years’ transportation at the Old Bailey on 10 December 1783, when he was described as a nine-year-old. By rights, given his crime, he should have been sentenced to death, but the judge had worked hard to save the boy.

The versions of convict trials we read in novels or see and hear in movies and on TV usually centre on a vicious ‘hanging judge’, a sneering brute, dealing out savage sentences to innocent heroes and heroines. While there were many, many offences for which the punishment was hanging, judges were commonly lenient and gentle, as we can see here.

Hudson was charged, among other things, with breaking into a house at night. If he had been in the house while it was dark, that was not mere breaking and entering, but burglary, a hanging offence. To avoid the jury deciding this way, the judge instructed them carefully as the Old Bailey records reveal. Note that the “prosecutor” here was the person robbed, not the lawyer conducting the prosecution.

The boy’s confession may be admitted, in evidence, but we must take it with every allowance, and at the utmost it only proves he was in the house; now he might have got in after daybreak, as the prosecutor was not informed of it till eight the next morning… his confession with respect to how he came there, I do not think should be allowed, because it was made under fear; I think it would be too hard to find a boy of his tender age guilty of the burglary; one would wish to snatch such a boy, if one possibly could, from destruction… [1]

The jury heard his message and obediently found the boy guilty of a felony but not guilty of burglary, and he was sentenced to be transported for seven years. Originally Hudson would have gone to America, and he was actually sent towards America in March, 1784, at a time when the newly independent United States of America was no longer accepting British convicts, but one man was still sending off ships of prisoners who might be sold in America as “servants”, effectively as slaves.

The planned destination of the transport Mercury is unclear, but just off the coast of England, the convicts took over the ship and sailed it into Torbay, where some of them went ashore to get drunk, though a few reached London before they were retaken. Some were hanged for the crime of “returning from transportation”, others like John Hudson were merely thrown into gaol, and later transferred to the hulk Dunkirk.

The boy spent a considerable time in the hulks before being transferred to Friendship, and was one of 67 Mercury veterans who sailed in the First Fleet. Hudson was sent to Norfolk Island in March 1790, where he received 50 lashes in February 1791 for being “out of his hut out of hours”, after which he disappears from the records.

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[1] Old Bailey records, JOHN HUDSON, Theft > burglary, 10 December 1783. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17831210-19&div=t17831210-19 Reference Number: t17831210-19: this record is worth reading in full.

Bolters: part 3 of many

Black Caesar.

The man the colonists called Black Caesar appeared in the official records as John Caesar. His common name tells us one of the few things we know for certain about him: he had dark skin, and was probably of African descent. Some people said he came from Madagascar, but slave owners often gave their slaves the names of ancient Romans, so the name “Caesar” may mean that he or his parents had been slaves at some stage.

All we can say for sure is that he was one of at least four people believed to be of African origin in the First Fleet. The others were John Williams (alias ‘Black Jack’), Daniel Gordon and Samuel Chinnery.

In 1786, Caesar was a servant, living at Deptford, now a suburb of London. On 13 May, he went on trial, charged with stealing £12 from a dwelling house, and he was found guilty.

At that point, he had some luck, because many thieves back then were sentenced to hang for taking far less valuable loot. Instead, he was given seven years in gaol, sent to the hulk Ceres, and then shipped off to Botany Bay in the First Fleet transport Alexander.

In the new colony, Caesar was known as a good worker at first. Judge Advocate, David Collins wrote in his story of the early days, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales:

This man was always reputed the hardest working convict in the country; his frame was muscular and well calculated for hard labour; but … his appetite was ravenous, for he could in any one day devour the full ration for two days.[1]

Caesar’s problem was that everybody, large or small, got exactly the same rations, meaning the same amount of food each day. Because he was big and toiled hard, Caesar was always hungry, so he stole food. On 29 April, 1789, he was tried, found guilty of stealing and given a life sentence.

