On January 19, 1788, Arthur Bowes Smyth, one of the surgeons assigned to accompany the First Fleet, stood on the deck of the Lady Penrhyn staring out at the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, desperately searching for a dark speck on the horizon, listening for the excited shouts of the crew that would mean their long journey was finally at an end. Two hundred and fifty long, weary days earlier, on May 13, 1787, they had left Portsmouth, entered the English Channel, and sailed by way of Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope to the Great Southern Ocean, riding the uninterrupted winds of the “roaring forties” to the South Pacific. Eleven ships under the command of Commodore Arthur Phillip had been selected to comprise the now famous “First Fleet” that was to establish a penal colony at Botany Bay. More than 750 convicts—548 men, 188 women, and 17 children—were bundled onto six transport ships, partially separated by sex. Two Royal Navy vessels, the Sirius and the Supply, provided an armed escort and three store ships conveyed much-needed supplies—food, seeds, tools, agricultural equipment—to help establish the colony and bridge the gap until it became self-sufficient. Smyth had risen at five o’clock that morning in hopes of catching a first glimpse of his new home, but his optimism had been quickly dashed. There was nothing but ceaseless blue as far as the eye could see. They had been expecting to see land for days, and Smyth had confided to his diary the night before, “A gentle breeze—Expect to see Land this Evening . . . No land seen at 8 o’clock for wh. reason the fleet were order’d to lye to all night.”12
The journey from England had been relatively smooth, but it had been ten weeks since they had left the Cape of Good Hope, ten long weeks without even the hint of land, “the longest period of any we had been at Sea without touching at any Port.” At seven o’clock, after eight months at sea, Smyth, the crew and the 101 female convicts of the Lady Penrhyn caught their first tantalizing glimpse of New South Wales. The feeling of sighting solid earth after so long a time was indescribable. “The joy everyone felt upon so long wish’d for an Event,” Smyth wrote, “can be better conceiv’d than expressed, particularly as it was the termination of the Voyage to those who were to settle at Botany Bay.” The next day the Lady Penrhyn sailed into Botany Bay, spying through an eyeglass “7 of the Natives, running among the trees.”13
The leader of this unlikely flotilla, the expedition’s commander, and the colony’s first governor was Arthur Phillip. Phillip had risen from inauspicious circumstances to his position of command. Born in Cheapside, London, the future governor’s father was a modest language teacher and former sailor born in Frankfurt and his mother the widow of a sailor. When his father died a year after his birth in 1739, Phillip’s life chances seemed dim; however when he was given a place at the Greenwich Hospital School, a charitable foundation meant to help the children of impoverished sailors, his luck changed. He began his nautical career as a sailor aboard a whaling ship before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1754. He saw action at the Battle of Minorca and the Battle of Havana during the Seven Years’ War, distinguishing himself enough during the conflict to receive promotion to lieutenant. With Britain at peace, in 1774 Phillip enlisted as a captain in the Portuguese navy, fighting off South America during the Spanish–Portuguese War. France’s entrance into the American War in 1778 led to Phillip being recalled to his position in the British navy.
The choice of Phillip as leader of the expedition to settle New South Wales was not without merit. He had previous experience of leading convict transports, having commanded a Portuguese fleet shipping convict laborers to South America during the Spanish–Portuguese War. His knowledge of South America was also seen as a boon by British authorities. One of the benefits of a colony in the South Pacific was its perceived usefulness as a base and staging ground for attacks on the Spanish colonies of the Pacific coast of South America. During the Revolutionary War, Phillip had been charged with planning and leading a mission to raze the Spanish colonies of Chile, Peru, and Mexico before crossing the Pacific to attack the Philippines. This plan was scuppered when peace with Spain was reached in 1783, but Phillip’s knowledge of Spain’s Pacific strength made him an appealing choice to lead the expedition to Botany Bay.
