A Commonwealth of Thieves Read Free Page B

memories of these river-bound prisons. Though Campbell himself had a reputation for decency, the Act of Parliament setting up the hulks called for prisoners to be “fed and sustained with bread and any coarse and inferior food” as a symbol of their shame, with misbehaviour to be punished by “whipping, or other moderate punishment.” There was on top of that the hulks' peculiar below-decks dimness, the frock of sewage and waste which adorned the water around them, and the horror of being locked down at night on the prison deck and abandoned to the worst instincts of the established cliques. The British thought of the hulks as a temporary expedient, but they would not be able to get rid of their floating prisons in the Thames and elsewhere until 1853—indeed, the hulks would make an appearance in Dickens's
Great Expectations.
    What Campbell could not control was the habitual brutality and extortion of some of the guards, or the savagery of locked-down prisoners towards the weak or naive.
    Periodically reacting to complaints from their constituents, London's members of Parliament and city aldermen kept telling the government that the prisoners on the hulks should be transported anywhere convenient—to the East or West Indies, Canada or Nova Scotia, Florida or the Falklands. But the administration continued with the hulks, for except for the rebellious North American colonies, no one place seemed the right destination for transportees.
    Because they were put off by estimates of expense of transportation to New South Wales of £30 per felon, six times the cost of transportation to America, a Commons Committee considered the possibility of Gibraltar, or the Gambia and Senegal Rivers in Africa. In the bureaucratic circles of Whitehall, New South Wales fell in and out of fashion as a destination throughout the mid-1780s. Everyone was aware that New South Wales was still surely a region for small, well-planned expeditions, rather than for an unprecedented experiment in mass transportation and penology. So a draft letter from the Home Office to the Treasury, dated 9 February 1785, described the country upstream on the Gambia River in West Africa as abounding with timber for building, the land as fertile and plentifully stocked with cattle, goats, and sheep, a place where tropical food would grow readily and the natives were hospitable. The site suggested was Lemane, up the river some miles and distant from the malarial coast. Convicts could be left to themselves: “They cannot get away from there for there is not a person who would harbour them.” By April 1785, Pitt's government seemed to have decided on this version of transportation. The only cost would be £8 per head for the journey out and the hiring of an armed vessel as a guard ship on the river during the trading season. Admittedly, “upon the first settlement, a great many of the convicts would die.” But over time, as the land was better cultivated, “they would grow more healthy.”
    Botany Bay in New South Wales, on a coast Cook had visited in 1770, had an eloquent proponent, though for a different reason than the penal one. Mario Matra, an Italian-American from New York and loyal to the Crown, had sailed as a gentleman in Cook's company and claimed to be the first European to have set foot in Botany Bay. He had more recently visited New York during the American Revolutionary War to recover what he could of the Matra family property, and disappointed, returned to London in 1781, where he found a great number of fellow American Empire Loyalist refugees living in squalor. With Britain doing little for the loyalist Americans, Matra drafted a pamphlet addressed to the British government,
A Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales to
Atone for the Loss of Our American Colonies.
American Empire Loyalists should be sent as free settlers to New South Wales, and wives should be supplied to them if necessary from amongst the natives of New Caledonia or