The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  For Holland was the key to strategic power in the East. The forts and harbors of the Dutch trading empire ran from Cape Town to the southwest Pacific. The Dutch monopoly of the Spice Islands was the oldest and toughest obstacle the East India company had to face. Yet the military weakness of this trading empire had been revealed after England declared war on Holland in 1780. The British began a series of inconclusive naval strikes against Dutch bases in the East. In March 1781 a British squadron bungled an attack on the “Gibraltar of Africa,” the Cape of Good Hope, from which East India convoys sailing round the tip of Africa could be harassed by privateers. This backfired badly with the net result that the French, under Admiral de Suffren, reinforced the Dutch garrison at the Cape and held it to the end of the war. Another British fleet captured two lesser Dutch ports which had some strategic influence over the sea lanes to the Bay of Bengal: Negapatam (modern Negapattinam) on the southeast coast of India, and Trincomalee in Ceylon. Soon after, de Suffren retook Trincomalee.

  The lesson Pitt drew from this distant, inconclusive sea war, after hostilities ceased, was that the combination of Dutch depots and French ships posed dangers for the British in India even though Holland was no longer a major sea power. There was a vacuum of naval power in the Far East, and the British had to fill it before the French did. In the postwar negotiations, Pitt tried very hard to reach friendly agreements with the Dutch on seaborne trade in the East Indies, while edging the French garrisons out of the Cape. He hoped (in the words of Sir James Harris, Pitt’s minister at The Hague) “not only to separate the Interests of the Dutch East India Company from those of France, but to unite them with those of Great-Britain.”13 The fabric of England’s Far Eastern trade was too delicate to permit anything but conciliation in dealing with the Dutch. If provoked again, they could join the French to drive England from the East Indies.

  But though there was no doubt that the French wanted India, they lacked the military force to take it. After the peace of 1783, they made a series of diplomatic moves to weaken British influence there. In 1785 they struck a treaty with the Bey in Cairo to give them trading rights in Egypt, which was seen as a distant gambit to a possible invasion of India. They also formed a chartered trading company, the French East India Company of Calonne, to compete with Britain’s East India Company. The peace settlement had called for a balance between British and French fleets in Indian seas—the understood figure was five warships each, none larger than 64 guns. There was some British concern (more from spies and diplomats than from naval men) when it appeared that the French East India Company was using decommissioned 64-gun cruisers, known as flûtes, as merchantmen. Their lower gun-decks had been removed, but in theory they could soon be re-armed. On the other hand, the French thought the massive and growing tonnage of British East India merchant fleets from the Cape to Canton could easily be converted to war, and they too were right. Despite the highly colored intelligence reports it got, there is no sign that Pitt’s government saw the French flûtes as a grave threat.

  Its main field of concern, in the problem of keeping the Indian trade routes open, was relations between the French and the Dutch. French postwar diplomacy concentrated on the majority faction in the Dutch government, the Patriot Party. At the end of 1785, France and Holland signed a treaty of defensive alliance. Early in 1786, the Patriots took control of the Dutch East India Company and, encouraged by their French allies, moved to put thousands more troops into the Cape and Trincomalee. The French also pressed the Patriots to take all military decisions about India and the Cape from the ailing hands of the Dutch East India Company. Sir James Harris gloomily reported to Pitt in March 1786 that France had told the Dutch Patriots “that a Rupture with England in Asia is not of a very distant Period—no Time should be lost in augmenting [British] Naval and Land Force in that Quarter of the World.”14

  The threat of such a “rupture,” according to the strategic-outlier arguments of Australian historians like Frost and Blainey, led to Botany Bay. The reason lay in pines and flax.

