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| In this rare photograph taken in the late 1860s or early 1870s, the Lyttelton hard-labour gang are working at Officers Point. Lyttelton Museum |
Lyttelton in 1865. At Officers Point, seven of the Tudor’s crew scratch at the cliff face, the dust and scree a constant companion, their tools a rudimentary set of pickaxes, carts and dynamite. The men had signed on in Liverpool, refused duty on board and were sentenced to hard labour in Lyttelton, where they found themselves improving a harbour.1 Two years earlier, a commission of inquiry had recommended the construction of a breakwater – increased shipping would bring prosperity to the province. So, for close to a decade, gangs of imprisoned men were marched out of gaol and put to work bludgeoning a headland. By September 1866, imprisoned workers had moved over 21,000 cubic metres of earth, used 2,000 kilograms of explosive powder and fired 877 shots into the hillside. The rubble became a breakwater, and the breakwater became Gladstone Pier in 1874. Today it services a major international port.
That imprisoned crew of the Tudor were part of the hard labour gang is unsurprising. In the maritime world that was nineteenth-century New Zealand, much of its Pākehā population were seamen. Around 1,500 overseas ships visited New Zealand ports in the 1840s, 3,000 in the 1850s, and over 8,000 in each decade of the 1860s and 1870s. That’s around half a million seamen.2 For the New Zealand state, this transient motley crew performed an additional service in the form of unfree labour. Barred from importing convicts by the British government and faced with an ‘idle’ environment that, from a colonial-capitalist viewpoint, demanded ‘improvement’, the state forced prisoners out of gaol and onto the colony’s nascent streets and public works.
In this paper I touch on how imprisoned seamen contributed to the making of nineteenth century New Zealand, from their class struggle on board to their unfree labour on land. The shift from crew to the chain gang (and back again) also shows how labour is a continuum of coercion rather than separate worlds of free and unfree. A key thread within this continuum is the capitalist imperative of improvement and its injunction against idleness.3
Improvement
As a social relation that is premised on (and reproduced through) a logic of separation, capital must turn all of life into work for its own reproduction, from care work to cheap nature to colonialism. Land, prison labour and the ideology of improvement is crucial to this reproduction.
Today, when we think of improvement we usually think of gradual betterment – of making something better. Its original meaning was very different, and points to the dialectical nature of capitalism and prisons. Both were deeply concerned with the inverse of improvement: idleness. Rooted in the Germanic word for worthless, to be idle is to squander something that could be turning a profit. In England during the sixteenth century ‘improvement’ meant to do something for profit, especially to make profit from land.4 According to one dictionary published in 1613, improve meant to raise rents and an improver made land productive and profitable.5 As Brenna Bhandar writes, improvement ‘produced and reflected new conceptions of value in relation to land, goods, commodities, and the value of human life.’6 This imperative to create and constantly improve property is evident in the birth of agrarian capitalism and in ongoing settler colonialism. Land and territory outside of capitalist social property relations were deemed to be waste, and in need of improving. So, too, was idle labour power.7
Hence the attack on idleness and waste. As Jessie Goldstein argues, waste ‘became a dual injunction against not working for a wage in the case of people, and not being worked upon by wage laborers – not being improved – in the case of land.’ In nineteenth-century New Zealand, so-called unimproved spaces were simultaneously landscapes of wasted potential and pregnant with the possibility of profit. At the same time, ‘idleness in prison meant waste’, and according to the criminologist John Pratt, ‘waste, in this early colonial society, was more criminal than crime itself.’8 The gendered use of unfree labour outside of the gaol – and the gendered work of women within it – addressed both.9
The use of prisoners for colonial improvement was also heightened by labour shortages, inadequate and overcrowded gaols, and a prohibition on importing convicts set by the Colonial Office. So, to meet the needs of New Zealand’s commodity frontier, incarcerated men shuffled out of gaol, were harried onto hulks or ferried by rail to a range of prison workscapes. ‘There was too much to be done on the frontier fringes to think of leaving untapped labour behind some hastily erected fences,’ wrote the historian Robert Burnett.10 In colonial New Zealand, the insatiable need for outdoor labour was the overriding imperative.11 And that included the labour of imprisoned seamen.
