Some indication of the nature of the work that Phillip must have carried out is revealed by a report sent to Nepean two years later by another agent, Lieutenant Monke, a naval colleague of Phillip. Just as Phillip had done when going to Flanders in the early 1770s, Monke used the pretence of travelling to Nice for the benefit of his health. In reality he proceeded to Marseilles and then to the French naval dockyard at Toulon. In Marseilles he learned that ‘all the shipwrights and carpenters, joiners, blacksmiths, locksmiths, rope makers, caulkers, bakers etc etc were gone to Toulon to assist in fitting out a squadron’. Then, in the darkness of night, he followed the postman carrying the mail to Toulon, knowing that the town gates were opened to him at four o’clock in the morning, and that ‘any carriage following very closely might, by a small bribe, take that opportunity of entering the Town’. Once in Toulon, he confined himself to a hotel room all day until he thought the French officers were at dinner.
He then ‘slipp’d downstairs unobserved by the people of the house and went out at a back door which open’d into a very private street that led directly to a spot …’ which was ‘the most advantageous for viewing the shipping in the harbour’. He explained that to reach the viewing point ‘I had to pass six or seven centinels [sic] to arrive at this spot, which all strangers were expressly forbid to approach. But having taken the precaution of frenchifying my person as much as possible, I deceived them by my appearance and gained my point’. Now in position to make strategic observations concerning the number of ships of the line, frigates and corvettes in the harbour, as well as their state of readiness for sail and the numbers of guns which they carried, he retired to a coffee house to consider his next move. Later in the afternoon, when he saw a number of people going into the shipyard, he ‘got into the midst of them and passed the two outside centinels [sic] and the Corps de Garde without being challenged as a foreigner, so much did my appearance favour my design’. But caution prevailed and he soon retreated when he encountered a sergeant’s guard conveying to prison several unauthorised entrants and the bribed or negligent sentinels who had permitted them to pass.
In the evening, Monke excelled himself. He resolved to get himself in a position to overhear the conversations of some of the captains of the French men-of-war. He knew there was to be a play that evening and ‘knew the custom of their provincial theatres was not to light up the house till a few minutes before the drawing of the curtain’. Loitering in the lobby, he observed four or five naval captains, followed them with as little noise as possible, seated himself unperceived behind their box and commenced to eavesdrop. To his satisfaction, the French captains engaged in careless and confidential conversation about naval and military movements, which he managed to record in lengthy and impressive detail. He then had supper in a coffee house and obtained yet more information, including about improvements to the pumps on French men-of-war.
In the morning, Monke must have thought the game was up when he was visited by two ‘sergens de ville’ and asked to state his business – to which he replied that he had come from Marseilles and was travelling to Nice for his health. He quickly resolved to leave Toulon, concluding that ‘a longer stay would be attended with very dangerous consequences to myself’. In England a convicted spy could still be hanged, drawn and quartered. This was the sentence given to the French spy Francois Henri de la Motte in 1781 and the Portsmouth naval clerk David Tyrie in 1782. Monke wisely departed, taking the road to Nice and turning off onto the Aix Road after 50 miles. From this point, he ‘never stopp’d till I reached Paris’, from where it seems, he returned in safety to England.
As a record of Phillip’s clandestine activities, we have nothing quite so vivid. Indeed, such a full account was neither usual nor necessary. Whitehall was interested in the objective information rather than the means by which it was obtained, however colourful those means may have been. Judging by Phillip’s two surviving reports, he was more circumspect in his despatches. But Lieutenant Monke’s frank account reflects the activities of spies of both countries in the late eighteenth century.
CHAPTER 8
PIONEER
The reasons for Great Britain’s decision to establish a settlement in New South Wales and the terms of Phillip’s appointment as commander and governor
Phillip returned from his covert service in France in August or September 1786. He had not served the full twelve months for which Nepean had paid him, but his return must have been at Nepean’s instigation. At the time, a number of issues of national importance were swirling through the corridors of Whitehall that would determine Phillip’s immediate future. Not all of them were generally known or fully understood, but collectively they led to a decision by the administration to establish a settlement in New South Wales. One of those issues was the subject of much press and public agitation. It was well known that Pitt was searching for a solution to the problem of overcrowded jails and overflowing hulks. The way had been prepared after the conclusion of the American Revolutionary Wars when Parliament passed a new act for the resumption of transportation. From August 1784 transportation beyond the seas was permitted anywhere in the world and was no longer confined to places within the existing, and recently diminished, British Empire. But no convenient place could be found, whether within or without the empire. It was not until August 1786 that a decision was finally reached on a suitable location.
That was the domestic problem, but there were also international concerns. Pitt aspired to create a global commercial network, the Admiralty needed secure supplies of naval materials in the East and the South Pacific and there was apprehension about France’s territorial and strategic ambitions in the Indian and Pacific oceans. These were threads in a tapestry that rendered the establishment of a British settlement in New South Wales not merely advantageous, but urgent and necessary. The convicts would facilitate the proposed settlement, but they were not the sole reason for it. They were instead the means by which it would be established. As one historian has observed, ‘The convicts were what they had always been – the servants of mercantilist interests.’
