Arthur Phillip

by Michael Pembroke

  I paid no attention, nor did I return the fort’s fire; but after the ship was anchored, I waited on the Vice-King and informed him, that unless I received ample satisfaction for the insult offered to His Majesty’s Colours, I should be obliged to fire on the fort.

  When the commandant of the fort was sent on board ‘to make an acknowledgement’ to him, Phillip must have derived some satisfaction, but in truth he achieved little and could not avoid the usual interrogation. He duly answered all questions, co-operating willingly and avoiding further trouble. His failure to comply with the protocol was an error of judgment but any difference between him and the Portuguese officials was happily resolved and quickly forgotten. And in the end, he earned the enduring respect and friendship of the new Viceroy Vasconcelos, who had replaced Phillip’s admirer, Lavradio. Strangely, however, Phillip’s report to Stephens, the Admiralty Secretary, seems out of sync with the agreeable outcome that ensued. Its tone is unrepentantly selfrighteous and belligerent – ‘exaggerating the incident and magnifying his own conduct, perhaps to impress the authorities at home with his firmness and courage’. To similar effect was his reiteration in the same report of the missed opportunity of carrying out raids on the Spanish settlements in the Plate estuary a few years earlier – raids which he had plotted, first with Sandwich and then with Sydney and Nepean. He said the Spanish forces were ‘such as I always thought them. Of five Companies of Regulars, sent out from Cordova only Seven Men returned, the rest were either killed or deserted to the Indians … All the Regulars in Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and the different Guards in the River of Plate do not amount to five hundred Men. No Ship of the Line and only two frigates in the River’.

  Phillip remained at Rio de Janeiro for twenty days, unloading and repairing the Europe and restocking her with supplies and provisions. While there, he added to the menagerie of live animals on board by taking on 20 bullocks to supplement the pigs, goats, fowls and turkeys acquired at the Cape Verde islands. This was normal practice. Phillip’s ship, like any eighteenth-century ship of the line, was not just a fighting machine, but also a floating farmyard carrying as many beasts as could be afforded and housed. Cattle and sheep, pigs and goats, hens and geese, and dogs and cats, were commonplace. Live animals were carried on warships for their milk and eggs, and were butchered for their meat. It was fashionable for senior officers to go to sea with their favourite greyhounds, and cats served a useful purpose in reducing the rat population below decks. On many ships, goats roamed freely. Fowl were generally kept in coops but sometimes also ran free. Below decks, where space was confined and the air frequently malodorous, cattle and sheep created formidable problems in the fodder they consumed, the dirt they produced and the miasmas they created. But they were an integral part of everyday shipboard life. They added a farmyard flavour to the sea air and were considered so natural that on another voyage, the seaman Aaron Thomas wrote approvingly in his journal that ‘this morning when I first came on deck the smell from the livestock was almost as fragrant as a cow yard’, adding that the aroma of their excrement and breath was ‘that of nature’.

  On 5 May 1783 the well-stocked and newly repaired Europe sailed from Rio de Janeiro. She would not make landfall again until mid-June in the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. Phillip had no need to stop at Cape Town and good reason to avoid it. Cape Town was a Dutch possession and, as far as Phillip was aware, the British and the Dutch were still at war. News of the peace did not reach him until a few weeks later when the Europe had a mid-Atlantic encounter with some Indiamen coming from England. However, there was still no treaty – just a general truce to which the Dutch had not assented. It was no doubt for those reasons that Phillip pressed on, charting a course across the Atlantic well south of the Cape of Good Hope and then up through the Mozambique Channel to the Comoros Islands off the coast of Tanzania. This inner passage between the coast of Africa and Madagascar was the original Portuguese trade route to India and the East Indies. It hugged the African shoreline before heading northeast across the Indian Ocean towards the Seychelles and the Maldives. There was another available route, but sound and explicable reasons for avoiding it as well, truce or no truce. It involved skirting around the southern tip of Madagascar and travelling in a more northerly direction to India after stopping at the French-owned Mauritius. The Dutch had first opened this route to keep clear of the uncharted atolls of the Mozambique Channel. In time, Mauritius became a Dutch territory. Then in 1715 the French occupied it and renamed the island somewhat improbably ‘Ile de France’. Phillip remained suspicious of the French, apparently taking the view that Mauritius was best avoided, notwithstanding the truce. This was reasonable, especially when one could not be certain whether a French ship bringing news from Versailles had yet reached the Indian Ocean outpost.

