by David Hill
The Gorgon had arrived in Sydney the previous September, bringing out convicts and supplies as one of the eleven ships of the Third Fleet and also carrying on board Lieutenant Philip Gidley King. King had been sent to London in 1790 by Arthur Phillip to report on the fortunes of the First Fleet; he returned to the colony with his new wife, whom he had married while in London.
The captain of the Gorgon, John Parker, had also brought his wife, Ann, along. She would go on to write A Voyage Around the World in the Gorgon, an account of the trip, which was published in London four years later.
Among the marines returning to England was their commander, Robert Ross. Apart from later being given command of a troop of marines at Chatham College and seeking to be paid a higher pension, Ross would all but disappear from the pages of history when he arrived back in England. He lived for only another two and a half years and died on 9 June 1794 at Brompton in Kent, aged 54.
Also on board was William Dawes, the marine officer who had established an observatory on Dawes Point, now the site of the southern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Soon after he returned to England, Dawes went to Sierra Leone and was three times appointed governor there over the next ten years. Back in England in 1804 he helped to train missionaries for the Church Missionary Society. From 1812 he embraced the campaign against slavery and died in Antigua in 1836. He had first married in 1800 and had two sons, one of whom, William Rutter, became an astronomer like his father. In Antigua he had married again, this time a woman called Grace Gilbert, who survived him.
When the Gorgon reached the Cape of Good Hope, it picked up the escaped convict Mary Bryant, her daughter, Charlotte, and the other four surviving escapees from Sydney who had been taken back into custody in Koepang several months earlier. The Gorgon also took aboard the ten surviving mutineers from the Bounty who had been recaptured by Captain Edwards of the Pandora so they could be taken back to England and put on trial.
Captain Watkin Tench was also on the Gorgon. Shortly after arriving back in England, he was promoted to brevet-major and, with the outbreak of war with France, was soon at sea again. In November 1794 he was on the seventy-four-gun Alexander when it was captured by the French, and he would spend the next six months as a prisoner before being released as part of a prisoner exchange. He spent the remainder of the war in the Channel Fleet and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1798. From 1802 he served on shore depots and finally retired, by this stage a major-general, in 1816. However, he was active again in 1819 and retired again as lieutenant-general in July 1821. Tench married Anna Maria Sargent of Devonport after returning to England, and while they had no children of their own they adopted the four orphaned children of Tench’s sister and her navy husband Captain Bedford. Watkin Tench died in 1833 in Devon, aged 75.
Governor Arthur Phillip was one of the last officers of the First Fleet to leave New South Wales. On 11 December 1792 he sailed on the Atlantic with the last of the remaining First Fleet marines who did not wish to stay as settlers in the colony.
Phillip had wanted to leave earlier, having first requested to be relieved on 15 April 1790. He had written a private letter to Lord Sydney with the request, not realising that Sydney was no longer the minister for the Home Office and that Lord Grenville had taken over nine months earlier. Phillip gave no sound reason for wanting to be relieved but acknowledged that even if his request was approved it would be at least another year before it could take effect.14 In a separate letter to Evan Nepean of the Home Office, Phillip made a very rare reference to his wife, saying that he thought she was dying and that other of his affairs needed attending to.15
Arthur Phillip had sent his request to go home at a time when the colony was suffering great hardship and was chronically short of food. However, he denied that he was trying to leave at the worst time. In a letter to Lord Sydney he insisted that the problems of the colony would be ‘done away with before this letter reaches your Lordship’.16
Whatever the truth of the matter, Lord Grenville denied the request. In a short letter written almost a year after Phillip’s letter to Lord Sydney, Grenville made it clear to Phillip that his private problems were less important than his public responsibilities to the colony:
Lord Sydney has transmitted to me a private letter which his Lordship has received from you by Lieutenant King, wherein you have expressed a desire to be permitted to return to England. I am much concerned that this situation of your private affairs should have been such as to render this application necessary at a time when your services in New South Wales are so extremely important to the public.
I cannot, therefore refrain from expressing my earnest hope that you might have it in your power so as to arrange your private concerns that you may be able, without material inconvenience, to continue in your Government for a short time longer. From the zeal which you have at all times manifested for the public service, I am inclined to believe that you will readily accede to this proposal, and I shall therefore only add, that as soon as your presence in the Colony can be dispensed with, you will be assured that everything on my part will be done to contribute to your accommodation.17
Phillip’s permission to return home was not granted until Grenville had been succeeded by William Dundas. In a letter on behalf of the British Government Dundas referred to Phillip’s health as a factor in the decision:
I cannot conclude this letter without assuring you how much I lament that the ill state of your health deprives his Majesty of your further services in the Government of New South Wales and I have only to hope that, on quitting the settlement, you will have the satisfaction of leaving it in a thriving and prosperous situation.18
Judge David Collins was one of the few officials to stay longer than Phillip, and he would later return to Australia and become the governor of Tasmania. He recorded Phillip’s departure:
He was now about taking leave of his own government. The accommodations for his Excellency and the officers who were going home in the Atlantic being completed … at six o’clock in the evening of Monday the 10th Governor Phillip quitted the charge with which he had been entrusted by his Sovereign, and in the execution of which he had manifested a zeal and perseverance that alone could have enabled him to surmount the natural and artificial obstacles which the country and its inhabitants had thrown in his way.
