1788
Page 12
Sergeant Scott, meanwhile, had little formal education but managed to keep a diary of the voyage and his three-year stay in Sydney. He and his wife were to have another child in the new colony, a son named William, who was born three years later on 4 June 1790.65 Scott and his little family left New South Wales to return home to England in October 1791 and arrived back at Portsmouth eight months later, in June 1792.
Arthur Phillip was able to do a little spying before the fleet recommenced its journey, and he sent back to England information he had acquired about the Spanish military defence of Montevideo. The English were still technically at war with Spain at the time and had contemplated invading the Spanish port, which was some thousand kilometres to the south of Rio de Janeiro. In a letter sent secretly to the British Government before leaving the city, Phillip provided details of the two thousand two hundred Spanish soldiers that defended the north and south sides of the River Plate in the city of Montevideo, which was a larger force than previously thought.66 The stopover in Rio de Janeiro had been valuable in a wide array of ways.
8
LEAVING CIVILISATION
It was natural to indulge at this moment a melancholy reflection which obtruded itself upon the mind. The land behind us was the abode of civilized people; that before was the residence of savages. When, if ever, we might again enjoy the commerce of the world, was doubtful and uncertain … All communication with families and friends now cut off, [we were] leaving the world behind us, to enter a state unknown.
On 1 September, after almost a month in the port and, as White recorded, ‘having now procured everything at Rio de Janeiro that we stood in need of, and thoroughly recovered and refreshed our people’, the fleet was ready to continue its journey.1
Phillip was to spend the next two days writing lengthy reports to Lord Sydney and his deputy Evan Nepean, which would be sent back on the next ship leaving Rio for London. It would be the last opportunity for Phillip to communicate with England until the fleet reached the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa, which was more than six weeks away.
A number of officers who were unable to continue on with the fleet were left behind to be put on the next available ship back to England. They included Micah Morton, the master of the Sirius, who had been badly injured when unmooring the ship in Santa Cruz harbour two months earlier. Two midshipmen were also sent home; one had been injured and the other was suffering from ‘a venereal complaint which being long neglected is not likely to be cured at sea’.2 They were put on a British whaling ship that had called into Rio to repair leaks.
On 4 September the fleet weighed anchor. As the convoy left to sail back across the Atlantic on the prevailing westerly wind to the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese on shore fired off a twenty-one-gun salute, which was answered by the Sirius. Such a salute was ‘a very high and uncommon compliment’, and an indication of the good relationship between the visiting English and the resident Portuguese.3
Four days after leaving Rio de Janeiro the convict Mary Bryant gave birth to a baby daughter and named her after the transport ship she was carried in, the Charlotte. Little Charlotte would later die of a fever in a small boat off the African coast following a daring and spectacular escape attempt by her mother and a number of other convicts.
The winds picked up and the fleet made good progress thanks to a solid south-westerly. However, the high seas made many of the passengers seasick and battered the Lady Penrhyn, which was leaning so far with the wind that the sea ran into the portholes. By the middle of September the ships were finally moving into cooler latitudes.4
On 19 September another convict was lost overboard, this time from the Charlotte, as White described:
William Brown a very well behaved convict, in bringing some clothing from the bowsprit end where he hung them out to dry, fell overboard. As soon as the alarm was given that a man was overboard, the ship was instantly hove to, and a boat hoisted out, but to no purpose. Lieutenant Ball of the Supply, a most active officer, knowing … that some accident must have happened bore down; but, notwithstanding every excursion, the poor fellow sank before either the Supply or our boat could reach him. The people on the forecastle, who saw him fall, say that the ship went directly over him, which … must make it impossible for him to keep on the surface long enough to be taken up.5
Towards the end of September the weather turned nasty and the fleet spent a week battling against a gale. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, aboard the Friendship, said the sea was so rough that those marines sleeping with the convict women were washed out of their beds.6
The Sirius was also labouring in the conditions and on inspection was found to have a number of serious problems below the waterline. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King complained that the ship should not have passed its inspection in England:
For these days past and a rolling sea, the ship has laboured very much … A discovery has also been made which tends to prove … the extreme negligence of the Dock Yard officers in not giving the Sirius the inspection they certainly ought to have done … On inspection we found that not only were the top timbers rotten but also many of the futtocks were in the same condition.7
Only a month after the fleet left Rio de Janeiro, the stores of fresh food were once again exhausted, and rations consisted largely of salted meat. The officers were sometimes able to break the monotony of their diet; on one occasion a sheep was killed on the Lady Penrhyn and shared with the officers on the Alexander.8
On 6 October, a week before the fleet was due to arrive at the Cape of Good Hope, there was another attempted mutiny, this time on the convict transport the Alexander. The uprising was organised by the same John Powers who had escaped and been recaptured when the fleet was in Tenerife four months earlier. With the help of the seamen on the ship, Powers and a number of other convicts were armed with iron bars. They planned to take control of the ship by overpowering the marines shortly before they arrived at the Cape of Good Hope.
