In Tasmania Read online

  By now, King’s illness had advanced into his chest, and he had been forced to take to his bed. But Kemp’s vendetta continued. Somehow a tightly rolled piece of paper found its way to the bed-bound Governor. On it were ‘seditious drawings’ of King and two short poems: ‘Extempore Allegro’, a brisk assault on the Governor’s character (‘for infamous acts from my birth I’d an itch’), and ‘Epitaph’, which cheerfully anticipated his demise (‘A wretch to whom all pity is bereft’).

  This anonymous doggerel enraged King. He arrested Kemp – who had been appointed the Corps’s paymaster – and prosecuted him. The trial was a farce. King, a naval man, had to draw the members of the court martial from Kemp’s army cronies such as the Rum Corps commander, Lieutenant Colonel ‘Phlegmatic’ Paterson, an inebriate botanist with failing eyesight who had been witness at Kemp’s marriage; and Major Johnston, Paterson’s no less alcoholic second-in-command, who had been the first officer to step ashore at Port Jackson. This was a tribunal that protected its interests.

  On February 25, 1803, the trial was suspended and Kemp acquitted. A startling dispatch from the Colonial Office advised King to forget the whole business and ‘consign to oblivion’ all that had passed. He was urged to proceed with his plan to colonise the virgin territory of Van Diemen’s Land.

  The idea of founding a colony had been pretty vague until Kemp started circulating rumours about the French. King now blundered in to fill the empty vortex. In August 1803, he chartered two ships – the Lady Nelson and the Albion, captained by the whaler Ebor Bunker – to unload a party on the Derwent estuary. The 49 passengers included a surgeon, a storekeeper, 21 male and three female convicts, seven free settlers, and a lance corporal and seven privates from the New South Wales Corps. A few months later, King assembled a second and larger force to take control of Bass Strait. He asked Colonel Paterson to lead it. Paterson, as commander-in-chief of the New South Wales Corps, wanted to be in full charge of his own area and refused to answer to a junior officer in the settlement on the Derwent. King agreed to divide the island in two, with Paterson in charge of the northern half. In London, knowledge of the island’s geography was so hazy that Paterson was given the go-ahead to establish a settlement at Port Dalrymple with its ‘advantageous position … upon the Southern Coast of Van Diemen’s Land’. King had to point out that Port Dalrymple lay on the north coast.

  In October 1804, King left his sick bed to wave off Colonel Paterson on board the Buffalo, with Kemp as second-in-command. The four vessels carried 181 soldiers, convicts and settlers, including Kemp’s brother-in-law Alexander Riley, who was to act as storekeeper. The Governor’s relief at seeing the back of Kemp – his ‘concealed assassin’ – must have cheered him at least a little; at any rate, he provided an eleven-gun salute for the expedition’s departure.

  At 7 a.m. on Sunday, October 14, the Buffalo edged away from Government Wharf to the tune of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and the hearty cheers of a ‘delirious’ population – and sailed smack into a tempest.

  X

  ON A CLOUDLESS MORNING I DROVE TO GEORGE TOWN AND PARKED above the beach where Kemp eventually landed. The river mouth was sprinkled with caravan parks and bungalows sporting names like ‘Ups-n-downs’, but the shoreline was pristine, the sand empty and the sea an outlandish ultramarine.

  Emerging from the tempest, Kemp’s ship had slammed into an unexpected sandbank off Lagoon Beach. I doubted the future ‘Father of Tasmania’ was happy to be on board. He would have been separated from his grog store. He would not have shared my love of the sea: for him it would have been something for convicts to wash in. He would have avoided the sun so as to preserve his complexion and distinguish himself from the Aborigines who watched the bungled landing of the Buffalo in puzzled silence.

  Kemp and the crew hurried to unload the stores on the east shore of the river. The wind blew in heavy squalls and was still blowing four days later when Colonel Paterson took formal possession of the colony and swore in Kemp and Riley as its magistrates.

  Riley owed his presence on the beach to a conviction that this latitude was the most productive possible for plants and fruit, with a climate that shed ‘fruitfulness on the earth and happiness on mankind in general’. He believed that the further away people were from this latitude, the less happy they were. Impatient to test his theory – which, he assured Kemp, ‘never fails’ – he had come out from England with hopes of making a fortune from growing silk, opium, hemp and rhubarb.

