On a merchant vessel, life was even more arduous. Transport vessels were always cramped. In fact, owners generally only tendered small vessels for transport service as larger vessels were more profitably employed elsewhere, on routes where lucrative return cargoes could be collected. Often they were under-manned so that the ratio of ship tons to men was frequently higher than on naval vessels. And on a merchant ship which had been converted for carrying convicts, there were additional difficulties. Marines had to be accommodated to guard the convicts and surgeons to supervise their medical care. To add to the difficulties, the seamen who worked the merchant vessels were inevitably drawn from the dregs of society.
When Phillip’s fleet emerged from the English Channel in high seas and fine weather 300 miles west of Portsmouth, the ships charted a course to take advantage of the trade winds and elemental currents of the Atlantic Ocean. They sailed for Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries. For centuries, when European sailing ships headed south out of the North Atlantic, they made their first port of call at the Canary Islands, perhaps at Madeira, occasionally at the Cape Verde Islands. The route to the Canaries was second nature to European navigators. It was facilitated by the northeast trade winds and the surface currents of the North Atlantic. In Stockdale’s publication of Phillip’s voyage, it was said that the Canary Islands ‘seem as if expressly placed to facilitate the navigation to and from the Cape of Good Hope’.
It may seem curious then that the fleet should next make for Rio de Janeiro on the South American coast. But a broad westerly loop, with or without a stop at Rio de Janeiro, was the second leg of a timehonoured route to the Cape of Good Hope. It was dictated by the trade winds and the currents and designed to avoid the Doldrums – or the Intertropical Convergence Zone as the meteorologists call it. In the eighteenth century, the sailing rituals of old were fundamentally unchanged – follow the currents, sail before the winds and follow the paths of seabirds. Thus nature laid an indirect path to the Cape of Good Hope. Off the North African coast, the Canary Current merges with the North Equatorial Current. Fuelled by the southeast trade winds, the latter sweeps across the Atlantic towards the Antilles and the South American coast. There it divides, the greater part being deflected north through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, eventually becoming the Gulf Stream and completing the clockwise circle of the North Atlantic gyre. The smaller part forms the Brazil Current flowing south along the South American coast before being deflected eastwards across the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope. This deflection is known as the Southern Connecting Current and it provides a red carpet ride to Cape Town. When it meets the South African coast it joins forces with the Benguela Current thundering up from the Antarctic. This is the eastern boundary of the South Atlantic gyre, moving in a circular anti-clockwise direction in perfect countervailing symmetry with the northern gyre.
For these reasons, there was no established sailing route directly south from the Canaries to the Cape of Good Hope. There were too many natural obstacles of wind and current. And if any sailing ship attempted such a course, it would first have to pass through the worst of the Doldrums in the Equatorial zone near the West African coast. In this region, the violent thunderstorms and stagnant calms that are a feature of the whole of the Equatorial waters are more frequent. Often there is no wind, not the slightest breeze. And a ship becalmed in extreme heat is a danger to the health of its crew, let alone to any human cargo below decks without adequate ventilation. Here the trade winds of the North and South Atlantic cancel each other out. This convergence, combined with the intense sun and perpetually warm water, contribute to increased atmospheric moisture, which is released in an ongoing series of thunderstorms and squalls. As was so neatly explained in Stockdale’s account: ‘The calms so frequent on the African side are of themselves a sufficient cause to induce a navigator to keep a very westerly course.’ If a ship persisted in maintaining a southerly bearing, it would, when finally emerging from the Doldrums, be slowed by the South Atlantic gyre flowing in the opposite direction. And if it stayed close to the West African coast, it would encounter head-on the full force of the Benguela. Phillip therefore steered a south-westerly course from Tenerife.
