Table of Contents
In Geoffrey Blainey’s seminal work The Tyranny of Distance the idea is present even in the title. For the early Europeans in Australia, he argues, their distance from their homeland was the ‘tyranny’ of their position, and that distance obviously involved the miles between land masses. The sea, by implication, was a void, a barrier to be crossed to another ‘real’ location. What is more, Blainey is uninterested in the experiences which had led the convicts across that watery non-place to their new home. It had apparently been covered as if in the blink of an eye. Distance was something that had just been imposed on them from above, rather than the seas being a space they had themselves inhabited directly before their appearance on the shores of Port Jackson. The journey was not a process which had informed their knowledge of the distance and established their new lives as residents of a new land, it was simply an abyss.[1]
This view of the sea as lacking any history of its own is currently being challenged in many fields of historiography. Derek Walcott’s much-quoted line ‘the sea is history’ has become the clarion cry to avoid the kind of formulation unconsciously used by Blainey.[2] Increasingly the ocean is seen as the arena in which much transnational history was lived, rather than simply being the means by which internationalism was achieved. One recent edited collection, Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun’s Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, sets its task as moving ‘beyond outworn patterns of historical causality and explanation … to recover in the history of the sea a paradigm that may accommodate various revisionary accounts … of the modern transnational experience of contact zones’.[3] The designation of the seas as ‘other’ in historical study is increasingly regarded, just like the ‘othering’ of groups of people throughout history, as unconstructive and subjective.[4] Yet much Australian convict scholarship seemingly remains tied to the idea that the long voyage out merely delivered – largely unchanged – British and Irish people to their new home in the southern hemisphere.
This is problematical, not just because of this current global focus on the sea as a historical arena, but also because of the realities of the early British settlement in Australia. It was, after all, a peculiarly maritime arrangement, ruled by the only naval governor who presided on land in the British realm. Early Sydney was a ‘sailortown’.[5] What this suggests is that the protracted voyage to this settlement was hardly a non-time, but was rather a formative and transformative experience for those who were forced to make it to atone for their crimes. Time, life, experiences, these things did not stop while the voyage was made; the sea was not a watery chasm to be crossed to another ‘real’ place. It was, rather, the site of adjustment and alteration. To use rhetoric often utilised by the historiographies of other forms of non-free migration, the long voyage southward was the convict settlement’s roots as well as the convicts’ route.
This nautical characteristic of the early settlement was also one of the traits which set it apart from earlier sites of convict transportation, and this factor changed essentially the nature of the voyage felons embarked upon to reach it. Historicising the oceans in terms of convict studies reveals that it was not simply the destination that changed with the British settlement of New South Wales in 1788, but also the purpose of the voyage by which criminals were banished. The familiar discussions of the origins of European Australia – the loss of the American colonies, the attempts to find an African site for a penal settlement, plus various attempts to re-start the American trade – were not merely theoretical posturing, but were lived as experiences which preceded the First Fleet voyage for some of Australia’s founding convicts. Their enforced transnationalism was enacted largely at sea, their familiarity with seagoing then becoming an integral part of the sailortown identity of early Sydney.
In this chapter I want to explore what the convict voyage across the sea meant to one man who, astonishingly, made three very different versions of it. Thomas Limpus is of interest because he was in many ways the archetypal convict – he was a handkerchief thief – but also because his experiences as a transported convict covered the whole realm of events which led to New South Wales. Of all the places commonly mentioned as background to the founding of the penal settlement – locations as diverse as North America, West Africa, and even the peripheral Honduras Bay settlement – Limpus had either been sent there or had narrowly escaped that fate. His route to Australia mirrored the complex twists debated by historians of ‘the Botany Bay decision’ but he lived these destinations; to him they were not merely abstract decisions imposed on Britain’s miscreants from on high. He arrived in New South Wales not as a newly deported Briton, but as a man who – probably unbeknownst to him at that time – had just ended a segment of his life in which he had constantly been cast away from land. Life had already displayed to him that convict voyages could take many forms, that the sea was both punishment and escape, and that it was a place in which he could negotiate space for himself as an individual.
Thomas Limpus was in many ways a typical First Fleet convict. He had been sentenced to three years hard labour in 1777 at the age of fifteen for the theft of a handkerchief, so beginning his criminal career banished to an area between sea and land.[6] After the rebellion of the American colonies, hulks anchored on the Thames were established as a stop gap arrangement on which convicts were employed in moving gravel and filling pits, driving in posts to support new wharves, digging ditches and building drains. Although skilled prisoners might be put to other tasks, for the majority the work was monotonous and extremely arduous.[7] Unable to find a place ‘beyond the seas’ to which to banish the felons, the British government chose to at least settle them on the river, a space which was neither truly land nor sea. At the age of 15, Thomas Limpus’s life as a man cast beyond the littoral had begun.
