An           
Irresistible   
TEMPTATION

An           
Irresistible   
TEMPTATION

The true story of Jane New
and a colonial scandal

CAROL BAXTER

First published in 2006

Copyright © Carol Baxter 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Baxter, Carol J.

An irresistible temptation: the true story of Jane New and a colonial scandal.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 978 1 74114 924 1.

ISBN 1 74114 924 X.

1. New, Jane. 2. Darling, Ralf, Sir, 1775-1858. 3. Female offenders - New South Wales - Sydney - Biography. 4. Women prisoners - New South Wales - Sydney - Biography. 5. Scandals - New South Wales - Sydney. I. Title

364.374099441

Set in 12.5/16 pt Centaur MT by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

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CONTENTS

Author’s note

Acknowledgments

Cast of characters

Prologue

Epilogue

Endnotes

Sources

Bibliography

Index

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In literature as in life there are true stories and there are ‘true’ stories. A current trend is the style known as ‘faction’: creating a vivid story by interweaving fictionalised dialogue and description into a story about real people and events. The drawback for the reader is the uncertainty as to where fact ends and fiction begins; depending upon the author this can be anywhere along a wide spectrum.

An Irresistible Temptation is neither fiction nor faction; the characters, events and dialogue are all drawn from the wealth of records relating to the Jane New scandal. To generate a sense of immediacy, a feeling that the characters were living their own story rather than a narrator observing them, I used information from court testimonies, affidavits, letters, reports and newspaper articles to describe events as they happened, and I converted recollections into speech. Conversions were not always straightforward: words, phrases, sentences and even paragraphs sometimes had to be omitted, or words added, or the arrangement tweaked slightly for ease of comprehension. Such changes would generally be denoted by the symbols for ellisions {…} and additions [ ], however these were inappropriate for speech so I omitted them. Consistency then dictated that I omitted these symbols from the entire story as one sentence from a particular document could be reproduced as dialogue and another as a quotation.

For ease of comprehension, I eliminated the excessive capitalisation typical of the period, and converted third person petitions and depositions (e.g. ‘the petitioner begs …’) into first person where necessary. I referred to Ralph Darling, the Governor of New South Wales, as Governor Darling or General Darling instead of his more accurate military title, Lieutenant-General Darling (ignoring his knighthood which was bestowed upon him years after the scandal). I called his southern counterpart Governor Arthur rather than using his full administrative title, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, and referred to the settlement itself as Tasmania instead of Van Diemen’s Land. I used given names for the protagonists and their family members and surnames for all other characters because of the popularity of certain given names, adding Mrs where appropriate to distinguish gender.

The sources for general historical information are included in the Bibliography. The sources for material relating to the scandal itself are documented in a chapter-by-chapter summary in the Sources preceding the Bibliography. The Endnotes serve only as a vehicle for my own elaborations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks: to my wonderful friend Kate Wingrove who has shared the journey with me and offered such wise input, and to Jason Wingrove for the Cinderella pictures. To professional advisers Keith Johnson AM, Professor Bruce Kercher of Macquarie University’s Department of Law and his invaluable website of important colonial cases: www.law.mq.edu.au, and historians Babette Smith and Dr Alison Alexander (I take all responsibility for any errors). To the Allen & Unwin team, and in particular publisher, Rebecca Kaiser and editor, Alexandra Nahlous for their inspired advice, and to Selena Hanet-Hutchins for recognising merit in my unsolicited manuscript.

To Chris, Mellony and Pete Batten for making my last-minute research trip to England a delightful experience, and to everyone else who contributed in their own way, in particular: Allison Allen, Debbie Drinkell, Michael Flynn, Caroline Forell, Michelle Grossman, Jane Hamby, Susan Holberton, Dr Carol Liston, Dr Perry McIntyre, Kathy Potts, Malcolm Sainty AM, Irene Schaffer, Christine Schwedhelm, Jacqui Simkins, Monnica Stevens, and the staff at State Records of New South Wales and the Mitchell Library, Sydney. Also to the descendants and connections of the First Fleet Nash family who first alerted me to the Jane New scandal.

Finally, to my long-suffering husband Allan Ashmore, my children, Camillie and Jaiden, and my mother Jill, my deepest love and appreciation for supporting and humouring me, and for trying not to glaze over too much when I talked (incessantly) about Jane and John. And to my late father Roy for instilling in me the fundamentals of writing and his appreciation for words: I hope you can see this achievement.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

PROLOGUE

Sydney, 6 January 1829

A menacing courtroom. A judge donning the dreaded black cap. A prisoner cowed. To all appearances it was just another day in the penal settlement of New South Wales. In truth, it was the beginning of the Jane New affair.