There was a point however, before the fleet’s arrival at Tenerife, when Phillip showed his steel and demonstrated his humanity. It was one of those flashes that sometimes reveals the measure of a man. The third lieutenant of the Sirius had engaged in the customary practice of striking some of the seamen with a cane or knotted rope to make them work harder. This was an unnecessary and brutal naval custom that was readily abused and too often connived at. It was known as ‘starting’ and was a delicate issue. Some captains contended that in moments of urgency, there was no alternative to herding seamen about the deck with blows or chasing up the lazy with a rattan. Phillip on the other hand would have none of it. When he heard of the incident, he ordered every officer ‘even to a Boatswain’s Mate’ to the great cabin. There, he informed them that if any officer struck one of the crew, he would ‘break’ him immediately. Those men, he explained, ‘are all we have to depend upon and if we abuse those men that we have to trust, the convicts will rise and massacre us all. These men are our support. We have a long and severe station to go through … if [the crew] are ill-treated by their own officers, what support can you expect of them?’
One would have thought this was clear enough but the incident was quickly followed by two more. In the first, a midshipman ordered the armourer’s mate to carry his hammock on deck for airing, to which the sailor apparently responded by saying that he could not do so immediately as he had a job for the captain. The midshipman, to his discredit, struck the sailor, knocking out one of his teeth. Not surprisingly Phillip was furious. This time he ordered all hands to be turned out on the quarterdeck. To the midshipmen of the Sirius, he explained some home truths, telling them that when he was a midshipman, he had to carry his own hammock on deck and that they ‘were no better than he was’. Turning to the seamen, he said that if he found any man carrying a midshipman’s hammock or a cot, he would immediately flog him. To Phillip’s astonishment, a few days later, a seaman was found carrying a midshipman’s hammock. Determined to see his orders enforced, Phillip ordered the man tied up and directed the Boatswain to have all hands turned out to witness the punishment. Only the entreaties of Captain Hunter and Lieutenant Bradley, together with the fact that it was a first offence, saved the man from a flogging. But Phillip had made his point.
The second leg of the voyage, from Tenerife to Rio de Janeiro through the equatorial waters of the mid Atlantic, involved considerable hardship for everyone – especially the convicts. Food and water had to be restricted. And the high temperatures and heavy tropical rain caused distress and anxiety. In the enervating heat and debilitating humidity of the equatorial region, the convicts suffered. None of them could have been familiar with the ambient temperatures to which they were exposed above decks, let alone the state of incalescence they must have suffered in their cramped quarters below decks. Phillip required the captains of the transports to allow the convicts on deck as often as possible without their leg irons – day and night. However, the use of the exercise area above decks depended on the captain’s discretion and his goodwill, which could not always be assumed. For the merchant captains in command of the transports were drawn from a rougher caste than Phillip, and humanity towards the convicts was often the least of their concerns. They were mostly men of little education or refinement; harddrinking, hard-swearing and occasionally brutal. Concern for the health of the convicts was often secondary to real or imagined anxieties that the safety of the ship would be imperilled or the security of the convicts compromised. And there was ample room for legitimate disagreement.
There were further complications. The principal surgeon, John White, adhered firmly to prevailing naval medical views about the dangers of dampness to human health. He felt it essential that the convicts be kept out of the torrential rains, no matter
how warm the rain or how rapidly the convict clothing might dry in the fierce sun. Thus the practical effect of the regular tropical storms and squalls was to limit the opportunities for the convicts to be brought on deck. Whenever the periodic rains lashed the convoy, the convicts were kept below while rain pounded on the hatches and washed across the deck. The position of the women convicts was even worse. During the suffocating sultry nights they were battened down as a matter of course, whether or not there was rain, to avoid what some officers primly described as ‘a promiscuous intercourse’ with the seamen and marines that was ‘uncontrollable’.
