Not everyone received what was due to them. One of the four main beneficiaries was Mary Ann Lancefield. Her grandson, who was christened ‘Arthur Phillip Lancefield’ in memory of the family’s generous benefactor, grew up to become a clergyman. Years later, he wistfully recalled that his grandmother never received her entitlement. He wrote that ‘all her share of the property was lost in the costs of a Chancery suit of the type of Jarndyce v Jarndyce’. He was referring to the fictional legal case in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House, in which the litigation over an inheritance dragged on for so many generations that the legal costs eventually devoured the entire estate, leaving nothing for the claimants. Dickens used the case as a vehicle for satirising the complexity and torpidity that bedevilled proceedings in the Court of Chancery at that time.
Fact follows fiction and Phillip’s estate suffered a similar, though not quite identical, fate. Thirty years after his death, legal proceedings over his will were still running. If you search carefully through the dusty law reports from the 1840s, only a few years before the publication of Bleak House, you will find an account of Phillip’s will and the dispute over his estate that followed. It is hidden under the name Attorney General v Potter. Potter was Phillip’s last living executor. The dispute, which commenced after Isabella’s death in 1823, involved the competing rights of the principal beneficiaries of the estate and the purchaser of No. 19 Bennett Street. The unhappy case went through layer upon layer of the court system, finally ending up before the Lord Chancellor who was, historically and euphemistically, ‘the keeper of the King’s conscience’ but is probably better known to non-lawyers as the fanciful and absurd ‘Lord High Chancellor’ of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe. In Phillip’s case, the real Lord Chancellor deliberated for a year before finally giving an admirably concise decision allowing the sale to proceed. He did not subscribe to the theory that the validity of a judgment depends on the length of its reasons, and his explanation of its legal basis was only a paragraph long. By that stage all of Phillip’s executors except Potter were dead, as no doubt were most of his beneficiaries.
There were many losers from the litigation, except of course the lawyers who fattened their wallets at every stage along the way. As usual their fees were paid out of the estate, constantly diluting its value and progressively thwarting Phillip’s intentions. Until the Lord Chancellor’s decision in 1844 the contract for the purchase of No. 19 Bennett Street by Dr Bowie, the father of the unreliable Miss Bowie, was still hanging in the balance, unable to be completed 21 years after it was entered into. And more than £1077 for unpaid duty was owed to Her Majesty’s representatives, the Commissioners of Stamps and Taxes. As for the four principal beneficiaries to whom Phillip wished the bulk of his estate to go after Isabella’s death, including Mary Ann Lancefield, the legal costs appear to have cut a swathe through his intended beneficence. We will never know how much they lost or how little they ultimately received. We have only the sad reflections of the Reverend Arthur Phillip Lancefield and the dry words of the Lord Chancellor’s judgment.
Phillip’s estate may have been depleted in death, and not everyone may have received what was due to them, but the most enduring legacy of his life remains the colony that he established; a colony that he thought would one day be ‘the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made’. It has long since ceased to be an acquisition and for over a century has been a proud and independent nation state. Phillip’s memory in Australia is perpetuated in the colossal monument by the Italian sculptor Achille Simonetti, commissioned by Sir Henry Parkes in 1889. The visionary Parkes, the father of federation, who brought the separate colonies together and laid the foundation for a single Australian Commonwealth of states and territories, understood Phillip’s significance. The bronze statue, surmounted on a pedestal of Carrara marble and ringed by base statues of Agriculture, Commerce, Neptune and Cyclops, dominates the broad sweep from the Royal Botanic Gardens across Sydney Harbour and onwards to the Heads – that sandstone portal through which Phillip first came in a longboat in 1788; the same entrance that has since greeted so many ships and so many migrants from all corners of the world.
There are more memorials in England. One is a bust at St Mary le Bow, ‘the Australian church in London’. It was rescued from the rubble of St Mildred’s in Bread Street when that church was destroyed by German bombing during the Blitz in May 1941. Another monument is in nearby Watling Street, depicting scenes from the arrival of the First Fleet, surmounted by a bust of Phillip. In London’s Guildhall there is a Phillip memorial tapestry commissioned by the Corporation of the City of London and woven in Melbourne. At St Nicholas, Bathampton, there is an Australian chapel. It is the only parish church in England with kangaroos in the stained glass windows. All of the woodwork in the chapel is of Australian black bean timber and the floor is of Wombeyan marble. In the south aisle is the Phillip memorial, which faces you as you enter the church and bears the words ‘Founder of Australia’. In Bath Abbey the Australian government has erected a memorial tablet, above which hangs an Australian flag. The tablet describes Phillip as ‘Founder and First Governor of Australia’ to whose ‘Indomitable Courage, Prophetic Vision, Forbearance, Faith, Inspiration and Wisdom was due the Success of the First Settlement in Australia at Sydney 26 January 1788.’
