by David Hill
The doctor was called up to see one of the convict womens children which was very ill and had been almost ever since it had been on board. It departs at two o’clock this morning, poor thing. It is much better out of this world than in it … At half after nine committed the body of Thomas Mason to the deep. Henry Lovall, one of the convicts read prayers over it.39
One of the convicts was lost when he fell overboard on the Alexander and drowned. He had apparently fallen into the seas in a high wind. The Alexander quickly lowered a boat and the Supply doubled back to aid the search, but there was a squall and a high swell and he couldn’t be found. Also, on the Prince of Wales, the convict Jane Bonner fell and crushed her spine and died six days later.40
The crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from Tenerife to Rio de Janeiro with less fresh water and fresh supplies than they had planned took almost two months. As a precaution the water ration was cut to three pints per day for everyone a month after the fleet left Santa Cruz (which, although difficult for those on the First Fleet to adjust to, was still more than those on the Second Fleet would receive). The decision was made after Phillip called all the masters of the fleet’s ships to the Sirius to assess how much water was left and how much was being used. With the new ration came the stipulation that the water could only be used for personal consumption, and washing and laundry had to be done with seawater.
Two weeks after the imposition of water restrictions, and with a strong south-westerly wind pushing the fleet along at good speed, Phillip agreed to lift the water ration from three pints to two quarts per day.
By the end of July, only about eight hundred kilometres and a week’s sailing away from Rio de Janeiro, many of the ships began to run short of food, and the last goose was killed and eaten by the officers on the Lady Penrhyn. The ships’ crews supplemented their diet with the flying fish that landed on the decks of the ships, along with fish that they caught more conventionally.
Throughout this long leg of the voyage Phillip continued to have difficulty keeping the fleet together, given the differences in sailing speed of the different vessels. The fastest was the Supply, which not only helped the Alexander in its search for the man overboard but also spent much of the time turning to escort the slower ships. The slowest continued to be the Lady Penrhyn, which constantly struggled to keep up with the others. Eventually the Supply, which was again sailing ahead of the rest of the fleet, signalled it had sighted land on 2 August.
Before the fleet reached Rio de Janeiro, the wind died away, and it would take another four days to reach the harbour. In these conditions it passed a number of ships from a variety of countries, including a ship from Guinea with slaves who were ‘of a strong and robust appearance’ and formed ‘an extensive article of commerce’.41
Rio de Janeiro, or St Sebastian as it was then more commonly named, was a vital part of the Portuguese network of strategically positioned ports that linked up its trading empire, which dated back to the early sixteenth century. At the time of the First Fleet’s arrival Rio was a thriving port, even though the Portuguese Empire, like the Spanish, had been in decline for more than a hundred years, while Britain was only beginning to build hers.
Portugal possessed the earliest and the longest-lived modern European empire, spanning nearly six hundred years from the early fifteenth to the twentieth century. The Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and a decade later Vasco da Gama reached India. In 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral landed in South America, which would lead to the establishment of Brazil. Throughout the 1500s Portugal established a network of ports from Lisbon to Japan, including Goa in south-west India, Mozambique and Angola in Africa, Malacca in southern Malaya, Macao in China, Ormus in the Persian Gulf and Nagasaki in Japan.
Rio de Janeiro, with an estimated population of forty thousand,42 was rich in its own right and exported gold, sugar, rice and rum. Its fine harbour, strategically placed on the east coast of South America, was on the trade-wind route to not only the Americas but also Asia.
Arthur Phillip later explained why he favoured the apparently odd route of travelling to the southern tip of Africa via South America:
It may appear perhaps, on a slight consideration, rather extraordinary, that vessels bound to the Cape of Good Hope should find it expedient to touch at a harbour of South America. To run across the Atlantic, and take as part of their course, that coast the very existence of which was unknown to the first navigators of these seas, seems a very circuitous method of performing the voyage. A little examination will remove this apparent difficulty. The calms so frequent on the African side, are of themselves a sufficient cause to induce a navigator to keep a very westerly course: and even the islands at which it is so often convenient to touch will carry him within a few degrees of the South American coast.43
Indeed, when the First Fleet eventually reached the Cape of Good Hope, it would encounter an American ship in Table Bay bound for India that had taken longer to sail directly from the Canary Islands than it had taken in sailing via Rio de Janeiro.
