by David Hill
Despite their fresh food being all but exhausted and knowing that a variety of fruit could be purchased here, Shortland decided to press on, failing to see how vital the food would ultimately become to his crew. This was a big mistake, as Shortland was later to confess:
From what was seen in the possession of these people, there can be no doubt that their land produces cocoa-nuts, breadfruit bananas, and most other vegetables of the Society and Friendly Isles. Nor was it without the greatest regret that [I] declined the invitations of the natives and proceeded without touching for refreshments, which doubtless might have been obtained in plenty but the length and uncertainty of [the] passage seemed to forbid the least delay; nor was it at this time foreseen how much superior to every other consideration the acquirement of a wholesome change of diet would be found.27
So the ships pressed on with their food stocks depleted, and Shortland continued with the detailed mapping of his route. A month later they passed through the straits that separate the Bougainville and Choiseul islands, on the northern end of the Solomon Islands chain.
Inevitably the scurvy arrived with a vengeance, affecting first the crew of the Alexander and then those on the Friendship. Five of the Alexander’s crew were unable to work and complained of soreness in their legs and difficulty breathing. Their gums were sore and bleeding and their teeth so loosened they could only eat the rice and flour from their rations with difficulty.
As they approached the equator and the weather became hotter and more sultry, the scurvy on the Alexander spread among the crew, despite efforts to control it including smoking the ship and washing it down with vinegar, and issuing the crew increased rations of beer, port and wine.
They passed the Palau Islands on 11 September and, seeing cocoa palms on a small island, lowered a boat from each of the ships to fetch fresh fruit and vegetables for the sick. Duncan Sinclair, the master of the Alexander, was on one of the boats and complained that they were only able to acquire about thirty green coconuts before he felt sufficiently threatened by the natives on the island that he ‘returned as expeditiously as I could’.28
By the end of September most of the Alexander’s crew were now disabled with the illness and men began to die. The Friendship, which till now had fared better, was also reporting that fewer men were able to work.
On 27 September the Alexander neared Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Two weeks later the fleet was to the west of Borneo when the Friendship struck a reef but was pulled off without incurring any serious damage.
By now eight men on the Alexander had died and the ship was reduced to two men in each watch; there were only four men and two boys still fit for duty. The Friendship had only five men left who were able to work the ship. In an attempt to get as many of the sick to work as possible, the crew were offered double pay when the ship reached Batavia (present-day Jakarta).
By the time another two weeks had passed, it was no longer possible to sail both ships any further. The masters of the ships, Duncan Sinclair of the Alexander and Francis Walton of the Friendship, agreed to abandon the smaller Friendship and transfer all the surviving crew to the Alexander on condition that Walton be allowed half the freight of the Alexander when the ship reached England.
It took four days for the remaining able-bodied men to transfer the supplies across from the Friendship to the Alexander, then the Friendship was bored with holes and set adrift to sink.
The Alexander sailed on and passed Pamanookan on northern Java on 5 November. They had now been at sea for almost four months with virtually no fresh food, and by now only one sailor and the officers were physically capable of going aloft to handle the ship’s sails.
To add to their woes, later that day four boats flying Dutch and Portuguese colours chased them. Three of the boats had eighteen oars and the other either twelve or fourteen, and Shortland says he had no doubt they meant to seize the Alexander. Throughout the day every effort was made, by both the healthy and the sick, to hoist more sail and outrun their pursuers. Shortland eventually ordered the ship’s guns to be fired over the pursuers’ heads, after which they pulled away and headed for shore.
On 19 November, as they limped towards the port of Batavia, the fatigued crew were unable to sail further when the wind dropped. The Alexander dropped its anchor between the islands of Alkmara and Leyden at the mouth of Batavia, fired its gun and signalled for assistance. At first no help came, but the next day a passing Dutch ship sent six sailors over to help sail the stricken ship into port, and the following day it sent over fresh food.
When the ship finally moored in Batavia, the sick were sent to the local hospital, ‘where several of them died, being too far gone for any accommodation or skill to recover’.29 The Alexander finally left Batavia on 6 December on the next leg of its journey to Cape Town, with only four of the original crew – the rest were either dead or had not yet recovered.
When the Alexander reached Cape Town on 18 February 1789, its crew encountered the Sirius, which had left Sydney the previous October, some three months after the Alexander. The Sirius, under the command of Captain Hunter, had already been in Table Bay for six weeks, picking up urgently needed food to take back to Sydney.
