King of the Australian Coast

Marsden Hordern

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522850437
• eBook ISBN: 9780522863574
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Phillip Parker King has been described as the greatest of Australia's early marine surveyors. But while the achievements of Cook and Flinders are widely known, this is the first telling of King's story.
Unlike Cook and Flinders, King was Australian-born—the son of Philip Gidley King, governor of New South Wales. In a series of gruelling voyages between 1817 and 1822, King charted most of the north-west coast of Australia from the eastern tip of Arnhem Land all the way round to Cape Leeuwin and King George Sound. He surveyed Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen's Land and the treacherous waters inside the Great Barrier Reef, filling gaps in the work of his famous predecessors.Marsden Hordern, a splendid storyteller, creates for the reader a sense of following, engrossed, in King's wake. The hazards of reefs, shoals and tides are ever-present, as is delight in unfamiliar wildlife and curiosity about the Aboriginal people. The question left hanging is whether King might be better known today had he been a less capable, good and faithful servant of the Crown, and more inclined to the excess and ineptitude of certain other early explorers.Winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for General History.Companion volume to Mariners are Warned!, another prize-winning maritime biography by the same author.

1

Officers and Gentlemen

PHILLIP PARKER KING, the first native-born surveyor of the Australian coast, came from a family whose history in the continent was as old as its white settlement. His father, Philip Gidley King, Second Lieutenant of HMS Sirius, was there when the Union Flag was raised for the first time in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788.

Lieutenant King came from Cornwall. He was born in 1758, the son of a draper, Philip King, member of a well-established Launceston family, and Utricia (née Gidley), the daughter of an attorney from the same town. Philip Gidley King entered the Royal Navy in 1770. Some twelve years later he joined the Ariadne under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip and so impressed Phillip that when he chose his officers for HMS Sirius—flagship of the first Fleet—King was among them. Thus began a life-long friendship between King and Australia’s founding father.

King did not remain long in Sydney in 1788. Shortly after the arrival of the first Fleet he was detailed by Governor Phillip to found a satellite colony on Norfolk Island, nearly a thousand miles out in the Pacific. This new outpost was to consist only of himself, six freemen and nine male convicts.

The appointment was a gratifying testimony of the governor’s trust, but it was also daunting. King faced isolation from civilized society, possibly for years, and realised that he would have to endure the additional loneliness of command. Unmarried, and with no immediate prospect of finding a wife, the 30-year-old lieutenant made a practical decision. He would take six female convicts to the new settlement, chosen from those still on board the transport, Lady Penrhyn, anchored in Sydney Cove.

Calling on Surgeon Lieutenant Arthur Bowes Smyth, who had been in charge of the women during their long voyage from England, King asked him to suggest suitable candidates for his project. This was a perplexing request, for Bowes Smyth—unable to recommend positively any of his charges—could only make a relative assessment and proffer the names of those whose characters, he said, stood ‘fairest’.1 This was later modified in his journal as, ‘those whose behaviour on board during the voyage has been the least exceptional’.2

The thought of yet another arduous sea voyage to an even more remote part of the world cannot have appealed to the women but, on King’s promising that if they behaved well their yoke would be easier and their burden lighter than that of their Sydney sisters, they agreed.

The life of Ann Inett, a Worcestershire girl and one of Bowes Smyth’s six nominees, was changed dramatically by this decision. She had already experienced one sudden reversal of fortune when her sentence for breaking, entering and stealing, for which she was to have hung, was commuted to seven years’ transportation. Now, on their arrival at Norfolk Island, King chose her as his mistress. During their relationship, which endured until they returned to Sydney together in 1790, Ann bore King two sons whom he named for their birthplaces—Norfolk and Sydney King.

With the settlement at Sydney Cove almost starving, Governor Phillip sent King back to England in 1790 to report on their plight, with the promise that on his return he would be appointed lieutenant-governor of the increasingly important colony at Norfolk Island. The prospect of such a promotion augured well for King’s career, but not for his domestic situation. There would be no place in the gubernatorial residence for a convict mistress, and King determined that while in England he must find himself a suitable wife.

This marked the break-up of his Norfolk Island family, although King continued to care for them. After promoting Ann’s marriage to an emancipated convict, he sent Norfolk and Sydney to England where they were educated under the forbearing guardianship of his mother and mother-in-law. Both men subsequently became lieutenants in the Royal Navy.

