Arthur Phillip

by Michael Pembroke

  It was then that Phillip’s hoped-for reconciliation occurred. In October Bennelong returned with a retinue of friends – like a king returning in triumph. Phillip opened the settlement to the Aborigines, allowing them to come and go freely as they chose. Soon the Eora were constantly among the British and became very familiar. Many of them slept in the houses of officers that clustered on the eastern side of the cove, around the newly built Governor’s residence. Phillip was delighted by the improvement in relations and was personally generous. He allowed Bennelong and his friend Barrangaroo to dine at Government House and had a small brick house built for them on the point that became known as Bennelong’s Point. Here in November, the Eora staged their first corroboree to which the British were invited.

  The improvement in relations, however, was not uniform and some sporadic attacks continued. And a serious setback occurred when Phillip’s gamekeeper McIntyre was savagely speared in December 1790 and died a lingering death. McIntyre had apparently committed some atrocious offence against the Eora for which he was speared with a cannadiul, an Aboriginal death spear studded with lethal jagged stones. When Phillip had been speared three months earlier, he pointedly directed that there be no retaliation. He now took a different approach, ordering Watkin Tench and Dawes to take a party of marines to Botany Bay with instructions to bring back the heads of ten men of the Botany Bay tribe and to capture two men alive for execution. Dawes initially refused, then relented, but regretted doing so and fell out with Phillip. Watkin Tench at least successfully bargained with Phillip to reduce the number of heads to six. Eventually on 14 December a troop of over 50 men departed for Botany Bay armed with muskets, hatchets for beheading, and bags for carrying heads.

  This seemed unlike Phillip. He knew the man who speared McIntyre. His name was Pemulwuy. On its face the object of the hunting party was to take the lives of the innocent instead of the guilty. In reality, it was an extravagant charade. It could not have been otherwise. The marines did everything possible to draw attention to themselves. A string of redcoats lumbered out to Botany Bay, with packs, kettles and cooking utensils bouncing around on their backs, muskets on their shoulders, eyes front, watching every step, feet thudding into the ground, twigs, branches and debris trodden underfoot, everything nosily snapping and cracking. The Aborigines watched from behind trees and among the rocks. They moved silently, stealthily. Few were seen and none was captured. The expedition served only as a melodramatic show of force – to reassure the convicts and to impress the Aborigines. Unless he was unwell, and his judgment impaired, Phillip could not have had a different objective.

  In fact, there were ominous signs of the deterioration of Phillip’s health. He now referred in his letters and despatches to a telltale pain in his side with repetitive regularity. In February 1790, he informed Nepean that his complaint had emerged in the first year of the settlement. In July he told Sir Joseph Banks that ‘I find my health declines fast’ and that he had at times ‘a severe pain in my side’, adding that he was ‘getting little sleep’. In March 1791 he told Sydney in a private letter, ‘For more than two years, I have never been a week free from pain in the side, which undermines and wears me out.’ The following month he told Banks that the pain in the side ‘has almost worn me out. I think it proceeds from an inflammation in the kidney’. In November he told Sydney, once again privately, that he had lately suffered more frequently than ever ‘from a violent pain in the left kidney’. In April 1792 he wrote to Banks complaining of the pain in his side that seldom left him for more than a few days. In May the young William Chapman, with whose family Phillip was on close terms, arrived in Port Jackson and called on Phillip. In his letter to his parents Chapman provides the only firsthand account. He said that he was ‘sorry to inform them that [Phillip] was not very well; his health now is very bad, he fatigues himself so much, he fairly knocks himself up, and won’t rest, till he is not able to walk’. Phillip could now barely continue. His slight, angular body was brittle and his constitution sickly.

