A Commonwealth of Thieves Read Online Free Page A

confinement with hard labour. By 1786, however, no progress had been made on the sites of the penitentiaries and the government had decided to begin transportation again. Crime levels had jumped because of the sudden discharge of members of the army and navy after the war in America. Lord Sydney was left to write, “The more I consider the matter, the greater difficulty I see in disposing of these people.”
    So by the end of 1785, Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Sydney and his Undersecretary, a former naval purser named Evan Nepean, were still looking for a scheme. They considered Africa again, a tract of country on the west coast between 20 and 30 degrees South latitude, near the mouth of the river Das Voltas (now the Orange River), where there were copper deposits. Convicts could be shipped out in slaving vessels which could then proceed up the coast and pick up their accustomed cargo of African slaves to take to America and the West Indies. The many American families that were still anxious to live under British rule could be sent to Das Voltas to serve as the discipliners and employers of the convicts. In preparation, the government sloop
Nautilus
was sent out to survey the Atlantic coast of Africa up to about modern Angola, but its ultimate report was that the country was barren, waterless, hopeless.
    In March 1786, Londoners and their aldermen again petitioned against the unsatisfactory solution represented by the hulks. They reminded the government that demobilised and unemployed sailors would make a mob and, imbued with the fancy American ideas of the rights of man, would set convicts free and burn the hulks. The hulks had brought the risk of mayhem and uprising as well as shipboard epidemics to within a long boat's reach of shore.
    At last, in August 1786, Cabinet finally plumped for New South Wales, the preposterously distant coast Cook had charted sixteen years past. Londoners rejoiced that a decision had been made to resume transportation. They believed it would mean an end to the river hulks.
    A London alderman wrote to Jeremy Bentham, a young political philosopher with ideas about prisons who was then in St. Petersburg in Russia, visiting his brother, who had a contract building ships for Catherine the Great. Bentham was developing a plan for a panopticon penitentiary, a huge circular prison where every prisoner would be visible from the centre—an idea which Bentham had derived from observing the way his brother had organised his office in the St. Petersburg shipyard. The alderman told him the “government has just decided to send off 700 convicts to New South Wales—where a fort is to be built—and that a man has been found who will take upon him the command of this rabble.”
    From the alderman's letter it sounded as if contemporaries saw the task of leading the expedition to New South Wales as potentially destroying whoever was selected for command. The man the government chose was an old shipmate of former purser, now Home Office Undersecretary, Evan Nepean—a forty-nine-year-old Royal Navy post-captain named Arthur Phillip, a man of solid but not glittering naval reputation, with some experience under fire. He had been at sea since the age of thirteen, and had no connection with the British penal system. But that did not worry the non-visionary Tommy Townshend, Lord Sydney. He just wanted a robust fellow to mount a flotilla and empty the hulks for him.

two

    T O CONVICTS, P HILLIP WOULD LATER convey the very breath of civil magisterium, even though his early childhood might not have been much more socially elevated than some of theirs. Not only had he known British seamen, who came from the same class as the convicts, but he had been a child of marginal London as well, the London where the lives of worthy strugglers like his mother were not immune from predatory crime. Arthur's mother, Elizabeth Breech, had been married to a sailor named Herbert. Some claim Herbert rose to captain's rank in the Royal