by David Hill
King spent only three months in England before his second trip to New South Wales. While in England, he was also promoted in the navy to the rank of commander. Only three days before his departure he married Anna Josepha at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, then sailed with his new wife and new commission back to New South Wales on the Gorgon in March 1791.
When the ship stopped at Cape Town on its way to Sydney, King heard of continuing shortages of food in New South Wales and bought more livestock to take on to the colony. His unauthorised spending would result in protracted correspondence later, and many of the cattle died before reaching Sydney anyway. The Gorgon arrived in Sydney on 21 September 1791, and King and his wife spent five weeks there before sailing on to Norfolk Island. There, six weeks later, Anna would deliver the first of their three children, Phillip Parker.
In the twenty months that King had been away from Norfolk Island, it had changed dramatically. The island now had a population of nearly a thousand people and, after a long period of martial law under Major Robert Ross, there was widespread disaffection among the settlers.
During his second term on Norfolk Island King tried again to grow flax, which had been the original reason why the British Government had wanted to colonise an island that had no natural harbour. While he had been in London, King had persuaded the government to authorise bringing Maori flax-makers from New Zealand to Norfolk Island to help get the industry off the ground. Captain Vancouver on the Daedalus duly brought two Maoris to the island, but it was then discovered that they knew nothing about flax-making. King used the return of the Maoris to their homeland as an excuse to undertake an unauthorised visit to New Zealand and wrote up an account of his journey, which was first published in London in 1794.
After nearly four years back on Norfolk Island King had developed a reputation for tempestuousness and heavy drinking. In 1796, suffering from gout and other illnesses, he was given permission by Governor John Hunter to return for the second time to England.
King was not yet 40 and had been commander of Norfolk Island for a total of nearly six years. By this stage the little island colony was not only self-sufficient in grain but also able to export pigs and other produce to Sydney, which was still dependent on imported food for its survival.
Back in London for the second time King found he still had supporters, including former governor Arthur Phillip, who was back in England and would actively promote King as the future governor of New South Wales. In a letter to the home secretary, William Dundas, Phillip said he wanted to render ‘justice to an officer of merit’ and that King was ‘the most likely to answer the intentions of the Government in the present state of the colony’.20 King also had the support of Joseph Banks, to whom he had regularly sent botanical specimens.
The representations on King’s behalf were successful, and in 1798 he was given a dormant commission as governor of New South Wales in the event that John Hunter died or was absent from the colony. At the time of this appointment there was no question of John Hunter’s not continuing as governor, however.
King’s departure from England for his third voyage to New South Wales was delayed for some months, and when he finally left Portsmouth on the Speedy in August 1799, the British Government had given him the dispatch recalling Hunter. King travelled with his wife, Anna, and youngest daughter, Elizabeth, while his two oldest children, Phillip and Maria, stayed with friends to be schooled in England.
During the next six years Governor King encountered the same resistance from the military that Hunter had faced when trying to make them relinquish their control over all facets of the colony’s economy. In 1806 King handed over the governorship to William Bligh and sailed home for the third and last time, sick and exhausted. He arrived in England in November 1807 and died less than a year later, aged only 50.
When he returned to England, Arthur Phillip had been away for five years and seven months and was 55 years old. He did not go into retirement but, immediately on arrival, attended to a number of personal matters, including making a successful request to Home Secretary William Dundas that he keep being paid a salary even after retirement. He also sought medical treatment for the pain in his side that had troubled him for some years. In February 1794, a little more than a year after arriving back in England, he married Miss Isabella Whitehead, a 41-year-old from Preston in Lancashire.
Phillip had returned to a turbulent Europe. While he was still sailing home aboard the Atlantic, there were massacres in Paris, and the Tuileries Palace was stormed. In the month he reached England, Louis XVI was executed, and soon England was again at war with France.
In March 1796 Phillip was recalled to the navy as commander of the seventy-four-gun warship the Alexander and spent several months patrolling from Plymouth to Portsmouth. In July he was made commander of a fleet of nineteen British ships that were bound for the East Indies. He took the convoy as far as Tenerife, where he handed over to two other British warships. For the rest of the year he appears to have been on routine patrol work based at Cawsand Bay, near Plymouth.
He then served for two years as commander of the Swiftsure but shortly after being transferred to the Blenheim was relieved as commander to make way for another captain. He was humiliated, saying that he had been forced ashore in the ‘most mortifying circumstances’.21
The Blenheim was to be his last ship. For the next three years he was alternately on half-pay and not working or doing shore work with the navy, which included being commander of the Hampshire Sea Fencibles at Lymington, not far from his old home at Lyndhurst. The Sea Fencibles was made up of naval officers and volunteers and was established as an anti-invasion coastal force during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with France.
