HISTORICAL NOTE
‘NOT FIT FOR YOUR PROTECTION OR AN
HONEST MAN’S COMPANY’
A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE SAINTLY WILLIAM DAWES
Cassandra Pybus
Cassandra Pybus is ARC Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Sydney and in
2008 was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Historical Studies, University of Texas. She
has published eleven books, most recently The Woman Who Walked to Russia (Avalon
Publishing, New York 2003); Epic Journeys of Freedom: runaway slaves of the American
Revolution and their global quest for liberty, (Beacon Press, Boston, 2006); Black Founders:
the Unknown Story of Australia First Black Settlers (UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006); and is
co-editor of Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World,
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007).
Correspondence to Cassandra Pybus: [email protected]
William Dawes is one of the very few white men in the history of early colonial Australia who can inspire
a universally good press from historians, praised as Australia’s first conscientious objector and perhaps
‘the most morally upright man’ in the fledgling colony. This historical note draws attention to Dawes’
subsequent historical endeavours in Africa and the West Indies which sharply contradict this view and
questions why historians have consistently overlooked Dawes’ morally dubious and exploitative activities
during his brief tour of duty in New South Wales.
There are very few white men in the history of early colonial Australia who can inspire a universally good press from historians. Marine Lieutenant William Dawes is one. According the admiring
entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Dawes was outstanding in ability and character.
His contemporaries united in his praise’ (Mander-Jones 1966: 297–298). Yet I am hard pressed
to find these admiring contemporaries. Dawes was liked by Watkin Tench and Daniel Southwell
described him as a religious young man, but in the main contemporaries at Sydney Cove did not
have much to say about him, complimentary or otherwise. In a letter home Elizabeth Macarthur
claimed to be impressed with the young man who was ‘so much engaged with the stars that to
mortal eyes he is not always visible’, but her tart remark seems to be something of a backhanded
compliment, referring to the fact that Dawes chose to live in seclusion about a mile away from
the settlement.1 In his hut at Observatory Point, well away from prying eyes, he installed an
Aboriginal girl of about 14 or 15. Her name was Patyegarang and she was Dawes’ tutor in the
Eora language. His transcriptions of her words to me suggest an unmistakably sexual element
in their relationship. It is not clear how long she lived with him or what eventually happened to
her. While this aspect of Dawes’ character drew no written comment at the time, Patyegarang’s
presence could have been the real reason that Mrs Macarthur abandoned her attempt to learn
astronomy from Dawes. Certainly his male contemporaries were unlikely to have believed Dawes
was just studying the stars and praying in his seclusion at Observatory Point. The first settlers
were a dissolute lot it is true, but I remain puzzled as to how Tim Flannery could have formed
the view that Dawes was ‘perhaps the most morally upright man in the colony’ (Flannery 1999:
36).
Dawes’ transcriptions of Patyegarang’s language are contained in two books of ethnographic
notes, now held at the University of London, and they represent almost the sum total of the
archive of Lieutenant Dawes, whose private papers were lost in a hurricane, so we are told.
HISTORY AUSTRALIA, VOLUME 6, NUMBER 1, 2009 MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS
12.1
Dawes was not much able to develop his study of the Eora, since he was forced to leave the
colony late in 1791. According to historian Inga Clendinnen, Dawes’ early departure was a
tragedy that cost us ‘a brilliant ethnography’. In her recent book Dancing with Strangers
Clendinnen glides over the exploitative aspects of Dawes relationship with Pateyegarang to gush
admiringly. ‘Dawes must have been an attractive fellow’, she writes, ‘as these brooding, solitary
types often are’. She speculates that such was his goodness, he may have put limits on his scientific
curiosity since ‘his tender conscience might not have allowed him to open the local people to
easier communication and so to more disruptive exploitations’ (Clendinnen 2003: 156–157).
The ‘tender conscience’ refers, of course, to Dawes’ initial refusal to participate in the punitive
expedition Governor Phillip ordered in retaliation for the spearing of his convict gamekeeper.
While Dawes was reconciled to his duty by the colony’s chaplain and went on the abortive expedition, he later annoyed the governor further by publicly stating that he was sorry he had been
persuaded to comply.
Dawes’ act of insubordination has earned him the unreserved approval of generations of
historians, who rarely fail to mention that this was the beginning of a career of conscientious
objection under the patronage of the abolitionist William Wilberforce. Dawes became ‘a tireless
campaigner against slavery’, so Flannery would have us believe (Flannery 1999: 27). It is this
construction of Dawes as a conscientious objector that fired Kate Grenville’s imagination in
creating the hero of her new novel, The Lieutenant. While her Lieutenant Rooke is a literary
creation who inhabits an imaginary world, it is plain to see his outline in admiring historical assessments of William Dawes.