Phillip quickly endeared himself to the crew of the Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet, as well. After leaving English waters in May en route to Tenerife, one of the ship’s officers had begun flogging some of the sailors for a petty infraction. The sailors complained to Captain Hunter that “if this was the usage they ware to have, it would be better to jump overboard at once than to be murdered in a foreign land.” The captain informed Governor Phillip of the dispute, who quickly let his officers know that the usual harsh naval discipline would not be tolerated on this journey. Phillip “ordered every officer on board the ship to appear in the cabin . . . and told them all if he knew any officer to strike a man on board, he would break him immediately.” In normal circumstances, such physical punishments might be overlooked, or even encouraged, but, as the governor realized, the sailors were all that stood between the officers and civilians and hundreds of angry convicts. As he explained to his officers,
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. We have a long and severe station to go through in settling this collona [colony], at least we cannot expect to return in less than five years. This ship and her crew is to protect and support the country, and if they are ill treated by their own officers, what support can you expect of them? They will all be dead before the voyage is half out, and who is to bring us back again?14
The governor’s sobering predictions of prisoner uprisings had the intended effect, and for most of the remaining journey landfall held as much danger as life at sea. The fleet spent six weeks in Brazil gathering supplies and refreshing the convicts. Whenever sailors went ashore, they were forced to be accompanied by a uniformed soldier in order to prevent their being pressed into service by another navy or another vessel. Between Rio and the Cape of Good Hope, where the fleet arrived for another six-week sojourn in October, the much-feared convict uprising first materialized. The prisoners on the Alexander, one of the convict transports, began plotting to “rise and take the ship,” but the ringleaders were discovered and captured before their plan could fully develop. The would-be Spartacuses were brought onboard the Sirius, where they were severely flogged before being returned to their ship in chains. Phillip’s warning had not been an idle threat.15
The sailors of the First Fleet were, as befitted the age of sail, a motley crew, hailing from every corner of Britain as well as from farther afield. Jacob Nagle, a sailor aboard the Sirius, had a particularly varied though hardly unusual background. He had been born to a family of German and English Quakers in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1762. In 1777, at the age of 15, he followed his father into the Continental Army and saw action at the Battle of the Brandywine under General Washington. His term of service ended while the army was camped at Valley Forge, but Nagle was a restless lad and, inspired by the stories of the sailors who gathered at his father’s tavern on Water Street in Philadelphia, Nagle joined the crew of a series of privateers starting in 1780. In 1781 he was captured by the British while serving on the Trojan and sent to the Caribbean island of St. Christopher as a prisoner of war. St. Christopher fell to the French later that same year, but Nagle’s freedom was short-lived. While in French Martinique waiting for a ship bound for America, Nagle was arrested by the French for aiding an escaped French prisoner from Pennsylvania. Nagle was freed once more in 1782, this time as part of a prisoner exchange after the British victory at the Battle of the Saintes, but instead of being released was pressed into service in the British navy.16
Nagle served in the British navy until the war officially ended in 1783, at which point his ship returned to England where he and the other sailors were to be discharged. He left the naval life behind at Plymouth and traveled with some fellow demobbed sailors to London in sea
rch of back pay and passage back home to Philadelphia. Finding a ship that would take him back to America proved more difficult than Nagle anticipated, perhaps owing to a lack of the necessary funds. With transport home not forthcoming, Nagle rejoined the British navy, participating in the third and final relief of Gibraltar in 1783. At first glance, the fact that Nagle would once more willingly join the very navy that had forced him to serve against his own country is surprising, but for common soldiers and seamen, service on multiple, even opposing sides was hardly unusual. Military service was a profession as much as it ever was a cause. By 1787, Nagle had become accustomed to life at sea and so inured to a peripatetic existence of travel and adventure that he jumped at the chance of a voyage to the newest spot on the globe. The youth who had walked in the shadows of Independence Hall in the heady summer of 1776, when America declared its independence from Britain, who had fought with George Washington against the British Empire, now found himself en route to the Pacific as a member of a new project of British imperial expansion.17
Nagle was not the only American to find himself sailing with the First Fleet. Among the crew of the Sirius alone there were five other American sailors, two of whom were Pennsylvanians like Nagle himself. The other three, John Rowley, James Proctor, and John Harris, came from Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York respectively. Perhaps somewhat awkwardly, the six Americans were serving on the Sirius under the command of Captain David Collins, a Scotsman who had seen action in the British army at Bunker Hill. Indeed, many of the officers of the First Fleet had previously served in the British army or navy during the war.