Two weeks later, he stole a gun and some food, and went bush. Caesar stayed close to the settlement, probably so he could steal food or tools. As a result, he was captured on 6 June and sent to work in chains, on Garden Island. His task was to grow vegetables, and he was allowed some of what he grew, on top of the usual rations. He behaved well, and soon he was allowed to work without the chains. Then on 22 December, he stole a musket, an iron pot and a canoe and went off into the bush again.

He now found himself up against the same problem that all the bushrangers faced: getting enough food. None of them knew how to find bush tucker, and so they had to steal. Caesar stole from settlers’ gardens and he also robbed Indigenous people of their food, but while this annoyed the locals he robbed, they weren’t all unfriendly to him. On 31 January, 1790, he was brought into the settlement by some of them after they found him near Rose Hill with spear wounds. They helped him back to Sydney so he could give himself up and get medical help.

Caesar’s wounds healed, and he was sent to Norfolk Island for three years, where he farmed. Then he was sent back to Sydney and stayed quiet for more than a year, but in July 1794, he took off into the bush again. He was soon caught and punished, but he took his flogging without reacting, beyond declaring that “… all that will not make me better”.

Caesar escaped again in December 1795, and became one of probably six to eight other escapees who were loose in the bush at the time. Even so, everybody in the colony blamed Caesar for all the thefts. They complained bitterly of having suffered quite enough from Caesar’s thieving ways.

Important people, meaning the ones who had something worth stealing, demanded that something be done about such rogues, and on 29 January, 1796, Governor Hunter offered a reward of five gallons of spirits for Caesar’s capture. Our first thief/bushranger had barely a fortnight left to live, hiding out in the bush near what is now the Sydney suburb of Strathfield. David Collins told the story of Caesar’s end:

On Monday the 15th a criminal court was held for the trial of two prisoners, William Britton a soldier, and John Reid a convict, for a burglary in the house of the Rev. Mr. Johnson, committed in the night of Sunday the 7th of this month. The evidence, though strong, was not sufficient to convict them, and they were acquitted. While this court was sitting, however, information was received, that black Caesar had that morning been shot by one Wimbow. This man and another, allured by the reward, had been for some days in quest of him.

Finding his haunt, they concealed themselves all night at the edge of a brush which they perceived him enter at dusk. In the morning he came out, when, looking round him and seeing his danger, he presented his musket; but before he could pull the trigger Wimbow fired and shot him. He was taken to the hut of Rose, a settler at Liberty Plains, where he died in a few hours. Thus ended a man, who certainly, during his life, could never have been estimated at more than one remove above the brute, and who had given more trouble than any other convict in the settlement.

Mind you, some of the convicts, just by making it to Australia, had achieved an escape of sorts, evading the gallows. John Hudson is a case in point, but he needed some help to bring it off.

Mind you, some of the convicts, just by making it to Australia, had effected an escape of sorts, evading the gallows. John Hudson is a case in point. He comes next.

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[1] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol 1, 58.

Bolters, part 2 of many

Following a “native road” to freedom.

The convict system was expected to reform criminals, but reformation was to be achieved by a combination of faint promises of kindness and large amounts of cruelty. Sadly, the vague promises rarely won the convicts over, and the cruelty just made them more obstinate, or more willing to die, taking their chances on the run, generally as bushrangers.

Looking at the evidence, it is no surprise that so many convicts found the going too hard and “ran”, or as the locals called it, they bolted gaining the name “bolters”. Having bolted, the escapees had three options. They could steal a boat and try to leave Australia; they could try to get away on a ship; or they could take to the bush and survive as best they could.

Stealing a boat was fine in theory, but it had to be large enough to survive storms on a long voyage. The escapees needed a navigator, instruments and maps, tools, food and water, and lots of luck. One group escaped to Timor by boat, but for most convicts, it was too risky, and probably impossible.

Getting onto a ship was not the best of choices either, because ships were searched before they left port, as The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reported in 1807:

[Thomas] Shirley and another prisoner found on board the Star when about to sail, were brought before the Bench with four others taken from on board the Lucy the morning of her departure, and severally charged with having attempted to escape the colony; and the charge being fully substantiated, they were ordered 200 lashes.

