History of Australia/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
Governor Macquarie.
Macquarie's rule began under favourable auspices. The period of suspense after Bligh's deposition was satisfactory to no one. Its termination gladdened all. The new military defenders of the colony were his own regiment. No bitter remains of past struggles would willingly have been kept in remembrance by the community. The general cordiality might have been at least for some years promoted by a prudent Governor. He received loyal addresses, and when sworn in he made what the Sydney Gazette called an animated speech at the grand parade. He was laborious and ambitious. He promoted discovery. He erected public buildings, and affixed his name to them. He gave it to natural and artificial objects. He would have been the founder of a new era if the construction of ugly buildings could have conferred such a title. His wife has given her name to a rocky spot called Mrs. Macquarie's Chair, from which the lounger on the picturesque promontories of the Government Domain in Sydney may admire the never-wearying charms of Port Jackson. She planned the drive which winds around the jutting promontory and picturesque domain; and it was her wish that the spot should be preserved for the enjoyment of all. It is to be hoped, and is not improbable, that the inhabitants will never part with this public possession; and thus the simple selection of a site of natural beauty may transmit the remembrance of the wife to a posterity which would otherwise not care for the husband. Her project of love was completed in June 1816, as is told in carving on the rock. The traveller at Athens gazes on the Pnyx and Mars Hill, rugged now and natural as they were in the days of Pericles, and feels with a thrill of pleasure that the rascal Turks have in these instances committed no desecration; and it may be hoped that Nature's work may be left unmarred in the public pleasure-ground in Sydney.
Macquarie desired to create a new order in society. King had said it was hard to make farmers out of pickpockets, and Macquarie essayed the harder task of making gentlemen out of convicts. He thought their society good enough for himself. His efforts were as futile as they were offensive to the gentlemen of the colony, and were the main cause of an inquiry into his government, and an unfavourable report. He governed, however, for nearly twelve years, and extended the bounds of occupation largely.
It may be convenient to record, in juxtaposition to the census of 1810, the last census made by Macquarie (Oct. 1821). Though individuals had been ruined, the material progress of the colony had not been arrested by floods or by civil convulsions. An official statement made by Governor Macquarie shows a census in March—
| 1810. | With V. D. Land—1821. | |
| Population (including the 73rd and 102nd Regiments) | 11,590 | 38,778 |
| Horned cattle | 12,442 | 102,939 |
| Sheep | 25,888 | 290,158 |
| Pigs | 9,554 | 33,906 |
| Horses | 1,134 | 4,564 |
| Acres cleared and in tillage under various crops | 7,615 | 32,267 |
Agriculture had not been extended after King's departure, but the genial climate, and winters in which live stock required no housing, and browsed at their leisure on pastures ignorant of snow, had largely increased the flocks and herds of the colonists. Scarcity was not unknown amidst the gradual increase, and the magistrates regularly held an "assize of bread." In 1814 they fixed the price of thirteen pence and a half-penny for the two-pound loaf. Macquarie commented in the Gazette (Feb. 1818) on the reluctance of settlers to supply grain to the government stores, "in the present alarming season of scarcity." Those indebted to the government were inexcusable. The Governor would show no lenity. He would cause them to be sued. Unless they became more prompt he would be under the "painful necessity to resort to foreign markets." There was one noble exception—Thomas Gilberthorpe, of Pitt Town. This order was to be read in the churches. In the following year an order from the Secretary of State relieved the stores of one drain upon their resources. Till 1814 Lord Bathurst had not been aware that the families of civil servants received rations from the public stores. Macquarie was to stop the practice, "as well as that of allotting to each a government servant, clothed and victualled at the public expense. Issue of fuel to civil servants was discontinued at the same time. In 1815 further "indulgences" were stopped by orders from England.
Macquarie's scheme for building a hospital by granting a monopoly in spirit-traffic was not to be repeated. The annual issue of a proportion of spirits, at a price, to civil and military officers, to superintendents, overseers, clerks, gaolers, constables, &c., and also to licensed publicans, was considered unnecessary, and prohibited. All contracts of government were to be paid for in money only. All barter of spirits for produce was forbidden, and offenders were to receive no indulgence. These directions prove that the Government, though slow to recall or arrest Macquarie in his career, could not long be ignorant of the mischief which his improper favours were calculated to produce.
Sir Joseph Banks, in a letter to Governor King, mentioned that Lord Hobart accepted as a reason for founding new settlements: "If you continually send thieves to one place it must in time be super-saturated. Sydney now, I think, is completely saturated. We must let it rest and purify for a few years, till it begins to be in a condition again to receive."
When Hobart was in distress its needs were met from Sydney. Bills drawn by Governor King supplied its early wants, whether of food, stores, or money, though, at intervals, kangaroo flesh was issued; and after the flood of 1806 seed wheat cost sometimes three or four pounds sterling per bushel, as in the older colony. Hobart had no control over the settlement at Port Dalrymple, where Paterson presided, and, with King's consent, named the river Tamar, and the town Launceston, in honour of Governor King, a native of the ancient capital of Cornwall. There, also, difficulties were met by grants from Sydney. During Bligh's government many of the settlers at Norfolk Island were removed to Hobart, chiefly in 1808.[1]
Collins, having declined to recognise Bligh as Governor-in-Chief, when called upon to do so in 1809, Macquarie would have proceeded against Collins if the "fell sergeant death" had not anticipated him. Macquarie[2] had lost no time in suggesting that Collins ought to be recalled, and that Foveaux should be appointed in his room, but Collins died before Bligh sailed to England in 1810. Macquarie visited Hobart in 1811, and reciprocated compliments with the inhabitants. He marked out and named many streets. Lt. Col. Giels (73rd) became Acting Governor in 1812, and, after encouraging agriculture for a time, gave way to a newly-appointed Governor (Colonel Davey), who arrived at Hobart in Feb. 1813. He had served at Trafalgar in the Marine Corps. He was rough, but generous. He was not prone to repress evil tendencies in those around him, for he is reported to have "shared in common a taste for spirituous liquors." But trade prospered, agriculture was extended, wheat was exported to Sydney, and whale-fishing grew into importance. Until 1814 Van Diemen's Land depended solely on New South Wales for the administration of justice in civil cases. Besides the Criminal Court of Judicature established under the Statute 27 Geo. III., cap. 2, there was the Governor's Court—a Civil Court presided over by the Judge-Advocate, and two nominees of the Governor. These courts were the Judicature in the parent colony.
Bates, the Deputy Judge-Advocate, arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1806; but Collins thought Bates' commission applicable only to Port Phillip; and Bates opened no court, civil or criminal. The Van Diemen's Land Courts existed under the same letters patent as those extant in New South Wales. The Criminal Court and the Civil Court of the continent might sit in the island, but never sat there. Litigants were compelled to seek justice in Sydney or go without it. Doubts were raised as to the power to establish courts in Van Diemen's Land at all. When the statute (27 Geo. III., cap. 2) was passed to enable the Crown to constitute a Court of Criminal Judicature at Sydney, Bass's Straits were unknown, and the power seemed limited to "the eastern coast of New South Wales or some one or other of the islands adjacent." Van Diemen's Land was not on the east coast, and was adjacent to the south coast. Necessity overruled doubt. A community in which a man could not be executed, could not be supposed to exist. Under a new Charter of Justice issued in 1814 provision was made for a Lt.-Governor's Court and a Deputy Judge-Advocate in the island; and Macquarie sent Abbott (late of the New South Wales Corps) to act in that capacity. He was empowered with two assessors chosen by the Governor to decide causes not exceeding £50, and until he arrived in 1815 there had been "no authority for the trial or determination of civil causes in the settlement."[3] He opened his court in 1816. The limited jurisdiction was found inadequate. A voyage to Sydney was costly, and consumed time. Means of communication were rare. The scope of Abbott's court was, by common consent, extended. The colonists broke up their claims, and took several securities not exceeding £50. Though actions were thus multiplied they were decided on the spot. There was no appeal from Abbott's court, and he prided himself upon administering law according to what was right without care about technicality. He listened, however, with complacence, to professional men. We are told that his decisions generally commanded respect. He permitted convict attorneys to appear before him "merely in virtue of the authority given to them by their employers." "As late as November 1821 no free professional person had arrived at Hobart Town to practise."[4] Towards the close of Collins' career in 1810 he endeavoured to establish a newspaper, but it did not prosper. In Davey's time (1814) it was temporarily revived, but sank again, and was only fledged for lasting life in 1816, with the title of the Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter.
Nevertheless there were stirring events in the little community. Bushrangers—runaway convicts who had become robbers—exercised a reign of terror in the sparsely inhabited districts. The columns of the Sydney Gazette furnish a picture of Van Diemen's Land. Macquarie, in May 1812, subjected the Port Dalrymple settlement to that at Hobart Town. In May 1814 it was announced that the late Actg. Dep. Surveyor of Lands at Port Dalrymple, and another man, late Actg. Dep. Commissary of Stores and Provisions at the same place, had "unlawfully absconded into the woods," "and put themselves at the head of divers profligate and disorderly persons, convicts, and others." Twenty-seven were named. Amongst them was Michael Howe, afterwards a notorious ruffian.[5] All were required to return peaceably. If they would do so all but wilful murderers would be pardoned. If they should refuse, they would be treated as outlaws. Some surrendered (including Michael Howe, who after three months absconded again), some were pardoned,[6] and immediately resumed their habits of plunder. Colonel Davey proclaimed martial law in May 1815 in spite of remonstrance from Abbott.
It was nominally in force during five months. Macquarie disallowed the proclamation as exceeding the powers of a Lt. Governor. But Macquarie was not able to enforce under Davey measures for crushing the evil which, in the measured language of a Commissioner of Enquiry, became a systematic, continued or combined effort of desperate convicts to defy the attempts of the local government or to subsist by plunder.[7] Davey was removed.[8] Some of the inhabitants of the distracted island had vainly presented an address (Sept. 1815) in favour of maintaining martial law. When the new Lt.-Gov., Colonel Sorell, arrived, bushranging was still rampant in the land, and one of the most notorious was Peter Geary, a deserter from the 73rd Regt. Sorell called the inhabitants together to devise the means of coping with the difficulty. They agreed (5th July 1817) to subscribe funds. Sorell offered rewards which breathed new life among the constabulary. For Geary one hundred guineas were offered. Soldiers joined in the pursuit. Many outlaws were taken, and a stop was speedily put to the dangers which, under Davey's rule, had terrified the peaceable and made insolent the bad.
A detachment of the 46th Regt. was the principal instrument in reducing the island to order. Under Sergeant McCarthy eight of the 46th encountered eleven bushrangers under Geary. The robber fell mortally[9] wounded. Two of his companions were wounded and captured. Colonel Davey was a witness of these events. He dwelt in the island for some time as a settler before he retired to England. Sorell instituted "musters," similar to those in New South Wales. Convicts were thus kept under watch, and a check was established upon the issue of passes to them. But Colonel Sorell was not successful in raising the moral tone of the community. Mr. Bigge reported that it was lower in Van Diemen's Land than in New South Wales.
Exploration of the interior and of the coast of the little island was prosecuted during Macquarie's control. Flocks and herds increased. Wheat and even meat were exported to Sydney (1816-20), and in 1821 the muster showed a population of 7400; 15,000 cultivated acres; 35,000 cattle; 170,000 sheep; 550 horses; and 5000 pigs. Macquarie visited his dependency in 1821. He made a vice-regal progress, conferred names on places and pardons on convicts, and published a glowing account of the island and of his proceedings.
On the gloomy picture of the condition of the natives he did not descant. It was in keeping with the events of 1804. When the settlement was reduced to straits for food, kangaroo hunting led many whites into the bush, and more than one isolated hunter fell a victim to the revenge of the blacks for the massacre of 1904. The number of natives killed is not recorded in any human annals. Yet between 1805 and 1810, we learn that one huntsman, Germain, was continually with them in safety, and that he declared that till they were excited by ill-treatment "there was no harm in them." In vain Lord Hobart urged the Governor to use them kindly. Convicts let loose to forage for themselves, and armed with muskets, cared little for the Governor when roaming out of sight in the primæval forest. Collins endeavoured to imitate Phillip by securing a native. The prisoner escaped with his fetters. Collins notified that those who fired on the natives wantonly, or murdered them "in cold blood," should suffer the last penalties of the law. His notice was vain. Two whites were missing in 1810. One was thus described in the Derwent Star (Jan. 1810):—
"The natives who have been rendered desperate by the cruelties they have experienced from our people, have now begun to distress us by attacking our cattle. . . . No account having been received of William Russell and George Getley, there can be no doubt of the miserable end they have been put to. This unfortunate man, Russell, is a striking instance of divine agency which has overtaken him at last, and punished him by the hands of those very people who have suffered so much from him; he being well known to have exercised his barbarous disposition in murdering or torturing any who unfortunately came within his reach."
Colonel Davey endeavoured to win the confidence of the natives. Through the agency of a native woman living with a white man, between thirty and forty of them visited the settlement. In spite of the Governor's known desires, some worthless Europeans maltreated them, and they escaped. Davey declared that he could not have believed that British subjects would have so ignominiously stained the honour of their country and themselves, as to have acted in the manner they did toward the aborigines." Sorell swelled the sad testimony. In 1819 he reminded his subjects that the natives were "unsuspicious and peaceable, manifesting no disposition to injure" in certain remote places, "and they are known to be equally inoffensive in other places where the stock-keepers treat them with mildness and forbearance." One instance will suffice as a record of the atrocities committed. Formal inquiry[10] established the fact that about the time of Governor Davey, a man, while capturing a native woman, killed her husband, slung the bleeding head upon her neck, and drove her thus before him to be retained by force.
