Henry Cable

Henry Cable was an illiterate convict who arrived in New South Wales with his wife, Susannah, and their young son aboard the Alexander in 1788. His story links the forced migration that established the penal colony to a striking legal reversal: although British law left convicts almost without rights, a colonial court heard the Cables’ claim against the ship’s captain and ruled in their favor. Cable later became an entrepreneur and substantial landowner, a transformation that exemplified the colony’s emerging economic opportunities for former convicts.

Identity and Transportation

Cable was a fellow convict whom Susannah met in Norwich Castle Jail, where they fell in love. By the time the authorities selected Susannah for transportation to Australia with the first fleet, the couple had a young son, also named Henry. Cable was initially excluded from the voyage, which would have separated the family. After news of the impending separation reached Lady Cadogan, she organized a successful campaign to reunite them. She also raised £20 to buy goods for the family’s use in Australia.

The Cables sailed together on the Alexander, commanded by Duncan Sinclair, as part of the fleet of eleven ships sent to Botany Bay under Arthur Phillip. On January 26, 1788, the settlers established their camp at Sydney Cove and named the colony New South Wales. The family’s arrival thus placed Cable within a society initially made up largely of convicts and their military guards, far from the institutions and legal protections of Britain.

The Missing Parcel and the Court Case

When the Cables reached Botany Bay, the parcel Lady Cadogan had arranged for them was missing. Sinclair claimed that it had vanished; only a small part, containing a few books, had been delivered, while the more valuable remainder was still aboard the Alexander. The Cables had little power under British law: convicts could not own property, sue in court, or give evidence. Sinclair knew, or at least understood, that they could not bring a case against him in Britain, and he boasted that they could not sue him. The account says he probably stole the goods, though he never admitted doing so.

A writ was nevertheless issued to David Collins, the colony’s judge advocate, describing the Cables as people whose clothes and other necessities had been bought by charitable supporters. Its description of them as “new settlers of this place” was later crossed out. That wording mattered: presenting them as settlers rather than convicts may have been an attempt to give their claim a chance of being heard. Collins likely ordered the alteration, but he did not dismiss the case. Henry and Susannah could not sign the writ because they were illiterate; they marked it with their crosses.

The court convened with a jury made up entirely of soldiers, the very people sent to guard convicts such as the Cables. Sinclair challenged the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs were criminals. The verdict nonetheless stood, and he was ordered to pay fifteen pounds. This was the first civil case adjudicated in Australia. Collins reached the outcome not by applying British law, which denied convicts the standing to sue, but by setting that rule aside. The case made visible a basic contradiction in the colony: the Cables were treated as rightless convicts under one legal order, yet as claimants entitled to a judgment under another.

From Convict to Property Owner

The Cables’ court victory was part of a broader divergence between colonial Australia and Britain. A separate early criminal case involved a convict accused of stealing another convict’s bread, worth two pence. Such a matter would not have reached court in Britain, where convicts were not allowed to own anything. In New South Wales, the fact that the bread was treated as someone’s property marked a different approach to both legal and economic life.

At first, convicts performed compulsory labor for food alone, while guards kept what they produced. The arrangement offered little incentive to work well, much as similar experiments had failed in Jamestown. Over time, colonial authorities allowed convicts to become entrepreneurs and hire other convicts; after completing their sentences, they could receive land and regain their rights. Cable himself benefited from this change. By 1798 he owned a hotel, the Ramping Horse, and a shop. He bought a ship and entered the sealskin trade. By 1809, he owned at least nine farms totaling about 470 acres, as well as shops and houses in Sydney. His rise from illiterate transported convict to merchant and landowner gives concrete form to the colony’s shift from coercion alone toward a system that used wages, property, and restored legal status to encourage work and enterprise.

Significance in New South Wales

Cable’s trajectory also anticipates the colony’s later contest over who would control its land and institutions. As the wool economy expanded, former guards and soldiers, together with some free settlers, formed an elite whose chief concern was securing legal title to land they had occupied. Convicts, ex-convicts, and their families sought an end to transportation, trial by a jury of their peers, and access to free land; the elite resisted those demands. Cable’s own movement from convict status into business and property ownership shows that former convicts could prosper, but it does not erase the unequal struggle that followed over the distribution of land and political rights.

The book presents the Cable case not as a simple extension of British justice but as evidence that the new colony was becoming institutionally distinct. A family that British law would have left powerless could bring a claim in Australia and win; a man transported as a convict could later own businesses, a ship, farms, and houses. The missing parcel and the fifteen-pound judgment thus sit beside Cable’s later holdings as two stages in a larger transformation: the colony’s institutions began to recognize claims and create incentives that the old convict regime had denied.