His Excellency, at embarking on board the Atlantic, was received near the wharf on the east-side (where his boat was lying) by Major Grose, at the head of the New South Wales corps, who paid him, as he passed, the honours due to his rank and situation in the colony … At daylight on the morning of the 11th, the Atlantic was got under way, and by eight o’clock was clear of the Heads, standing to the E.S.E. with a fresh breeze at south. By twelve o’clock she had gained a considerable offing.19
The Atlantic would take six months to reach England, arriving in May 1793. Phillip took with him two convicts he had pardoned and two Aboriginal people, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne, who were to attract a lot of interest in London.
Chief Surgeon John White was another of the few senior members of the First Fleet who returned to England after Phillip. After several years working under stressful and difficult circumstances tending the sick in the colony – not to mention the large numbers of sick convicts who came on the Second and Third Fleets – he had applied for leave in England in December 1792, when Phillip himself was returning. White had to wait more than a year for approval and finally sailed home on the Daedalus in December 1794.
White married in 1800 and had three children. He had also had a son, Andrew, with a convict woman from the First Fleet, Rachel Turner. Andrew had been born in Sydney in 1793 and he later also went to England. He was to join the Royal Engineers and fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 before going back to Sydney in 1823 to reunite with his mother, whom he had not seen since he was an infant.
John White finally resigned his post rather than have to return to Sydney after his leave finished. For three years he served as surgeon on a
number of navy ships then on shore before retiring in 1820, aged 63. He spent his retirement years on the south coast of England and died at Worthing, aged 75, in 1832.
White had kept a journal from the first month of his appointment to the First Fleet. Covering the voyage to New South Wales and the early years in the colony, it was published in London in 1790.
In 1792 – two years before he went home – a recently arrived convict artist, Thomas Watling, had been assigned to White, and the two men went on to develop an effective creative partnership. A keen naturalist, White recorded the bird and animal life of the colony, with illustrations by Watling. It is widely believed that some of the drawings and paintings in White’s published book were Watling’s work.
Watling was a 26-year-old Scottish coach painter when he was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation in 1788 for forgery. He left England on the convict transport Pitt in July 1791 and escaped in Cape Town but was recaptured by the Dutch, imprisoned and subsequently handed back to the English. He was then put on the Royal Admiral and reached Sydney in October 1792, when he began working with White.
Not a great deal is known about Watling’s life after White went back to England. He was pardoned by Governor Hunter in 1797, and it is believed that in 1801 he went to live in Calcutta with his young son, thought to have been born to a convict woman in Sydney. In India he worked as a miniature portrait painter for some time before returning to Scotland. Once there, he was charged with forgeries committed in 1804 but discharged with the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’. He later moved to London, where he managed to obtain some financial support from the Royal Academy. It is not known how, when or where he died.
Judge David Collins had also requested to return to England, citing ‘very urgent private and family affairs’. His leave was approved, but successive governors kept him in the colony for another four years before he finally went back on the Britannia in August 1796.
In 1802 Collins was chosen to establish a new colony north of Bass Strait near what was later to become Melbourne. However, a shortage of water and timber forced him to shift to Hobart in Tasmania, where he remained until he died in 1810, aged 54.
After Phillip left Sydney in December 1792, there would be a period of almost three years before the appointment of the next governor of New South Wales. In the meantime the affairs of the colony were left in the hands of Lieutenant-Governor Major Francis Grose, and later, for a period of nine months, of Captain William Patterson.
When he arrived in the colony in 1791, Grose was to express some surprise to see so many crops growing, because he had heard so much about famine and food shortages before he arrived. In a letter to a friend that was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in February 1793, Grose painted the colony as a land of milk and honey – although he had arrived in late summer when the local scene would have looked its best:
Landed with my family at this place on 14th February and to my great comfort and astonishment, I find there is neither scarcity that was represented to me, nor the barren sands I was taught to imagine I would see. The whole place is a garden, on which fruit and vegetables of every description grow in the greatest luxuriance. Nothing is wanting here but oxen and black cattle, within five miles of my habitation there is food in abundance for thousand head of cattle … There is a good house as I desire.
The 39-year-old Grose had come from a well-to-do family, and his grandfather had been a well-known antiquarian during the reign of King George II. Young Francis had been commissioned as an ensign in the army in 1775 and fought in the American War of Independence before being wounded and sent home in 1779.
In his two years as acting governor of New South Wales he appointed a number of marines and former marines to important positions in the colony. He also granted land to serving marines and allocated convicts to work their farms. Grose believed the colony would develop more by encouraging private initiative rather than by relying on the public enterprise and encouraged the marine officers to engage in trade. It was under the watch of Grose that military control of the colony’s economy began to be established.