From such scenes it is a relief to turn to the progress of discovery in New South Wales. When Macquarie assumed the government in 1810, the colony consisted only of the county of Cumberland, with an outpost at the mouth of the Hunter, reached by sea. Westward, the Blue Mountains, whose rugged watershed fed the Nepean, the Cox, the Grose, and other tributaries of the Hawkesbury, had hitherto barred all progress. The colony was cooped in by a mountain barrier on the west, and by broken sandstone ridges on the north and south. The Hunter river was known, but it was resorted to only as a penal settlement, and as a place where coal and cedar might be procured. In 1817, Captain Wallis, commandant at Newcastle, permitted well-behaved convicts to go to Wallis plains and to the river Paterson, and assist in raising food for themselves and others. The whole free population of the district, viz., the store-keeper, the assistant-surgeon, and the pilot's son, were allowed to take up lands at the same places. But in 1813 the gloom which had so long shrouded the western interior was dispelled.[11] Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth, then only twenty years old, and Lt. Lawson, with four servants, four horses, and five dogs, started on the 11th May with six weeks' provisions, from the South Creek near Penrith, to solve the mystery which for a quarter of a century had baffled explorers. The Sydney Gazette recorded their departure with hope, but hardly with confidence. They crossed the Hawkesbury at Emu Island, and by toilsome journeys literally cut their way by slow stages through the tangled underwood and amongst the rocky precipices and broken mountains and gorges. When they found patches of grass they cut it and carried it on as food for their horses. They endeavoured to keep on the dividing ranges between the river Grose and the Western river. Leaving two men to guard the horses, on the fourth day the remainder of the party "cut their way for about five miles." On the fifth day they cut their way two miles further; finding no food for horses. On Sunday they rested, but "found reason to regret the suspension of their proceedings, as it gave the men leisure to ruminate on their danger." On the following day (17th) they loaded the horses with as much coarse rushy grass as they could carry, and the whole party moved on in the path already cut. They camped on a ridge, having to fetch water for themselves up the side of a precipice six hundred feet high. The horses were without water. On the 18th the explorers cut their way for a mile and a half, being compelled to remove large stones to enable them to pass along a ridge which had deep precipices at its sides. On the 19th they "began to ascend the second ridge of the mountains," and obtained a view of the settlements they had left behind them. Mount Banks bore N.W., Grose Head N.E., Prospect Hill E. by S.; the seven Hills E.N.E.; Windsor N.E. by E. "At a little distance from the spot at which they began the ascent they found a pyramidical heap of stones, the work evidently of some European. This pile they concluded to be the one erected by Mr. Bass, to mark the end of his journey," but it was afterwards attributed to Caley, and it become known as "Caley's Repulse." Congratulating themselves on having penetrated further than any other European, they proceeded by daily journeys of from three to five miles, and on the 28th they "contrived to get their horses down the mountain by cutting a small trench with a hoe, which kept them from slipping, where they again tasted fresh grass for the first time since they left the forest land on the other side of the mountain." They had passed the mountain barrier and left Mount York behind them. On Monday the 31st May, computing that they had travelled "fifty miles through the mountain," and being then in fine forest or grass land," they "conceived that they had sufficiently accomplished the design of their undertaking, and on the following day they bent their steps homewards." On the 6th June they "reached their homes, all in good health." The Sydney Gazette triumphantly recorded their "return from their trackless journey without the slightest injury," after discovering "a prodigious extent of fine level country."
In Nov. 1813 Macquarie despatched Mr. G. W. Evans, an Assistant-Surveyor, with five men, and two months' provisions, to follow the marked path of the volunteers. Following their track to the end, Evans continued his journey for twenty-one days more, and described the country he saw as "equal to every demand which this colony may have for extension of tillage and pasture lands for a century to come." He returned after an absence of seven weeks. In a Government Order (12th Feb. 1814) Macquarie, "in consideration of the importance of these discoveries, and calculating upon the effect they may have on the future prosperity of the colony," announced his intention to grant to Evans a pecuniary reward, and one thousand acres of land in Van Diemen's land whither he was to proceed as Deputy-Surveyor. In the same Order, the Governor was
"happy to embrace this opportunity of conveying his acknowledgments to Gregory Blaxland and William Charles Wentworth, Esqs., and Lieut. William Lawson, of the Royal Veteran Company, for their enterprising and arduous exertions on the tour of discovery which they voluntarily performed, being the first Europeans who accomplished the passage over the Blue Mountains The Governor, desirous to confer on these gentlemen substantial marks of his sense of their meritorious exertions, means to present each of them with a grant of 1000 acres of land in this newly-discovered country."
Macquarie visited the new territory, and conferred pardons upon convicts who had the honour of assisting to convey supplies for the use of his suite. Convict labour was devoted to making a road across the Blue Mountains. It was opened in April 1815. Macquarie fixed upon Bathurst as the site of a town. Many colonists sent sheep and cattle to the park-like forests and plains on the watershed of the interior. But whither did those western waters flow? A band of eight convicts thought their course must be to the east coast, and in October 1815, started from Windsor on their way to New Guinea. Skulking near the main road, and avoiding exposure at Bathurst, they followed downwards the Macquarie river. Reduced to utmost want they were sustained by the kind offices of the natives, who fed them, and in response to signs, guided them to Bathurst. Emaciated almost to death, most of them reached the settlement, but for some time barely clung to life. Such account as they could give of their wanderings was obtained by the Government, and it whetted public curiosity. Macquarie determined that the rivers Lachlan and Macquarie, named after himself, should be traced; and in 1817, Oxley, the Surveyor-General, started from Bathurst with a well-equipped party, containing Mr. Allan Cunningham the botanist, and Mr. Parr as mineralogist. They followed the course of the Lachlan until they found themselves on the boundless level surface through which the river (which to their surprise was rising though they had had no rain) lazily meandered in ana-branches amongst which it was difficult to ascertain the main stream. The rising waters endangered the lives of the party. Oxley turned aside, steering for the south-west, in hope of reaching Cape Northumberland. He had run risk from flood. He was to endure thirst. The country between the Lachlan and the Murrumbidgee was parched; water was scarce; and some of the horses perished. He was but a few miles from the Murrumbidgee, and had he then persevered he would have reached it with far less difficulty than he encountered in turning back to the Lachlan. But he had to save the lives of his party, and could not surmise that within a few miles of him on the south, ran a larger river than the deceptive Lachlan whose marshes had defied him on the north. He turned back, and regaining the Lachlan, followed its course downwards, until the spreading of its waters made him resolve to close his explorations altogether. He denounced the country as "useless for the purposes of civilized men;" inferred, and not unjustly, that the Lachlan itself, unfed by affluents, must either be dry or become "a chain of ponds" in summer, and recorded his opinion that the low sandy hills on the south-western coast line were the "only barriers which prevent the ocean from extending over a country which was probably once under its dominion." His last effort was to take three men for a final attempt to solve the mystery of the Lachlan waters. Returning from a point in latitude 33.57.30, longitude 144.31.15, he diverged from the Lachlan to the north-east, and after cutting his way successfully through a belt of mallee scrub (eucalyptus dumosa) struck upon the Macquarie river, near a place he called Wellington Valley, and returned to Bathurst through a country which he described as beautiful and fertile. His narrative, though discouraging as to the Lachlan, was tempting as regarded the Macquarie. He was sent again in May 1818 to explore that river. Like the Lachlan it deceived him. He concluded that both rivers ran into "an inland sea or lake, gradually filling up by immense depositions from the higher lands left by the waters which flow into it. It is most singular that the high lands on this continent seem to be confined to the sea-coast, or not to extend to any great distance from it."
Unable to follow where the river could not preserve a marked channel, Oxley determined to steer to the eastern coast. The Castlereagh arrested him for a week, but he reached the Arbuthnot Range, and ascended Mount Exmouth on the 8th August. Passing on to what he called Hardwick Range, he surmounted all difficulties, and reaching a beautiful and rich pastoral land on his way, called it Liverpool Plains.
On his Lachlan journey he had seen the Myall tree, which Allan Cunningham had called the Acacia pendula. At Liverpool Plains he saw it in its most graceful forms, and most redundant growth. Crossing the Peel river, he ascended the western slope of the cordillera, attained the table-land of New England where it divides the waters of the Namoi from those of the Macleay, and reached suddenly one of the most startling sights which could confront a traveller. As he passed over an undulating country, the land terminated. An abyss was before him. The waters of various streams found their way by broken waterfalls, and reached the bottom of a gorge from one to two thousand feet in depth. The sides of the ravine were precipitous rock. Lesser clefts branched here and there to make extrication more difficult. He had reached the edge of the New England Falls. Descent was impossible. He determined to skirt the gigantic precipice till some practicable place could be found which would enable him to reach the sea. Foiled as he was by this sheer wall of rock, and gazing downwards into the distant depths, where the streams tumbled foaming among the boulders at the foot of each mountain side, Oxley could yet admire it. "It would be impossible," he said, "to form any idea of the wild magnificence of the scenery without the aid of Salvator's pencil."
After vain efforts to descend towards the sea, he found a way to the south of the falls, where he named Mount Seaview, whence he descried the coast-line. The ascent and descent were difficult. None but those who have been in a primæval mountain forest can understand how, in the absence of all path or track, the growing timber, the fallen trees, the tangled underwood, the precipices, ravines, and crags, thwart the progress of an exploring party. Oxley overcame all difficulties, and by a tributary of a river (he named the Hastings) reached and named Port Macquarie, twelve weeks after leaving the Macquarie river. Even then his journey to Sydney was full of hazard. Horses died of exhaustion; the Manning river was only crossed by means of a stranded boat seen on the shore twelve miles off, and by great exertion carried by men to the river. Oxley reached Newcastle on the Hunter with an advance party, and obtained provisions to relieve his companions.
Early in Macquarie's reign a man born for exploration appeared, and succeeded in all his attempts. Hamilton Hume (the son of a commissariat officer, who after being wrecked in the Guardian with Riou, reached Sydney in the Lady Juliana), was born at Parramatta in 1797. The ease with which he could move from place to place in a mountainous and thickly wooded country,—seeming intuitively to divine the most practicable course,—was wonderful in the eyes of those who accompanied him. When seventeen years old, he, with a brother and a black boy, went beyond the Cowpastures, threaded his way through Bargo Brush, and discovered the country about Bong Bong and Berrima. Two years afterwards he led Mr. Throsby to that neighbourhood, and afterwards discovered Goulburn Plains on the Wollondilly, and Lake Bathurst. For this exploit Macquarie granted him three hundred acres of land.[12] Thus in a few years were the bounds of the colony extended, and new regions made known, and Macquarie was in imagination the master of the ceremonies, presenting a fertile continent to his country. Exploration by sea was continued during his rule. Captain Phillip Parker King, son of the late Governor King, was selected as the commander, and in 1817 sailed in the Mermaid, of eighty-four tons burden. His instructions were to continue the work of Flinders (whose book and maps had been published in 1814) from Arnhem Bay on the west of the Gulf of Carpentaria, by the north-west Cape, and on the west coast. After taking in wood and water at King George's Sound, he commenced his actual survey at the North-West Cape. Exmouth Bay, Nichol Bay, Port Essington, Van Diemen's Gulf, were surveyed, and the Alligator river was ascended in a boat for nearly forty miles. King saw many Malay proas. He was kind and cautious in dealing with the natives, but could not always prevent the use of firearms by his men. In 1818 he surveyed Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen's Land, and Port Macquarie (on the east coast of New South Wales), which Oxley had discovered. In 1819 he sailed through Torres Straits; and, though reduced to one anchor, continued his coast survey. At longitude 125° 41′ he bore up for Timor, having in his two voyages added more than a thousand miles to the coast-line surveyed by his countrymen. In 1820, Macquarie being still Governor, King sailed again in the Mermaid; but after reaching his previous point, was compelled by the leakiness of the Mermaid to return. Macquarie fitted out the Bathurst for him, and again King sought the north-west coast,[13] resorting to the Mauritius for provisions, and returning by King George's Sound and Swan River to continue his survey. His labours were concluded in 1822, when Macquarie no longer reigned in Sydney.
The legal functionary whom Governor King had so often and so earnestly asked for, was, by force of events, extorted from the government after the deposition of Bligh. Macquarie took with him a new Advocate-General, Mr. Ellis Bent (who was in 1811 made Judge and Commissary of the Vice-Admiralty Court of the territory). It soon appeared necessary to erect a Court which no Governor could hope to deal with as Bligh had attempted to treat the highest Court in the colony in 1808. The quarrels of civil litigants, it was resolved, should be separated from the administration of the high Criminal Court. A new commission and letters patent (4th Feb. 1814) effected a separation of the civil and criminal judicatures, formerly united under the presidency of the Judge-Advocate. A Civil Court, called the Governor's Court, was composed of the Judge-Advocate of the colony and two inhabitants appointed by the Governor. Another, called the Lt.-Governor's Court, was created in Van Diemen's Land under the presidency of a Deputy Judge-Advocate.
A Supreme Court was established in Sydney. The Judge was to be appointed by the Crown. Two magistrates appointed by the Governor were to aid the Judge. Over all was the High Court of Appeal, presided over by the Governor himself, with the Judge-Advocate as assessor. No change was made in the Criminal Court, where the Judge-Advocate presided. Mr. Ellis Bent, after painstaking compilation of rules of practice, died, universally regretted, without being able to open the Governor's Court. A locum tenens opened it for the first time in January 1816, and a new Judge-Advocate, Wylde, arrived in October of that year to preside over it. Mr. Wylde (afterwards Sir John Wylde, and Chief Justice at the Cape of Good Hope) had the rare and not felicitous fortune of presiding in the Court in which his father was a subordinate official as Clerk of the Peace.
The first Judge sent to the new "Supreme Court of Civil Judicature" was Jeffery Hart Bent, a brother of Ellis Bent.
Macquarie quarrelled with Judge Bent at a very early date. Bent questioned the legality of a certain road toll, of which the surplus, after repairs, was paid to a Police Fund. Macquarie told the Secretary of State that a letter from Bent contained "false assertions and malignant insinuations." Macquarie having determined to associate with freedmen, and to force their society upon others, was enraged because Bent would not suffer convict attorneys to practise before him. George Crossley was one of those who desired the privilege. The irate Governor wrote of Bent—he holds no Court, "nor is it his intention to hold one until the point in regard to the re-admission of attorneys sent here as prisoners shall be determined agreeably to his own wishes in the negative." Macquarie went so far as to express his "decided opinion" that Bent ought to admit Crossley.[14]
Lord Bathurst was discreet enough to agree with Bent rather than with Macquarie.[15] But the latter acted vigorously on the spot. He informed Lord Bathurst[16] that he had issued a General Order (11th Dec. 1816), notifying Bent's "removal and recall from his official situation, and declaring his disqualification and incapacity to act from thenceforth as Judge of the Supreme Court or a magistrate of this colony." . . . It was a "severe measure"—"I did it with extreme reluctance. . . . In one letter particularly Mr. Bent declares in speaking of himself and me that 'our local rank places but a shadow of distinction between us,' and, with a view of drawing a malignant contrast of his own, he adds that his irritability of temper has never led him into acts either of illegality or oppression," Lord Bathurst sanctioned the removal of the angry Judge by the angry Governor.