There were less willing travelers of American origin as well. Fourteen of the transportees came from North America, and at least eight of the prisoners had begun the war as slaves in the American colonies. Referred to as “a negro” in the court records, John Martin was most likely a former slave who had used the revolution as an opportunity to make his bid for freedom. After escaping a life of servitude in America, Martin had made his way to London, where he took employment as a sailor. Martin’s newfound freedom was not to last, and in 1782 he was arrested and convicted of stealing clothing. He was imprisoned at Newgate and sentenced to transportation to Africa. A bout of typhus saved Martin from the disastrous attempt to settle convicts on the African coast, and he remained imprisoned at Newgate from 1782 until he was added to the convicts on the First Fleet. With him aboard the Alexander transport ship were Janel Gordon, Caesar, and John Randall, who had escaped slavery in Connecticut and joined the British army. After the war, Randall had been discharged from the army at Manchester where he was arrested for theft and sentenced to transportation.18
The whole affair thus had an American flavor. The war with America was itself the primary catalyst for the creation of a new penal colony in the Pacific, and one of the earliest proponents of the colonization of New South Wales was himself an American. Mario Matra, a New Yorker of Italian descent, had traveled with Captain Cook on his famous voyage to Botany Bay in 1770 (Matra in fact claimed to have been the first European to set foot in the area). Matra remained loyal to Britain during the revolution, fleeing like so many of his countrymen to London. His experience as a loyalist refugee neglected by the British authorities, and his observation of the suffering of his fellow Americans in exile, led him to propose a new settlement in New South Wales “to atone for the loss of the American colonies.” While his plan to settle American loyalist refugees in Australia would be scrapped in favor of a penal colony, his proposal was instrumental in raising the possibility of planting a marginal population, unwanted in Britain, in New South Wales.19
For Americans and British alike, the leg of the journey between the Cape and Botany Bay was, despite its relatively uncharted nature, perhaps the most pleasant, with fair weather and good winds allowing for rapid progress. Despite a freak gale off the Australian coast, the fleet reached Botany Bay on January 21, 1788, a little over eight months after departing from England. In a letter home to his brother, George Worgan, a surgeon assigned to the Sirius, painted a dazzling portrait of Botany Bay as it appeared to the eyes of the first British arrivals. “This Part of the Coast,” Worgan explained,
is moderately high and regular, forming small Ridges, Plains, easy ascents and descents. It is pretty generally clothed with Trees and Herbage Inland; the Shore is rocky and bold, forming many bluff Heads, and overhanging Precipices. On approaching the Land which forms Botany Bay (but I shall speak more particularly to that which forms Port Jackson) It suggests to the Imagination Ideas of luxuriant Vegetation and rural Scenery, consisting of gentle risings & Depressions, beautifully clothed with variety of Verdures of Evergreens, forming dense Thickets, & lofty Trees appearing above these again, and now & then a pleasant chequered Glade opens to your View. Here, a romantic rocky, craggy Precipice over which, a little purling stream makes a Cascade There, a soft vivid-green, shady Lawn attracts your Eye. The Whole, (in a Word) exhibits a Variety of Romantic Views, all thrown together into sweet Confusion by the careless hand of Nature.20
Arthur Smyth was not fooled by the paradisiacal prospect of Botany Bay and quickly realized that settlement would be arduous to say the least. Aptly presaging the problems the settlers would face, Smyth lamented that:
upon first sight one wd. be induced to think this a most fertile spot, as there are great Nos. of very large & lofty trees, reachg. almost to the water’s edge, & every vacant spot between the trees appears to be cover’d wt. verdure: but upon a nearer inspection, the grass is found long & coarse, the trees very large & in general hollow & the wood itself fit for no purposes of buildg or anything but the fire — The Soil to a great depth is nothing but a black sand wh. when exposed to the intense heat of the Sun by removing the surrounding trees, is not fit for the vegitation of anything, even the grass itself then dying away, wh. in the shade appears green & flourishing; add to this that every part of the growth is in a manner cover’d wt. black & red Ants of a most enormous size.
