1788 Read online

  During his remarkable career David Hill has been chairman then managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, chairman of the Australian Football Association, chief executive and director of the State Rail Authority NSW, chairman of Sydney Water Corporation and chairman of CREATE, a national organisation responsible for representing the interests of young people and children in institutional care. He is the author of the bestselling The Forgotten Children. He lives in Sydney.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  1788

  ePub ISBN 9781864714159

  Kindle ISBN 9781864716399

  To my mother

  A William Heinemann book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by William Heinemann in 2008

  This edition published 2009

  Copyright © David Hill 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Hill, David.

  1788.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 800 1(pbk).

  First Fleet, 1787–1788.

  Convicts – New South Wales.

  Transportation of convicts – Great Britain.

  Penal colonies – New South Wales.

  New South Wales – History – 1788–1851.

  New South Wales – Social conditions – 1788–1851.

  994.02

  Cover paintings of the First Fleet ships the Alexander, the Lady Penrhyn and the Supply by Frank Allen

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Note on Extracts from Primary Sources

  1 England

  2 The Botany Bay Decision

  3 Arthur Phillip

  4 Preparation for the Voyage

  5 The Convicts

  6 Portsmouth

  7 The Voyage

  8 Leaving Civilisation

  9 Arrival

  10 Struggle

  11 Friction in the Settlement

  12 The Fleet Goes Home

  13 The Aboriginal People

  14 Crisis

  15 A Waiting Game

  16 Arrival of the Second Fleet

  17 Escape

  18 The Departure of Phillip

  Chronology

  Notes

  Bibliography and Further Reading

  Search Term

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In the writing and researching of this book, I was able to access an extensive amount of primary source material due to the survival of a great deal of the original documentation in archives and libraries in Britain and Australia. For this I am extremely grateful.

  A wealth of official letters, records and government files exist in the Public Records Office in Kew, England, and many of these documents were published in the Historical Records of New South Wales in the late nineteenth century and in the Historical Records of Australia from the early twentieth. There are also a number of original documents and copies in various Australian libraries, including the National Library of Australia in Canberra and the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.

  In addition to having access to the official records and dispatches, we are fortunate that many of those who sailed on the First Fleet kept journals and diaries. (The unfortunate aspect is that most were written by naval officers and marines, and we have little by way of first-hand accounts from women, convicts and the Aboriginal people.) The first journals were sent back to England on returning ships in late 1788 and published the following year in London, even though many of the authors would not themselves return for some years. The last of the personal accounts was written around thirty years later by an American seaman, Jacob Nagle, when he returned to his homeland.

  Also, a number of very valuable personal letters survive, and originals and copies of the originals are available in a number of libraries, including the Mitchell Library in Sydney. I would like to thank all the staff of these institutions who helped me in my research.

  Increasingly, all of this documentation is becoming electronically accessible, including via the Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service (SETIS), run by the Sydney University Library, and the electronic resources of the Mitchell Library. I found both of these resources very helpful.

  Finally, I would also like to register my thanks to everyone at Random House for their guidance and support, and particularly to Kevin O’Brien for his professional and sensitive editing.

  NOTE ON EXTRACTS FROM PRIMARY SOURCES

  In quoting material from the primary sources consulted for this book, I have remained faithful to the authors’ non-standard grammar, spelling and punctuation as much as possible. However, there are some cases where a verbatim transcription would have hampered the meaning or otherwise presented a stumbling block to the reader. The only text that I have corrected, as such, is the misspelling of people’s names. I have, though, made a number of formatting decisions in my transcriptions, such as to italicise the names of all ships, to spell out abbreviations, such as ‘wt’, meaning ‘with’, to spell out numbers and to eliminate the confusing use of capital letters in the middle of sentences. I hope the reader will forgive me for taking these small liberties.

  There was also the problem of conflicting dates being given by different journal writers concerning the same event. In these cases I have compared a variety of accounts, where possible, and quoted from one of the concurring ones.

  1

  ENGLAND

  More prisoners were destroyed by [disease] in gaols than were put to death by all the public executions in the Kingdom.