  Phillip therefore made his way to the Comoros Islands, to a place that was rich in the Swahili influence of East Africa and much exposed to the cross-cultural currents of Arab, Persian and European civilisation. More importantly, the islands contained plentiful food supplies. One island, named Johanna, was particularly fertile and for ten days before continuing the journey to Madras, the crew of the Europe replenished wood, water and food there. Phillip even set up a tent on shore, receiving half a dozen small bullocks from representatives of the ruling family in return for muskets, ammunition and a brass box compass. From Johanna, the Europe set a course for Madras, threading her way northeast across the Indian Ocean. Her condition had now deteriorated and she began to feel the effects of the long voyage. The ship’s timbers weakened, showing the strain of both the gales that she endured at the commencement of her voyage and her subsequent long crossings of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the Arabian Sea, Phillip ordered that some of the great guns be stowed in the hold to increase the ship’s ballast and enhance her buoyancy. Then one evening at about eight o’clock, still approximately 700 miles from the Maldives, there was a cry of fire. The flames, which had started in the purser’s slop room, were swiftly extinguished. Edward Spain was this time rightly justified in his observation: ‘I cannot help reflecting what would have been the consequence if the ship had burnt. We were 150 leagues from the coast of Arabia, which was the nearest land. We had near 600 men and 4 women on board. The boats would not have carried above 200 of us.’

  As the Europe rounded Ceylon, heading for the Coromandel coast, the anxiety of all on board abated. From the land, they were greeted by fragrant scents wafting in the light airs – ‘the aromatic smell of the cinnamon with which this island abounds’ as one member of the crew described it. They were now near their immediate objective and reached Madras on 18 July, four weeks after Hughes had fought the last battle against de Suffren. Although Phillip had learned of the peace in May, the British and French naval commanders in the Bay of Bengal had only become aware of the January armistice on 29 June when a British ship flying a truce flag arrived. At Madras there was no harbour and the only anchorage was a mile or more offshore beyond the surf. Phillip presented Admiral Hughes with two of the bullocks from Johanna and several drawings of places that they had visited during the passage to India.

  The condition of the Europe was now as precarious as that of some of Hughes’ ships that had been damaged in battle with the French. A survey showed her to be so badly strained that she was compelled to undergo essential repairs. The carpenters stripped and fished the mainmast, the rigging was overhauled, more guns were stored in the hold and supplies of wood, water and food replenished. When she was ready to sail, Hughes ordered her home, in a squadron of eleven other ships under Sir Richard King’s command. Phillip may have reached his destination but within three months of his arrival at Madras, he turned for England. On 2 October, Commodore King’s squadron including the Europe sailed for Cape Town with a northeast monsoon at its back.

  In late November, near the Cape of Good Hope, in the notoriously stormy seas off Cape Agulhas on Africa’s southernmost tip, the squadron’s progress was cruelly delayed. In this regi
on, known to sailors as the ‘Cape of Storms’, the cold waters of the Atlantic meet the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean. And two great currents, one from the Equator and one from the Antarctic, collide – resulting in the warmer current turning back on itself. These are the wild seas where the legend of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman had its origin. The meeting of the currents generates significant turbulence and contributes to a welldelineated change in the natural history of the area. One consequence is that the kelp beds that thrive in the cold Atlantic waters stop abruptly at Cape Agulhas where warmer water commences. The conjunction also contributes to periodical foul weather and occasional freak waves – to which the many shipwrecks in the surrounding waters attest. Here in these lumpy and dangerous conditions, a number of the ships were further damaged and the condition of the many scorbutic seamen on board worsened. When the twelve ships eventually sailed into Table Bay on 9 December 1783, an astonishing number of the crews had contracted scurvy. Approximately 1800 men were afflicted. One ship, the Monarca, had buried 180 men at sea since leaving Madras. Whether the four women were still on the Europe and, if so, whether they were also afflicted, remains a mystery.

