1788
Page 15
There was a particular urgency about unloading the livestock as many cows, horses and sheep had already died after the last of the fresh fodder had run out. On the day the fleet had arrived in Botany Bay, fresh grass had been cut and rowed out to the ships to keep the weakened surviving animals alive. As soon as the fleet arrived in Sydney Cove, the livestock were clumsily lowered by rope into boats, rowed ashore and left to graze on its eastern side.
Earlier in the day the governor had ‘marked out the lines for the encampment’.5 Phillip and some of his officers were to be camped on the eastern side, with the freshwater stream and most of the marines on the western side, and the convicts further to the west. The western side of the cove was steeper and rockier, and was later to be known as The Rocks. It was on this side that the tent hospital of the early colony was also established.
As everyone who could be landed was working on clearing land and pitching tents, the usual Sunday religious observances were ignored. It was not until the following week that the chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson, conducted the first church service, under a large tree overlooking the harbour.
The following day the last of the marines and their wives and children were brought ashore,6 but it was to be another ten days before the majority of the female convicts were unloaded from their transports and rowed to the shore, by which time a large number of tents had been pitched for them.7
A number of the women convicts had somehow managed to keep some good clothing and were rowed to shore on their first morning in Sydney dressed in colourful dresses and pretty bonnets.
Only five convict women had been brought ashore earlier – women ‘who sported the best characters on board’ – to act as cooks and domestic servants. Phillip thought that landing all of the women straight away would be a distraction to the men, some of whom had been on male-only convict transports and would not have seen a woman for the best part of a year.
Phillip’s caution turned out to be not unwise, because the women’s eventual landing resulted in wild scenes and debauchery that shocked many of the officers. Surgeon Bowes Smyth, who had already made critical comments in his diary about the convict women, described what happened during that day, and especially during that night after the seamen later came ashore during a tumultuous storm, bringing grog with them:
At five o’clock this morning all things were got in order for landing the whole of the women and three of the ships long boats came alongside us to receive them. The men convicts got to them very soon after they landed, and it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night … The scene which presented itself at this time and during the greater part of the night, beggars every description; some swearing, others quarrelling others singing, not in the least regarding the tempest, though so violent that the thunder that shook the ship exceeded anything I ever before had a conception of.8
Captain Watkin Tench spelled it out more clearly:
While they were on board ship, the two sexes had been kept most rigorously apart; but when landed their separation became impracticable, and would have been perhaps, wrong. Licentiousness was the unavoidable consequence, and their old habits of depravity were beginning to recur. What was to be attempted? To prevent their intercourse was impossible.9
The next morning, Thursday 7 February, when just about everyone was finally ashore, many with hangovers, the battalion ‘under arms’ was marched on parade to a piece of cleared land with colours flying and pipes playing. The convicts were forced to stand in line while the formal declaration of the colony was made.
It began with Judge David Collins’ lengthy reading of Governor Phillip’s commission. A number of officers were surprised at the apparent breadth of powers given to him. Ralph Clark noted that he had ‘never heard of any one single person having so great a power invested in him as the Governor has by his commission’.10
This was followed by a speech from Phillip in which, according to Judge Collins, the governor promised good treatment of those convicts who deserved it and threatened severe punishment and execution for wrongdoers:
He should ever be ready to shew approbation and encouragement to those who proved themselves worthy of them by good conduct and attention to orders; while on the other hand, such as were determined to act in opposition to propriety, and observe a contrary conduct, would inevitably meet with the punishment they deserved.11
Phillip also recommended to the convicts that they marry each other and threatened that those guilty of ‘indiscriminate and illegal intercourse would be punished with the greatest severity and rigour’.12 Bowes Smyth described Phillip’s speech as a ‘harangue’:
He also assured them that if they tried to get into the women’s tents of a night there were positive orders for firing upon them, that they were idle, not more than two hundred out of six hundred were at work; that the industrious should not labour for the idle; if they did not work they should not eat. In England thieving poultry was not punished with death, in consequence of their being so easily supplied but here a fowl was of the utmost consequence to the settlement, as well as every other species of stock, as they were reserved for breed, therefore stealing the most trifling of stock or provisions should be punished with death; that however much severity might mitigate against his humanity and feelings … justice demanded such rigid execution of the laws.13
After the parade the officers were invited to the governor’s tent for a celebratory dinner at which ‘many loyal and public toasts were drank’.14 Lieutenant Ralph Clark felt the occasion was spoiled by the maggots in the cold collation of mutton that had been killed the day before and complained that ‘nothing will keep 24 hours in this country’.15
Unloading the stores and provisions would take many weeks. Initially some were simply put on the ground and covered until storehouses could be built, but the theft of food and grog was an immediate problem, which severe punishment and even executions failed to prevent. Much of the food stored on the ground was also lost to insects and parasites, many of which were completely new to the European settlers.