As it happens, Dawes need not have complied with the governor’s order; there was little
Phillip could do about his refusal to obey. As the governor complained in a letter detailing his
dissatisfaction, Lieutenant Dawes was ‘not amenable to a general court martial in this country’.2
From the moment the marine officers arrived in the colony they had insisted that whatever their
offence, they could not be tried in New South Wales, as the only authority that could empower
a court martial was the Lord High Admiral.3 While officers like Dawes were immune to legal
proceedings in Sydney Cove, they acted as both judge and jury for any lesser mortals who
transgressed the governor’s rules. Dawes regularly sat on the court which handed out astonishingly
inhumane sentences to convicts and marine privates. He was a member of the court that heard
the case against Thomas Orford, a black convict charged with stealing some potatoes from a
marine officer’s garden As Orford explained to the court, he had lost his own meagre ration and
was so hungry that when he saw the potatoes he could not help himself. It did him no good; he
was sentenced to 2000 lashes, an illegal punishment that no human could withstand.4 Dawes’
good friend Marine Captain Watkin Tench was also sitting in judgment on Orford that day, and
he ruefully recorded the sentence as ‘the melancholy lengths to which we were compelled to
stretch our penal system’ as famine began to stalk the fledgling colony.5
In the face of starvation conditions, Governor Phillip instituted an ironclad law that individual
rations must not be bought or sold. Nevertheless, a clandestine trade in food persisted, sometimes
with tragic consequences. When a convict collapsed dead in the street, an autopsy revealed that
his stomach was completely empty. He had been selling his ration pittance. As Phillip later explained to the Secretary of State, the convicts found a ready market among those who had the
capacity to pay the going rate of ‘ten pounds of flour for a bottle of rum or thirty pounds of
12.2
‘NOT FIT FOR YOUR PROTECTION OR AN HONEST MAN’S COMPANY’ HISTORICAL NOTE
flour for a pound of tobacco’. The buyers, he was convinced, were certain marine officers. And
who should be caught trading flour with a convict? The good Lieutenant Dawes, who protested
he was unaware that flour he purchased was part of the convict ration. The governor did not
believe him, pointing out that Major Ross had already had occasion to warn Dawes about the
impropriety of buying rations from the convicts.6 It was this transgression that enraged Phillip,
at least as much as Dawes’ insubordination over the punitive expedition, and convinced the
governor that the man did not deserve to be appointed to a senior rank in the New South Wales
Corps. Dawes had wanted to stay in the colony when the marines were ordered home, but the
governor offered him no more than the rank ensign and then only if he would apologise for all
his transgressions. It is little surprise that Dawes took the option of going home.
When Dawes returned to England in the spring of 1792, he was not empty handed. He carried
a letter of introduction from the chaplain of New South Wales to the parliamentary leader of
the abolitionist movement. William Wilberforce was quick to recognize the worth of a half-pay
officer who was ‘an avowed friend of religion and good order’ and so Dawes was taken into the
evangelical fold of the Clapham Sect.7 Wilberforce was a director of the Sierra Leone Company,
which had established a settlement for freed slaves on the coast of West Africa. In August 1792,
Dawes was appointed to be one of two councillors who, with Governor John Clarkson, were
the governing council of company settlement at Sierra Leone. He spent much of the voyage to
West Africa in prayer, anticipating the challenge of bringing Christianity to Africa.
The settlers of the colony Sierra Leone were runaway slaves who had been allied to the British
during the American Revolution. Dawes had met some of this cohort of ex-slaves as convicts at
Sydney Cove. Several of them, Thomas Orford among them, appeared before him in court and
carried savagely scarred backs to show for it. But the settlers at Sierra Leone were not convicted
felons; they were free British subjects with a keen sense of their own entitlements. Taking stock
of Dawes on his arrival they did not like what they saw. ‘He may be a very good man’, they told
Governor Clarkson, ‘but he does not show it’. Anna Maria Falconbridge, a keen-eyed observer
whose husband worked for the company, felt that Dawes would never win the confidence of the
settlers. Despite his habit of dropping to his knees in prayer at any time of the day or night,
Dawes wore an ‘awful severity in his looks and actions’ which may have been appropriate in a
penal colony but was completely wrong in a settlement of free black people. Falconbridge was
especially censorious about Dawes’ dubious morality, and she accused him of trading in slaves.