On the Alexander the suffering of the all-male convict contingent was dangerously aggravated for yet another reason. At one stage en route, the ship’s bilge water, from the lowest part of the ship beneath the hold, inexplicably rose to such a level that many became sickly. The noxious effluvia was so powerful that cabin panels and buttons on officers’ jackets turned black. When the hatches were removed, the stench made it scarcely possible to stand over them. Beneath the hatches, in oppressive conditions, in semi-darkness and filth, without portholes, where rats, cockroaches, fleas and bedbugs ran free, the convict squalor was at its very worst. When complaint reached Phillip on the Sirius, he immediately ordered the Alexander’s master, Duncan Sinclair, to pump out and regularly replace the bilge water. Only Phillip’s prompt reaction brought these convicts back from the brink. Sinclair had prior form on matters of health and hygiene, having been responsible for much avoidable sickness on the Alexander when it was moored at Portsmouth.
The heat and tropical squalls were not the only natural phenomena to which the bewildered convicts were exposed. Schools of flying fish abounded in these ocean waters. White recorded his astonishment at the behaviour of the streamlined torpedo-shaped fish, whose wondrous flight is an escape mechanism from predators. More confusing still was the changing celestial panorama of the night sky. At certain times of the year, and for a few hours each night, and only within about 20° north of the Equator, both the North Star (Polaris) and the Southern Cross (Crux) can be seen simultaneously – the former sitting low over the North Pole and the latter on the far southern horizon. If that were not strange enough, the uninitiated would have been startled to see stretching across the heavens the broad, blazing and unfamiliar band of the Milky Way. In the northern hemisphere, the axial tilt of the North Pole, away from the galactic centre of the Milky Way, renders its appearance indistinct and almost inconsequential – no more than a ‘faint silvery vapour’ according to the Scots writer Robert Louis Stevenson, observing from the mountains of the Cevennes in France.
Eventually, at the beginning of August, after a longer than expected two months’ sailing from Tenerife, the fleet approached the capacious harbour at Rio de Janeiro. White recorded in his journal that ‘Captain Phillip for the first time displayed his broad pendant’. This is somewhat surprising given Howe’s refusal to appoint Phillip as commodore. Equally surprising is the midshipman George Raper’s contemporary illustration of the fleet in Rio de Janeiro showing the broad red-forked commodore’s pendant flying from the Sirius’ mainmast. It would seem that like other captains before him, Phillip was prepared to take liberties when beyond the reach of the Admiralty – ‘south of the line’ as it was known.
For the convicts, the arrival of the fleet in Rio de Janeiro was a relief. They were rested and provided with fresh food. For Phillip, it was a homecoming to a port with which he was affectionately familiar. Although his friend and admirer Lavradio was no longer the Viceroy, Phillip knew his successor Vasconcelos, who had befriended him when he visited Rio de Janeiro in 1783 on the Europe and now treated him as someone to whom the Portuguese nation was indebted. Thus the fleet’s arrival was greeted with pomp and ceremony. As the eleven ships entered past Sugarloaf and Santa Cruz, each flew an ensign from the stern and hoisted a pennant from the mainmast. And the Sirius saluted with a volley of thirteen cannon, conforming to a tradition designed to show that by firing and thereby partially disarming the ship, she had no hostile intent. In turn, the Portuguese fort returned the salute with an equal number of guns. When Phillip was ready to disembark, Vasconcelos sent the palace guard to formally receive him as he came ashore. The guard was directed to pay to Phillip the same honours as were paid to Vasconcelos as the representative of the Portuguese crown. This was high praise indeed. And at the ensuing vice-regal reception, Vasconcelos ordered that Phillip’s senior officers – but not the merchant captains, the seamen or the marines – be permitted to move freely about the city and its environs unaccompanied by a military escort. This gesture was almost unheard of in security-conscious Rio de Janeiro, and Hunter described it as an extraordinary mark of civility and confidence. All took it for granted that it was due to the standing of Phillip in the Portuguese community.
Phillip knew what to expect of Rio de Janeiro but for his untravelled companions, especially the civilians, the city was a novel cultural experience. The vivacity of the religious processions and feast days that punctuated daily life was a revelation to them, as were the multitudinous convents, churches, chapels and seminaries, not to mention the altars on street corners dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the constant exhibitions of public veneration wherever they went. White the surgeon and Collins the judge-advocate were intrigued by the Portuguese women whose dark and lively eyes seemed to follow the English visitors from balconies and windows and even from behind convent gates. Collins notably lapsed into rhapsody when later recording his impressions. He described the women of Rio de Janeiro as ‘daughters of the sun’ and made other even more Delphic comments about them. But whatever he may have experienced, or possibly imagined, there was little time for attachments.
