by David Hill
They were easily able to supplement their meat ration by catching birds, however, which were plentiful on the island. To start with they ate the large gannets: ‘A sea fowl, apparently as big as a goose, would come open mouthed at you, but destroying a good many, they left the island.’ Then they hunted the mutton bird on Mount Pitt on the north-west of the island, which, according to Nagle, was the only reason they survived:
These bird seemingly as god would have it, was the saving of us, as it was the chief living we had while they lasted …
We would start out in the afternoon and reach the mount by dusk. I suppose about four or five miles up hills and down steep valleys … when we arrived on the mount we would knock up a fire and wait till the birds begin to fall. There would be sailors, soldiers and convicts, to the amount of fifty or sixty a night. By calculation there would not be less than twelve to fourteen hundred destroyed of a night. When they began to drop, we would go down into the vales and the more we hollered ‘ho, ho, ho’, the birds would come running, crying out ‘ke, ke, ke’ thinking it was their mate or their young, and by that means every man would take home what he thought sufficient in his knapsack, which would be twenty or thirty or more. When completed, every man would light his torch and set out homewards, all in a line, as the path was small and in this season of the year was heavy rains. By the time we got to town, would be eleven or twelve o’clock at night, all wet and muddy.8
Nagle said that Ross tried to stop the sailors from hunting the birds but that Captain Hunter disagreed. When Ross had one of the seamen flogged, Hunter ordered his second in command from the Sirius, Lieutenant Bradley, to issue leave passes to any of his crew who wanted one:
About this time the Governor issued orders that no man dare kill a bird at Mount Pitt … he had a convict which he sent daily to the mount for birds who discovered one of our seamen that had killed two or three and the Governor Ross punished him with two dozen. Through his tyrannical behaviour, Captain Hunter and him did not agree while on the island. He would not allow the soldiers or convicts to go a foraging and wished the Captain to prevent us likewise but as the Governor clapped sentries on the roads which led around the island, that no one could go anywhere without a pass, the Captain ordered Mr. Bradley to give the seamen a pass whenever they called upon him for one … He [Hunter] told him [Ross] he did not wish his men to starve while there was anything to be got by foraging around the island.9
Ross’ tyrannical rule of Norfolk Island would last only eleven months, as he and the rest of the marines were recalled by the British Government to be replaced by the newly formed New South Wales Corps, under Major Grose, which would arrive on the Second Fleet ships from June 1790. The instructions terminating Ross’ appointment, in a letter written by the home secretary, Grenville, on Christmas Eve 1789 – some months before Ross went to Norfolk Island – were totally unambiguous:
Major Grose has been appointed to succeed to the Lieutenant Government of New South Wales and on his arrival you will direct Major Ross and his officers of the marine corps operating under his command together with such of the non-commissioned officers and private men as may be desirous of returning home, to be embarked as soon as possible for that purpose.10
The devastating news of the sinking of the Sirius was brought back to Sydney by the Supply. Watkin Tench recalled being rowed out to meet Lieutenant Ball in Port Jackson with Arthur Phillip:
The Governor … determined to go down the harbour and I begged permission to accompany him. Having turned a point about halfway down, we 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 …11
On the same day that the news of the sinking of the Sirius arrived, Arthur Phillip called together his senior colleagues in Sydney to discuss their predicament. Until then Phillip had rarely confided in or consulted with anyone. At the meeting the severity of the food situation was outlined and a decision made to yet again cut the food ration. It was now down to starvation levels. Everyone would receive a weekly ration of one kilogram of now very old salted pork, which had dried out and shrivelled, half a litre of peas and fifty-five grams of rice. The only significant addition to the ration would be whatever vegetables the gardens could deliver and from fishing, which had already proved to be unreliable and irregular.
Phillip of course did not know that the Guardian, carrying urgent relief supplies, had been shipwrecked. However, he correctly guessed that because such a long time had passed since he had pleaded for more food that an accident must have occurred: ‘[F]rom the time which has passed since my letter might be supposed to have been received in England, there was reason to suppose some accident had happened to the store ships sent out.’12
As the hungry colony approached its third winter, many of the clothes had been worn out to rags. Captain Watkin Tench tartly observed: ‘There is nothing more ludicrous … than the expedients of substituting, shifting and patching, which ingenuity devised to eke out wretchedness and preserve the remains of decency.’13
Tench went on to describe the severity of the situation:
The insufficiency of our ration soon diminished our execution of labour. Both soldiers and convicts pleaded such loss of strength as to find themselves unable to perform their accustomed tasks, the hours of public work were accordingly shortened … every man was ordered to do as much as his strength would permit and every other indulgence was granted.14
Tench also said that a number of people died of starvation and that he witnessed one case himself:
I was passing the provision store when a man with a wild haggard countenance who had just received his daily pittance to carry home came out. His faltering gait and eager devouring eye led me to watch him and he had not proceeded ten steps before he fell. I ordered him to be carried to the hospital, where, when he arrived he was found dead. On opening the body the cause of death was pronounced to be inanition [an empty stomach].15
In April 1790, after more than two years in the colony, Chief Surgeon John White finally exploded. In a savage and honest letter to a friend in England he described what was not contained in any of the official letters or journals of Phillip or any of the officers, who would have been careful when they wrote not to offend their superiors. The letter, which was published in a number of London newspapers in December 1790 and January 1791,16 caused a sensation:
Hope is no more, and a new scene of distress and misery opens our view … For all the grain of every kind which we have been able to raise in two years and three months would not support us three weeks …. Limited in food and reduced as the people are, who have not had one ounce of fresh animal food since first in the country.17
White also lashed out at the British Government. He could not have known at the time that the Guardian, hurrying to bring them relief supplies, had been wrecked only weeks away from reaching New South Wales a few months earlier. Nor would he have known that the Second Fleet was on its way; already in Cape Town, it would arrive in Sydney two months later. ‘In the name of heaven, what has the ministry been about. Surely they have forgotten or neglected us, otherwise they would have sent to see what had become of us, and to know how we were likely to succeed.’
