The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [51]
Janet Houston was next in line: age seventeen, fresh complexion, hazel eyes, red hair, oval visage, and no facial marks. She took off her shoes and was measured at five feet, three-quarters inches tall. Stern yet unexpectedly polite, Surgeon Superintendent Ellis handed the girls a sponge and a hunk of soap. The fully clothed sponge bath took place right on deck next to a cask of water. Among the first to embark on the Westmoreland, Janet and Agnes treasured the luxury of relatively clean water and fresh soap made from lard and lye. For the first time in months, Agnes scrubbed her hair and fingernails and used the sponge to clean her ankles and feet. She was happy to remove Newgate’s grime, but her elation ceased when Mr. Ellis picked up her fashionable brown leather boots. He looked them over and handed them back to a relieved Agnes.
In earlier transports, the ship’s supply list included “clothing for use during the voyage.” But by 1836, this no longer appeared, and the allowance was enforced sporadically.15 Many prisoners arrived with only the clothes on their backs, and with no means of repairing items that would be worn threadbare on slippery decks, in driving rain, and through frigid temperatures. Agnes’s sturdy boots would come in handy in Van Die-men’s Land, but she learned quickly that bare feet served her better on the ship.
Drawing a simple X, the fifteen-year-old signed the convict record list that bound her as official property of the Crown for the next seven years. Agnes’s 113-day journey had just begun. Her new world measured 28 feet between the scuppers and 133 feet stem to stern. The Westmoreland , built four years earlier, was a three-masted barque, registered at 404 tons, under the command of Captain Brigstock. The ship had spent the last month at Deptford, where it was fitted with guns and munitions for protection against pirates and mutineers. After the convict hulk had passed inspection by the Government Agent for Transports, a steamer towed it to Woolwich for mooring at a spot known as “the Bony off the Butt.”16 Here she lay ready to accept her human cargo. The vessel would eventually carry 185 female prisoners, their children, and a crew of 28 boys and men.
Surgeon Superintendent Ellis handed Agnes and Janet a wooden bowl and spoon, a blanket, and a bed tick of heavy cotton filled with straw. Primitive mattresses in hand, the Glasgow girls followed a waiting officer through a bulkhead, down a cramped ladder, then through another hatchway to the orlop deck. This was the ship’s lowest deck. Two tiers of berths filled the tight space designed to pack in as many bodies as would fit head to toe, like tins of sardines tucked into His Majesty’s larder. Once in the ship’s bowels, Agnes was assigned a berth. Her bed and refuge aboard the Westmoreland was eighteen inches wide and four feet long, an elevated plank a foot and a half above Janet’s berth. Across the aisle, another two prisoners would be squeezed into the stuffy passage.
While Agnes leaned over to lay out her bedding, she took in a deep breath and began choking on fumes emanating from beneath her feet. The Westmoreland was only a few years old but had already developed a distinct odor. Prisoners slept on the lowest deck right above the bilge, distinguished by a rotting stench from accumulating human waste and dead rats. Accustomed to the open air in the wynds, Agnes couldn’t escape soon enough. The officer ushered her back to the main hatch and pointed to two tiny water closets in the center of the ship. Feeling a bit woozy in this floating cesspool, she stumbled toward the