As usual during the voyage, Phillip’s first concern was the health of the convicts and marines. The sick were taken off the ships, landed on an island in the harbour known as Ilha das Cobras and provided with generous allowances of fresh meat and vegetables. Phillip also procured prodigious quantities of citrus. At Tenerife, the only fresh fruits in season had been figs. And as the voyage progressed, scurvy had begun to make its presence felt. Fortunately, oranges were abundant in Rio de Janeiro. Baskets brimming with Brazilian citrus were brought to the ships and hauled up over the rails. Men on the Portuguese guard boats even amused themselves by throwing oranges onto the decks of the transports. Within a week of arrival, the marine private John Easty described an entirely new culinary experience on his ship – ten oranges a day prescribed for each of the convicts and marines. Soon every symptom of the scurvy receded.
All of the ships lowered their yards and topmasts and overhauled their rigging. An observatory was set up on Enxadas Island in the harbour where Dawes and two of the midshipmen took their instruments. Daily the convicts were served with a pound of rice and a pound and a quarter of fresh meat, together with vegetables and fruit. And Phillip attended to the business of obtaining the flora that would be suitable for the climate in New South Wales. He took on board as many of the seeds and plants recommended by Sir Joseph Banks as he could. They included coffee and cocoa, prickly pear with cochineal insects, tamarind, banana, orange, lime and lemon as well as guava, tobacco and rice. He also procured 115 pipes of poor-quality rum for the marines. It was inferior to rum from the West Indies and the marines said that they drank it ‘only out of absolute necessity’ … of course. Wine was important for medicinal purposes but its limited availability and high price led Phillip to purchase only fifteen of the 30 pipes proposed. One hundred sacks of the bread substitute casada were also purchased. Phillip thought that the sacks, made of strong Russian flax, would serve the dual purpose of providing clothing for the convicts, ‘many of whom are nearly naked’.
There was good-natured fraternisation by the senior officers at many levels, onshore and on board some of the ships. Dawes assisted Portuguese astronomers to establish the then still uncertain longitude of Rio de Janeiro. White assisted the Portuguese surgeon Ildefonso, teaching him the Allenson’s method of l
eg amputation and performing it on one of his patients, to Ildefonso’s consternation. Phillip and Vasconselos enjoyed each other’s company as friends. And at the gates of the Ajuda Convent, three English gentlemen, including the principal surgeon White, basked in the charms of the young ladies who were confined in monastic isolation inside. White wistfully explained how ‘We formed as tender an intercourse with them as the bolts and bars between us would admit of’.
Finally, in early September at the Viceregal Palace, the Portuguese colours were laid at Phillip’s feet and Vasconcelos raised a toast to Phillip. In his private apartments, they farewelled each other as friends. At dawn on 3 September, almost a month after they had arrived, Phillip led the fleet out of the harbour at Rio de Janeiro. The fort at Santa Cruz performed a 21-gun salute, the highest national honour. And the Sirius duly responded gun for gun. Phillip then charted a course southeast across the South Atlantic Ocean. For the next five weeks, the conditions were robust and challenging. The weather was stormier than it had been during the first and second stages of the voyage and the convoy encountered strong gales and winds for the greater part of the passage to the Cape. The transports pitched and rolled, sometimes shipping large quantities of water, flooding between decks and causing misery to the convicts who were compelled to remain below, wet and seasick. Miraculously, only one life was lost, a convict from the Charlotte who fell overboard. The boisterous weather ensured that the convicts were generally subdued and well behaved, although those in charge of them were not. Surly tempers and bickering began to emerge with more than usual frequency. All yearned to reach Cape Town. When they arrived, 93 convicts and twenty marines were on the sick list.
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