So taking to the bush was an attractive choice. Most convicts were willing to explore all the options, but among those, going bush meant they could limp back to a settlement again and take their punishment if they could not make a go of it. Besides, going bush offered a bolter the option of getting onto a ship later, when all the fuss had died down. They became, in one sense or another, bushrangers.

Until about the 1860s, criminal bushrangers were usually convicts or ex-convicts. Australia was founded as a convict settlement, and somehow we imagine early Sydney as a sort of giant gaol, but the convicts in the First Fleet outnumbered their guards by a ratio of about 3 to 1. There were no cells to hold the convicts, and from the start, the colony functioned as an open gaol where convicts fended largely for themselves, and were expected to behave themselves but they were free to run away.

That said, there was nowhere to hide, except in the first days of the new colony, when nobody knew how to find their way around in the bush. Things changed when the new arrivals realised that there were tracks through the bush, and that brings us to the very first bushrangers, a term with a different meaning in the first 17 years of the colony.

First, we need some background: Botany Bay was selected because Sir Joseph Banks, an influential figure, said it had nice green meadows, which were probably distant swamps.

When the faster ships of the First Fleet reached Australia in January 1788, they anchored in Botany Bay, waiting for the other vessels to arrive. Within a day or two, some of the officers had gone ashore and examined the ground near Botany Bay. They found only sandy soil and no water supply large enough for a settlement with 1200 people in it — especially as the settlement was likely to grow in the years to come. Clearly, Botany Bay was no place to start a colony.

A boat was sent to explore a harbour just up the coast to the north. James Cook had passed the entrance to this port in 1770, without looking in, but he gave it the name Port Jackson, though today, we call it Sydney Harbour. This was a far better place for a settlement, and orders were given to move just a few miles north.

Then just as the fleet was preparing to set off for Sydney Cove, two other ships appeared out to sea. Quite a few modern Australians know that these were commanded by Jean François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, whose name lives on in the suburb of Laperouse on the northern side of Botany Bay. Most of them are adamant that if Lapérouse had arrived a few days earlier, we would all wear berets, speak French and eat croissants.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and the evidence is there in the records. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who would later be the governor of the colony, knew all about the French and Lapérouse, even before seeing the ships. He wrote in his journal that the ships flew the French flag and that one of them “… wore a chef d’escadre’s [commodore’s] pennant.” From this, he said, they realised that the ships must be La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, “… under ye orders of Monsieur de La Perouse, on discoveries.”

In other words, the English naval officers knew in advance that they might see Lapérouse’s ships at Botany Bay, and they had instructions to greet the French in a friendly way. Time was pressing though, so the First Fleet sailed for Sydney Harbour, leaving the French in Botany Bay to repair their ships and their boats, and to get fresh water and maybe some fresh meat.

There was some formal contact with the French over the next few weeks. Then Lapérouse and his ships disappeared after leaving Botany Bay, but before he sailed away, he left letters and reports to be forwarded home to France. The first British-French contact, though, was far less official than the meeting to give those papers to Governor Arthur Phillip.

The first fleet began landing its human cargo in Sydney on 26 January, 1788, and on 1 February, Lt. King and Lt. William Dawes, a marine officer, set off in a cutter, sailing north to the Heads before turning south to Botany Bay. There was a southerly wind blowing, which helped the crew at first, but they had to row all the way down the coast, once they left the harbour.

They arrived in Botany Bay at 10 am, had a friendly visit, during which Lapérouse told them of an earlier unofficial visit, made by our very first rangers of the bush: a number of convicts had already walked overland from Sydney Cove, following “the road to Botany Bay”, the clear bush tracks of the original inhabitants of Australia. The convicts had begged to be taken aboard, but the French commander had sent them off with threats, though he kindly gave them some food so they could get safely back to Sydney Cove.

