A Commonwealth of Thieves by Thomas Keneally Page A

holes cut in it.
    On the
Alexander
's prison deck, somehow, 195 male convicts would ultimately be placed, and elsewhere crew and marines, and marines' wives and children, and an extraordinary assortment of stores, beggaring modern belief that such modest space could accommodate so much human and maritime material. On
Lady Penrhyn,
reserved for women, the master kept the prisoners handcuffed and chained and below decks in those first days, purely out of fear. The poor country girl Sarah Bellamy, from Worcestershire, would most likely have found the cramped head room and narrow sleeping space claustrophobic. In the midst of her prison deck rose the great, groaning mainmast and the trunk of the foremast, like malign and barren trees. Security was uppermost in the masters' minds, and so ventilation was poor. On these lower decks oxygen could become so scarce that a candle would not light. Added to that was the noise of timbers and tide, and the raucousness and bullying of worldly, rebellious Newgate girls, their voices bouncing off the low head room. For young Bellamy the convict deck of the little
Lady Penrhyn
must have been a perfect hell, and when Joe Downey, a sweet-talking sailor soon to be appointed quartermaster, offered his attentions and protection, how grateful she must have been for what he could do to relieve the situation.
    Phillip came aboard his ships on 11 January to see the recently loaded men and women, and what impressed him most was their marginal health and their need of clothing and blankets. Clothing would always be a problem and was not standardised in quality or quantity. The navy did not want sailors and transportees to wear heavy wool—wool was worn on the hulks and in Newgate and infallibly attracted lice and typhus. So while the male convicts were given woollen caps, the jackets issued on board were of blue cotton cloth or the light, compacted woollen cloth called kersey. Shirts were of linen, trousers of duck, and stockings were of yarn.
    Phillip complained to Evan Nepean that the clothes the women were sent down to the ships in “stamp the magistrates with infamy.” He ordered that they be supplied with clothing from the naval stores of
Sirius,
and hoped the Navy Board would make up the loss. For “nothing but clothing them would have prevented them from perishing, and which could not be done in time to prevent a fever, which is still on board that ship, and where there are many venereal complaints, that must spread in spite of every precaution.”
    Phillip asked the authorities that the ships be moved out of the Thames and down the English coast to Spithead off Portsmouth, where, in the lee of the Isle of Wight, they could anchor on the broad Motherbank. Because of its distance from shore, the inmates could be unchained there and allowed fresh air. Indeed, the fleet would begin assembling there from mid-March.
    Phillip knew very well that the transports' masters wanted the convicts secured and immobilised for as long as possible, to keep the ships safe. But he also knew that for the sake of their health, the felons would need to be unchained once the transports were at sea if their elected mess orderlies were to come on deck to collect their rations, and that all of them should be freely exercised on deck in good weather. As it was, with seasickness and diarrhoea, with dampness and the stink of bilges, with waves sloshing below and streams of water penetrating between ill-sealed timbers onto the sleeping platforms during storms, it would be hard enough to maintain the health of the felons half as well as an enlightened man of conscience would wish.
    Charlotte
and
Friendship
headed off for Plymouth to collect prisoners from the hulks and gaols there. The two little vessels boarded between them 164 males and 41 females. One of the prisoners loaded from the hulk
Dunkirk
onto
Friendship
was a young, athletically built redheaded Norfolk man named Henry Kable. At the time of his sentencing to death in