On arrival in Rio de Janeiro it was again Lieutenant Philip Gidley King who was sent ahead into the port to announce to the Portuguese governor the arrival of the fleet.
All eleven ships sailed into Rio in relatively good shape, considering they had been travelling for three months and had last taken aboard fresh food and water two months earlier in Tenerife. However, by the time the fleet was anchored in the harbour between twenty and thirty convicts had come down with the expedition’s first outbreak of scurvy.44
By the eighteenth century disease – and, most prominently, scurvy – was the largest killer of seafarers, responsible for about fifty per cent of all deaths at sea. (Accidents, largely involving falling from the rigging onto the deck or into the sea, accounted for about thirty per cent; shipwrecks, fire and explosions accounted for about ten per cent; and the remainder were due to fighting enemies at sea.)
It would take the European seafaring powers almost two hundred and fifty years from the first voyages of discovery in the early fifteenth century to find for themselves the simple remedy to this terrible disease, which caused livid spots to appear all over the body, bleeding from every orifice, the loss of teeth, depression and death. Until the mid-eighteenth century long sea journeys had come at great human cost, and phenomenally high levels of fatalities were accepted as inevitable until it was learned that the disease could be largely avoided with a regular intake of fresh food, particularly fruit and vegetables (although, of course, there was no understanding back then of the reason for this: their vitamin C content). By the time of his great voyages of exploration in the 1760s and 1770s Captain James Cook had successfully controlled the disease, and nearly twenty years later the lessons were well known to Captain Phillip and the surgeons of the First Fleet.
The arrival of the ships in port allowed the scorbutic convicts to be treated with a fresh-food diet, while the others were in a condition that delighted the fleet’s officers. Captain John Hunter was to boast that the general health of the fifteen hundred confined to the small ships of the fleet was probably better than to be found in any English town with a similar population.45
Arthur Phillip was to report back to England from Rio de Janeiro that the good health of the convicts was also due to the policy of getting them out regularly onto the decks both during the day and at night.46
During their stay in the port John White would regularly row around the different transports in the harbour to check the condition of the convicts, while the fleet chaplain Reverend Richard Johnson attended to their spiritual needs by going around to conduct church services on the decks of the ships on Sundays.
The stopover also allowed repairs to the ships, particularly to the Sirius, which was found to be leaking badly. As Phillip was to report to the Admiralty from Rio de Janeiro in a letter that would be carried on the next ship leaving for England, both the top, or spar, deck and the gun deck of the ship were leaking badly and the seams betwe
en the decking needed to be refilled, or ‘caulked’.47
The English were especially welcomed in Rio de Janeiro on this occasion as Arthur Phillip was well known and highly regarded by the Portuguese due to his service in the Portuguese navy during the war with Spain.48 He had also formed a friendship with the governor, Don Luis de Varconcellos, having met him on an earlier visit to Rio de Janeiro in 1783 when Phillip had arrived on the sixty-four-gun Royal Navy ship Europe.
While guests of the Portuguese, Phillip and his officers were extended every courtesy – which on occasion was taken to excessive lengths. Whenever Arthur Phillip was ashore, he was attended by palace guards, who would parade at the wharf steps and escort him and his party around the city. Jacob Nagle, one of the rowers on Phillip’s barge, recorded Phillip’s embarrassment at this:
The Governor often landed in different parts of the town, round about the skirts, because he did not wish to trouble the guards, but land where we would, we could see the soldiers running to wherever we landed and parade under an arrest for him.49
As part of their hospitality the Portuguese permitted the English to pitch a tent on the little island of Enchandos, about two kilometres further up the river from the anchored fleet, to use as Phillip’s land office while they were in port. They also allowed Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer, to unload his scientific equipment and use the island for experiments, which included measuring and calculating the time.
