The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  It took longer than that. No ship was sent to reconnoiter Botany Bay because, as Lord Sydney and his more able undersecretary Evan Nepean stressed, the hour was late and the British hulks and jails were facing an imminent breakdown. (In one hulk riot, in March 1786, eight prisoners were killed and thirty-six wounded.26) The Government did not have eighteen spare months to send a ship to New South Wales and back; and in any case the Beauchamp Committee trusted what Banks told them of its merits as a spot for convict settlement. Nepean and Sydney also appeared to believe Matra’s claim (supported by Young) that New South Wales was not so very far from the strategic centers of the Far East: “a Months run from the Cape of Good Hope, five weeks from Madras, and the same from Canton; very near the Moluccas, & less than a Months Run from Batavia.” These figures were absurdly low. It took the First Fleet two months to reach Botany Bay from the Cape, with the prevailing westerlies behind it. Returning against them, the run was more like three months. And no ship could reach Canton or Madras from New South Wales in five weeks.

  Attractive though it may have looked on paper to the geographically naïve, the “strategic” argument of Matra, Young, Call and Banks for a convict-colony in New South Wales remained a chimera to which Pitt’s government showed no attachment. The flax industry began weakly and was soon abandoned. No ship (except the Buffalo, a small colonial-built vessel) ever had a suit of sails woven from Norfolk Island flax or sailed under spars of Norfolk Island pine. Although the early colonial governors Arthur Phillip and Philip Gidley King did pursue the cultivation of the flax plant Phormium tenax on Norfolk Island, their home government’s actions spoke louder than its instructions: It sent neither trained flax-dressers nor appropriate tools to the colony. (David Mackay is probably right in seeing King’s enthusiasm for flax production as “a personal and colonial necessity, rather than a strategic one”27; he wanted to be remembered as the governor of an infant state, one with its own export economy, not just as the keeper of the human dump that New South Wales actually was.)

  As for the direct strategic role of the colony, it was nugatory. Port Jackson was thousands of miles from England’s areas of strategic interest and, in any case, the threat posed by French ships in the Far East dwindled to insignificance by the mid-1790s. The garrison sent to guard the convicts was too small and weak to resist a determined invader; not that it mattered, for no invaders were interested. In terms of military advantage, the English presence in Australia at most caused some ripples of apprehension in France and on the far side of the Pacific. In 1790 the Viceroy of Mexico thought there were “not enough forces in our South Seas and the Department of San Blas to counteract those which the English have at their Botany Bay.” A visit to the half-starved, virtually shipless colony of Sydney would have put his mind at ease. Although Napoleon thought about invading New South Wales, he did not try, and the place played no role in the Napoleonic Wars.28

  Thus, despite the talk about strategic advantage that was heard up to the dispatch of the First Fleet in 1787, the actual benefits of the new colony to England were only two: It was a sign of claim, a foothold on the new continent; and, in Evan Nepean’s words, it absorbed “a Dreadful banditti.” For all the hopes, New South Wales was too far out on the geopolitical periphery of the late eighteenth century to do much else.

  In the summer of 1786, Pitt’s Cabinet, having run out of alternatives, decided to found its penal colony at Botany Bay. Lord Sydney’s announcement to the Lords of the Treasury (drafted by Evan Nepean) held a note of urgency: “The greatest danger is to be apprehended” of escape from the crowded hulks and jails, while “infectious distempers” threatened their inmates. Thus “measures should immediately be pursued” for getting the transportable convicts out of England. In round numbers, the first shipment should contain 600 of them (later 750), guarded by three companies of marines. Nepean estimated the cost of the equipment for founding the settlement in Australia at £29,300. Running it would cost the government £18,669 the first year, £15,449 the second and under £7,000 the third; after that, if all went to plan, it would be self-victualling.29

