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A REBEL HAND
NICHOLAS DELANEY OF 1798:
FROM IRELAND TO AUSTRALIA
by PATRICIA AND FRANCES OWEN
ON BOARD THE CONVICT SHIP
He and his fellow convicts spent these months in dangerously overcrowded gaols; the overflow was herded onto moored derelict, mastless ships known as hulks. There, in the foul air, stinking of wounds and excrement, they had to wait until ships were chartered and ready to sail. The unlucky ones died of ‘gaol fever’, a virulent form of typhus which was endemic in prisons and frequent in the hulks.
Once a ship was in the bay, the ragged and filthy convicts were stripped, scrubbed and dressed in new canvas shirts in order to reduce the likelihood of infection spreading through the ship. They were then chained together and packed in batches of 120 into long cabins. It is a reflection on the conditions on land that prisoners competed to get out of the gaols and hulks and onto the transport ships – whatever might lie ahead...
Convicts transported to America had been assigned to their ships’ masters for the length of their sentences. The captains could sell on the services of their convicts; they therefore had a reason to protect their human cargo and land them in good health.
This was not what happened to convicts sent to Australia. Though they were still assigned to the ships’ masters for the voyage, once they arrived, the assignment automatically passed to the colonial governor. There was little financial incentive for the captains to look after the convicts, although the governor might set up an enquiry into cases of outstanding malpractice or attempted mutiny. Prisoners were regarded as goods rather than as people. Captains were paid a sum for every convict shipped out and an extra amount if the transportee was still alive when the ship arrived in the colony. Presumably the ships’ other cargo gained their masters enough profit to make the humans on board relatively dispensable.
A CONVICT IN AUSTRALIA
On arrival in New South Wales, the luckier convicts escaped government service and were ‘assigned’ to a master – often himself an ex-convict. The majority of convicts arriving in Australia were unmarried landless workers with an average age of 26, much like Nicholas. Where he differed from the crowd was the fact that he was a countryman and a political prisoner: most were urban thieves who did not know how to work the land.
It was Major George Johnston, commander of the New South Wales Corps, who was to be Nicholas’s master. As a senior officer – and one of the largest landowners in the colony – Johnston was a person of importance and would have had his pick of the newly arrived convicts. Nicholas, a young man, must have still looked strong and competent, despite the deprivations of the voyage.
The assignment system was centrally controlled. Convicts’ masters had to feed and house their workers to standards regulated by the government. Any punishment of an assigned convict had to be endorsed by a magistrate. And, while unsatisfactory convicts could be returned to government service, they could, in theory, sue their masters if the conditions of assignment were breached. When adhered to, it must have seemed a fairly liberal regime to masters and assigned convicts alike. Certainly George Johnston rather prided himself on his treatment of his labourers. Asked his opinion on the controversial question of whether convicts really could be reformed, he replied: “‘Yes’; he kept them hard at work and gave them plenty of vegetables”.
MARRIAGE: INTRODUCING ELIZABETH
On October 17 1806 young Elizabeth Bayly (also spelled Bailey or Bayley) sailed from England, bound for Australia. She arrived in Sydney on April 4 1807, a free settler who had braved the long journey in the ship Brothers under Captain Oliver Russell. She was only 16 years old. In October 1808 she married Nicholas Delaney...
It is one of the paradoxes of Australian history that, as one who ‘came free’, Elizabeth is less documented than her convict husband. It is nearly impossible to know why she came to New South Wales, apparently without any family to support her. Until the 1820s most women who went to Australia of their own (comparatively) free will were the wives or close relatives of men who went there. Fewer than one in five of the transportees in the colony were female, and the proportion of those who came free was even smaller. Women of any age were at a premium, and young women even more so.
The arrival of women, convicts or free, in the colony in its early days was not welcomed by the administration, which saw them not as sources of productive labour but as extra mouths to feed – and threats to morality. The aim was to get them dispersed as quickly as possible, mainly as domestic servants. Britain’s view was that all convict women, most of them transported for theft, were impossible to reform and that, coming from gaols where “extortion, prostitution, and drunkenness were routine”, as the Parliamentary Report of 1814-5 on Mendicity had found, they would turn the colony into an extended brothel. The fact that many women had been used sexually by the guards and crew while on board ship, and arrived pregnant or with a babe in arms, would have added to the administration’s prejudice.
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