Young convicts coming to the new settlement in NSW found plenty of opportunities to make good. Often illiterate, without any great training or skills — beyond a sharp eye for the main chance, which had got them into trouble in the first place — individual convicts with enough luck, initiative and sheer hustling ambition began making their way up the colonial ladder, setting up lucrative businesses even as they were still serving their sentences. Here are two good examples.
Aged 19, Simeon Lord had been sentenced to seven years transportation for theft in Manchester in 1790. He’d been lucky not to be hanged, because the jury had deliberately underestimated the worth of the goods — 100 hundred yards (91 metres) of muslin and the same amount of calico was worth far more than the 10 pence it was valued at, but juries preferred to have a person transported rather than executed for such crimes. Getting to Sydney on the Third Fleet, he was assigned as servant to Officer Thomas Rowley, who obviously spotted a lad with sharpness about him and set him up as his retail frontman. Lord proved so valuable that when he was emancipated — sooner rather than later — Rowley set him up as a licensed victualler (supplier of goods) and baker. Officers purchased large amounts of cargos of merchandise and put it all in Lord’s hands to sell on commission, both wholesale and retail. Ship captains also found him useful, especially when they found out how much profit the officers were making off the imported goods. They started to bypass the officers and sell their goods by auction. Lord was the auctioneer, took 5 per cent for selling the cargo and collecting the bills, and built a huge warehouse on the site of Macquarie Place — and began making a killing selling from there. By 1806, Lord had a house bigger and more luxurious than the Governor’s residence, had bought ships and was trading with India, China, England, New Zealand and the Cape of South Africa.
Henry Kable was an illiterate man who arrived, aged 25, with his soon-to-be wife, Susannah Holmes, on the First Fleet. Phillip made him one of the constables of the early settlement. Soon he was running the gaol and selling liquor at steep prices to the drunks and malefactors that he locked up. In 1794 he was granted 30 acres at Petersham, and in 1799 he was appointed chief constable of the colony. Demoted for illegally importing pigs in 1802, his trading went on from strength to strength. In the early 1800s he became heavily involved in the new sealing industry, turning the sealskins into leather boots and shoes in a Sydney manufactory, and exporting sealskins to first Canton and Calcutta, and then London. By 1806 he employed five convicts, held 215 acres, and owned 10 horses and numerous cattle and sheep.
Hunter’s wheels fall off
John Hunter, originally so enthused, found his inspiration waning as he became embroiled in a power struggle with the hustler-in-chief of the officers of the NSW Corps, John Macarthur.
When Hunter first arrived on the scene he had been highly impressed with Macarthur’s capacities, but as time went on his doubts began to grow. Macarthur was an individual who was so intensely driven as to occasionally border on the sociopathic. He had a tendency to take any snub or rebuff as a good excuse to launch furious vendettas. He did exactly this when Hunter questioned some of his practices. Hunter and the NSW officers (the ones who sided with Macarthur at least — others continued to remain very close to Hunter) were soon at each other’s throats.
Hunter looked around for allies and found that the angry Evangelicals, Johnson and Marsden, were ready to step into the new feud. Hunter invited them to send examples of monstrous excess that the NSW Corps officers’ regime had committed to the Colonial Office. The reverends were more than happy to oblige. More outraged reports about the corrupt, debased and much abused state of the colony of NSW followed.
In 1800, Hunter was recalled to Britain in mild ignominy — his administration had proved largely inept. Worst of all, he hadn’t cut expenses. Getting approval from the reverends didn’t alter the impression of a governor with no real control and with many of the NSW officers against him.
King Came, King Saw, King Conquered — Kind Of
In 1800, Hunter was replaced by Philip Gidley King, who swept a new broom through some of the colony’s more rank practices. He tried to make trade and production more diversified, hoping the colony itself would provide the market for the more varied products that would be produced. Less successfully, he also tried to end the rum trade.
Vigorous cost-cutting measures were also the orders of his day, so King introduced a system whereby some convicts were granted conditional freedom on arrival if they had the skills, capital or connections to ensure they could support themselves.
Diversifying trade and production
Like Hunter, King was a veteran of the First Fleet, and so had burned on his memory the original hardships and squalor of the foundation years. He arrived with one very strong official injunction — Cut Down Costs. The colony, said the Colonial Office (and this is only slightly paraphrased), is costing a bomb. Do something about it.
Which King did. For a start, he stopped assigning so many convicts as free labour to private farmers. He also re-established public farms so he was no longer forced to purchase foodstuffs to feed those convicts still being kept by the government.
King attacked inflation and the ruinously high prices being charged in the colony by effectively managing the government store. King developed the government store into a real alternative to the stores run by the emancipist (ex-convict) traders, some of who were charging frankly extortionate prices. King’s attack on inflation was also helped by a glut of incoming commodities and imports. Prices dropped naturally, but at least he was putting in place structures that could permanently assist the settlers.
King also vigorously championed a more diversified economic life in the colony, figuring that if everyone was a simple small-scale farmer (as Britain’s original plan had it), there’d be no-one to buy the surplus crops that the farmers produced.
Having people involved in a range of different industries actually helped those tilling the soil, because they provided a market for what the farmers grew. Not rocket science maybe, but a bit of a conceptual breakthrough. King encouraged entrepreneurs to set up local manufactures, and to further explore trading possibilities in the Pacific region.