Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  The first convict colonists were chosen with care, except towards the end when a bit of a grab bag was added to make up numbers. They were young, as healthy as the horrendous prison system allowed, weren’t guilty of any major crime, and if possible had useful skills. This was their chance for redemption, and when they served their sentences the males would even be offered free land.

  This selection is important. Many of Australia’s first settlers were lazy, ignorant, and prejudiced, but they had also been chosen as those most likely to succeed. (It is also possible that the ‘laziness’ of the first few years was a symptom of widespread depression in new and frightening circumstances, with little hope of return to the life they’d known, rather than a true dislike of hard work.)

  Of the 1487 people on the First Fleet, 759 were convicts, thirteen were convicts’ children and 252 were marines (soldiers sent to sea) and their wives and children. There were also 210 Royal Navy seamen and 233 merchant seamen, but when the ships had unloaded their human and other cargo they would sail away, and these seamen with them, leaving the colony with only the two small ships Sirius and Supply.

  Nearly all the convicts were thieves – pickpockets, sheep stealers, poachers – with seven swindlers and four forgers.2 Most were young but had been starved in filthy, disease-racked prisons and hulks, and lice-ridden and ragged. Almost half the men were farm labourers, and had some farming experience. There was only one gardener and one fisherman, five cobblers or shoemakers, six carpenters, five weavers (including a silk weaver), two bricklayers, a jeweller, a baker and a scattering of other trades. Most of the women had been servants, so could presumably sew and knew the rudiments of cooking. There were also oyster sellers and cloak, hat and glove makers, who would know how to do fine sewing.

  Polynesian brides for the colony?

  Of the approximately 759 convicts, about 586 were male, plus the male marines and sailors. There were only about 217 women in the whole fleet, about 192 of whom were convicts. (This number also included the wives of non-commissioned officers, but as record keeping wasn’t good, various sources give slightly different numbers.) This was at least better than the original plan, in which there would have been only seventy women. A young officer suggested hopefully that Polynesian women would be eager to marry English men. The British government informed the fleet’s captain (and later colony governor), Arthur Phillip, that he might ship five hundred Polynesian women back to the colony.

  If the plan had worked and shiploads of Polynesians had been brought to Australia, our rugby teams might be more successful and our rate of melanoma lower. But the dream of eager Polynesian lovers was as unfounded as Banks’s illusions of a harbour of good trees and grass. The young colony would have more pressing duties for its ships than fetching five hundred dark-eyed women, nor would the women have been likely to come willingly, though admittedly that didn’t stop blackbirders later in Australia’s history from capturing Melanesian slaves to work in the canefields of Queensland. Many Australian men would suffer lifetimes of loneliness until the male–female ratio more or less evened up in the 1870s and 1880s.

  Stripping and scrubbing

  The prisoners’ wrists and ankles were chained before they were sent in open carts from their various prisons to the port of Plymouth, then rowed in small boats out to the waiting ships. On board they were unchained and their filthy rags stripped off before they were washed in two big tubs of water – not so much to get them clean but to get rid of the fleas and lice that might carry diseases. Once a disease caught hold on a ship it might spread to everyone – sometimes ships were found floating and empty, everyone on board dead of plague or typhus, or with too few healthy crew members to sail to shore.

  The convicts were given coarse off-white shirts and trousers; the convict arrows came decades later. Their chains were put back on and they climbed down the ladder to below deck.

  Captain Phillip had argued long and hard with the authorities about providing proper food, tools and clothing for the convicts. A crooked contractor, Duncan Campbell, had stolen half the food supplies, and ignorant Royal Navy bureaucrats had tried to give the fleet only enough food to get to the Bahamas, no cloth for new clothes and only six scythes for an entire colony.

