Abstract
During Barrington’s passage to Botany Bay, the tainted, mutinous prisoner is relegated, literally and metaphorically, to an area below deck and out of sight; he or she is available to the reader only through the narrator’s fragmentary observations and abbreviated comments. The “cured” convict, Barrington himself, alone merits a continuous story focusing on his sensibility, his courage, and ultimately his triumph as a valued British subject. This aesthetic choice is in keeping with how other famous convicts of the 1790s would present their own experiences of conviction and exile. Four of the five Scottish Martyrs—Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, and Maurice Margarot—experienced transportation through the prism of mutiny.1 All four men sailed for Australia together, aboard the royal transport the HMS Surprize. While Barrington sided with the authorities against potential mutineers, however, the Surprize’s captain became convinced that Palmer and Skirving in particular were collaborating with other convicts to seize control of the ship. Margarot and Muir were drawn into the volley of accusations during the long voyage, the former as an accuser and the latter as a defender of their fellow reformers.
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Notes
The fifth reformer of this group to be transported, Joseph Gerrald, was tried somewhat later and, after spending a year in Newgate, finally was sent to Botany Bay in 1795.
The Oxford English Dictionary cites, as one meaning for mutiny current in the eighteenth century, any “open revolt against constituted authority.”
Alan Frost’s Convicts and Empire remains the most decided argument in favor of the imperial thesis; for views of the Australia choice as mostly dictated by convict disposal, see Mollie Gillen and David Mackay. Accounts from Cook’s landings at Botany Bay and Norfolk Island mentioned the presence of flax plants and pine trees— potentially key materials for the British navy in the south Pacific, if they could be transformed into sails and masts. In the event, south Pacific pine trees proved too soft for masts, and flax was never processed in any significant quantity.
Curiously, Coleridge’s sympathy for transported convicts did not carry over into compassion for French émigrés fleeing civil war. Along with other young radicals, Coleridge viewed émigrés suspiciously in the 1790s, seeing them as reactionaries fleeing the richly deserved justice awaiting them back home. He publicly wondered whether “these emigrants from their private Depravity and political Intrigues were not such men, as no State in the act of settling itself could safely tolerate” (Lectures 124).
The only published scholarly biography of Muir is Christina Bewley’s.
Chapter 4 of John Barrell’s Imagining the King’s Death extensively analyzes the trials of Skirving, Margarot, and Gerrald, demonstrating how the prosecutors who posited sedition as an imaginary wrong to the crown laid the groundwork for the 1794 treason trials of John Thelwall, John Horne Tooke, and Thomas Hardy.
Chapter 2 of Pascoe’s Romantic Theatricality lucidly dissects the courtroom dramatics of Erskine and Hardy in particular, and of the ways in which such theatricality was coded as feminine by onlookers and the press.
At Skirving’s sentencing, Lord Swinton stated, “I have heard that [Skirving] has a great family, and I am sorry for it; but the cases of Messrs. Muir and Fyshe Palmer should have led him to be industrious for his family, followed an honest occupation, and not have meddled with illegal associations” (State Trials 598).
From Authentic Biographical Anecdotes of Joseph Gerrald. . . .
Refuting those who argued that transportation was “an ordinary event” in criminal sentencing, the authors of Gerrald, A Fragment emphasize the stark difference between men like the reformers and the stereotypical felon: “No, Sir, it is not an ordinary event. We see men bred among the refuse of society, transported by the hundreds; and the philanthropist will see it with regret. But it is yet extraordinary for a man like Gerrald, to be subjected to this nefarious treatment: a man, from whose various information the wisest might be contented to learn, and whose bursts of eloquence and penetration might charm the most refined” (23).
This sort of position was not new in British jurisprudence; Michael Scrivener describes a 1704 ruling by Justice Holt finding that any government criticism lacked proper deference and was potentially seditious (172).
Peter Brooks explains how the kinds of narratives ensured by Habeas Corpus benefit plaintiffs. The recent interest in storytelling among legal scholars centers around how “. . . storytelling serves to convey meanings excluded or marginalized by mainstream legal thinking and rhetoric. Narrative has a unique ability to embody the concrete experience of individuals and communities, to make other voices heard, to contest the very assumptions of legal judgment. Narrative is thus a form of countermajoritarian argument, a genre for oppositionists intent on showing up the exclusions that occur in legal business-asusual . . . .” (16)
Cf. Paul Carter, who regards articulations of Australian convict experience, necessarily at odds with official authority, as a kind of mutiny: “To let the convicts speak for themselves would have been to entertain the unthinkable: mutiny, another history” (295).
Michael Roe set out to vindicate Margarot from Palmer’s charges and reclaim his reputation as a sincere advocate for reform in his study “Maurice Margarot: A Radical in Two Hemispheres.”
Bewley notes that “people at home had no real conception of the problems and shortages in New South Wales and, as the war pro gressed and conditions in Britain became harsher, the ‘martyrs’ slipped from the forefront of men’s minds” (133).
At least two of Palmer’s letters to friends back in Britain were published in the 1790s as broadsides. One document reprints a letter dated in June of 1795 that aimed to generate publicity for the upcoming publication of Palmer’s Narrative, mentioning as it does Palmer and Skirving’s persecution under Campbell in the opening paragraph. Palmer explains that in December of 1794 he had conveyed the text of the Narrative and accompanying depositions to an officer returning home, entrusting “him with what is dearer to me than my life,—my character” (qtd. in Hugh Anderson 315).
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© 2009 Toby R. Benis
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Benis, T.R. (2009). The Scottish Martyrs and the Reform of Narrative. In: Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés, British Convicts, and Jews. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622647_5
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