Three years later, back on dry land, he was again at the Old Bailey charged with stealing another handkerchief. It was probably the violence he showed at his arrest that set him on his destiny as international voyager. A witness to the theft said that he heard the watchman, Mr. Collins, ‘halloo out Stop thief!’ and heard Limpus swear ‘damn his eyes, he would cut his bloody … life out’. Knives were drawn, and Limpus had allegedly tried to cut the watchman. It was evidence enough to ensure that he was sentenced to be transported away from Britain’s shores for a period of seven years.[8]
Limpus was sentenced to this particular punishment at a peculiar moment of penal history. With the American colonies already lost (though hope of them accepting British felons was not yet totally despaired of) the government was searching for a new place to receive the reprobates it wished to export. It turned to the outposts of British authority on the West African coast, principally in those years engaged in transatlantic slave trading. Although the leaders of the African Company and slaving merchants had vehemently resisted convicts being sent to their forts, they were perennially short of labour because of the catastrophic death rates among the white fort soldiers and guards. Eventually the British government circumvented their objections by sending several hundred convicts not as transported felons but by giving them respites to join the British Army. As such they had no different status to the regular soldiers and the African Company could offer no objection. Despite the fact that the army expedition was a total disaster, which ended with the majority either dying or deserting to the supposed enemy and their commander charged with murder, the British government continued its plans to transport convicts to West Africa.[9]
Thus Thomas Limpus had the misfortune to be convicted at the Old Bailey to seven years transportation, not merely to the unstipulated ‘places beyond the seas’, but to go specifically to Africa. He was to go to West Africa not as a soldier but simply as a transported felon, although what role he was supposed to fulfil there was unclear. Others who went aboard the same ship were to be soldiers at the African Company forts.[10] Moreover, the settlement at which Limpus disembarked had plenty of convict soldiers. Its governor, Joseph Wall, who would later be hanged for having some of those soldiers whipped to death by black slaves, described those he ruled over as ‘generally regiments in disgrace for mutiny, deserting their colours, riot or some other cause’. ‘Their ranks’, he complained, were ‘usually recruited by desperadoes, picked up from convicts from our gaols, or incorrigibles in our military prisons.’[11] Regardless, it was not Limpus’s fate to be a fort soldier.
Strangely enough, at this point Limpus’s story intersects with that of the twelve million plus captive Africans who were transported to the Americas. Searching for a vessel to take the convicts sentenced to Africa, a deal was struck with the owners of the Den Keyser , which would continue its voyage transporting Africans to be sold into slavery in perpetuity once the convicts had been delivered.[12] So Limpus was embarked with about forty other convicts ‘chained two and two together’ aboard one of the notorious slave trading fleet operating out of London at that time.[13] Among his shipmates were two other men who would later be First Fleeters to the colony of New South Wales. John Ruglass and Samuel Woodham had been part of a group of ten or so people who had robbed and beaten a sailor who was newly arrived home from sixteen long years at sea, a crime for which they had originally been sentenced to death.[14] Another First Fleeter, John Martin, described as ‘a negro’ at his trial, narrowly escaped departing on the Den Keyser when he was returned to gaol too sick to travel.[15]
This, then, delivered to a slave ship anchored in the Thames, chained by the legs to another convict, was Thomas Limpus’s first experience of convict transportation. Perhaps the convict to whom he had originally been chained had been the black man John Martin. Of course it is not possible to push this analogy too far: British convicts were never slaves. Yet in the uncertainties inherent in their destination, and a lack of knowledge of what was expected of them, there were some strange parallels. Even the fact that their position was temporary rather than theirs to suffer ceaselessly had little reality when very few British men survived for seven years in West Africa. ‘Beware beware the Bight of Benin, for one that comes out, there’s forty go in’ said the seamen’s ballad. The Den Keyser was not delivering its white cargo to the Bight of Benin, but that was probably little comfort to Limpus, even if he was aware of it.