Very early on, Ann Smith and a Frenchman called Peter Paris (or Parris) went missing. Surgeon John White thought a Frenchman might have found favour with Lapérouse, but he added that “… the French commodore had given his honour that he would not admit any of them on board … he [Parris] might have been concealed, through pity, by his countrymen, and carried off without the knowledge of the commanding officer”. [1]

Though these people stole nothing, the people who visited the French were bushrangers. Until about 1805, when people in Sydney spoke of bushrangers, they generally used the word differently from the way we do now. To the early colonists, bushrangers were just men who ranged the bush, finding their way through the scrub and home again, a matter that wasn’t too hard in a country that was populated and occupied by people whose feet had left easy tracks to follow.

Later white explorers often used much the same method as these first bushrangers, travelling along “native roads”, the tracks worn through the bush by generations of Indigenous feet. Meanwhile, back at Botany Bay, Lapérouse and his officers decided that what the convict visitors had done in one direction, Frenchmen could do in the other. Three of Lapérouse’s men walked over the same tracks and popped, unannounced, out of the bush at Sydney Cove.

This day 3 of the Frenchmen from the ships w’h lie in Botany Bay came here overland w’h fowling-pieces, under the pretence of shooting, but I rather think they came to take a view of the matters going on here. They have already erected a fort w’h 2 or 3 guns on shore at B. Bay. The Governor has forbid any one going over to Botany Bay. Two horses were sent over to conduct the French commodore and suit [sic] here.
— Arthur Bowes, Journal, HRNSW (2), 394.

Score one to bushrangers as way-finders — or maybe allow them to score two points, because the French had also ranged the bush! Faced with the inevitable, Phillip sent a horse over to Botany Bay, so Lapérouse could ride over in style and visit the new colony.

The old sense of ‘bushranger’ lived on. In November 1805, Governor King (as the former Lieutenant King now was) wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, describing the people he had sent out to find a way over the Blue Mountains. The men came back, complaining of rocky ground, heath and bogs, before they got tired and went back to the Hawkesbury. King told Banks:

The whole of their story is so contradictory that I should not have inserted these particulars but to prove what little confidence can be put in this class of what is locally termed bushrangers.

So in early 1805, bushrangers did not have to be thieves, robbers and runaways, but the tide was changing, and before the year’s end, the sense of “thieving scoundrel, roaming the bush” had largely replaced the earlier meaning. The old sense must have lingered alongside the new, given an 1807 Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser report, where the “bush ranger” John Campbell appears to have been living in the bush as a labourer, rather than as a robber:

Yesterday a Bench of Magistrates assembled, before whom appeared several settlers at and about the Northern Boundary, charged with having employed John Campbell, a bush ranger, in contempt of established local Regulations to the following effect, viz. “No person is to be employed unless he produce his certificate, if a freeman, or his ticket of leave if a prisoner: penalty to be levied on the employer 5£, and 2s. 6d. for each day the man has been employed.”

Yet, looking back, the man who was very definitely the first bushranger in the criminal sense, had already been dead and buried for more than 11 years.

Black Caesar is up next.

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[1] John White, Journal of a Voyage to NSW, February 8, 1788, available as http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00092.pdf, p 72.

Bolters, part 1 of many

I have finally got my study of peculiar rocks, previously called Not Your Usual Rocks, into print as Mistaken for Granite, so I am back to Australian history for a bit, looking at the people the Australian vernacular calls bolters—escapees, in other words.

My father had a B.A., mainly in philosophy and Latin. Nine decades ago, that made him “educated”, but he had no notion of what mattered to a boy whose interests were centred on things mechanical, natural and scientific. Even though he never expressed it in as many words, I think he would have endorsed poet Matthew Arnold’s words when, according to Lytton Strachey, the idiot banished science from the curriculum at Rugby school thusly:

Rather than have Physical Science the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would rather have him think the Sun went around the Earth, and that the stars were merely spangles set in a bright blue firmament.

One Christmas, my father gave me a book called Great Escapes, a collection of essays and excerpts that introduced me to a self-important Casanova, who made a great fuss of his escape from the Leads, a prison in Venice, and Winston Churchill’s equally exaggerated account of his escape from the Boers in Pretoria. Luckily I was an info-sponge, and any book would suffice because I always turned to the practical aspects of what I read.

