Note: This is a reproduction of a story that originally appeared in the Truth (Sydney), 4 November 1934, by John Henry (Macartney) Abbott (1874-1953). Descendants of Major James Morisett, Ronald and Margaret Thompson, have extensively researched their ancestor and offer a different account of his time as Commandant of the Coal River settlement in their article "James Thomas Morisset - A Family Story" published on Hunter Living Histories, which can be found here. This article is reproduced as a fascinating insight into the brutalities of the convict system in New South Wales in the 1820s.
by John Henry (Macartney) Abbott (1874-1953)
THERE are four books, written by men who knew the conditions of the country contemporaneously, which, to the writer's idea at any rate, are more capable of giving the modern reader a better notion of what early Australia was really like than any others that have been published.
The first is contained in the seven volumes of "The Historical Records of New South Wales," wherein we get the point of view of everybody, from the Governors and Colonial Secretaries themselves down to that of the humble convict who is petitioning authority for some amelioration of his hard lot, or that his wife and children in Britain may share his exile in the antipodes.
They are invaluable to the student, mainly for the fact that they are entirely catholic in their outlook.
"Two Years in New South Wales," written by Surgeon Peter Cunningham, R.N., gives the point of view of a member of the official class who was shrewd, just, and benevolent.
"The adventures of Ralph Rashleigh," that strange MS. discovered by Mr. C. H. Bertie, Sydney's Municipal Librarian — who probably knew more of early Australia than any man living at that time — gives us the honestly told story of a convict who made good.
It bears an impress of truthfulness that is not an attribute of the "Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux," a plausible rogue who was a liar all his days—though he often draws a picture of his times that is true and vivid enough. And there is a small volume entitled, "Settlers and Convicts," by "An Emigrant Mechanic," which is possibly the most valuable of them all.
The Emigrant Mechanic" was a settler named Alexander Harris, who came here in the early 1820s, and published his book in London in 1847, after he had carved out a career for himself in the new world of the South and made a success that was as satisfactory as it was well deserved.
There were many of his sort in the country in those far off days, and they were the real founders of Australian nationhood.
From his book we may get as faithful a picture of thirty-year-old Australia as has been written. He gives us a startling insight into the workings of the convict assignment system, and has things to say of its terrors and abuses that are well borne out by the Historical Records.
In an early chapter, dealing with his first weeks in New South Wales, he repeats the words of a man who told him something of the condition of things then obtaining in the young colony, and his own subsequent experiences as he tells us, amply confirmed their truthfulness.
"Before proceeding with an account of my personal adventures," he writes, "it is necessary that I should inform the reader of a circumstance which gave me my first and ineradicable impression of the system of convict discipline maintained in Australia at this time.
"A gentleman, through misfortunes reduced to the inferior condition of a farm overseer, who had originally come to the colony in the possession of a very good property, breakfasted in the same room with me at the Australian Hotel.
"As I was looking over the police reports in "The Sydney Gazette," our conversation was led to the subject of convict discipline, and then took in substance the following turn. This gentleman is still alive, though very aged. His character for perseverance and integrity obtained for him about three years subsequently a lucrative situation, and finally extensive credit from his employer, a Sydney merchant.
"You may wonder, my lad," he said, "at what you read about the treatment of prisoners; most people do when they first come. But you'll see things yet up the country that these Sydney doings are only child's play by the side of."
"You don't mean to say," I replied, "that I shall meet with anything worse than this case I have just read? Here is an offence called by three different names; three several charges are made upon it; three several trials; three several sentences, and three several punishments following.
A man gets drunk, has his clothes stolen, and is afraid to go home to his master; he is tried first for drunkenness, a second time for making away with his clothing, and a third time for absconding. His sentence is in sum total one hundred lashes, which, with the cat-o'-nine-tails, is really nine hundred."
"Why, I have known the same act to be called by five different names, and five sentences passed upon the prisoner for it. It was in the case of a Government servant belonging to a magistrate near me.
"The man, as in the case you read, had got a drop of liquor from a travelling dealer; his master's son, a very pert young fellow, began to curse at and threaten him; the man retorted; a constable was sent for, whom he knocked down and escaped from.