France’s naval build-up had been a concern for some years. It was the very reason for Phillip’s despatch to France in October 1784. By the time he returned to England in mid 1786, the political situation had deteriorated. Among other things, the treaty between the Dutch and the French, which Britain had struggled to prevent by diplomatic means, had finally come into existence in December 1785. Castries, the French Minister of Marine, saw the treaty as enabling French forces, assisted and fortified by Dutch ships and Dutch bases, to overwhelm the British settlements at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta and threaten British wealth and power in India. For Pitt and his Cabinet, there was really no doubt about the French intentions. In February 1786, Harris, still the British ambassador at The Hague, warned that the ‘intentions of France in forming a connection with [the Dutch republic] are too evident to admit of doubt’. Then, over the next few months, the French engaged in transparently provocative actions in Bengal, asserting that their ships could sail up the Ganges River without paying customs duties or submitting to British inspections.
These were the first drumbeats of war. They were followed by alarming news. On 1 August, Harris wrote that there would soon be a major development and that France intended to send troops to the Dutch bases in India. On 8 August, he reported that the crisis ‘is drawing nearer and nearer every hour’. On 16 August, Sydney sent an account of the French naval capacity in the East to George III. Within hours the King acknowledged what Pitt, Sydney and their colleagues knew all too well: ‘France certainly under the name of flûtes can soon collect a considerable naval force in the East Indies’. Three days later Pitt’s Cabinet decided to establish a settlement in New South Wales.
In the background was another issue. Both the British and French claims to possession, on the east and west of the Australian continent, were only conditional. When it came to the annexation of new lands, the international law of nations had two prin
cipal tenets. The first was an assumption that a country could be effectively without an owner, and therefore terra nullius, even when it was inhabited, as long as the occupants consisted of no more than an indefinite population of itinerant hunter-gatherers. Since the time of the philosopher John Locke, Enlightenment thinkers had maintained that ownership of land through habitation could only be established when labour was mixed with the land through agricultural activity and construction. Cultivation was therefore necessary to ownership. The rights of an indigenous population with no permanent settlements, whose members lived by hunting, gathering and fishing, could therefore be ignored.
The second tenet was that a nation’s claim to ‘uninhabited’ land required more than a bare proclamation. Hoisting a flag was insufficient by itself. Any claim would remain conditional unless and until it was followed by occupation and settlement. The principles were set out by the legal philosopher Emerich de Vattel in his influential 1758 text The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law. In it he explained that title to unoccupied land necessitated the formation of settlements and actual use of the land:
But it is questionable whether a nation can, by the bare act of taking possession, appropriate to itself countries which it does not really occupy, and thus engross a much greater extent of territory than it is able to people and cultivate …
The law of nations will, therefore, not acknowledge the property and sovereignty of a nation over any uninhabited countries, except those of which it has really taken actual possession, in which it has formed settlements, or of which it has made actual use.
Cook was therefore just ‘a passing bird’, as was Saint-Aloüarn when he claimed the west coast of the continent two years later. Since neither had established any settlement, nor made actual use of the land, the way remained legally open for other nations to claim sovereignty. This is what makes explicable the British apprehensions in 1785 that Lapérouse might establish a settlement in the South Pacific at New Zealand with French convicts. The intelligence on which these apprehensions was based turned out to be wrong, but it revealed British sensitivities and acted as a reminder, if one were needed, that until a British settlement were established in New South Wales, the French might still win the territorial race. As is well known, the crucial task of establishing a settlement in New South Wales was entrusted to Phillip. He was wary of the French, to which his period undercover in France in 1784–86 no doubt contributed. Tellingly, before his departure for New South Wales, he specifically queried how he should act ‘in case of being opposed by any European ships when I arrive on the coast’. He presumably had Lapérouse most immediately in mind.
Britain’s broader strategic and commercial objectives were a pervasive influence on the whole process of decision. Pitt, who was a Chancellor of the Exchequer before he was Prime Minister, and who professed himself to be a disciple of Adam Smith, envisaged an international trading network to advance British commercial interests in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Like his father before him, he was an avowed commercial imperialist for whom the expansion of British trade was of paramount importance. And he was certainly not a lone voice. To give effect to his aspirations, he needed secure shipping routes, strategic bases and accessible naval supplies. Between Europe and India, Britain was particularly poorly served south of the Equator, where it possessed only St Helena in the South Atlantic, with its unsatisfactory harbour at Jamestown.