After two years Grose resigned, claiming his old wounds from the American wars were causing him much pain. At the end of 1794 he returned to England. For the next nine months he was replaced by Captain William Patterson, who had arrived with the New South Wales Corps of marines in 1791. Patterson was to be the colony’s administrator until the arrival of the new governor, Captain John Hunter.
Like his immediate predecessor, the 39-year-old Patterson had joined the army at an early age and had served in Cape Town in 1777, India in 1781, received his commission as a lieutenant in 1787 and was promoted to captain in 1789 when he volunteered to join the New South Wales Corps.
During the nine months he was in charge, Patterson granted more land than Arthur Phillip had done in five years as governor, and, like Major Francis Grose, he did nothing to check or control the increased involvement of the military in the farming and commerce of the colony. This gradually became a major problem, one that would dog the colony’s administration for many years, eventually coming to a head with the overthrow of Governor William Bligh more than ten years later, in 1808.
While Grose and Patterson were administrating the colony in the absence of a new governor, Captain John Hunter was pressing his claim to the governorship. Hunter’s reputation – and no doubt the feeling that he was governor material – had been further enhanced by the publication of his An Historic Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island in London in 1793.
By 1795 Hunter had been back in England for three years, having arrived home in April 1792 to find England again at war with France. He immediately joined as a volunteer on the Queen Charlotte and met up with his old commander and mentor Sir Roger Curtis, whom he had sailed with in the north Atlantic and the West Indies during the 1780s. Also on the Queen Charlotte was his old patron Admiral Lord Howe, who along with Curtis was to support Hunter’s claim to succeed Phillip as governor of New South Wales.
The unmarried Hunter sailed back to New South Wales in September 1795, celebrating his 58th birthday a few weeks before reaching Sydney and assuming the office of governor on his arrival. While his first reports to London were favourable, he was soon to privately complain that he was facing a difficult time in the job.
Hunter was to have the same problem as most of the other naval officers who were appointed governor. He was accustomed to the discipline of the quarterdeck, where the commander was the absolute and total master. Like Phillip before him and King and Bligh after him, he had no experience and little aptitude for dealing with the entrenched commercial interests and disobedience of the military.
Hunter moved to reduce the influence of the military in the colony. Government control of wages, prices and hours of work had become ineffective, and the mark-up on imported supplies by the military merchants reached as high as seven hundred per cent.
By 1798 and after three years of Hunter’s government, more of the settlement’s economic activity had shifted to the fertile soils around Parramatta. Here, most of the harvest came from private farms and not those cultivated by the government.
In the absence of a large program of free settlers it had been the marines who had become the farmers. Many had also become merchants, building up an effective monopoly in the selling of supplies – especially grog – at the huge mark-ups already mentioned.
One such successful former military officer was John Macarthur, who was to become one of the richest and most powerful men in the colony. Macarthur had been a captain in the New South Wales Corps, which arrived in 1791 to replace the original Marine Corps. Over the next few years he became a successful farmer before taking the appointment of inspector of public works.
After four years as governor Hunter’s reputation in London was being undermined by increasing complaints, many of which were being sent by his enemies in Sydney. His position was further weakened by the discovery that some of his own sta
ff were corrupt, including his steward Nicholas Franklyn, who committed suicide after being accused of being at the centre of an illegal trading operation in rum.
Eventually, and probably unfairly, Hunter was abruptly recalled. His former colleague and friend Philip Gidley King, who had successfully manoeuvred himself into the job while he had been back in England, carried the dispatches outlining Hunter’s formal sacking from England to Sydney.
A devastated Hunter left Sydney on the Buffalo and arrived back in England in May 1801, demanding an inquiry into his management of the colony. He was not only denied the chance to clear his name but was given the official cold shoulder and denied an audience with the secretary of state.
He was, however, able to attract some sympathy and an element of vindication with the publication in London in 1802 of his account of the colony, Governor Hunters Remarks on the Causes of the Colonial Expense of the Establishment of New South Wales. Hints for the Reduction of Such Expense and for the Reforming the Prevailing Abuses. Hunter was subsequently granted a pension of £300 per annum and, in 1804, despite being nearly 67 years old, was given command of the Venerable, a seventy-four-gun warship in the Channel Fleet. In 1807 he was appointed rear-admiral and in 1810, when he was 73, vice-admiral. In his last years he lived alone in Hackney in London and died in 1821, aged 84.
For Philip Gidley King the voyage to Sydney in 1800 to take up the position of governor was his third trip to New South Wales.
After arriving originally with the First Fleet, King had spent almost all of his two years in the new colony establishing the little settlement on Norfolk Island before leaving for England in 1790. King was 32 years old when he arrived back in London for the first time, to discover that while he was sailing for England a letter confirming his promotion and pay increase had been sent to Sydney. Governor Phillip had recommended his promotion, but lack of seniority had been a problem until the British Government announced he was to be given the title of lieutenant-governor of Norfolk Island, on a salary of £250 a year.