Bent's successor, Mr. Barron Field,[17] the author of more than one law-book, had arrived in Sydney when Macquarie thus justified himself. Of Wylde, the Judge-Advocate, and Field, Macquarie said, "I have every reason to hope and believe they will in their respective situations prove a great blessing and acquisition to this colony." Of a solicitor who had not been a convict he wrote: "This worthless and unprincipled reptile under the pupilage of Mr. Bent shows himself a ready agent to undermine and blast, if possible, my honour and public character."
Without any consultation with the Judge, or apprising him of the nature of the case, Macquarie appointed a freedman as one of the magistrates, who, with Field, were to constitute the Supreme Court. Field, unconscious of the fact, could not remonstrate, but he afterwards expressed to Mr. Bigge his indignation at the "want of candour" displayed by the Governor, who thus plotted to force the convict element into positions of importance.
Macquarie's general policy must be treated separately. It is sufficient to point out here that his deception of the new Judge at the outset renders it probable that at this early period Macquarie's association with the criminal class had blunted his own moral sense.
There was a feeling abroad that the powers of a Governor, who might be as rash as Bligh or vain as Macquarie, ought to be guided, if not controlled, by a council of advice. A Committee of the House of Commons had in 1812 recommended the creation of such a council. It might be deemed dangerous to place a Governor in a position of weakness; but at least his council would be able to protest against evil measures and transmit their protest to the Secretary of State. Lord Bathurst did not adopt the recommendation, and in June 1813 Macquarie poured forth his "great satisfaction." "So far from being an assistance, if unhappily tried, it would, in my opinion, most assuredly be productive of all the evils and inconveniences your Lordship so justly observes as likely to result from it. I, therefore, indulge a fond hope that the measure will never be resorted to in this colony."[18] Assuredly, it would have been hazardous to create a council of advice, unless under restrictions which would have prevented Macquarie from placing upon it any of the convict class whom he delighted to honour; and it was hardly to be expected that the Secretary of State of those days would knowingly permit any of that class to take part in making laws after being condemned for breaking those which were in force.
Macquarie's industry was undeniable. For maintenance of order in his capital, he divided it in 1810 into five districts, each containing a watch-house. He named new streets,[19] and changed the names of old ones. After a few months he promulgated fresh regulations, dividing Sydney into eight sections; appointed fifty constables; defined their duties; called on all householders to report within twenty-four hours all persons in their houses at any time; and made D'Arcy Wentworth Superintendent of Police in Sydney and its vicinity.
In 1806 patrols had been established by Governor King in Sydney and Parramatta, with power to "imprison idlers," to pass officers, masters, supercargoes, and others enumerated, on their "making themselves known," and to detain "persons answering officer' who were not entitled to that appellation;" but the troubled times which had intervened, and the growth of the community, had made more systematic measures necessary, and Macquarie, with ampler military force, addressed himself to the task. He denounced the total disregard with which many of the lower classes treated the Sabbath, and their notorious profanation of it. Reluctantly, in May 1810, he resorted to coercive measures "to put a stop to the growing evil," and empowered constables to take up persons who could "not give a satisfactory account of themselves."
He resorted to a singular experiment in building a hospital. In a colony where Governor after Governor had striven to repress the vice of drunkenness with varying success; where on Governor King's retirement Bligh had been specially enjoined to adhere to King's custom of allowing no spirits to be landed without his written permission—Macquarie bargained with three persons, Wentworth, Blaxcell, and Riley, that if they would build a hospital, according to a plan submitted, they should have a monopoly of the sale of spirits for a term of years. The monopolists paid their workmen partly with goods and spirits. They built public-houses in the neighbourhood of the hospital. They would not let the public participate in the trade which debased the community and enriched themselves. D'Arcy Wentworth was the principal surgeon[20] of the colony at this time, and became Superintendent of Police, Treasurer of the Police Fund, and an active promoter of the Bank of New South Wales. It will be remembered that he had pledged himself on the faith of a gentleman, in 1800, not to enter into any future speculations contrary to His Majesty's instructions." He speculated in drunkenness with the aid of Macquarie in 1811. In a letter (23rd April 1811) to Mrs. King, the widow of the Governor, Marsden thus alluded to the transaction:—
"Messrs. Wentworth, Blaxcell, and Riley have got the contract for building the hospital at Sydney, and they have the sole privilege of buying spirits. . . . This contract will continue more than three years. consider it a very great evil to the settlement. The affairs of this country have taken quite a new turn, and a very unexpected one;—a new class of magistrates with all the new productions that such a union was likely to produce. I have retired behind the scene, and live very quiet, remote from the din of politics. I have nothing to attend to but my own duty, which makes me inore happy than I ever was since I came to this colony."
Macquarie laid the first stone of his hospital in Oct. 1811. He completed the King's Wharf in 1813. When Commissioner Bigge was conducting his inquiry Macquarie alleged as one of his reasons for keeping so many convicts employed on works and buildings that the settlers could not take them as assigned servants, but Bigge found ample evidence to the contrary. It is as satisfactory to find that Lord Liverpool was displeased with Macquarie's spirit-monopoly contract, as it is astonishing to notice that Macquarie expressed (Nov. 1812) his surprise that the contract had met with "disapprobation." He promised to avoid making similar arrangements without previous communication. He explained that when the project was first mooted, Wentworth[21] had nothing to do with it, but at the request of Riley and Blaxcell joined them. He was forbidden to repeat such experiments. The traffic which Governor King had crushed in 1800, when he obtained the pledges of D'Arcy Wentworth and others, "on their faith as gentlemen," that they would "not enter into any future speculations or purchases, contrary to His Majesty's Instructions," was, by Macquarie's formal act, revived in favour of D'Arcy Wentworth himself.
Earl Bathurst after a short time revived the prohibition.
In 1816 Macquarie published a General Order stating that he was specially commanded by Lord Bathurst" to notify to all persons holding situations under this government that they are not to be permitted, on any account whatever, to carry on, or be concerned in, mercantile or commercial transactions; and that in the event of any officers under this government either commencing or continuing any kind of mercantile occupations after the promulgation of this notice they shall be dismissed from their said situations." . . .
Macquarie in a published letter (1820) declared that, "If at present any of the officers of the government carry on trade, it is by underhand means. . . . "It would be very greatly for the benefit of this settlement if the civil servants were removed occasionally bodily to some other colony as the military are. . . . Persons long domesticated in a country naturally colonize, and form themselves into combinations destructive of social order. . . ." The social order which Macquarie desired was the aggrandizement of the emancipated convicts, and it jarred upon the feelings of those who, whether civil servants or settlers, were "naturally" (in his language) bent upon "colonizing" of a different order from that which he aimed at.
In June 1813 it was resolved to build a new Court-house. The Governor recommended the subject to the public, and offered £500 on the part of the government. A meeting of the principal inhabitants was held at the Judge-Advocate's Office. It was determined to collect subscriptions. Macquarie privately gave £60, the Lt.-Governor gave £50, the Judge and D'Arcy Wentworth gave £40 each, and Marsden gave £30. In August nearly £2000 had been subscribed, and in September tenders were invited. Fines and forfeitures for misdemeanours were appropriated for the Courthouse Fund, of which D'Arcy Wentworth was treasurer.
Thus did the early builders create Sydney. In one instance Macquarie abstained from providing a building urgently required. In 1815 Mr. Marsden vehemently urged that the female factory at Parramatta should be replaced by a fitting building. There were one hundred and fifty women and seventy children. There was no room that could be called a bed-room for them. There were two workshops. In these, after the labours of the day, about thirty women slept as they could on the floor. No bedstead, no candle, was in the establishment. About "one hundred and twenty women are at large in the night to sleep where they can." There were thirteen public-houses in Parramatta, while five at the utmost would suffice for public accommodation. Marsden besought Macquarie to provide at least lodgings for the women.
"When I am called upon in the hour of sickness and want to visit them in the general hospital, or in the wretched hovels where they lodge, my mind is often oppressed beyond measure at the sight of their sufferings. As their minister I must answer ere long at the bar of Divine Justice for my duty to these objects of vice and woe; I see how they live and how they die, and often feel inexpressible anguish of spirit, in the moment of their approaching dissolution, on my own and their account, and follow them to the grave with awful forebodings lest I should be found at last to have neglected any part of my public duty as their minister and their magistrate, and by so doing contributed to their eternal ruin. So powerful are these reflections sometimes that I envy the situation of the most menial servant who is free from this solemn and sacred responsibility, namely, the care of immortal souls. . . . I humbly conceive it is incompatible with the character and wish of the British nation that her own exiles should be exposed to such privations and dangerous temptations, when she is daily feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, and receiving into her friendly, and I may add pious, bosom, strangers, whether savage or civilized, of every nation under heaven."
Macquarie replied civilly, but did nothing, and Marsden, after waiting eighteen months without any prospect of obtaining relief for his clients, sent copies of his letter and of Macquarie's reply to the Secretary of State. Both documents were in 1819 laid before a Committee of the House of Commons with Macquarie's explanations. Marsden was not without support in England. Mr. Henry Grey Bennett read in his place in Parliament a letter from Marsden showing that in spite of all remonstrances Macquarie would do nothing to ameliorate the condition of the female convicts;[22] that in the hospital the grossest debauchery prevailed, and that Marsden's protests were set at nought.
Mr. Bennett himself published (1890) a letter to Lord Sidmouth, on the condition of the colonies "as set forth in the evidence" taken before the Committee in 1819. At that date Mr. Bigge had gone to Sydney as a Commissioner to inquire into the state of the colony. Mr. Bennett expected "much from his talents and integrity," but some of the existing evils were so great that "the Colonial Office should not delay a moment in correcting" them. Mr. Bigge condemned the apathy of Macquarie with regard to the Parramatta Hospital and Factory, and pointed out that while neglecting to improve them the Governor had been erecting costly stables for his own use in Sydney. Macquarie's trusted architect was a convict.
The Governor's friends were indignant with Marsden for exposing the evils prevalent at Parramatta. Mr. J. T. Campbell, the Governor's Secretary, attacked Marsden anonymously in the Sydney Gazette, of which Campbell was the official censor. Suspecting Campbell to be the libeller, Marsden caused him to be prosecuted criminally. After lengthy proceedings,[23] the Court (six military officers) found Campbell guilty of permitting the publication, which it was his duty to prevent. Campbell's position was subsequently made worse by proof that he had written the libel, and that he consented nevertheless to the publication of an Order in which the Governor was made to "assign reasons of inadvertence for an act that was afterwards proved to have been wilful."[24] Marsden's solicitor thereupon solicited a respite of judgment on the ground that Marsden was actuated by no vindictive feelings. The defendant was discharged as regarded the criminal aspect of the case, a civil trial was instituted in the Supreme Court for damages, and in spite of the influences brought to bear by Macquarie, Marsden obtained a verdict against Campbell for two hundred pounds.
There was one institution which combined in its favour the kindly offices of those who disagreed upon other matters. Of the Female Orphan Institution, established with such care by King, Macquarie was patron. Mrs. Macquarie was one of the patronesses. Marsden was treasurer. Writing to Mrs. King (in 1811), Marsden said: "The Orphan School still goes on. We have had some trouble with the men in power, but I believe that everything now relative to the school is well. We have some very fine girls in the school, and some have been married and do well. This school will be yet the greatest blessing to this colony."
A Male Orphan School was founded by Macquarie in 1819.
With his aid the first bank in the colony (the Bank of New South Wales) was formed in 1816. With characteristic bias he strove to ensure the presence of the convict class in the directory. One of them, conditionally pardoned at the time, was associated with the committee for drawing up the rules. His original offence was felony. Judge Wylde was one of the promoters, and conscious that an infusion of felonious element in controlling such an institution would be injurious, took an early opportunity of proposing a resolution that no person should be eligible as a director who should not be absolutely and unconditionally free. Macquarie was indignant at the adoption of such a resolution, and soothed the feelings of his friend by granting him an absolute pardon, but it did not provide him with the coveted post of director. The Governor's Secretary became the President of the Board of Management, and D'Arcy Wentworth added a seat at the board to the numerous offices he had previously held. Wylde was a member, maugre the opposition of Macquarie.
In 1819, a Savings Bank was formed, and it does not appear that Macquarie ventured to place emancipists in the governing body, which was to control the deposits of the poor. Half-crown deposits were received, and interest at the rate of seven and a-half per cent. was given. To inspire confidence in the management, Mr. Justice Field, the Lt.-Gov. (Colonel Erskine), Judge-Advocate Wylde, and Mr. Jamieson, were made the first trustees.
The circulating medium was scanty, and to increase its quantity and raise its purchasing power, in 1813, the centre of the Spanish dollar, then principally current, was struck out. The circular piece so taken out was called a "dump," and was taken as worth fifteen pence. The remainder, called a "holy dollar," was taken at the value of five shillings. Thus, in the colony, a part was made equal to the whole, and the mutilated coin was rendered worthless for exportation. Promissory notes were not to be issued for less than two shillings and sixpence.