I passed over the narcissistic excesses of two boastful liars and soaked up the escapes from World War II German camps. These people forged travel documents that would pass even close examination, but the escapees said that most of the time, German officials gave the papers scant attention.

Enter my practical side, and while the statute of limitations has probably run out, I admit nothing, but assert without comment that officials are indeed lax in their scrutiny of paperwork. I always had the legitimate documents with me, which would have saved my bacon, but I admired the escapers, who lacked a safety net.

I fashioned keys with coat hangers, nail files and pliers, acquired useful skills that I do not disclose (and never got to use), and kept the escapers high in my Pantheon of Clever People. Had things turned out differently, I was well prepared to emulate them, because escaping is an art, not a science, and I had my bachelor’s in those arts long before I gained a real B. Sc.

Because I am Australian, it was appropriate for me admire escapers, because the original Australians were good at dodging the white hunters who pursued them, and on the Gubba side, some of the invaders were keen to escape as well. Most of these would-be escapers were convicts, and one of those felons was active, even before any of them reached Australia.

The ships of the First Fleet left Portsmouth on 13 May, 1787, and reached Tenerife in the Canary Islands on 3 June. There, they bought musket balls and paper for musket cartridges (somebody had forgotten to bring these!), but security was slack, and a convict saw his chance while working on the deck of the convict transport Alexander in Tenerife harbour. John Powers slipped over the side and rowed away in a jolly boat, a smallish skiff, which had been carelessly left in the water, with oars.

The fugitive got ashore and fell asleep near the boat, which was unwise. Next morning Marines found the boat, then they found Powers, and took him back to the ship, where he was “heavily ironed”[1].

The masters of the transports would have taken extra care of their involuntary passengers after that, because, as an assistant surgeon, Arthur Bowes Smyth noted, ships’ masters had to land the convicts safely and deliver them “into the Care of the Governor … under the penalty of 40£ for every Convict that was missing”. [2]

In Sydney, in November 1788, John Powers received 200 lashes for stealing some boards, presumably to make another boat, but after that, he seems to have disappeared. Perhaps he just died and nobody bothered to mention it. Then again, he may have stolen some more boards, made a boat and headed out to sea, but if he did, he probably drowned.

At the end of 1793, David Collins listed the losses in that year: two settlers, seven soldiers, seventy-eight male convicts, twenty-six female convicts, and twenty-nine children had died. Added to that, there had been other deaths: one convict was hanged; another was found dead in the woods; one was killed by the fall of a tree and two more were killed by lightning. That was an escape of sorts, but there were some real escapes as well.

To this decrease may be added, four male convicts, who found means to escape from the colony on board of some of the ships which had been here. [3]

Not all of the early escapees were white, though. In May 1795, an Indigenous warrior named Pemulwuy speared a convict “…within half a mile of the brickfield huts” (800 metres from where Sydney’s town hall stands today), and ran off. Soon after, the convict known as ‘Black Caesar’ (also a frequent escaper, as we will see shortly) claimed to have killed Pemulwuy, but in March of 1797, Pemulwuy was shot and wounded, and put in hospital, where he recovered and escaped, still with an iron shackle on his leg.

The escapes kept on coming. In September 1803, a party of 50 under Lt. John Bowen landed at Risdon on the Derwent, and struggled to establish a settlement. A few weeks later, Lieutenant-Governor David Collins landed at Sullivan Bay on Port Phillip with a party including marines, free settlers and convicts. One of the convicts was William Buckley, who escaped, and later lived with the local people, surviving to meet the next wave of white settlers in 1835. After that, he moved to Hobart.

And so far, we have yet to view the full richness of Australia's many, many bolters, and their many, many motivations, but those matters will be addressed in due course.

---

[1] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in V, volume I, Introduction, page lxiv.