  A quick walk along the east shore revealed brackish water and stony soil. Paterson left Kemp to oversee the erection of a church and jail, and crossed the Tamar River. He decided to establish a permanent residence on the edge of a shallow rivulet. Riley’s optimism had infected him. ‘It is my opinion,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘that the Country will turn out to be Superior to any yet discovered.’

  The settlement of York Town is recollected today by a bronze map in a deserted picnic spot beside a garden supplier. The pyramids of wood-chips and ‘chook-poo’ are, at first glance, all that remain of the first permanent settlement in the north.

  I was poring over the map when a man drove past and parked in front of a shack. He tracked me with a sheepish expression as I walked towards him, and looked even more apprehensive when I explained that a relative of mine had founded a town that was possibly buried under his property. Had he, I asked, come upon any evidence of the settlement?

  He nodded. Only ten weeks ago he was clearing the bush out the back when his spade struck something. Now, he called over to his son, who had come onto the porch. ‘Michael, remember those convict bricks?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you show them to him?’

  Michael led me through the scrappy back yard – a dog in a cage watched on hind legs – and into the bracken and thistles. He darted his glance here and there, unable to find what he was looking for, and then I saw a clearing. In the clearing, a floor of pale red bricks.

  He let me take one. ‘We hit those when we were pulling up scrub and then we broomed it.’

  I could see the ironstone in the brick. The iron ore that Paterson dug from here in December 1804 was the first mineral deposit found in Tasmania. ‘If I had carts,’ he wrote, ‘I could load in time the whole Navy of Great Britain.’

  Kemp’s cottage, possibly one of two prefabricated wooden houses brought out in the Lady Nelson, was on a high piece of land among the black wattle and gums. It looked down on the quarters housing 42 convicts and a flat area of five acres, known inaccurately on the bronze map as ‘Major Kemp’s garden’. Kemp was a captain and the original garden was, in fact, Paterson’s creation.

  His horizons reduced by ophthalmia, Paterson concentrated on his plants and apple orchard and soon was able to treat Kemp to a corned beef dinner served with eight different vegetables and an impressive cucumber. But his optimism had started to ebb.

  In York Town, Kemp watched his commander go steadily barmy. The site had been a disastrous choice. The closest a ship could anchor was six miles away. After rain, the place became ‘a complete swamp’. The climate was windy and the temperature colder than in Sydney. As winter set in the animals started to die. Soon half of the settlement’s 622 Bengal cattle had perished and Kemp and Riley were having to hoist the surviving animals into slings and daily massage their legs. And there was trouble in the garden. Nettles had grown with a sting so violent that it killed four dogs and gave several officers a terrible fever. In February, Kemp discovered that a small white insect, ‘the most destructive in the world of its size’, had devoured his coat and hat and was advancing through the vegetables. Paterson surrounded his garden with soapsuds in a forlorn attempt at defence, but his potatoes and French beans were eaten anyway, by rats. Then one morning, Paterson woke to find that unidentified predators had devoured his ducks and chickens: only their feathers were left.

  By June, the community was on half rations. Desperate and homesick, the colonists were hanging on by their fingernails when they received
a further blow – the pirating of a supply ship by a convict crew. Bringing much-needed pork and flour, the brig Venus was also carrying letters from Kemp’s brother-in-law, which the captain had stored in a small deal box. Not even Kemp could have choreographed the fate of William Potter’s correspondence. In his embarrassed deposition, the captain described how, just before his ship was seized, he saw an object hurtle overboard: the box of papers belonging to Kemp, thrown into the sea by a drunken female convict (‘very corpulent with full face, thick lips and light hair’) who would help navigate the ship to New Zealand, where she took up with a Maori chieftain.

  In August, a sick and fatigued Paterson sailed for Sydney. He had left behind Kemp as acting Lieutenant Governor and enough rations to last five months. Unable to withstand another ‘Breeze of Wind’, Paterson reported to the new Governor that he had put his government ‘in tranquillity with Captain Kemp’.

