Las Granjas Autosustentables

The frontiers of mankind do not only lie where the land is empty; they are to be found wherever there are men of enterprise. The frontier of enterprise is as real as the geographical frontier.1

Merchant Statesman Captain Charles Swanston (1789−1850) was a complex, enigmatic and powerful Van Diemen’s Land pioneer. His character was well-formed when, at the age of nearly forty, he first ventured to Hobart Town. Banker, legislator, merchant, import-export agent and wool-grower were all occupations he could have claimed, yet in his final Will and Testament he adhered to the descriptor ‘a Captain in the service of the Honourable the East India Company at present on the retired list’.2 It seems that he felt the major achievements of his lifetime were behind him, in India, rather than in Van Diemen’s Land where he had invested intellect and energy and committed his family’s future. A tracing of Swanston’s youth shows that indeed he had an extraordinarily adventurous early career in India. It was there he developed his superior strategic and financial ability, his talents were recognised, and he became member of a prominent network of civil servants and commercial men – men who subsequently underpinned many of his Van Diemen’s Land enterprises.

When Swanston set foot in Hobart Town in June 1829, Van Diemen’s Land was a tiny outpost of the British Empire governed as a penal colony, as far removed from the financial hub of the City of London as it was possible to be. The remarkable feature of Swanston’s new life was the rapidity with which he rose to power and status in his fresh environment and how judiciously he used that power, at least until his final years. After settling

permanently in 1831 Swanston became Managing Director of the renowned Derwent Bank (a joint stock company) for seventeen years and a Member of the Legislative Council where he held office over sixteen years. He was a leader of the Port Phillip Association which instigated the settlement of Melbourne, President of the Hobart Town Horticultural Society, Treasurer and a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Van Diemen’s Land from its inception until his departure from the colony, director of several private companies, an import-export agent, Warden of St John’s Church New Town, a guardian of the Orphans’ Schools, member

1 _{RM Hartwell, The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land 1820-1850, (Melbourne, 1954), p 4.} 2

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of the Board of Education and the Mechanics Institute and active in many civic organisations. In public life he exhibited a constant commitment to civil liberties, the

cessation of transportation, colonial self-sufficiency, the legislative process and government efficiency. He maintained a wide circle of friends and business associates in Van Diemen’s Land and overseas and, with his wife, Georgiana, raised nine children. As a man of business, a powerful banker and an agent dealing in wool and other commodities, Swanston held the power to make or break other settlers trying to establish themselves in their new life in the antipodes. His power and influence in Van Diemen’s Land were recognised by all around him. In 1845 former Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin wrote that ‘The people of Van Diemen’s Land are well aware that for years the Derwent Bank has held half the colony in its thraldom’.3 Franklin was referring to the power Swanston wielded as bank manager in holding mortgages over so many properties. Control of money equalled power, and Swanston’s influence penetrated the heart of public affairs. In 1841 one newspaper called him ‘the paramount authority in the public affairs of this Colony’.4 After Swanston resigned from the Legislative Council in August 1848 and the Derwent Bank spectacularly crashed in September 1849, another newspaper claimed that:

…for ten years, the fallen manager of the Derwent Bank exercised a greater influence over the public affairs and interests of the people of Van Diemen’s Land than did any recognised British or Colonial authority.5

This chapter outlines what is known of Swanston’s early life in an attempt to discover his characteristics and what motivated him.

Men of Empire

Swanston’s arrival in Van Diemen’s Land came at a confluence of significant events in the colony and in India. In 1829, according to chronicler Henry Melville, the southern colony was at its most prosperous.6 Land grants, cheap labour and the developing wool industry offered enticing prospects. In India, where Swanston was an officer in the Madras Army of the

3

J Franklin, Narrative of Some Passages in the History of Van Diemen’s Land, Facsimile Reproduction, (Hobart, 1967), p 8.

4

True Colonist Van Diemen’s Land, 5 February 1841, p 2. 5_{Colonial Times, 20 August 1850, p 4.}

6

H Melville, The History of Van Diemen’s Land: from the year 1824 to 1835, inclusive during the administration of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, ed. George Mackaness, (Sydney, 1959), p 7. Melville wrote: ‘the year 1829 may be considered as one of the most prosperous the Colonists have ever yet enjoyed: with the exception of the continued war with the blacks, there was nothing to disturb the tranquillity of the Colony.’

