Sailing to disaster

When a convict ship that left Cork in 1835 sank off Tasmania, drowning 224 people, some blamed a ‘party atmosphere’ between the Irish prostitutes and sailors on board, writes Richard Fitzpatrick

ON May 13, 1835, a convict ship carrying female prisoners, along with nine free women, 55 children and crew, went aground off an island on the north-west coast of Tasmania. A total of 224 perished, only nine crew and six women survived. It was one of the worst shipwrecks in Australian history, and one of the most notable in Irish seafaring terms, for the convicts were Irish.

They left Cork 125 days beforehand, although for many on board their incarcerations went back a couple of years before their departure. Most had ended up in Dublin’s Kilmainham Prison, known at the time as “Ireland’s Bastille”, as far back as 1833, wending their way slowly through the legal system towards deportation to Australia.

Most of their crimes seem harmless, although one woman, Bridget King from Co Wexford was guilty of manslaughter. She took a hatchet to her father-in-law. Thieving was the commonest cause for their imprisonment, items lifted such as linen, muslin, oats, watches, spoons. A lot of the women were put away for “vagrant immorality”, the euphemistic term of the day for prostitution.

Cal McCarthy, co-author with Kevin Todd of the painstakingly reconstructed book on the shipwreck, entitled The Wreck of the Neva, says, however, their crimes must be put in context.

“All of us were reared on the Fields of Athenry vision of the [deportation ships to Australia]. When you look deep down into it, most of these people who were transported were criminals. There were only about 5,000 out of 40,000 transported from Ireland that were in any way political. You were talking about criminals; some of them not very nice people, people who had offended again and again. Very few people ended up on convict ships for their first offences, unless it was a killing, but most of these people were thieves. A lot of those things that seem minimal now were substantial property in the 19th century. If somebody stole your turnips, then you might go hungry.”

One of the convicts on board, Mary Russell, was convicted for “stealing a piece of cloth”. Her six-year-old son joined her in prison and on board the Neva, as did several babies who were being breastfed by their convict mothers at the time of their arrest.

McCarthy and Todd also recount the story of Jane McLaughlin from Co Mayo. It seems her husband Edward was deported on board the Asia I in 1824. The government finally granted her permission to re-unite with him so she took her family, four daughters and four sons aged between eight and 23, by foot from Mayo to Cork, where she was promised free passage. Her two eldest sons were denied travel, being too old to travel on a female ship.

While on board the boat, the women were treated to the luxury of three set meals a day, welcome fodder for many who would have been used to bouts of hunger on dry land. They were kept busy sewing and doing needlework. Heavy wooden collars were applied to errant convicts on ships at the time, but there is no evidence that the punishment was used on board the Neva.

“The first convict fleet which left Britain in the late 19th century had appalling mortality rates,” says McCarthy. “What happened was that the colonists in Australia didn’t want a load of sick convicts arriving. They were no good to them; they were only draining resources instead of providing labour.

“There was such a kick-up about these convicts arriving in poor health that the Royal Navy put a surgeon on each ship. In the case of the Neva it was Dr John Stephenson, and he was responsible as an appointee of the government to ensure that the convicts arrived healthy on the far side of the world. They tied in his payment and the captain’s payment according to the number of healthy convicts they landed. The mortality rates on board convict ships were quite low by the 1830s, lower than, say, ‘the coffin ships’ that crossed the Atlantic 10 years later.”

The real hardship for those on board was in their heads. Ship’s surgeons such as Dr Stephenson continually complained that the women on board were prone to hysterical fits, understandably so, cooped up in high seas for the first time, with poor daylight and ventilation, their fate preying on their minds.

“In some ways, deportation was almost as bad as a death sentence. They would never see anyone they ever knew again, and the people they knew would never see them again. The symptoms of some of the illnesses they had were stress-related.”

Interestingly, it was when the health of Dr Stephenson deteriorated that probably led to the misfortunate end of their voyage.

“I suspect that as soon as Stephenson became ill [with dysentry] and went to bed, the common behaviour on board female convict ships took over,” says McCarthy. “Sailors were known to be a little loose in the morals department. It was a ship that had a fairly high concentration of prostitutes aboard. I suspect that it turned into a party ship, that they forgot about navigation, and that they came across reefs without expecting to.”

- Cal McCarthy and Kevin Todd’s The Wreck of the Neva: The Horrifying Fate of a Convict Ship and the Irish Women Aboard is published by Mercier Press.