Beyond these shared experiences, however, it is evident that there is no comparison between the nature of the voyage endured by Limpus and his fellow convicts, and that made by the 300 or so African slaves the ship would transport later on its voyage.[16] The difference was not chiefly the humanity shown (or rather the lack thereof) but in the very purpose of the voyage. In fact, while the Den Keyser was a slaving vessel, the function of convict and slave voyages had actually been more similar during the period of transportation to the American colonies when the captain and crew of a ship had a financial interest in the labour of banished British felons. On this occasion, the rationale behind sending the convicts to Africa was ambiguous, and while a fiscal deal had been struck between the British government and the ship’s owners and contractors, the crew of the ship were told merely that the shackled passengers were felons who had to go to Africa. John Townsend, who worked for Akerman the keeper of Newgate, later recounted that he had been one of the men who took the prisoners to the port to board their vessel. Once they had ‘delivered them safe, and they ironed them, and put them in the hold’ the entire duties of the crown and its employees was seemingly discharged.[17] This was truly the moment at which the convict voyage was itself intended as punishment, with each nautical mile covered representing the entire purpose of the venture.
This uncertainty about the nature of the Den Keyser’s voyage to Africa was evident in events after arrival, for it delivered convicts to at least three locations to fulfil vastly different roles. Thomas Limpus and about nineteen other convicts were the first to be disembarked, leaving the ship not at Cape Coast Castle, the centre of British slave trading on the West African coast and the destination of most of the transported convicts, but rather in the Senegambia region, probably at Fort St Louis. Exactly where the notorious governor Joseph Wall was when Limpus and the others disembarked is uncertain, but his harsh, chaotic rule is certainly evident behind stories of what happened next. Captain Lacey, who appears to have been as antagonistic to others as his superior officer, having already been challenged to a number of duels, ordered the convicts to be ‘drawn up in a circle on the parade’.[18] According to Thomas Limpus, he then ‘told us we were all free men, and that we were to do the best we could, for he had no victuals’. John Ruglass said simply that Lacey ‘had sent them off’ and they were forced to go and fight for their survival as best they could.[19] The uncertainty inherent in the purpose of the voyage, apparent from the moment John Townsend had delivered them with no instructions other than to take them to Africa, had reached its logical conclusion. The voyage had achieved no objective other than to remove the men from Britain, and that, and abandonment, was to be their punishment.
Limpus turned his face back towards the seas. With few other options, he went on board a British ship that was in the river at that time. Going ashore several times he did some work for Governor Wall but ultimately chose to sail away with the ship when she weighed anchor rather than stay behind. It was still wartime, and the French and Dutch, were all around the coast. As he plaintively later put it, ‘I did not chuse to go into the hands of the enemy’.[20] Limpus had learned what many before him also had, that the sea could provide escape as well as incarceration. His words also suggest another truth: ships were small outposts of the mother country. They could return him to his homeland, but they also, in another sense, were part of that country floating on the deep blue sea.
John Ruglass and Samuel Woodham also decided on a similar step to Limpus. Having originally been sentenced together, they very probably escaped together, almost certainly also taking passage on a ship that arrived in the area. They may well have had seafaring experience despite being very young, as they had lived and committed their original crime among London’s seafaring community.[21] Ironically it could well have been a slave ship (or ships) that took away all three men, for they often stopped in the Senegambia region on their way down to the larger slave trading ports of the coast and often needed additional hands to replace seamen who were already dead. So the men who had been despatched from their homelands on a slave ship learned the vagaries of the seafaring life. It was a fact many a seaman – falling foul of his captain or being taken a prisoner of war – had also learned. The gap between chained captive and useful crew member could be very slim indeed.
Unfortunately for Limpus, his freedom was to be short lived. While the ship was temporarily docked in London he was seen by men who knew him to be a banished felon and he was sentenced for having returned from transportation. When he was charged at the Old Bailey, he said that he had only returned to England temporarily and unavoidably; he had planned on to go back to sea with the same captain that had enlisted him in Africa.[22] Indeed, his pleas were not unreasonable. The exact nature of what was expected of a transported convict was in dispute for long after the 1780s, and technically a man did just have to leave the shores of Britain for the term imposed. Of course he should not have been in London, but a seaman’s life was clearly reconcilable with the idea of banishment for long periods. Convicts had in recent history been offered respites to serve in the Royal Navy, and occasionally even the merchant marine.[23] Perhaps Limpus had been held in Newgate with men who had exchanged their death sentences for the seafaring profession. Whatever the reasons for his plea, clearly the man who had been loaded on a slave ship, chained by the ankles to a companion, had come to regard the sea as a potential refuge as well as a fate to be endured. He hoped that banishing himself not to a ‘place beyond the seas’ but to the seas themselves would mollify the British government.