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Honourable East India Company, that enterprise was suffering from expensive wars and profound changes in its status both in London and in India. With a widespread reduction of the army and prospects of promotion dampened, a number of officers were faced with leaving the company without receiving their anticipated level of pension. Realising they could not maintain back in England the many servants, privileges and the style of life they had enjoyed in India, many were attracted by favourable reports of the new Australian colonies.

The officers who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land from India in the 1820s had served the company near the zenith of its power. Their own spirit of enterprise and adventure, as well as their expectations, was shaped by their experience of its enormous wealth and power. Historian Hew Bowen explains that by 1818 the East India Company had secured direct or indirect control over much of India and a company ‘state’ had emerged.7 Bowen quotes political economist Patrick Colquhoun as saying that in 1815 the company possessed nearly seventy million acres of cultivated land containing a population of around forty million, representing sixty-five per cent of all the people living under the protection of the British Empire. The company and the Bank of England were acknowledged as the two ‘most powerful engines of the state’.8 Bowen quotes the Member of Parliament for Yarmouth 1806−7, Thomas Plummer, claiming that a large portion of the English community was directly or indirectly interested in the prosperity of the East India Company.9 An ever- widening circle of people in Britain had been brought into economic contact with the company since 1756. Investors and employees gained income from the company’s military and commercial expansion in Asia. Merchants, contractors, and ship owners who supplied the company in Britain derived considerable benefit from the growth of trade and empire, and knock-on effects were felt by manufacturers, shipbuilders, shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, and labourers in different parts of the country. People all over Britain became participants in the process of commercial and imperial expansion whether or not they went

7

HV Bowen, The Business of Empire: the East India Company and Imperial Britain 1756-1833, (Cambridge, 2006), pp 1-5.

8 _{Company Chairman Jacob Bosanquet quoted in Bowen, The Business of Empire, pp 30-31.} 9

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abroad.10 The eager young Englishmen carving out careers in India assuredly would have had a sense of participating in a great empire-building enterprise.

Among the men who emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land instead of returning to England at the end of their service in India were Captain Edward Dumaresq (1802−1906), Captain Thomas Betts (?−1834), Captain Patrick Wood (1783−1846) and ‘the fighting Fentons’− relatives Captains Michael (1789−1874), John and Thomas Fenton.11 Other men with East India Company connections were William Henry Hamilton (1790−1870), a former naval officer in India and a partner in a mercantile house at Bombay before coming to Van Diemen’s Land in 1824, and Thomas Learmonth (1783−1869), a merchant in Bombay before his emigration in 1835.12 George Frankland (1800−1838) had served as surveyor-general in Poona, India, in the 1820s before taking the appointment as first assistant surveyor of Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 and subsequently becoming surveyor-general.13

Origins in the Scottish Borders

Born in 1789 at Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, Swanston was the second son of Robert Swanston and Rebecca (nee Lambert).14 His father was a farmer in New Farm, within the bounds of Berwick, on the bank of the River Tweed on the English side of the border. Nothing is known of Robert Swanston’s origins, although the surname has strong links to the region of the Scottish Borders. Robert and Rebecca had their five children baptised in a Church of Scotland, the parish church at Mordington, a village just within Scotland where Rebecca’s parents, Johnston and Margaret Lambert, lived. Throughout his life Swanston had an affinity with Scottish people, as friends, business associates and employees. Among significant commercial contacts were lowland Scots, William Jardine and James Matheson,

10

Bowen, The Business of Empire, pp 3-6. 11

These men were prominent in Van Diemen’s Land and several have entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, (hereafter ABD), for example, R Page, ‘Dumaresq, Edward (1802−1906), ADB, Vol 1, (Melbourne, 1966) p 332; J Eastwood, ‘Wood, John Dennistoun (1829−1914)’, ADB, Vol 6, (Melbourne, 1976), p 433; LL Robson, ‘Fenton, Michael (1789−1874)’, ABD, Vol 1, (Melbourne, 1966), p 371. The other Fentons mentioned in Robson’s ADB entry were cousins, not brothers. No biographical information is on the public record about Betts.

12

PR Eldershaw, ‘Hamilton, William Henry (1790−1870)’ ADB, Vol 1, (Melbourne, 1966), p 507; PL Brown, ‘Learmonth, Thomas (1818−1903) ADB, Vol 2, (Melbourne, 1967), p 100. Thomas Learmonth senior is featured in the same entry.

