May 26, 2005
Thongy Gobbets
I finished Fatal Shore yesterday, except for skimming the endnotes.
One of the things I've enjoyed about the book is Hughes's wording. You'll stumble across a sentence like "there was no way to make a thongy gobbet of barely singed wallaby meat digestible to a teething infant" and then spend the next week trying to use the word "gobbet" in conversation. I don't even know where I'd seen it before.
I do know where I've seen the word "trapanned", however. It shows up in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, as well as Morgan's American Freedom, American Slavery. It's a seventeenth-century word for "kidnapped", and was used to describe transportation, either to Virginia or Australia.
My own family immigrated as indentured servants, so it's impossible for me not to compare the condition of the "assignment men" in Australia with that of the servants of Virginia. Hughes makes the comparison only briefly, on p. 287:
The American colonist owned his indentured servants. He had paid for their transportation across the Atlantic. . . . Convicts were capital, like slaves, and had been freely traded as such since the early seventeenth century. . . . In Australia, which had been settled as a jail, no free settler ever paid for a convict's passage from England; and that, in the official view, disposed of the settler's claim to a right of property in the convict's labor.
I'll be posting some comparisons between the two systems of unfree labor over the next couple of weeks, as time allows. In the meanwhile, here's a thread tracing the ballad "The Lads of Australia" back to "The Lags of Virginia."
Posted by Ben Brumfield at May 26, 2005 07:10 AM