As Governor Phillip’s instructions that King return to the colony as soon as possible left little time for social intercourse or courting, he selected a bride from his family circle—a pragmatic and seemingly un-romantic course of action which nevertheless proved highly successful. In his cousin Anna Josepha Coombe he found a wife who was sufficiently hardy to withstand the rigours of the life to which he took her, yet sensitive and kind enough to provide the comfort and support he needed in his solitary official position on Norfolk Island, and later in Sydney.

The couple took passage in HMS Gorgon under the command of Captain John Parker and arrived in Sydney on 22 September 1791. Continuing on to Norfolk Island, they moved into its dilapidated little Government House built on a rise above Sydney Bay, and there, on 13 December 1791, Anna Josepha gave birth to a son, the subject of this book. The baby was baptized on 5 February 1792 and named Phillip Parker for his godfather, Governor Arthur Phillip, and Captain Parker of HMS Gorgon.

In that year of Mozart’s death and the first performance of the Magic Flute no gentle arias greeted the boy’s arrival—only the boom of the sea on the island’s cliffs and the sigh of the wind in its pines. This music of sea and air he was to hear all his life and at his death it would play a spectacular part in the pageantry of his funeral.

Other influences from that time also shaped King’s future. In 1796 Matthew Flinders visited Norfolk Island in the Reliance—a momentous event for the 4-year-old child. When asked by the eminent navigator what he intended to be, he is reputed to have replied, ‘I shall be a sailor like my papa and find islands of my own’.3 But it was to be many years before Phillip Parker King found his own islands. He did not stay long on Norfolk. By the end of 1795 the stress of command and the financial burden of supporting a family, now augmented by the arrival of a daughter, Anna Maria, were so damaging his father’s health that Governor John Hunter granted him leave to return to England. They sailed from Sydney late in 1796, and that was the last Phillip Parker King would see of his native land for twenty-one years.

His health partially restored, in 1799 Philip Gidley King again prepared to leave for Sydney where he was to succeed Hunter as governor of the colony. This appointment would ameliorate his financial situation, but it would also separate his family—now increased to three by a daughter, Elizabeth, who had been born on the homeward voyage.

Phillip and Anna Maria were to stay in England. Phillip was now eight, and his father hoped that in three years’ time he might be accepted for the Naval Academy which, although founded primarily for sons of the aristocracy, retained a few places for the sons of serving officers. P. G. King had petitioned his patron, Sir Joseph Banks, to nominate young Phillip for a place, assuring him that the boy was anxious to serve his country, and hoping that ‘present embarrassments and family situation would plead for him’.4 His plea had succeeded to the point where in October 1799, shortly before the family was to leave for Sydney, King learned from Sir Evan Nepean, Secretary to the Admiralty, that his son had been accepted and that his name was ‘eighteenth on the list’ for the academy.5

This did not guarantee his entrance, however. Another three years would elapse before they would learn his fate, and King had to accept that his son’s chances of admission would be much greater if he spent the intervening period at a recognized educational establishment in England rather than under indifferent tutoring in Sydney. In spite of straitened circumstances, and a natural reluctance to part with the boy, he enrolled Phillip at the Reverend Peter T. Burford’s boarding school at Stratford Grove in Essex.

The Kings sailed for Sydney in November 1799, leaving Phillip and Anna Maria to be cared for by their many relations and by King’s close friends, his naval agent, James Sykes, and Samuel Enderby, an influential shipowner who had connections with Port Jackson. Some of Enderby’s nearly seventy whalers had carried convicts to Sydney in the Third Fleet in 1791, and since then three of the vessels, including the Speedy, on which the Kings were making their outward passage, had plied regularly to that port.

The parting was sorrowful for the parents and on 14 January 1800, when they were three weeks from the Cape, the governor elect wrote, telling his son,

. . . you will easily conceive how anxious we are about your health and welfare, which gives both me and your mother many uneasy moments. However we trust and hope that you are still the same good boy you used to be, and if that is the case we have no doubt of your being beloved, & making that progress in your studies which will be hereafter not only an ornament to yourself but also a comfort to me and your mother if it please God to spare our lives to see you and your dear sister again; think my dear little fellow what a joyful meeting we shall have . . .

King assured his son that they had not forgotten to drink his health on his birthday and on Christmas Day, and concluded:

I must now take leave of you my dear Phill write to us by every opportunity that Mr Sykes or Mr Enderby informs you of and say everything about yourself, who you have been with, and if you think you have behaved well which I hope is the case; God bless and preserve you is the wish of your Affectionate Father, Philip Gidley King6

In the event, the boy was not accepted for the academy, but life in the Enderby household, where he spent much of his time after the departure of his parents, confirmed his leanings towards a career at sea and, with his youthful zeal for voyaging and exploration enhanced by the whaling captains’ stories of cannibal islands and palm-fringed atolls, the Aurora Australis and the blink of polar ice, he began to study the history of Australian navigation.