Before the mutineers could rise up, they were betrayed to the master of the Alexander, Duncan Sinclair, who alerted his marines, strengthened the watch and locked all the convicts below decks. Powers was removed to the Sirius, where he was chained to the deck. The four seamen accused of assisting the insurgents were flogged and replaced by seamen from the Sirius, and the convict who had betrayed the plot was moved for his own protection to the Scarborough.9
The arrival at the Cape took longer than expected as the fleet was being blown away from the port. ‘The wind is driving us farther to the southward than we want to go,’ complained Lieutenant Ralph Clark.10 To bring the fleet back on course, Phillip ordered all the ships to stay close to the flagship Sirius.
Finally, at daylight on Saturday 13 October the fleet sighted Lyons Head ‘five leagues away’ and with a fresh breeze soon saw the Cape of Good Hope ahead. By nightfall the fleet was anchored in Table Bay, where there were already more than twenty American, French, Danish, Portuguese, Dutch and English ships lying at anchor.11
The first European to discover the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz, sailed around the southern point of Africa in 1586. Diaz had originally called it the Cape of Storms, but the name was later changed by the Portuguese King John II to the Cape of Good Hope. Table Mountain was given its name by another Portuguese, Antonio da Saldania, some seventeen years later.
The Cape was not regularly used until 1652, when Jan van Riebeeck was sent by the Dutch East India Company to establish a halfway station to provide fresh water, vegetables and meat for its trading ships travelling to and from the East Indies.
At that time the Dutch were a major European trading power, with a network of ports at New Amsterdam (now New York), Suriname and Guyana in South America and Antilles in the Caribbean. The Dutch East India Company’s biggest trading area was the Dutch East Indies, which covered a large area of current-day Indonesia, Malaysia and West Papua New Guinea.
In the early nineteenth century Cape Town came under British contro
l, but at the time the First Fleet arrived at the end of 1787, the port was there very much to serve Dutch maritime interests first and those of the British and other nations second. Arthur Phillip and his fleet were to find the hospitality in Cape Town very different from the treatment they had received in the Portuguese-controlled port of Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish port of Tenerife.
The fleet stayed in the Cape for longer than it had planned. It had formally asked the Dutch governor for supplies and had to wait more than a week for a reply.12 While the crews and passengers waited, they had to make do with their own limited diet of ship’s rations, supplemented by a small amount of fresh rations provided by the Dutch port authority.
Lieutenant Philip Gidley King was once again the first sent ashore, this time to purchase food for the last long leg of the voyage to New South Wales. He hoped to buy eighty thousand pounds of flour, sixty bushels of wheat and eight hundred bushels of barley. However, he returned to say that the governor had told him that the colony was itself short of food and none could be spared for the English.
The day after the fleet’s arrival, Sunday 14 October, it was officially allowed to enter the port and Phillip, together with a number of officers, presented himself to Governor Van de Graf. A polite exchange led to more discussions about buying food. The governor told Phillip that they could purchase livestock and wine, but that there was a shortage of grain following recent disappointing harvests.
In the following days Phillip took lodgings on shore and began to talk to local traders:
As I found on inquiry that the last years crops had been very good, I requested by letter to the Governor and Council permission to purchase what provisions were wanted for the Sirius and Supply, as likewise corn for seed, and what was necessary for the livestock intended to be embarked at this place.13
To add to their troubles the harbour provided little shelter for the ships, which led Phillip to complain:
This bay cannot be properly called a port, being by no means a station of security, it is exposed by all the violence of the winds, which set into it from the sea; and is far from sufficiently secured from those which blow from the land. The gusts, which descend from the summit of Table Mountain, are sufficient to force ships from their anchors … The storms from the sea are still more formidable; so much so that ships have frequently been driven by them from their anchorage and wrecked at the head of the Bay.14
Phillip’s fellow officers were equally unimpressed and compared the Cape unfavourably to the exotic Rio de Janeiro. Bowes Smyth wrote that even the appearance of the shoreline was unappealing:
There are many gallows and other implements of punishment erected along the shore and in front of the town. There were also wheels for breaking felons upon, several of which were at this time occupied by the mangled bodies of the unhappy wretches who suffered upon them: their right hands were cut off and fixed by a large nail to the side of the wheel, the wheel itself elevated upon a post about nine or ten feet high, upon which the body lies to perish.15
The city boasted a Calvinist church and a Lutheran church, and the impressive Dutch governor’s house with its adjacent parklands reminded some of the English visitors of St James’ Park in London. John White noted that the gardens were overlooked by a hospital, which was generally ‘pretty full’ when ships arrived after a long voyage.16
While the fleet waited in the harbour, many of the convicts and marines fell seriously ill with a putrid fever. White reported that the disease was worst on the Charlotte, where thirty were ill and a number expected to die.17