Sydney was a town of 15000 souls squatting on the banks of Port Jackson when the spotlight blazed upon Jane New.¹ In the forty years since the First Fleet ejected its cargo of crime into the pristine bushland lining Sydney Cove, a remarkable transformation had occurred. Sydney was no longer such a feared place that British prisoners facing the noose would choose execution over the offer of transportation to ‘Botany Bay’. Indeed, a traveller observed that nearly all of the recent transportees had been volunteers, delighted to be sent there.

While convict transports continued to offload British outcasts, they were outnumbered by trading vessels — barques, brigs, schooners, cutters — carrying luxuries unimagined by the early settlers who, tattered and barefoot, had almost starved to death. Whalers regularly scuttled into Sydney Harbour reeking of savage deaths on the high seas, with sailors so desperate for dry land and convivial company that mutiny threatened. Passenger ships materialised in increasing numbers, ferrying the free immigrants who would soon swamp the colony. British and Russian warships and scientific expeditions swanned into the harbour. By 1829 Sydney was a regular port of call on the international shipping routes.

As the penal settlement opened its arms to the outside world, the population balance shifted and society evolved. Gone were the days when convicts outnumbered free people four to one, when a military autocracy was the appropriate form of governance. Gone were the days when emancipated convicts and small settlers would defer to pastoral king John Macarthur and his fellow ‘exclusives’, and allow that colonial aristocratic body to monopolise most situations of power, prestige and pecuniary advantage. Yet their British overlords appointed the autocratic General Ralph Darling as Governor and he aligned himself with the exclusives, effectively supporting their aspirations.

Darling found himself at loggerheads with William Charles Wentworth of Vaucluse. Described by his friends as a man of the people and by his foes as a vulgar ill-bred demagogue, Wentworth piloted the opposition ‘emancipist’ cause. Anxious to claw his way into the political limelight, Wentworth grasped every opportunity to strike at the exclusives and Governor Darling. And into his political sights early in 1829 sashayed Jane New.

Wentworth played a pivotal role in one of Jane New’s legal confrontations, however his primary role lay in the supporting cast. John Stephen Jnr precipitated the scandal. The son of a Supreme Court judge, John came from a family of legal distinction and liberal outlook. He exuded charm and respectability. But he had a dark side, one revealed by his willingness to dip his toe into the social and political whirlpool of an ‘intimate’ association with a convicted felon. He was helping a persecuted damsel in her fight against their cruel Governor, he protested. And the political knife-thrust was a secondary advantage. Yet when the maelstrom eased, Jane New had skipped to freedom leaving John Stephen Jnr enmeshed in the consequences.

Was Jane New merely a pawn in this political game of one-upmanship? Or was she a siren luring men to their destruction?

Part I:
TEMPTATION

Vice is so fascinating,
that she cannot be looked upon
without peril to the beholder.
Chief Justice James Dowling

Chapter 1

THE SIREN AWAKES

Criminality descends, as surely as physical properties
and individual temperament.

Chief Justice Alfred Stephen

A fresh ruddy complexion, dark brown hair, black eyes: this bald description jotted down by the colonial authorities is the only surviving portrait of Jane New. Yet it fails to communicate any sense of her charms: her beauty, the seductive nature intimated by her contemporaries, the allure that led men to suspend their intelligence and to act against their better judgement. Nor does it reveal that she carried a scar like the ‘King’s Evil’ branded upon her neck.

‘My proper name is Maria Wilkinson,’ Jane informed the colonial authorities, although she answered to ‘Jane’ even during her youth. Claiming Leeds in Yorkshire as her native place, she was one of at least three children born to Isaac and Elizabeth Wilkinson. Was she the baby named Maria Wilkinson baptised on 13 October 1805 at Headingly? At that time, Headingly was a village lying a couple of miles north-west of Leeds although it has long since been swallowed by the expanding metropolis.²

Little is known about Jane’s father. He was most likely the widowed mason who married Elizabeth Cormack in 1804 at Leeds. Jane probably inherited his height (she was a relatively tall five feet three inches) but her mother’s allure. Elizabeth — a tiny four feet nine and a half inches with a pale complexion, hazel-grey eyes and dark brown hair — would later marry a man young enough to be her son.

Families like the Wilkinsons tend to slip through the cracks of history; the wealthy, propertied or politically inclined and the destitute or criminally inclined are more often captured in the archival net. In all probability Jane’s family was little different from the thousands of others in the Regency period who struggled to survive and were unable to resist the lure of the city that was mushrooming in their backyard. Leeds was among the many British towns transformed by the recent and ongoing Industrial Revolution. Once known for its sedate cottage woollen industry, Leeds by the early 1800s housed a conglomeration of squat manufactories producing engineering and agricultural equipment and, as a by-product, fetid air, stinking piles of refuse, and sluggish rivers and streams.

