The Sea Inside

Salvages
’, Four Quartets,
1941



O n 29 January 1831, the convict ship
John I
arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. On board was a new consignment of two hundred prisoners from Britain. Among them was a twenty-nine-year-old cabinet maker from Newcastle-under-Lyme, described as a ‘very bad old offender’. Two years previously he had been convicted of stealing fowl, for which he was given a month in prison. In 1830 he repeated the offence in Stoke-on-Trent, this time with nineteen hens and one cock, and was tried for his crime at Stafford Assizes. He was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. His name was James Nind, and he was my distant cousin. Like my other relatives of that same name, he had travelled far from England, but unlike them, he had no choice in the matter.
    I know little of James’s life before his conviction – only that he came from the extended family of Ninds who had flourished in middle England – but his crime has bequeathed him a kind of immortality in the penal records of Britain and Tasmania. After his conviction, he was kept in gaol with his fellow transportees until they were taken south, chained hand and foot, to Portsmouth. There they were decanted into prison hulks – slowly rotting, superannuated Napoleonic ships named
York
and
Leviathan
which lay stranded in the mud as if serving their own sentence, overbuilt arks with shed-like structures and redundant rigging from which laundry fluttered in the breeze; in Dickens’
Great Expectations
, Magwitch escapes from such a hulk before being transported.
    Once on board, the men were sent deep below. At night, after lockdown, they were left to their own devices. By day they were put to work in Portsmouth’s naval dockyard. Every kind of vice ran riot in such circumstances, and although James Nind’s behaviour on his hulk was reported to have been ‘good’, he was probably relieved when the time came to embark on his voyage for the Antipodes.

    John I
sailed from Spithead on 9 October 1830. Along with its cargo of convicts, it carried a detachment of thirty officers and men of the 17th Regiment, as well as eight women and nine children; the journey took 106 days, with up to five prisoners sharing one sleeping berth. Most had been found guilty of theft, although five men had been convicted of rape, and were to serve life sentences. In some cases, transportation allowed magistrates to impose more lenient punishment on those they might have been forced to send to the gallows for such crimes as James’s. Yet the voyage was a trial in itself, for innocent and guilty alike. Although the log kept by the
John I
’s surgeon maintains that prisoners were allowed on deck during fine weather, had their manacles removed if they were suffering from ulcers, and were given lime juice to prevent scurvy, their true situation was appalling. Men were locked together and treated little better than slaves. In bad weather and when disease ran rife below decks, the journey took on the aspect of a nightmare; the surgeon serving on the
John I
’s previous trip had thrown himself overboard ‘in a fit of lunacy’.
    After more than three months at sea spent mostly in the dark, the prisoners emerged, blinking in the slanting southern light of Van Diemen’s Land. Their arrival coincided with the stern governorship of Sir George Arthur, a man who believed that surveillance was the key to control. He presided over an island which was, in effect, an open-air Panopticon – the all-seeing penitentiary proposed by the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who regarded prison as ‘a mill for grinding rogues honest’. After the establishment of Botany Bay as a penal colony, Van Diemen’s Land had become a last resort for reoffending criminals, sent to Macquarie Harbour, a ‘Place of Ultra Banishment and Punishment’ set in a remote inlet on the far side of the island. Conditions there were so appalling that rather than endure its tortures, men would commit murder in order to be hanged in Hobart. Others were held in complete isolation. Sent to the end of the world only to be kept in utter silence and complete darkness, some simply lost their minds.
    But like Port Arthur, the infamous prison on the Tasman Peninsula, such horrors were reserved for recidivists. James’s servitude in Hobart might have been quite endurable. Convicts were employed in public construction works or as bonded labour, and although theirs was a state only a step above slavery, many were