In 1799 he was promoted to admiral in the blue and in 1804 was still inspecting the Fencibles’ detachments along the Sussex coast, ensuring they were in readiness for an invasion from Napoleon’s France. Later in 1804 he was promoted again to admiral of the white and in 1805 to rear-admiral of the red, after which he retired from the navy.
At that time Phillip was 67 years old and had left New South Wales almost twelve years earlier. He would spend the next nine years living mostly in Bath, where he was regularly visited by many of his former colleagues from New South Wales, including his friend Philip Gidley King.
Phillip died on 31 August 1814 and was buried at St Nicholas’ Church in Bathampton. His wife Isabella died nine years later and was buried with him.
There were just over four thousand two hundred people in the colony when Phillip left. A little more than three thousand one hundred were in Sydney or at Parramatta and Toongabbie west of Sydney, and just over one thousand one hundred were on Norfolk Island. Over three thousand were convicts, forty-seven were part of the civil establishment and five hundred and two were military. The balance of the population was made up of emancipated convicts, a few free settlers and children.22
There were now more than two hundred and fifty children, compared with the thirty-six that had landed with the First Fleet five years earlier. The great majority of the new offspring had been born to convict parents, and many were illegitimate.
Phillip had been extremely sparing in the exercise of his powers to emancipate convicts. According to the commissary’s report of December 1792 a little more than a month after Phillip left only twelve men and three women had been officially freed, although there would have been many more who had served their sentences by that time.
Within the first five years, too, not many major buildings had been built in Sydney Cove. Apart from the two-storey, six-room, stone governor’s residence, which was the only building in the colony with a set of stairs, there was the commissary’s office and the more modest houses of Judge Advocate David Collins, Reverend Richard Johnson and his wife, and the surveyor-general, Augustus Alt. There was the dry store and a smaller house and some stores and sheds nearer the water’s edge. Across the stream on the western side of Sydney Cove was the ‘commodious’ one-storey hou
se of Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose, the military barracks, the spirit store and, further towards Dawes Point, the hospital and the residences of Surgeon John White and his assistants. Scattered over the slopes were a total of one hundred and sixty wattle-and-daub convict huts, which housed as many as ten convicts each.23
A little over a month before Phillip departed for England, in October 1792, an official survey revealed that only one thousand seven hundred acres (less than seven hundred hectares) of ground was under cultivation.24 Of this about a thousand acres was ‘public farming’ and the remaining seven hundred acres was split between a total of sixty-seven ‘settlers and others’, the ‘others’ being individual ex-convicts who had been given small grants of land. The survey also showed that almost all of the farming was now around Parramatta and nearby Toongabbie, about twenty-five kilometres west of Sydney, and that very little was taking place around Sydney itself.
During his time as governor Phillip had relied on state-owned farms and done little to promote the development of private farming. The public farms, however, had only limited success and Phillip repeatedly complained that the convicts did not make good farm workers and he lacked the supervisors to make them work better.
While he was governor, Phillip had the power to grant land to convicts who had served their sentences. However, he did so sparingly, and during his entire term only four thousand acres were given to individuals. At no stage had he ever seen the convicts as forming the foundations of the new country that was being established in Australia. From the earliest days of his appointment until he left to return to England, he only ever regarded them as a source of farm labour to free settlers for the duration of their incarceration. Within six months of arriving, he had pleaded for free settlers to develop the new colony, saying that fifty farmers would be more productive than a thousand convicts in ‘rendering the colony independent of the mother country as to provisions’.25
Nearly two years later he was still arguing with the British Government that the colony’s lack of progress on the agricultural front was due to the convicts, who he consistently complained were incapable of providing the foundation for viable food production in the colony:
[I]t has never been possible to direct the labour of more than a small part of the convicts to the principal object. A civil and military establishment forms a considerable part of our numbers, which is increased by women and children, all of whom are undoubtedly necessary, but are deadweight on those who have to render the colony independent for the necessities of life … Settlers will secure themselves and their provisions in a short time and everyone they feed will then be employed in cultivation.26
He had already proposed that the most fertile lands west of Sydney should be earmarked for free settlers, rather than being wasted as grants to incompetent convict farmers:
The land … twenty miles to the westward of Rose Hill, that is, to the banks of the Nepean, is as fine land for tillage as most of England … I propose that tract of land for those settlers which may be sent out … I think each settler should not have less than twenty men on his farm, which I suppose to be from five hundred to one thousand acres; it will be necessary to give that number of convicts to those settlers who come out, and support them for two years from the public stores; in that time if they are in any ways industrious – and I do not think they will be able to do it in less time – at the expiration of two years they may return half the convicts they have been allowed and would want no further assistance from the Government.27
Before Phillip returned to England, he called together the convicts whose terms he had recognised as expired and outlined their options. First, they could accept a land grant and endeavour to make a success of farming on a small plot of land. Second, if they didn’t want to take the chance on their own, they could continue to work as labourers and draw the normal rations. Third, they were at liberty to return home, which most still dreamt of doing. It was made clear, however, that the government would provide no assistance to them and they would have to arrange their own passage on one of the ships returning to England.
