by David Hill
At midnight the water level reached six feet and ‘it was blowing a strong gale and an immense sea was running’.52 All night long the crews continued to pump and by sunup the next morning – Christmas Day – at last the water level below decks began to fall. By that afternoon the crew were exhausted: ‘About this time the crew became almost unable to perform any duty, from their limbs being benumbed by the frequent transition from the heat of labour and having rested in wet clothes.’53
By five in the afternoon the water had risen again, and Riou severely bruised his hand when it was crushed by a crate they were endeavouring to throw over the side. By 4 am on Boxing Day the water level was nearing seven feet for the first time. To make matters worse, during the night the topsails, which had been left unattended, were torn to pieces ‘by the violence of the wind and the ship was left to the entire mercy of a most tremendous sea’.54
Up to this point the crew had not been told of the seriousness of their predicament, but around six o’clock on the morning of Boxing Day the ship’s carpenter came up and reported that the water was as high as the orlop, or lowest deck, and gaining about a foot every hour. A number of the crew, already exhausted, resigned themselves to the inevitable sinking of the ship and certain death and broke into the rum store: ‘A few of the more profligate escaped with utmost vigilance and secreted themselves below, where they got intoxicated with liquor and became insensible of their danger.’55
Amazingly, while all this was going on, Riou went to his cabin and wrote a letter to the Admiralty in which he declared ‘there seems to be no possibility of my remaining many hours in this world’ and praised all the crew for their honourable conduct. No mention was made of the fact that a number of crew were comatose with alcohol:
If any part of the officers or crew of the Guardian should ever survive to get home, I have only to say their conduct after the fatal stroke against an island of ice was admirable and wonderful in everything that related to their duties, considered either as private men or on his Majesty’s service.56
By evening, when the water was up to the lower gun deck and it appeared the ship was about to sink, everyone on board was given the option of abandoning ship and going aboard one of the five small boats. Riou decided to go down with his ship: ‘As for me, I have determined to remain in the ship and shall endeavour to make my presence useful as long as there is any occasion for it.’57
The boatswain was ordered to make sure every little boat had oars, a mast and a sail, a compass, a cask of water and ‘other necessities’, but their loading proved to be extremely difficult and resulted in panic and chaos. A number of the little boats were buffeted against the side of the ship in the high seas:
We then set to work and hoisted out the cutter on the starboard and lee side and afterwards the other boats on the booms; they were all fortunately got into the water with very little damage but the sea was immensely high and it was with great difficulty they were kept from being stove to pieces along side.58
The largest boat was quickly adrift of the Guardian. It had only seven men aboard, but no food or water. In desperation a number of the men jumped into the icy water trying to reach the boats. According to Riou, ‘If these men lived out the day it would be the utmost: indeed, I am inclined to think they could have survived a few minutes.’59
Clements, on one of the boats, watched one of the others sink and then lost sight of another.
Sixty-two men of the original one hundred and twenty-three60 stayed on board the Guardian, either because they could not safely board one of the lifeboats or because they thought their chances of survival were better trying to keep the Guardian afloat. Among those who stayed was Thomas Pitt, the nephew of the prime minister, two midshipmen, the ship’s carpenter, the surgeon’s mate John Fairclough, thirty seamen and boys, twenty-one convicts and three of their supervisors.
Of the five small boats, only one was ever heard of again. Among its fifteen survivors was Clements, who would later record their nine-day ordeal in an open boat in freezing conditions. He described how they boarded late in the afternoon on Boxing Day in squally and cloudy conditions and tried to head ‘as much northward as the sea would allow’ but finally lost sight of the only other boat that they still had contact with.
There was very little drinking water, so they rationed it out in the bottom of a tobacco canister at the rate of about two gills, or a little less than a quarter of a litre, for each person each day. After four days they were running out of food and divided ‘our last fowl … and received a small thimble of rum each’.
By New Year’s Eve, according to Clements, they were so thirsty that ‘many people this day drank their urine’. There was still some cheese and ham on board but it remained uneaten:
We could not eat the smallest crumb till supplied with additional measure of water to moisten our lips. We dropped our bit of biscuit into the water and afterwards sipped a little of it with each mouthful to force it down.61
On 4 January 1790 they sighted a ship about four hundred kilometres east of Natal off the east coast of Africa:
One day more of such misery as we suffered in the last twelve hours, would have certainly terminated the lives of some, and the others must soon after have paid their debts to nature. At day break the gunner, who was then at the helm, discovered a ship at a little distance from us … Our joy at this sight was great beyond expression.62
It was a French ship, the Viscountess of Brittany, which was on its way to the Cape from India. Fifteen days later the survivors were landed safely back in Table Bay, which they had left nearly two months earlier.