Financial troubles were the subject of more than one proclamation. In 1813, "divers victuallers, publicans and others, irregularly and privately combined" to form themselves into a Commercial Society, and (Macquarie said) altered the then "subsisting rate of exchange between the bills drawn for the public service, and the promissory notes issued by different individuals, known by the name of currency," and introduced great confusion. There was reason to believe that they conspired not to take the notes of "persons however respectable other than themselves, or on their plan." It was necessary therefore to define how meetings might be held. There should be no meeting exceeding six persons without a requisition from at least seven householders, and convention by the Provost-Marshal. All other meetings of more than six persons would be unlawful assemblies. A magistrate might order the dispersion of such assemblies, and if they continued for one hour after such order, the offenders would be "deemed guilty of unlawful combination and conspiracy, and on conviction be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for the space of two years. The Provost-Marshal was to submit requisitions to the Governor, and not without his approval to convene meetings, at which he was to preside. The printer who inserted an advertisement without the Governor's authority was to be fined £50 for each offence. Licensed victuallers calling unlawful meetings in their houses would thereby forfeit their licenses. If any person (after 8th Dec. 1813) should agree, or confederate, or entice, or persuade others "to refuse to take in payment the promissory note of any person or persons whatsoever, such person shall be deemed guilty of an unlawful combination and confederacy." Macquarie had again to intervene by proclamation. After the 18th Dec. it was to be unlawful to make notes "directly or indirectly expressing the rate of exchange or relative value between the sum payable by the same note and sterling money, or any government or public bills or notes whatsoever." To assist in negotiating such notes was made unlawful, and offenders were to "forfeit and pay, to any person informing of the same, treble the nominal sum secured or made payable by unlawful notes, with costs."
The export of wool proved its importance during Macquarie's term of office. The imposition of an import duty in England would have strangled it, if the product of the colony had been of coarse or inferior nature. The cost of freight amounted to four pence halfpenny per lb. in 1818, while land carriage, commission, and other charges raised the expense to nearly tenpence on every pound of wool taken to London. Only the finest quality could leave a profit to the grower. For one bale, John Macarthur obtained in London (Aug. 1821) as much as ten shillings and fourpence per lb., but for the bulk which reached England not more than two shillings per lb. was received. Wool sent by those who devoted no attention to its quality was sold at prices ranging from two shillings to one shilling.
Living in comparative retirement, Macarthur groaned in spirit during Macquarie's reign. Writing to England (1818) he deplored the obstacles to proper control of convicts. Of wool-growing he said: "My feeble attempt to introduce Merino sheep still creeps on almost unheeded, and altogether unassisted. Few of the settlers can be induced to take the trouble requisite to improve their flocks."
Mr. Bigge asked for Macarthur's opinions on the state of the colony, and management of convicts. Macarthur (1820) advocated the growth of exportable articles: wool, tobacco, bark, hemp, flax, oil. Convicts should be employed in pastoral and agricultural pursuits. Solitude, reflection, and the absence of temptation were better than the "herding together in towns amidst a mass of disorders and vices." Much good might be effected by the introduction of respectable persons worthy to be entrusted with authority over convict servants. The regulations which placed the good and bad servant, the honest man and the thief, upon the same footing, and authorized him not only to claim but to insist upon the same indulgences," operated perniciously.
Very shortly after the close of Macquarie's government, the Society of Arts in London presented to Macarthur by the hand of the Duke of Sussex two gold medals "for importing into Great Britain wool, the produce of his flocks, equal to the finest Saxony."
Macquarie's treatment of the natives did not redeem the government from the shame attached to it after the departure of Phillip.
He issued a proclamation (Dec. 1818) enjoining all persons to abstain from atrocities in New Zealand, Tahiti, and elsewhere. No vessel was to be allowed to clear from any port "without entering into a bond of £1000" to be of good behaviour. Trespass on lands and burial-grounds was forbidden. No native was to be shipped without his own consent. No female native was to be shipped without the Governor's permission.
Up to this period Macquarie had officially been courteous to Marsden. In April 1813 he issued an order—"to be read by the several chaplains during the time of Divine Service," returning (Macquarie's) most sincere "thanks to (Marsden) for his able, firm, and unwearied exertions as a magistrate." In Dec. 1813, at Marsden's suggestion,[25] a Society was formed for the protection of the South Sea Islanders against outrage. Macquarie was its patron; Marsden its secretary. When an "Institution for the Civilization and Care of the Aborigines or Black Natives of New South Wales," was afterwards formed by Macquarie during Marsden's first visit to New Zealand, Marsden was not included among the managers, and did not visit the school.
In June 1814 Macquarie notified his regret at unhappy conflicts at Bringelly, Airds, Appin, and the mountains; . . . "the first personal attacks were made on the part of the settlers and of their servants." He had strong assurances from natives, "that unless they be shot at or wantonly attacked (as in the case which occurred lately at Appin, wherein a native woman and two children were in the dead hour of night, and whilst sleeping, inhumanly put to death), they will conduct themselves in the same peaceable manner as they had done previous to the present conflict." The Governor would protect and decide between all. The Order was to be read in the churches.
Macquarie's appeal was vain. If he had acted as it was in his power to act he might have given effect to his wishes. In 1814 John Macarthur was kept in exile from Australia by the desire of the government, and in 1817 Macquarie himself sent away a Roman Catholic priest because he could not produce a written permission to immigrate to the colony. The deportation of those who butchered children at Appin would have been a less startling exercise of power than the imprisonment and deportation of the priest. Macquarie did not conceal the facts from the Secretary of State. He wrote (May 1814), that in consequence of "an aggression" in which one soldier and three other Europeans were killed—
"I despatched a small military party to the disturbed district, on whose approach the natives retired without being attacked or suffering in any degree for their temerity. In the course of this business I have caused inquiry to be made into the motives that might have produced it, and from thence I have learned that some idle and ill-disposed Europeans had taken liberties with their women, and had also treacherously attacked a woman and her two children whilst sleeping, and this unprovoked cruelty produced that retaliation whereby persons perfectly innocent of the crime lost their lives. Having had their revenge in the way they always seek for it, I am not at all apprehensive of their making any further attacks on the settlers, unless provoked as before by insults and cruelties."
In a later despatch (Oct. 1814) he enlarged upon the good qualities of the natives. They had never been cannibals, and he was anxious to establish an institution for their benefit.
While Marsden was on the sea (bearing a proclamation from Macquarie denouncing all wrongs done to the Maoris in New Zealand; declaring Mr. Kendal a resident magistrate at the Bay of Islands; and investing Ruatara, Hongi, and Korokoro with power and authority to aid Kendal) Macquarie (Dec. 1814) announced in the Gazette his intention to form a school for the aborigines. He wished to hold public conference with the tribes, and requested them to meet him at the market-place at Parramatta. All constables were directed to acquaint the natives, who assembled in large numbers. It was determined to found a school, and children were handed over for tuition. The meeting at Parramatta became annual, and blankets were in after years distributed to the failing remnants of the tribes. Even after the meeting at Parramatta there remained a few Hofers among the natives, who would not trust the Napoleon of the South, and Macquarie outlawed them, offering £10 for their capture "or destruction." Like a more ancient persecutor, he could say: "Nil opus captivis, solam internecionem gentis finem bello fore."
Not long after Macquarie's conference there were hostilities. One instance will show their nature. A score of the evicted lords of the soil descended upon a farm at Bringelly, and carried off maize and other property. Seven white men crossed the Nepean on the following day to obtain vengeance. They had scarcely crossed the river when the natives darted from ambush, and disarmed every man before a shot could be fired. Two white men escaped unwounded. On the following day more farms were plundered; the occupants flying at the approach of the marauders. A farmer's wife, who was in a barn, took refuge in a loft. A servant assisted in barring out the assailants, who were beginning to tear off the roof (composed of sheets of bark), when the servant recognized one of them, and entreated them to show mercy. The prayer was granted. The blacks said, "they would not kill them this time"; and, as they departed, said "good-bye" to the astonished whites.
In March 1816 Macquarie reported that the mountain tribes had killed five white men. He would employ the military. In June he informed Lord Bathurst that he had sent military detachments "either to apprehend or destroy" the natives at the Nepean, the Hawkesbury, and the Grose. The band of Captain Wallis had killed fourteen and captured five, Macquarie had invited the hunted creatures to become "settlers." In April 1817 he reported that, the bolder spirits being extinguished, hostilities had ceased. The terrified remnant sued for peace. At the annual meeting at Parramatta (Dec. 1816) 179 assembled, and some surrendered their children to be educated. Macquarie proclaimed that no native should appear armed within a mile of any town or village, and that they should not assemble in a larger number than six. He offered to introduce a passport system amongst them, and to give them land. If they would become farmers on small lots of land carved out of their old inheritance he would give them provisions for six months, seed, implements, a suit of clothes, and a blanket. His military detachments meanwhile obtained cheap glory. The killing of the fourteen blacks, reported to Lord Bathurst, was described as a battle. Many captives were lodged in prison. Many of their countrymen were shot in places not reported as battle-fields. On the branches of trees, in lagoons, in the swirling of rivers, many a black carcase was left to the kites and crows.
Under Macquarie the evacuation of Norfolk Island was completed. In June 1813 he informed Lord Bathurst that he had ordered the slaughtering of all the live stock on the island, to hasten its abandonment, which he reported as completed on the 28th Feb. 1814.
In Feb. 1816, while Macquarie was in the interior, the Rev. Benjamin Vale, military chaplain, caused an America vessel discharging cargo at Sydney to be seized as a prize under the Navigation Act. Macquarie removed the arrest from the vessel. A solicitor, whom Macquarie afterwards denounced as "an unprincipled reptile under the pupilage of Judge Bent," had aided the military chaplain. Macquarie told Lord Bathurst (March 1816), that the conduct of the chaplain and the lawyer was "highly disrespectful, insolent, and insubordinate" The former endeavoured to "vindicate the measure," "I ordered him into a military arrest, his commission as military chaplain rendering him amenable to martial law. I ordered a court-martial": 1. For the subversive act of seizure. 2. For insolent, disrespectful, and insubordinate conduct to the Governor. 3. For disgraceful and ungentlemanly conduct in making the seizure personally. 4. For equally disgraceful conduct in authorizing his agent (the lawyer) to write improper and inflammatory language to Lt. Col. Molle, during Macquarie's absence. Macquarie ordered the stoppage of the solicitor's salary, for his "insolent, offensive, and insulting conduct in the late false, unwarrantable, and vain attempt to seize the vessel" in contempt of the Governor's authority. The lawyer averred that at the time of the seizure he knew "nothing of the Governor's having given permission for the vessel to be entered at the port." Lord Bathurst told Macquarie that his conduct was illegal, but Macquarie endeavoured to justify himself, and pending further instructions did not comply with the order to restore the solicitor to his position. Harsh language was not rare in Macquarie's mouth. In 1819, under his own hand, he addressed the government printer thus:—
"Understanding you have in your service a man who came to this colony last from the Cape of Good Hope without the sanction of His Majesty's Government, but who from motives of humanity I permitted to become a settler; and it having come to my knowledge that the said——— . . . . did affix his signature to a scandalous, rebellious, and libellous paper, directed to the House of Commons, against my person and government now it being my determination that no such infamous incendiary shall be employed in any department under government in this colony, I hereby command and direct you at your peril to retain the said————— in your employ after one month from the date hereof."[26]
Macquarie was dissatisfied with his brother officers. It was time, he thought, to alter the Criminal Court, and he asked that the 73rd Regiment might be removed.
Before the 46th Regiment left the colony, Colonel Molle had, as Lt.-Govr., asked for a court-martial to try certain charges against D'Arcy Wentworth, the principal surgeon. Macquarie, though he described the charges as "frivolous and ridiculous," ordered a court-martial, but the Judge-Advocate thought a court-martial had no jurisdiction over a civil officer like Wentworth, and the objection was sustained in England. Macquarie did not find reason to commend the "Royal Veteran Company of New South Wales," which he formed in 1810, when the 102nd (the old New South Wales Corps) were relieved. In 1817 he recommended that they "should be disbanded altogether." They were "ineffective, old," and expensive. They received grants of land in various places. The settlement of some of them on the Mulwaree Ponds, in Argyle, caused the name "Veterans' Flats" to be given to the site. The name survived long after the Veterans had disappeared, and their holdings had been merged with adjacent possessions near the town of Goulburn. Though Macquarie recommended the disbandment in 1817, it was not carried out until 1823. Free passages to England were offered, but only three or four were accepted. Some veterans remained where they had spent a quarter of a century as soldiers.
Macquarie (Dec. 1817) reported the arrival of an immigrating priest, one O'Flynn; who told Macquarie that he had Earl Bathurst's permission:
"—but as he could not produce any written document from your Lordship or any other of His Majesty's Ministers, I concluded that if he had solicited he had been refused your sanction, and thence considering him an impostor I declined giving him permission to remain in the colony, but, on the contrary, have instructed him to quit it in the same ship (Duke of Wellington) in which he came, being persuaded he would do a great deal of mischief among the lower order of Roman Catholics were he allowed to remain."
On the 18th May Macquarie reported that he yielded to O'Flynn's entreaty for permission to remain till an expected ship might bring the desired credentials. But they did not arrive. O'Flynn was told to go back with the ship which had brought him. He "retired to some skulking place in the country where he could not be found, and from whence he did not return until after the ship had sailed." He then promised to sail in the next ship to China or elsewhere, and Macquarie "being reluctant to resort to compulsory measures trusted to his honour." . . I found he was "tampering with the soldiers of the 48th Regiment. I directed him by letter to hold himself in readiness to embark in the ship David Shaw." (The answer being unsatisfactory, there were) "no other means left for me to get rid of this meddling, ignorant, dangerous character than by securing his person, if possible." On the 15th May, O'Flynn was secured and put in "jail, where I mean he shall remain until the ship shall be under weigh, at which time he will be embarked for England." Macquarie enclosed two of O'Flynn's letters which displayed ignorance; and said, if there were to be Roman Catholic priests, they should be educated people. O'Flynn, moreover, was seditious. In the colony there was some consternation. Marsden, in a letter to England (May 1818), said "the Roman Catholics are much enraged." Questions were asked in Parliament. Mr. Goulburn admitted that O'Flynn had applied to the Colonial Office, but averred that his letter was so ill-written as to create doubt; that the Roman Catholic authorities disowned the man, and that Macquarie had acted rightly in sending him away; but that measures would be taken to supply the wants of the Roman Catholics in the colony. Accordingly two Roman Catholic Priests were accredited to the colony, After a time subscriptions were collected in Sydney for the building of a Roman Catholic cathedral. Macquarie laid the foundation-stone (Nov. 1821) and hoped that the encouragement given to the Roman Catholics would induce them to continue," as he had ever found them, loyal and faithful subjects of the Crown."
