1788 Page 9
When Phillip returned to Portsmouth a week before the fleet was to leave, all of his colleagues were already aboard, including the colony’s judge, David Collins, who was to sail with Phillip on the Sirius.
The 31-year-old Collins was born in Ireland and came from a fairly well-established family. His grandfather, Abel Roper, had written the first edition of Collins’ Peerage in 1709 and his father was a marine officer who attained the rank of major-general. In 1770 young David joined his father’s division as a 14-year-old ensign and became a second-lieutenant a year later. In 1775 he was fighting the Americans in the War of Independence and, like Major Robert Ross, was at the battle of Bunker Hill. The following year he was stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and, now 20 years old and a full lieutenant, married Maria Stuart, the daughter of a British officer. In 1781, back in England with the rank of captain, he joined the Courageux in the Channel squadron. In 1783 he was retired on half-pay.
Like a number of his fellow officers Collins volunteered most probably because he was bored with being retired on the half-pay that had come with peacetime. It is also believed that his father encouraged him to seek the job as judge advocate even though he had no formal legal training.
Unlike those officials who would take their wives with them, David Collins left his wife in England. He would not return for another ten years, and when he did he found his wife ill. However, Maria recovered sufficiently to help her husband publish his journal in England in 1802, and two years later Collins left his wife again to take up the position of lieutenant-governor in New South Wales, with the responsibility of establishing a new settlement in Port Phillip Bay, near present-day Melbourne. Collins found the new site deficient in water and timber and successfully applied to move his entire settlement to Hobart Town on the Derwent River in Tasmania.
He was never to see Maria again. He had one child with her, a daughter who died in infancy, but fathered four other children in Sydney and in Hobart. Like many of his fellow officers Collins was to live with convict women. In Sydney he lived with Nancy Yates and had a son and daughter with her. She had sailed as a 19-year-old on the Lady Penrhyn in the First Fleet after being convicted in the York court in 1785 for stealing printed cotton worth five pounds. She had been sentenced to be hanged but reprieved and transported for seven years. Later, in Hobart, Collins lived with 16-year-old Margaret Eddington, the daughter of a convict couple, and had two children with her in 1808 and 1809.
Collins died suddenly in Hobart in March 1810, three weeks after his 54th birthday. According to Maria her husband died insolvent, leaving her with only thirty-six pounds a year, the pension of a captain’s widow. She repeatedly appealed to the Colonial Office, and she was eventually granted an allowance of one hundred and twenty pounds a year, retrospective to January 1812, in consideration of her husband’s services in superintending the commencement of the settlement at Hobart Town. She died in Plymouth on 13 April 1830.
Back in Portsmouth at the end of April 1787 the fleet was ready to sail, but first it had to confront a series of last-minute problems. With less than a week to go the marines discovered they would not be issued with a grog ration once they arrived at the new settlement. In a protest note to their officers they argued that the grog would be ‘requisite for the preservation of life’ in the new colony:
We, the marines embarked on board the Scarborough, who have voluntarily entered on a dangerous expedition replete with numerous difficulties … now conceive ourselves sorely aggrieved by finding the intentions of the Government to make no allowance of spiritous liquor or wine after our arrival at the intended colony of New South Wales.36
Arthur Phillip had tried to warn the government the previous December that there would be ‘much discontent’ in the garrison if the marines were denied a grog ration.37 On 8 May, with the matter still unresolved, Phillip wrote again to Nepean, pleading the marines’ case and repeating his warning that trouble would inevitably result if they were denied the grog:
They all in general expected the usual allowance of wine or spirits … They have no market to go to, and I fear much discontent amongst the garrison. I wish such an allowance could be granted them; indeed I fear very disagreeable consequences if they have not the same allowance of spirits in the garrison as the marines and seamen are allowed on board the Sirius and they certainly were told they should be victualled in the same manner.38
Phillip sent his letter not knowing that the government had relented and that a letter of permission written by Lord Sydney three days beforehand was on its way. It was too late to procure the grog and load it in England before the fleet left, so Phillip was given approval to spend up to £200 buying the drink in either Tenerife or Rio de Janeiro.39
On Thursday 10 May Phillip’s orders to set sail were defied by the sailors:
The wind this morning coming round from the southeast, I made the signal and got under weigh, but the seamen on several of the transports refused to get their ships under sail … unless they were paid what wages were then due.40
Judge David Collins revealed the reason in his journal:
On the Thursday following [Phillip] made the signal to prepare for sailing. But here a demur arose among the sailors on board the transports, who refused to proceed to sea unless they should be paid their wages up to the time of their departure alleging … they were in want of many articles necessary for so long a voyage.41
The officers of the fleet held different views about the strike. Phillip saw the seamen on the transports as the contractors’ responsibility and was impatient to sail. Collins thought the demands of the men ‘appeared reasonable’,42 and Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, second in command on the Sirius, was also sympathetic:
I think the seamen had a little reason on their side … They had been in the employ upwards of seven months, during which time they have received no pay except their river pay and one month’s advance.43
John White was less charitable and recorded that he thought the men were drunk and that the trouble arose ‘more from intoxication than from nautical causes’.44
The contractors would not pay the sailors, and the strike ended when Phillip ordered that those men not prepared to sail be put ashore and replaced with a number of naval seamen who were on the Hyaena. This Royal Navy ship had been ordered to escort the fleet for the first hundred leagues (about five hundred kilometres) of its voyage, out through the English Channel and into the Atlantic Ocean.