Jane’s childhood in Leeds was one of work, work, work from a young age. She had minimal schooling — one week was all her parents could manage. The teachers had to be paid: a penny here, a halfpenny there. The cost added up, proving too much for most families. Instead, Jane went into service, possibly in Leeds, almost certainly in Manchester.

A revolution in cotton manufacture had transformed Manchester from the thriving but unremarkable textile centre of the 1770s into the textile trade’s commercial centre. Jobs abounded for carters, porters, packers and labourers in addition to the essential factory hands. The Wilkinsons were among the hordes drawn towards this burgeoning metropolis.

Forty miles separated Leeds and Manchester. As the Wilkinsons jolted along in an old cart or plodded wearily down the rutted roads, their journey probably provided Jane with her first view of the little-changed rural landscape: sepulchral woods, eerie moors, and, of course, the palette of crops in the miles of tamed fields. Weed-infested fields often bore testimony to a farmer’s absence. Through fair means or foul, some had found themselves drafted into Britain’s military and naval forces to fight in the two-decade-long Napoleonic Wars. Britain’s battle against France was not just the usual story of preventing French domination; it masked a fear that the masses would catch the radicalism that had spawned the French Revolution in 1789. Yet for families like the Wilkinsons, the War probably existed only as a background hum. To a child like Jane, the present was all that mattered.

Dotted along the Wilkinsons’ route were stately homes and gentlemen’s residences similar to those depicted in Jane Austen’s literary tales of manners and morals. Despite the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and the political and emotional dramas of the interminable war, these families had the same demands: food, clothing and domestic services. Maids of different ages and abilities were required, even untrained young girls like Jane.

Jane’s mother later described herself as a house and laundry maid, and she possibly found work for Jane with her own employers. The young girls slaved at the most menial of household tasks: scrubbing floors, peeling potatoes, mending the unimportant fabrics. Jane showed needlework skills and dressmaking soon became her occupation.

Unmitigated drudgery summarises the life of a dressmaker in Regency England. While textile manufacture had early succumbed to industrialisation, clothing manufacture remained in the hands of single women or small workshop enterprises until the mid-1800s. Although dressmakers and milliners were the elite of this needlework industry, the proliferation of women with needlework skills kept wages low. Seamstresses laboured from dawn till dusk and beyond, 8 am to 11 pm in winter, 6 am to 12 am in summer, all night long if necessary during the fashionable season. Backbreaking, eyestraining, exhausting work. Stitch, stitch, hour after hour, day after day. Those who craved excitement, stimulation or change generally turned to alcohol or sex. Some, like Jane, turned to crime.

Jane’s first venture into the criminal world was most likely driven by her family’s desperation. In 1815 England’s future looked rosy. The Duke of Wellington had triumphed in the Battle of Waterloo, the final victory in the Napoleonic Wars. The French defeat had quelled the fear of contagious revolutionary ideals. All was right with the world. Except that 300000 unemployed British soldiers and sailors flooded the countryside, attempting to rejoin communities who could provide neither support nor jobs. Mass unemployment dimmed the glow of victory; harvest failures doused it. As domestic consumption, production and trade withered, England spiralled into a depression. As usual the poor were the first to suffer.

With few sources of social welfare available other than the dreaded workhouse, the primordial instinct to survive motivated much of Britain’s criminal activity, the Wilkinsons’ no doubt included. Perhaps Isaac was unemployed or ill. Presumably the family’s expenses surpassed their meagre income. Whatever the circumstances, Elizabeth turned to crime to support her family. Her decision to use her alluring thirteen-year-old daughter as an accomplice was undoubtedly deliberate. Jane would be useful as a decoy, or to actually pull off the theft, and to twist any heartstrings — particularly male — if they were caught.

On 13 November 1818, Jane, her mother and a sixteen-year-old accomplice, Josephine Townley, were indeed caught. They had entered the premises of shopkeeper Ann Mainwaring. Elizabeth and Josephine possibly distracted the woman while Jane snatched two pairs of boots. Whether Jane was spotted committing the crime or discovered with the boots in her possession is not documented. The records merely show that Manchester’s corrupt deputy constable, Joseph Nadin, already notorious for arresting innocent people and for accumulating wealth through thief-catching and pay-offs, arrested them. He charged all three of them, committed them to stand trial at the next sessions and trundled them off to the New Bailey prison at Salford on the outskirts of Manchester.