Time would shortly prove Smyth’s disenchanted assessment correct.21
In the days after their arrival in Botany Bay, Governor Phillip began exploring the area for a more suitable place to settle. To the north of Botany Bay, a more promising site was found at Port Jackson, where Phillip described finding “the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security.” It was decided that this natural harbor would be a much more felicitous place to build the new colony, and thus, six days after making their initial landfall at Botany Bay, the troops and convicts were landed at Port Jackson, and the hard work of building the colony began in earnest. According to Jacob Nagle:
The troops landed and pitched their tents, and convicts to clear away the ground. The governor had a frame canvas house brought from England and that was set up on the east side of the run of fresh water at the head of the cove, and the Lieutenant Governor, Major Ross, officers and troops encamped on the west side of the run of water. In the center, the men and women were incamped on the west side, but the women by themselves, and sentries placed through all the camp, likewise a guard on the Governors side . . . The convicts ware amediately employed in cutting down timber and clearing to build log houses for the officers and soldiers on the west side, and fencing in ground, and the women employed carrying stones away into the corners of the fences.22
Around 150,000 men, women, and children would be forcibly resettled in New South Wales over the course of the next fifty years. As in so many colonial contexts, as European settlement expanded conflicts with indigenous peoples intensified, for despite what many in Britain may have thought, Australia was not an empty land. The area around Botany Bay was inhabited by a fair number of indigenous Australians—the Wangal, Cadigal, and Cammeraygal clans of the Eora people, numbering between 1,500 and 4,000—and thus contact between the British and indigenous inhabitants occurred as soon as landfall was made. Cook had spent time in the area a mere eighteen years before, and it is thus likely that strange men
landing on their shore were not entirely unfamiliar or unexpected by the Eora. Still, those on both sides of the first encounters were wary as well as curious. We have no written accounts of these early meetings from the Eora perspective, but the British accounts describe the Eora with a typical combination of superior racist condescension and genuine humanity, a mix of wondrous admiration and disgust.
George Worgan’s description of the Eora is more sympathetic than most, and while he certainly viewed them as crude, and wretched, savages, his account also contains notes of sympathy, admiration, and understanding. From our vantage point, we tend to assume a uniform European chauvinism toward non-Europeans, but there was never a singular attitude toward indigenous peoples. In practice, Western accounts of native peoples ran the gamut between simple revulsion and empathetic romanticism, between Hobbes’ nasty brute and Rousseau’s “noble savage.” Worgan’s account embodies these contradictions beautifully, and is worth quoting at length.23
They are of a moderate Height, few reaching up to 6 Feet, rather slight than Robust their Complexion is of a reddish, Blackish Soot Colour, filthy & dirty to Disgust; Men Women and Children go entirely naked, scorning a Veil as big as a Fig-leaf . . . The Generallity of them, Men & Women, have Scars in different parts of their Body, which in some, seem to have been cut in particular Lines by way of ornament . . . Many of the Women, Old & Young, Married & Unmarried have had the two first joints of the little Finger of the left Hand cut off, this Custom being apparently, practised indiscriminately, We do not know what to conjecture of it. Almost all the Men have had one of the Fore-teeth extracted, but from being so universal we are equally at a Loss as to ye Motive of this Custom, they will sometimes thrust their Fingers into your Mouth to see if you have parted with this Tooth, the Governor happens to want this Tooth, at which they appear somewhat pleased & surprised . . . They are wonderfully expert at the art of Mimickry, both in their Actions and in repeating many of our Phrases, they will say—“Good Bye” after us, very distinctly, The Sailors teach them to swear. They laugh when they see us laugh, and they appear to be of a peaceable Disposition, and have a Generosity about them, in offering You a share of their Food. If you meet with any of them, they will readily offer You Fish, Fire, & Water . . . In a Word, to sum up the Qualities Personal & Mental, (those at least we have been able to discern) They appear to be an Active, Volatile, Unoffending, Happy, Merry, Funny, Laughing Good-natured, Nasty Dirty, Race of human Creatures as ever lived in a State of Savageness.24
To Begin the World Over Again Page 42