Meanwhile, it was thought that the Guardian had sunk, and when the news reached London The Times reported that ‘The Captain made every exertion possible to save the ship’ but ‘with the rest of the crew are all supposed to have perished’.63
However, Riou and sixty-one of the remaining crew who had stayed on the waterlogged ship somehow stayed afloat for two months, travelling without an effective rudder at a maximum speed of barely four knots. By the end of the first week in January the water was above the lower deck as the exhausted crew continued to pump it out. For several weeks the ship drifted across the Indian Ocean to the south of Cape St Mary in Madagascar and back towards Africa.
On 21 February, two months after it began sinking, the Guardian was seen by a passing Dutch packet boat that was carrying mail from the Spice Islands and Batavia back to Europe. The Dutch ship was ‘providentially steering a high southerly latitude’ and assisted the half-sunken Guardian back to the Cape of Good Hope.
The ship was now beyond repair, with a large part of its hull missing and much of its structure torn away. Riou reported to the Admiralty that repairing the ship would be pointless, the ‘cost would be so immense, together with refitting her, as to exceed the value of a new ship’.64
On 12 April the disabled vessel was torn from its moorings in a fierce gale and beached, and the cargo that had not been thrown overboard was salvaged and put ashore. Over the next three months first the Lady Juliana and then the three convict transports from the Second Fleet – the Neptune, the Surprize and the Scarborough – arrived in Cape Town and were ordered to take aboard some of the Guardian’s salvaged supplies ‘from Lieutenant Riou for use in the colony’.65
Salvaged items that finally reached Sydney included leather, clothing, linen and two hundred casks of flour, but much of what was vitally needed in the colony, including salt, rice, oatmeal, sugar and medicines, was ‘perfectly spoilt and useless’, according to Riou’s letter to Lord Stephens of the Admiralty.66
In the same letter Riou praised the surviving twenty convicts who had stayed on the stricken ship and who were now to be sent on with the Second Fleet to Sydney to complete their sentences.67 As a result of these representations the British Government authorised their pardons, provided they did not return to England until their time for transportation was completed.68
Of the overseers and qualified convict tradesmen who had be
en sent on the Guardian at Phillip’s request, only five made it to Sydney on the Lady Juliana:
Of the five superintendents who have arrived only one is a farmer, two say they were used to the farming business when they were 17 and 19 years of age but they cannot … instruct the convicts or direct a farm; and we are in great want of a good master carpenter, brick and tile master.69
Prior to the arrival of the Lady Juliana in early June 1790 the Sydney Cove settlers had been forced to cut the food rations again. The previous November the ration had been cut by a third. In April, in the absence of any relief, it had been cut to half the standard ration, and many in the colony were too hungry to work:
The settlement had been at two thirds of the established rations from the 1st of November and now it was reduced to something less than half a ration, consequently little labour could be expected from the convicts and they are only employed for the public in the mornings leaving the afternoons to attend their gardens.70
Everyone was given the same: a small amount of flour, pork and rice. Even with the reduced ration the food was expected to totally run out later in the year – the pork by July, the rice in the first week of September and the flour in November.
15
A WAITING GAME
[W]e were surprised to see a boat, which was known to belong to the Supply, rowing towards us. On nearer approach, I saw Captain Ball make an extraordinary motion with his hand, which too plainly indicated that something disastrous had happened … A few minutes changed doubt into certainty and to our unspeakable consternation we learned that the Sirius had been wrecked on Norfolk Island …
At the beginning of the third year of the settlement the Supply had returned from Norfolk Island with news from Philip Gidley King that the settlement there had reaped a successful harvest of grain and that the vegetable gardens were also doing well. On receiving the news, and aware that Sydney was rapidly running out of food, Phillip decided to send two hundred convicts and a force of marines with their families to Norfolk Island, where their prospects for survival would be much better. King, who by this time had been on Norfolk for more than two years, had reported that the soil was good and they had managed to harvest good crops of vegetables and other crops. He also said there were plenty of birds and fish.
Phillip was able to use the venture as an opportunity to recall his protégé, Philip Gidley King, in order to send him back to England to comprehensively report on the settlement. At the same time he would rid himself of his nemesis Major Robert Ross, who would replace King as commander of Norfolk Island, since the greatly enlarged colony there would need a proportionately enhanced force of marines.
In justifying his decision to send Ross, Phillip said that the marine commander was so hot-tempered that he would only talk to him when it was absolutely necessary:
I readily acknowledged the assistance I received, but the warmth of temper, which has been the source of many discontents, has obliged me for some time past to avoid, as far as the service permits, calling on the Lieutenant Governor otherwise than as the commandant of the detachment.1
Some of Phillip’s colleagues were equally delighted to be rid of the unpopular marine commander. Judge David Collins, who despised Ross, later wrote to his father detailing the happy news and suggesting Ross’ day of retribution had arrived: ‘Since Major Ross went from here, tranquillity may be said to have been our guest … While here he made me the object of his persecution – if a day will come – a day of retribution.’2
To take such a large party and supplies to Norfolk Island required both of the remaining two ships left in the colony – the Sirius and the Supply – and would leave Sydney with no ships at all.