Considering the Dickensian image of nineteenth-century prisons, Salford’s New Bailey was better than most. Upon their arrival Jane, Elizabeth and Josephine had to strip and hand over their clothing for disinfection, then bathe, the authorities recognising the importance of cleanliness in reducing outbreaks of prison fever. Wearing the appropriately colour-coded prison garb — a drab-coloured wrapper, woollen petticoat, body linen, and clogs for the pre-trial females — the three were escorted through the courtyard to the female quarters where the felons were lodged and fed separately from those facing minor charges. Children received little special treatment, being thrown in with the hardened adult criminals.

Jane attended the prison’s school two days a week, although the students were not taught to write; lessons from the Bible served as the foundation for their education. Did the authorities believe that proverbs like the loaves and fishes would miraculously provide them with the sustenance they needed to survive? On the remaining days, Jane toiled at the mundane repetitive work considered appropriate as punishment: weaving, wool-picking, hair-picking, rope-making, pin-heading, clogging, shoemaking, tailoring and the loathed bobbin-winding.

Two months into their incarceration, the women faced court. Considered more serious than the usual misdemeanours brought before the magistrates, their case was presented at the General Quarter Sessions of the Peace held in the prison’s courtroom on 19 January 1819. Much pomp and ceremony accompanied the quarter sessions. Black robes, wigs, Latin phrases tripping off the tongue. The crowds resisted the formality, rustling noisily in the gallery, the volume increasing as loud voices and rattling chains heralded the prisoners’ arrival. The ever-present tipstaffs cast a black shadow as they hovered in anticipation, ready to take into custody any offender sentenced to imprisonment, transportation, or worse.

Out of sympathy for the girls’ youth, Ann Mainwaring valued the boots at only a penny apiece. This ‘pious perjury’ — undervaluing the stolen goods below the capital threshold — ensured that a conviction would not propel the girls towards the gallows. Such a thought revolted even the most hardened supporters of capital punishment.

‘How will you plead?’ enquired the judge.

‘Guilty,’ Jane piped up, acting upon her mother’s instructions. Elizabeth and Josephine followed. ‘Not guilty,’ both pleaded. Although the case against them was evidently less convincing, the jury expressed their scepticism. As it turned out, Jane gained no benefit from pleading guilty. Both girls received fourteen-day sentences although these were passed for time served. Elizabeth was remanded for twelve months.

With her mother in gaol, her family in trouble — her father died within the following two years — and few readily available jobs, particularly for those with a known criminal conviction, Jane’s return to criminality seems inevitable. But at some point desire infiltrated necessity. As later financial independence failed to curb her shoplifting pursuits, she must gradually have become enthralled by the sense of exhilaration it gave her. The delicious feeling of anticipation upon venturing into a store, of crossing into ‘their’ world. The heightened sense of awareness, of watching out for an opportunity while concealing her intentions. The focusing of attention on a particular object which pulled her in, wanting to be possessed. The sleight of hand required to grasp and hide the object. The ruse allowing her to escape undetected. The satisfaction at achieving a successful violation of the rules both moral and legal that shackled her to a tedious existence.

It was a game with a winner and a loser and, as Jane quickly learnt, shoplifters usually won. Constables were in short supply so crim inals were rarely apprehended. Victims had to pursue prosecutions, so many grudgingly accepted their losses because of the expense and trouble involved. Adept thieves could follow their calling for years before facing the consequences.

Jane managed eighteen months. With another accomplice, a widow named Ann Ogden, she shoplifted twice in the one day: three scarves and six yards of silk from one shop, two lengths of cotton cloth from another. Committed to the Salford gaol on 21 August 1820, the two faced the quarter sessions on 23 October. The stolen items were again valued at only a few pennies, and both pleaded guilty, received six-month sentences, and were remanded to the same prison. This time, Jane found herself in the garb of a convicted felon — the blue and yellow clothing that shrieked of a more serious offence.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Wilkinson pursued her own timetable. Indeed, mother and daughter conceivably spent more time together in gaol than out of it. Released in January 1820, Elizabeth remained outside the clutches of the law for twelve months, until she and an accomplice, Elizabeth Hotchin, stole ten handkerchiefs (five silk) from one shop and six pairs of gloves from another. Although the goods were again undervalued and she pleaded guilty to both crimes, Elizabeth Wilkinson was sentenced to hard labour at Lancaster Castle for two years. Her previous conviction undoubtedly contributed to her harsher sentence.

Three months after Elizabeth’s second conviction Jane was discharged, however she managed only a month of freedom. On 26 May 1821, Jane and a 33-year-old widow, Ann Bates, were caught stealing twenty yards of ribbon, undervalued again at one penny. By this time Jane knew that a guilty plea carried few benefits. Convicted on 16 July, she was remanded for twelve months although she apparently spent the duration in Liverpool Gaol. Her accomplice joined Jane’s mother at Lancaster Castle for twelve months.³

When the guards unbolted the gaol door in July 1822, Jane was only sixteen years of age, had three convictions behind her, and was well-known to the corrupt constable Joseph Nadin. She had little chance of eluding his grasp even if she found secure employment and resisted the compulsion to continue shoplifting. Jane slipped away, heading ten miles south to Macclesfield in East Cheshire where she reportedly found work as a dressmaker.