The moment this man took over the governorship from Clarkson, she astutely predicted, ‘anarchy
and discord’ would result.8
Dawes became governor early in 1783 and almost immediately he informed the settlers that
they must relinquish the lots of land they currently occupied. He had drawn a new town plan
that allocated them lots, away from the waterfront, which would be reserved solely for use by
the company. Access to the water was an absolute necessity in Sierra Leone. There were no carts
or horses; communication and transport were all by means of water. The settlers responded with
angry dismay, according to Falconbridge, informing Dawes that they were ‘free British subjects,
and expect to be treated as such’ and would never ‘tamely submit to being trampled on’. Finding
the settlers would not bend to his will, Dawes threatened to quit, a strategy he had seen employed
to great effect by his predecessor. The settlers responded with one voice: ‘Go! go! go! we do not
want you here’. A policy of insult and disobedience continued in the hope they could drive him
‘NOT FIT FOR YOUR PROTECTION OR AN HONEST MAN’S COMPANY’ HISTORICAL NOTE
12.3
away.9 His deputy Zachary Macaulay reported that one of the black preachers pointedly compared
Dawes to Pharaoh, reminding his congregation that his oppressive rule must be endured until
‘God in his own good time would deliver Israel’. Others were not so patient. After news arrived
of the execution of Louis XVI, hints were dropped to Dawes that such a fate could easily be
his.10
Two of the settlers actually took the journey to England to petition Wilberforce and other
directors of the Sierra Leone Company to remove Dawes as their governor. The problem was
that ‘Mr Dawes seems to wish to rule us just as bad as if we were all slaves which we cannot
bear … [and] we are afraid concerning the happiness of our children for as we have not justice
shewn us we do not expect our children will after us’. Under the regime he established, the settlers
had no option but to work for the company, which set both the price of their labour, which they
thought too low, and the price for the goods they bought, which was artificially high. It was a
form of labour exchange little better than bondage, they claimed. At the heart of their concern
was a palpable terror of losing the capacity for a sustainable, independent life, and as consequence
their children could be re-enslaved. They got no answer from the company other than the offer
of a return berth aboard a company ship sometime in February or March 1794.11
About the same time, Dawes returned to England. He still held his commission in the Marine
Corps but found life difficult on half pay. Again he sought Wilberforce’s help, this time to assist
his return to New South Wales. Wilberforce wrote to Henry Dundas to press for Dawes’ appointment as a superintendent of schools in the colony, but he did not prevail. Dawes returned to be
governor of Sierra Leone for a brief period from January 1795 to March 1796 and was again
on hard times in January 1801, after a stint teaching mathematics at Christ Hospital. Wilberforce
again engineered his reappointment as governor of Sierra Leone, which lasted until February
1803, when he joined another of Wilberforce’s projects, the Church Missionary Society, helping
to train missionaries for Africa. Following the passage of Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the Slave
Trade, and the subsequent transformation of Sierra Leone into a Crown Colony, Dawes was
again the recipient of Wilberforce’s patronage. He was appointed to a lucrative position as one
of the commissioners of inquiry reporting on the state of the British possessions on the African
coast. The other commissioner was also a previous governor of Sierra Leone, and a close friend,
Thomas Ludlam. It was during this period that the accusations made earlier by Anna Maria
Falconbridge concerning Dawes’ dubious morality when it came to the trade in Africans began
to get wider circulation.
At Wilberforce’s suggestion, Thomas Perronet Thompson was appointed the first Crown
governor of Sierra Leone, which proved to be a turbulent and short-lived introduction to a lifetime
of radical reform and antislavery agitation. He traveled out to West Africa with Dawes and was
horrified to hear his companion’s opinion that slavery was necessary in Sierra Leone. It soon
became apparent to the new governor that during their term in office both of his predecessors,
Dawes and Ludlam, had purchased African labourers whom they worked without pay, hired
out to others, and hunted down when they ran away. Dawes referred to this practice as apprenticeship, but Thompson was left in no doubt that it was slavery. Official and anecdotal evidence
that Thompson compiled about the operation of the so-called apprenticeship scheme in Sierra
Leone suggested that none of these apprentices was ever liberated from servitude. He went so
far as to accuse Dawes of continuing to traffic in slaves as the agent for a coalition of slave
12.4
‘NOT FIT FOR YOUR PROTECTION OR AN HONEST MAN’S COMPANY’ HISTORICAL NOTE
merchants and bluntly warned Wilberforce that Dawes was ‘not fit for your protection or an
honest man’s company’.12 In time it became obvious to Thompson that Wilberforce and the
other company directors knew all about this dubious activity. ‘Messers Wilberforce Thornton
and Co have at last become slave traders with a vengeance in their old age’, he wrote to his
fiancée in horror.13 He would have none of it and bombarded Lord Castlereagh with strongly
worded and imprudent letters of accusation and protest.14 Thompson’s views were later repeated
much more publicly by the first Chief Justice of the Crown Colony, Robert Thorpe, who published
signed affidavits from settlers concerning the purchase and hiring out of slaves by the companyappointed governors Dawes and Ludlam.15
Yet slave trading was not the most incendiary charge that Thompson made against Dawes.