Hunter had heard reports of the misfortune of the Alexander and the Friendship from a Dutch frigate that had earlier arrived in Cape Town from Batavia:
On the 19th [January] a small Dutch frigate arrived here from Batavia from which I learned Lieutenant Shortland had arrived at that port with a single ship, about the beginning of December in a very distressed condition, that he had buried the greatest part of the ships company and was assisted by the officers and the company of the above frigate to secure his vessel and hand the sails, which could not have been done without assistance, and that he had been reduced to the necessity, some time before his arrival, to sink the other vessel, which was in company with him for the purpose of managing one out of the remaining part of the two ships companies, without which he never could have reached Batavia with either: for when he arrived there he had only four men, out of two crews who were capable of standing on deck.30
A month later, as Hunter was leaving Table Bay, the Alexander limped into the port:
On the 18th of February, to my no small satisfaction (for I was preparing to sail the next day), Mr. Shortland arrived in the Alexander transport. I was going off from the shore, when I discovered the ship coming round Green Point; I rowed directly on board, and his people were so happy to see their old friends in Table-Bay, that they cheered us as we came alongside. I now received from Mr. Shortland an exact confirmation of all the intelligence which I had received concerning him from the officers of the Dutch frigate.31
Hunter had also heard what had happened to the other two ships, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale, which had become separated from the Friendship and the Alexander off the New South Wales coast some seven months earlier. Two English ships had been seen in Rio de Janeiro, and their crews were also in a terrible condition. From the description given to him, Hunter was in no doubt that the ships were the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale:
A Dutch ship arrived here from Rio de Janeiro. By this ship I received information of the arrival at that place of two vessels from the east coast of New Holland, that had arrived singly, and in very great distress, from sickness, and death of many of their people, that the first which arrived, had her name on her stern (Prince of Wales – London) from which circumstances there could be no doubt of its being one of our transports. The other vessel was also well described that I knew it to be the Borrowdale store ship. The officers of this India ship observed further that they were so weak that had they not been boarded by boats without the harbour, they had been unable to bring their vessels to safety.32
The Borrowdale and Prince of Wales, after losing contact with the Alexander and Friendship, had taken the other route after all. Even though it had been decided in Sydney before they left that they should return to England by heading west back to Cape Town, t
he two private transports had gone the easterly route around Cape Horn.
Hunter was told that there was so much ‘sickness and death’ on the ships in Rio de Janeiro that the crew were unable to sail any further and had to be helped into Rio’s harbour.
The Borrowdale and the Prince of Wales, with their depleted crews and some additional seamen they signed on in Rio de Janeiro, would finally reach England in March 1789. The Alexander left Table Bay on 16 March 1789 and arrived at the Isle of Wight in England on 28 May.
By any measure the voyage of the Alexander and the Friendship had been calamitous. They had lost contact with the other two ships, the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale, within two days of leaving Sydney; they had failed to rendezvous at Lord Howe Island; and they had also failed to ensure they were carrying sufficient quantities of fresh food. These events and mistakes saw almost all of the crew dead or incapacitated and required the scuttling of a perfectly good ship, the Friendship. Shortland, however, would be congratulated on his leadership because he was able to provide detailed charts and maps of his journey – even though earlier explorers, including Carteret and Bougain, had mapped much of it before.
The arrival of the Prince of Wales and the Borrowdale in England, with the first news of the First Fleet since its arrival in Botany Bay more than a year before, attracted widespread public interest and extensive coverage in the newspapers in England. The first news had been brought back on the Prince of Wales, but England would have to await the arrival of the Borrowdale to read Arthur Phillip’s more extensive dispatches.
The General Evening Post reported on 24 March that ‘The Prince of Wales from Botany Bay arrived at Falmouth, brings an account of the fleet being all safe arrived at Botany Bay’. The same day the Whitehall Evening Post reported that ‘The two ships of war, the Sirius and the Supply’ and the convict transports ‘had made good their voyage to Botany Bay’. The paper went on to say that Arthur Phillip’s dispatches for the British Government were on the Borrowdale, which had not yet reached England. Similar stories ran the same day in the Evening Advertiser and the London Advertiser, and in The Times three days later.
Within two days the Borrowdale arrived carrying Arthur Phillip’s reports and dispatches, and far more detailed stories appeared in a number of papers, including the General Evening Post, the London Chronicle, the Advertiser and the Whitehall Evening Post. The reports covered details of the voyage of the First Fleet, the decision to abandon Botany Bay, the clearing of land in Sydney Cove for the new settlement, a description of the ‘bushy’ bearded and ‘fuzzy’ haired Aboriginal people, kangaroos (‘as big as sheep’), bird life, soil and climate.
On 27 March the Evening Advertiser reported that a copy of Phillip’s first dispatches was being sent to King George III, ‘by royal command, for the perusal of his Majesty’.
Until now all the stories had reported positively on the expedition. Indeed, on the same day as the story above, the London Advertiser got a little carried away with its description of Sydney, ‘where Natures gifts appeared equal to all their wishes – the verdure strong and rich, and the springs of the best water’. However, on 28 March Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal reported that the information brought back on the Borrowdale indicated that all was not well in the new settlement:
The accounts they bring are far from favourable, they lost all their livestock, the soil is not so good as represented, nor can they prevail on the natives to converse with them, or supply them with provisions, of which they are short.