  Phillip’s symptoms were indicative of the presence of kidney stones – small solid concretions formed in the kidneys from dietary minerals in the urine. Most stones pass in the urine stream but some cause obstruction of the ureter, which in turn leads to intermittent pain that comes in waves and is felt in the flank between the ribs and hip. It can be one of the strongest known pain sensations. Phillip is unlikely to have lightly described his pain as ‘severe’ and ‘violent’. Dietary factors are the primary cause of stone formation and some have suggested that the affliction was one of the occupational hazards of seafaring life. In Phillip’s case, isolated in a far-flung colony, without adequate food, there was little that the surgeons could do. As the waves of pain coursed through his side, he would have doubled up, colour draining and facial muscles tensing. His sleepless nights would have made him disorientated, perhaps mildly delirious, certainly exhausted and debilitated. Laudanum, if administered, would have added to his disorientation.

  While so afflicted, unable to walk, confined to his chair or forced to seek comfort in his bed, Phillip could no longer function effectively as His Majesty’s representative. In November 1791 he had made his first official request to resign his commission. There had been an earlier private request in April 1790 for leave of absence to attend to his ‘private affairs’ in England but this was refused. Phillip’s health, not his private affairs, was now the overwhelming factor. He told the new Home Secretary, Grenville, that he was ‘induced to request permission to resign the Government that I may return to England in hopes of finding that relief which this country does not afford’. In March 1792 he pressed his request, stating, ‘As my bad state of health continues without any hopes of a change for the better, I have to request that you, Sir, will move his Majesty to be graciously pleased to grant my request, if it has not been complied with before receipt of this letter.’ By October Phillip seems to have been almost desperate. At the beginning of the month, he sent an official despatch with a long list of requirements, adding a final plaintive note in which he observed that ‘the wants of the colony had made it a duty the severest I have ever experienced’. A few days later on 4 October, he wrote again, repeating that his state of health ‘obliges me to hope I shall be at liberty to leave the country’. He did not know that Dundas, who replaced Grenville, had already approved his request and that the official response was on board the Royal Admiral, which was only a few days out of Port Jackson. Dundas’ letter arrived on 7 October. To Phillip’s relief, the new Home Secretary was understanding, graciously lamenting that ‘the ill state of your health deprives his Majesty of your further services in the Government of New South Wales’.

  One might have thought that was all Phillip required. But he was now ambivalent and uncertain. Perhaps he was overwrought. Perhaps it was difficult for him to sever the emotional ties that bound him to the colony he had guided and nurtured from its conception, whose destiny he had shaped, whose people he had struggled to keep alive. Phillip had a profound sense of duty and he would not have wanted any odour of precipitous departure or abandonment – nothing to suggest that by leaving at this point he had failed in his duty. Within days he replied, inexplicably expressing his doubt whether Dundas’ letter was really intended to convey the King’s permission to return. He added that he feared that ‘there is a possibility of its being expected that I should remain until permission to quit the Government is more fully and clearly expressed’. Despite these diffident remarks, there were no further communications. Phillip decided to leave on the first available ship. He was miserable but stoic. His pinched face now creased only rarely into the most formal of smiles. He was suffering, as one historian surmised, from ‘exhaustion of spirit and decay of body’. When White and Collins heard of Phillip’s plans to depart, they also requested permission to return. Collins said that he had lived so long with Phillip that ‘I am blended in every concern of his’. But it would be some years before he or White would see England again.


  Phillip could leave with a clear conscience. He had put the colony on a sound footing. In his final year in New South Wales the settlement’s relative hardships diminished and perceptible signs of a sustainable community emerged. The colony stabilised. The drought that had nearly caused famine in 1790 and 1791 had ended. And the autumn harvest in 1792 was copious. In February, Major Grose arrived with the final company of the New South Wales Corps to replace the vexatious marines. The New South Wales Corps introduced its own problems and brought irreversible changes. Many of its officers were robust entrepreneurs who had purchased their commissions with an eye to profit. The buccaneering free enterprise of these ‘trading officers’ contributed to the settlement’s economic progression in ways that Phillip did not approve and Sydney had not envisaged. But the metamorphosis from the heady idealism with which Phillip founded the colony to the free trade and rumbustious commerce for which the soldiers, settlers and newly emancipated convicts clamoured, was inevitable. As Phillip prepared for the resumption of his English life, a new chapter was opening in the colony that he had founded.