  Phillip got his way, but it is worth remembering how hard he had to work to get adequate supplies. He and the officers would have every reason to make their needs known, in the most vivid terms possible, in letters sent back to the authorities in the future. Even with all his arguing, most of the stores were years old even before they were loaded onto the ships: rancid butter, weevilly flour, maggoty dried peas and hard ship’s biscuit. The food for common sailors was usually the cheapest possible (officers and passengers brought their own stores), and frequently spoiled, but due to Campbell’s conniving, the fleet’s stores may have been even worse than most.

  Finally the ships set sail in May 1787. It was the largest expedition in European history: eleven ships carrying 1487 people travelling 15,063 miles. (Earlier Chinese fleets were larger, and may have journeyed longer.) HMS Sirius and Supply were Royal Navy ships, with naval men and officers. The Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Scarborough, Prince of Wales and Lady Penrhyn were merchant ships chartered by the British government to transport the convicts, as were the three store ships, Borrowdale, Golden Grove and Fishburn. The largest was only thirty-six metres long.

  The only light down below came from the hatch, and the ships stank. The toilet bucket was generally emptied once a day, though in rough weather they weren’t emptied at all. Instead buckets would have floated back and forth in the water between the two rows of bunks, where three convicts shared each bed, along with the faeces, vomit and dead rats. But Phillip provided fresh food wherever possible and, except in storms or when the ships were in port, the shackled convicts were allowed up on deck for part of each day.

  * * *

  Free settlers

  It wasn’t until 1791 on the Second Fleet that a single free settler arrived, James Smith or Smyth, but was found ‘too advanced in years’ to work. Eleven free settlers would arrive in 1793.

  * * *

  Farewell to old England forever

  All on board knew they had about a thirty per cent chance of shipwreck on the way – one in three English ships of the time was lost on each long voyage. And about thirty per cent of sailors might die on a bad voyage, though the convicts would rate their chances at far less. Few, if any, could swim, and the ship’s pinnaces (small wooden boats that could be sailed or rowed in the event of an emergency, or used to row to shore) could not carry more than a couple of dozen people away from a wreck.

  The convicts had been sentenced to either seven or fourteen years, though some had already served several years of their sentence. In five years or less they might be free. But they would face another nine-month voyage, with all its dangers, to get back again. The men might sign aboard as crew; the only hope for the women was to find a man who might provide for them.

  They would have feared the ocean, its storms and, even worse, its doldrums, where no wind blew and ships rotted, becalmed, till all on board died of thirst. Most of all, they would have feared the land ahead. The ignorant might have imagined dragons or cannibals. The better-informed would have been as worried, for they might understand just how little Banks had really experienced of the land he had so confidently selected for them.

  We don’t know what the marines, Captain Phillip and officers ate on the voyage – while they would have eaten some of the official stores, or claimed that amount of stores to sell later (the food ration was part of their wages, and so theirs to dispose of as they wished), they are more likely to have dined on traditional traveller’s fare for the time: ‘portable soup’ (soup bones and vegetables boiled down to a tough jelly before being wrapped in greased paper), dried fruit, port, well-boiled plum puddings, portable lemonade (sugar with dried lemon zest), tough digestive biscuits, possibly long-baked ginger biscuits too, well-smoked hams, wax-wrapped whole
cheeses – all tried and traditional foods for gentlemen to take while travelling. They probably also ate fresh meat, eggs and possibly milk from privately owned animals taken on board. As only the official stock was listed, we don’t know exactly what animals were on the ships when they sailed from England, but it’s likely that the officers followed common practice and did bring some stock.

  Convicts were fed twice a day. At sea the rations for each adult man for a week were seven pounds of salt beef (or four pounds of salt pork) stewed with three pints of dried peas, plus one pound of flour (which equated to about two hunks of bread a day, but due to Campbell’s thieving they often had weevilly rice instead) and six ounces of salty, rancid butter. Women received two-thirds of this.3

  At Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, Phillip ordered the convicts to eat all the fresh fruit they could – and be lashed if they refused to eat – as well as fresh meat and vegetables to help keep scurvy at bay during the next leg of the voyage. At Rio, Phillip bought a hundred sacks of tapioca so that the women convicts might use the tough bags to make clothes for themselves – many were in rags or nearly naked. They also loaded orange trees, guava trees, and prickly pear.

