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descriptions of the men sent out to Australia. In 1797, in A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis , Patrick Colquhoun described a whole underground society of idle and disorderly mechanics, labourers, pilferers, embezzlers, coiners, receivers of stolen goods, spendthrifts, rakes, and ‘giddly young men … in the pursuit of criminal pleasures’. They were ‘profligate, loose and dissolute characters … seducing others to intemperance, lewdness, debauchery, gambling and excess …’
    They really were a sorry lot and they tried the patience of those appointed as their moral guardians. Surgeon Haslam’s attempted reforms fell on arid ground. He tried to educate the convicts in the hulks about ‘the beauties and conveniences which the light of truth and rectitude of conduct would present’ in contrast to the infamy and contempt they then wallowed in. They were having none of it. ‘My admonitions,’ Haslam lamented, ‘were drowned in a roar of blasphemy.’ The Reverend Bedford of Hobart Town was subject to the gross indignity of being mooned by a group of uppity female convicts who drew up their skirts and smacked their arses as he attempted to tell them off. Some just admitted defeat; the Reverend Richard Johnson regretted on his departure from Sydney that the convicts had not been improved at all by their odyssey. They were still indulging themselves in sloth and idleness, engaging in most ‘profane and unclean conversation, and committing abominations which it would defile any pen to describe’.
    Contrary to the hopes of those in the United Kingdom who thought transportation a salutary and reforming example, the likelihood that the blinking, benighted creatures who stumbled from the convict transports in Port Jackson were hard core criminals actually increased over time. Reforms to the English legal system saw exile to the colonies progressively reserved for more and more serious offences. The system which consigned the first convicts to Australia was much more ferocious and haphazard, however, and some really were exiled for petty misdeeds born of want and desperation.
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    The convicts were not alone in their exile. Having volunteered for the adventure of the First Fleet, Ralph Clark, a newly-wed second officer of His Majesty’s Royal Marines, found himself haunted and depressed at the prospect of a long separation from his home and family. Clark took time to set down his feelings as Arthur Phillip’s squadron weighed anchor and set course for a brisk run down the Solent, a deep strait which bends sharply, just like a boomerang, between the low broken shoreline of Hampshire and the steeper, chalky northern coast of the Isle of Wight. As watery daylight leaked into the world, the estuaries of the Medina, the Newton and Yar Rivers slipped by on the port side and then Hurst Castle loomed, a grim sixteenth century fortress squatting at the end of a long, thin pebble bank jutting out into the channel. The castle’s contribution to English penal history – King Charles was held there after the civil war before being removed to Westminster for trial and execution – meant little or nothing to Clark. He was busy imploring God to allow the fleet to put in at Plymouth so he could see his ‘dear friend and affectionate Alicia’ and their ‘sweet son’. Sadly the Lord wasn’t taking requests that morning and a little further on, as England receded, Clark wailed, ‘O my God all my hoppes are over of seeing my beloved wife and son’.
    He was an attentive diarist but a bit of a hypocrite. His journal is replete with furious references to the female convicts, abandoned trollops who were not to be compared with the lovely lost Alicia. A few days after sailing from Tenerife four tradesmen aboard Clark’s vessel, the inappropriately named Friendship , broke through a bulkhead to get to the female convicts. They were discovered