In 1815, a Wesleyan minister, Mr. Leigh, arrived in Sydney, and was soon joined by another, Mr. Carvasso. Macquarie discouraged Leigh at first, but Marsden took him by the hand, and on one occasion offered him, out of his private property, land sufficient for sites for a chapel and minister's house at Windsor. Marsden, having accompanied Governor King to England in 1807, had interviews with Lord Castlereagh. He urged that, to promote morality, convicts' wives should be sent from England at the public expense. He did not prevail. Already the wealth of emancipists attracted attention, and transportation was beginning to be looked upon as a means of reaching a better land. To enhance the comforts of criminals was but to increase the premium on crime. From Marsden's point of view his object was good, and his representations had the effect of causing the soldiers' wives to be sent with them. He urged that practical mechanics and manufacturers should be sent out also; and in Warwickshire and Yorkshire found the experts required. He saw George III., and (through Sir J. Banks) was allowed to procure pure Merino sheep from the Royal flock. He asked for two, and five were given. But his general and secular labours did not engross all his time. He personally sought and found two fellow-labourers for his Master's vineyard; the Revds. W. Cowper and R. Cartwright. He selected three schoolmasters, who were sent to the colony. He had interviews with the London Missionary Society and the Church Missionary Society, and impressed upon them his opinion that arts and civilization should go hand in hand with religion to the races which were to be converted. He laid before them his plans for carrying the Gospel to the South Seas and New Zealand. The Church Missionary Society selected Mr. William Hall and Mr. John King as missionaries to New Zealand. Both were laymen, but no clergyman could be found for the post. How, by meeting the high-born but woe-begone Ruatara on board the vessel which bore him to Australia, Marsden became the successful apostle of New Zealand, belongs to the history of that country. It is sufficient to say here, that Marsden's house was from that time until his death the home of every Maori who wanted advice, or was in any other need or affliction.
Having glanced at the religious condition of the colony, and the efforts of the first ministers of the Church of England, the Wesleyans, and the Roman Catholics, it is requisite to record one voluntary work, carried on apart by a few poor convicts, which cast light upon the gloom of the time, and gathered a devout congregation, whose orisons, like those of the cottar of Burns, shed a halo round the humble, and perhaps were heard as the acceptable "language of the soul." A number of prisoners were employed in sawing, and in splitting rails and shingles, at Pennant Hills, then a part of the forest remote from all sound of the holy bell which knolls to church. By their own exertions during leisure hours they built a decent wooden chapel there, for which the government supplied the nails, and permitted the workmen to appropriate the requisite timber. The overseer, a freedman named Kelly, and another carpenter, whose name is unfortunately not recorded, were the architects.[27] A freedman named Home, who had been a schoolmaster at Parramatta, performed divine service regularly to an earnest audience in the temple thus made by the contrite for the worship of Him who is no respecter of persons. We are told that Home ever held fast to the doctrines which in this remarkable manner he was called upon to preach; and dull must he be who is not touched by the yearnings after righteousness displayed by his fellow-creatures in the lonely Australian forest.
For many reasons Macquarie's treatment of the free settlers, and of the convict class, deserves attention. With the petulance of the vain he irritated the first on all occasions; with the weakness of a small mind he made unworthy favourites amongst the second. He brought about his own recall by his demeanour towards the convicts, though his removal was based partly on other grounds. At first, all convicts except those employed as domestic servants were made to work for the government. The houses, the wharves, the streets, the roads, the barracks, and the gaol, had to be provided at once by Phillip. When civil and military officers were allowed to have grants of land, Grose supplied them with convict servants, and these servants were still "on the stores," as it was called, or provided with rations by the government. The convicts preferred assignment to a settler to service under government. Their overseers were convicts or ex-convicts, and were deemed more harsh and unfeeling than overseers who had always beer freemen. When a convict-ship arrived there was much striving to procure the services of expert artificers as assigned servants The freed class usually procured the assignment to themselves of their relatives who might arrive in bonds. A notable thief might sometimes find himself assigned to his own wife, or to his mistress who had followed his fortunes, and applied for him as an assigned servant. Masters of assigned servants in process of time endeavoured to make money directly by their services. They were not content with the profits on farm produce. They sold the boots, the chairs, and other articles manufactured by their skilled servants. But the number of servants to be assigned was limited in some degree by King, and Macquarie's passion for public works demanded so many workmen that he could not supply the settlers. His plea that the settlers could not take them Bigge found to be incorrect. At one time lots were drawn by applicants, but the system settled down. into assignment by the superintendent of convicts, who was, of course, directly amenable to Macquarie. Favouritism prevailed. It is creditable to the shrewdness of King and his advisers, among whom Marsden was conspicuous, that the quantity which they fixed upon as a day's labour for convicts, in various employments, was so well adjusted that it was adhered to till the end of Macquarie's government. It left a margin of time which a hard-working man could profitably employ, and many men were paid for extra work done for their masters, or, by permission of their masters, for others. An ex-convict to whom a convict had been assigned, found it more profitable sometimes to hire out his skilled servant than to employ him at home. This source of gain to himself and his master was lost to the convict retained in government control. Convicts concealed their accomplishments, in order to be assigned to private masters. Convict overseers vied with the impostors in sharpness, and even when a skilled workman had evaded the watch, he was, if detected in his handicraft, taken back and put into the government "gang," by which term roadway and other large parties of convicts were known. The clank of the fetters of the "ironed-gang" passing on the road, jarred strangely on the unaccustomed ear of the immigrant. The corruption which was engendered by the system was notorious, and the demoralization of some masters was inevitable. A Parliamentary Committee (1812) denounced the assignment of convicts to masters who traded in their skill, many of the masters being "overseers and themselves convicts." "The selection of the assigned convicts being left principally to the overseer, it is made with reference to the means of payment possessed by them, and not to their characters or conduct." Hence skilful guilt purchased advantages which clumsy criminals could only hope to obtain by long servitude. Convict overseers connived at the evasion of taskwork by those who could buy indulgence.
One motive with convicts who concealed their skill was the fear of being kept in bonds. To retain a good workman a settler of low moral tone, or a government overseer, would pick a quarrel with him, and the punishment inflicted always put off the time at which under the regulations the indulgence of a ticket-of-leave or a conditional pardon would be granted. The Parliamentary Committee (1812) declared that the convicts were well aware that any skill that they may acquire or display in the service of government will be the cause of their further detention in it." The applications for assignment of convicts were in the first instance made direct to the Governor. Macquarie, in this matter, as well as respecting spirits landed from vessels, ordered that applications should be made to subordinate officials.
From the gangs in which the convicts were collected, thieves, burglars, and sharpers went out marauding. At a later date (1835) Judge Burton declared (in a Charge) that they poured in and out like bees; "with this difference, the one works by day, the other by night; the one goes forth to industry, the other to plunder." Macquarie and his friends vainly pleaded that the colony had prospered under his care. Emancipated crime had certainly thriven. The wit of Sydney Smith impaled the folly that made crime the stepping-stone to wealth and station. Culprits stood—
Orantes primi transmittere cursum,
Tendebantque manus, ripe ulterioris amore.
Circumstances might have done something towards this end, but Macquarie did more. He endeavoured to make Australia a convict paradise; he reiterated that the colony was created for the benefit of convicts; he scorned the assumption of virtue by the unconvicted. He recognized no man's right to be in the colony unless he had, or ought to have been, convicted, and he strove to compel the free to receive the freed into their society. "My principle (he wrote) is that when once a man is free, his former state should no longer be remembered, or allowed to act against him." The class of which he was gaoler occupied his thoughts. Others were intruders in their domain. He was surprised at "the extraordinary and illiberal policy adopted by all the persons who had preceded him" in office. The man whom he delighted to honour, and who was made a magistrate before Macquarie had been a fortnight in the colony, was, at the time, accused of conniving at frauds upon the government. The anomalies of the case were rendered more startling by the fact that (Feb. 1810) Macquarie notified his reprobation of immorality, and his intention to encourage only the decorous and moral. Yet from Jan. 1810, until his death, Bligh's ex-bailiff was an intimate associate with Macquarie. Bligh himself could hardly have recommended such conduct. When questioned at Johnston's trial in 1811 as to his conduct towards Thomson he swore: "When he had the impudence to address me on other subjects beside the little trust which was confided to him, I reprimanded him for it in the severest manner."
To be the companion of Thomson,[28] and to wade through degradation in defence of his companionship, seemed to gratify Macquarie. Thomson died in 1810, and Macquarie indulged two passions by erecting a memorial, and declaring that by having made Thomson a magistrate he had "restored him to that rank in society which he had lost." But the vanity of the man led him to think that he could create a new world; and, having coined a foolish theory, he wore out his life in defending it when it had miserably failed, and he himself had become soured. Another emancipist whom he made a magistrate was notably immoral, and was induced to resign after many years at Macquarie's request. A few extracts from the Governor's despatches should be cited. He declared (April 1810) that he had taken upon himself to "adopt a new line of policy," and had admitted several of the convict class to his table. He told Lord Bathurst (1813) that "free people should consider they are coming to a convict country, and if they are too proud or too delicate in their feelings to associate with the population of the country they should consider it in time, and bend their course to some other country." He endeavoured to persuade Lord Bathurst that anarchy was in the minds of the free. He admitted "that the only measure of mine" opposed is the reception of convicts "into my society;" but inconsequentially declared in the same despatch that his policy had encountered opposition, adding—
Although the principal leaders who headed the faction which occasioned so much mischief and anarchy in this country (previous to my arrival) have left it, yet the seeds of it were so deeply sown that a considerable part of that factious spirit still exists. . . . I must also inform your Lordship that free settlers in general (not excepting the Messrs. Blaxland) who are sent out from England, are by far the most discontented persons in this country. . . . The best description of settlers are emancipated convicts, or persons become free by servitude who have been convicts."
The Secretary of State ought to have foreseen the probable consequences of the new "policy" propounded with so much ostentation. By not arresting it on the threshold he made himself in part an accomplice. When in after times he administered rebuke, evils had grown so great that censure of Macquarie effected little until the necessity of appointing a Commission of Inquiry brought about a total change.
Macquarie was at least disingenuous in his despatches. He had, indeed, in explaining his general intentions, said enough to rouse Lord Bathurst's suspicions, but it was unjust to recommend for high office ex-convicts, to whose condition he called no attention. On two occasions he thus sinned. An assigned servant was employed by Surveyor-General Grimes in a trusty capacity; and, though he had no scientific knowledge except in practical mensuration, he was, during the absence of Grimes in England, allowed to manage the department. When Grimes resigned office Macquarie, who had admitted the assistant "to his table," appointed him Acting-Surveyor-General, and was disconcerted when the Earl of Liverpool appointed Oxley, an old companion of Flinders, as the new Surveyor-General. Macquarie at once appointed his protégé Deputy Surveyor-General and Inspector of Roads and Bridges, and subsequently devised a scheme for promoting him to the coveted office held by Oxley, who was on the point of starting to explore the interior. Oxley might be lost. Macquarie urged that his protégé should be made Deputy Surveyor-General, "with the immediate right of succession to the principal situation in the event of its becoming vacant by whatever cause." The despatch was silent as to the civil condition of the nominee. But the Australian wastes were not fatal to Oxley, and Macquarie's plot was futile.
In 1818, Macquarie endeavoured to entrap Lord Bathurst. Macquarie advocated a retiring allowance to D'Arcy Wentworth, who desired to give up the office of principal surgeon. In succession, he recommended, without hinting that he was an emancipated convict, "a man of very eminent medical talents, an excellent scholar, and possessed of universal knowledge . . . at present only assistant-surgeon in the medical establishment." There was an obstacle, in the person of a "first and senior assistant," but he was defective in medical knowledge, and had bad eyesight. "These are my sole motives for passing over Mr. Mileham." That his nominee was one of the convict class, with whom he intimately associated, and with whom he had striven to compel military officers to associate, Macquarie did not say. But Lord Bathurst had learned to distrust Macquarie, and he appointed Dr. James Bowman to the post. The disappointed candidate wrote a violent letter to Bowman, and Macquarie endeavoured to console his friend by making him a magistrate. The chagrin of Macquarie and the grief of his friend were aggravated by the attempted remedy, for Lord Bathurst directed the removal of the new magistrate from the commission of the peace. But if Macquarie could not coerce Lord Bathurst, he might pull down the pride of dwellers in the colony. It was true, Mr. Bigge reported, that "the civil and military officers were in the habit of exacting from emancipated convicts the same species of respect as they had yielded in their former state of servitude." The exception in the case of Mr. Bellasis, transported for shooting an opponent in a duel, only proved the rule, for the crime was one of which all persons in civil and military life in those days ran the risk; and society could not condemn itself. When Governor King, deserted by the army officers, made Bellasis his right-hand man, they exhibited no coolness towards the instrument which foiled their efforts to subject King to their will. But Macquarie's designs were repulsive to men of honour. As Colonel of the 73rd, he was able to cause his emancipated friends to be entertained at the regimental mess; but when the 46th Regiment arrived, Colonel Molle and his brother officers were not so compliant. Long and acrimonious correspondence reached the Secretary of State; but the 46th left the colony without abatement of their determination. When the Rev. S. Marsden prosecuted the Governor's Secretary for libel, the officers of the 46th wrote to congratulate him on his success. Marsden's reply (Oct. 1818) reveals the importance ascribed in the colony to the stand taken by the 46th. They did for society in Sydney what their active comrades did for the safety of life in Van Diemen's Land.
(He could) "never forget the public service you rendered to this colony from the time you landed to the day of your departure, by your firmness and gentlemanly conduct as British officers, and by your good and prudent example as members of the community. . . . When you first arrived in New South Wales every barrier against licentiousness was broken down. There were a few, and but a few, who resolved to stand their ground and preserve that line of conduct which the wisest and best men consider essential as marking the distinction between the good and the evil. Had you not arrived in New South Wales and acted the honourable part you did, the few who were marked out for future conquest would not have been able to have stood out longer, but must have either yielded to superior force, or have withdrawn from the colony. Some would not have had strength of mind sufficient to have carried on a perpetual warfare against such unequal force, and thus would not have been able to meet the expense of continued resistance. You just arrived in time to turn the wavering balance, and to inspire the desponding with hopes."