On a cool and cloudy morning, 3 March 1790, the marines and their officers boarded the two ships, and the following morning nearly two hundred convicts were put aboard. The next day the ships were seen leaving Port Jackson heads with their two hundred and seventy passengers and heading into huge seas that almost blew them onto the rocks at North Head.
After that rocky start the two ships made good time, however, and reached Norfolk Island after only eight days’ sailing, but the now familiar huge surf prevented them from landing in Sydney Bay on the south side of the island. Both ships sailed round to Cascade Bay on the northern side and managed with some difficulty to unload most of their passengers over the next two days, before high winds blew the ships back out to sea. They had not yet managed to unload all of the provisions for the new settlers.
Realising they were unlikely to be able to unload their cargo in Cascade Bay, the ships returned to the south side and Sydney Bay. Early on the morning of 19 March, despite high seas and strong winds, Hunter managed to steer the Sirius into the bay, where it met up with the Supply, which had already arrived there.
Later in the morning the crews had started loading the stores onto the small boats to be rowed to shore when the Sirius was caught in the surf and dragged onto the reef.
Captain Hunter was well aware of the dangers of trying to anchor the Sirius off Norfolk Island – which was renowned for not having anything resembling a natural harbour – but felt that those on the island were desperate for the unloading of their provisions:
We had put on shore from the Sirius and the Supply two hundred and seventy people, and had no opportunity of sending any stores with them, as we were now driven out of sight of the island. I knew the exhausted state of stores there; I was also acquainted with the many difficulties which Lieutenant Ball, commander of the Supply, had met with in the different voyages he had made from Port Jackson to this island, with provisions; and the length of time he had, in some of those voyages, been obliged to cruise, before he could have any access to the shore; so continually does the surf break all round it. These considerations gave me much anxiety and uneasiness.3
American seaman Jacob Nagle was on the Sirius when it hit the reef. He described things as fairly calm at the time:
A fine pleasant day with a light breeze off shore all the seamen that could muster hook and line was catching gropers not thinking of any danger or at twelve o’clock, when thinking of going to dinner, Captain Ball of the Supply brig hailed us and informed Captain Hunter that we were too close in the swell of the surf having hold of us … and Captain Ball, being at a distance out side of us, perceived it sooner than we did. Immediately we made sail that we could set, and a light breeze off shore, but the wind and swell driving us in.4
As the water poured into the torn hull, the crew were ordered to cut away the masts in an attempt to lighten the ship and allow it to pull clear of the reef, but the damage was already too great. When they opened the hatch, according to Nagle, there was already four feet of water in the hold. Late in the day it became obvious they were in a hopeless situation and a pulley was made that allowed the crew to be taken one by one to the safety of the beach. Over the next few days the crew worked ‘both night and day, so we had no rest’ to salvage as much of the cargo as possible before the stricken vessel completely broke up.
One of the survivors of the wreck was the second-lieutenant of the Sirius, Newton Fowell, who noted that some of the officers lost ‘part of their clothes and all of their [live] stock’ but that his loss was, luckily, ‘not very great’ as he was able to salvage his trunk, even though most of his clothes were badly stained.5
Fowell described how, during the salvage operations, two convicts went out to the stricken ship to throw dying livestock – which had been three days without water – overboard. Instead of carrying out this duty, the convicts found some grog, lit themselves a fire and stayed to get drunk. When they ignored the order to come ashore, another convict was sent with the instruction that if they did not obey the order he should throw them both overboard. The next morning they came ashore.
Major Robert Ross now found himself commander of an island with a population of around seven hundred people, which included the original party who came with Philip Gidley King and those who had come since. The new settlers had lost
a large proportion of their food and other provisions with the sinking of the Sirius, and Ross immediately stamped his authority on his new realm by declaring martial law.
In a letter he sent back to Phillip, he said that the morning after the sinking of the Sirius he ‘judged it necessary … to proclaim marshal law’ so as to preserve what food was left and to stop anyone from killing or plundering any livestock.6 He immediately reduced the food ration and stopped the hunting of wild birds.
Jacob Nagle, who would be stranded on Norfolk Island for almost a year because of the sinking of his ship, was unimpressed with Ross’ authoritarian rule:
Lieutenant Governor Ross was a merciless commander to either free man or prisoner. He had us under three different laws; the seamen were still under navy laws, the soldiers under military laws, besides the civil laws and the marshal laws of his own directions, with strict orders to be attended for the smallest crime, whatever the neglect of duty.7
Nagle describes how the crew of the Sirius survived on Norfolk Island. Not wishing to live in the barracks with the marines, they built a village of shacks near the beach. Many of the convict women were assigned to collect rushes for thatching the roofs of the shacks and ended up living with the seamen.
The convicts were assigned to clear land for a garden where, according to Nagle, the ground was ‘rich black soil’. They were initially given rations of ‘a pound and a half-pound of flour and a pound and a half-pound of grain mixed together and a few ounces of meat’ a week, but in only six weeks the meat ran out.