Free A Commonwealth of Thieves by Thomas Keneally Page A

women tried to avoid pregnancy. They delayed weaning if they already had a child, practised
coitus interruptus,
pleaded illness, including syphilis, and so on. Patent abortion medicines were advertised in newspapers, but the young women of the transports had no access to them. As for condoms, they were available in London but were expensive, and were gentlemen's devices, designed more to avoid venereal disease than to prevent pregnancies.
    Despite the ban on prostitution, there were so many alliances between convicts, male and female, and between marines and sailors and sundry women aboard, that perhaps Phillip and the Home Office, within the bounds of what they saw as proper discipline, were willing for such associations to occur. Some officers acquired housekeeper-lovers from amongst the convict women, and on at least some of the ships, sailors were permitted to attach sea-wives to themselves. There was a common Georgian belief, subscribed to by James Boswell, that sexual abstinence induced gout. The sailors were taking no risks.
    Lieutenant Clark on
Friendship
hated the disorderly women and ordered four of them to be put in irons for fighting, which must have been a hard punishment in that climate. “They are a disgrace to their whole sex, bitches that they are. I wish all the women were out of the ships.” Clark was gratified that the corporal ordered to flog one London prostitute and
Mercury
escapee, Elizabeth Dudgeon, later in the voyage “did not play with her but laid it home.” With the same ink and at the same hour he raised fervent thanks that God had sent him his wife: “Oh gracious Jesus, in what manner shall I humble myself to make you a recompense for giving me so heavenly a gift?” By contrast, Liz Barber, a less than heavenly gift, abused Surgeon Arndell and invited Captain Meredith “to come and kiss her cunt for he was nothing but a lousy rascal as were we all.”
    But apart from the ten or twelve women who were always in trouble on the
Friendship,
the others behaved well, which might have meant in part that they were amenable to discipline but also to washing and sewing and other chores and demands.
    Phillip knew from the stories of
Mercury
and
Swift
how endemic the dream of mutiny was amongst the convicts, the chief fantasy, and an attractive one in the northern part of the Atlantic from which, in the schemes of mutiny, the newly self-liberated American colonies, champions of men's rights, could most easily be reached. Lieutenant Clark and Captain Meredith on
Friendship
were very concerned; they asked the master, Captain Walton, to go on board
Sirius
and tell Phillip they doubted whether his order to unchain the convicts for their health's sake was wise. “There are so many
Mercury
s on board of us,” Clark confided to his wife, Betsy Alicia, by letter. That same day, a convict came to the commanding marine officer on board the
Scarborough
and told him that two men were planning to take the ship over. Neither of them had been involved in earlier mutinies, but they were both sailors and knew how to work a ship. One of them, Farrell, had been transported for stealing a handkerchief—in his case, a handkerchief with a value of one shilling. The two men, Farrell and Griffiths, both in their twenties, were brought aboard the
Sirius
to have two-dozen lashes inflicted by the bosun's mate. Both men “steadfastly denied the existence of any such design as was imputed to them.” Nevertheless, they were transferred to yet another transport in the fleet, the
Prince of Wales,
and put under special watch.
    A group baptism on the
Lady Penrhyn,
with the Reverend Johnson, the chaplain appointed to New South Wales, performing the rite, was an event of “great glee” with “an additional allowance of grog being distributed to the crews of those ships where births took place.” But crossing the equator, the
Lady Penrhyn
and the
Charlotte
came close to colliding with each other, as the
Lady Penrhyn
's crew were