Convicts

NAVY'S ROLE IN CONVICT TRANSPORTATION

 

Navy Ships: only nine Naval ships were used to transport 2,520 convicts between 1788 and 1865. Transportion was contracted to private companies who used over 500 vessels to transport 162,000 convicts. The Navy's ships were:

YEAR

SHIP

CONVICTS

DESTINATION

1789 HMS Guardian - 44 gun frigate 25 M NSW
1791 - Third Fleet HMS Gorgon - 44 gun frigate 31 M NSW
1803 HMS Calcutta 307 M Victoria and Tasmania
1803 HMS Glatton - 56 gun frigate 271 M, 130 F NSW
1820 HMS Coromandel - storeship 300 M (150) NSW and (150) Tasmania
1820 HMS Dromedary - storeship 370 M (22) NSW and (348) Tasmania
1833 HMS Buffalo 180 F NSW
1842 HMS Tortoise 400 M Tasmania
1844 HMS Anson 506 M Tasmania

HMS Anson - after the 1840's, hammocks were sometimes supplied instead of beds. HMS Anson considered hammocks to be more suitable "both for health and morality".

HMS Tortoise - after unloading 400 convicts in Hobart Tasmania in 1842, the ship enlisted there a young George Hinckley who would win a navy VC in China in 1852.

HMS Calcutta - sent to found Port Phillip Victoria, only to settle Hobart Tasmania instead.  The first convicts to land at Port Philip were despatched from England in 1803 in H.M.S. Calcutta, which with the storeship Ocean, conveyed the expedition under Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins detailed to found a new penal settlement. Collins, after serving as Phillip’s judge-advocate in the First Fleet, had returned to England in 1797. The Calcutta’s sister-ship, HMS Glatton, a 56-gun ship armed en flute, with only eighteen guns on her upper deck, had arrived at Port Jackson with prisoners on March 11, 1803. Touching at Madeira and Rio de Janeiro, the Glatton had made a passage of 169 days. The Calcutta, having embarked 307 male convicts, with 30 of their wives and children, sailed from Spithead on April 24, 1803.

Three days later she and the Ocean left Yarmouth Roads. They made the passage to Teneriffe in 19 days, and, after a stay of four days, resumed their voyage on May 20. They ran from Teneriffe to Rio in 40 days, arriving there on June 29. They sailed again on July 19, but on the 31st, the two ships separated in thick weather. The Ocean sailed direct to Port Phillip, and arrived there on October 7. The Calcutta arrived two days later. She had run from Rio to the Cape in 24 days and from the Cape to Port Philip in 45. The voyage from Spithead had occupied 168 days, on 109 of which the Calcutta had been at sea. Including a prisoner drowned in attempting to swim ashore at the Cape, eight convicts died on the passage, but as five deaths had occurred before the Calcutta left Teneriffe, it is evident that some of the prisoners had been embarked in poor health. Regarding Port Phillip as an unsuitable site for the settlement, Collins early in 1804 transferred the expedition to Sullivan’s Bay, on the banks of the Derwent River, in Tasmania, thus becoming the founder of Hobart instead of Melbourne.

HMS Guardian - first convict transport to be wrecked on the voyage to Australia. Strictly speaking, HMS Guardian was not a convict ship. She was taken up as a storeship, but she embarked twenty-five specially selected prisoners. Designed as a 44-gun frigate, she was armed en flute, her lower tier of guns being removed, when, commanded by Lieutenant Edward Riou, R.N., she sailed from Spithead on September 12, 1789. The Guardian carried 1,003 tons of cargo, and had as passengers the Rev. John Crowther, who had been appointed assistant chaplain at Sydney, a number of superintendents being despatched to the penal settlement, Elizabeth Schafer the ten-years-old daughter of one of the superintendents, and the twenty-five convicts. At Santa Cruz, where she remained four days, the Guardian shipped 2000 gallons of wine, and on November 24 she anchored in Table Bay. Having loaded some cattle and horses, she resumed her voyage on December 11. On the 22nd, when the temperature had dropped to 49F, she sighted her first ice, and two days later, with the wisps of fog showing every sign of clearing, she fell in with a huge iceberg.  As the cattle were consuming prodigious quantities of water, Riou decided to replenish the supply by collecting some of the loose ice thath had floated away from the berg. The Guardian was then 1300 miles from the Cape, in Lat. 440 S. and Long. 410 E.

