William Pitt and national revival

by J. Holland Rose

The more enormous of our offenders might be sent to Tunis, Algiers, and other Mahometan ports, for the redemption of Christian slaves; others might be compelled to dangerous expeditions, or be sent to establish new colonies, factories, and settlements on the coast of Africa and on small islands for the benefit of navigation.—W. Eden, A Discourse on Banishment.

The first settlement of the white man on a Continent where all was strange might seem to be a topic more engaging, as well as more important, than the escapades of a selfish young prince and the insanity of his father. But the piles of printed paper respecting the affairs of Carlton House and the Regency attest the perennial preference of mankind for personal topics; and its disregard of wide issues that affect the destinies of nations is seen in the mere scraps of information concerning the early colonization of Australia. The statement of the late Sir John Seeley that the British people founded an Empire in a fit of absence of mind is nowhere more true than of the events of the years 1787, 1788, which marked the beginning of a new epoch of expansive energy.

There is a curious periodicity about the colonizing efforts of the British race. At one time the islanders send forth swarms of adventurers and make wide conquests. At another time the colonies languish for lack of settlers; so that one is tempted to compare these movements, albeit slow and irregular, with those of the blood in the human organism. They have had beneficial results. The contracting impulse has prevented that untimely diffusion of the nation’s energies which leads to atrophy of the essential organs. But when these are once more in full vigour they can do naught else but send forth their vitalizing streams. By this systole and diastole the nation recovers strength and makes use of that strength. The variation of effort is doubly beneficent. It prevents the too great effusion of life-blood which enfeebled Portugal in the sixteenth century; and the recurrence of the colonizing instinct has saved England from the undue absorption in domestic affairs which until recently narrowed the life of France.

The terrible drain of the American War naturally concentrated the attention of Britons for some time on home affairs. The most imperious need of the body politic was rest; and, as we have seen, Pitt used all his tact and energy to bestow and prolong that boon. Fortunately, the loss of life had been slight. Lack of money rather than of men put a stop to colonizing efforts and induced the belief that they weakened the State. But the life-blood was there in abundance, ready to flow forth as soon as confidence returned and the will was quickened.

Meanwhile, for want of a firm and intelligent lead, the experiment began slowly and awkwardly. As is well known, it was excess of population, of a particular type, which led the authorities to take action. The savage penal code of that age hanged or immured in gaol numbers who would now escape with a small fine. As many as 160 offences were punishable with death, and this gives the measure of the code, in its less Draconian enactments. Indeed, but for sleepy Dogberries, and reluctant jurymen, a tenth part of the population might have lodged in the filthy gaols which formed the fruitful seed-bed of crime. Goldsmith in his “Vicar of Wakefield” asks whether the licentiousness of our people or the stupid severity of our laws was responsible for the numbers of our convicts doubling those of continental lands. The question impelled John Howard and Romilly to their life-long efforts.

Meanwhile the State continued to avert the need of building more gaols by extending its time-honoured methods, hanging and transportation.[696] During the years 1714–65 those two cures for overcrowding enjoyed increasing favour. Under the first George any one found guilty of larceny, either “grand” or “petit,” might be transported to America for seven years. The same penalty was inflicted in the next reign on poachers who were caught, with arms in their hands, in the act of chasing or taking deer in unenclosed forests; or, again, it fell to be the lot of those who assaulted magistrates or officers engaged in salving wrecks, and likewise on all who were married without banns or licence. It was reserved for the law makers of George III to allot seven years of transportation to all who stole or took fish “in any water within a park, paddock, orchard or yard, and the receivers, aiders and abettors.” Sir William Eden, in his “Discourse on Banishment,” cites these offences as about the average of the crimes punishable by transportation; but he hints that many less heinous offences led to the same dreary goal. That philanthropist apparently did not think it an ingenious means of torture to send some of these convicts to Algiers to rescue from life-long slavery the Christians caught by the Barbary rovers.

Meanwhile, the United States having closed their doors against poachers, thieves, and those who married in too great haste, a paternal Government found it necessary either to relax the penal code, to build more prisons, to commission more hulks, or to found new penal settlements. Georgian legislators, being practical men, turned their thoughts to the last alternative. The subject was brought up in the House of Commons by Burke on 16th March 1785. He asserted that as many as 100,000 convicts were then liable to transportation; and protested against the rigour, cruelty, and expense attending that mode of punishment. Lord Beauchamp again called the attention of the House to that topic on 11th April, when Pitt admitted the importance of finding a new penal settlement. The Gambia River in West Africa had been used for that purpose; and Burke now rose to protest against the inhumanity of sending convicts to any part of that deadly coast. He was interrupted by the Prime Minister, who assured him that such a plan was not in contemplation, and that a Report would soon be issued.[697]

Parliamentary Papers on this subject appeared on 9th May and 28th July. The latter is remarkable for the statesmanlike utterance, quoted as a motto at the head of this chapter, which shows that at least some of our politicians looked on a new settlement as something more than a chapel-of-ease of our prisons. In other respects the Report is somewhat puerile. It recommended the need of strict discipline in the new settlement, and pointed out the district of the River das Voltas as desirable. If this were the same as the River Volta of the Gold Coast, the Committee evidently regarded fever as the most effective of governors.

It is curious to speculate on the results that might have attended these weak and stumbling moves. Probably the strenuous opposition of Burke vetoed the Gambia and Gold Coast schemes; but the Government, still intent upon the Atlantic coast of Africa, sent a sloop, H.M.S. “Nautilus,” to survey the south-west coast between 15° 50´ and 33°. Very fortunately for the future of the British people the whole coast was found to be inhospitable. If the hinterland of Walfisch Bay or Angra Pequeña had been less barren it is almost certain that the new penal colony would have been formed at one of those spots. Ministers also turned their attention to the coasts adjacent to Cape Town; for we find Pitt writing to Grenville on 2nd October 1785: “I have desired Devagnes also to send you some papers relative to a scheme of a settlement on the Caffre coast, to answer in some respects the purposes of the Cape, and to serve also as a receptacle for convicts, which I hope you will have time to look at.”[698]

This points to a plan for settling some point of the coast of Caffraria, possibly Algoa Bay or what is now East London. There were special reasons for gaining a foothold in that quarter, seeing that the Dutch Republic was falling more and more under the control of France, and the union of those two Powers in the East would have threatened the existence of our Indian Empire. A British stronghold on the South African coast was therefore highly desirable; but perhaps matters were too strained in the years 1786 and 1787 for this menacing step to be taken.