NOTES ON TRAVEL
The writing of this book was the result of a great deal of reading, even more thinking and quite a lot of travel. The City of London was my geographic starting point. I traipsed thoughtfully along its ancient lanes and narrow alleys; visited its churches and searched for the remains of its taverns and coffee houses, its prisons and poor houses. I plied the River Thames from city to estuary, imagining the bustle of London’s eighteenth-century riverside docks and shipyards, and stared in wonder at the imperious buildings of Maritime Greenwich, where the naval pensioners and the ‘orphans of the sea’ once lived in architectural splendour.
In the south of England, I strolled with my wife through the village of Lyndhurst in Hampshire, picnicked in the New Forest and visited the sea at Lymington and Lyme Regis. At Portsmouth, I crawled all over the Victory from bow to stern and from top deck to hold, and spent hours in the Royal Naval Museum. In Bath, I sauntered around the Circus, imbibed the curative waters in the Pump Room, paid homage to Phillip’s home in Bennett Street, sipped coffee in the Upper Assembly Rooms and marvelled at the eighteenth-century fashions on display.
On the continent, I visited Paris, Calais, Flanders and Lille, searching for clues of Phillip’s ‘lost years’. At Gibraltar, I climbed the Rock and looked across the strait to Jebel Musa in Morocco. In Lisbon, I absorbed the remnants of Portuguese historical grandeur and immersed myself in its Maritime Museum. On the Atlantic island of Madeira, I stared out across the ocean from Reid’s Hotel and contemplated the enormity of the voyages of exploration and slavery that passed through the surrounding waters.
At Cape Town, I examined the harbour at Table Bay and travelled by small boat to Robben Island. And in the old Dutch town centre, I investigated with horror the Slave Lodge Museum, the Company Gardens where the slaves once toiled, and the Dutch fort known as the Castle of Good Hope. From the flat top of Table Mountain, I looked west across the South Atlantic, and from the rocky cliff tops of the Cape of Good Hope, I gazed at the turbulent seas that Vasco da Gama first conquered in the fifteenth century. In India, I travelled to Calcutta in Bengal and along the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu, south from the coastal port once known as Madras.
On the far side of the Indian Ocean, I went to Fremantle in Western Australia, to the foremost maritime archaeology museum in the southern hemisphere, where the full extent of the early Dutch and French exploratory voyages to Terra Australis was revealed to me. In Sydney, on the Pacific coast of Australia, I studied firsthand the little coves and inlets, and the Heads at the entrance to the harbour, which remain virtually unchanged since Phillip’s men first saw them in January 1788. And I crossed the Tasman Sea, to Stewart Island at
the southern tip of New Zealand, where sailing ships returning to England turned east to run with the westerly winds and currents across the vast expanse of the Southern Ocean. As for Cuba, Brazil and Cape Horn, I relied on my own research and the accounts provided by friends and emissaries. Their assistance enabled me to form a clear and striking historical picture.
NOTES
Abbreviations used throughout the Notes:
HRNSW 1 Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 1, part 2, Phillip, Government Printer, Sydney, 1892
HRNSW 2 Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 2, Grose &Paterson, Government Printer, Sydney 1893
HRNSW 5 Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 5, King, Government Printer, Sydney, 1897
NA National Archives, London:
– ADM Admiralty
– CO Colonial Office
– FO Foreign Office
– HO Home Office
– PRO Chatham Papers
– PROB Prerogative Court of Canterbury
– SP State Papers
PREFACE
‘a man with a good head … plenty of common sense’ George Mackaness, Admiral Arthur Phillip: Founder of New South Wales, 1738–1814, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1937, pp. 464–65.
CHAPTER 1 Naval education
‘starveling, barefoot, onion-nibbling peasants’ Roy Porter, England in the Eighteenth Century, Folio Society, London, 1998, p. 12.
