A Commonwealth of Thieves by Thomas Keneally Page B

1783 for burglary, he had been a lad of sixteen. Like his father and an accomplice, he was to be hanged on a gibbet outside Norwich Castle. At the scaffold, he was pardoned on condition of transportation, but saw his father and the accomplice executed.
    In Norwich Castle prison, he had fallen in love with a slightly older woman, Susannah Holmes, guilty of burglary. Their prison child, Henry, born in the pen of Norwich Castle, had not been allowed to accompany his parents down to the dismal
Dunkirk,
and was being cared for by the Norwich gaoler, John Simpson. Now that Henry was on
Friendship,
and Susannah aboard
Charlotte,
the young family was utterly broken up. The efforts of Simpson to get Lord Sydney to reunite the baby with his mother captured the public's imagination, which extended itself to romantic tales of doomed young felons but which, unlike the Victorian imagination, did not require that the lovers be virginal or married. Indeed, during their wait at Norwich Castle, Henry and Susannah had requested they be married but were refused permission. Soon, Simpson came down to Plymouth by coach with the infant. Baby Henry was presented to Susannah, and she and the child were transferred to
Friendship.
The family would not be broken up again by circumstance until late in the voyage.
    Also boarded on the two ships were British marines from the Plymouth division. For the garrison in New South Wales, only eighty marines from Plymouth were wanted, though 130 had voluntarily offered their services under the incentive that a stint in the penal colony, should the fleet survive, would entail the option of honourable discharge and a land grant in New South Wales.
    At the same time the
Sirius,
its tender the
Supply, Prince of Wales, Scarborough,
and the remainder of the ships were anchored on the robust tide of the Motherbank. Here further convicts and marines were rowed out to the transports from Portsmouth.
Scarborough
would receive over 200 male convicts, and cramped little
Prince of Wales
(318 tons) some forty-nine females and one male. A marine garrison of eighty-nine men came from the Portsmouth division, and about the same number from the Chatham division had already boarded
Lady Penrhyn
and
Alexander
in the Thames.
    Phillip was concerned to hear, however, that some of his marines were going ashore sick, and some were even dying there. Part of the problem was that the marines were frequently quartered underneath the seamen's accommodation in the forecastle or aft of the prison, and were “excluded from all air.” Their quarters on the transports were appropriate, Phillip wrote, only for stowing away provisions, and he began to look into ways of better accommodating them.
    Officers had better quarters but, for reasons unspecified but which everyone seemed to take for granted, were not permitted to bring their families on the fleet, though some wives of private soldiers, about ten per company, were allowed to travel. A total of 246 marine personnel have been positively identified as having sailed in the First Fleet, and thirty-two wives and fifteen children sailed with their marine husbands and fathers. Ten further children would be born to the families of marines at sea.
    Movements of convicts from London to Portsmouth continued. One report of a gentleman's visit to Newgate showed convicts delighted to be slated for the fleet. Their merriment had a hint of the graveyard about it, of the vacancy yawning before them. One party left Newgate on the morning of 27 February, and a large contingent was moved in six heavily guarded wagons from a Woolwich hulk via Guildford. Following a night stop at Godalming, they reached Portsmouth in bitter weather. As the large body of felons was moved through the town, the windows and doors of houses and shops were closed, and the streets lined with troops “while the wagons, I think thirty in number, passed to Point Beach, where the boats were ready to receive them; as soon as they were