13

PR Eldershaw, ‘Frankland, George (1800−1838)’, ADB, Vol 1, (Melbourne, 1967), p 410.

14 _{Baptism records at Mordington, Scotland, show Charles Swanston was baptised 11 December 1789, son of} Robert Swanston, farmer in New Farm, and his spouse, Rebecca, Berwick Record Office, by email 19 October 2013.

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of the phenomenal Far Eastern trading company, Jardine Matheson & Co in Canton (Guangzhou), and George Mercer, of Edinburgh, who financed many enterprises in Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip. Swanston favoured Scots as overseers and shepherds for properties he owned, or managed for overseas clients, in both colonies. His Scottish

connections must have been evident because occasionally fellow settlers identified him as a Scot. His friend and colleague in the Van Diemen’s Land Legislative Council Thomas Anstey recorded one particular instance:

My friend Sandy Reid of Ratho will have it that you are a Scotchman – and he throws his cap up in the air, and shouts “Auld Reekie forever!” because you led the minority in the Lewis matter on the 18th May. I have dampened his ardour by assuring him that you were born on the English side of the Border! Faith, the feeling is

uncommonly strong throughout the Colony against the Majority on that occasion. But whether you are our countryman or not, we English must admit that the Scots of our day take the vanguard and lead us whenever anything sound, and good, and liberal is to be achieved. I dare not tell my honest friend Reid so, for fear of inflating him with too much pride!15

On Swanston’s mother’s side, Charles was a nephew of the prominent Bengal merchant, Anthony Lambert (1758−1800), a cadet with the East India Company before setting up as a merchant in Calcutta and making a fortune, mainly from the opium trade.16 One of Anthony Lambert’s partnerships, Lambert, Ross and Biddulph, became the first merchant house to send goods to the half-starved fledgling settlement of Sydney.17

15

T Anstey to Swanston, 2 June 1836, Box 32/9, Derwent Bank Papers, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office (hereafter TAHO). On this occasion Swanston opposed money being paid out of the public purse as

compensation for the controversial conviction imposed by Judge Algernon Montagu in the Lewis Case of 1835- 36. PL Brown writes of Alexander Reid, of ‘Ratho’, that he was one of the solid pioneering Scots who helped shape a community and open the way for the squatting expansion of the 1830s that brought the Clyde Company into being, PL Brown, Clyde Company Papers, Prologue, 1821−1835, (Melbourne, 1941), p 5. Margaret Steven in her biography of Australia’s first merchant, Robert Campbell, defines Scottish traits as flexibility, dependability and toughness, Merchant Campbell 1769−1846: a study in colonial trade, (Melbourne, 1965).The Scots in Swanston’s commercial network in Van Diemen’s Land exhibiting such attributes included Charles McLachlan, Walter Angus Bethune, James Grant, Robert Kerr, John Bogle and Alexander McNaughtan. 16

Asiatic Annual Register, 1798−9, pp 77-78. Although the register is dated 1798−9, it reported Lambert’s death at Portland Place, London, on 17 January, 1800.The article described Anthony Lambert as an enlightened and honourable merchant and claimed he pursued his business with ‘an ardent spirit’ and ‘an impeachable integrity’. Lambert’s work ‘On the Maritime Commerce of Bengal’ was printed in the Asiatic Annual Register in 1803.The eminent orientalist, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, used Lambert’s original treatise of c1794 for his own book Remarks on the husbandry and internal commerce of Bengal, (Calcutta, 1804), noting in the preface that the work had been ‘chiefly written by a gentleman now deceased’ although he did not name Lambert. 17 _{When the Guardian, the first supply ship anticipated in Sydney, was lost off the Cape of Good Hope,} Lambert, Ross & Bidduph took the initiative to offer a cargo of supplies to the settlement, pointing out that this would be cheaper than sending supplies from England. Thus began trade from India and the use of ships

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The Lambert family had a tradition of service with the East India Company. The names of sons over generations named either ‘Anthony’ or ‘Charles’ are found in the company’s records. Swanston’s next younger brother, Anthony Lambert Swanston (1791−1828) followed him into the East India Company Army and also obtained the rank of captain before dying at Barrackpore.18 Two of Swanston’s own sons, William Oliver Swanston (1826−1908), and Nowell Swanston (1833−c1912) both rose to senior ranks in the Indian Army.19

