Arthur Phillip

by Michael Pembroke

  Once the decision to attack Havana was made, preparations were undertaken with impressive speed and efficiency. The meeting point for all the ships of the invasion force was off Cape St Nicholas, the western headland of the island of Hispaniola, immediately to the east of Cuba and separated from it by the Windward Passage. The Stirling Castle was part of this force, being one of eleven ships in a squadron commanded by Augustus Hervey. Her captain was now James Campbell. In late May 1762, the 156 transport ships carrying the huge expeditionary force of soldiers and slaves gathered together with the line-of-battle ships off Cape St Nicholas. In total, there were approximately 200 ships, formed into seven divisions. George Pocock, the son of a naval chaplain, was the admiral in charge of the fleet and George Keppel, the Earl of Albemarle, was the military commander. His two younger brothers, Commodore Augustus Keppel and Colonel William Keppel, also had prominent roles.

  The most daring feature of the plan – intended to ensure the element of surprise – was the direction of approach to Havana, which is situated on the north coast of Cuba. Virtually all navigators approached from the west, after taking the southerly passage where there was deep and open water, rounding the western end of Cuba at Cape St Antonio and beating east into the prevailing wind along the north coast to Havana. The plan devised by Anson and Pocock was one of the riskiest feats of navigation of the age. They chose to approach from the east, through the virtually uncharted Old Bahama Passage along the north coast, where white surf marked the outer edges of the channel and the shallow aquamarine, cobalt and peacock green waters were perilously cluttered with reefs, shoals, cays and islands. And there were no reliable pilots available to assist. All that could be done was to send a frigate ahead to survey the channel, accompanied by cutters, tenders, longboats and other small craft to take soundings and mark shoals and hazards by anchoring over them or mooring buoys where reefs and cays broke the surface. At night, they lit bonfires on the coral. For a week this unwieldy secret flotilla edged forward warily, searching for a safe passage. Meanwhile in the troop transports, there was apprehension, not only of the enemy they would soon meet, but of the climate and tropical disease. As the tension and wariness of the men increased, Pocock and Albermarle attended to a matter of first importance. On the flagship they drew up and signed a long agreement providing for the allocation of prize money among the soldiers and sailors. After the two commanders and their deputies received their share, nine-fifteenths would be divided between the rest according to rank. If the expedition succeeded Phillip would be entitled to a lieutenant’s proportion of the fabulous riches of Havana.

  Phillip saw much action during the siege, both on board the Stirling Castle and also on shore. The coastline was rank and reeked of unseen pestilence. The heat was oppressive and the English had little resistance to the diseases carried by the ubiquitous mosquitoes. One army major lamented that the hardships sustained by his troops in their approaches against El Morro were ‘altogether inexpressible’. Officers were distraught as men in their hundreds died on their feet or lay sick and diseased in makeshift hospital tents. The navy was called upon to assist the troops by providing cannon, which were landed three miles from El Morro and dragged by seamen along the foreshore on wooden sledges and then inland over steep rocky tracks. Over the same tracks, soldiers and slaves hauled ammunition, rations and kegs of water. The supply chain was congested, and the situation became worse as men stumbled and fell by the wayside, spilling the contents of their boxes, repeatedly halting the line.

  It was debilitating and dangerous work, to which the seamen were unaccustomed. And as they approached the fortress, hauling the heavy cannon, they came under fire from Spanish guns occupying the high ground. On 21, 24, 25 and 26 June, Phillip noted that the Stirling Castle ‘sent ashore a Lieut and forty men to hawl Cannon’. The work continued through July as more and more naval guns and seamen were sent ashore. On 8 July the Stirling Castle provided more 24-pound cannon. Increasingly, the naval detachments were employed ‘in assisting to raise new batteries and in carrying up to them cannon, ammunition and stores’. Pocock reported to the Admiralty that ‘the seamen have performed extremely well at the batteries … They have been commanded by Captains Lindsay and Douglas and lieutenants of the men-of-war’. Phillip was one such lieutenant, and must have witnessed much distress. The effect of yellow fever on such large numbers of exhausted and diseased men was indescribable. Almost nothing could be done for them. They were mired in filth and stench. Their diarrhoea and dysentery went unattended. The eyes of the dying protruded from their sockets; their blackened tongues lolled out of their mouths; their jaws clenched and their teeth rattled. In those pre-Crimea days, a century before Florence Nightingale’s reforms, there was no adequate nursing and very little treatment. For the men who collapsed, the prospect of salvation was negligible.

