1788 Read online

  A corpse sew’d up in a hammock floated alongside our ship. The cabin, lately occupied by the third mate Jenkinson, who died of a putrid fever the night before I came on board, and was buried at Ryde, was fresh painted and fumigated for me to sleep in.18

  While waiting for the fleet to sail, Bowes Smyth was able to go for long walks on the mainland and the Isle of Wight, an escape not available to the convicts being held mostly below deck on the transports. Back on the ship Bowes Smyth recorded how many of the women convicts who had never been on a ship before ‘were very sick with the motion of the ship’ out in Spithead.19

  Bowes Smyth was born in Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex, the seventh son of a surgeon, and as a youth would follow in his father’s footsteps, working locally as a surgeon, before signing up with the First Fleet.

  The officers had many weeks to kill waiting for the fleet to sail, but marine captain Watkin Tench found good uses for the time:

  Unpleasant as a state of inactivity and delay for many weeks appeared to us, it was not without its advantages; for by means of it we were able to establish regulations among the convicts, and to adopt such a system of defence, as left us with little to apprehend our own security, in case a spirit of madness and desperation had hurried them on to attempt our destruction … An opportunity was taken, immediately on their being embarked, to convince them, in the most pointed terms, that any attempt on their side, either to contest the command, or to force their escape, should be punished with instant death; orders to this effect were given to the sentinels in their presence.20

  The ships’ officers and the marine officers were from a totally different world from the ordinary seamen and the marine privates and would enjoy a very different experience of the voyage to the rest. They were also given the added incentive of a year’s pay in advance before leaving England.21

  The officers were far better accommodated on the ships than anyone else, even if by today’s standards their quarters were tiny. Usually they shared a cabin, which was typically five feet by seven feet (one and a half by two metres) and large enough only for two bunks and a little storage space.

  Some of the more senior officers had their own cabin and were also able to take servants with them, which produced the expected envy from those who were not. This sentiment was echoed by the surgeon John White, who had not yet left for Plymouth when he learned that the chaplain Richard Johnson had been given approval to take his servant. Sitting in the Hungerford Coffee House on The Strand, he wrote directly to Evan Nepean to plead his own case:

  Sir,

  Finding that the Revd. Mr. Johnson is to be allowed the privilege of taking with him to Botany Bay a servant, I hope it will not be deemed unreasonable or improper if I solicit a like indulgence. Being … without a servant, my situation must be truly uncomfortable … you … must know and admit the inconveniences I shall be subject to, not only on the passage, but after landing without one … I have apply’d to Captain Phillip, who has no objection.22

  While at sea, the officers ate and drank better than anyone else. The captain could mess with other officers or eat alone and would sometimes keep his own table or invite other officers to join him to be served by his own servants. The other officers would be served their meals at a dining table in a wardroom and would drink port and other wines. Their diet would be more varied and regularly supplemented by the slaughter of a chicken, a pig or some other animal on board, and the officers were usually far less likely to contract scurvy than the ordinary sailors.

  The marines and seamen would be lucky to have a bench on which to sit while they ate and were fed a ration based on salted meat, dried peas, rice and ‘hardtack’ bread. The meat was either pork or beef that had been dried and salted and stored in barrels. The notorious hardtack bread, which was the basis of the seafarer’s diet for several hundred years, was made from wheat or barley and was baked brick hard and devoid of moisture, like a biscuit. Normal bread would only be edible for about a week if stored in cool and dry conditions and even less if it was damp or hot. Hardtack bread could last practically indefinitely but was less palatable, very hard to chew and often infested with weevils. The men would also have some of the fruit or vegetables that had been loaded aboard at the last port of call, until they ran out, and were entitled to a daily grog ration that was invariably half a pint of foul-tasting rum.

  The officers’ clothes also differentiated them from everyone else on the ships, their uniforms being colourful and absurdly impractical. The dress coat was full skirted with very deep cuffs and had much in common with the formal suits of the mid-eighteenth century, except that instead of silk or velvet it was made of hard-wearing wool that would have been extremely hot in the tropics. The outfit’s one practicality was that it dramatically distanced those who gave the orders from those who carried them out.

  There were several hundred sailors on the First Fleet, although no exact number was ever recorded – they were all expected to return with their ships to England and were not part of the calculation of those who would form the colony in New South Wales.

  Most of the sailors were merchantmen who were contracted to work on the privately owned convict-transport ships. The rest were Royal Navy seamen who had volunteered, or had previously been pressed into service in wartime. Signing up enough sailors for the navy ships was not difficult because, as Lieutenant Philip Gidley King noted, ‘a great number of seamen were at this time out of employ and the dockyard was constantly crowded with them’.23

  Among those who signed up to sail on the flagship Sirius was the 25-year-old American Jacob Nagle. Nagle was born in 1762 in Pennsylvania into a German Presbyterian Reformist family that had migrated to America around 1750. In 1777, at 15 years old, he joined his father in the American War of Independence in fighting against the British. Nagle recalls seeing General George Washington, who ‘came riding up to the Colonel Procter with his life guards with him and enquired how we came on’ in September that year during the Battle of Brandywine.24

  After three years with the armies of George Washington the young Jacob Nagle joined the American navy and later transferred to the privateers, which were the privately owned American ships that were encouraged to sink and pirate any ships in British colours. In November 1781 he was captured by the ships HMS Royal Oak and HMS La Nymphe and pressed into service in the Royal Navy with sixteen other American sailors. He was later to be rescued from the island of St Kitts by the French, who were American allies, but subsequently recaptured by the British. It was here in the Caribbean that his involvement on the American side of the war ended and a twenty-year career with the British Navy began.