  Years later, as a bankrupt in London, Kemp argued in a petition to the government to restore his land grant that he had spared neither trouble nor expense ‘converting a howling wilderness into a cultivated plain’. But he was not a natural leader and under his command the settlement almost starved to death. His barn burned down and floods destroyed the crops that the injured Riley had managed to grow in spite of his ‘painful circumstances’ (he had been speared in the loins by Aborigines). The settlers survived on seaweed and pigs which they had fed on whale scraps and that tasted of lamp oil. In February, Kemp sent five men in the longboat to row and sail 600 miles to seek help on the Australian mainland. They were never heard from again.

  Kemp’s most important point in his petition was that he had been responsible for the first crossing of the island by a European. In the same month as he dispatched the longboat, he ordered Lieutenant Laycock, the tallest man in the Rum Corps, to walk to the settlement in Hobart and seek help. Laycock and four men, relying only on a compass, trekked for nine days until they reached the Derwent. They walked through plains of silver tussock and kangaroo grass and pines 100 feet high, and discovered a pair of lakes that Laycock named ‘Kemp’s Lakes’ (now Lakes Sorell and Crescent). But having penetrated the interior, Laycock found that the southern settlers were starving too. Stricken with scurvy, catarrh and diarrhoea, they told him: ‘We can afford no relief.’

  In April, Paterson sailed back up the Tamar to a settlement in a state of anarchy. He had been away two months longer than anticipated. Stepping ashore, he was greeted by naked, shoeless men who needed ‘every species of provision’. Paterson sought out Kemp who admitted that in order to ward off famine and mutiny he had been obliged to distribute guns to the convicts to hunt kangaroo, and at least ten of these prisoners had stayed out in the bush, harassing the settlers. Paterson wrote prophetically: ‘It is much to be dreaded that they will become a desperate and dangerous banditti.’ Nor had Kemp succeeded in cultivating crops. Rather, he seemed to have added to his fortune by selling kangaroo flesh to the government store at three times the official rate. In charge for seven months and eleven days, he told Paterson that he now wanted to leave. Complaining of ‘extreme ill health’, he requested permission to take his wife and nine-month-old son George to Sydney. The placid Paterson agreed, but warned Kemp that the new Governor, William Bligh, was a different kind of man from the Governor who had preceded him.

  This was Bligh of the Bounty, the man who 17 years earlier had been set adrift in a boat by Mr Christian and his fellow mutineers. Now he had arrived in Sydney with the express intention of stamping out the rum trade. He was not favourably disposed towards Kemp’s return – he considered Rum Corps officers to be ‘tremendous buggers’ – and was suspicious of his reasons. As it turned out, he had excellent cause. On a scorching evening five months later, on what is now ironically Australia Day, the Rum Corps mutinied and it no longer surprised me to discover who marched up the drive at their head, sword drawn, into Government House.

  I wondered briefly whether this was Kemp finally exercising his republican ardour; but it transpired – of course – that his rebellion had been prompted by liquor and corruption. Major Johnston, acting Rum Corps Commander in Paterson’s absence, conceived a desire to unseat Bligh, a plan that was largely formulated when Johnston and Kemp were drunk. ‘What do you think he told me?’ Kemp railed. ‘Yes! Told the oldest merchant in the colony – that he came here to protect the poor. That is not the Governor WE want!!!’ And so it was that the mutineers barged into the Governor’s residence around supper time and after a couple of hours stumbling around the house, frightening Bligh’s recently widowed daughter and an Irish parson who was there to comfort her, discovered Bligh hiding in a room upstairs. One of Kemp’s soldiers noticed a bedcover twitching, prodded it with his musket, and struck a boot. There was the Governor, covered in spiderwebs and with his shirt hanging out.

  By 8.30 p.m. the mutiny was successful, the only casualty being Kemp’s friend Laycock, who fell through a manhole, landing on his ‘principal joint’. As a reward for his part in unseating Bligh, Johnston gave Kemp 24 cows, 4,000 acres of land, and appointed him Judge Advocate. A lampoon described him as ‘a grinning tobacco boy’ whose prolific learning was praised to the skies. For the next seven months he ruled as the supreme legal officer in an area the size of Western Europe, a position of extraordinary power. For seven months there was no court of appeal after Kemp – except to God. With tremendous relish, he transported former adversaries like William Gore, chief of the constabulary, to seven years on the Coal River. ‘Take him away, take him off; take him away, take him away.’