  The proposal to colonize Botany Bay with convicts was formally drawn up (almost certainly by Nepean rather than Sydney) in an unsigned document titled “Heads of a Plan for effectually disposing of convicts” and was presented to the cabinet in August 1786. Its emphasis was clear: The proposed colony would serve as “a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increase of felons in this country, and more particularly in the metropolis.” The secondary benefit of the region’s raw materials was presented at the end of the document: “It may also be proper to attend to the possibility of procuring … masts and ships’ timber for the use of our fleets in India, as the distance between the two countries is not greater than between Great Britain and America.” The author’s eulogies on Pacific flax repeated Matra’s almost phrase for phrase.30

  The cabinet gave its approval; and without further ado, the government chose a man to lead the expedition and govern the new colony. He was found on the navy’s semi-retired list: a man of independent but modest means, living as a gentleman farmer at Lyndhurst in the New Forest of Hampshire. His name was Captain Arthur Phillip.

  v

  WHEN PHILLIP received his commission from George III on October 12, 1786, appointing him “Governor of our territory called New South Wales,” he was one day past his forty-eighth birthday. To judge from the surviving portraits, he was slight in build, with a long nose, a slightly pendulous lower lip, a smooth pear of a skull, and liquid melancholy-looking eighteenth-century eyes. It is a face most unlike the square-boned visage of Cook; one could imagine it under a European peruke, perhaps belonging to a kapellmeister in some little Bavarian court. Phillip was half German. His father, Jakob Phillip, was a language teacher from Frankfurt, who emigrated to London and married a certain Elizabeth Breach.

  Phillip first went to sea at the age of sixteen, in time for the start of the Seven Years’ War against France. Three years later he was promoted to lieutenant, but when peace resumed in 1763, he retired early on half-pay at the age of twenty-five. He married, but the marriage was not a happy one and he was formally separated from his wife in 1769. They had no children. Rural life at Lyndhurst now palled on him, and by 1770 he was back on the active list. In 1774 he got leave to join the Portuguese Navy, then at war with Spain. As captain of a Portuguese ship, Phillip delivered 400 Portuguese convicts across the Atlantic to Brazil without losing a man—a feat that presumably convinced Lord Sydney of his fitness to govern a penal colony.

  By 1778 he was back in the British Navy and in 1779 he received command of the fireship Basilisk. To be past forty with no better post was no triumph, but three years later he had risen to be master of a full ship of the line, the 64-gun Europe. Yet by 1784 he went back to his farm again, on half-pay.

  The best reputation Phillip could have had, in view of this lackluster record, was that of a reliable, forthright and rather unimaginative man; solitary, perhaps; competent on ship and self-effacing on shore. Nobody could have mistaken him for a charismatic leader. He had no apparent political talents. But politicians were the last people the Crown needed in a remote penal settlement. If the colony were to survive at all, it must be run by chain of command, not consensus, led by an eminently practical man. Australia’s remoteness would set free cruelty and madness in some British officers sent to guard convicts there. But power made Phillip equitable and level-headed, and he appears to have believed that at least some of his convicts could be reformed, provided they were isolated. “As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire,” he wrote,

  I think they should remain separated from the garrison, and other settlers that may come from Europe, and not allowed to mix with them, even after the 7 or 14 years for which they are transported may be expired. The laws of this country will, of course, be introduced in [New] South Wales, and there is one that I wish to take place from the moment his Majesty’s forc
es take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves.31

  One could hardly compare Phillip’s words with the clarion speech of a Jefferson or a Lafayette, but they were the only ones verging on the description of a social ideal that would be uttered in, or about, Australia for the rest of the eighteenth century. However, what Phillip was really talking about was apartheid. He had no “democratic” feelings toward the convicts, and his later gestures of apparent equality, such as cutting rations for free and bond impartially in times of crisis, indicated no special sympathy for them. He thought of the convicts essentially as slaves, by their own fallen nature if not in the strict terms of the law. In declaring that “there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves,” he was not suggesting that his new colony would begin free; he was pointing to a remote future in which it might become so, a time when the convict system would have withered away and New South Wales would be populated by free emigrants, English yeomen and planters.