‘lazy, sotted and brutish’ Francois Lacombe, Observations sur Londres … par un Atheronome de Berne, chez Lacombe, Paris, 1777, in Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Collins Harvill, London, 1987 p. 24.
‘when trade is at stake’ William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons, Aylott & Jones, London, 1848, p. 6; see also Porter, p. 411.
‘easy, glorious and profitable’ NAM Rodger, Command of the Ocean, Penguin Books, London, 2005, p. 235.
‘obscure German wanderer’ Alan Frost, Arthur Phillip 1738– 1814: His Voyaging, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, p. 257.
‘a kapellmeister’ Hughes, p .67.
‘un-English physiognomy’ Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 94.
‘long hooked fleshy nose’ Andrew Tink, Lord Sydney, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2011, p. 220.
‘Mindful of the perils and dangers of the sea’ PROB 6/108; PROB 11/653, NA.
‘a hell such as Dante might have conceived’ The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725–1798, Vol. 5, trans. Arthur Machen, GP Putnam’s Sons, New York/Elek Books, London, 1894, p. 367.
‘an emblem of hell itself’ Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, Pocket Books, New York, 1957, p. 296.
‘the Sons of disabled Seamen’ Establishment for Admitting, Maintaining, and Educating of Poor Boys in the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich …, n.p., London, 1732, article 2. See also John Cooke & John Maule, An Historical Account of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, G Nicol, T Cadell, J Walter, GGJ & J Robinson, London, 1789, pp. 60–77; Pieter van de Merwe, A Refuge for All: A Short History of Greenwich Hospital, National Maritime Museum, London, 2010, p. 5; HD Turner, The Cradle of the Navy, William Sessions, London, 1990, pp. 1–5; Articles and Instructions for the Better Government of His Majesty’s Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich …, 2nd edn, n.p., London, 1741, article 2.
‘seamen, seafaring men and persons’ Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman 1200–1860: A Social Survey, Paladin, p. 123.
‘the darling object of her life’ van der Merwe, p. 4.
‘oneofthe most sublime sights that English architecture affords’, van de Merwe, p. 9.
‘If any boy shall get in by false testimonials’ Establishment for Admitting, Maintaining, and Educating of Poor Boys …, article 8.
‘Arthur Phillip is noted for his diplomacy’ Nigel Rigby & Pieter van der Merwe, Pioneers of the Pacific: Voyages of Exploration, 1787–1810, UWA Press, Crawley, WA, 2005, p. 24.
‘the best Way and Manner’ Turner, p. 157.
CHAPTER 2 Junior Officer
‘young gentlemen’ Michael Everitt to John Clevland, 30 June 1755, ADM 1/1758, NA.
‘All ships sailing up the straits of Gibraltar’ R Baldwin, The Importance of the Island of Minorca and Harbour of Port Mahon, London, 1756, p. 40.
‘no one can see two yards before him’ Roy Adkins & Lesley Adkins, Jack Tar: Life in Nelson’s Navy, Abacus, London, 2009, p. 273.
‘When Admiral Byng hoisted the Red Flagg’ Arthur Phillip to [Rebecca] Phillip, 21 June, PRO 30/8/52, Chatham Papers, NA.
‘Indeed he shall be tried immediately’ Tom Pocock, Battle for Empire: The Very First World War 1756–63, Caxton Editions, London, 2002, p. 33.
‘in England it is thought necessary to kill an admiral’ Voltaire, Candide, J. Nourse, London, 1759, p. 95.
‘are all turned over to the Neptune’ The London Chronicle, 6–9 August 1757, vol. 2, p. 134.
‘Brightly dawned the auspicious morning’ Adkins &Adkins, p. 23.
‘our bells are worn threadbare’ Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 21 October 1759, in Horace Walpole, Letters from the Hon. Horace Walpole, to George Montagu, Esq. from the Year 1736, to the Year 1770, Rodwell and Martin, Henry Colburn, London, 1818, p. 180.
‘Splice, Knot, Reef a sail’ Adam Nicolson, Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero, Harper Perennial, London, 2006, p. 25.
‘altogether inexpressible’ David Syrett, The Siege and Capture of Havana 1762, Navy Records Society, London, 1970, p. xxix; Pocock, p. 212.
‘sent ashore a Lieut and forty men to hawl Cannon’ ‘Lieutenant’s Logbook for HMS Stirling Castle 1759–1762’, ADM/L/S/447, National Maritime Museum, London.