  At the Cape of Good Hope, nine head of cattle and seven horses were led on board, as well as chickens, pigs, sheep – at least five hundred animals – and also plants and more seeds. These were selected by the ‘King’s botanist’ there, Mr Mason (or Masson), according to the account written by David Collins.4 Sir Joseph Banks had hoped that Mason would join the colony. He didn’t, but did make sure they were provided with sugarcane sets, grapevines and quince, orange, lime, lemon, apple, pear and many other fruit trees. As well as the official plants and animals, many of the officers and marines bought more animals, trees and seeds for themselves. All were crammed in below.

  The next part of the voyage was the most dangerous – the great rearing waves of the Southern Ocean where Cape Agulhas marked the place where the Atlantic and Indian oceans met. Sheep would have bleated; convicts clung to each other or their beds. The waves of the Cape were the ship destroyers unless you were lucky to meet them on the few days they were calm.

  The First Fleet was not lucky. Day after day the tiny ships climbed each great wave, then tumbled down between the swells only to face another monster, white-tipped with spray. The storms continued on even when they were past what was supposed to be the worst. Lightning and wind split the Golden Grove’s topsail and blew the Prince of Wales’s mainyard away. But at last the relentless westerly winds were blowing them towards Australia, taking about a month off the expected nine-month voyage. Miraculously, only twenty-three convicts had died during the voyage, fewer than might have died in the squalor and starvation of British prisons or workhouses.

  Finally, on 19 January 1788, the lookout on the Supply saw land for the first time since leaving the Cape.5 The next morning the ships were all anchored in Botany Bay, looking at the land that Banks had promised them.

  Across the world to a sandy waste

  It didn’t look good. Exposed and sandy, with scattered tussocks and twisted trees. No river or even a creek. And on the shore were natives – not the meek inhabitants promised by Banks but warriors with two-metre spears tipped with long, sharp bone. According to the chief surgeon of the expedition, Surgeon John White:

  Although the spot fixed on for the town was the most eligible that could be chosen, yet I think it would never have answered, the ground around it being sandy, poor, and swampy, and but very indifferently supplied with water. The fine meadows talked of in Captain Cook’s voyage I could never see, though I took some pains to find them out; nor have I ever heard of a person that has seen any parts resembling them.6

  If the land looked dismal to the marines and sailors, the newcomers must have looked even worse to the Kameygal people (a clan of the Dharug language group) gathered on the shore. They had seen big ships before – and been shot at by the sailors – but Cook’s men had recuperated in New Zealand, with fresh food and time ashore. These intruders would have been pale from too long with no fresh food.

  The watchers grew wary. A mob assembled on the beach yelling, ‘Warra warra’ – ‘Go away!’ One man threw his spear, though not right at the newcomers. Then a second man aimed his at the marines. A marine fired a blank from his musket. The Kameygal ran, startled by the noise.

  If Australia wants heroes from the First Fleet, we have Captain (later Governor) Phillip. Not only had he secured the supplies that would enable the colony to survive, he had also brought his people safely across the world. He stepped out of the ship’s boat and walked alone towards the angry Kameygal, holding out some bread. His confidence and deep integrity must have shown. The Kameygal returned. They even showed the newcomers where to find fresh water – a seeping spring, not the ample water supply promised by Banks.

  A land to starve and die in

  But the colony had far greater problems than the fact that there were a lot more Aboriginal people than Banks had said. The sheltered harbour they expected could only be reached if the ships passed over a sandbar where they risked running aground. There was no turning back now for far-off England.

  For hundreds of years, Australia had been ignored because of its lack of good harbours. The nearest known good harbour was far to the north, at Endeavour River, near present-day Cooktown, but to get there they’d have to navigate the deadly reef that had wrecked the Endeavour and nearly cost Cook and his crew their lives.