  On August 31, 1786, Lord Sydney told the Admiralty that the voyage was going ahead, and instructed it to commission the fleet. There were, in all, eleven vessels. Only two of them were naval warships—the flagship Sirius and the brig-rigged sloop Supply. The rest were converted merchantmen. The Navy Board chose three storeships—Borrowdale (272 tons), Fishburn (378 tons) and Golden Grove (331 tons)—and six transports: Alexander (452 tons), Charlotte (345 tons), Friendship (278 tons), Lady Penrhyn (338 tons), Prince of Wales (333 tons) and Scarborough (418 tons). Most of them were fairly new vessels; Scarborough, the oldest, had been launched in 1781. The terms of the charter contract were that all of these ships, except the naval vessels, would cost the Government 10 shillings per register ton per month. Assuming an eight months’ passage out and the same back, the government would have to pay the contractors at least £20,900 for the hire of their ships, and that was the largest single expense of the First Fleet.

  But they were all small vessels, and very overcrowded by modern standards of sea travel. The largest transport, the Alexander, was 114 feet long and 31 feet in beam. In all, the fleet had to carry almost 1,500 people—officers, seamen and marines, women, children, and convicts. That meant a close pack—less than 3 tons of ship per person embarked.32 (The ration on a modern passenger liner is closer to 250 tons per person.) In an exasperated letter Phillip complained that his passengers, convicts and marines alike, “after taking off the tonnage for the provision of stores … have not one ton and a half per man.”33

  As the winter wore on, Phillip did what he could to call the authorities’ attention to the lack of space. On January 11, 1787 he wrote to Nepean,

  I find that 184 men are put on board [Alexander.] … [T]here are amongst the men several unable to help themselves, and no kind of surgeons’ instruments have been put on board that ship or any of the transports.… It will be very difficult to prevent the most fatal sickness among men so closely confined; on board that ship which is to receive 210 convicts there is not a space left … sufficiently large for 40 men to be in motion at the same time.34

  No craft, then or later, was ever designed specifically to carry convicts; that would have cost the owner too much for too specialized a vessel. It became the practice to dump the bulkheads, sleeping-racks and iron grilles in Sydney before the ships sailed north to China for their cargoes of tea on the home run. The ’tween-deck plans of the First Fleet transports are lost, but the quarters were certainly very cramped for the marines and crew, let alone for the convicts: Four transportees lying in a space seven feet by six feet, the dimensions of a modern king-size bed, were the norm. There was little headroom; Scarborough, the second-largest transport, had only four feet, five inches, so that even a small woman had to stoop and a full-grown man had to bend double. Philip Gidley King, second lieutenant on Sirius, described the security, “which consists,” he wrote in his journal,

  of very strong & thick Bulkheads, filled with nails & run across from side to side in ye tween decks abaft the Mainmast with loop holes to fire between the decks in case of irregularities. The hatches are well secured down by cross bars, bolts & locks & are likewise nailed down from deck to deck with oak stanchions. There is also a barricade of plank about 3 feet high, armed with pointed prongs of Iron on the upper deck, abaft the Mainmast, to prevent any connection between the Marines & Ships Company, with the Convicts. Centinels are placed at the different Hatchways & a Guard always under arms on the Quarter Deck of each Transport in order to prevent any improper behaviour of the Convicts.35

  The prisoners’ quarters had no portholes or sidelights; such things were an innovation and perhaps a security hazard. The lower decks were as dark as the grave, as lanterns and candles were banned for fear of fire. The only fresh air the convicts got was from a windsail rigged to scoop a breeze down a hatchway. In a storm, when the hatches were battened down, there was no fresh air below. In calm weather, prisoners could exercise on deck.