The jolly-boat and the cutter were hoisted out and began to pick up the loose ice, but the fog, instead of clearing, suddenly became so thick that from the Guardian’s decks the berg could scarcely be discerned three-quarters of a mile away. An hour was occupied in emptying the boats and hoisting them on board, and then, with Riou directing the steering, the Guardian tacked. Soon she was making six or seven knots. Riou remained on deck for fifteen or twenty minutes, when, believing the ship was clear of the berg, he went below. Half-an-hour later she struck, her bows crashing on to a projecting ledge of ice under the water. She got free, but was apparently in a sinking condition, and as she swung round her stern struck violently, severely damaging the false and main keels and sternpost, and knocking away the rudder. Water at once poured into the Guardian, and, despite the manning of her four pumps, it gained steadily. Cattle, guns and cargo were jettisoned to lighten the ship, and she remained afloat. During the night the wind freshened until it was blowing a gale. The main topsail and fore topgallant sail were ripped to shreds. The work of pumping and lightening the ship continued throughout the night, and an attempt was made to tether her, a lower studding sail, filled. with rolls of oakum, being passed under her bottom forward, carried aft and there made fast. When day dawned, the Guardian, with six or seven feet of water in her hold, was still afloat, but she was labouring and pitching heavily in the rough sea. Late in the afternoon a second attempt was made to fother her, but every effort to locate the leak failed.

On the 25th the five boats were hoisted out. Worn out by their exertions at the pumps and in lightening the ship, and believing she must sink at any moment, many of the officers, seamen and convicts had broached the liquor aboard and were hopelessly drunk. A quarrel between two drunken sailors led to the swamping of one boat, but the other four got clear. One man, dressed in Riou’s new gold-laced hat and two of his uniform coats, and carrying his sword, drunkenly told the commander that an officer had drowned the surgeon. One boat, filled principally with drunken seamen, returned to the ship. While its occupants were demanding a sail to replace the one they had lost overboard, at least twenty men jumped from the Guardian into the sea and tried to clamber into the already overcrowded boat. "It seems that they had not a single thing in this boat either to eat or drink," wrote Riou, in his narrative of the disaster, "and she was loaded as full of men as she could hold. If these men lived out the day it was the utmost; indeed, I am inclined to think they could but have survived a few minutes."

With the departure of the boats, about sixty-two persons were left with Riou in the Guardian. Twenty-one of these were convicts, the other four prisoners having leapt overboard into one of the boats. In cold, tempestuous weather, the fight to keep the Guardian afloat continued. By January 7 the water was above the lower deck, and the ship, so deep that she scarcely moved through the water, was shipping whole seas. The survivors pumped until they fell from sheer exhaustion or, having, in their despair, broached a puncheon of ruin or a cask of wine, they were incapable of any labour. The attempts to fother the ship were renewed, and an effort was made to steer her, first by the construction of a steering machine, which was unsuccessful, then by the use of a cable, which proved uncertain, and, finally, by the making of a rudder, which it was found impossible to place in position. The pumps alternately gained and lost, but the Guardian miraculously remained afloat. She staggered drunkenly across the Indian Ocean almost to Cape St. Mary, Madagascar, and then made her uncertain way back to the coast of Africa, which was sighted on February 21. Boats came to her assistance and she anchored in False Bay, where the salvaging of such of her provisions as had not been jettisoned was put in hand. On April 12, however, a fierce gale drove her from her moorings and on to the beach, where she became a total wreck.

Of her boats, only the launch, commanded by her master, Thomas Clements, was rescued, being picked up by the French merchantman Viscountess of Brittany on January 3. The ten survivors, who included the Rev. John Crowther, were landed at Table Bay eight days later, although some accounts assert that fifteen persons were aboard when she was picked up. The remaining boats were never heard of again. The twenty-one convicts who had remained aboard the Guardian were saved, but one subsequently died at the Cape. The remaining twenty eventually reached New South Wales, and fourteen of them, in consequence of Riou’s report of their good conduct, received conditional pardons from Phillip.