Multiple Border Crossings

1 Discourses of exclusion and the ‘convict stain’ in the Indian Ocean1 CLARE ANDERSON University of Warwick In recent years, the historiography of the British presence in India has grown to include an impressive set of literature on marginal communities, including soldiers, prostitutes, orphans, vagrants, and ‘loafers’.2 This work has been significant in drawing out some of the social complexities of colonial settlement and expansion, particularly during the era of ‘high imperialism’ at the end of the nineteenth century. In this, it is strongly suggestive of the processes through which orientalist discourses on and of the Indian ‘other’ were produced through reference to social, economic, and cultural structures in the British metropole. Non-elite British communities were also orientalized within complex webs of power that both reinforced the social - and eventually racial - exclusivity that both underlay colonial governance and took empire back home.3 This chapter will examine the escape and migration of Australian convicts, ex- convicts, and free settlers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a means of extending our understanding of India and the Indian Ocean more broadly as ‘spaces of disorder’ through which colonial discourses of exclusion were constructed. It is also through an exploration of their experiences that aspects of what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe as ‘the many-headed hydra’ of proletarian life, and the open challenge they sometimes posed to British authority, can be discussed in the Indian Ocean context.4 The colonial authorities either returned escaped convicts to the penal settlements in Australia or sent them back to England to face charges of returning from transportation. Escape was a capital offence, but most usually convicts faced retransportation and transfer to the harsher regime of a penal station. The fate of ex-convicts and free settlers was more complex, for they embodied and represented Australia’s ‘convict stain’. British colonial administrators were ambivalent about their social desirability, and in practice they retained their status as felons long after serving their sentence. A discussion of the ‘convict stain’ thus reveals something of subaltern practices of resistance, the social complexities of 2 the British presence, and the production of culturally exclusive social boundaries in the Indian Ocean colonial context. * In 1800, the colonial authorities in the Bengal Presidency produced a list of Convicts and Other Persons Escaped from Botany Bay and residing in Calcutta, with their period of residence and their occupation.5 The list gave a surprisingly detailed account of fifteen women, eleven men, and six children living in the city. It identified explicitly three of the women as escaped convicts: Elizabeth Harvey, who had been transported to New South Wales on the first fleet (Friendship), Mary Ann Fielding (Indispensable), and Mary Bryant (Britannia).6 The women had escaped to Calcutta on board the Marquis Cornwallis, and were living in Rada Bazaar with three men from the same ship, Duncan Campbell, Thomas Brading, and William Reid. The men – probably ex-convicts – had been given permission to leave the colony, and it is likely that they had been complicit in the escape of their female partners. Another woman on the 1800 Calcutta list was first fleet convict Mary Radford, who had left Botany Bay in 1796 for Amboyna (Ambon Island in modern Indonesia, then a British possession). She went to Calcutta three years later, probably after the death of her husband, master of the East India Company artillery band. Elizabeth Marshall, also an ex-convict, had been in the city since 1796. It seems that she had spent some time in French Ile de France (later British Mauritius) before travelling to India on a Dutch ship. A third time-expired convict, Sarah Young, arrived in Calcutta in 1798, later marrying a cooper. At least two of the men detailed, John Wisehammer and Richard Manly, had also served sentences of transportation in Australia. However, there is no evidence that any of the others had convict antecedents.7 One, James Roll, had arrived in Calcutta from the northwest coast of America, having been employed as a carpenter on board several ships sailing between the Cape, America, and India. Another, Thomas Smith, had worked his passage from Botany Bay as a ship steward. Elizabeth Wise had spent time in Batavia before settling in Calcutta. Margaret Holt and her husband had migrated to Australia as free settlers. After he died, she went first to Bencoolen and later to India. In their experience of colonial islands and enclaves across the Indian Ocean, these men and women were part of what Rediker has described in the Atlantic context as a ‘huge, boundless, and 3 international’ world.8 Turn-of-the-century Calcutta was a vibrant multi-cultural port city, and many of those listed in 1800 lived in the area around Lal Bazar. Rada Bazar, where the three escaped convict women and their male companions had fled, housed most of the Europeans living in the city, including James and Eliza Scott and their three