  At sea, there was another side to the siege. In early July, Phillip’s ship joined in the memorable but ultimately unsuccessful naval bombardment of El Morro led by Augustus Hervey. At dawn on 1 July, four warships approached the fortress – the Dragon, the Cambridge, the Marlborough and the Stirling Castle. Their object was to use naval firepower to breach the castle’s walls but things went wrong from the outset. Hervey’s ship, the Dragon, lost her anchor when weighing. Phillip’s ship, the Stirling Castle, lagged astern. When the ships opened fire, it soon became obvious that while the Spanish guns could not be lowered sufficiently to hit the ships’ hulls, the British guns could not be elevated high enough to strike above the thick lower walls of the fortress. The booming guns and thick smoke created a mighty spectacle, recorded for posterity in the stirring painting by the British marine artist Richard Paton, but the bombardment achieved little. After three hours Commodore Keppel ordered the ships to withdraw. Only slight damage was inflicted on El Morro but the Dragon was badly damaged, the captain of the Cambridge was killed and there were many casualties among the crews. Hervey was so incensed by the conduct of Campbell, Everitt’s successor as captain of the Stirling Castle, that he ordered that he be court-martialled. He was confident, he explained to Keppel, that Campbell’s officers, presumably including Phillip, would ‘represent his conduct more than adequately’. As Campbell was dismissed from the service, their evidence must have been damning. The whole incident is a curious echo of Phillip’s experience at Minorca when Byng disgraced himself. This time, however, Phillip had the opportunity to do more than write to his sister.

  On 13 August 1762, the Spanish finally surrendered Havana. But as Samuel Johnson sadly observed, it was ‘a conquest too dearly obtained’. Approximately 8000 British soldiers and sailors had died from exhaustion and tropical disease. Relatively few were killed by the enemy. The riches that fell to the victors, or at least to those who survived, were stupendous. When accounts were finally settled, more than £737,000 was distributed in prize money. The Keppel family fortune was made by the campaign. And the victory was crowned by the capture of nine seaworthy Spanish ships of the line, on one of which – the 70-gun Infanta – Phillip returned to England. The siege was said to have been ‘the most difficult since the invention of artillery’. In terms of lives lost, it was certainly one of the most costly. For Phillip, the campaign provided him with invaluable experience of artillery and ordnance and brought him into closer contact with Augustus Hervey. Their paths had already crossed at several points before Havana – ‘off Minorca; in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay; at Martinique and Cap Francois’ – and would do so again.

  The peace settlement, ratified in February 1763 by the Treaty of Paris, represented an unparalleled triumph for Great Britain. The war had been her most successful of all time and she emerged as the world’s leading colonial empire. When the treaty was finalised, the geopolitical landscape was set for the second half of the eighteenth century. The colonial world, as far as it was known, was effectively divided between Great Britain and France, Spain, Portugal and the Dutch republic. Great Britain owned Canada, and for the time being retained its thirtee
n colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. It controlled the Mediterranean through Minorca and Gibraltar. It was the most powerful colonial force in India, especially at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, and it had the lion’s share of the fertile islands of the West Indies. The Dutch controlled the Cape of Good Hope and most of the East Indies, where they were the ‘market maker’ for the export of spices and dominated the trade from Java, Sumatra, the Moluccas and Borneo. The Portuguese not only owned Brazil but also Goa on the west coast of India and a series of colonies along the sailing route to the East, including the Azores, Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic; Angola on the South Atlantic coast of Africa; and Mozambique on its Indian Ocean coast. Spain dominated Central and South America, except for Brazil. Not only did it own Cuba, Mexico and the whole of Central America, but also those South American countries that we now know as Columbia, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina. In North America, Spain also possessed much of what is now Texas and New Mexico and in the western Pacific, it controlled the Philippines.