The weakness in Britain’s position was highlighted by the problems that beset its India Squadron in the mid 1780s. At a time of enhanced threat from the French and Dutch, the squadron was in dire need of naval materials but was forced to rely on shipments from Europe. Not only was the lead time lengthy and the journey uncertain, but supplies of European timber, hemp and flax were rapidly diminishing. Each 74-gun ship-of-the-line, the navy’s workhorse, used about 40 miles of rope and more than an acre of sails. The manufacture of the rope, rigging and cordage required approximately 168,000 pounds of hemp. And the timber for the ship’s construction had to come from approximately 3400 trees representing about 75 acres of forest. What is more, the vast majority of these trees had to be ‘shipbuilding’ oak trees 80 to 150 years old. And at least a third of the oak timber had to be curved for the knees and breast hooks on which the ship’s integral strength depended.
The necessity of finding new sources of supply explains why, for several years prior to August 1786, there was much speculation within the administration about the potential commercial and naval advantages of establishing a settlement in New South Wales. The proposals of Matra (1783), Young (1784) and Call (1784) all promoted the advantages of navigation, trade and military influence. Specific mention was made of timber for masts from Norfolk Island, New Zealand and New Caledonia and of the flax from which canvas and cordage could be made. When the Beauchamp Committee reported in July 1785, it also noted the need for a strategic and commercial return, stating that a convict colony in the southern hemisphere should ‘promote the interests of future commerce or future hostility in the south seas’. Nepean had no doubt about the strategic and commercial objectives of a settlement in New South Wales. A few months after the decision was made, he mused in a draft letter to an Irish colleague that ‘above all, the cultivation of the flax plant seems to be the most considerable object’. The fact that he annotated the official copy by stating that he had removed this paragraph from the original only reinforces its significance. He clearly thought better of advertising the expedition’s commercial objectives. Sydney also revealed his true feelings. In a communication with the East India Company, he said that the proposed settlement in New South Wales was ‘a means of preventing the emigration of our European neighbours to that quarter’.
These strategic and commercial objectives were not merely contextual; they constituted part of Phillip’s core instructions. Among other things, he was directed to secure Norfolk Island as quickly as possible ‘to prevent its being occupied by the subjects of any other European power’. And he was ordered to attend to the cultivation of the flax plant because it was perceived to have ‘superior excellence for a variety of maritime purposes’. To this end, the fleet was supplied with the necessary equipment for dressing flax and an adventurous master weaver named Roger Murley was induced to join the expedition as a free man. No one connected with the expedition was really under any illusion about the reason for these instructions and their strategic and commercial objective. When the hopes for Norfolk Island flax subsequently failed to materialise, Watkin Tench, an alert junior marine officer, made the uncomplicated observation that ‘the scheme of being able to assist the East Indies with naval stores in case of war, must fall to the ground’.
An additional consideration, tantalising but difficult to verify, appears to have been the proximity of New South Wales to the Spanish Pacific empire, stretching from the Philippines to Acapulco, not to mention the Dutch settlements in Java. As James Matra had pointed out in his 1783 proposal, a settlement at New South Wales could give England a ‘commanding influence in the policy of Europe’. That was because, he said, if England should be at war with the Dutch or Spanish ‘we might very powerfully annoy either State from the new settlement, and with equal safety and expedition, make naval incursions into Java, and the other Dutch settlements, or invade the coast of Spanish America, and intercept the Manilla ships’. These statements, although for obvious reasons not official government policy, received widespread and worldwide circulation, repeated in newspapers in Europe and America.
Notwithstanding the importance and secrecy of all of these issues, the more visible and troublesome question was the domestic convict furore. For ordinary members of the English public, it was effectively the only known reason for Phillip’s expedition to New South Wales. Offshore detention then as now had popular support. But the government needed to find a place to which felons sentenced to transportation across the seas could actually be sent. Since mid 1783, government ministers had been receiving a barrage of complaints from munici
pal authorities about their overflowing jails. The Lord Mayor of London was understandably vocal. Although English judges continued to hand down sentences of transportation, no clear alternative had emerged to Virginia and Maryland, where transportees had usually been sent in the past. Convicted felons simply multiplied in typhus-ridden jails in London and the counties. Not surprisingly, the problem had a very public airing and soon became a source of embarrassment. And it took the government three agonising years to settle on a solution. In the process, some desperate options were canvassed. The major initial focus was on West Africa and the southwest coast of Africa – first at Lemane, an island on the River Gambia in the slave trading region, and second at Das Voltas Bay, near the present-day border between Namibia and South Africa.
But before the schemes for Lemane and Das Voltas Bay were entertained, another option was more than once canvassed which would be comic if it were not so callous. In August 1784 Nepean optimistically enquired of the Portuguese ambassador whether Portugal might be interested in taking malefactors off Britain’s hands. He suggested that the Queen of Portugal might be able to put British convicts to good use as galley slaves; or in the settling of remote parts of her vast dominions; or in the cultivation of land, in mining or in any other forced labour, no matter how difficult or arduous. He even added that they could be transported to the East as soldiers, just as Portuguese nationals or degredados were. But Queen Maria I of Portugal, known as ‘Maria the Pious’, politely declined the offer.
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