A week after landing in Port Jackson, on 1 February, Arthur Phillip asked Lieutenant King to pay a courtesy call on the French captain La Perouse, who was still anchored in Botany Bay. King left at 2 am on 2 February, to be rowed in a cutter with Lieutenant Dawes and a marine escort, and had been instructed that when he met with La Perouse he was to ‘offer him whatever he might have occasion for’.16 It took eight hours to row the twelve kilometres to Botany Bay, and they reached the French ships at around ten o’clock that morning.
King recalled that the English delegation ‘were received with the greatest politeness and attention’ by La Perouse and his fellow officers aboard the Boussole.
He was informed that he was not the first of the English to visit; a number of convicts had already walked the twelve kilometres overland from Port Jackson to Botany Bay and had been refused the opportunity of escaping on the French ships.
The French thanked King for the offer of assistance and made exactly the same offer of help to the English. La Perouse said he expected to be back in France in fifteen months but had enough supplies on board to last three years and would be happy to provide Phillip with anything he needed.
During their cordial meeting King learned of the remarkable voyage of the French since they had left the French port of Brest three years earlier. They had sailed around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast from Chile to California and Kamschatka in eastern Siberia before sailing south to Easter Island, Macao in China, Manila in the Philippines, the Friendly Isles, the Sandwich Isles and Norfolk Island.
When the French ships had been in Kamschatka, they had been told that the British intended establishing a colony at Botany Bay, and so La Perouse was surprised to see nothing there when he arrived except the English fleet attempting to leave. As Judge David Collins noted:
It must naturally create some surprise in M. de la Perouse to find our fleet abando
ning the harbour at the very time when they were preparing to anchor in it. Indeed he afterwards said, that ‘until he had looked round him in Botany Bay he could not divine the cause of our quitting it … having heard at Kamschatka of the intended settlement, he imagined he should have found a town built and a market established.17
King was also told of how a number of French officers and crew had been massacred and many others wounded by natives on Mauna Island in the Isles des Navigateurs less than two months before, on 11 December. Among the thirteen who were killed were the captain of the Astrolabe, M. De Langle, eight officers, four seamen and a boy.
La Perouse explained that the French had been on good terms with the islanders for a period of several days, during which the French had ‘furnished … every article of stock in the greatest profusion for barter’18 and trading had taken place. Then, when everything was ready for their departure, De Langle asked La Perouse if they could collect more fresh water from the island, and two longboats and two smaller boats were duly sent ashore.
On landing the boats were surrounded by locals who ‘were armed with short heavy clubs by which means they rendered the French arms useless’.19 The order to fire the muskets was given and the French believe about thirty natives were killed, but not before many of their own were also killed.
A number of the French managed to swim from the longboats and scramble onto the two rowboats before making their escape back to their ships.
La Perouse had also lost twenty-one crew when two boats were destroyed in the surf off the Alaskan coast in July 1786.
Despite these tragic losses La Perouse said that not a single person had died on the French ships from scurvy during their three years at sea, suggesting that the French were even more effective at managing the disease than the English.
King describes the French vessels as having been ‘fitted out with the greatest liberality’. Governor Phillip had had to fight the bureaucracy for all his supplies and had left Portsmouth short of many essentials, but La Perouse’s situation, according to King, had been very different:
Monsieur de La Perouse told me that the king told him to get whatever he wanted and added that if he was now at Brest and had to equip his ships for the remainder of his voyage, that he could not think of any article that he should be in need of.20
King was particularly impressed with the array of scientists on the French expedition, which included botanists, astronomers and natural historians and an impressive range of astrological and navigational equipment. The French also carried three timepieces on each ship, whereas the English carried only one for the entire fleet.
After dining with La Perouse and his fellow officers, King and his colleagues were taken ashore to where the French had established a stockade with two cannons around a number of tents housing a range of scientific equipment.
King said his farewells on the night of 4 February and at five o’clock the next morning left to row back to the English settlement in Port Jackson. The return boat trip took even longer, as they were ‘obliged to row all the way against the wind and a great swell’, and King and his party did not reach Sydney Cove until 7 pm, some fourteen hours later.
Over the next few weeks there was little further contact between the English, busy trying to establish their new home, and the French, who were preparing for the next leg of their long voyage of exploration. However, shortly before the French left Botany Bay Captain John Hunter of the Sirius paid them an informal visit and, like King, was impressed by the cordiality and hospitality of his hosts:
At the beginning of March at which time … the two French ships were preparing to leave the coast, I determined to visit M de La Perouse before he should depart, I accordingly with a few officers sailed around to Botany Bay in the Sirius long boat. We stayed for two days on board the Boussole and were most hospitably and politely entertained and very much pressed to pass a longer time with them.21
At the very time that Hunter and his party had gone to visit the French, Judge David Collins described how the captain of the Astrolabe, Monsieur de Clonard, came from Botany Bay ‘to bring round some dispatches from Monsieur de La Perouse, which that officer requested might be forwarded to the French ambassador at the court of London, by the first transports that sailed for England’.22
Within two more weeks the French quietly left Botany Bay, with the two commanders, Phillip and La Perouse, never having met. The Astrolabe and the Boussole were never seen again and were believed to have sunk off the coast of the New Hebrides with all the crew drowned.