  France, which had suffered most from the Treaty of Paris, still vied with Britain in India and the Caribbean but mourned the loss of its North American possessions, which once extended from the distant north of Canada through Quebec, Montreal, the Great Lakes and as far south as New Orleans. On the Indian subcontinent, it retained Pondicherry, south of Madras as well as the strategic Indian Ocean islands of the Seychelles, Mauritius and Reunion. And on the west coast of Africa, it still had a number of settlements that served an important role in the supply of slave labour for its sugar plantations on the French islands of the Caribbean, of which Martinique and Guadeloupe, which were returned to it, were the most prized.

  Hand in glove with this division of colonial riches was the Atlantic slave trade, of which Great Britain was the leading exponent. The European colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean were economically slave-dependent. Their sugar and tobacco plantations and their gold and diamond mines could not be exploited without the powerfully built West African slaves who were shipped in their hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, across the Atlantic. From Angola slaves were sent directly to Portuguese Brazil. And from Ghana, Senegal, Gambia and elsewhere along the west coast of Africa, British and French merchants despatched slave ships groaning with their tightly packed human cargo destined for plantations in the West Indies and North America. These plantations in turn produced the sugar and coffee that fuelled the salons and coffee houses of London and Paris – in which, ironically, Enlightenment aspirations, liberal ideas and rationalist thought politely fermented.

  CHAPTER 3

  GENTLEMAN FARMER

  Phillip’s first marriage, his period as gentleman farmer in Hampshire, his separation, the years spent in France and the beginnings of his career in espionage

  The Infanta reached Portsmouth harbour in March 1763. Within days of Phillip’s arrival, the Navy Board confirmed his appointment as a lieutenant and shortly afterwards his name was entered in the half pay register – not belonging to a ship, but paid two shillings per day. Phillip was able to add his share of the prize of Havana – £138.10s – but this was insufficient for him to make his way in the world or to establish himself as a gentleman. In the eighteenth century, a half pay lieutenant, even with a small prize, was usually a man in need of financial support. Phillip needed a wife, with means.

  The postwar London to which Phillip returned was the same London to which James Boswell, the contemporary diarist and Samuel Johnson’s constant companion, had arrived a few months earlier. Great Britain was ‘master of the world’ and stood at the apex of its international success. Among London’s middle classes, the pervading atmosphere was one of unbridled confidence, prosperity and ostentation. The daily culture was one of sensation and celebrity, gossip and dispute, and relentless optimistic materialism. Affluent society was driven by fashion, consumerism and aspiration. Getting and spending was everyone’s business. London pulsated with excitement. There was then ‘no place on earth more tempting … to a young man who longed to become somebody’. The prosperity was matched by an exorbitant national debt compounded by the cost of the war, but no one seemed concerned. Even the modestly affluent regarded a slice of serpentine river and a wood as an absolute necessity ‘without which a gentleman of the smallest fortune thinks he makes no figure in his country’. There were 60 newspapers published every week, endless ephemera to buy and almost limitless amusements to enjoy. The pursuit of pleasure reached new levels of secular respectability. What the Victorians later regarded as debauchery was, if not de rigueur, almost commonplace. Calvinist taboos against indulgence were ignored and killjoy denunciations of the pleasures of the flesh were derided. Puritans were objects of ridicule. Boswell’s ‘whim’ with an unidentified lady on Westminster Bridge would not have been an isolated incident.