  CHAPTER 12

  SOCIETY

  GENTLEMAN

  Phillip’s return voyage to England, the recovery of his health, his second marriage and life in Georgian Bath

  On 10 December 1792 Phillip embarked on the Atlantic, saluted by a guard of honour from the New South Wales Corps. On the following morning, in the pre-dawn light, the ship weighed anchor and slipped out of Sydney Cove. All of the principal officers of the colony accompanied the Atlantic to the Heads, the entrance to the harbour through which Phillip had first nudged in a longboat on 21 January 1788. The officers then gave three cheers before parting and returning. Also on board the Atlantic was a remarkable coterie. Phillip brought with him four fine kangaroos that were accustomed to sleeping beside the fire in his kitchen at Government House. He also brought dingoes, birds, other animals, plants and timber samples. In addition, he was accompanied by two Aboriginal men, Bennelong and his younger friend Yemmerrawannie. They boarded the ship willingly, despite the distress of their wives and the dismal lamentations of their friends. Another passenger was returning marine private John Easty, who privately recorded in his journal that ‘the state of the colony at this present time seems far better than at any time since the settlement was made’.

  Even for the fit and able-bodied, the homeward passage via Cape Horn was arduous and not without considerable danger. For Phillip, ill and in pain, it must have been a sufferance. Ships such as the Atlantic sailed south from Port Jackson towards Stewart Island at the tip of New Zealand. There at latitude 47°;S, they turned east and ran more or less within the ice zone, staying as far south as possible and seeking the strongest winds until they reached Cape Horn, where they kept the rocky, barren and southernmost headland of Tierra del Fuego on the port bow. In the Drake Passage, between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, the unimpeded westerly winds of the Southern Ocean and the waters of the Antarctic circumpolar current funnel together, surging in the same direction. The result is a matchless intensity of atmospheric phenomena that causes the sailing conditions to be frequently hazardous and often violent. The winds moan and keen and the waves and icebergs sometimes dwarf passing ships. But for all its dangers, when travelling east, the Drake Passage was preferred to the treacherously narrow in-shore routes known as the Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel that thread between the archipelago of islands to the north.

  The Atlantic made rapid progress, reaching the latitude of 47°S by 19 December before changing course and steering east by south into the ice zone. Keeping more or less to the 55th parallel, the latitude of Cape Horn, she bowled along with the westerly winds, encountering much rain, snow, hail and storms, as well as icebergs. In fact, in early January 1793 the passengers and crew had the surreal experience of encountering at least 60 or 70 icebergs. It was like the ice scene in the Southern Ocean graphically depicted five years later in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

  By 8 January 1793 the Atlantic had sailed 4500 miles and was still 1300 miles from Cape Horn. A week later she cleared the snowcovered headland and beat up through the South Atlantic against the wind, into the teeth of rain and squalls, reaching Rio de Janeiro on 7 February. We know not what Phillip did at Rio de Janeiro or where he stayed, although it has been suggested that he was ‘honoured with extraordinary attention’. This seems likely given his reception there in 1787. Easty was given shore leave and recorded in singular and amazed detail the ‘grand and magnificent Romish churches, the statuary, the altars, the candlesticks and the constant blessings and genuflections by the citizens’. This had a familiar ring. The observations of Collins, White and Watkin Tench when the First Fleet visited Rio de Janeiro in 1787 were similar but Easty’s observations have the hilarious intolerance and refreshing frankness of a simple man. He thought their practices were ‘a thing so absurb that is Enough to make a prodstant Shuder’ [sic]. He worried that ‘so Great is thier idolatry thay kneel down when Ever any Images Pass them in the street’ [sic]. And he felt sorry for them, saying that ‘the Ignorance of the Lower Class of people makes me to pity them’.