[2] This is from the transcript of page A1085095 of the State Library of NSW copy of Smyth’s journal. It is missing from the version in the National Library of Australia. (This often happens when one of the versions was the original, and another is a “fair copy”. Scholars say the State Library version is probably a fair copy, and the National Library version is probably the original…)

[3] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in NSW, volume 1, 332.

Do libraries need non-fiction books?

I'm busy on several almost-finished books right now, hence the dearth of essays here, but a teacher-librarian list I lurk on has just raised this issue. I remembered that I had written on this, went burrowing, and here's something from 2008. Note that this means the count of 14,000 in schools is probably much higher now, but the points remain the same.

"Another damned, thick, square, book . . . always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr Gibbon?" 

Tradition has it that the Duke of Gloucester or some other minor 18th century Royal showed his insight into the writing process with those words. His Grace had no need of, or want for, such books. Anybody who has read a book feels qualified to express opinions about books.

Sadly, some of those people want to do away with books. The latest fad is replacing all the non-fiction books in a library with computers loaded to the gills with Internet access. "Books are old-fashioned. School libraries don't need non-fiction books," they bleat. They are wrong.

School libraries will continue to need non-fiction books for some time to come, and when they don't need non-fiction books, they will need works in some other format that are produced with the same care and commitment that books receive today. You cannot replace a resource with a nothing, and a palimpsest is no substitute for a considered and crafted work.

I write non-fiction, so perhaps I might be accused of bias, but I also understand the publishing industry. According to a recent count by the Educational Lending Rights folk, 14,000 books that I wrote or part-wrote were to be found in Australian school libraries at the end of the last financial year. That involves 18 titles and five publishers — but I also own a web page that pulls half a million visits a year, I spent six years writing for an online encyclopaedia, and I contribute to Wikipedia.

So I am no Luddite when I say that we need non-fiction books, but I understand what is involved in developing both the new and the old media. The whiz-kids who want to bustle in and do an "out with the old, in with the new" job simply do not have those insights. To all intents and purposes, they are functionally illiterate in precisely those areas where they wish to set the agenda, where they wish to be hailed as world leaders of shining excellence.

I also understand the education industry, from the classroom perspective, as a coordinator and as a bureaucrat. Along the way, I noticed how people on the make like to destroy, in the hope of getting the credit for the imposing pile of pieces that is left over. I have seen empire-builders and back-stabbers, and observed them at close range, but always just outside of stab-range. I distrust all grand plans that begin with the demolition of something that works.

Sensible folk can see good things coming with the web and new media, but the more subtle among us wish to see an orderly progression, so that if wondrous new media emerge, they can sit alongside the old media, and replace them gradually. It is too soon to march in and throw out.

It is clear that the simpletons who think "the Web" will replace books have simply no idea of what is involved, from research, to drafting, to writing, to revising, to editing, to designing, to marketing.  It all takes time, careful planning and money. If people think a web page knocked up in five minutes can compete, it may be wise of them to think again.

Those who would jettison all non-fiction books have committed the same error as those who, having taught somebody to drive, think they know all about teaching. Or those, who having written an account of a basketball match for the local paper feel that they are journalists. They aren't.

It's like saying "I cured a cold with lemon-juice and rum last week -- this medicine stuff is a doddle. Nurse! Send in my next brain surgery patient!" Who among us would fall for that? Our reaction and disdain should be the same when people suggest that web pages created by amateurs can replace print pages which have come from seasoned professionals.

Writing a book is not the same as writing a shopping list, and web pages are far closer to the shopping list end of the writer's continuum. There are ideas and concepts that cannot be usefully expressed as bullet points, but only those who have tried can know this within them.

Making a book, a detailed package of information, is mostly about money. When I wrote a history of rockets in 2002, I needed to get to the Smithsonian Aerospace museum and the Library of Congress in Washington DC, to Baltimore to see Fort McHenry, which was attacked with rockets in 1814, to Worcester Massachusetts to read pioneer rocket scientist Robert Goddard's personal papers, to a rocket plant in California to see where they fill solid boosters and chat to rocket scientists, then to Woomera, for the launching of the University of Queensland's Hyshot, the world's first scramjet.