  This was Phillip’s first visit to the Dutch-owned Cape Colony and it provided him with valuable insights that would stand him in good stead for the future. On this occasion, he was part of a squadron of twelve men-of-war whose first priority was the landing of a huge number of scurvy-ridden seamen. When the ships were moored, Commodore King sent Phillip ashore to request permission to land the sick. But the Dutch Governor had received no formal advice of the rumoured truce and refused the request. King sent Phillip back to reason with the Governor and gave him a copy of Sir Edward Hughes’ order to cease hostilities against the Dutch. Only then was the Governor reluctantly persuaded to allow the scorbutic seamen to be landed. He stipulated Robben Island, five miles up the bay from the dock. For centuries this windswept, lowlying and barren island has served as a place of banishment, isolation and imprisonment. The Dutch quarried its stone and salt and incarcerated their political prisoners there. So did apartheid governments in more recent times. In the nineteenth century the British used it as a leper colony. For the scorbutic British seamen in 1783, it was a refuge of sunshine, clear air and above all, fresh food – whose supply was not without its logistical difficulties. For at that time of the year boats could only ply up and down the bay in the mornings before the winds blew up – winds that would prove to be an unpleasant characteristic of Table Bay on future visits during the southern spring and summer.

  Phillip came ashore to reside in the township and to better supervise the resupply of the squadron. This was no easy task as the Dutch were obstructive and uncooperative. While he was there, he had the opportunity to familiarise himself with Cape Town’s structure, its resources and its society. And he was able to observe its slave culture, which differed from that in Brazil. The Cape slaves were not the broadshouldered West Africans who were sent to the Americas. They were more ethnically heterogeneous and came from diverse parts of the East – from Mozambique and Madagascar; from Java, Bali, Timor and Burma; from the Malay Peninsula; from the Coromandel and Malabar coasts of India; and even from China. While he was at the Cape, Phillip met and dined with the Dutch Governor and must inevitably have met the commandant of the garrison, Colonel Robert Gordon. Gordon was of Scottish descent but his service and loyalty were with the Dutch republic. He was also an amateur naturalist who shared his interest with the Scots gardener Francis Masson, whom Sir Joseph Banks had sent to the Cape to collect plants for the gardens at the Royal Palace at Kew.

  The lack of cooperation from the Dutch at Cape Town was so great that Commodore King sent Phillip ahead in February to deliver Admiral Hughes’ despatches and to inform the Admiralty of ‘the difficulties which have attended the refitting of His Majesty’s Squadron at the Cape of Good Hope’. The Europe sailed from the Cape on 20 February and reached Spithead on 22 April 1784. Phillip’s voyage, which had started in great haste and almost never eventuated, thus ended on a personally triumphant note. Its original objective, to provide reinforcements to the India Squadron, was thwarted by the peace. But he had taken the Europe and the ship’s complement of men and women across the Atlantic from north to south and from west to east; twice doubled the Cape of Good Hope; twice traversed the Indian Ocean from Cape Agulhas to the Coromandel Coast of India; and earned the honour of being sent ahead of the returning squadron with the Admiral’s despatches.

  CHAPTER 7

  SECRET AGENT

  Phillip’s role as a secret agent and the reasons for British espionage during the 1780s

  The peace to which Phillip returned in April 1784 was brittle and precarious. Anglo–French relations continued to be marked by mutual distrust and the administration in Whitehall remained wary. The immediate cause for British concern was France’s apparent designs on India and the East. Intelligence reported disguised French warships sailing for the East with guns de-mounted and stored in the hold, as if they were merely cargo vessels or ‘flûtes’. The French expression for this subterfuge was ‘armés en flûte’. There were also reports that France intended to send Admiral de Suffren back to India; and other reports of increased activity in the French naval dockyards at Brest and Toulon. The British consul in Nice reported that the French were working day and night in arming their navy. And the consul at Genoa reported that all the caulkers and carpenters in Marseilles had been ordered to go to Toulon. In early October British agent Mevrow Wolters reported that the shipyard at Toulon had orders to fit all the line-of-battle ships and frigates for sea and that French naval officials expected to have 30 line-of-battle ships ready by the following January.