The fleet was almost delayed again by the late delivery of bread by the contractors, but Phillip hastened its loading when he ‘ordered it to be sent on board’ on the night of Friday 11 May.45
Finally, on the night of Saturday 12 May, Phillip ordered that the fleet should prepare to leave early the next morning. At three o’clock on Sunday morning all the ships were ready. At four the signal was given from the Sirius, and by six the whole fleet was under sail.
The total number of people in transit on these ships was now almost fifteen hundred, although accounts of the exact number are wide-ranging. Phillip’s own return gives a total of seven hundred and seventy-eight convicts and thirteen children. There is no complete record of the number of ships’ crew, which would likely have totalled over four hundred and would have included the navy officers who were to stay in New South Wales, as well as all of those who returned on the transports after the convicts and supplies were unloaded in the new colony. Phillip’s biographer Mackaness says there were two hundred and ten naval seamen, two hundred and thirty-three merchant seamen and a total of two hundred and fifty-two officials – marines and marine officers – giving a grand total of one thousand four hundred and eighty-six.46
The First Fleet, heavily laden with passengers, supplies and equipment, was finally on its way.
7
THE VOYAGE
I never met with a parcle of more discontent fellows in my life. They only want more provisions to give it to the damned whores the convict women of whom they are very fond since they broke through the
bulk head and had connections with them.
The First Fleet’s initial progress was as faltering as its departure had been, as the sailors discovered that the ships were difficult to sail. The American seaman Jacob Nagle, aboard the Sirius, complained that the ship was ‘so deep with stores, and having large buttocks, we could scarcely steer her until we got better acquainted with her’.1
As the fleet passed the Isle of Wight, Watkin Tench went below deck to register the mood of the convicts:
By ten o’clock we had got clear of the Isle of White, at which time, having little pleasure in conversing with my own thoughts, I strolled down among the convicts, to observe their sentiments at this juncture. A very few excepted, their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land could not be wholly suppressed.2
By noon on the first day they passed the Needles, on the west of the Isle of Wight, heading to the port of Santa Cruz on Tenerife in the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands. This first leg of their journey would entail more than three weeks of sailing, covering almost two thousand kilometres to their southerly destination off the coast of north Africa.
For the first three days of the run down the English Channel there was a rising swell and rain and ‘great sea sickness’, particularly among the convicts who had never been to sea before. On the second day they could see the Devon coast and on the third many boats off Falmouth harbour. They also saw many fishing boats out on the sea, and one, according to Arthur Bowes Smyth on the Lady Penrhyn, ‘came alongside and all the hands in her were very drunk’. Later in the day they passed the lighthouse at Eddystone and the Lizard peninsula on the Cornish coast, which for many of the fleet would be the last they would ever see of England.
This was the first time that all of the ships comprising the First Fleet had sailed together, so they had little idea of their comparable sailing ability. Shortly after starting the journey the officers ‘had the mortification’ to discover that two of the convict transport ships, the Lady Penrhyn and the Charlotte, sailed ‘exceedingly bad’, and the Charlotte fell so far behind that at the beginning it had to be towed by the navy escort, the Hyaena.3 These differences in speed and sailing ability were to create difficulties later on in the voyage and would cause Arthur Phillip to eventually split the fleet, taking the faster ships ahead and leaving the slower ones behind to follow as best they could.
The first serious accident occurred after three days at sea. A marine corporal, Baker, lost his balance in the rough seas and accidentally fired off his musket. John White, who was on the Sirius at the time, witnessed the incident:
Extraordinary as this incident may appear it is no less true … On laying the musquet down which he had just taken out of the arms chest Corporal Baker was wounded by it in the inner ankle of the right foot. The bones after being a good deal shattered, turned the ball, which taking another direction, had still force enough left to go through a harness-cask full of beef, at some distance, and after that to kill two geese that were on the other side of it.4
After a week, and when the ships were well out to sea, Phillip ordered ‘to release from their irons’ those convicts who were still fettered but sufficiently well behaved. Captain Tench recorded that the disposition of the convicts immediately improved, and Captain Hunter also noted that the additional freedom of the criminals would better their health as they could now ‘wash and keep themselves clean’.5
The following day the navy agent John Shortland began to visit each of the transports to collect information about the convicts’ ‘trades and occupations’ for Arthur Phillip, who was already planning the building of the settlement in New South Wales.6
Towards the end of the first week, as the convoy was still battling its way in heavy rain westward along the English Channel, the sailors on the contracted convict transport ship the Friendship went on strike, demanding an increase in their meat ration from one and a half pounds to two pounds a day. Lieutenant John Shortland came aboard from the Sirius and told the sailors there was not enough meat carried on the ships to increase the daily ration, but he did promise them an increase in their pay.