I funded most of the travel out of my advance from the publisher, though a contract from the ABC for a report (on their web site!) funded the Woomera trip. Web page writers of the future probably won't be able to draw on funds like that, because there is no viable funding model, no plan for the writers to be rewarded. Keep in mind that the greatest attraction of "the Web" to the new visionaries is that it is seen to be free.

The high cost of textbooks is cited by many of these self-anointed experts, who seem to think the cost is all in the paper. Having negotiated improved paper on a past project, I have an insider's insight into the realities, and paper is not a big cost: getting stuff to put on paper is what costs.

The big-ticket items are in the production. A good author can expect around 50 cents a word for researched, polished, finished product if they are paid a fee for writing something. Then there is editing, proofing, illustrating, typesetting, design, advertising, publicity and sales.

We hear that information wants to be free. Oddly enough, we don't hear that beer wants to be free, or even that petrol wants to be lower-priced, we only hear that information wants to be free. There is just one snag: information providers want to be paid.

Any competent writer producing an electronic form of a textbook is entitled to expect similar payment levels for a similar effort, and the same support effort will be needed to get the "book" ready to be released. Result: the good stuff will never be free.

Funding issues will ensure that sustained narratives and detailed sequences of instruction will still go into books, or not be written at all. Make no mistake: there is an art, a science and a craft involved, and the makers of the book need to pour all three into every book, one way or another. One or two of those dashed-off web pages may pass muster, but the vast majority will be no more than amateur drivel.

Some of the remainder will be professional drivel, and in the end, only a few of the pages and web sites will be effective replacements for what can now been found in books. Most of these are not available, and we face many years of the plaintive chorus "Are they there, yet?".

Web sites generally fail to deliver a sustained narrative or a sequence of instruction, but that does not mean the web and new digital media have no role. I fully expect that in the future, the web and new digital media will allow publication of the previously unpublishable. I also anticipate that a work may be released simultaneously in more than one medium, or sequentially in several media.

Reference material on, say, "Goldfish of the Gobi Desert" will be available as PDFs for either print-on-demand, or to be read on some clever interface, but the histories-of-things that I write, known in the trade as narrative non-fiction, do not fit there. They are not created as reference works.

There is a place and a need for digital materials, indeed, two of my published books are now available in digital versions, which serves to satisfy a small but steady demand from specialists and enthusiasts who do, indeed, use them mainly as references. One of them, and a more recent work as well, have been turned into "talking books". Yet the digital and audio versions would not be saleable if they had not been through a complex process of editing and production.

Libraries need room NOW for digital storage, and the need will grow, but for the time being, they would be most unwise to dispense with their bookshelves, or their books.

Now I'm off to find a web page on DIY surgery so I can lop off my legs. I mean, I've trimmed my toenails before, so I know where to start, and scaling-up can't be hard. In this modern age of the motor car, legless people need less storage space, and I can drive to where I want to be. Let's get with the future!

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

Peter Macinnis is the author of the digital work "Self-decapitation For Fun and Profit: Better ways to Avoid the Poll Tax", available from all good snake-oil retailers.

I like to light fires

No, not bushfires, silly, though as readers of my new book Survivor Kids: get Ready for Wild Australia (released April 1, 2020) will learn, I used to light bush fires for research, under very tightly controlled conditions.

(I was a junior research assistant, supervised by senior scientists, and one of them did the actual lighting. Each day, we had tankers, up to 30 crew, knapsack sprays and tools, and the work we did gave rise to the present six-point bushfire danger scale.)

My recent silence is because I have been in New Zealand, playing with my grandkids and other kids, and thereby lies a tale of lighting a fire in the hearts of three anonymous children.


My wife and I decided to take in the Auckland Art Gallery, a superbly designed building with delightful Jura Grey limestone floors and stairs from Bavaria, all highly polished, and chockers with fossils.

