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Bounty
,
during the famous “Mutiny on the
Bounty
.” Bligh was a strict
disciplinarian, a trait that was probably largely responsible
for the mutiny. His ways had not changed, and he
immediately challenged the rum monopolists. This would
lead to another mutiny, this time by the monopolists, led by
a former soldier, John Macarthur. The events, which came
to be known as the Rum Rebellion, again led to Bligh’s
being overpowered by rebels, this time on land rather than
aboard the
Bounty
. Macarthur had Bligh locked up. The
British authorities subsequently sent more soldiers to deal
with the rebellion. Macarthur was arrested and shipped
back to Britain. But he was soon released, and he returned
to Australia to play a major role in both the politics and
economics of the colony.
The roots of the Rum Rebellion were economic. The
strategy of giving the convicts incentives was making a lot
of money for men such as Macarthur, who arrived in
Australia as a soldier in the second group of ships that
landed in 1790. In 1796 he resigned from the army to
concentrate on business. By that time he already had his
first sheep, and realized that there was a lot of money to be
made in sheep farming and wool export. Inland from
Sydney were the Blue Mountains, which were finally
crossed in 1813, revealing vast expanses of open
grassland on the other side. It was sheep heaven.
Macarthur was soon the richest man in Australia, and he
and his fellow sheep magnates became known as the
Squatters, since the land on which they grazed their sheep
was not theirs. It was owned by the British government. But
at first this was a small detail. The Squatters were the elite
of Australia, or, more appropriately, the Squattocracy.
Even with a squattocracy, New South Wales did not look
anything like the absolutist regimes of Eastern Europe or of
the South American colonies. There were no serfs as in
Austria-Hungary and Russia, and no large indigenous
populations to exploit as in Mexico and Peru. Instead, New
South Wales was like Jamestown, Virginia, in many ways:
the elite ultimately found it in their interest to create
economic institutions that were significantly more inclusive
than those in Austria-Hungary, Russia, Mexico, and Peru.
Convicts were the only labor force, and the only way to
incentivize them was to pay them wages for the work they
were doing.
Convicts were soon allowed to become entrepreneurs
and hire other convicts. More notably, they were even given
land after completing their sentences, and they had all their
rights restored. Some of them started to get rich, even the
illiterate Henry Cable. By 1798 he owned a hotel called the
Ramping Horse, and he also had a shop. He bought a ship
and went into the trade of sealskins. By 1809 he owned at
least nine farms of about 470 acres and also a number of
shops and houses in Sydney.
The next conflict in New South Wales would be between
the elite and the rest of the society, made up of convicts,
ex-convicts, and their families. The elite, led by former
guards and soldiers such as Macarthur, included some of
the free settlers who had been attracted to the colony
because of the boom in the wool economy. Most of the
property was still in the hands of the elite, and the ex-
convicts and their descendants wanted an end to
transportation, the opportunity of trial by a jury of their
peers, and access to free land. The elite wanted none of
these. Their main concern was to establish legal title to the
lands they squatted on. The situation was again similar to
the events that had transpired in North America more than
two centuries earlier. As we saw in
chapter 1
, the victories
of the indentured servants against the Virginia Company
were followed by the struggles in Maryland and the
Carolinas. In New South Wales, the roles of Lord Baltimore
and Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper were played by Macarthur
and the Squatters. The British government was again on
the side of the elite, though they also feared that one day
Macarthur and the Squatters might be tempted to declare
independence.
The British government dispatched John Bigge to the
colony in 1819 to head a commission of inquiry into the
developments there. Bigge was shocked by the rights that
the convicts enjoyed and surprised by the fundamentally
inclusive nature of the economic institutions of this penal
colony. He recommended a radical overhaul: convicts could
not own land, nobody should be allowed to pay convicts
wages anymore, pardons were to be restricted, ex-convicts
were not to be given land, and punishment was to be made
much more draconian. Bigge saw the Squatters as the
natural aristocracy of Australia and envisioned an
autocratic society dominated by them. This wasn’t to be.
While Bigge was trying to turn back the clock, ex-convicts
and their sons and daughters were demanding greater
rights. Most important, they realized, again just as in the
United States, that to consolidate their economic and
political rights fully they needed political institutions that
would include them in the process of decision making. They
demanded elections in which they could participate as
equals and representative institutions and assemblies in
which they could hold office.
The ex-convicts and their sons and daughters were led
by the colorful writer, explorer, and journalist William
Wentworth. Wentworth was one of the leaders of the first
expedition that crossed the Blue Mountains, which opened
the vast grasslands to the Squatters; a town on these
mountains is still named after him. His sympathies were
with the convicts, perhaps because of his father, who was
accused of highway robbery and had to accept
transportation to Australia to avoid trial and possible
conviction. At this time, Wentworth was a strong advocate
of more inclusive political institutions, an elected assembly,
trial by jury for ex-convicts and their families, and an end to
transportation to New South Wales. He started a
newspaper, the
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