  In eighteenth-century strategy, pine trees and flax had the naval importance that oil and uranium hold today. All masts and spars were of pine, and flax was the raw stuff of ships’ canvas; neither could be had in quantity in the Far East, although there was plenty of coir fiber for rigging. A first-rate ship of the line needed immense quantities of spar timber. The mainmast of a 74-gun first-rater was three feet thick at the base, and rose 108 feet from keelson to truck—a single tree, dead straight and flawlessly solid. Such a vessel needed some 22 masts and yards as well. No other timber would do. Only conifers made good masts, because of their natural straightness and because the pine resin cut down friction between the fibers in their grain. This second characteristic made the great sticks relatively supple, so that they could absorb the punishing stress of heavy-weather sailing.

  No such spar timber grew in the British Isles or in India. It all had to come from Riga, on the Baltic coast of Russia. The flax for sails also came from Russia, and England spent half a million pounds a year importing it. The supply line from Riga to Portsmouth through Russian and Scandinavian territorial waters was 1,700 miles long and highly vulnerable to shifts of alliance between England, France and their northern neighbors. Even when these strategic materials reached England, they still had 10,000 miles to go before they could be of use to a British squadron in the Far East. Hence the anxiety of the British in September 1784, when France got from Sweden the right to put a naval depot on the island of Göteborg at the mouth of the Baltic; from there, French ships could harass the British timber-transports.

  One reason for the French-British naval stalemate in Indian seas in 1782 was the drastic shortage of spar timber, all of which had to be shipped from Europe. “There was not anywhere in India, so much as a Spar fit to make a Jibb Boom for a 64 gun ship,” Admiral Sir Edward Hughes reported in 1781, “nor any Timber to be had of a size to make an Anchor Stock for a Line of Battle Ship.”15

  Faced now by the prospect of a Far Eastern war (so the argument goes) Pitt’s counsellors remembered Norfolk Island, a rock that Captain James Cook had discovered in the Pacific a thousand miles east of Botany Bay during his second voyage a decade earlier, in 1774. His track toward it had taken him past several islands on which pine trees grew, some trunks of which were the size of the foremast of his ship, the Resolution. Larger ones, he thought, might well grow on larger islands, and this would be a boon to navigators. As he noted in his log, “I know of no Island in the South Pacifick Ocean where a Ship could supply herself with a Mast or a Yard, was she everso much distress’d for want of one.… the discovery may be both useful and valuable.” His guess proved right. The Norfolk Island pines grew to 3 feet in diameter and 180 feet in height. Better still, the island’s cliffs and shoreline were densely covered with stands of flax, Phormium tenax, seemingly ideal for the manufacture of canvas.16

  Samples of the flax were gathered and, back in England, test pieces of hawser, canvas and twine were made from them. The “New Zealand flax” proved to be exceptionally tough and durable. Surely it, and the pines, were to be seen as a strategic asset for the Indian ships? And—stretching the possibilities further—might not the coast of New South Wales provide an armed haven, a “strategic outlier,” where warships could refit with this timber, sailcloth and cordage, protected by a garrison?

  To some people then, and to later historians, this looked good on paper, but there is no hard evidence that it did so to William Pitt or his ministers. The first man to propose it was an American-born functionary, James Mario Matra (ca. 1745–1806), who had held minor administrative posts in London and diplomatic ones in Tenerife and Constantinople. Matra held no official position in England. He was one of the bit-players in the drama of Empire: a speculator petitioning for a commercial scheme that, he hoped, would give him a job. It is in this light that one must see his suggestion—the first on record—that pines and flax might afford a strategic reason for colonizing Australia. It was read beca
use he, at least, had seen Botany Bay, having sailed as a midshipman under Cook on the Endeavour. He presented his idea in a letter to Lord North, who had briefly replaced Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney, as the home and colonial secretary in 1783. His memo was endorsed by Banks, whose name Matra invoked in flattering terms throughout.17

  It did not involve convicts. To “atone for the loss of our American colonies,” the loyalist Matra proposed a free settlement in New South Wales, a country that held out “the most enticing allurements to European adventurers.” The settlers should be of two kinds: British peasants, and dispossessed Loyalists fleeing from America to find asylum. Matra was an apostle of prophylactic emigration; he wanted to export the British poor before they turned to crime. “Few of any country,” he realistically observed, “will ever think of settling in any foreign part of the world from a restless mind and from Romantick views.” Thus, he reasoned, the Australian colonists ought to be the newly poor, of whom there was no shortage, as the economic woes brought about by the American revolt had caused a serious rural depression in England by 1783.