Back in Sydney the new settlers were shocked by the harshness and volatility of the climate, even though it was the middle of the southern-hemisphere summer. Less than a week after arriving, five sheep belonging to the lieutenant-governor and quartermaster were killed by lightning under a tree during a heavy storm. Phillip noted that the branches and trunk of the tree ‘were shivered and rent in a very extraordinary manner’ and was later to report that nothing had prepared them for the savageness of the weather: ‘This country is subject to very heavy storms of thunder and lightening, several trees have been set on fire and some sheep and dogs killed in the camp since we landed.’23
A number of the other members of the First Fleet, including the surgeon from the Sirius, George Worgan, also recorded their surprise at the violence of the local climate, for which they were totally unprepared:
The thunder and lightning are astonishingly awful here, and by the heavy gloom that hangs over the woods at the time these elements are in commotion and from the nature and violence done to many trees we have reason to apprehend that much mischief can be done by lightning here.24
Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the marines recorded in his journal how difficult it was to sleep in the first week during the kind of tumultuous summer storms that he had never experienced in England:
Thursday 31 January – what a terrible night it was of thunder and lightening and rain – was obliged to get out of my tent with nothing on but my shirt to slacken the tent poles … Friday 1 February. In all the course of my life I never slept worse my dear wife than I did last night – what with the hard ground spiders, ants and every vermin that you can think of was crawling over me. I was glad when morning came.25
Watkin Tench was later to describe the fierceness and changeability of the hot summer winds, which were ‘like a blast from a heated oven’.26 The temperature one day ‘peaked at a hundred and nine degrees farhenheight, which killed some of the vegetables that had been planted’. He went on:
It is changeable beyond any other I have ever heard of; but no phenomena sufficiently accurate to reckon upon are found to indicate the approach of alteration … clouds, storms and sunshine pass in rapid succession. Of rain, we found in general not a sufficiency, but torrents of water sometimes fall. Thunderstorms in summer are common and very tremendous.27
The settlers were having great difficulty clearing the tough Australian bush. They found that many of the tools they had brought with them from England were not strong enough, particularly the wood-cutting tools, for the gnarled hardwoods of Australia. Joseph Banks may have been right in saying there was ‘abundant timber’, but, as Phillip was to report, the new settlers were to find the Australian gum trees far from ideal for building with:
The timber is well described in Captain Cooks voyage but unfortunately it had one very bad quality, which puts us to great inconvenience; I mean the large gum tree, which splits and warps in such a manner when used green and to which necessity obliged us, that a store house boarded up with this wood rendered it useless.28
Captain Tench said that the local timber was close to unusable and described how it had delayed the construction of buildings:
The species of trees are few, and, I am concerned to add, the wood universally of so bad a grain as to almost preclude a possibility of using it; the increase of labour occasioned by this in our buildings has been such, as nearly exceed belief.29
Surgeon White also noted the lack of suitable b
uilding materials in his journal in March 1788:
The principal business going forward at present is erecting cabbage-tree huts for the officers, soldiers, and convicts; some storehouses, &c.; and a very good hospital; all which in the completion will cost a great deal of time and trouble, as the timber of this country is very unfit for the purpose of building. Nor do I know any one purpose for which it will answer except for fire-wood; and for that it is excellent: but in other respects it is the worst wood that any country or climate ever produced, although some of the trees, when standing, appear fit for any use whatever, masts for shipping not excepted. Strange as it may be imagined, no wood in this country, though sawed ever so thin, and dried ever so well, will float. Repeated trials have only served to convince me that, immediately on immersion, it sinks to the bottom like a stone.30
The landscape was foreign and the newcomers had no knowledge of how best to exploit the natural resources. In another contrast with the La Perouse expedition, which brought scientists and botanists, Phillip, although an experienced farmer, was later to confess that his lack of knowledge of this strange new environment was making the task of establishing the colony more difficult:
I must beg leave to observe, with regret, that being myself without the smallest knowledge of botany, I am without one botanist, or even an intelligent gardener in the colony; it is not therefore in my power to give more than a superficial account of the produce of this country, which has such a variety of plants that I cannot with all my ignorance help being convinced that it merits the attention of the naturalist and the botanist.31
Sydney had two great advantages over Botany Bay: fresh water and a sheltered harbour. However, very soon the settlers were to realise that not only was the timber virtually unusable, but the local soil was poor and they would have trouble trying to grow their own food.