Reconsidering the Convict Ships

Between 1788, when the first convict ship arrived on the east coast of Australia at what is now Sydney, and 1868, when the last official convict ship landed on the west coast, at Fremantle, roughly 160, 000 convicts were transported from what was then the British Isles to Australia.¹ Most of the convicts who survived to earn their "tickets of leave" stayed on and became, slowly, part of the fabric of Australian society, and in recent years the "stain"—the previously widespread shame of convict ancestry—has all but disappeared. In fact, Australia's convict history has been embraced by the tourist industry. Historical markers identify convict-built stone work on the Old North Road from Sydney into the Hunter Valley, and regular tours are given in the extant convict prisons. The convict ships themselves have disappeared, of course, but their image, too, remains fixed in popular imagination.

In Moondyne: A Story from the Under-world (1889), a novel based on his own experiences aboard a convict ship, John Boyle O'Reilly created the following scene:

Only those who have stood within the bars, and heard the din of devils and the appalling sounds of despair, blended in a diapason that made every hatch-mouth a vent of hell, can imagine the horrors of the hold of a convict ship.²

In his obituary for O'Reilly, Denis B. Cashman, who had been on the same convict ship and who, like O'Reilly, came to the United States and lived the rest of his life in Boston, presented a similar description:

A three month's voyage on board a British convict ship to an Irish political prisoner is an indescribable horror. It is utterly monotonous, and is only varied occasionally by hearing the cat on a convict's back, the funeral services now and then, followed with a splash and the fins of a shark or two darting after the prize; the constant rattling of the chain on the limbs and hands of the unfortunate convicts.³

Although both accounts have been quoted as fact, it must be remembered that O'Reilly was writing a novel, albeit one with a serious political message, and Cashman's obituary for O'Reilly was scarcely free of political motive.⁴

Still, theirs is the continuing and popular view of life on board a convict ship, and it probably represents the fate of many convicts with a good deal of accuracy, especially those on the earlier ships. The Second Fleet and Third Fleet of the 1790s were particularly disastrous. According to Robert Hughes,

More than a thousand [prisoners] had embarked [in the Second Fleet], but a quarter of them died at sea, and half were landed helplessly ill at Sydney Cove. . . . Some had died from the brutality of the ships' masters, others because they had been too sick to sail. The authorities in England had simply used the Second Fleet to rid the hulks and prisons of invalids, dispatching them to oblivion.⁵

Australia's Governor Phillip wrote complaining that sending prisoners in such poor health would ensure that the colony continued to be dependent on England, but before his letter reached London and reform could be instituted, the Third Fleet was on its way. According to Hughes, "One man in ten died, and the survivors were landed in 1791 'so emaciated, so worn away,' in Phillip's words, that they were utterly unfit to work—more helpless parasites to drag the colony down."⁶

The deaths on board ship and the condition in which the living arrived in Australia were the results of both bad planning and inhumane treatment. Food on those early ships was a major problem; there was not nearly enough, nor were the anti-scorbutics, usually lime juice and vinegar, and other foods necessary for a healthy sea voyage available in quantity on the early voyages. In a 1790 letter to his parents that was later published as a broadside, Thomas Milburn, a convict in the Second Fleet, wrote

[W]e were scarcely allowed a sufficient quantity of victuals to keep us alive, and scarcely any water; for...