There is an even more serious accusation tucked away in the papers of Thompson and the colonial office files. As Thompson himself admitted, the accusation referred to conduct which ‘from
its very grossness’ would never be talked about in public.16 As part of his campaign to clean up
the lax morality of Sierra Leone, Thompson reported to the Secretary of State that Dawes was
notorious up and down the coast as a debaucher of local African women, as well as the wives
and daughters of the black settlers. Worse yet, Thompson charged that Dawes encouraged women
to kill the babies that resulted from such liaisons. This awful circumstance came to Thompson’s
attention soon after he arrived, when he was informed that one of the settlers’ daughters, Anne
Morgan, had committed infanticide by disposing of her newborn half-white child. When
Thompson sent officials to arrest the women they found their entry to the house blocked by
Dawes, who was, it became apparent, the child’s father. In protesting against the arrest Dawes
was supported by his friend Thomas Ludlam.17 Anne Morgan was found guilty of murder and
her sentence was commuted to transportation from the colony to another part of Africa. Before
this could happen, Wilberforce intervened to put a stop to Thompson’s increasing list of charges.
The governor was unceremoniously bundled out of his job and sent back to England. His replacement was a friend of Dawes who promptly appointed Dawes and Ludlam to the governing
council and provided Anne Morgan with a complete pardon. Another appointed member of the
council who protested at this impropriety was driven out of the colony.18
Although Dawes was cleared by a perfunctory local inquiry into Thompson’s allegations, his
reputation was never the same. By 1812 even his old patron was hard pressed to find paid employment for him. Once again Wilberforce directed Dawes to the Church Missionary Society
and in 1813 Dawes travelled to the slave colony of Antigua as a correspondent for the Society,
charged with the responsibility of establishing Sunday Schools for slaves. Now Tim Flannery
may like to think that this activity constituted tireless campaigning against slavery, but in reality
neither William Wilberforce, nor the Church Missionary Society, were primarily interested in
the abolition of slavery. It was not the exploitation and brutalisation of the slave body that
concerned them but the condition of the slave soul.19
These Sunday Schools, held on the one day of rest on the plantation so they did not interfere
with estate labour, were avowedly engaged in Christian indoctrination. To instil Christian doctrine,
together with obedience and respect, was the purpose of Dawes’ missionary endeavour and in
this role he displayed much the same attitude to the enslaved children as he did to black settlers
in Sierra Leone. He complained that the senior boys at the English Harbour Sunday School exhibited marks of arrogance, insubordination and ‘a disposition to ape their superiors in rank
‘NOT FIT FOR YOUR PROTECTION OR AN HONEST MAN’S COMPANY’ HISTORICAL NOTE
12.5
and station … truly painful to behold’. These schoolboys ‘failed’ in his eyes because they displayed
attitudes and behaviour that were inconsistent with the expectations of plantation slave culture.20
Dawes lived in Antigua for twenty-three years. I am tempted to think that his contribution
to slave society might have been the concept of a forced labour ‘apprenticeship’ that Thompson
had found so repugnant in Sierra Leone. In an attempt to extend the bonded labour system after
the abolition of slavery in August 1834, West Indian planters instituted an apprenticeship system
whereby adult slaves were forced into bonded labour for another twelve years. It had many of
the hallmarks of the system Dawes and Ludlam had run in Africa. A spirited campaign against
apprenticeship was led by the radical MP for Hull, none other than Dawes’ bête noire, Thomas
Perronet Thompson. The detested scheme was abandoned, and full emancipation granted to the
enslaved, in 1838, two years after William Dawes had died.