"He then ran off into the bush, taking with him, as he passed his own hut, about three-parts of a cake he had by him ready baked. The young fellow prosecuted him for drunkenness, insolence, theft (the piece of bread, for rations are considered the master's till used), and bushranging; and then the magistrate made the constable swear the assault against him.
He got 25 lashes for drunkenness, 25 for insolence, six months in a iron-gang for stealing the cake; and three months for assaulting a peace-officer in the execution of his duty. The flogging he got before going to the iron-gang frightened him; and on receiving a sentence for some trivial offence at the iron-gang, he escaped before the punishment was inflicted, took to the bush, joined a gang of bushrangers who had arms, committed several robberies with them, was taken with arms in his hands, and hanged."
"The man was a quiet, hardworking, honest fellow; but he could not stand flogging, and he was fond of liquor. The crime he was sent here for he committed when drunk, and it was perhaps the only one he had to answer for. That man was murdered! And so hundreds upon hundreds have been, and are being, every year in this cursed country. Since Dr. Warden and young Mr. Wentworth came out and began to look after the government and the magistrates, there are not such dreadful doings as there used to be in former times."
"How long have you been here, then, sir?" I inquired.
"Nearly a score of years. I have seen a good deal with my own eyes, and that makes me believe other things I have only been told. And then, again, I have often heard men, after they became free, throw into the teeth of overseers the usage they had received at their hands.
It is a well-known fact that they used to rouse up the poor half-starved skeletons of fellows at midnight to load lime, when the boats happened to come in with a night's tide. They used to have to carry the baskets of unslacked lime a great way into the water in loading the boats, by which means many of their backs were raw, and eaten into holes. But that made no difference.
"The work they must do. The shed they had to sleep in was close by the waterside; and the slabs were so wide apart that you might almost have galloped a horse through.
"Many of them, at one time, had scarcely a rag of clothes; nothing more, indeed, than some piece of an old red shirt that they tied round their middle, and neither bed nor blanket.
"A man who worked for me told me that such was his case for a long time; and that for warmth they used to gather sea-weed off the beach and spread it some inches thick on the floor of the hut; and numbers of them would turn in together covering themselves over with it, and getting warmth from the fermentation of the sea-weed; you may say, in short, they buried themselves in a dunghill to keep warm.
"Still, even this was better than so much flogging!
"Ha, but you must understand the flogging went on in full swing along with this. But the fact is, flogging in this country is such a common thing that nobody thinks anything of it.
I have seen young children practising on a tree, as children in England play at horses. I have now got under me a man who received 2600 lashes in about five years, and his worst crime was insolence to his overseer.
There is a lieutenant (a mere boy), who is now magistrate over a gang that are making a road not three miles from the farm where I stop.
"Whenever this lad means to send a man to the lock-up for the night he makes the lock-up keeper start three or four buckets of water over the floor, under pretence of keeping it free from vermin, but really for the purpose of tormenting the culprit by compelling him to walk about all night; and then he will have the poor wretch tied up to the triangles the first thing in the morning before breakfast. This I know to be true, because I have it from the lockup keeper himself."
"I was sent for to Bathurst Court-house to identify a man supposed to have taken to the bush from the farm I have charge of.
"I had to go past the triangles, where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run from his lacerated flesh squashing out of his shoes at every step he took.
A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground. The scourger's foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which be whirled himself round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged and swollen.
"The infliction was a hundred lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the punishment through nearly an hour. The day was hot enough to overcome a man merely standing that length of time in the sun; and this was going on in the full blaze of it.
"However, they had a pair of scourgers, who gave one another spell and spell about; and they were bespattered with blood, like a couple of butchers. It brought my heart into my mouth."
".... I know of several poor creatures who have been entirely crippled for life by these merciless floggings; and, which is worse than all, oftentimes for offences which no considerate and right-thinking person would dream of considering heinous and unpardonable."
The reference made by Harris to the dreaded and dreadful Limeburners' Camp, near Newcastle, recalls the shuddering memory of a place that was the most terrible penal establishment in all the history of Australian convict administration.
Bad as they were, Port Arthur and Norfolk Island could not be compared to this frightful place of punishment. Hell contained no worse torments than were practised there upon poor humanity.