  Cook had already charted this coast minutely and found no harbour, just the small opening between the cliffs he’d named Port Jackson but hadn’t been able to investigate because of the strong southerly. With few other options, Phillip sent a boat of officers north to investigate. It must have seemed a hopeless task, to go where the great mapper and navigator had already found no safe mooring. Large harbours aren’t usually well hidden, nor are large rivers of fresh water. The colony desperately needed both to survive.

  It must have seemed a miracle when they found them: a vast harbour, big enough to house Britain’s entire navy, with deep water close enough to the shore to make transferring humans, stock and supplies relatively easy. The narrow entrance could be defended against invading French or Dutch ships. Port Jackson had fresh water, good soil, and tall, straight cabbage trees that looked (deceptively) as if they’d make superb timber. After a small collision as the ships manoeuvred their way out of Botany Bay, the fleet anchored at Port Jackson and began to unload.

  We can only imagine what the watching Cadigal saw: the big, white-topped ships, the small, pale men wearing what must have seemed hot and heavy skins. It is easier to reconstruct what the newcomers gazed at: the beauty of the harbour, long inlets of blue water, green bush flowing down onto black rocks and golden sandstone; curls of smoke from the fires on the shore; small, low-slung canoes where women fished and children dived into the waves or shrieked as they saw the strange ships. The trees grew thick and strong, and the creek they’d name the Tank Stream flowed rippling down to the water alongside beaches of white-gold sand (most now vanished under port facilities) and great golden-brown fissured cliffs (now hidden behind the hotels of the Rocks and the Toaster at the Quay). According to Surgeon White’s diary entry for 26 January: ‘Port Jackson I believe to be, without exception, the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe, and at the same time the most secure, being safe from all the winds that blow …’7

  They had left Banks’s sandy desert of Botany Bay behind. This was a paradise.

  A food Eden

  In 1787, the year before the British First Fleet arrived, the Dharug people ate extremely well. It only took an hour or two each day to gather enough food and starvation was an almost impossible concept: every metre or so would bring new things to eat. A Dharug woman would eat as she walked, plucking berries or fern tips, the children sucking the nectar from banksias, wattle, melaleucas and grevilleas, or collecting them to soak in water to make the sweet drink called bool. Even a child could pull baby bet
tongs out of their nests in the tussocks, make a bandicoot trap from long grass, catch a snake-necked turtle, pull a sleepy possum from its hole high up in a gum tree, or grab a snake sleepy from winter cold and snap its neck quickly.

  The food was partly cultivated, with fruit and fibre trees and shrubs planted near the best campsites, and partly carefully harvested. The clan moved on before the food source was exhausted. There were also seasonal eel gatherings at Parramatta, whale feasts or grass-seed harvests. Fish were plentiful the year round if you knew which ones to catch according to their season. The Dharug women netted fish or threw lines overboard from their small bark canoes that sat low in the water, with tiny fires on board to cook the fish for their children. Back on shore, long lines were strung up to smoke excess fish as travelling food. Freshwater mussels in the creeks and oysters on the rocky foreshore were there for the taking. The Dharug women even ‘called’ whales to the shore, dancing on the squeaking sand to make a high-pitched whale-like cry. A whale feast lasted for days or weeks. Sometimes the entrails were thrown out into the harbour as a reward for the fish-eating orca whales that had herded the other whale species towards the hunters. The Dharug lit hunting fires, but also dug ground traps and covered them with branches to catch wallabies, kangaroos and emus. Woven reed, lomandra or sticky fig sap traps caught birds and smaller animals like bandicoots. Fruit bats and possums – both excellent eating – were captured while they slept during the day. The women smeared themselves with mud to disguise the scent of human, then lit smoky fires of bark, or banksia cones. As the fruit bats fell to the ground, confused by the smoke, they were grabbed and despatched.