This is not the biography of a tireless campaigner against slavery, nor even that of a morally
upright man. If Australians are to find an impeccably moral and humane man as a founding
hero, we will have to look further afield than Lieutenant Dawes.
ENDNOTES
1
Elizabeth Macarthur, quoted in Tim Flannery, ed. 1999. The Birth of Sydney, Melbourne: Text
Publishing: 11.
2
Phillip to Grenville, 7 Nov. 1791, Historical Records of Australia (HRA), vol. 1: 290–294.
3
Campbell to Ross, 13 Oct. 1788, enclosing ‘Officer’s Objections’, HRA, vol. 1: 92–94.
4
Orford is called Halford in this case, see trial of Thomas Halford, 12 April 1790, Minutes of the
Court of Criminal Jurisdiction, 1147A, State Records of NSW.
5
Tench quote from Watkin Tench from Tim Flannery, ed. 1996. 1788: Comprising a Narrative of the
Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, Text Publishing,
Melbourne: 125.
6
Phillip to Grenville, 7 November 1791, HRA, vol. 1: 290–294.
7
Wilberforce to Clarkson, September 1793, Clarkson Papers, Add MSS 41262A, British Library.
8
Anna Maria Falconbridge. 1794. ‘Two Voyages to Sierra Leone’. In Maiden Voyages and Infant
Colonies, edited by Coleman, Deirdre. 1999. London: Leicester University Press: 113, 116.
9
Two Voyages: 123, 131.
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
12.6
Macaulay Journal, 13 September 1793. Huntington Library, San Marino.
Perkins and Anderson petition, November 1793, in Two Voyages: 143–144.
Thompson draft statement, nd. Thompson Papers, DTH 1/23; Thompson to Wilberforce, 23 August
1808, in Thompson Papers, DTH 1/61, University of Hull.
Thompson to Barker, 23 July 1808, DTH 4/1.
Wilberforce to Thompson, 19 October1808, DTH 1/61.
Robert Thorpe. 1815. Point By Point Reply to the Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution. London: Rivington: 26–29.
Thompson to Columbine, 1 March 1810, CO217/63, National Archives of the UK.
Thompson to Castlereagh, 25 October 1809, CO217/63.
Minutes of Governor in Council, March 1810, CO217/63.
‘NOT FIT FOR YOUR PROTECTION OR AN HONEST MAN’S COMPANY’ HISTORICAL NOTE
19
20
For a discussion of Wilberforce’s ambivalent position on slave labour see Pybus (2007: 97–112).
William Dawes, 31 March 1825, CW/0,6,8, Rhodes House Archives, Oxford.
PRIMARY SOURCES
ARCHIVED COLLECTIONS
Clarkson Papers, Add MSS 41262A, British Library.
Colonial Office Series (CO), National Archives of the UK.
Macaulay Journal, Huntington Library, San Marino.
Minutes of the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction, 1147A, State Records of NSW.
Thompson Papers, DTH 1/23; DTH4/1; DTH 1/61, University of Hull.
William Dawes, CW/0,6,8, Rhodes House Archives, Oxford.
BOOKS
Falconbridge, Anna Maria. 1794. ‘Two Voyages to Sierra Leone’. In Maiden Voyages and Infant
Colonies, edited by Coleman, Deirdre. 1999. London: Leicester University Press.
Tench, Watkin. 1788: Comprising a Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete
Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. Edited by Tim Flannery. 1996. Melbourne:
Text Publishing.
Thorpe, Robert. 1815. Point By Point Reply to the Special Report of the Directors of the African
Institution. London: Rivington: 26–29.
OTHER
Historical Records of Australia, Vol. 1.
REFERENCES
Clendinnen, Inga. 2003. Dancing with Strangers. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Flannery, Tim. 1999. ‘Introduction’. In The Birth of Sydney, edited by Flannery, Tim. Melbourne: Text
Publishing.
Mander-Jones, Phyllis. 1966. ‘Dawes, William (1762–1836)’. Vol. 1 of Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press: 297–298.
Pybus, Cassandra. 2007.‘“A less favourable specimen”: The abolitionist response to self emancipated slaves
in Sierra Leone, 1793–1808’. Journal of Parliamentary History 26 (2): 97–112.
Cite this article as: Pybus, Cassandra. 2009. ‘“Not fit for your protection or an honest man’s company”:
A transnational perspective on the saintly William Dawes’. History Australia 6 (1): pp. 12.1 to 12.7. DOI:
10.2104/ha090012.
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12.7