The motherly Mary Enderby was also a powerful influence. Her understanding of maritime affairs earned Governor King’s highest praise. In urging his son to heed her advice he assured him that had Mrs Enderby been a man, and entered the Navy, and had she become a captain, ‘she could not have said more to you on a Sea life than the contents of her dialogue with you on that subject’.7

The 14-year-old King left Stratford in 1805, fluent in French and Latin, and having mastered writing, composition, grammar, literature and mathematics. But although he was set on a sea life, his father wanted him to return to Sydney first, and this required complex organization, since it often took over a year to receive a reply to a letter. The governor had to make contingency plans for events which might occur during this twelve-month hiatus in their correspondence and, in a letter methodically endorsed by young Phillip, ‘Dated 21 July 1805, Rec’d April 18th 1806 concerning me going out to N.S.W.’, he sent painstaking directions.

Phillip was told to join his parents in Sydney. Tentative arrangements had already been made for him to sail in HMS Buffalo. The costs of fitting him out for the voyage would be attended to by the ‘inestimable’ Mrs Enderby. Before leaving he was to pay his respects to his many patrons, expressing ‘the most grateful remembrance for those who had nourished him’. The influential Sir Joseph Banks, a sincere family friend, must not be neglected. If Sir Joseph was well and in town, Mr Enderby would take him on a Thursday or Sunday morning before nine o’clock. Phillip must behave circumspectly and, if Lady and Miss Banks were present, he must ‘be sure to ask their commands very politely’. And if ‘our dear friend Admiral Phillip’ was not in London, he should be written to by Mr Enderby and informed of his godson’s movements.

Mr Enderby would also take Phillip to see Mr John King, Under Secretary at the Home Office, if he was still in office. Mr King had been assured that if the boy was leaving for Sydney he would visit him. Phillip was to be at his Whitehall office by ten o’clock and send in his card on which he should write ‘Master King to take leave and receive Mr King’s commands for his father Governor King’. This was an important call and, if the under secretary was not in Whitehall, Phillip was not to give up but was to ‘go to his house in Saville Row’. Then there was Mr Secretary Cooke at the Colonial Office in Downing Street and Sir Evan Nepean at the Admiralty. He was to explain to Sir Evan that as he had failed to get into the Naval Academy he was going out to New South Wales to join his father.

On the voyage out he was not to be idle, but was to practise reading and writing not only for amusement but also for the improvement of his mind. He must not eat too much fruit in foreign ports as that would bring on disease. He must be liberal with Mrs Enderby’s servants who have been kind to him, and must consult her as to the amount to tip them.

These arrangements, although seemingly comprehensive enough to cover any eventuality, were complicated even further by P. G. King’s uncertainty regarding his own future. It was possible that after the Buffalo had left for Sydney the governor would be recalled and that by the time Phillip arrived in Sydney his parents might be on their way back to England. In that case letters would be waiting for Phillip and friends to care for him and send him back again. And, again, the father might be dead. In that case, ‘you will find your dear mother waiting’.

The governor ended on a tender note:

And take care to observe the Sailor’s Golden Rules—Hold fast Never neglect your Prayers & shun bad company

Observing those rules, doing to others as you would be done unto, keep your head Cool, & your feet warm, & use plenty of exercise, and you may bid defiance to Old Nick and all his works—with the most affectionate wishes for your health

I remain My dear boy

Your affect’e father

Philip Gidley King8

So much careful planning, and all to no...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Officers and Gentlemen
• 2 The Voyage Out
• 3 The Little Mermaid
• 4 Westward
• 5 Dangerous Work
• 6 Arnherm’s Land
• 7 Van Diemen’s Bay
• 8 Unlocking Hell’s Gates
• 9 The Labyrinth
• 10 The Thirsty Coast
• 11 Refitting and a False Start
• 12 Widening the Reef Road
• 13 Pump or Perish
• 14 Earl Bathurst’s Namesake
• 15 Coral Convoy
• 16 Kimberley Coast
• 17 Port Louis
• 18 Meeting the Minang
• 19 Cygnet Bay
• 20 Farewell to Sydney
• 21 ‘Laus Deo’
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Conversion Scales
• Index