  With the announcement of the end of the War of Independence in April 1783 plans were made for the English to return home. The Royal Navy ship Prudent arrived in Portsmouth with Nagle aboard several months later. After being paid off, Nagle tried to get home to America and, with a fellow crew member, took a stagecoach to London. Things there, however, did not go according to plan:

  By this time London was full of sailors. The men of war being all paid off, and the American ships were gone full of passengers from London and no possibility of getting work, or a ship, and what few did get work for a shilling a day.

  Our money getting short, we begin to look out for a ship of any kind. The ship Sippio, man of war, was then shipping men for different stations laying in the river abreast Woolwich. We went down and shipped on board … We sailed for Spithead.25

  Nagle was to transfer to the HMS Ganges in Portsmouth, on which he would sail for the next three and a half years, largely transporting British soldiers to different ports before jumping at the opportunity of joining the First Fleet:

  I was now near four years on the Ganges and often applied to the captain for my discharge, but could not get it, when the Sirius, twenty-eight-gun freighter came round the Downs to Spithead commanded by Captain Hunter and Governor Phillip bound for Botany Bay with a fleet of eleven sail of transports, the Supply brig as a tender, full of me
n and women convicts and soldiers, with provisions and stores. The Governor having the privilege of taking any men that turned out from the men of war, there was a great number turned out, but the captain took his pick, all young men that were called seamen. A hundred and sixty in number, no boys and no women allowed. Seven of us volunteered out of the Ganges … I was put into the Governor’s barge.26

  He was lucky enough to be assigned to Phillip’s boat crew and over the next few years would spend a lot of time close to Phillip and other officers. He said that he kept a journal at the time but it was lost, possibly with the sinking of the Sirius off Norfolk Island a few years later. Nagle returned to England in 1792 and eventually went back to America, where, years later, around 1822, he wrote his memoirs, The Nagle Journal. Despite being barely able to write ‘behind the façade of misspelling, meaningless commas and semi colons, questionable capitalizations and never ending sentences’,27 it is a fascinating eyewitness account of the settlement of Australia.

  Most of the sailors aboard the First Fleet had more normal lives. They and the customs and practices they followed were very typical of their times. Most eighteenth-century seamen would have first gone to sea as boys, commonly between the ages of ten and 12, beginning work both on deck and on the rigging, where nimbleness was required. By the age of about 16 most had matured and become able to work aloft, reef sails, knot and splice ropes and steer the ship. At the same time their bodies took on the characteristic broad-shouldered, barrel-chested physique – the result of heavy hauling and lifting and often being bent double over the yards – while the constant roll of the ship gave them a ‘peculiar rolling gait’.28

  At sea the sailors would normally be divided into watches, usually two, which shared the work, and into messes of eight to ten individuals for catering. Each mess was a self-assembled group of like-minded men, usually with the same skills and rank. They shared the domestic chores of preparing food, collecting cooked dishes and washing up. These small groups formed the core of shipboard life and were the basis of effective teamwork, working together in key areas, perhaps in the rigging or as a gun crew.

  They had no personal space on the ship and would sleep, usually in hammocks, in a common area below decks that had little space for private effects and no provision for washing or relieving themselves, which was always done up on deck.

  Most sailors worked at sea for a decade or two before settling down and working on shore or in coastal seafaring. Some remained at sea for as long as they were physically able, often moving into more skilled work as a master, responsible for the navigation of the ship.

  The clothes worn by the ordinary sailors aboard ship were completely practical. At work they wore long trousers that could be rolled up, short-waisted jackets that kept the body warm and, in colder weather, heavy knitted pullovers. These clothes were either supplied by the ship or made from raw materials that the men purchased on board. Most worked barefoot, for extra grip on the ropes while aloft.

  By the time of the First Fleet, at the end of the eighteenth century, many of the sailors would have been tattooed. The tattoo had become popular with European seamen after they were introduced to it by Polynesian societies in the south Pacific. It is widely believed that the practice was first taken up by the seamen of Cook’s voyages from 1768 to 1770. A number of the crew thought a tattoo would be the perfect souvenir to bring back from their exotic experience. It is said that Joseph Banks had his discreetly applied to his buttocks, while the majority of sailors were more interested in having theirs on display.

  Discipline aboard ship in the eighteenth century was enforced with fairly brutal beatings. There was little point imprisoning men on the ships, so offenders were typically flogged then forced to return to work as soon as they were physically able. The whip was usually a cat-o’-nine-tails, which had nine leather strands, each with metal studs that would tear the flesh from the back of the person being punished. The rest of the crew were assembled on deck and forced to witness the punishment as ‘the theatre of example’, with marines drawn up with loaded muskets between sailors and officers.29 Sometimes the punishment would be suspended on the advice of the surgeon if the person being flogged became unconscious or was thought to be at risk of dying while tied to the flogging board.