After a few days limited fresh food rations, including soft bread, beef, mutton and greens, started to arrive and were rowed out to the ships. All of the officers who could be spared were allowed on shore leave, where they could take lodgings and buy ‘the comforts and refreshments to be enjoyed on land for the last and longest stage of their voyage’.18
Surgeon White made a number of typically stern observations about the women in the Cape:
The habits and customs of the women of this place are extremely contrasted to those of the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro. Among the latter a great deal of reserve and modesty is apparent between the sexes in public. Those who are disposed to say tender and civil things to a lady must do it by stealth, or breathe their soft sighs through the latticework of a window, or the grates of a convent. But at the Cape, if you wish to be a favourite with the fair, as the custom is, you must in your own defence (if I may use the expression) grapple the lady, and paw her in a manner that does not partake in the least of gentleness. Such a rough and uncouth conduct, together with a kiss ravished now and then in the most public manner and situations, is not only pleasing to the fair one, but even to her parents, if present; and is considered by all parties as an act of the greatest gallantry and gaiety. In fact, the Dutch ladies here, from a peculiar gay turn, admit of liberties that may be thought reprehensible in England; but perhaps as seldom overstep the bounds of virtue as the women of other countries.19
White was also unimpressed with the local Dutch military:
The Cape militia differ from the English in not receiving pay or wearing regimentals. In fact they should rather be called volunteers, who turn out for the protection of their own property, and are not subject to strict military discipline. Most of them wore blue coats, with white metal buttons, awkwardly long, and in the cut and shape of which uniformity had not been attended to. Neither was it visible in the other parts of their dress or accoutrements; some wore powder, others none, so that, upon the whole, they made a very unmilitary appearance. The officers are chosen annually from among themselves. Some of these, indeed, I observed to be very well dressed. Neglect, non-attendance, and every other breach of their military rules, is punished by fine or forfeiture, and not corporally. At this burlesque on the profession of a soldier, I could not help observing that many of them had either got intoxicated that morning or were not recovered from their overnight’s debauch.20
The long wait for approval to purchase and load the supplies, with the convicts mostly locked below decks and most of the crew kept on board ship, began to grate on everyone’s nerves. The convicts fought with each other and the marines were regularly drunk and disorderly.
On 20 October a brawl between marines erupted aboard the Scarborough. Thomas Bullimore, one of those involved, would be murdered by other marines shortly after arriving in Sydney.
Two days later a marine was flogged for stealing and fighting on the Alexander and another for insubordination on the Charlotte. The troubles did not end there. The second mate of the Friendship, Patrick Vallance, fell overboard while drunk: ‘He had gone to the head to ease himself … [and] … although three men jumped overboard after him they could not save him, for soon after he sank and has not been seen since.’21
Although October is the second month of spring in the southern hemisphere, the weather was cold for much of the stay in Table Bay. High winds and rough seas threw the ships around, and for several days no supplies could be taken out to them as it was too dangerous to row to and from the shore. It was so rough that a boat belonging to the supply ship the Borrowdale came adrift and was blown out of the harbour towards Penguin Island. Another boat belonging to a Dutch East India ship anchored in the bay was overturned and two of its crew members drowned.
Finally, after eight days, Phillip received the letter he had been waiting for from the Dutch governor, approving the purchase and loading of supplies that would allow the fleet to be on its way once again.
The fleet immediately began to load up in earnest. All were aware that they needed to take with them everything they would need for survival in the new colony. Daniel Southwell, a midshipman on the Sirius, wrote home:
It was a time of constant bustle as this being the last port we must take every advantage of it, for the leaving behind of many articles that are requisite and necessary would beyond here, be irreparable: and this therefore now keeps us constantly employed in getting the ships supplied wi
th water and all the species of provision that are proper.22
During the next few weeks the fleet took on a large quantity of rice, wheat, barley and Indian corn, and a variety of seeds and plants, which included ‘fig trees, bamboo, Spanish reed, sugar cane, vines of various sorts, quince, apple, pear, strawberry and oak, myrtle’.23
The loading of water and other supplies was a major task for ships coming in to port, but at least the facilities here were better designed than those at Tenerife and Rio de Janeiro. At the eastern end of the harbour there was a long wooden pier that had a number of cranes and water pipes running along it so that a number of scoots, or small boats, could load water at the same time.24
While still in Table Bay, the ships’ carpenters constructed wooden stalls on the already congested decks of the Sirius and the transports, and more than five hundred animals were brought aboard, including cows, bulls, pigs, horses, ducks, chickens, sheep, goats and geese. The sight led one of the surgeons on the Sirius, George Worgan, to write to his brother in England, noting that each ship now looked like a ‘Noah’s Ark’.25
The animals were considered of the highest priority, and the women and some of the men convicts on the Friendship were moved to other ships to make way for thirty-five sheep. The decks of all the ships were now crowded with penned animals, whose urine and faeces would seep through the deck and onto the convicts below.