The 25-year-old Dawes was a lieutenant in the marines, but his great passion was science and astronomy, and he was to make a big contribution to New South Wales as a surveyor and in planning the layout of the new settlement. He was later to fall out with Governor Arthur Phillip, whom he believed did not support scientific discovery.
Dawes had joined the marines as a 17-year-old second-lieutenant on 2 September 1779, and in September 1781 as a 19-year-old was wounded in action against the French off Chesapeake Bay during the American War of Independence. When he volunteered for service with the First Fleet to New South Wales, he was known as a competent astronomer, and on the recommendation of the astronomer royal, Reverend Dr Nevil Maskelyne, he was supplied with instruments and books for an observatory by the Board of Longitude. Dawes was asked especially to watch for a comet expected to be seen in the southern hemisphere in 1788.
The convicts were held on the ships, locked below decks in the sweltering heat, but the crew were able to enjoy some shore leave. A number of them were to record their visits and the exotic birds, butterflies, insects and other wildlife they saw, as well as the colourful markets and coffee houses where ‘they had coffee in great plenty, sweetmeats and a great variety of rich cakes’.50
The marines spent most of their time on the ships but were permitted occasional shore leave if they acquired a special pass. While in Rio harbour, a number of them were punished for sexual relations with the convict women. Cornelius Connell, a private in the marines, was given a hundred lashes after he was caught having sex with some female convicts, and Thomas Jones was caught trying to bribe one of the sentries to let him get below decks and among the women. Two other privates, John Jones and James Riley, were charged with similar offences but acquitted for want of evidence.51
The English officers were again struck by the colour and the splendour of the Roman Catholic church services. Being from Protestant backgrounds, they were accustomed to more subdued worship, in grey churches with little decoration or pomp. A number of them witnessed the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption and were amazed at what they saw, including the Lady Penrhyn surgeon Bowes Smyth:
The church was decorated in a most superb manner, there was a band of music playing in the church yard … The ladies who appeared publicly at the windows and in the procession were elegantly dressed [resembling] actresses at a puppet show in Bartholomew Fair … At night there was a grand display of fireworks off the top of one of the churches.52
John White described the well-dressed citizens and how the churches were decorated with flowers and ‘most brilliantly illuminated’. The ‘multitudes’ paraded, prayed, sang hymns and bought coloured beads from hawkers, and the throng ‘jostled’ to gain admission to the churches to fall on their knees and ‘pray with fervour’.53 But he was shocked at the number of well-dressed women in the crowd who were ‘unattended’ and who, after dark, would ‘bestow their favours’ on strangers as well as acquaintances.