Many regiments bear on their banners mottoes telling of their past services, but it may be questioned whether the escutcheon of the 46th could be more nobly adorned than by the memory of their conduct in New South Wales, which smells sweet across the lapse of the century.
The 48th Regiment arrived, and Macquarie found Colonel Erskine more pliant than Colonel Molle, but as a body the officers were actuated by the same sense of honour as encountered him on the 46th. Erskine agreed to join Macquarie in forcing an emancipated protégé upon society. The man was welcome at Government House; but all was nought so long as the hated free settlers, and civil and military officers, were not compelled to meet him elsewhere. A Brigade-Major, of lax domestic relations, accompanied the protégé in calling on the officers of the 48th. All the officers, except the Colonel and two Majors, denied admittance to their would-be visitor. Erskine, nevertheless, at Macquarie's instigation, invited him to the regimental mess. The nature of the issue was fully understood. It was not a question of preserving a decorous forbearance on casually meeting an improper character. The man's character, whether good or bad, was almost immaterial. It was to be decided whether Macquarie could break down all barriers and debase the free element of the population to the level of the convicts, now pouring in at the rate of a thousand a year in a colony where he was doing his utmost to discourage free immigration. To the honour of the junior officers they gallantly braved the vultus instantis tyranni, and abruptly quitted the table. Erskine promulgated an order "that no officer should quit the table until after the first thirds were drank." To obey a regimental order was a duty which involved no private complicity. Macquarie, dissatified with the officers, warned them on parade (1818) not to follow the example of the 46th, and on the same day the protégé, uninvited by the officers, appeared at the mess as Erskine's guest. The officers did not abruptly depart, nor display rudeness; but they so comported themselves that the cause of dispute appeared amongst them no more. Macquarie learned that his high-handed tyranny evoked a spirit of resistance. As the man whom the officers thus repelled was the same whom the Governor endeavoured to smuggle into the position of principal surgeon on D'Arcy Wentworth's retirement, it may be imagined that the indignation of the defeated plotter was unbounded. Many of the facts are to be found in Mr. Bigge's report laid before Parliament; and the impetuous William C. Wentworth (son of D'Arcy Wentworth) was unwise enough to give them further circulation by a violent diatribe in favour of Macquarie's creature and his father's friend.
Another convict, transported for life in 1798 (who like Crossley was an attorney, and had been employed as a clerk in the Secretary's office) was suffered by Macquarie to copy his despatches; and to become a sort of poet-laureate, paying compliments to Macquarie, as the man "to whom a grateful people fondly bend." He was allowed publicly to read his fulsome odes at the Governor's lévees, and to receive the thanks of Macquarie's parasites.[29] These and similar instances were reported on by Mr. Bigge, and must have been corrected by the Imperial Government if no graver complications had demanded redress. "In referring to the principle (said Mr. Bigge) by which Governor Macquarie has been guided in introducing these individuals to the society of Government House, and in attempting and encouraging others to adopt it, I can only add the humble testimony of my approbation to that which has been so unequivocally expressed by the Committee of Parliament, that reported on the state of transportation in 1812, and that which was expressed in more qualified terms by your Lordship in your despatch to Governor Macquarie, 3rd Feb. 1814." Michael Crossley was early distinguished by the favour of Macquarie. He was one of those for whom the Governor specially applied to Judge Bent for permission to practise as an attorney. Bent declined on the ground that it was contrary to law. When his assessors added their entreaties he regretted that
"any gentleman had been found who differed from him on a point of pure professional feeling and practice, and to say that those persons whom they confess it is a disgrace to admit to their tables or to suffer any part of their families to associate with, are fit and proper persons to be admitted to the situation of attorney. I do now solemnly declare that I will not admit as attorneys of this Court nor administer the oath to persons who have been transported here as felons."
Though the admission of ex-felons as legal practitioners was not approved by Lord Bathurst, he found other grounds for the dismissal of the Judge. It was prophesied at the time that Macquarie's victory boded ill for the morals of the community, and Macquarie remained in the colony long enough to see cause to regret his patronage of Crossley, who was (23rd Aug. 1821) fined £50 for wilful and corrupt perjury. Such disappointments appear to have soured Macquarie's mind. At the close of his career he became severe even towards the class he had patronized; and among whom it could not be denied that crime had increased. In March 1821, twenty-five men were sentenced to death in Sydney, and the hanging of nineteen of them proved his change of opinion, or his temper's loss. Soon afterwards, when he was in Hobart Town, ten men out of twenty-five were ordered for execution.
The acerbity which Macquarie displayed in his letters led him into excesses which not even his friends could excuse. Since the framing of Magna Charta by the great Stephen Langton, it had ever been the boast of his English countrymen that only by law could even the king deal with his subjects. "Nec super eos per vim, vel per arma, ibimus nisi per legem regni nostri, vel per judicium parium suorum." But Macquarie would be greater than a king. He had in 1812 built a wall to separate the government pleasure-ground from the open space outside. There was a wicket through which the public were admitted near a lodge occupied by a constable. Like the primitive limit of Rome, the wall was so low that profane persons could easily pass over it, and numerous breaches were made by continual trespass. In April 1816, Macquarie placed two men in ambush to apprehend trespassers. Six men and two women were seized. One of the latter was a servant, and had her mistress's child with her. All were arrested. The servant was permitted to take the child home, and when the mistress refused to let the servant be carried off, the chief constable threatened the mistress. All the alleged trespassers were lodged in gaol. The gaoler reported their condition to Macquarie. One of the men was a free immigrant; two were freedmen; and three were convicts. Macquarie ordered that the free men and one convict should, without trial, receive twenty-five lashes; that the other two convicts should receive thirty lashes, and that the women should be imprisoned in a cell for forty-eight hours. Conscious of the wrong directed, the gaoler showed the order to D'Arcy Wentworth, the Superintendent of Police, who declared afterwards that he had a strong desire to suppress the order, but it was executed; and there was an immediate ferment in Sydney. A petition for Macquarie's recall was prepared. Many of the class emancipated by the direct favour of Macquarie joined in the protest against his arbitrary audacity. He, in return, refused licenses to publicans in whose houses the petition had been seen, and refused, with opprobrious epithets, a grant of land to a freedman who had signed it. But he could not undo or justify his act. The free-man and the freedmen who had been flogged, sailed to England. The facts were proved before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Prisons in 1819, and publicly denounced by H. G. Bennett, M.P., in his letter to Lord Bathurst in 1820.
Macquarie (replying to Mr. Bennett's letter to Lord Sidmouth in 1819, and) generally justifying himself in a letter written in Sydney in 1820, and published in London in 1821 admitted that one of the men, William Blake, had never been a convict, and that two others, Henshall and Reid, had become free; but he denounced them as "far from respectable," and thought them "very fit subjects to be made an example of." He did not order the punishment "hastily," or in "passion or anger," but
"coolly and deliberately. . . . In vindication of myself for having ordered these profligate men, though at the time free, to be corporally punished, I can only say that I did at the time consider, and now still remain of the same opinion, that I was legally authorized, in my capacity as Governor-in-Chief and first magistrate of this territory, on such positive and clear proof of their guilt (Macquarie had spoken to the apprehending constables), to direct them to be punished in this summary manner, without any regular trial or examination before a Court. . . . Even granting that it was according to the strict letter of the law legally wrong, which I do not by any means allow, still I maintain that ordering such punishment was morally right; and on this ground I am neither ashamed nor sorry for the act." (But for) Mr. Justice Bent and a few other factions discontented men of lower ranks in the colony, all of whom joined in making a subscription to defray the expenses, and the pious advice of the Rev. Mr. Marsden and other equally amiable counsellors, these poor men never would have thought of quitting this country to seek redress in England."[30]
He declared that the punishment inflicted (19th April 1816) "was so slightly laid on that it was hardly felt by those who received it." Macquarie's defence, after four years' reflection, proves that if he had ever valued the liberties of his country his perceptions had been corroded by the unhappy course of his government. That a Governor could suppose in haste, or argue at leisure, that "without any regular trial or examination" he was entitled to order freemen to be flogged—was proof of his unfitness, but his offence was not known in England for some time after its perpetration. In days of tardy communication the consequences of his illegal acts recoiled slowly upon Macquarie.[31]
One of his favourites was engaged in mercantile enterprise, and deemed his profits encroached upon by the competition of an American resident named De Mestre. The East India Company's charter prevented an English subject from importing tea direct from China, and it reached him circuitously from Bengal. The American was under no such restraint. But Macquarie had declared that the colony was a field for profit of the convict class. The ex-convict brought an action against the American (under a Statute of Charles II.) for trading in the colonies. The American applied to the Court for twelve months' time to plead, in order to produce proof of the conviction of his antagonist, alleging at the same time that he had a good defence in the action, which (he averred) was prompted only by malice. Judge Field granted the application,[32] and the proceedings against the American ignominiously perished; as did similar proceedings taken at a later date against a Frenchman. The Court declared that before they applied the highly penal statute of 12 Charles II. cap. 18, in "favour of tradesmen who were themselves only the creatures of remission of sentence, they ought to be fully satisfied that they had power to try a qui tam action, a public penal action, two-thirds of the fruits of which are to go to the King and the Governor, under a charter, the object of which is to make sufficient provision for the recovery of debts and determining of private causes between party and party in New South Wales." There was no reason, the Judge said, to believe that the Governor had authorized the action, and therefore he gave time to procure a certified copy of the plaintiff's conviction of felony. There was no desire to prevent any convict from suing as between party and party, and official records proved that "one-third of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court had been convicts." The plaintiff against De Mestre was one of those whom Judge Bent had refused to permit to practise in the Courts. He had moreover special antipathy against Judge Field, and unsuccessfully prosecuted the Judge for slander. The Judge took the benefit of the Act which foiled his assailant in the prosecution of the American. The Governor's Court determined to give Field time to produce the record of conviction. The prosecutor was infuriated. He felt for the order to which he belonged, and the order felt with him. Its position was critical. Its right to property was imperilled by incapacity to sue. When the classic commentator, who might be read for his style as well as for his legal lore, published his great work on the Laws of England, it was distinctly laid down that "a pardon must be under the Great Seal. A warrant under the privy seal, or sign manual, was not "a complete irrevocable pardon." After Blackstone's death an Act was passed (30 George III. cap. 47) which enabled the Crown to authorize the Governor of a colony to remit sentences absolutely or conditionally. But such remission had only the virtue incident to the sign manual; and to make the pardon complete it was necessary that names of the pardoned convicts should be inserted in the next general pardon which might pass the Great Seal. There was one of the freed class in Sydney who had become reputed owner of nearly 20,000 acres in New South Wales. He felt warm interest in his possessions; and ex-convicts whom Macquarie had "admitted to his table" were equally fervid. Modestly disposed freedmen did not share the presumption of Macquarie's friends who strove to force themselves upon an unwilling society; but were anxious for indisputable title to the fruits of their industry. It was little consolation to them to be told that by the Act 54 Geo. III. cap. 145, corruption of blood and forfeiture of real property were abolished (1814), except in cases of treason or murder. Many of them had acquired property before that Act provided unretrospective relief. The man whom Macquarie had striven to thrust upon the society of the officers, and whom he wished to mislead Earl Bathurst to appoint as principal surgeon; the other whom he wished in like manner to foist upon the Survey Department; the owner of thousands of acres obtained by questionable arts from intoxicated settlers; another doubly convicted offender who for robbing the King's stores had been transported to Norfolk Island, but by thrift had become rich, and had been made by Macquarie principal superintendent of convicts (1814); these and others, styling themselves" emancipated colonists," petitioned for leave to hold a meeting to discuss their grievances and fears. Commissioner Bigge was in the colony, and the Governor consulted him as to the propriety of allowing the meeting to be held. Bigge advised that the resolutions to be proposed should be submitted in anticipation to the Governor, and that the emancipist who had prosecuted Judge Field should pledge himself not to allude to his quarrel with the Judge. Macquarie obtained the pledge; and, with Bigge, revised the resolutions. Judge Field and Judge-Advocate Wylde, on the point of sailing to Van Diemen's Land to hold a Circuit Court, wrote to Macquarie. They pointed out that if the Governor had consulted them they could have demonstrated that none of the civil privileges of the persons styling themselves "emancipated colonists" had been affected by any rules they had laid down, and that as they were about to leave the colony for some time they took leave to inform the Governor of their objections to the meeting, not with a view to oppose what his Excellency might approve, but to absolve themselves from responsibility for consequences arising from the convening of such a meeting while the Courts were closed. The letter was forwarded to Bigge (for his information) by the Judges themselves. Neither Macquarie nor Bigge apprehended mischievous consequences from the meeting. The former said the emancipated convicts were labouring under a serious grievance. Judge Field replied. All the correspondence was sent to the Secretary of State. The meeting, convened by the Provost-Marshal, was held (23rd Jan. 1821). The convict friend of Macquarie, whom he had risked so much to compel the officers of the 48th Regiment to receive at their table, was in the chair. The convict attorney whom he had pressed Judge Bent to admit to practise, and who had ineffectually prosecuted Judge Field for slander, was the principal speaker. Macquarie received a tropical shower of compliments. The aggrieved attorney-merchant was deputed (with the chairman of the meeting) to carry complaints to England. He did not return; but in 1823 Sir James Macintosh presented a petition to the House of Commons from him praying that he might be heard by counsel at the bar of the House against two provisions in the New South Wales Judicature Bill then before the House. The prayer of the petition was not granted.