Limeburners' Bay is in the estuary of the Hunter River, directly opposite to the lower end of Moscheto Island, where the Stockton peninsula narrows into a sandy ridge separating the waters of the ocean from those within the harbour.
The Commandant of the Coal River settlement at the time of which Mudie speaks was Major James Morrisett, of the 48th Regiment, and to the memory of this officer and gentleman an odium must ever attach itself that gives him a reputation of one of the most ruthless and cruel slave-drivers the infamy of The System ever produced.
The lime-burners' camp consisted of two lines of rude huts, enclosed by a tall palisading, where the exiles and outcasts of the settlement behind Nobby's were sent from that place of horrors.
Here the vicious, the weak, and the futile insubordinates were busily employed loading boats with burnt marine shells, unslaked, to be used for making lime. The loading was done by means of baskets, which were filled and carried through the salt water on the convicts' backs to the barges, into which the shells were tipped.
The work was fiendishly cruel to men who had been recently flogged, with backs still raw and bleeding from the lash. If a man complained it was the pleasing habit of the overseer in charge of the loading-gang to fling a handful of quick-lime on to his festering sores, and cut him sharply across the agonised flesh.
"Get to your work, you----crawling caterpillar!" he would shout, "or I'll soon serve you ten times worse than that!"
When the victim picked up his basket and waded out into the salt water, which set the lime sizzling in his festering wounds, the brine seemed to eat into the raw cuts left by the cat-o'-nine-tails.
Maddened by the pain, he was nevertheless kept steadily on the job until about 10 o'clock at night, when the last of the boats were loaded, and the jaded, starving unfortunates who had been in and out of the water at this work for sixteen hours, were at last allowed to go to their horrible hovels and rest. A very few of the hundred and fifty men on the muster-roll of the camp had contrived to make themselves beds of dried seaweed, but most of them slept on the hard wooden slabs which served as bedsteads.
The living conditions in the camp were incredibly severe. The only clothing permitted did not vary through scorching summer days and biting chills of winter, and consisted of nothing more than a rag apron to cover their loins.
No man had less than two sets of leg-irons — some wore as many as four and six for extra punishment — and at all hours, in accordance with the state of the tides as it suited for filling the barges, they were compelled to work breast-deep in the salt water.
In the summer their bare hides were blistered with sunburn, and in the winter they were frozen and frost-bitten.
They huddled their naked carcases together at night on the floors of their huts so as to generate a precarious warmth. Their weekly allowance of food was three and a half pounds of maize in cob, and a similar weight of badly cured salt-beef, part of which they were often cheated out of by the officials of the commissariat department. There were no fixed hours for labour, and the overseers were instructed to work the prisoners as long as they could be compelled to stand — this often meant fifteen or sixteen hours a day.
But the most awful depth of their misery was plumbed when the commandant visited the camp. He was always accompanied by two flagellators, each of whom carried three or four sets of the cat-o'-nine-tails.
It was his practice to stroll round the different working parties, pick out anyone who struck him as being inclined to "go slow," tie him to the nearest fence-post or tree, and have him scourged with never less than fifty lashes. Their backs running with blood, his victims were at once sent back to work.
His special delight was to pick out men from the boat-loading gangs and have them lashed until their backs were raw, so that he could enjoy the sight of their writhings and the sound of their shrieks, as he forced them to place the baskets of lime on their bleeding backs and wade out into the stinging salt water.
He literally enjoyed noting the pain caused by the lime slaking in the blood of the wounds. More than once some wretched creature, driven, to desperation, would drown himself before the eyes of his torturer, whose only comment was to the effect that it would save the government rope and the hangman a job.
Apart from the personal exhilaration he found in witnessing the infliction of torture on his fellow beings, he probably believed that the only certain means of controlling the criminals under his charge was to break their bodies as well as their souls.
And it cannot be denied that his methods were successful. The lime-burners were always broken in body and cowed in spirit within three months.
Little wonder was it, in those terrible days, that men fled to the unknown terrors of the wilds, braving bullet and gallows in their desperation, to become bushrangers.
Source: Bushrangers—Noted and Notorious (1934, November 4). Truth (Sydney, NSW : 1894 - 1954), p. 28.
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