  Matra rhapsodized on what the colony might produce, with the help of Chinese slave labor: tea, silk, spices, tobacco, coffee. There would be trade with China, Japan, Korea and the Aleutians. Best of all there were the flax and the pines, material “of the greatest importance,” “eminently useful to us as a naval Power.” Through them, the blank coast of New Holland would acquire

  a very commanding influence in the policy of Europe. If a Colony from Britain was established in the large Tract of Country, & if we were at war with Holland or Spain, we might very powerfully annoy either State from our new Settlement. We might with a safe, & expeditious voyage, make Naval Incursions on Java, & the other Dutch Settlements, & we might with equal facility, invade the Coasts of Spanish America … This check which New South Wales would be in time of War on both those Powers, makes it a very important Object when we view it in the Chart of the World, with a Political Eye.18

  Lord North ignored Matra’s scheme, and a glance at the atlas will show why: These strategic promises were puffery. The “facility” with which Chile could be attacked from Sydney involved crossing the whole Pacific. The “safe and expeditious voyage” to Java was some 4,000 miles long, through ill-charted and reef-strewn seas, with a dangerous choke-point in the Torres Straits.

  Lord Sydney replaced Lord North at the end of 1783. He faced a rising clamor over the problem of criminal confinement—the shamefully overcrowded hulks and prisons. As home and colonial secretary, he was pressed to come up with a plan for disposing of British convicts. Matra heard he was casting around for a place to send them, and so he quickly wrote convicts into his plan and re-submitted it to Sydney:

  Give them a few acres of ground as soon as they arrive … in absolute property, with what assistance they may want to till them. Let it be here remarked that they cannot fly from the country, that they have no temptation to theft, and that they must work or starve.19

  Meanwhile, the administration drafted a new bill authorizing the revival of transportation to places other than America, “to what Place or Places, Part or Parts beyond the seas” the Crown might think fit. This Transportation Act (24 Geo. III, c. 56) became law in August 1784. All that was lacking was a place to receive the felons. Lord Sydney passed Matra’s idea of an Australian thief-colony along to Lord Howe, the first lord of the Admiralty, who curtly rejected it as impractical.20 But another naval man liked it, Sir George Young (1732–1810), a future admiral who had served in Indian waters. He advised Pitt that Botany Bay would make a good base for British ships “should it be necessary to send any into the South Seas”; that it should be established by convict labor; and that Pacific flax could replace that of Russia. Like Matra, he fancied that every imaginable cash crop could be grown in New South Wales, “uniting in one territory almost all the productions of the known world.” Although his plan was scarcely distinguishable from Matra’s, Young proposed sending only 140 convicts a year.21

  Another proposal for opening a strategic supply-base in Australia with convict labor came from John Call (1732–1801), a former colonel in the service of the East India company, whose specialty was military engineering. He pointed to “the declining if not … precarious state” of Britain’s East Indies trade, and recommended a British base in either New South Wales or New Zealand, with Norfolk Island and its superior flax as a convict-worked source of naval supplies.22

  Nothing suggests that Pitt gave this more than glancing attention, although his attorney general, Pepper Arden, liked the idea. The strategic argument was ridiculed in July 1785 by a man whose views carried more weight in official circles than Young’s, Call’s or Matra’s: Alexander Dalrymple, hydrographer to the East India Company, who opposed plans to colonize Norfolk Island as a violation of the company’s monopolistic charter. In a report to the Court of the company’s directors, Dalrymple sharply pointed out that serviceable mast timber could be got in Borneo and Sumatra—Chinese and southeast Asian shipwrights, after all, had done without Riga pines for centuries—and that “the best cables in the world” were made from Eastern coir and a palm fiber called gummatty. Dalrymple thought there was every reason to grow Pacific flax in England, but none to bring “so bulky an article” from Norfolk Island—“The absurdity … is too great to merit any serious consideration.” And he heaped scorn on the way promoters like Matra, Young and Call had tried to tailor the idea of a strategic thief-colony to fit whatever the British Government seemed to have on its mind:

  This project of a Settlement in that quarter has appeared in many Proteus-like forms, sometimes as a halfway house to China; again as a check upon the Spaniards at Manila and their Acapulco Trade; sometimes as a place for transported Convicts; then as a place of Asylum for American Refugees; and sometimes as an Emporium for supplying our Marine Yards with Hemp and Cordage, or for carrying on the Fur Trade on the N.W. Coast of America; just as the temper of ministers was supposed to be inclined to receive a favorable impression.23

  But through the flurry of promotional schemes, more attractive to historians as documents today than they had ever been to Pitt’s government at the time, the real problem continued to grow. The jail and hulk population swelled through the winter of 1784–85, and the task of finding a place for transported convicts became perceptibly more urgent. Provincial jails were filled to bursting and even Newgate, whose complete rebuilding by George Dance the Younger was finished in 1785, was already so overcrowded that three hundred convicts had to be taken from it and put in a hulk in Langston Harbor at Portsmouth. On April 20, 1785, as the pressure on Pitt’s government mounted, a committee met to decide once and for all where to send the convicts. Its chairman was Lord Beauchamp.

  The first proposal was the island of Lemane, 400 miles up the Gambia River in West Africa. It was put up by the governor of the Africa Company, a British slaving enterprise. “Notorious felons,” he urged, could be sent there packed in British slavers; stranded on Lemane with natives all around and a guardship stationed downstream in the Gambia River to stop them fleeing to the coast, the prisoners could be left “entirely to themselves” without a garrison and permitted to elect their own disciplinary officers. Many would perish in this African grave, but the survivors would turn into planters.

  The Beauchamp Committee, to its credit, saw through this lunatic scheme, and one of its members, Edmund Burke, spoke against it in the House of Commons. So Lemane was dropped, and the committee was left with two alternatives: Das Voltas Bay, by the mouth of the Orange River on the southwest coast of Africa, and Botany Bay. It closely questioned its witnesses on the cost of sending convicts to Botany Bay, and how to keep them alive and disciplined once they got there. Yet despite the arguments of Matra, Call and Young for a convict settlement in New South Wales, the vote went to Das Voltas Bay, for several reasons. Das Voltas Bay was more strategically located. Unlike Botany Bay, it sat plumb on the main sea route from Europe to the Far East and promised to be an ex
cellent staging depot for naval supplies. A British garrison there could offset a French one in Cape Town. The country behind it was said to be fertile and could serve as a new home for American Loyalists, those displaced and slightly embarrassing reminders of England’s vast failure in the New World. Besides, there were rumors of copper ore in the mountains, at a time when the British Navy had started coppering the bottoms of all its ships to increase their service life in distant seas.24 With high hopes, the government dispatched a sloop to survey Das Voltas Bay in September 1785, but it came back with the news that the place was too dry and sterile to be settled.

  That left Botany Bay as a mediocre second choice. Perhaps its putative access to flax and pines, as raw material to be obtained by convict labor, gave it the edge over other suggested places such as Gromarivire Bay, on the Caffre Coast east of Cape Town, or Madagascar or Tristan da Cunha. But the “strategic” arguments for Botany Bay do not seem to have impressed Pitt. References to them in his correspondence are few and vague. His concern was getting rid of convicts, for by the spring of 1786 he was under severe political pressure from independent MPs to enforce the sentence of transportation and get convicts out of hulks within their constituencies at Plymouth and Portsmouth. “Though I am not at this Moment able to state to You the Place, to which any Number of the Convicts will be sent,” he wrote placatingly to one of these Devon men, John Rolle, “I am able to assure You that Measures are taken for procuring the Quantity of Shipping necessary for conveying above a thousand of them.… [A]ll the Steps necessary for the removal of at least that Number, may be completed in about a Month.”25