  The leading feature of female fashion was a low-cut and very conspicuous décolletage. The spirit of the age was so pervasive that even in the north of England a Whitby collier was named The Free Love. Nowhere was the morality of these times better exemplified than in the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh and at the masked balls, ridottos and assemblies that were a feature of the social calendar. These were places to promenade – to see and be seen. In May 1769, a ridotto at Vauxhall Gardens was attended by more than 10,000 people. On his way there, Horace Walpole found himself stuck in a traffic jam of horses and carriages for an hour and a half. These libidinous gatherings were a mere front for assignations on a mass scale. Their raison d’être was orchestrated heterosexual sociability. Their size ensured a high degree of indecent ribaldry and licentiousness. Women were at the forefront and an air of feminine boldness was pervasive. Ladies were assumed to possess strong sexual appetites and the right to their gratification. Masquerades, with their strict anonymity and erotic frisson, promoted an abandonment of decorum – refined nonetheless, and accompanied by an atmosphere of gaiety, beauty and splendour. Older women were emboldened to seek young men of stamina and men of all ages routinely sought women of fortune. One of the chief dilemmas of the age was whether to marry for money or for love. Somewhere in this beguiling social context, at some point between March and July 1763, Phillip the half pay lieutenant found himself a wife. Her name was Charlott.

  Charlott Tybott was born to a farming family in the county of Montgomery in North Wales in 1722. She married Arthur Phillip at St Augustine’s Church in Watling Street on 19 July 1763 – four months after his return to England. On the day before the wedding she and Phillip signed a prenuptial agreement to which Charlott’s sister Mary Thomas was also a party. The bride was 41. Her groom was just 24, a little pudgy and almost penniless. It was not Charlott’s first marriage. In 1759 she had married John Denison but less than ten months later he was dead. Denison had been a prosperous cloth and wine merchant of King Street, Cheapside who owned property in Lambeth and farming lands in Dorset. Upon his death, Charlott inherited his vast estate including a £120,000 trust fund with the Bank of England. It was equivalent to about £200 million in today’s money – depending on the methodology adopted.

  Charlott Denison may have been an attractive prospect for a half pay lieutenant but the evidence suggests that she was no ingénue. She was either financially knowledgeable or was well advised, or both. Denison’s will was proved and its validity established on 4 June 1760. Although it took another four years for the executors to compile and file a full statement of the assets of his estate, Charlott would have known from that date that she had become extremely wealthy. Paradoxically, the acquisition of significant wealth could be a serious problem for women of marriageable age in the eighteenth century. Georgian property law stipulated that upon marriage, the husband became entitled to all his wife’s property, income and belongings. Male suitors with base motives were a social hazard. It was relatively common, at least at the wealthy end of the social scale, for women in Charlott’s fortunate position to enter into a deed of set
tlement vesting in favour of trustees the legal title to their property. These deeds were protective measures – in substance prenuptial agreements – entered into either generally or in anticipation of a specific marriage. They prevented a putative husband from taking ownership of his new wife’s property when the wedding vows were concluded.

  In an age when the length of a person’s rent-roll determined their attractiveness, marriage and settlement were bywords for negotiation and bargain. If a woman of means did not settle her property on trustees to remove it from the clutches of her future husband, she would at least usually require a marriage agreement carefully delineating the respective rights and property entitlements of bride and groom. Sometimes these prenuptial agreements would oblige the husband to secure annuities in favour of the wife or persons nominated by her. More often, the husband would disclaim his entitlement to the bride’s property. By these means, or a combination of them, Charlott’s marriage agreement entered into on 18 July 1763 – on the day before the wedding – protected her fortune.

  The newly married couple lived fashionably. Charlott owned a residence at Hampton Court and she and Phillip appear to have resided there with all the trappings of wealth befitting someone of her financial standing – silver, china plate and carriages being much valued by the Georgians. In the 1760s Hampton was an Arcadian idyll on the Thames about fifteen miles upstream from the City of London. Henry VIII’s palace stands there and in 1764 George III appointed Capability Brown as its master gardener. It was a residential area that attracted the well-to-do and the genteel. It was also David Garrick’s world. Garrick was not only a famous actor and theatre owner but he was pre-eminently a leader of fashion. And he was one of the most well-known residents of Hampton. The locale conformed to the most romantic ideals of the eighteenth century. The paintings by the neoclassical artist Johann Zoffany, of Garrick and his family reposing on the sloping lawn running down to the river depict all those elements that were considered necessary for civilised living – a natural vista, a meandering stream and a home in the classical style.