From crew to the chain gang
Seafarers were prominent among the state’s early prison population. Between 1841 – 1844, an average of 300 prisoners passed through New Zealand gaols each year.12 If they weren’t unpicking the oakum needed to plug the hulls of ships, then they were put to work outdoors. A Wellington gaol return for July 1842 recorded 18 hard-labour prisoners, nine of whom were seamen making and widening drains and forging roads from Lambton Quay to The Terrace.13 An 1844 return for Auckland Gaol showed eight seamen at work building stone jetties – an entire pirate crew, in fact. The Hannah was being fitted up for a whaling expedition in the Chatham Islands when it was seized in a blaze of gunfire. The pirated ship was eventually captured off the Coromandel coast and its crew imprisoned – including the carpenter John Bacon, a native of Kennebec County in Maine who claimed no part in the mutiny.14
The number of seamen in gaol remained steady as the volume of transnational shipping increased and the Merchant Shipping Act 1854 came into force. Seamen made up a fifth of the country’s prison population between 1860 and 1864 (2,810 of the 12,938 people committed to gaol, or 21.7 per cent).15 In the southern port of Dunedin between 1851 and 1861, 355 of the 677 prisoners were seamen.16 Lyttelton also experienced high numbers of detained deckhands. In August 1858, its prison was overrun with crew from two recently arrived ships. In a gaol designed for a maximum of 21 prisoners, the 18 seamen brought the number to 34.17
The unfree labour of seamen was extremely useful for the developing colony. They joined other prisoners making roads, levelling hills, draining swamps, diverting waterways, building bridges and retaining walls, creating foundations for schools and universities, forging harbour forts, planting trees and maintaining cemeteries, reserves and botanical gardens. In the soon-to-be capital of Wellington in April 1861, progress was attributed to ‘the wholesale criminality of the crew of the John Bunyan. They have been made very serviceable in forming and repairing much of the streets.’18 In 1863, over half of Lyttelton’s 335 inmates were seamen at work on its main roads, drains and retaining walls, while in Auckland, nine of the 30 hard labour prisoners recorded in October 1851 were sailors making roads.19 Two decades later, seamen from the Carisbrook Castle were quarrying at Auckland’s Mount Eden Stockade, where they were joined by crew of the John Rennie who’d refused to obey a lawful command.20 The stone they quarried was used for buildings, ballast for train tracks and rubble for roads, all sold to local councils, private contractors and government departments at reduced rates.
In Dunedin, gangs were based on prison hulks that could be moved about Otago Harbour. The hulk Sarah and Esther was declared a prison in December 1874 and fitted up especially for runaway seamen. Not only did they make roads on both sides of Otago Harbour that are still used today, they also formed the massive Aramoana Mole, protecting shipping and adding to the city’s commercial viability.21 From October 1867, imprisoned seamen also manned Dunedin’s dredge, whose work reclaimed a harbour and made way for a thriving portside city.22 As well their work at Officers Point, in Lyttelton imprisoned crew like those of the Westland, charged for desertion and embezzling cargo, made roads, reclaimed land and laboured on other harbour works in the 1870s and 1880s.
As late as the 1890s, seamen were forced to forge roads and the colony’s harbour forts. Irish seaman Edward Williamson laboured at Devonport’s North Head, digging gun emplacements and underground bunkers; an Italian seaman named Emanuel Silva and an African-American seaman named John Williams helped establish a track at Milford Sound, now the shopfront of New Zealand tourism and billed as the finest walk in the world; Nils Jacobsen, a red-bearded seaman from Finland, battled heavy seas and loose scree to build Rocks Road in Nelson.