Now as the people who travelled with me last year in Spain, Portugal and Morocco can attest, I keep my head down when on marble or limestone, watching out for fossils like the ones seen here.

(The second is a belemnite, an extinct squid-relative, the others are ammonites, and they are all from the Jurassic.)

I always lay down an Australian 50 cent coin for scale: the coins are 32 mm across.

This often draws attention when people only see me picking up the coin after getting a shot, and I have been known to claim that it's a form of magic, but really, it's just for scale purposes.

Let me tell you, though, that joy is discovering that the floors and stairs at the  are of fossil-stuffed limestone.

True joy is finding a father and three children interested enough to ask what I was photographing.


Sheer blissful joy is walking out the front door later to hear the oldest one, a girl of 8 or 9, giggling with glee at finding yet another fossil in the outdoor paving.


I think I won that one.


So yeah, my hobby is lighting fires.


And by the way, there's another book about to emerge as an e-book, previously announced as Not Your Usual Rocks.


It now has a new name and is now called Mistaken for Granite.  It's for older readers and armchair travellers who prefer not to hike over 3 km of blasted heath in stinging rain, only to be lowered down into a volcano. We did that, for the sake of the book.

I Aten't Dead Yet

That title is for the people who know who Granny Weatherwax is, who know that STP is not necessarily Standard Temperature and Pressure.  If you aren't one of that elect band, just treat it literally.

I have been somewhat distracted by the need to get some product out the door:

The first is Going Micro: Foundation to Stage 5, which is free gratis and for nothing. The constant reader will have been aware that this has been taking up my time since January.

These are teaching ideas that can also be used by hobbyists, but once I have drawn breath, I plan to convert them into a straight-out guide for hobbyists and naturalists.

If you scroll back a few entries, you can find out what all of this is about in the Microscopist's Mate series. If you didn't come in through the front door of the blog, use this link to see #7, with links to the previous six. Or go back and find the front door...

The main point to take on board: Go Micro is FREE! Just grab it.

Next, one of my less successful publishing deals was with Five Mile Press, who published two of my books in a slip case: these were Not Your Usual Bushrangers and Not Your Usual Gold Stories.

e-book cover

paperback cover

They released Bushrangers as a single title, but having failed to release Gold, I was getting ready to treat them roughly and seize back the rights to the work on the legitimate ground that they had failed to publish the work, when they told me they were folding, going under, turning into dead parrots, and the rights were mine.

So in the past week, I have prepared and published Not Your Usual Gold Stories as both an ebook and a Print on Demand paperback through Amazon.

Here is the link for the paperback version, US$12 plus postage, rather less than Five Mile charged: https://www.amazon.com/dp/198309207X

And here is the link for the ebook version, US$5, no postage, and with 236 hot links to the key sources: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07DK4MZVZ

Draft cover, A Shore
Companion

In between, I have reverted to another of the jobs that has been on the drawing board for a while.

Originally called A Shore Thing or Shore Things, as you can see, I have changed the name, but it may well change again. Specifically for Australian readers, this is a book to dabble in while you are around rocky shores, sandy shores and any other wet-and-dry places: estuaries, mangroves and all that stuff.

Cover, Australian Backyard
Earth Scientist

It covers biology, geology, hydrology and all their interactions. There will be some familial overlap with the book on the right, one of two books that are with the publisher.

Australian Backyard Earth Scientist is now fully edited, designed and indexed, and a professional proof reader will be let loose on it: it will show up on the bookshelves in January next. Targeting ages 8 to 14, it is suitable for ages 8 to 94: most of my kids' books go down well with grandparents, possibly because I am one of them myself.

After that, there's only one title I have to do before I cark it. As things panned out, that work was half-written several years ago, so I have the structure and all of the illustrations sorted.

I put it on hold and drew on a few bits of it for Australian Backyard Earth Scientist. Just bits, mark you: Not Your Usual Rocks is for adults, and it looks at weird rocks all over the world, in a rather more technical way.

Note to file, January 2020: Not Your Usual Rocks is now Mistaken for Granite, and fast approaching completion