It seems that the sailors wanted the extra food not for themselves but to pay the convict women for sex. While a prison wall had been built below decks in England to keep the convicts separated from the crew, the sailors had already broken through a hole in the barrier on the Friendship to reach the women. Ralph Clark kept a detailed diary of the voyage and was not impressed:
I never met with a parcle of more discontent fellows in my life. They only want more provisions to give it to the damned whores the convict women of whom they are very fond since they broke through the bulk head and had connections with them.7
Having cleared the English Channel, the convoy turned southwards into the Atlantic Ocean, and the Hyaena, which had escorted the fleet for the first week, turned back towards Portsmouth.
The Hyaena left the convoy some two hundred kilometres west of the Scilly Isles, as the seas were getting higher heading into the notoriously rough Bay of Biscay. The conditions made it difficult for Phillip to find out what was happening on the other ships before he wrote and sent his first report back with the returning Hyaena.8 He consequently sealed his letters unaware that on the Scarborough the captain was thwarting what he believed was a planned mutiny by the convicts. When Phillip learned of the planned uprising, he hastily penned a note, which he managed to get to the Hyaena before it was too far away:
Since I sealed my letters I have received a report from the officers on board the Scarborough respecting the convicts, who it is said, have formed a scheme for taking possession of the ship. I have ordered the ringleaders on board the Sirius … I have no time to enter into particulars.9
The planned mutiny had apparently been plotted by two convicts on the Scarborough, Phillip Farrell and Thomas Griffiths. Before they could organise the support of other convicts, though, they were betrayed to the ship’s officers. According to Captain Hunter’s journal the men had planned to free other convicts, take control of the ship and quietly sail away from the rest of the fleet at night.10 Such a plan was feasible as both of the plotters were experienced sailors. Before being convicted and sentenced to seven years’ transportation at the Old Bailey for stealing a one-shilling handkerchief, Phillip Farrell had been boatswain’s mate on the navy ship HMS Goliath. Thomas Griffiths had been the master of a French privateer during the American War of Independence before being convicted of stealing cloth at a value of two pounds, also at the Old Bailey, and sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1784.
Once the plot was uncovered, the two men were rowed over to the Sirius, flogged, put in irons and then sent to another of the transports, the Prince of Wales. The traitor who revealed their plan before it could be carried out was transferred to another of the convict ships for his own safety.
Despite the high drama at the time Phillip was to say in a letter sent three weeks later from Tenerife that he did not think there was too serious a threat to the security of the Scarborough:
In my letters by the Hyaena I mentioned the apprehensions the officers on board the Scarborough were under, and though I did not then think they had reason to be seriously alarmed. As some of the convicts had behaved very ill, two of the supposed ringleaders were ordered on board the Sirius, punished, then sent on board the Prince of Wales, where they still remain.11
About halfway to Tenerife the officers and men were to witness an incident that would give them a valuable insight into Arthur Phillip’s thinking about the future of the New South Wales settlement. It occurred when the duty officer on the Sirius, Sergeant Maxwell, ordered the flogging of two seamen who were not on deck during their watch. Jacob Nagle described the incident in his journal:
The Governor ordered every officer on board the ship to appear in the cabin, even the boatswain’s mate and told them all if he [k]new any officer to strike a man on board, he would break him imme
diately he said, those men are all we have to depend upon, and if we abuse those men that we have to trust to the convicts will rise and massacre us all. Those men are our support and if they are ill treated they will all be dead before the voyage is half out and who is to bring us back again?12
When the fleet reached the Canary Islands – or the Madeira Isles, as they were then known to the English – on 2 June, a further eight convicts had died, in addition to those who had died before the fleet left Portsmouth. Five of the eight had died on the Alexander. One of the dead was Ishmael Colman, of whom John White recorded the following: ‘worn out by lowness of spirits and debility, brought on by long and close confinement, [Colman] resigned his breath without a pang’.13
By now a total of twenty-one convicts had been lost on the Alexander, the unhealthiest ship in the fleet, to fever, pneumonia and dysentery, which included the sixteen convicts who had died on the ship while waiting to sail. However, the rate of fatalities on all ships began to fall after Tenerife, and John White was to observe that the convicts were generally in better health than before the fleet first set sail.14
At the time of the English fleet’s arrival in Tenerife the Canary Islands had been under Spanish control for three hundred years, since becoming part of the Spanish Empire in the late fifteenth century. While Spain’s influence as a world seafaring power had for a long time been on the wane, the port of Santa Cruz remained strategically important to Atlantic shipping.