Nineteenth century New Zealand was part of a global maritime world. Port Chalmers, Dunedin. Alexander Turnbull Library
A continuum of coercion
Improvement and the imposition of carceral spaces and carceral work regimes point to ‘unfree labour as a relational category’, one that forms a wider continuum of coercion. As Jairus Banaji put it in ‘The Fictions of Free Labour’, wage labour is also subject to coercion. This springs from the reproduction of capitalist social relations and a ‘set of legal rights, privileges and powers that place one person in a position to force another person to choose between labour and some more disagreeable alternative.’23 For Robert Steinfeld, free and forced labour don’t exist in separate worlds. ‘It is more accurate to think about labour relations in terms of degrees of coercive pressure that can be brought to bear to elicit labour.’24 A growing body of literature explores how all forms of capitalist labour – whether free, indentured or unfree, waged or unwaged – involve a set of disagreeable alternatives that are pervasively shaped by law, gender and racialized violence.
The working lives of seamen are a good example. As well as their onshore experience of class and crimping, many seamen were ex-convicts that had already rubbed up against the carceral state in Europe or its colonies. As David Haines and Jonathan West note, convicts and seamen in the Tasman world shared multiple overlapping identities. ‘All transported convicts knew something of the sea, and of ships and sailing. One in five early convicts was a seaman’, and ‘seafaring skills were in demand in Sydney, so former convicts possessing them rose to prominence.’25 Indigenous seafarers and crewmen of colour also brought their own experiences of coercion with them.26
This broader experience was compounded by the nature of maritime labour. Historians such as Marcus Rediker illustrate how seamen were not only subjected to the discipline of the wage – prefiguring the industrial factory – they also experienced legal and extra-legal punishment specific to their industry.27 Because of a ship’s articles, the fixed-term employment contracts that bound seamen to the ship’s master or owner, the enacting of workplace perks (otherwise known as theft), as well as assault, disobeying orders, withdrawing one’s labour through desertion, strikes and other forms of work refusal were all punishable by hard labour. As ‘the judicial dice was usually loaded against them’, resistance to drunken captains, dangerous working conditions or long, tedious hours were punished in the courts with vigour.28 Resistance also met swift retribution onboard, through violence, manacles and confinement. Class struggle contributed to the regular imprisonment of seamen, complicating tidy divisions of free and unfree.
Another blurring of the free/unfree binary was the use of prisons as labour clearing houses. Neill Atkinson shows how captains and local merchants, fearing their crew would jump ship, favoured imprisonment due to the difficulty of finding replacements and the potential for costly delays.29 A crew’s stint at hard labour matched the time needed for a ship to refit and make ready to sail: indeed, a rider added to the terms of a seaman’s sentence allowed captains to collect his imprisoned crew when required.30 Take the hands of the Indiana, whose work refusal in 1858 saw them landed in the Lyttelton gang until their ship was reprovisioned.31 Or the eight men of the Isabella Hercus who refused to leave port until their seriously undermanned vessel found more crew. Sent to Dunedin Gaol in February 1856, four of the prisoners went aboard a month later when the ship was ready to sail. However, four refused and served out their three-month sentence.32
These acts of working-class self-activity highlight the scope for agency within a world of coercion.33 For example, a crew’s dislike of a particular captain, the desire to seek better wages and conditions under a different master or article, or to migrate by jumping ship meant some took their chance with the temporary hardship of hard labour. In December 1852, the commander of the government brig Victoria complained that all but one of his crew had deserted in Auckland, ‘in consequence of the high wages given to seamen out of this port.’34 The colonial secretary fired off an urgent letter to the sheriff of Auckland Gaol: were there any imprisoned seamen willing to ship out? The two seamen in his charge preferred prison and declined, forcing the brig’s commander to raise his rates.35 Likewise, five imprisoned seamen in Wellington Gaol were offered the chance to return to their vessel and shave two months off their sentence. The men refused.36 In Napier, five crew of the Winchester chose forced labour over returning to their vessel; three months later, six of the Bebington’s crew also defied their captain and rebuffed the offer to reboard. ‘Napier seems to present wonderful attractions to English sailors’, quipped a reporter.37
Conclusion
Prisons were said to be run like a ship for good reason. Hierarchy, violence and coercion stalked the decks and shaped the seagoing experience of sailors. As Peter Methven notes, prisons like Wellington’s Terrace Gaol were managed as though they were ships, ‘with strict adherence to the regulations and heavy punishment for infractions.’38 The work refusal of prisoners were known as mutinies not strikes, and like seamen, prisoners were confined and flogged for insubordination.