As a result very few of the convicts ever reached home, which is as the government designed it. As Lord Grenville, the home secretary, had made clear to Phillip, as far as Britain was concerned the convicts were beyond correction, and even where they had served a seven-or fourteen-year sentence, they were expected to stay away until they died:
The return of the [convicts] to this country cannot legally be prevented, provided they can engage the masters or owners of any vessels arriving in New South Wales to transport them from thence. But as there is little reason to hope that any persons of that description will apply themselves here to the habits or pursuits of honest industry, it will be extremely desirable that every reasonable indulgence should be held out to them with a view of inducing them to remain in New South Wales and that it should be distinctly understood that no steps are likely to be taken by Government for facilitating return.28
Contrary to Phillip’s vision, then, it was the convicts and their offspring who would remain in Sydney and unwillingly form the backbone of what was to become the nation of Australia. When the idea of transportation to New South Wales had been conceived, the British Government had expressed little hope in the colony’s becoming anything more than a dumping ground for its human refuse. The story of the First Fleet, however, turned out to be one of success against the odds. In an expedition remarkable for its courage, hardship, famine and misadventure, perhaps the most remarkable thing is that this new colony and its people survived at all.
CHRONOLOGY
1717 The British Parliament passes legislation for the overseas transportation of convicts to America. Over the next sixty or so years more than forty thousand British convicts are sent.
1760 George III ascends to the British throne and begins a fifty-year reign. He will authorise the colonisation of Australia before becoming insane and being replaced by the Prince Regent in 1811.
1770
April Captain James Cook charts the east coast of Australia and anchors in what he names Botany Bay.
May After leaving Botany Bay, Cook sails north past another harbour, which he names Port Jackson. Eighteen years later this will become the settlement of Sydney.
1776 The American War of Independence means the British can no longer export their surplus convicts to the American colonies. The prison population grows rapidly in Britain, accelerated by an increase in convictions and a decrease in executions.
1777 The British Parliament passes the Hulk Act to allow the increasing number of convicts to be housed on decommissioned naval vessels on the Thames and in other ports. A Bill is also passed in the British Parliament authorising the resumption of overseas transportation of convicts, but no country of destination is prescribed in the legislation.
1779 A British House of Commons committee examines a number of possible overseas destinations for the transportation of convicts, including Gibraltar and the west coast of Africa. Eminent botanist Joseph Banks recommends Botany Bay as a site.
1781–2 A number of attempts to establish convict settlements on the west coast of Africa fail.
1783
August American James Matra proposes that the British Government establish a colony in New South Wales for American loyalists following the loss of the colonies in the American War of Independence.
1784 A further Bill is passed in the British Parliament calling on the government to resume overseas transportation of convicts.
1785
April Another House of Commons committee is established to examine where to transport convicts. The committee baulks at the high estimated costs of transporting convicts to New South Wales.
August The navy sloop Nautilus is sent to survey the west African coast and later reports it unsuitable for the establishment of a convict colony.
1786
March The nation is shaken by the news of a prison riot on a hulk in Plymouth. Forty-four convicts are shot, eigh
t of them fatally.
18 August Lord Sydney announces that King George III has authorised the establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales.
31 August Lord Sydney instructs the British Admiralty to arrange enough shipping to take seven hundred and fifty convicts plus marines, officers and some civilian officials to establish a settlement in Botany Bay.
September The British Government announces that Captain Arthur Phillip has been appointed as leader of the expedition and first governor of New South Wales.
October The Admiralty confirms it will assign two navy ships, the Sirius and the Supply, and will arrange the charter of other, privately owned, vessels to carry the First Fleeters and their supplies to Botany Bay.
Other key personnel are appointed to the venture, including commander of the Marine Corps Major Robert Ross, the Reverend Richard Johnson, Chief Surgeon John White and Judge David Collins.
November The Admiralty stipulates that only forty of the wives of the two hundred and fifty marines will be allowed to accompany their husbands to Botany Bay.
December The first convicts are transferred from the hulks and prisons to the convict transport ships on the Thames prior to being ferried to Portsmouth, where the First Fleet is being marshalled.
1787
11 January Arthur Phillip complains of overcrowding on the transports, and the ninth chartered ship is added to the fleet. The six convict transport ships are the Alexander, the Charlotte, the Scarborough, the Lady Penrhyn, the Friendship and the Prince of Wales. The three ships to carry food, equipment and supplies are the Fishburn, the Borrowdale and the Golden Grove.