  Kemp’s duties also expanded to performing all the marriages in the colony. I discovered from a copy of the Tasmanian Times dated November 4, 1868, a terrible story. One morning, with eleven services to conduct, through a combination of impatience and drink he married the wrong couples. ‘The Parson-Captain, when subsequently applied to, bade them “settle it amongst them, for he could interfere no further!”’

  XI

  ONE DAY IN 1810 THERE WAS A KNOCK AT POTTER’S DOOR IN Aldgate: Kemp had come home from New South Wales to give evidence at Major Johnston’s court martial. Bligh had singled out Kemp as the person he particularly wished to see prosecuted for the mutiny, but – of course – Kemp managed to avoid punishment. Commended for his candour in the witness box, he forfeited only his 4,000 acres and his 24 cows, rather than his freedom.3

  Nevertheless, his return home was hardly triumphant. A letter from his sister Susanna calls him ‘a strange man’, often silent, very proud – and a bankrupt, just as he had left England 20 years before. From the letters I gathered that he was briefly a shipping agent, a pawnbroker, and a wine-merchant, but ‘lost much on Bordeaux wine speculation’. At one point he lost a bet of £150 against the capture or death of Napoleon.

  By 1815, he had exhausted his options. The world regarded him, he complained, as ‘an uncertificated bankrupt, alias an outlaw’. There was nowhere to go but back to the antipodes. He prepared to flee the country for a third time. Pursued by ‘clamorous’ creditors, he went cap in hand to see Potter in the house where he grew up and, with staggering optimism, requested his biggest loan to date: an amount equivalent to the entire annual turnover of ‘Kemp & Potter’.

  Kemp asked Potter to guarantee two shiploads of goods worth ‘upwards of five thousand pounds’. He assured Potter that he would be able to sell the goods at considerable profit in Van Diemen’s Land, thanks to the exceptional contacts of his other brother-in-law, Alexander Riley, who had recently built Sydney’s new hospital and made £30,000 from the contract (‘some say Fifty, but he is a close man and no person could tell exactly how much’). A similar ‘most splendid fortune’, he promised Potter, would be realised by ‘Kemp & Potter’ from the cargoes of tobacco, brandy and seedlings. Kemp required the money only for nine months and would pay full interest.

  Unbelievably, Potter agreed.

  But Kemp did not stop there. Since 1801, the Potters had looked after his illegitimate daughter Emily. Before he
boarded the Dawson, Kemp also unloaded on them his legitimate children George and Elizabeth.

  The first sign of trouble came in a letter dated several months later from Paraiba (now João Pessoa) in Brazil. Kemp’s ship was detained after losing her anchor. Her captain ‘appears to me to be a little deranged’. And Kemp has run out of money. ‘I have been under the necessity of drawing on you for sixty pounds.’

  Potter hears nothing else for the next two years. He wrote letter after letter appealing to ‘our agreement with your good self’, but they remained unanswered. By now Kemp’s father had died and Potter was having to steer the firm from the rocks on which Kemp’s negligence threatened to pitch it. At Aldgate, his desk piled up with demands for Kemp’s £5,000 (more than £400,000 today). Kemp’s sisters wrung their hands uselessly. Susanna wrote to Amy: ‘It’s complete swindling to fly one’s country for speculation.’

  At last, in August 1817, a letter arrived from Hobart. It begins breezily: ‘I arrived here about six weeks ago and have commenced my mercantile pursuits.’ But due to ‘the severe trials’ lately experienced, combined with ‘unprecedented mercantile circumstance’, Kemp fears he will not be able to make his remittances ‘so punctual as I would wish’. He details his sales to date.

  Tobacco: ‘I am sorry to say there is no market for that now’ – although he did sell some sacks of Prince’s Mixture in Cape Town (‘You was either rob’d or cheated,’ Potter replies).

  Brandy: ‘The market is completely glutted with spirits and all other goods – such that to force sales would be ruinous.’