  At four o’clock in the morning on Sunday 13 May 1787 the signal was given by the flagship Sirius for the ships of the First Fleet to set sail and begin their eight-month voyage from Portsmouth to establish a British convict colony in a remote and little-known spot on the far side of the world.

  There was no ceremony or fanfare, as it was still nearly two hours till daybreak when the ships were assembled outside Portsmouth Harbour at Spithead, which separates the mainland from the Isle of Wight.

  So began the program of mass exile that over the next seventy years would see more than a hundred and sixty thousand convicts dispatched from Britain to New South Wales and to other Australian colonies.

  The First Fleet was the biggest single overseas migration the world had ever seen at the time. Each of the eleven tiny ships – the largest was less than forty metres long �
�� was heavily loaded with human cargo (they carried nearly fifteen hundred people between them), two years’ supply of food and the equipment needed to build a new settlement once they reached their destination.

  This was the Georgian era, and Britain was enjoying the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of the mighty British Empire and the rising affluence that went with it. Great canals, sturdy roads and giant bridges were being constructed, and, from the 1760s, labour-saving machinery was being introduced for the manufacture of cotton, iron, steel and pottery. The steam engines developed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton were being put to various uses, and there was a quickening pace of advancement in all fields of human endeavour.1

  The Empire was expanding at a time when the earlier European powers of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands were in decline. In 1773 the British Parliament passed the legislation that began the government takeover of the administration and control of India from the British East India Company, which was to precipitate nearly a hundred years of British rule of the subcontinent. In 1768 Captain James Cook had begun a series of remarkable voyages through the southern oceans and the Pacific in which he discovered new lands and claimed new territories for the Empire.

  It was also the age of the Enlightenment. As the century progressed, new approaches and fresh currents of thought provided the setting for the revolutionary changes ahead. It was during the Enlightenment that the ecclesiastical establishment was dislodged from its central role in cultural and intellectual life, and science was emancipated from the restraints of theological tradition. Predominant figures included Newton, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Hume, Locke, the Irishman Edmund Burke and the Americans Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man (which supported the French Revolution), Benjamin Franklin, scientist, statesman and writer, and the younger Thomas Jefferson. These latter two were involved in the drafting of the American Declaration of Independence. In 1776 Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published and the first of the six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was released.

  The late eighteenth century was a period during which music, theatre, the arts and science flourished. Writers included Jane Austen and the social commentators Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, while William Hogarth was satirising British society in his highly stylised paintings and cartoons. Prominent poets included Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake and Byron, and the painters Gainsborough and Reynolds were making names for themselves. The Georgian era had its own architectural style – made famous by architects such as Robert Adam, James Wyatt and John Nash – and its own style of furniture, which was characterised by strong, clean lines typically highlighted with vertical reeds and flutes.

  Britain’s king at the time was George III. He was to sit on the throne for fifty years from 1760 – at the time the longest reign of any monarch – and his rule covered tumultuous change and dramatic events. He had come to the throne as a 22-year-old on the death of his grandfather, King George II,2 and was the third German to become the British monarch but the first of those to be born in England and to speak English as his native language.

  The German kings had taken over the throne of England when Queen Anne had died in 1714 without any heirs. The English realm was offered to her nearest Protestant relative, George of Hanover, who became George I of England. Throughout the long reigns of George I, his son George II and George III,3 the very nature of English society and the political face of the realm changed. The first two Georges took little interest in the politics of rule and were quite content to let ministers govern on their behalf, but George III became far more involved in the running of his governments.

  After a rocky start, largely due to the instability caused by the Seven Years War with France, George III was to become a popular monarch, although the remainder of his reign was far from easy. He was first believed to have gone mad in 1788, the year the First Fleet arrived in Australia, and at one point Parliament debated whether he should continue as king.4 He appeared to have recovered, but in 1811 the recurrence of the illness forced him to abdicate in favour of his son, the Prince Regent, who would later become King George IV when his father died in 1820.