  It was in Rio de Janeiro that the first indication emerged of another war with France. On 23 February Captain Colnett, who was six weeks out of England, gave an account of ‘great disturbances’ in England and ‘every preparation of war with the French’. During Phillip’s absence in New South Wales, France had been torn apart. In July 1789, while he was puzzling over the smallpox that struck the Aboriginal population, a Parisian mob had stormed the Bastille in Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And only a few weeks before the Atlantic arrived at Rio de Janeiro, Louis XVI had been executed at the guillotine. Then on 1 February 1793, the French revolutionary government declared war on Great Britain and the Dutch republic. Neither Phillip nor anyone on the Atlantic knew of these dramatic events and would not learn of them until they encountered a Portuguese ship in April. Wisely nonetheless, the Atlantic’s captain proceeded with caution, exercising the ship’s great guns with increasing frequency as she moved into the waters of the North Atlantic. When the ship crossed the Equator, the crew amused themselves with the usual equinoctial ceremonies. And if Easty can be believed, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie were convinced that Neptune was a king who lived in the sea. But the reality soon hit home when the Atlantic was fired upon by a French privateer in the approach to the English Channel. It is not difficult to imagine Phillip’s depth of feeling a few days later when the English coast was sighted. Easty recorded in his journal ‘our unspeakable Joy [at landing] in old England’. On 19 May 1793, almost exactly six years after he had sailed from Portsmouth with his complement of 800 convicts, Phillip returned to England with two Aboriginal men of the Eora people. They went ashore at Falmouth, Cornwall and took the coach to London.

  Phillip’s first priority on his return was the restoration of his health. He had been travelling at sea for almost six months and the long coach trip from the Cornish port of Falmouth to London was gruelling. For Falmouth is only a little less distant from London than Penzance, England’s most westerly town. The journey along the coaching road from Falmouth to London, frequently used by returning naval officers, involved over twenty stops to change horses at coaching inns. On arrival in London, Phillip needed to rest, to make arrangements for Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie and to attend to his financial affairs. He was anxious about his wife’s will and the obligations that he had entered into upon marriage and separation. In particular, he had been concerned for several years about the two annuities he had secured. These were the ‘private affairs’ to which he referred in his unofficial letters to Sydney and Nepean in April 1790, when he sought leave of absence to return to England for twelve months. To make matters worse, the onset of war had caused great uneasiness in London’s financial district, resulting in many failures, especially among firms trading with North America. John Lane’s banking f
irm, Lane, Son & Fraser, was one such casualty.

  In London, Phillip consulted his physician and his lifelong friend and banker, John Lane. And he learned that his wife Charlott had died during the previous year. Phillip must have read her will anxiously. It contains many references to him but the terms of the will could only have given him solace. After recounting Phillip’s financial commitments under the marriage agreement dated 18 July 1763 and the separation deed dated 22 April 1769, Phillip’s eyes would have lit upon the comforting words ‘I well and sufficiently release and discharge the said Arthur Phillip’. They were repeated, with excessive lawyerly thoroughness, several times. Charlott released Phillip from the obligations that he had entered into when they married and separated; freed him of the requirement to secure the annuities and to repay his debts to the estate; and left him a legacy of £100 – all on condition that he did not challenge any other provisions of the will, which he did not do.

  When well enough, Phillip attended to official business. In late June 1793 he reported to the Home Secretary, Dundas. And afterwards he discussed the colony’s agriculture and natural products with Banks and Hawkesbury, the President of the Board of Trade, explaining that he would have presented his returns earlier ‘but that I have been much indisposed for several days’. In late July he discussed the formal resignation of his commission as Governor of New South Wales and sought from Dundas the grant of a lifetime pension in recognition of his service. Dundas promised to speak to Pitt on the matter. In due course the administration approved Phillip’s pension effective from the date of his departure from New South Wales, namely 11 December 1792. The pension was half Phillip’s salary as Governor: £500 a year in addition to his naval pay, which would continue to rise as he advanced in seniority. Nor would the pension cease on Phillip ‘attaining any one of those places to which officers look up as rewards for past services’ or to which a commanding officer might in due course expect to be appointed. Phillip had himself suggested the possibility of appointment to a seat on ‘either of the Naval Boards, Colonel of Marines or Greenwich Hospital’. The honour of election as one of the governors of the Greenwich Hospital would have had a touching symmetry given his early education there, but Phillip may have overreached and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty demurred to his request.