Macclesfield was awash with silk. These shimmering swathes of beauty competed against the supreme French silks made at Lyons, the centre of France’s silk industry. Ironically, Lyons was also home to Jane’s future nemesis, a woman named Madame Rens, who would sail for Australia two years later carrying a piece of silk fabric that was to prove Jane’s undoing.

Chapter 2

RICHES OR RUIN?

I sentence you, says the Judge, but to what I know not: perhaps to
storm and shipwreck; perhaps to infectious disorders; perhaps to
famine; perhaps to be massacred by savages; perhaps to be devoured
by wild beasts. Away, take your chance; perish or prosper, suffer or
enjoy; I rid myself of the sight of you; the ship that bears you away
saves me from witnessing your sufferings.

Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment⁴

When Jane awoke on 13 March 1824 she could not have known that she hovered at a crossroads, that the choices she made as the day progressed would change her future irrevocably. Was it a spur of the moment decision to enter David Jackson’s premises as she wandered past? Had she a desperate need for the two pieces of cloth valued at five shillings apiece or the money they would fetch, or was her decision to snatch them merely a flutter of opportunism? Whatever Jane’s motivation, her adversary was determined to thwart her. Despite beseeching looks, tears, pleas, Jackson remained firm. He hailed a constable who imprisoned her, he lodged charges against her, and he pursued the prosecution despite the time and expense involved in travelling 33 miles west to Chester Castle to do so.

With three previous convictions, Jane knew she faced a harsh penalty if again found guilty. She told the authorities her name was Jane Henry, although they soon discovered the truth. She had plenty of time to bemoan her fate as she was carted from Macclesfield to Chester, ankles chained and chafing, at the mercy of the stares and jeers of those she passed. For six weeks she languished in the gaol at the back of Chester Castle, her fears no doubt escalating when another inmate was gibbeted and his body dissected and anatomised.

Trials were swift and the accused benefitted from legal representation only if they could afford it. Eighteen-year-old Jane was most likely alone as she faced the judge and jury on 27 April 1824. She shuffled to the prisoner’s box, heard the charges read, and pleaded not guilty. Her accuser David Jackson testified, describing the robbery and the goods stolen, and pointing to Jane as the thief. He was convincing. Two other witnesses, both female, offered their testimony. The prosecution rested. If Jane was granted permission to speak in her own defence she failed to sway the court.

‘Guilty,’ declared the jury.

‘Seven years’ transportation to such parts beyond the seas as His Majesty with the advice of the Privy Council should direct,’ pronounced the judge. And with the bang of his gavel, Jane’s future was ordained.

A seven-year sentence of transportation — which effectively comprised lifelong banishment as few emancipated convicts could afford the return journey — for the theft of goods worth, in today’s terms, considerably less than $50? A harsh punishment indeed. Yet it could have been worse. Under the law, convictions for shoplifting goods worth more than five shillings merited a death sentence. The noose. Perhaps Jane’s youth and physical attractions had influenced the judge when he sentenced her.

Punishments for criminal behaviour were particularly harsh at that time. For years social reformers battled the general consensus that criminals belonged to a ‘criminal class’, one found in British society at a level below that of the working class, the ‘honest poor’, and populated by irredeemable thieves and abandoned prostitutes. Judges, magistrates and politicians believed that criminals inherited these criminal tendencies, that entire families carried the taint from birth, and that they deserved little sympathy or understanding.

Did Jane carry the taint of inherited criminality? The authorities undoubtedly believed so. Nine months previously, in July 1823, her mother had faced the Manchester quarter sessions for the third time. Elizabeth was apprehended after stealing a piece of sarcenet and ten yards of cloth from one store, and four buckles (two gold) from another. These were expensive items; serious trouble loomed. Elizabeth employed an attorney, the items were revalued at a penny apiece, and she was saved from the gallows. Her seven-year sentence of transportation surely seemed like a holiday in paradise when she considered the alternative.

Such evidence of criminality within families, combined with the need for effective deterrents, had led to the draconian punishments inflicted upon criminals: hang ’em or banish ’em. Deterrence was eventually taken to such absurd and barbaric lengths that, by the early 1820s, 223 crimes were punishable by death.

As the century passed, social reformers gradually discredited the concept of inherited criminality, and society began to accept the nexus between poverty and crime. In hindsight transportees like Jane were recast as poor helpless wretches forced from their homeland because economic circumstances had induced such destitution and desperation that they were forced to steal a loaf of bread.