The admirers of William Charles Wentworth might have hoped that the success of Sir J. Mackintosh's resolution. would bring their young champion into the foreground. After his exploration in the Blue Mountains he had gone to England, but not before in his youthful ardour he had satirized Colonel Molle in a manner which D'Arcy Wentworth had to explain for his absent son when the circumstances came to his own knowledge.[33] Unfortunately the domestic associations of the father were not such as to allow the son to take an unbiased view of the struggle between the emancipist and the free. In the household of Thomas Jefferson, who boasted of his love of freedom, there were slaves of his own blood; and though D'Arcy Wentworth was an official called upon to administer the law, and to maintain a standard of morality, he associated, and his son was necessarily familiar, with members of the class whom Macquarie delighted to honour. They scorned to be excluded from any position. They demanded trial by jury, and inveighed against the power of the Governor to deport a British subject. W. C. Wentworth[34] in 1819 denounced with almost savage fury, but classic force, the things which seemed evil in the sight of the first of Australian patriots, then about twenty-five years old. Crude his book might be, but it was a new power, and would have commanded attention, even if it had not been published while the appointment of Mr. Bigge was under consideration. The book was not all of one vein; amidst fulminations against the tyranny of Bligh, praise of Macquarie, and longings for free institutions in Australia, he thus apostrophized the mother country:
"Generous Britain, not more renowned in arts and arms than in mercy and benevolence, may thy supremacy be coeval with thy humanity! Or if that be impossible; if thou be doomed to undergo that declension and decay from which no human institutions, no works of man, appear to be exempt, may the records of thy philanthropy hold the world in subject awe and admiration long after the dominion of thy power shall have passed away! May they soften the hearts of future nations, and be a shining sun that shall illuminate both hemispheres, and chase from every region of the earth the black reign of barbarism and cruelty for ever!"
The various remedies which he proposed for existing evils embraced the constitution, the administration of justice, and the fiscal condition of the colony. They were not adopted. The representations of Mr. Bigge were to prevail.
The grievance of the half-pardoned convicts was specially redressed. Mr. Bigge reported that they had just reason to ask relief. The judgment of the King's Bench in 1819—which declared that by attainder all personal property and rights of action in respect of property accruing to the person attainted either before or after attainder were vested in the Crown, and that attainder might be well pleaded in bar to an action on a bill of exchange endorsed to the plaintiff after his attainder—was put forward by Bigge as proving the necessity of some change in New South Wales, where so large a proportion of the community consisted of persons who had been attainted. The English Government dealt with the subject. By the Act 5 Geo. IV. cap. 84, passed in 1824, it was provided (sec. 26) that while conditionally or incompletely pardoned felons resided where they were lawfully entitled to reside, they might "maintain any action or suit for recovery of any property—real, personal, or mixed—acquired" after conviction. They might do so not only in the colony, but throughout the King's dominions. If the defendant should plead or allege the plaintiff's or complainant's conviction of felony, and the plaintiff could prove a remission of sentence by the Governor—" and is residing in some place consistent therewith and with the provisions of this Act, a verdict shall pass, and judgment shall be given for the plaintiff or complainant." The difficulty so prominent in the colony had been felt in the mother country also. The 27th section enacted that in England, Wales, or Ireland such a verdict should carry "treble costs."[35]
Marsden had offended Macquarie by refusing to associate himself on the magisterial bench with the ex-convicts whom Macquarie placed there. Mr. Bigge summed up the cause of difference between the chaplain and the Governor as based on the characteristic firmness with which Marsden refused to lend himself to Macquarie's schemes to mingle the convicted with the free. Macquarie was not content with alleging that convicts were fit to be his own associates. He would make others sit with them. Within three months of his arrival, without any previous communication with Marsden, he appointed (by a published Order) Bligh's ex-bailiff, Thomson, and another freedman, as co-trustees of a turnpike road with Marsden. Marsden declined the office, and assigned as a reason the notorious immorality of the lives of Macquarie's nominated freedmen. Macquarie declared that he would consider Marsden's refusal an act of hostility to his government, and personally disrespectful. The sturdy churchman still refused. His mind was fixed to accept no appointment which would degrade his office by undue association with the convict class in the community. Macquarie told him it was well for him that his appointment was civil, or he might have been tried by court-martial. D'Arcy Wentworth had no scruples, and was appointed co-trustee with Macquarie's friends.
When men and women were unlawfully dealt with by Macquarie's order (for crossing the wall of the public pleasure-ground), Marsden was applied to by "the public flogger" to attest a deposition as to the facts. Macquarie thereupon sent for Marsden, and upbraided him in the presence of witnesses. Marsden said that as the Governor had ordered the punishment he did not suppose he cared if all the world knew that he had done so. Macquarie retorted: "I do not care; but I care for your signature being put to the deposition. In doing so you have been guilty of mutiny, sedition, and other high crimes." Marsden replied that he had not drawn up the statement. He merely attested it. The Governor read a reprimand, and desired the chaplain not to set foot again in Government House except on duty. Marsden desired to retire from office as a magistrate, but was not permitted to do so. At a later date, thinking his position lowered by the release of several prisoners sentenced by himself and another magistrate at Parramatta, Marsden sent a written resignation, which was not noticed, but was followed by a copy of a public Order dispensing with his services as a magistrate. Marsden applied for leave of absence. A letter to him assigned as a reason for refusal that his absence would be fraught with injury to the colony. To Lord Bathurst Macquarie explained (May 1818) that he thought Marsden's "object was to co-operate in malicious attacks" upon Macquarie's measures.
Before leaving the colony Macquarie winged a shaft at Marsden which rankled long. In a letter to Lord Sidmouth, he accused him of severity as a magistrate, and of trafficking in spirits. The last charge was easily refuted. Marsden had never purchased any spirits for sale. He had, like other persons, exchanged wine and spirits for other commodities, and this had been done by previous Governors as well as by Macquarie. The first charge being vaguer was more elusory; but by common consent was worthy of credit. Mr. Bigge reported that the sentences inflicted by Marsden were more severe than those of other magistrates. Bigge did not impute the exceptional severity to harshness of disposition, but to the "habitual contemplation of the depravity of the people brought before him," and a sense that "any other punishment than that which was severely and corporally felt by them" was inefficacious. When making the charges Macquarie had miscalculated his own stay in the colony. His letter was printed in England, and copies were sent to Sydney. Bigge had departed. Marsden awaited the arrival of Brisbane, Macquarie's successor, and then asked for the explanation from Macquarie which-"it was not in my power to call upon him for so long as he continued to administer the government." Macquarie did not heed him. Marsden, prepared to take legal steps, wrote to Brisbane, who induced him to desist. "At that period (Marsden wrote) there were strong reasons of a public nature existing in the colony, which induced me to relinquish my intended prosecution of Governor Macquarie, contrary to my own judgment." The militant chaplain wrote nevertheless to England to ask his friends to institute a suit there. Macquarie, meanwhile, published a statement which Marsden eventually answered. He also wrote a pamphlet to vindicate himself against a greater than Macquarie—William C. Wentworth—who, in a third edition of his 'Australasia,' attacked Marsden and defended Macquarie, with cultured but coarse vehemence.
Crafty—rancorous—vindictive—turbulent and ambitious priest—canting hypocrite,[36] were among the epithets hurled at the already venerable and venerated head of the chaplain; and Wentworth complained that Wilberforce had been duped, when in glowing terms he extolled Marsden as a moral hero whose name was dear to the friends of virtue and humanity. Marsden did not shrink from a contest with the youthful giant. He inquired, through his solicitor, if Wentworth was the author of the work to which his name was attached. Wentworth laconically answered: "I decline furnishing the information which the Rev. Samuel Marsden has sought through you." The confident Marsden resorted to the tribunal of the press. He published in London, "An Answer to certain calumnies in the late Governor Macquarie's pamphlet, and the third edition of Mr. Wentworth's account of "Australasia.[37] He included in it a testimonial from representatives of the London Missionary Society, vindicating him from certain charges which Wentworth, on erroneous information, had made respecting Marsden's conduct towards a Mr. Crook, connected with the Society. The charges were described as "untrue and infamous." The charge made by Macquarie as to Marsden's severity was to be made the ground of serious occurrences during Brisbane's government, and for that reason it was necessary to allude to it.
While Macquarie was intoxicated with vanity, and arrogating to himself the power to flog a free Englishman without even a form of trial, his follies were not fully known in England. But the man Blake went thither to show his stripes. Civis Romanus sum. "I am a poor labourer; but have you, gentlemen in England, no sympathy for my wrongs?" Both in and out of Parliament men denounced. the demoralizing policy of the Governor. Wilberforce was no mean champion of Marsden. The fiery Brougham resented the invasion of liberty, which without a trial subjected free men to the lash. The lame defence of Mr. Goulburn was puffed aside. There could be no serious opposition to inquiry. General reasons would have demanded interference, but the outrage upon William Blake in 1816 must be deemed a prime cause of the appointment of Mr. J. T. Bigge to conduct an inquiry as to the government of New South Wales. Macquarie's friendship[38] for the convicts was also borne in mind. Lord Castlereagh himself, in moving for a Committee on the State of Gaols, &c. (1st March 1819), gave utterance to the thought of many minds when he spoke of the
"cessation of that salutary terror with which transportation from this country was formerly accompanied." "It would be necessary to inquire, even in justice to Botany Bay, whether the period had not arrived when it might be relieved from being the resort of such characters as had hitherto been sent to it, and might be permitted without interruption to follow the general law of nature by a more rapid approximation to that state of prosperity to which it was to be hoped every part of the world was destined to arrive."
These words were the knell of Macquarie's encouragement of the convict as against the free. The petitions of the emancipists to Parliament were hardly judicious. They assumed the tone of injured men. They vied with Macquarie in exalting their order. The preliminary proceeding was the appointment of the Commissioner of Inquiry. Mr. Bigge's Reports were laid before Parliament in 1822 and 1823. He recommended the discontinuance of large gangs of convicts in the towns; that free settlers should be encouraged by grants of land; and that convicts should be assigned as servants to them in the country districts. The better to classify the convicts, the formation of out-stations on the coast, at Moreton Bay, Port Curtis, and Port Bowen, was suggested. In the main the government adopted, or tried to adopt, their Commissioner's advice, which was embodied in able and painstaking reports.
Three reports (ordered by Parliament to be printed) embraced the whole condition of the colony. Mr. Brougham, in 1819, had denounced the system under which duties had been collected. Wentworth's book had condemned it as illegal, and declared that on an appeal from the magistrates even the Civil Courts of the colony would be compelled to pronounce it so. In reply to Brougham Mr. Goulburn admitted that on a late occasion several persons had refused to pay the duty; that Lord Bathurst had referred the matter to the law officers; and that "only within the last fortnight" those functionaries had delivered their opinion that the duties were illegal.
The Act 59 Geo. III. cap. 114, was immediately passed (12th July 1819), indemnifying all Governors and other persons acting under them as regarded the past, and staying proceedings against them until 1st Jan. 1821. Till that day the Governor was empowered by the new Act to levy any of the duties previously existing, but not to raise the amount, though he might discontinue a duty. He was also empowered to levy an excise duty on spirits. The Acts 1 Geo. IV. cap. 62, and 1 and 2 Geo. IV. cap. 8, continued the law of 1819; and the 3rd Geo. IV. cap. 96 (30th March 1822), continued the duties, gave power to impose fresh duties on spirits and on tobacco, and an ad valorem duty on all other goods until 1st Jan. 1824. A maximum of fifteen shillings per gallon on spirits, four shillings per lb. on tobacco, and 15 per cent. ad valorem on other goods, was laid down for the limit of the Governor's discretion. He might reduce and revive duties.
Mr. Bigge's report bore immediate fruit in this Act as regarded import duties on wool, bark extract, and timber in England. He had shown how discouraging these duties were to the colony. From 5th Jan. 1823 to 5th Jan. 1826 it was to have been 3d. per lb., and after the 5th Jan. 1826 no less than 6d. per lb. By 3 Geo. IV. cap. 96 it was reduced to 1d. per lb. on wool, the product of New South Wales, and the duty on bark and timber, similarly produced, was abolished for ten years after the 1st Jan. 1823.
Something more than revenue required to be dealt with, however, and the New South Wales Judicature Act, 4 Geo. IV. cap. 96 (19th July 1823), remodelled the machinery of government. A Governor was no longer to be arbitrary. It was determined to reverse Macquarie's policy of discouraging the free element of the population. Immigration of free settlers was to be promoted. Such a community would require the law to be administered in conformity with constitutional usage. The first provision of the Act authorized the formation of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, with the necessary powers of a Court of Record.
The clause (4) which created a jury of "seven commissioned officers of His Majesty's sea or land forces" was hotly contested in the House of Commons, but was carried in spite of Sir J. Mackintosh's efforts to substitute the words "a jury of twelve men duly qualified to serve." In actions at law the Chief Justice was to be aided by two assessors; but the parties might require a jury of twelve men. The juror was to be a freeholder of not less than 50 acres, or a householder in a dwelling of not less than £300 value in the colony.
The eighth clause enabled the Crown to cause trial by jury to be "further introduced and applied." Appeals were granted in cases exceeding £500. Courts of Quarter Sessions (sec. 19), were provided for, and the Governor was empowered to institute a Court of Requests for cases under £10, to be tried by a Commissioner, to be appointed by the Governor, subject to approval of the Crown. The Council which Macquarie had dreaded was created. The 24th clause enabled the Crown to appoint a legislative body—not more than seven nor less than five in number. The members were entitled to enter on the minutes their dissent from any project of law; but if one or more members agreed with him, the Governor could (entering his reason on the minutes) put the law in operation pending the pleasure of the Crown. In case of rebellion, or actual insurrection, the Governor could make and promulgate Orders in face of the dissent of the whole of the Council. By the 26th clause the Crown had power, with advice of the Privy Council, to make and establish any law or ordinance which the whole, or a major part, of the Governor's Council had dissented from. By the 27th no tax or duty could be imposed except for local purposes, and the purpose was to be distinctly set forth in the enactment. By the 28th the power to levy duties given by 59 Geo. III. cap. 114 was made perpetual. By the 29th it was required that the Chief Justice should certify that any projected law was not repugnant to general law before the Governor could lay it before his Council. The Governor could only fill vacancies in his Council ad interim. The 34th dealt with pardons under the great seal. Errors had occurred. Some Governors had not duly sent the names of pardoned persons for confirmation in England. All instruments of pardon by Governors were now made of the same effect as if they had been under the great seal, and the signification of His Majesty's pleasure sufficed to make valid a pardon by the Governor. Retransportation was provided for.