He also described how the well-to-do were carried about the city. In earlier times they had been conveyed in ‘elegant cotton hammocks’ adroitly made by the native Indians, but they had been replaced by a fashion for sedan chairs: not as good as those in London but able to be carried ‘at a great rate … borne on the shoulders of two slaves’.54
Bowes Smyth noted how he and many of the English officers in Rio had lost their fitness, such that previously easily accomplished physical exertions now took their toll: ‘Being very much fatigued with my long walk yesterday I remained on board all this day: nor is it to be wondered at that I should be a good deal tired having been without any exercise for nine weeks.’55
While the officers only recorded the more reputable pursuits, Jacob Nagle was to later write more honestly about the typical behaviour of sailors, when he was attacked after picking up a prostitute in a local bar. Nagle and his companion were granted shore leave and had a sergeant for protection who did not want to walk the city streets but wanted to sit ‘in the punch houses all day’. After Nagle left the tavern with a woman he had picked up for the night, a man followed and was about to attack him with a sword, when luckily a soldier arrived on the scene in the nick of time:
One evening two of us got in to a grog shop … and a very handsome young woman being there who was very familiar with me and asked me home with her. I accepted the offer and had walked one square, arm in arm … up came a Portuguese with a great cloak on and pushed me away from her … He drew back and drew his sword and was raising his sword over his head to make a cut at my head. At that instant a soldier turned the corner … drew his sword and guarded the blow he was going to make [at me]. Another soldier … abused him and threatened to cut him down for meddling with me, but the fellow begged their pardons and said I had taken his wife from him. The soldiers sent him and her about their business and told me she was a poota, which is a whore. I thought I was well off to be clear of them.56
Criminal ingenuity also continued at every opportunity. When the fleet came in to any port, little bumboats would pull alongside and sell food and other wares to the crew. In Rio de Janeiro some convicts were buying food from them using counterfeit money. The coins had been very well constructed by Thomas Barrett on the transport Charlotte, with the help of other convicts. They were coined from old buckles, buttons from the marines and pewter spoons during the long voyage from Tenerife. John White recorded that the fake currency was almost good enough to be passed off as the real thing:
The impression, milling, character, in a word, the whole was so perfectly executed that had the metal been a little better fraud, I am convinced, would have passed undetected … The adroitness … gave me a high opinion of their ingenuity, cunning, caution and address; and I could not help wishing that these qualities had been employed to more laudable purposes.57
Thomas Barrett had already been twice condemned to execution and twice committed to transportation.58 He would eventually be the first convict to be hanged in New South Wales.
The fleet stayed almost a month in Rio, where its officers were able to purchase plenty of fresh food, particularly oranges, to supply to all the crew and convicts. The oranges were so abundant that it was possible for everyone to be fed several each day. Captain Hunter said that there were so many oranges in season that some of the boats passing the transports would throw ‘a shower of oranges’ onto the decks.59 John White wrote, ‘the commissary supplied the troops and convicts with rice (in lieu of bread), with fresh beef, vegetables, and oranges, which soon removed every symptom of the scurvy prevalent among them.’60
Before leaving, the fleet also loaded many plants and seeds for planting in Botany Bay, including coffee, cocoa, cotton, banana, orange, lemon, guava, tamarind, prickly pear and eugina or pomme rose, ‘a plant bearing fruit in shape like an apple and having the flavour and odour of a rose’.61 However, the biggest purchase while the fleet was in Rio was a hundred and fifteen pipes (sixty-five thousand litres) of rum for the remainder of the voyage and for the first three years of the new settlement, which no doubt would have been a great relief to the marines, who had earlier feared there would be no rum ration in the new colony.
The local rum was produced from aquadente, a byproduct of sugar cane. Such a huge surge in demand sent the local retail price of rum soaring by more than twenty-five per cent and forced the fleet to offset its costs by buying only half the planned amount of the spirit for medicinal purposes.62
The large intake of grog required the reorganisation of the cargo of the entire fleet: ‘It has been necessary that the store ships might receive the spirits to move part of the provisions from them to the transports.’63
As things turned out, the rum was of poor quality and was to attract criticism when the settlers reached Sydney and had to drink it. Robert Ross was to say that ‘in taste and smell [it] is extremely offensive’, adding that his marines drank it only out of ‘absolute necessity’.64
The fleet was also able to purchase some of the vital stores that had been missing when it left Portsmouth, including cloth for the women convicts’ clothing and musket balls.
A few days before departing Rio de Janeiro, Jane Scott, the wife of marine sergeant James Scott, gave birth to a baby daughter after a twenty-seven-hour labour on the Prince of Wales. Baby Elizabeth Scott was to be one of the nine girls and twelve boys born on the ships of the First Fleet. She was more fortunate than the fourteen children born to the convict women, who would have been wrapped in torn-up adult clothing as there were no provisions made for convict babies when the ships were prepared in Portsmouth. This was in spite of the fact that many of the women were obviously pregnant before the ships set sail. The first child born to a convict was the daughter of Isabella Lawson, born less than three weeks out from Portsmouth on 31 May.