Later, however, statistical analyses proved that most transportees to Australia were multiple offenders, and that a significantly large proportion came from London and industrial cities like Manchester which housed criminal communities so dangerous the authorities feared to venture into their terrain. Historians gradually realised that the higher incidence of crime in these cities was not just a function of poverty, but relative poverty. As the urban poor rubbed shoulders with the extravagantly wealthy, they were surrounded by the surfeit of goods produced by this first industrial society. But they could rarely benefit; they could only watch and desire. Naturally, the temptation towards criminal activity was compelling, not only for those motivated purely by survival but for those like Jane who lusted after the luxuries. Physically the circumstances were ideal: crowds, busyness, anonymity. They pounced.

So, were criminals like Jane innocent victims of poverty and an unjust society, or were they evildoers? The truth is, they included all types. Social and environmental disadvantages, and sometimes rotten luck, precipitated poverty, crushed families and bred social and emotional maladjustment. Such an environment often fuelled criminal activity and encouraged associations with other similarly deprived or like-minded individuals. Congregations of criminals nested in the poorer sections of England’s industrialised cities, spawning the concept of a criminal class and an inherited criminality that influenced political thinking in the transportation era.

For the poor in Regency England, it was the rule of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. The resilient ones like Jane survived, the others died.

Chapter 3

THE WILD ONES

It is a melancholy fact, but not the less true, that the far greater
proportion of the female convicts are utterly irreclaimable, being the
most worthless and abandoned of human beings.

W.H. Breton, Excursions in NSW

‘And in the meantime to be imprisoned in the gaol of the Castle of Chester,’ the judge intoned when pronouncing Jane’s sentence. Was she grateful? The alternative was worse: to be consigned to the prison hulks hunkering in the malodorous mudflats edging the Thames and other harbour ports. Conditions on the hulks were shocking: rations both meagre and inedible, backbreaking labour, brutality and worse — rape. By the guards, by the other prisoners, even by outsiders. To supplement their pitiful incomes, the guards often rowed the prettiest girls to nearby ships and threw them to the sailors. Innocence had no chance of surviving the degradations of the British penal system.

Instead, Jane spent over four months locked in Chester Castle Gaol while the authorities awaited instructions for her disposal. Her previous incarcerations had armed her. She was tough, she was troublesome and she knew the right people to curry favour with. ‘Notorious character, bad connexions,’ denounced the gaolkeeper. The gaolkeeper’s report also proved premonitory. Within five years word of Jane’s notorious colonial escapades would travel halfway around the world.

As summer turned into autumn, two ships anchored in the Thames and prepared to receive 160 female convicts for transportation to Australia. Both Jane and Elizabeth — who had remained in gaol for over twelve months despite a female transport sailing for Hobart in December 1823 — were ordered to London. Jane and her fellow Cheshire transportee presumably travelled with the larger Lancashire contingent on the 170-mile journey. Looks of astonished delight must have crossed their faces as mother and daughter found themselves together again, until they learned that Jane was sailing for Hobart on the Henry while Elizabeth was Sydney-bound on the Grenada. They made tentative plans to find each other, having no comprehension of the vast distance that separated the two penal settlements.⁵

Jane and Elizabeth would never know that the decision to transport them at this time had little to do with their crimes or sentences. While their male counterparts were transported as a punishment for their crimes — the recidivists, the troublemakers and those with longer sentences singled out first — the female prisoners of Britain were primarily transported for their sexuality. As women committed considerably fewer crimes than men, the penal settlements of Australia were awash with males. This generated its own set of problems, so the British authorities conceived a simple solution: send more women. ‘Let it be remembered,’ warned the Transportation Committee in 1812, ‘how much misery and vice are likely to prevail in a society in which women bear no proportion to the men.’ Accordingly, they scoured the hulks and prisons for any suitable women, rejecting the old and unhealthy and hustling the remainder, like Jane and Elizabeth, onto the transports. Nobody cared that this was a serious injustice. The women were all considered prostitutes anyway.

Yet prostitution was not a transportable offence and only a small proportion of the female transportees supported themselves either casually or professionally in this manner. The same mentality that associated criminality with heredity equated prostitution with female criminality. Consequently these women were not only condemned for their crimes, they were punished for their sexuality. And to add insult to injury, when some fulfilled the agenda intended for them, they were lambasted for their behaviour.

On 18 September 1824, Jane was among the female prisoners rowed out to the Henry, a 386-ton six-year-old ship rocking gently at anchor at Woolwich on the Thames River. As she neared the vessel, she must have seen a surprising number of sailors lining the decks. The vessel had carried male convicts once before, but never female. Pushed up the ladder with the unceremonious assistance of the sailors and heaved onto deck, she must have felt assaulted by their lascivious eyes.

