The convict ship Surprize, bound for Australia, was on contract from Camden, Calvert and King, whose agent on board was Thomas Shapcote. It undertook to transport, clothe and feed the convicts for a flat inclusive fee of L17 7s 6d per head, whether they landed alive or not.
'When any of our comrades that were chained to us died, we kept it a secret as long as we could for the smell of the dead body, in order to get their allowance of provision, and many a time have I been glad to eat the poultice that was put to my leg for perfect hunger. I was chained to Humphrey Davies who died when we were about half way, and I lay beside his corpse about a week and got his allowance.'
It is worth noting that conditions only improved when there was a financial incentive for delivering prisoners to Australia in a healthy condition and when an ex-convict who had experienced one of these ships drew up guidelines for how they should be run.
Similarly, Dr David Chapman (in a scheme described in the chapter on Old Age), proposes that residents in old people's homes should provide an incentive for the management by giving a regular rating which would determine what bonus the management is to receive from government funds. Prisoners could also make the same assessments, he believes, provided that there were safeguards such as fines for prisons that allowed escapes, or that let drugs in.
'The Fatal Shore' is engrossing in its description of the convict system in Australia and of the multitude of incentives (to supplement flogging and hanging) that its first governors were forced to come up with in an effort to cope. Governor Macquarie, for instance, paid the convicts some 45,000 gallons of rum to build the Sydney hospital, and offered 60 convicts their freedom if they could build a road through the Blue Mountains within six months instead of the estimated three years (they succeeded). Is it possible that prisoners today might respond to similar if less arduous ways of winning their freedom? Indeed the whole experiment of transportation, had it not been deformed by its unnecessary and truly appalling cruelties, would doubtless have beeen judged a success in prison reform terms. As Robert Hughes, the author of 'The Fatal Shore' writes:
'It did give a fresh start to many thousands of people who would have been crushed in spirit or confirmed in crime by long stretches in an English prison. And the post-colonial history of Australia exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a community of people, handpicked over decades for their 'criminal propensities' and for no other reason, whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world.'
Nicholas Albery, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).