| DreadPirate |
19-11-2007 09:40 PM |
Tis something more you'd like to sink your teeth into eh? Well I've just the story for you then...What starts tonight is just the beginning of a long a wonderful journey...
One night, three days after midsummer in 1782, James Parker looked furtively for the guard, took a stolen file from beneath his jacket and set it to the rings around his legs. He had been shackled to a chain gang for six months, ever since he was sent up from Hobart Town to break and lay stone in a line of twice and thrice convicted felons. Fifteen years later, he would recall that labour camp as ‘one of the most dreadful places I have ever seen’.
From sunset to sunrise, Parker and the other prisoners were locked into huts so small that ‘the whole number could neither stand upright nor sit down at the same time (except with their legs at right angles to their bodies), and which, in some instances, do not allow more than 18 inches in width for each individual to lie down upon on the bare boards’. At half-past five each morning, they were called to muster and marched to the quarries. After three hours of breaking stone, they were given a pint of skilly, a ‘hasty pudding composed of flour, water and salt’, and a slice of bread. ‘I have to overlook them,’ wrote a boastful young soldier to his mother at home in England, ‘with a stick in my hand and… I am obliged to be very severe with them. If I report any of them for neglect, they get 25 to 50 lashes.’ Every day, lunch was mutton and potatoes, and if an overseer fancied the food in a man’s bowl for himself or his favourite, that man was wise to say nothing. Once all were fed, the guards leant again on their muskets and watched, and more stone was deafeningly broken and laid by men hacking passes through the rock. Each convict wore the hated iron bar between his legs and slops patched with the incongruous harlequin colours of yellow and blue; each was chained to the next. When they returned to camp at the end of the day, more skilly was sent to the cells, bolts were drawn and the prisoners were left caged and unattended. What happened by night among men already ‘degraded and incorrigible’, was not part of the soldier’s watch. The chain gang, said the colonial governor who had devised the system, was ‘as sever a punishment as can be inflicted’. The prospect of three years here was too much for James Parker. He was determined ‘to escape this scene of wretchedness or perish in the attempt’.
The camp was in Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania, thirteen thousand miles and four months’ sailing from London, and Parker’s escape plan was the same as that of fugitives all over the island: to steal a small boat, head downriver for the coast and sell his labour to some ocean-bound skipper. Small craft littered the banks and creeks of the River Derwent, close to the chain-gang camp: punts, barges, gigs, cutters of shallow draft and the ubiquitous whaleboat which, in this mountainous, unexplored island, would connect the coastal townships until the roads were cut through rock and laid. A day’s sailing from the Derwent estuary would take him close to the whalers and sealers of a dozen nationalities who had colonised the island’s east and south coasts. These were the hard men of the sea, who cared nothing for the judges of Hobart, nor thepolicies of London, nor anything but gain and gratification. They kept Aboriginal women chained to huts for their use and turned out blinding liquors from their distilleries. Here, it was hoped, were captains who might welcome runaway convicts begging to work their passage out, the women on their backs and the men before the mast, carrying the valuable whale oil to ports across the world.
Selecting four or five of his fellow prisoners to man a stolen whaleboat’s oars and row quietly away downriver, James Parker ‘put the question to them, they agreed and the Saturday came we were to seize the sentry and overseers and fly them from slavery’. It was only when he was too far compromised to change his mind, with the iron rings loosened and fallen about his ankles, that Parker found the men who had promised to accompany him had changed theirs. They were timid, or exhausted, or unsure of their captain’s skill. They preferred to work out their existing second sentence to risking a third for a failed escape. James Parker would have to go alone, and fast, for the alarm would soon be given by some scheming comrade, hungry for an informer’s reward. Should he be found with a file and a broken chain between his ankles, he would be lashed to the triangles and flogged, his sentence would be lengthened, his irons doubled and his rations reduced. Free from his shackles, he crept to the perimeter of the camp, pushed a sleepy guard into a ditch and pelted into the night.
Be sure to check back soon and we can follow on with this fascinating tale...
DP
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