Yet as I hope this paper has shown, such comparisons mask a deeper relationship embedded in the imperatives of improvement and a continuum of coercion. Prisons and their unfree work regimes were part of colonisation’s quest to bring unruly bodies and the land itself to order – to transform and ‘improve’ Indigenous space. As Clare Anderson, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan, and others note, ‘by appreciating the importance of convicts for expansion and colonization,’ the history of punishment ‘was not so much characterized by a developing immobilization of prisoners within the walls of jails but by their ongoing geographical mobilization as forced labour.’39 Faced with coercion on and off the ship, the example of seamen shows how this labour was fluid, not fixed.40
Despite its absence in New Zealand historiographies, the use of prison labour was crucial to colonisation, stamping an indelible mark on the social and material development of the colony and its infrastructure. Like the prisoners peeking out from the edge of an 1896 photograph of Napier's Marine Parade, it may be a hidden history, but prison labour is deeply connected with the flow of people and profit through the modern-day city or port, as well as the productive force of the sea itself.
This paper was presented at the 2023 Australian Historian's Association Conference and subsequently published in the LHP Bulletin 88, August 2023. Many thanks to Haureh Hussein, Felix Schürmann and the participants of the Maritime labour practices in colonial contexts workshop held in Trier in May 2023, whose feedback on an earlier version of this paper improved it considerably.
2. James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, Auckland, 1996, p.428.
3. For more on these themes, see Jared Davidson, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2023. For more on seamen and coercion in a New Zealand context, see Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen's Union, Seamen’s Union of New Zealand, Wellington, 1968; Neill Atkinson, Crew Culture: New Zealand Seafarers Under Sail and Steam, Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2001; David Grant, Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seamen's Union, 1879-2003, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2012; Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2012, especially Chapter 6, ‘Sealers, Whalers and the Entanglements of Empire’; David Haines and Jonathan West, ‘Crew Cultures in the Tasman World’, in Frances Steel (ed.), New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2018. Not to mention an older historiography on whalers and sealers, such as work by Robert McNab and others. James Belich has also written about crew cultures and their work on the colonial frontier in Making Peoples. For women aboard whaling vessels in New Zealand waters, see Joan Druett, Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920, Collins New Zealand, Auckland, 1991.
4. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, New York: Verso, 2017), p.106; Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.4; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.114.
5. Slack, The Invention of Improvement, p.5; Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, p.106. Improvement, wrote cultural historian Raymond Williams, was a keyword in the development of agrarian capitalism and its market compulsions. Williams, Keywords, p.114.
6. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2018, p.72.
7. This radical upheaval in social property relations not only divorced people from their means but contributed to the rise of houses of corrections, prison hulks and penal transportation. Contrary to Foucault’s ‘Great Confinement’, houses of correction and the prisons that followed didn’t just confine the poor, they mobilised them to offer their labour power for sale on the market. As Marc Neocleous writes, their ‘mobilizing work was the mobilization of work.’ Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order, p.20.
8. John Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society: The New Zealand Penal System, 1840–1939, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1997.
9. Much more could be said about the role of gender in this paper. For example, the public work of male prisoners was simply not possible without the domestic work of incarcerated women. Confined indoors and given the dreary work of washing, mending and making, cleaning, sweeping and scrubbing, women prisoners kept the place in order but, more importantly, saved gaolers from having to hire cleaners or hold male prisoners back for domestic chores. In other words, their work reproduced the labour power needed for outdoor labour.
10. Robert I.M. Burnett, Hard Labour, Hard Fare and a Hard Bed: New Zealand’s Search for Its Own Penal Philosophy, National Archives of New Zealand, Wellington, 1995, p.66.
11. Pratt, Punishment in a Perfect Society, p.85.
12. Nationally there were 309 prisoners in gaols in 1841, 385 in 1842, 305 in 1843 and 231 in 1844. Blue Books of Statistics, 1841 and 1842, ACGO 8344 Box 2 and 3, Archives New Zealand. For a vivid description of Auckland’s early gaols, see Mark Derby, Rock College: An Unofficial History of Mount Eden Prison, Massey University Press, Auckland, 2020.