White believed the whole expedition was a failure, and couldn’t understand why the location hadn’t been more carefully vetted before settlers were dispatched:
From what we have already seen we may conclude that there is not a single article in the whole country that in the nature of things could prove of the smallest use or advantage to the mother country or the commercial world … It would be wise by the first steps to withdraw the settlement at least such as are living, or remove them to some other place. This is so far out of the world and the tract of commerce that it
could never answer.
The Reverend Richard Johnson reflected the desperation of the settlers in a tone perhaps even more bitter than White’s: ‘Tis now about two years and three months since we first arrived at this distant country. All this while we have been as it were, buried alive … our hopes are almost vanished.’18
With the Sirius lost and with food running out, Phillip had no choice but to send the last surviving ship off to Batavia to hunt for food. Lieutenant Ball, on the tiny Supply, was to collect as much food as could fit on the seventy-foot tender and hire any other vessel he could find in Batavia to bring additional supplies.
On board he had Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who was returning to England at the request of Arthur Phillip to report directly on the colony. In Batavia King was able to board a Dutch packet, the Snelheid, which set off less than a month later. Shortly after the ship left the Dutch port, ‘a putrid fever made its appearance’ and killed many of its crew. This forced it into Mauritius, where King, who was also ill, had to recuperate for most of August and part of September. The ship then resumed its journey via the Cape of Good Hope back to Holland. King was put over the side and into a local English boat as they passed by Beachy Head off the Sussex coast. He reached London four days before Christmas in 1790.
A number of the crew of the Supply also became sick when they reached Batavia, a port which was notorious for disease. Lieutenant Newton Fowell, now on the Supply, described Batavia in a letter to his father. It was unhealthy, he said, because its many canals were not kept clean and the build-up of waste was ‘very offensive’. None of the crew had been sick before they arrived, he wrote, but many became ill within days of anchoring in the city.19
Back in Sydney food had become so scarce that dinner invitations took on a new twist, as Tench described:
If a lucky man who had knocked down a dinner with his gun, or caught a fish by angling off the rocks, invited a neighbour to dine with him, the invitation always ran ‘bring your own bread’. Even at the governor’s table, this custom was constant observed. Every man when he sat down pulled his bread out of his pocket, and laid it on his plate.20
Finally, at 3.30 in the afternoon on 3 June 1790, two and a half years after the arrival of the First Fleet, the signal flag was broken out on Port Jackson’s South Head – a ship’s sail had been sighted.
Captain Watkin Tench had been alone and, hearing noise, rushed outside to see people running around in a state of excitement:
I was sitting in my hut, musing on our fate, when a confused clamour in the street drew my attention. I opened my door and saw several women with children in their arms running to and fro with distracted looks, congratulating each other and kissing their infants with the most passionate and extravagant marks of fondness. I needed no more; but instantly started out and ran to a hill where, by the assistance of a pocket glass, my hopes were realised. My next-door neighbour, a brother officer was with me but we could not speak. We wrung each other by the hand, with our eyes and hearts overflowing.21
Despite the heavy rain that began to fall, Arthur Phillip and a number of his colleagues began to row down the harbour and out towards the incoming ship. Once he was satisfied that it was an English ship, Phillip returned to Sydney Cove in one of his fishing boats. Tench and Surgeon John White continued until they were alongside the ship, planning to direct it back up the harbour.
It was the Lady Juliana. Because of the heavy weather it anchored that night inside the North Head and sailed into a jubilant Sydney Cove the next morning. From the Lady Juliana the settlers would receive not only food but their first direct news from England in more than three years. As Tench reported, ‘Letters, letters, was the cry. They were produced and torn open in trembling and anticipation.’22
They were also to learn of the Guardian, which had been lying wrecked in Table Bay when the Lady Juliana had passed through the Cape of Good Hope three months before.