Speaking generally, this Act laid the foundation of a new order of things. Law was substituted for caprice. In the last resort a Governor was still uncontrolled on the spot, but the forms imposed upon him in making Orders brought about a graver and more methodical mode of action than could exist under former Governors. The military gave place finally to the civil authority. Another change, not made in terms by the new Act, was enforced by the instructions to Governors. The pampering of the convict class was to be discontinued. Convictions for forgery, mutiny, and rebellion were no longer to be passports to the favour of the representative of the Crown. Officers in the army were no more to be coerced into social relations with the convict associates of a Governor. Macquarie's ill-appointed magistrates had disappeared from the commission of the peace. The English Government, which had expended four millions sterling in founding the colony, was indeed entitled to a voice in its affairs, and especially in dealing with the class for whose control they had spent so much. When a Governor, an officer in the army, yielded to the fascinations of graduates in crime, it was high time to redeem the colony, and to enable it to hold up an innocent head before the world. Free settlers were to be encouraged. Grants of land were to be made, and convicts were to be assigned to them in proportion to the land held. Commerce was to be promoted, and English import duties on colonial products were to be lightened or abolished. Such were the conclusions arrived at by the English government. Before giving them legislative shape Macquarie was recalled, and Major-General Sir Thomas Brisbane was appointed in his stead.
Like his predecessors, Macquarie had contended by Proclamations and Orders against numerous difficulties. A few lines will give some idea of the multifarious objects of his care, and of the life of the colony.
Some murderers had been executed. Marsden's magisterial activity had led to their apprehension. Macquarie, in an Order, to be read during Divine Service at Sydney, Parramatta, and Windsor, thanked the chaplain for his "able, firm, and unwearied exertions as a magistrate."
The increase of population during Macquarie's long rule, and the various duties of the Governor, furnished a strange mixture of notifications in his Gazette.' They were published to tell the inhabitants that if they did not repair the streets opposite their places he would tax them and do the work, but hoped it would be unnecessary to protect the tank-stream from pollution; to prevent forestalling; to prohibit any one from the "high offence of buying any corn or other victuals in any market and selling it again in the same market or within four miles thereof;" to advise more decent clothing" of some persons he had seen during a late "extensive tour of inspection;" to regulate the landing, the duty on, and the sale of spirits; to establish tolls, pounds, and markets; to widen the streets, and invite people to remove back their enclosures, "houses in the way being re-erected at the public expense;" to compel the yoking and ringing of pigs; to destroy "degenerate and useless dogs; to guard the Government Domain from damage to soil or shrubs "on pain of prosecution for felony;" to cause registration of carts and waggons; to prevent giving wheat to "dogs, pigs, or cattle until the next harvest shall be secured;" to prevent grantees from selling their land within five years of the deed of the date of grant; to warn persons to whom cattle were allotted from the government herds that they should not sell them within three years, and to caution intending purchasers that the cattle were-for that period-" considered the real property of the Crown;" to announce that cattle not distinctly marked, joining the government herds, would be considered government property; to exhort sufferers from floods at the Hawkesbury to remove their habitations to the high grounds which his Excellency's "solicitude for their welfare had marked out for their secure retreat;" to promulgate his observations after his tours, in one of which he said of the site of George Town in Van Diemen's Land, that of that "enchanting situation an adequate description cannot be given;" to publish the General Order of the court-martial on Colonel Johnston "for the information and guidance of the troops serving in this colony;" to tell the disobedient that if they did not present their receipts for grain and food delivered to the government by a certain day they would be "paid in copper coin for the receipts so overheld;" to point out that the gallery of the church was extended, and that he "confidently hoped all excuse for not attending Divine worship was done away;" to regret that an officer of very high rank in the civil service (from "motives of delicacy" unnamed) had refused to pay the toll authorized by a Proclamation of 1811, and to declare that all except those exempted by Macquarie must pay; to offer a free pardon for the discovery of the authors of the malicious libel (or Pipe) which was thrown into the barracks, and which maligned the 46th Regiment. For these and many other purposes Macquarie used the columns of the Sydney Gazette, over which his secretary was censor. After his long reign, and the failure of his plan to cultivate virtue by honouring vice, Macquarie would perhaps have retired gladly from his thankless office. But under the circumstances, removal was a sore blow to him.[39] He remained in the colony after Sir Thomas Brisbane had (1st Dec. 1821) assumed the government, and he fondly contemplated the public buildings he had erected. His farewell to his favourites must have been strange.
- ↑ In Oct. 1810 Macquarie recommended that Norfolk Island should be "totally evacuated."
- ↑ Despatch, Macquarie. 1810.
- ↑ Bigge's Report. Judicial Establishments. House of Commons Papers. Feb. 1823.
- ↑ Bigge's Report. Judicial Establishments. House of Commons Papers. Feb. 1823.
- ↑ It would be unprofitable to record the exploits of bushrangers generally, but as much has been written about Howe, a few lines may be necessary. He had been a sailor. Having been convicted of highway robbery, he was transported to Hobart in 1812. He joined the band spoken of in the text. His thieveries were numerous. He was assisted in some of his escapes by an aboriginal girl who accompanied him. A scouting party, led by an owner of a schooner, attacked Howe and his numerous comrades. Five of the assailants were killed. Soldiers were sent to garrison the homestead of the unsuccessful owner of the schooner. When the bushrangers in their turn attacked, they were beaten off with loss. Their leader, Whitehead, was shot; and Howe, in pursuance of a compact, cut off his comrade's head to prevent its falling into the hands of the Government. Howe became the captain of the band, and called himself the "Governor of the Ranges." He took the life of any member of the gang who offended him. A convict, Worrall, who yearned for the free pardon offered for the capture of Howe, was zealous in aiding the soldiers. In a race for life, the black girl, following Howe closely and guiding his flight to intricate fastnesses, could not keep up with him. The rascal urged her to speed, but her strength was exhausted. He shot her, and escaped in a ravine. She was not killed, but her affection for him was quenched. She aided his pursuers. At last Howe was alone. He was once captured, but slipped from the cords which bound him, killed one of his captors, and, wounding the other mortally, escaped. But Colonel Sorell's measures were effective. William Pugh, an intelligent and daring soldier, concealed himself with Worrall in a hut to which a third man enticed Howe in 1818. After fruitless exchange of shots and desperate pursuit, Pugh and Worrall dashed out Howe's brains with the butt ends of their firelocks. Sorell entreated Macquarie to give Pugh "the greatest favour he could," and urged that Worrall should receive a free pardon and a passage to England.
- ↑ Commissioner Bigge's Report (May 1822). House of Commons Papers, p. 109.
- ↑ Bigge's Report, p. 102.
- ↑ Despatch—Macquarie to Earl Bathurst, 3rd April 1817-thanks him "for so readily and promptly attending to my suggestion for the removal of Lt. Governor Davey," who neglected his duty and Macquarie's orders, and was shamefully extravagant with public property.
- ↑ There was a coroner's inquest on Geary's body. The verdict was—"Homicide in furtherance of public justice."—Wentworth's "New South Wales," p. 143. 1819.
- ↑ Report of a Committee appointed by Governor Arthur in 1830. "In exemplification of (the 'dreadful and unnecessary barbarity' practised) the Committee cannot but mention one fact, which from its atrocity would have appeared to them perfectly incredible, had it not been confirmed by testimony which they cannot doubt."
- ↑ "A Journal of a Tour of Discovery across the Blue Mountains in the year 1813." Gregory Blaxland. Reprinted in Sydney, 1870.
- ↑ The settlement made at Goulburn Plains was remarkable for being one of the few at which there was no fend between the black and white The first settlers were circumspect and kindly to the natives, who responded amicably. One stockman indeed detained by force a native woman. The tribe remonstrated, and told the man they would kill him rather than allow him to keep their countrywoman from them. The man was confident against them, but they kept their word. An inquiry was instituted, but when the facts were known, no steps were taken by the authorities to avenge the stockman's death. No other victim fell on either side subsequently.
Familiar with the district, the author knows these facts on the authority of W. P. Faithfull, Esq., one of the first who went thither; who long resided in it with the esteem of all; and was one of its earliest representa tives in the Legislature. - ↑ In passing Clark's Island, off Princess Charlotte Bay, on the east coast (latitude 14° S.), Allan Cunningham saw paintings by the natives on rocky cliffs, and within a large cave, which impressed him and King as works of art deserving particular observation. They seemed of a higher order than those seen by Flinders in the Gulf of Carpentaria. They represented animals, fish, creeping things and vegetable substances. They were executed with several colours
- ↑ House of Commons Paper. Appendix to Report of Gaol Committee, 1819.
- ↑ Bigge's Report (22nd May 1822), p. 96.
- ↑ Despatch to Secretary of State, 3rd April 1817.
- ↑ He wrote "Narratives of Voyage and Travel;" and in 1822 read paper on the Aborigines of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, before a Philosophical Society of Australia.
- ↑ Macquarie to Lord Bathurst, 28th June 1813.
- ↑ George-street was then named, having been theretofore called variously High-street, Spring Row, and Sergeant-Major's Row; Macquarie-street and King-street were christened for the first time; Hyde-park, then named, had been alternately called the Common, Exercising-ground, Cricket-ground, and Racecourse.
- ↑ When Jamison died in England Lord Liverpool was requested by Lord Wentworth Fitzwilliam (Jan. 1811) to appoint D. Wentworth to the vacant office "if found not incapable of the duty-as the reward of long service."
- ↑ Bigge said: "Mr. Wentworth . . . . . who has had considerable experience on this subject (admits), that the desire of obtaining spirituous liquors is the principal incentive to crime among the convicts, and that the greatest and only chance of their improvement is to be found in the absolute privation of them." Macquarie extended his favours to the uttermost. When instructed that the importation of spirits must be free, he, "in consideration of certain statements made by the contractors" for the hospital, extended their monopoly from 1813 to Oct. 1814.-Bigge's Report (on Judicial Establishments), p. 64.
- ↑ A singular Order appears in the Sydney Gazette in 1814. A muster had been held. Macquarie announced that, "as it appears that a considerable number of female convicts are living in Sydney without any control of servitude, probably availing themselves of former government indulgences, but without having received tickets of leave or any other regular authority for so doing; such persons are hereby required to make proper application for that purpose, and those who produce such testimonials of their good character as may appear deserving of consideration" would receive tickets of leave.
- ↑ A summary will be found in Commissioner Bigge's Report on the Judicial Establishments of the Colony.
- ↑ Bigge.
- ↑ Bigge's Report (Judicial, &c.), p. 27.
- ↑ The above letter was published in England by Mr. H. G. Bennett, M.P., in a letter to Lord Bathurst, 1820. Mr. Bigge was then engaged in his inquiry in the colony.
- ↑ Bigge's Report, p. 26.
- ↑ The man though shrewd was illiterate. He was transported when sixteen years old; became a stonemason's labourer, retail dealer, builder of small vessels, illicit distiller, farmer, and superintendent of convicts working in his district for the government. Most of the facts about him are in Commissioner Bigge's Report.
- ↑ Vide supra, p. 234.
- ↑ Macquarie's language in the colony was less measured than in his letter to Lord Sidmouth. One of the colonists who had signed the petition to England applied to the local government on a matter of business. By Macquarie's command he was told (Nov. 1816): "Your conduct in having signed a petition lately sent from this country by a few despicable. factions, and malignant individuals, and well known to contain the most false, libellous, and seditious matter, is an instance of such unprincipled depravity, that His Excellency can never think you deserving of any indulgence whatever from this government."
- ↑ Mr. Goulburn's subsequent apology for Macquarie was inane. He said that a Select Committee of the House of Commons had, in 1812, reported in such terms as to show that such punishments were extant, and that "as no observation was made on that report, it was natural for Governor Macquarie to conclude that there was no objection to the practice."
- ↑ He relied upon a case, Bullock against Dodds, tried before the King's Bench, in 1819, as to the effect of attainder.
- ↑ The alleged lampoon was thrown into the barracks. Mr. Surgeon
Foster, in the name of the officers, advertised that a reward of £200 would
be given for information leading to the conviction of the author or authors
of a paper "containing a false, malicious, and scurrilous attack on Colonel
Molle, both as Lt. Governor and commanding officer." A report was circulated that an officer of the 46th was the author, and the officers were
greatly exasperated. Bigge's Reports, 1822-3.
Macquarie had early noticed the capacity of young Wentworth. He made him, in 1811, Deputy Provost-Marshal, when he was only eighteen years old, and, as the Provost-Marshal was in England, the duties of the office devolved entirely upon the deputy. Wentworth was ever complimentary to Macquarie. He was one of a committee of twelve persons appointed by a public meeting to prepare an address of congratulation to him, and a dinner to commemorate his assumption of the government was given in January 1814. The company was heterogeneous. Mr. Gore, who was imprisoned by the deposera of Bligh, was in the chair; others who were active in deposing Bligh were in prominent positions. - ↑ "A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, &c." By W. C. Wentworth, Esq., a native of the colony. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker. 1819.
- ↑ In Dr. Lang's "History" he speaks of Barron Field's judgment in favour of De Mestre's application as a denial of common justice, and an "outrage upon the common sense of mankind." He does not allude to Bigge's Report, to the leading case before the King's Bench in 1819 (Bullock v. Dodds), or to the law passed in 1824. If he had seen them he could hardly have commented thus on Field's conduct.
- ↑ Long years afterwards Joseph Hume borrowed the term 'turbulent priest' to apply it to the devoted Christian, G. A. Selwyn, the Bishop of New Zealand. The phrase was not original, and the application was untrue.
- ↑ London. J. Hatchard and Son, Piccadilly. 1826.
- ↑ In his letter to Lord Sidmouth, Macquarie wrote (1820): "If the free settlers are not well disposed towards the population of the country which they have selected . . . . as the place of their abode, they do not deserve a settlement here; and it appears to me a duty of the first magnitude in every man's office who accepts of a civil appointment in this colony, to come here with the full determination of holding out every encouragement to the reformation of the people, by associating with those who have proved themselves worthy of regard. in the same manner as if they had ever been free." The misfortune was that Macquarie deemed "worthy of regard" those whom others deemed unworthy.
- ↑ John Macarthur wrote to his son in London (1820): "You talk of the present Governor coming home. Take my word, he will never come unless ordered. . . . In our present state his distinguished convict friends are the majority, and their voices preponderate in every public question. . . . What labours has the new Governor, whoever he may be, to perform I maintain it would be easier to found five colonies than to reformn this. He must have unlimited authority, with power to cleanse the Augean stable,"