13. Return of prisoners confined at the gaol in Wellington, 31 July 1842, enclosed in ACGO 8333 Box 15/ 1842/1537, Archives New Zealand.
14. ‘From: Percival Berry, Sheriff, Auckland Date: 30 June 1844 Subject: Petition from John Bacon 'Hannah' [Schooner] for release from gaol’, ACGO 8333 Box33/ 1844/1298, Archives New Zealand. Bacon claimed to be a Baptist by profession and that he left behind a wife and children in Adelaide.
15. Statistics of New Zealand for 1860-1864, available online at https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators-and-snapshots/digitised-collections/19th-century-statistical-publications#statistics-of-new (accessed March 2023)
16. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.102.
17. Sheriff to Provincial Secretary, 23 August 1858, CAAR 19936 Box CP6/ ICPS 939/1855, Archives New Zealand Christchurch Office.
18. Wellington Independent, 9 April 1861. Said to have launched a mutiny near the New Zealand coast that ended in violence, eight of the crew were imprisoned with hard labour for six months while two of them received a further eighteen months’ imprisonment for piracy. Yet their captain, who was charged but never convicted for manslaughter, got away with shooting crewman Daniel McDonald in the forehead and killing him. Addressing the discharged captain, the judge proclaimed: ‘I think that the owners of your ship, as well as your passengers have every reason to be grateful for the manner in which you have acted.' Wellington Independent, 5 March 1861.
19. Weekly gaol return, 6 October 1851, ACGO 8333 Box 98/ 1851/1964, Archives New Zealand.
20. Thames Advertiser, 14 September 1875.
21. Mutiny aboard the prison hulk in April 1885 brought an end to this floating prison. See Davidson, Blood and Dirt, 77-78.
22. For more on the development of the harbour, see Heritage New Zealand, ‘Dunedin Harbourside Historic Area’, The New Zealand Heritage List Rārangi Kōrero, https://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/7767 (accessed May 2021).
23. Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p.19
24. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, p.8
25. Haines and West, ‘Crew Cultures in the Tasman World’.
26. See, for example, Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870, SUNY Press, 2021. For more on Māori involvement in the maritime industry, see Michael J. Stevens, ‘Māori History as Maritime History: A View from the Bluff’, in Steel (ed.), New Zealand and the Sea; Rachel Standfield and Michael J. Stevens, ‘New Histories But Old Patterns: Kāi Tahu in Australia’, in Victoria Stead and Jon Altman (eds), Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019.
27. Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, Canto/Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.83.
28. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.105.
29. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.102.
30. Atkinson, Crew Culture, pp.102–3.
31. Lyttelton Times, 11 December 1858.
32. Atkinson, Crew Culture, p.104.
33. As Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Michael Quinlan note, ‘the question of agency and resistance is not just something to be added to the narrative of unfree labour, its nature and extent can shape fundamental understandings of labour history, if not history more generally’. Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2022, p.12.
34. Commander of “Victoria”, Auckland to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1852, enclosed with ACGO 8333 Box 111/ 1852/2821, Archives New Zealand.
35. Sheriff, Auckland to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1852, enclosed with ACGO 8333 Box 111/ 1852/2821, Archives New Zealand.; Commander of “Victoria”, Auckland to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1852, enclosed with ACGO 8333 Box 111/ 1852/2821, Archives New Zealand.
36. Letter from the Wellington Gaoler, 6 January 1870, ACGS 16211 Box 93/ 1870/38, Archives New Zealand.
37. Hawkes Bay Times, 1 September 1874; Hawkes Bay Times, 25 December 1874.
38. Peter Methven, The Terrace Gaol: A Short History of Wellington's Prisons, 1840-1927, Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2010, p.33.
39. Clare Anderson, ‘Introduction: A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies' in Clare Anderson (ed.), A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.9.
40. Maxwell-Stewart and Quinlan, Unfree Workers, p.12.
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