The officers and crew of female convict ships frequently expressed delight when informed of their cargo. Female convicts, particularly the pretty ones like Jane, were considered fair game by the men they came into contact with. The authorities had set regulations to prevent a return to the floating brothel environment of the early female transports, however enforcement was ultimately the captain’s responsibility. Some crew members claimed that the women enticed them into breaking the rules. ‘To see twenty wicked fingers beckoning to him,’ wrote the surgeon-superintendent of one female transport, ‘and twenty wicked eyes winking at him at one and the same time, no wonder his virtue should sometimes experience a fall!’ Others reported that the women were not reluctant to provide such services, a defence that was undoubtedly true to some extent. These women were survivors, and better an officer’s bed with a decent meal thrown in than imprisonment for months on end in the hold. However, transports were not crewed by well-disciplined men dressed in starched whites; brutality was an intrinsic part of shipboard life. For some convict women, the voyage would prove a living hell.

One by one the women clambered down the ladder to their quarters in the hold. Jane’s new home proved to be damp, dim and dismal. Rats and mice; cockroaches; a strange unpleasant smell, a mingling of odours from previous cargoes. The seventy-nine female prisoners were accompanied by ten children: infants, toddlers and even some older children — male children under six and female children under twelve were permitted to travel with them. Elsewhere on the vessel, twenty-five free women and their twenty-three children settled themselves. Their government-paid passages enabled them to join husbands and relatives — usually convicts — in the colony.

The surgeon, Dr William Bell Carlyle, began treating patients shortly after the women arrived, some with ulcers on their legs from travelling in irons, some with ‘intestinal derangement’. The bacteria in London’s water was apparently taking its toll. One woman — a twenty-year-old prisoner described by the surgeon as a ‘very stout heavy young woman’ — had a nasty accident, falling backwards into the main hatchway just as the surgeon walked by. Finding her unconscious with her head bent down, he diagnosed a partially broken neck, however his timely assistance enabled her to walk again a few days later.

And then Dr Carlyle diagnosed a case of variola: cowpox or smallpox brought on board by a convict’s son. One of the world’s most dreaded plagues, the disease could ravage a confined population. The surgeon immediately vaccinated those at risk, however five caught the disease. Only one, a sixteen-year-old female passenger, died. It was a low toll under the circumstances, although some sufferers were undoubtedly disfigured.

On 5 October 1824 as autumn’s chills crept into the hold, the Henry slunk out of London, inching along the Thames towards the North Sea. First to the alarmingly named Gravesend, then along the north coast of Kent where the variola victim’s body slipped into the depths, then around Margate and through the Downs where they awaited the ideal conditions. Finally on 12 October, the Henry sailed through the Strait of Dover into the English Channel and began the long journey to Australia. By the 15th, seasickness exacerbated the misery endured by many of the women.

The Henry sailed towards the tropics, towards a world the women could never have imagined. Flying fish, sometimes thousands at a time, soared from the depths, and whales were occasionally seen — ‘huge monsters that would be a danger if they struck the ship’. On 30 October they passed Madeira, off the coast of Morocco, and headed towards their first port of call. Many transports were plotting a direct route to the penal settlements by this time, shaving two or three weeks off the journey. Jane was perhaps glad to hear that they were breaking up the trip, a release from the incessant rocking, the stifling hold.

On 8 November, the Henry stopped for supplies at St Jago [Santiago] in the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast near Senegal. Perched on the side of a volcano punched up from the ocean depths, the tropical island just north of the equator was hot and dry, with a minimum temperature higher than that of the average English summer day. Even before Jane climbed up to the deck, the odours must have besieged her: overripe tropical fruit, rotting garbage, an alien humanity, all the more noxious somehow because of the smothering heat. Another smell tainted the air, perhaps not so unfamiliar: terror. St Jago was a Portuguese colonial outpost and served as a collection point for slaves until the American slave trade was finally abolished half a century later.

Fresh fruit and vegetables to fight the dreaded scurvy, water and other supplies were loaded, and on 13 November the Henry set off on the remaining leg of its journey to Tasmania. Weeks of stultifying heat continued as they lumbered past the equator, hoping to escape the doldrums and to ride the trade winds south. More equable temperatures followed as they steered east of the Island of Tristan d’Acunha, looped around the tip of Africa and kept north of the Roaring Forties until they passed above the island of St Paul on 17 January. Days of paralysing cold tormented them as the Roaring Forties hurled the Henry towards Tasmania; hours of terror as storms lashed the ship. Fear, exhaustion, boredom: the litany of emotions experienced by the women during the seemingly never-ending four-month journey climaxed in relief on the afternoon of 5 February 1824 when a sailor yelled, ‘Land ahoy.’ The Cape of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) was in sight.