  King George III typified much of the enlightenment of the era. He founded and paid the initial costs of the Royal Academy of the Arts, started a new royal collection of books and later gave all sixty-five thousand copies to the British Museum (now the British Library). He was keenly interested in agriculture and earned himself the nickname ‘Farmer George’ for his enthusiastic work on the royal estates at Windsor and Richmond. He also studied science and made his own astronomical observations. Many of his scientific instruments survive and are now in the British Science Museum.

  George III had become king when George II died suddenly in October 1760, and immediately a search began to find the new young monarch a suitable wife, so as to ensure succession. The year before George was said to have been smitten by Lady Sarah Lennox, the daughter of the Duke of Richmond. He was forced to abandon the idea of marriage with her, however, as she was not a royal and was therefore deemed to be an unacceptable match.

  The following year he married Duchess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz at St James’ Palace in London. George met his wife for the first time on the day of the wedding, but they appear to have enjoyed a happy marriage and had fifteen children together. In contrast to his predecessors and his sons George III does not appear to have taken a mistress and enjoyed spending time with his family and farming on the royal estates.

  The remarkable advances of the age and the rising level of affluence did not benefit everyone, of course. While the rich got richer, an overwhelming majority of people continued to live and die poor. The industrial changes brought a huge movement of people from the country to the increasingly overcrowded towns and cities. This overcrowding was compounded by the ‘enclosures’ of the commons, whereby landowners fenced off land that had previously been used by everyone. Hand in hand with the growing numbers of King George’s displaced and unemployed subjects came an increase in crime, as many resorted to stealing to survive.

  At the same time King George and his governments were distracted by a succession of foreign wars, first with France and later with Britain’s American colonies. The American War of Independence would have a direct bearing on the British decision to dispatch the First Fleet and to create a convict colony in Australia. For most of the eighteenth century the British had been transporting surplus convicts to America. In 1717 the Parliament had passed the Act for the Further Preventing of Robbery, Burglary and Other Felonies and the More Effective Transportation of Felons etc., which marked the beginning of the large-scale removal of criminals to foreign shores. Over the next sixty or so years about forty thousand convicts were sent to America, until the practice was halted when the American colonies rose up in revolt against Britain.

  Unlike the later transportation to Australia the system of transporting convicts to America was entirely privately run. Convicts committed to transportation were sold by their gaolers to the shipping contractors, who took them across the Atlantic and sold the prisoners to plantation owners for the duration of their sentences.

  The American revolt that began in the 1760s and turned into war in the 1770s was triggered by Britain’s policy of taxing its colonial citizens even though they were allowed no say in the British Parliament – and at the same time that Britain was allowing the British East India Company tax breaks on tea being sold directly to America. On 16 December 1773 a number of Boston radicals dumped a large quantity of British-owned tea into Boston Harbor in what was to become known as the Boston Tea Party. Tough retaliatory measures by the British, including the closure of Boston Harbor, escalated the situation and, rather than isolating the Boston radicals, united many of the colonies in protest. The following year representatives of the colonies met in Philadelphia and resolved to boycott British trade and withhold taxes.

  In 1775 the first shots of the war were f
ired in Massachusetts, and while the British managed to regain control of the area around Boston after what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, their win came at the cost of many of their troops.

  The Americans now moved to establish the new Continental Army under General George Washington to bring many of the local militias into a coordinated fighting force. Over the next few years the fighting spread across all the colonies. In 1776 the British sent their biggest ever force across the Atlantic, and the colonies approved the Declaration of Independence. There was no way of going back.

  The year 1777 was the last year of British ascendancy in the war. The following year the French, who had already been providing the colonists with support, joined the hostilities on the American side following the signing of an alliance between the French and Americans in Paris. For the next three years the armies fought a number of battles, until the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia in May 1781, when the British general Cornwallis surrendered and more than six thousand British troops were taken prisoner.

  When news of Yorktown reached London, the Parliament moved to end the war, despite the opposition of King George III, who wanted a continued British military commitment until the insurrection was crushed. His prime minister, Lord North, duly continued the war but when faced with declining parliamentary support was forced to resign in 1783. (North would be replaced as prime minister by the 24-year-old William Pitt (‘the Younger’), who would be the head of the government when the decision was made to establish a convict colony in Australia.)