The Lady Juliana was the first arrival of the Second Fleet; more convict ships would arrive over the next few weeks. There were five ships in the Second Fleet: the convict transports the Lady Juliana, the Surprize, the Neptune and the Scarborough, and the storeship the Justinian. They had left England with more than twelve hundred convicts and provisions. While food rationing would continue, the Second Fleet, with its stores and provisions, had averted almost certain disaster for the First Fleet settlers.
Three months after the arrival of the Lady Juliana and the other ships of the Second Fleet the lookout at South Head signalled the arrival of the Supply, which had returned from Batavia with a cargo of food. They had been gone for six months and two days.
Lieutenant Ball reported that he had experienced difficulty buying all the grain he wanted in Batavia so he had bought almost ninety tons, or ninety thousand kilograms, of rice instead. He had also managed to charter a small Dutch ship, the Waaksamheyd, that would arrive in Sydney with more food on 17 December. This additional food included items that were not on the Supply, including pork, beef and sugar.
The arrival of the Second Fleet also brought relief to Norfolk Island, which also was struggling to find enough food. Having unloaded convicts and supplies in Sydney, the Surprize and the Justinian were sent with some of the convicts and relief supplies to the island. Jacob Nagle, still stranded there with the other crew members of the shipwrecked Sirius, described the arrival of the two ships:
On one evening four of us was sitting in my hut. We were all messmates and considering the situation we were in at that present time. I think it was a Thursday evening. On the next Saturday our last provisions was to be served out, which was but one half-barrel of flour, to be served amongst seven hundred souls. The birds were destroyed, the cabbage tree likewise all gone, and as for the fish, it was very uncertain … We allowed ourselves to be in a wretched situation. The next morning at daylight … I walked out on the beach aback of my hut. I cast my eyes around on the ocean and then to the westward of the island, I discovered a ship close under the island.
I hollered out ‘sail ho! sail ho!’ … By this time the whole town was alarmed.23
Nagle said that when they boarded the Surprize, ‘the Captain, understanding our situation, treated us extremely well, gave us a hearty meal and some grog’.
Nagle also said that despite the food shortages no one died of starvation or disease during the eleven months they were stranded on the island. He suggested that when the Supply finally came to take the Sirius crew back to Sydney some of the seamen would have preferred to stay:
We now found ourselves comfortable, being on full allowance, and I know a great many seamen would rather have stayed on the island than to come away. It was rather singular, though the hardships and want of provisions, while on this island, eleven months and seven days, there was neither, woman or child died a natural death, excepting one old woman 70 or 80 years of age.24
Despite the relief brought by the Second Fleet and the arrival of more food on the Supply and the Waaksamheyd, the Sydney settlement would continue to experience shortage. Captain Watkin Tench recorded in his journal the return of hardship as the settlement entered its fourth year and the food ration was cut again: ‘Notwithstanding the supplies which had recently arrived from Batavia, short allowance was again proclaimed … I every day see wretches pale with disease and wasted with famine, struggle against the horrors of their situation.’25
Nevertheless, the crisis that had threatened the survival of the entire settlement had passed. With the arrival of the Second Fleet, the British Government announced that in future two convict fleets a year would be sent to New South Wales and with them additional provisions. At the same time the farms that had been started in more fertile soil around Rose Hill began to yield good harvests of food, and with this success more and more farms were being started nearby around the Parramatta, Nepean and Hawkesbury Rivers.
16
ARRIVAL OF THE SECOND FLEET
The landing of these people was truly affecting and shocking; great nu
mbers were not able to walk, nor move a hand or foot, such were slung over the ship side in the same manner as they would sling a cask, a box or anything of that nature.
While the arrival of the Lady Juliana and the other four ships of the Second Fleet in June 1790 would be the end of the crisis that had threatened the survival of the early convict settlement, it would also mark an infamous episode in the early history of Australia, one of the worst chapters in seafaring history.
Of the one thousand and thirty-eight convicts who were loaded on board the Surprize, the Neptune and the Scarborough in England in 1789, nearly a quarter died before they reached Sydney. Of the remaining seven hundred and fifty-six who arrived alive in Sydney, four hundred and eighty-six were immediately hospitalised in hastily erected tents. A hundred and twenty-four would die during their first days in the colony.
Less than six months after the First Fleet had sailed into Sydney Cove, and unbeknown to Arthur Phillip, the British Government had begun preparations for sending a second fleet. The London press carried reports that Home Secretary Lord Sydney had issued orders for another ‘Botany Bay fleet’ to be prepared, even though the government had not yet received any news from Sydney.1
The first ship commissioned for the Second Fleet was the four-hundred-ton Lady Juliana. In November 1788 the loading of convicts and supplies began. It was planned that if no good news came back from New South Wales, the ship would instead be sent to Nova Scotia, in what was referred to in the press as the Quebec Plan.2
In March 1789, nearly two years after the First Fleet had left England and more than a year after it had arrived in Sydney, the government received the first reports from Governor Phillip. These gave them sufficient confidence to send more convicts to New South Wales.