‘in assisting to raise new batteries’ Syrett, pp. xxix, 247.
‘the seamen have performed extremely well’ George Pocock to John Clevland, 17 July 1762, in Syrett, p. 247.
‘represent his conduct’ Augustus Hervey to Augustus Keppel, 3 July 1762, in Syrett, p. 222.
‘a conquest too dearly obtained’ Bennet Langton recalling a passage in a letter from Samuel Johnson to Topham Beauclerk on the death of Dr Bathurst in Havana in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, George Dearborn, New York, 1833, p. 104.
‘the most difficult since the invention of artillery’ Duke of Cumberland to Earl of Albermarle, 2 October, 1762, in George Thomas, Earl of Albemarle, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and His Contemporaries, Vol. 1, Richard Bentley, London, 1852, p. 125.
‘off Minorca; in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay’, Frost, p. 44.
CHAPTER 3 Gentleman farmer
‘master of the world’ See Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World, Jonathan Cape, London, 2004, p. 1.
‘no place on earth more tempting’ Stella Tillyard, ‘Foreword’, in Frederick A Pottle (ed.), Boswell’s London Journal 1762–63, Folio Society, London, 1985 (1950), p. xi.
‘without which a gentleman of the smallest fortune Porter, p. 202.
‘Boswell’s whim’ Pottle, p. 233.
‘principally in domestic disbursements’ The Observer, 15 December 1793.
‘acquiescently fertile’, Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, Collins, London, 1941, p. 119.
‘reason to believe that some days were more severe’ Gilbert White, The Natural History & Antiquities of Selborne, Folio Society, London, 1994 (1788), p. 38.
‘some circumstances occurred’, The Observer, 15 December 1793.
‘constantly attend to what is passing’ Earl of Suffolk to Horace St Paul, 23 July 1773, in Frost, p. 55.
‘ the recovery of his health’ ADM 106/2972, NA.
‘superior to what it was’ ‘Capt. Arthur Phillips. Intelligence. Naval Force at Toulon’, January 1785, ‘Phillips. Intelligence from Nice’, 21 March 1785, FO 95/4/6, fols 499, 501 extract, NA.
‘the unspeakable pleasur
e’ GT Landmann, Adventures and Recollections of Colonel Landmann, Colburn & Co., London, 1852, p. 121.
‘the most difficult since the invention of artillery’ Duke of Cumberland to Earl of Albermarle, 2 October, 1762, in Thomas, p. 125.
‘le Theorie avec beaucoup de Pratique’ Augustus Hervey to Pinto de Souza, 25 August 1774, in Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, The Rebello Transcripts: Governor Phillip’s Portuguese Prelude, Souvenir Press, London, 1984, p. 205.
‘own little knowledge as a field engineer’ Arthur Phillip memorandum, c. October 1786, in HRNSW 1, p. 52.
CHAPTER 4 Mercenary
‘one hundred leagues west’ McIntyre, p. 26.
‘apple of discord’ ibid, p. 44.
‘there are 4,000,000 cruzadas in silver’ … ‘The clandestine trade’ Allan Christelow, ‘Great Britain and the Trades from Cadiz and Lisbon to Spanish America and Brazil, 1759–1783’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 1947, pp. 5, 12.
‘because on the contrary follows the ruin’; Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain Cook, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1955, p. 489.
‘très bon officier de Marine’ Augustus Hervey to Pinto de Souza, 25 August 1774, in McIntyre, p. 205.
‘the English Casanova’ David Erskine (ed.), Augustus Hervey’s Journal, William Kimber, London, 1953, p. xi.
‘princesses, marchesas, countessas’ NAM Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, Collins, London, 1986, p. 255.
‘in England, makes a great difference’ Pinto de Souza to Mello e Castro, 8 November 1774, in McIntyre, pp. 207–08.
‘Apply yourself with diligence’ Christelow, p. 24.
‘He gives way to reason’ Marquis do Lavradio to Mello e Castro, 10 May 1778, in McIntyre, pp. 233–34.
‘a city of churches’ Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal, Cape, London, 1946, p. 91.
‘conspicuous information concerning Phillip’s intelligence’ Mello e Castro to Marquis of Lavradio, 24 January 1775, in Frost, pp. 69–70.
Arthur Phillip Page 25