children, alongside the Armenian and Portuguese communities. Mary Radford lived on Cossiatola Street. Doomtollah, where Elizabeth Wise resided with her husband Edward Sweeney, together with Richard Manly and Elizabeth Davis, was a Jewish and Parsi area. Moorghihatta, home to Thomas Smith, John Wisehammer, Sarah Merchant, and Thomas Tuck, was the site of the Portuguese market.9 These time-expired convicts and free migrants were models of respectability. Most followed a trade, as artisans, tradesmen, retailers or servants. John Potrie was a tailor, John Wisehammer and James Roll were carpenters, and Richard Manly a bookbinder. James Scott and Thomas Smith were licensed retailers of spirits. Elizabeth Davis was a midwife employed by a Dr Dick. Thomas Tuck was a servant. Where the list added personal comments on individuals, it described them as peaceable, quiet, industrious, and well behaved. Most of the women were either married or in stable relationships with European partners. There were no hints that any were of ‘bad character’ or working in the sex trade, the accusation so often levelled at female convicts in Botany Bay.10 Most female convicts remained in Australia after their sentences expired, with only a small minority returning to their homes in Britain or Ireland. Many had formed personal attachments or found employment in the colony which meant that they did not wish to go back. Even if they did, it was difficult for them to save enough money to pay the cost of their passage.11 Some of the women on the 1800 Calcutta list had travelled to India with partners in military service. Mary Radford is a case in point. Another woman, Sarah Merchant, had first travelled to Pondicherry with a Company soldier, going on to Calcutta after she was widowed. Other women found new partners in India. In 1800, four were cohabiting with harbour pilots, underlining the intensely maritime nature of the world in which they all lived, moved, and worked. Despite the apparent respectability of these ex-convict and free migrant settlers, they were faced with hostility from the British authorities, for they brought with them the Australian ‘convict stain’. In the colonial world, New South Wales was viewed widely as a degraded society. Europeans with criminal records embodied the moral shortcomings of metropolitan life, therefore challenging ideological claims that 4 colonialism was a civilizing presence. In the context of sensitivities about British colonial status (and their social if not racial superiority), the ‘convict stain’ proved remarkably enduring.12 For these reasons, the East India Company did not want time- expired convicts settling in the city. In 1800 it issued a proclamation ordering the return to New South Wales of the escaped convicts, and prohibiting any person who had ever been transported as a convict from landing in Bengal, under threat of deportation. The governor-general wrote of ex-convicts as ‘persons from whose establishment in these possessions the most prejudicial consequences are to be apprehended both to the British character and interests’, and requested that ships sailing between New South Wales should not embark them.13 There is no record of the deportation of any of the time-expired men and women resident in Calcutta in 1800, and migration from Australia continued.14 However, at least one of the escaped convicts, Mary Ann Fielding, was returned to England, for there is a record of her trial on a charge of returning from transportation.15 The response of the colonial authorities to the settlement of ex-convicts was part of a broader effort to monitor closely all Europeans not employed in the service of the Company. From at least the 1780s, a List of European Residents was kept in Bengal and sent to the court of directors in London on an annual basis, for careful inspection.16 In addition, the masters of ships were obliged to produce a list of all Europeans on board when they arrived and left the port of Calcutta, and were responsible for any discrepancies. Passengers wishing to stay in India were obliged to register with the master attendant or face deportation.17 A significant minority of British settlers had been employed formerly in military service. Many were also skilled craftsmen, and worked as silversmiths, jewellers, and carpenters. Others became traders.18 However, administrators feared that if they fell sick, lost their jobs or went out of business they would become a financial and social burden. Worse still, they might take military service with competing Indian elites. Though British society in India was not homogeneous, the illusion that it was had to be maintained. Poor Europeans could bring the ‘ruling race’ into contempt.19 Company administrators viewed ‘poor whites’, as they were generally known, with suspicion, and vagrants as a menace.20 From the end of the eighteenth century, the colonial authorities confined unemployed Europeans within the limits of Fort William.21 They also admitted European paupers to hospital.22 These policies removed socially disruptive 5 individuals from the visible parameters of the British community.

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