A Merchant's Proposition

The summer heat had settled over Sydney with characteristic intensity when Reginald Donnelly made his way to the commercial wharves at Campbell Cove on a Thursday afternoon in late January. The merchant was a familiar figure in colonial commerce—a man of perhaps fifty-five years whose silver-grey hair and measured bearing spoke of authority accumulated over decades of successful enterprise. His warehouses dominated stretches of the harbour front, his ships plied routes between Sydney and ports across the Pacific, and his opinion carried weight in circles where opinions determined fortunes.

The counting room at the rear of Warehouse Three was not a space that typically received visitors of Donnelly's stature. It was a working chamber, furnished with a battered desk and shelves of ledgers, where checkers verified cargo counts and documented the endless flow of goods that sustained the colony's economy. Yet it was to this modest room that the merchant directed his steps, seeking a man whose name had reached him through channels both commercial and personal.

William Jeffries rose from his desk as Donnelly entered, immediately conscious of the contrast between his working clothes and the merchant's tailored coat. At twenty-nine years of age, Jeffries had been working the Sydney docks for nearly two years, having earned his ticket of leave through five years of model behaviour at the Parramatta government farm. His original sentence would expire the following month, granting him the legal status of a free man—though the convict stain would follow him regardless of what documents declared.

The merchant had come, he explained, because of the Harrington discrepancy. A captain named Harrington had been helping himself to cargo for years, the shortfalls attributed to honest errors by checkers who noticed but did not pursue the pattern. Jeffries had been the first to document the systematic nature of the theft, to recognise that the numbers told a story others had failed to read.

What followed was less a conversation than an assessment. Donnelly asked questions that probed not merely Jeffries's competence but his character—his ambitions, his understanding of colonial commerce, his willingness to take calculated risks in pursuit of advancement. The merchant listened with the attention of a man accustomed to evaluating potential investments, weighing responses against whatever criteria he had established for the encounter.

The offer, when it came, was presented with the measured tone of a business proposition. Donnelly had associates in Van Diemen's Land—merchants in Hobart Town who were building something significant in the southern colony. One such associate, Samuel Hartley, required a clerk to manage his shipping interests, to coordinate the movement of goods between Hobart Town and Sydney. It was not glamorous work, but it was work with prospects. A man who proved himself in Hartley's employ might find doors opening that would remain forever closed in New South Wales.

The implications were clear to both parties. Van Diemen's Land offered what Sydney could not—a fresh beginning in a colony too hungry for capable men to scrutinise their pasts too closely. The convict stain that would forever mark Jeffries in New South Wales might fade to insignificance in a place where half the population had arrived in chains. Hartley, Donnelly assured him, judged men by their capabilities rather than their histories.

Jeffries requested time to consider. The offer was generous, and he expressed appropriate gratitude, but it was not a decision to be made in haste. Donnelly accepted this without surprise, leaving his card and a deadline: the Doris sailed for Hobart Town on the third of March. If Jeffries wished to seize this opportunity, he would need to be aboard her.

The merchant departed, leaving behind a rectangle of expensive card stock that seemed to pulse with significance on the counting room desk. Whether Donnelly understood the full weight of what he was offering—or the personal considerations that complicated the decision—remained unspoken. But the proposition had been made, and the clock had begun to tick toward a departure date that would determine the course of William Jeffries's future.