  By January 6, 1787, the first convicts were loaded from the Woolwich hulks, the men onto Scarborough and the women aboard Lady Penrhyn. But two months passed before all the convicts embarked and the eleven ships were mustered at anchor on the Motherbank outside Portsmouth harbor, and they would remain at anchor two months more. The late winter and spring of 1787 went by in a stream of blunders and delays. The bureaucrats of Whitehall naively supposed that the logistics of a six-week slave run across the Pacific could be applied to an eight-month passage to Australia—which, as Phillip kept stressing, they could not. His letters to Nepean and Sydney are full of the complaints of a practical sailor. Luckily, Nepean understood them; Sydney was too insulated or obtuse to do so.

  To begin with, the fleet was undervictualled by its crooked contractor, Duncan Campbell. He had shortchanged the convicts with half a pound of rice instead of a pound of flour—“this will be very severely felt”—and supplying only enough bread to give each prisoner the pitiful ration of six ounces (two slices) a day.36 Even worse, despite the lessons of Cook’s voyages, there were no anti-scorbutics. Phillip knew it would be murder to sail without them, and his letters now grew very blunt:

  The contracts … were made before I ever saw the navy Board on this business.… I have repeatedly pointed out the consequences that must be expected of the men’s being crowded on board such small ships, and from victualling the marines according to the contract which allows no flour.… this must be fatal to many, and the more so as no anti-scorbutics are allowed on board.… [I]n fact, my Lord, the garrison and the convicts are sent to the extremity of the globe as they would be sent to America—a six-weeks’ passage.

  … I am prepared to meet difficulties, and I have only one fear—I fear, my Lord, that it may be said hereafter that the officer who took charge of the expedition should have known that it was more than probable he lost half the garrison and convicts, crowded and victualled in such a manner for so long a voyage. And the public … may impute to my ignorance or inattention what I have never been consulted in, and which never coincided with my ideas.37

  A stickler for detail, a true professional, Phillip knew that survival might depend on the humblest item of inventory and that he had to double-check them all. Why were only six scythes and five dozen razors provided? Could Nepean not see that they would need 560 pounds, not 200 pounds, of buckshot? How would the convict superintendents be paid? Where were the bolts of cloth against the inevitable day when, thousands of miles from Portsmouth, the convicts’ clothes wore out? Phillip begged for fresh meat for the convicts, wine for the sick, fumigants, extra medicine. His masters moved with maddening slowness.

  The work of the embarkation dragged on through late February and March. The convicts came rumbling down to the Plymouth and Portsmouth docks in heavy wagons, under guard, ironed together, shivering under the incessant rain. The pale, ragged, lousy prisoners, thin as wading birds from their jail diet, were herded on board and spent the next several months below; orders forbade them to exercise on deck un
til the flotilla was out of sight of land. The condition of the women provoked Phillip to a furious outburst:

  The situation in which the magistrates sent the women on board the Lady Penrhyn, stamps them with infamy—tho’ almost naked, and so very filthy, that nothing but clothing them could have prevented them from perishing, and which could not be done in time to prevent a fever, which is still on board that ship, and where there are many venereal complaints, that must spread in spite of every precaution I may take hereafter.38

  Who were these First Fleet convicts? It was once a cherished Australian belief that at least some of the people on the First Fleet were political exiles—rick-burners, trade-unionists, and the like. In fact, though victims of a savage penal code, they were not political prisoners. On the other hand, few of them were dangerous criminals. Not one person was shipped out in 1787 for murder or rape, although more than a hundred of them had been convicted of thefts (such as highway robbery) in which violence played some part. No woman on the First Fleet, legend to the contrary, had been transported for prostitution, as it was not a transportable offense. Many were treated as whores, and doubtless some were, although only two—Mary Allen and Ann Mather—had been described by their judges as “unfortunate girl” or “poor unhappy woman of the town.”

  In all, 736 convicts went on the First Fleet. Of these, we know the age or occupation, and sometimes both, of 330 people—127 women, 203 men.39 They came from all over England, but most of them were Londoners. Their main categories of crime were as follows:

  OFFENSE NUMBER

  Minor theft 431