Book publishers were quick to cash in on the public excitement. On 28 March an advertisement appeared in the World for the first of many journals to be published by officers who had sailed on the First Fleet: ‘In a few days will be published: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. By Captain Tench of the Marines. Printed by Debrett.’
At this time Tench was still in Sydney and he would not return home to England for another three years. He had nevertheless managed to complete his first manuscript and have it taken back on the first available ship for publication in London.
The government was quick to react to the news from New South Wales and the positive spin given to the venture in the newspapers. On 30 March it was reported in the Public Advertiser that the government had ‘come to the resolution to send out all convicts sentenced to transportation, and all respites, in the next fleet that is to sail for Botany Bay, in order that his Majesty’s gaol in the Kingdom may be once cleared’.
The last two ships to leave Sydney to return to England were the store ships, the Golden Grove and the Fishburn.
Their release had been delayed by the need to build secure storehouses to receive the provisions still held on the ships, particularly on the Fishburn, which had a large quantity of rum aboard that was most at risk of theft.
The Fishburn was finally unloaded and ready to depart at the end of September. The Golden Grove, which had been cleared earlier and was waiting on the readiness of the Fishburn, had in the meantime been sent with more settlers to Norfolk Island, returning on 10 October.
On 19 November these last two ships left to return to England via Cape Horn. They were the only two contracted ships of the First Fleet that would return without encountering serious misadventure. After reaching England, the Golden Grove worked carrying freight on the London to Jamaica run until it disappeared from the records in 1804. There are no surviving records as to what happened to the Fishburn after its return home.
Back in the colony, with all the contracted ships departed and the Sirius off to fetch food, only the little Supply remained, which only added to the sense of isolation felt by the thousand settlers who were struggling to survive at the end of their first year in Sydney.
13
THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE
[T]he natives revenge by attacking any stragglers they meet …
Relations between the new settlers and the Aboriginal people were characterised by a mutual incomprehension that gradually worsened. The settlers had virtually no knowledge or understanding of the local inhabitants beyond the brief observations of Cook and Banks, who had stayed barely a week in Botany Bay almost eighteen years earlier.
The first European encounter with the Aboriginal people on the east coast of Australia came on the day Cook landed in April 1770:
As we came in, on both points of the bay, several of the natives and a few huts, men women and children on the south shore abreast of the ship, to which place I went in the boats in hopes of speaking with them, accompanied by Mr. Banks, Dr. Solander, and Tupia [a native Polynesian who had voluntarily joined Cook on the Endeavour at Tahiti] – as we approached the shore they all made off, except two men, who seemed resolved to oppose our landing. As soon as I saw this I ordered the boats to lay upon their oars, in order to speak to them; but this was to little purpose, for neither us nor Tupia could understand one word they said. We then threw them some nails, beads, etc., ashore, which they took up and seemed not ill pleased with, in so much that I thought that they beckoned to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fired a musquet between the two, which had no other effect than to make them retire back, where bundles of their darts lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us, which caused my firing a second musquetload, with small shot and although some of the shot struck the man, yet it had no other effect than to make him lay hold a target. Immediately after this we landed which we had no sooner done than they throwed two darts at us this obliged me to fire a third shot soon after which they both made off, but not in such haste but what we might have taken one, but Mr. Banks being of opinion that the darts were poisoned made me cautious how I advanced into the woods.1
Later the same day, when Cook encountered them again, he said they ‘all fled at my approach’ and in his journal he was later to record that ‘I do not look upon them to be a warlike people, on the contrary I think they are a timorous and inoffensive race, no ways inclinable to cruel
ty.’2
Banks concurred but in harsher terms. After observing the lack of aggression in the Aboriginal people over a five-day period from the end of April to early May 1770, even when the English provoked them, he was to record in his journal, ‘Myself in the woods botanizing as usual, now quite void of fear as our neighbours have turned out such rank cowards.’3
As we have seen, he elaborated on this theme nine years later when giving evidence to the House of Commons inquiry that had examined Botany Bay as a site for the transportation of convicts:
[Banks] apprehended there would be little possibility of opposition from the natives, as during his stay there in the year 1770, he saw very few and did not think there were above fifty in the neighbourhood, and had reason to believe the country was very thinly populated, those he saw were naked, treacherous, and armed with lances, but extremely cowardly.4
The Gadigal Aboriginal people around Sydney Cove had no knowledge of the Europeans. The short visit by Cook’s party in 1770 had been to Botany Bay, which was mainly inhabited by different tribal groups, and it is unlikely that any of those living around Port Jackson ever saw one of Cook’s men.
There were almost thirty different Aboriginal groups living within about a forty-kilometre radius of Sydney at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet.5 There were about ten groups around Port Jackson, with the Gadigal language group predominant around Sydney Cove and on the south of the harbour.
There is no reliable count of the local Aboriginal population at the time. Cook had said they were not numerous, and Phillip reported that there might have been about fifteen hundred spread out through the entire Sydney region, including Botany Bay, Port Jackson and Broken Bay and ‘the intermediate coast’.6