Little is known of Swanston’s childhood, apart from the facts that Robert and Rebecca’s five children were all two years apart – James baptised in 1787, and then Charles, Anthony Lambert (Swanston), Jean and Robert and that Charles was the only one of the siblings to survive beyond his twenties.20 There is evidence that the family may have lacked paternal support as Rebecca was living alone in 1806 and her brother, Anthony Lambert, on leaving her £1,000 in his Will, had requested that the bequest was not to be put at the disposal of her husband and specifically appointed two trustees to act for her benefit.21

licensed by the East India Company as convict transports, M Steven, ‘Eastern trade’, in J Broadbent, S Rickard & M Steven, India, China, Australia: Trade and Society 1788−1850, (NSW, 2003), p 33.

18_{Alphabetical List of Officers of the Bengal Army, ed. Messrs Dodwell & Miles, (London, 1838), p 242. Another} of Charles’ younger brothers, Captain Robert Swanston (1795−1821), died on the ship Mentor in Batavia on 15 April 1821, which may have been engaged in the Indian trade. Berwick Advertiser, 15 December 1821, np. 19_{London Gazette, 1 March 1878, p 1769; London Gazette, 7 February 1911, p 958.}

20

Berwick Record Office, by email 19 October 2013. 21

A Directory and Concise History of Berwick-upon-Tweed, (Lochhead, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1806), p 161, http://rgcairns.orpheusweb.co.uk/Berwick%20Directory%201806%20GIFs/pp160%2C161.html accessed 27 October 2013; Lambert Family Papers per John Kenyon, pers com 28 October 2013. Rebecca died on 12 May 1845 at Tweedmouth and her own Will describes her as a widow, copy of Rebecca Swanston’s Will, Derwent Bank Papers, Box 21/14, TAHO; Durham Probate Records pre 1858, Durham University

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Image 2: Swanston’s maternal uncle, prominent Bengal merchant, Anthony Lambert (1758-1800).

Artist: Antoine Cardon, after Robert Home. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums, Gift of Belinda L Randall from the collection of John Witt Randall, R7647.

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Madras Army of the Hon East India Company

The East India Company was in ascendancy when Swanston joined as a cadet in 1805. He began army training at the Cadet Company at Tripassore and in 1806 was promoted to lieutenant and sent to the Military Institute at Fort St George, Madras.22 At the Institute he observed the machinery and politics of the great East India Company enterprise and

established a network of associates and enduring friends, many of whom he encouraged to invest in his later enterprises in Van Diemen’s Land and Victoria.

After completing studies in surveying and engineering in November 1808, Swanston was ordered to Bombay and attached as a surveyor to General Malcolm’s force proceeding to Persia.23 On abandonment of the expedition against Persia, he joined the Madras Army in the field against the Rajah of Travancore. When the British took possession of Mauritius from the French in 1810, Swanston made a military survey of the island, including soundings of its harbours, bays and coasts. This he accomplished single-handedly and expertly in eighteen months and, as a consequence, in 1812 the Commander-in-Chief at the Isle of Mauritius, Major-General Henry Warde, ordered Swanston to London to lay his map in person before the Commander-in-Chief, His Royal Highness the Duke of York. As a reward, the Duke recommended him to the Court of Directors of the East India Company and offered Swanston a company in the Royal Staff Corps, which Swanston declined. The British government presented him with a purse of 500 guineas. From this date onwards,

Swanston’s military service reads as high adventure. In twenty-six years in India, he served in all three Presidencies, as well as in Mauritius, Persia and Arabia, the island of Bourbon, at sea and in various staff positions.24 Three particular episodes drew attention.

One of the most exotic missions was between May and October 1814 when Swanston carried despatches overland from London to Bombay informing the Governor-General of India of the First Peace of Paris. Across Europe he was attached to the suite of the Envoy to

22 _{C Swanston, Statement of the Services of Captain Charles Swanston of the 2}nd _{Battalion, 12}th _Regiment, Madras N.I., subsequently the 24th M.I., (London, 1891), pp 3, 28-29, TL.P 920. SWA, State Library of Tasmania. Although catalogued variously with Charles Swanston as author or by an anonymous author, this publication