  Ever since the indignity of France’s losses in the Seven Years War (1756–63), successive French Ministers of Marine had taken the view that the renewal of the navy was a national magnum opus crucial to the restoration of French prestige and the recovery of its valuable overseas territories. At the end of the American Revolutionary Wars, France’s net gains were minimal and its losses were only partly redressed. By 1784, in the months after Phillip returned to England, it had become clear that the upsurge in French shipbuilding activity had reached new heights and that the French and the Dutch were manoeuvring for advantage in India and the East. The administration of the 24-yearold Prime Minister William Pitt was under no illusion about the pretensions of its enemies. In early October 1784, Lord Carmarthen, the Foreign Secretary, stressed the necessity of knowing the extent of the proposed French and Dutch forces in India. The information was essential, he added, ‘in order that we may ascertain the number of ships to be employed by us in that quarter of the world’. In November, Henry Dundas, possibly Pitt’s closest advisor, warned that ‘India is the first quarter to be attacked, we must never lose sight of keeping such a force there as will be sufficient to baffle or surprise’. As Sir James Harris, the foremost diplomat of the age and then British ambassador at The Hague, put it: ‘Our wealth and power in India is their great and constant object of jealousy; and they will never miss an opportunity of attempting to wrest it out of our hands.’

  Renewal of war with France was everywhere anticipated. While British diplomats strived to prevent any possible alliance between France and the Dutch republic, British intelligence simultaneously sought to obtain accurate information about the precise extent of the French naval build-up in the ports and arsenals. On 19 October 1784 Carmathen instructed the British ambassador in Paris to obtain ‘the fullest and most accurate intelligence of the present state of the French marine, of the particular force now fit for, or preparations for service, both at Brest and Toulon, as well as what ships of war may have sailed from either of those ports since the last; and as far as possible, the respective destinations of such ships’.

  In this state of heightened anxiety Nepean once again turned to Phillip. It was only a relatively short time since they had worked closely together on the planning and preparation for the proposed ‘Southern Expedition
’ and on the voyage of the Europe to the India Squadron. And Phillip’s fluency in French, German and Portuguese, his previous experience as a covert agent and his record of discretion, made him a valuable resource. On Nepean’s instigation, Phillip was granted twelve months’ leave from the navy. The official reason for his absence was absurdly meretricious: he was, it was said, travelling to Grenoble ‘on account of his private affairs’. The truth was somewhat different. Nepean had commissioned Phillip on behalf of the Home Office ‘to undertake a Journey to Toulon and other ports of France for the purpose of ascertaining the Naval Force, and Stores in the Arsenals’. On 11 November Nepean entered in the Secret Service Ledger, in his own hand, the details of the payment to Phillip of £150 from Secret Service funds for his salary and expenses.

  In the 1780s the Secret Service operations of the British government were apportioned between the Foreign Office and the Home Office. Strange as it may now seem, the Home Office, not the Foreign Office, was primarily responsible for gathering intelligence on French and Spanish naval operations. This was in a sense a historical accident following a reorganisation in 1782 when the Home Office absorbed the responsibilities of what was known as the Southern Department. Until then, the foreign affairs of state were divided between the Northern Department and the Southern Department. Espionage was an essential allied component of the operations of both departments. The Northern Department’s attention was directed to Russia, the Holy Roman Empire and the northern European states. The Southern Department focused on France, Italy, Switzerland, the Iberian Peninsula and Turkey. Significantly, responsibility for colonies, as well as voyages of discovery and settlement, also came under the umbrella of the Southern Department and therefore, in due course, of the Home Office.