A pilot boarded at the mouth of the Derwent River and sailed the transport forty miles upriver. Gradually the barrenness disappeared and the scenery became breathtaking as they neared their destination. In sheltered bays and inlets they could see signs of habitation, with settlers’ crops appearing like a chequerboard of colour against the sombre mountain backdrop. ‘It brought old England and all its dear recollections home to us,’ reported one traveller. Finally on 8 February, the Henry reached the penal settlement of Hobart. The same traveller described her first impression of the colonial outpost:

Hobart is picturesque beyond measure with carts and cottages, ships and shops, girls in their pattens, boys playing at marbles, above all rosy countenances, chubby cheeks and English voices. You have probably dreamt of Tasmania as a kind of wilderness, an appropriate insular prison for the vagabonds who are sent yearly from England. You have never supposed that it has a beautiful harbour, a fine metropolis, with towns, streets, shops and pretty shopkeepers, like some of the larger towns of Devonshire or of Sussex. The view from the harbour would make the most beautiful panorama in the world, were a painter to give the deep brown and purple tints to the foliage which clothe these hills.

Female convict transports remained an unusual sight in Hobart. While nearly 5500 of Jane’s male counterparts had staggered off 33 transports in the two decades since the Derwent River penal settlement was established, the Henry was only the eighth transport to offload female convicts. The previous seven had carried a mere 345 women in total. But not just any women. In comparison to their New South Wales sisters, these were considered the worst of the bad lot: ‘artful and deceitful’; ‘drunken, dissipated and of a bad disposition’; ‘impudent, vicious and sullen’. Intimidated neither by their lowly state nor by the attitudes of their superiors, many of the women were considered incorrigible, more troublesome indeed than the men — swearing, hair-pulling, fighting, screaming abuse at each other and the men around them.⁶

Yet as their ship anchored at Hobart, Jane and her fellow transportees decked themselves in their finery — silks, satins, frills and flounces, if they possessed them — and prepared again to go into battle against whatever fate would throw at them.

Chapter 4

A PRISON WITHOUT BARS

I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer;
it seemed scattered on the wind . . . ‘Then,’ I cried, half desperate,
‘grant me at least a new servitude.’

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

The arrival of a freight of female fodder was viewed with mixed feelings by the penal settlement. Delight by emancipated convicts and small settlers who hoped to find themselves a wife (no romantic arrangement, of course; just a woman to cook, clean and provide night-time solace). Relief by settlers desperate for domestic servants. Concern by the authorities who had limited opportunities to dispose of the less desirable women. Dread by the wives of some married settlers who feared the invasion of a servant whose lack of skills and moral attributes was overshadowed by a fetching appearance and an audacious flirtatious manner.

Revelations that some masters had views regarding the women’s duties that differed markedly from those intended by the authorities had become a topic of concern both in the colony and back in Britain. Yet the general consensus was that, under the circumstances, the resulting abuse was inevitable. ‘What can be done?’ some shrugged. ‘The women are used to selling their bodies,’ others rationalised.

Of course, the women’s behaviour exacerbated the problem. The street-smart women soon realised that judicious use of their bodies empowered them. It was the only currency they had to assert control over their lives and destinies. For services rendered, they could often entice gaolers, masters or other authority figures to manipulate the system in their favour. Once recognised, once acted upon, it was a lesson never forgotten. Their eyes became bold, their smile teasing, their pose provocative. They exuded sexuality, testing their power on every man within their ambit. And for the comely few like Jane, this raw sexuality proved a particularly potent and alluring mix.

The authorities were at a loss to understand convict women. Why were they not appropriately cowed? ‘Their fierce and untameable audacity would not be believed,’ one Hobart magistrate exclaimed in disgust. ‘Bold Amazonians’, ‘the shameless ones’, lashed the press. Settlers had little choice but to bring such women into their homes. Until free immigration became policy, few other candidates were available for domestic service. As one settler reported: ‘Servants are not to be had, prisoners supply all the demands. If the histories of every house were made public you would shudder. Even in our small ménage, our cook has committed murder, our footman burglary and the housemaid bigamy!’

Yet employing such women exposed wives and children on a daily, intimate level to tainted lives and experiences. Could children be raised with the appropriate manners and morals if their care was left to women with open and shameless vices? asked the community. Indeed, the degrading and demoralising impact of transportation not only upon transportees but upon the whole community added strength to the movement for the abolition of transportation. The Americans had reached the same conclusion half a century earlier when they protested against Britain’s policy of dumping their gaol refuse on American soil. Such actions, denounced Benjamin Franklin, were even more insulting than if the British had emptied their chamber pots onto American tables!