  The two hundred and fifty marines who were to maintain order during the voyage of the First Fleet and provide security for the settlement once they reached Botany Bay were largely from a similar lower class background to the convicts and seamen and were similarly poor and uneducated. They were also disciplined severely – in fact they were flogged more frequently for breaches of rules than were the convicts, which was to become one of a number of sources of resentment when the marines reached New South Wales.

  The marines were a big influence on the shaping of early Australia. In the absence of free settlers in the first years of the new colony many of the marines – and particularly marine officers – would become its principal farmers and merchants. Within a few years they monopolised most of the economic activity in New South Wales. Most of the marines were single when they signed up with the First Fleet, but this did not mean, as we have seen, that all of those who were married were permitted to take their wives and children with them. Ralph Clark was just one of the marines who were devastated at having to leave their families behind:

  May the 13th, 1787. Five o’clock in the morning. The Sirius made the signal for the whole fleet to get under way. O gracious God send that we may put in at Plymouth or Torquay on our way down the channel that I may see our dear and affectionate Alicia and our sweet son before I leave them for this long absence. O Almighty God hear my prayer and grant me this request.30

  Twenty-seven-year-old Clark was from a humble background in Edinburgh, where his father had been a gentleman’s servant. Ralph had joined the marines as a 17-year-old and volunteered for the expedition to Botany Bay because he was ambitious for promotion. Three years before the departure of the fleet Clark had married Betsy Alicia Trevan from Devon, and their son, Ralph Stuart, was born the following year. Clark was to keep a highly personal and intimate diary in which he mourns the separation from his ‘beloved Betsy’ and ‘my sweet boy’.

  When he reached New South Wales, he was promoted to acting lieutenant on the death of the marine captain O’Shea. After two years he was sent to the settlement on Norfolk Island with the marine commander Major Robert Ross and other marines. While he was in Sydney, he lived for a while with a convict woman, who bore him a son.

  Clark was to return home to England in June 1792 with most of the other marines who had sailed with the First Fleet. Tragically, within two years, Clark, his wife and his son would all die. Early in 1794 his wife died after giving birth to a stillborn daughter. In June Clark died of yellow fever on a naval ship in the West Indies, and his son, who was a young midshipman on the same ship, died of the same disease ten days later.

  While the loading of the fleet stretched on from January through to May, Phillip returned to London and did not join the fleet again until days before it set sail. While in London, he was regularly appraised of preparations in Portsmouth. In April he was to complain that a hundred and nine female convicts had been loaded onto the Lady Penrhyn when there should have been only a hundred and two.31

  It was one of many occasions when Phillip was to show his frustration with the organisation of the venture. At one stage he protested that the amount of ammunition ordered for the marines’ muskets was ‘very insufficient’, and earlier he had demanded to know why the advance wages to which the staff were entitled had not been paid, because they were ‘much distressed’ and needed the money to fit themselves out for the voyage.32

  In March 1787 an exasperated Phillip wrote to Lord Sydney to warn him that many marines and convicts would die because of inadequate provisions being made for the journey:

  I fear, my Lord, that it may be said hereafter the officer who took charge of the expedition should have known that it was more than probable he lost
half the garrison and convicts, crowded and victualised in such a manner for so long a voyage.33

  Over the next weeks there was further correspondence between Phillip and the government before Lord Sydney replied directly to Phillip at the end of April, only a few weeks before the fleet departed. Sydney reassured Phillip ‘that any supplies which it may be necessary to provide for the maintenance during the voyage will be obtained and paid for’. He added that should the fleet find itself short of supplies, it would have the authority to purchase what it needed at ports ‘where the convoy may touch’ during the voyage.34

  By staying and working in London, Arthur Phillip was able to liaise directly with Evan Nepean, who, as the deputy to Lord Sydney in the Home Office, was the most important single figure in the organisation of the venture. Nepean was a key figure not only in organising the First Fleet but also in the administration of the new colony in New South Wales in its early years, and was a useful ally for Phillip.

  As the day of their departure drew nearer, many of the crew and the convicts said their goodbyes, wrote their wills and otherwise put their affairs in order. Major Robert Ross, who had been an active soldier for more than twenty-nine years, wrote to Evan Nepean pleading for his wife and children to be taken care of if he did not survive the venture:

  You know my daily pay to be the whole of the fortune I am possessed of … My only view in mentioning the situation in which cruel necessity compels Mrs Ross and my young family is, that in case of any accident should deprive them of their all, in depriving them of me, you will then permit me to hope that your friendly assistance and interest shall be employ’d in endeavouring to procure for the widow and fatherless some compensation from the public … Could I but be assured that Mrs Ross and the little ones would have your friendship to plead their cause in support of their claim, my oppress’d mind would then be reliev’d in some measure from a weighty load of the care and anxiety.35