Botany Bay and the First Fleet

The Real Story

Alan Frost

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781743820995
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Now in one definitive volume, Botany Bay and the First Fleet is a full, authentic account of the beginnings of modern Australia.
In 1787 a convoy of eleven ships, carrying about 1400 people, set out from England for Botany Bay, on the east coast of New South Wales. In deciding on Botany Bay, British authorities hoped not only to rid Britain of its excess criminals, but also to gain a key strategic outpost and take control of valuable natural resources.
According to the conventional account, it was a shambolic affair: under-prepared, poorly equipped and ill-disciplined. Here, Alan Frost debunks these myths, and shows that the voyage was in fact meticulously planned – reflecting its importance to Britain's imperial and commercial ambitions. In his examination of the ships, passengers and preparation, Frost reveals the hopes and schemes of those who engineered the voyage, and the experiences of those who made it.
The culmination of thirty-five years' study of previously neglected archives, Botany Bay and the First Fleet offers new and surprising insights into how Australia came to be.

PREFACE

SURPRISING AS IT IS, THIS IS the first extended study of the mounting of the First Fleet that carried the officials, marines and convicts who began the British colonization of New South Wales in 1788.

It is based on some 2500 documents that I have collected over the past thirty-five years, and that Dr Natasha Weir and I have transcribed and edited. I have told the story of this gathering in Botany Bay: The Real Story. While this long process may reflect no particular merit except persistence, it is also true that such a study as this could not properly have been undertaken without a detailed knowledge of the extended documentary record.

Despite its being so extensive, it is clear that even this record is not complete. Much of the planning was undertaken in conversations among officials at the Home Office, Treasury, Admiralty and Navy Board, and First Fleet officers such as Arthur Phillip (governor) and John White (chief surgeon). Also, numbers of the documents that were created are now lost to history. But while some aspects of the venture remain obscure (e.g. Phillip’s appointment), most can now be elucidated in considerable detail.

Editorial practices

In editing the documents we have mostly modernized spelling, capitalization and punctuation. (The principal exception is that we have left in their original form legal documents, such as Letters-Patent and Acts of Parliament.) Sometimes, in the interest of readier comprehension, we have also broken up very long passages into shorter paragraphs. While misspellings have been silently corrected, we have indicated where we have corrected obviously wrong words. We have standardized the spelling of personal and geographical names.

To avoid repetition, I have throughout referred to the Treasury and Admiralty Boards simply as Treasury and Admiralty, but retain the full titles for the Navy Board and Board of Trade.

INTRODUCTION

THE FIRST FLEET CARRYING the Botany Bay colony’s officials, marines, convicts, animals, plants and supplies set out from Portsmouth harbour in the early morning of Sunday, 13 May 1787.

Comprising eleven ships – two Royal Navy ships, six convict transports and three storeships – it wasn’t really a ‘fleet’. A more accurate characterization would be ‘squadron’ or, better, ‘convoy’. Still, ‘fleet’ is how it is known in Australian history, so that is the term I shall continue to use.

The First Fleet has had possibly a worse press than the decision to establish a convict colony at Botany Bay. Manning Clark wrote that ‘an indescribable hopelessness and confusion dominated the scene’ as the ships gathered at Portsmouth.¹ A.G.L. Shaw thought that the government ‘did not seriously consider the needs of a new settlement, penal or otherwise’.² Jonathan King wrote that ‘bureaucratic sloth, poor communications, faulty equipment and bad conditions’ delayed the departure of the Fleet.³ David Mackay held that ‘the despatch of the First Fleet to Botany Bay was a reckless act on the part of a desperate ministry … The expedition itself was poorly organized and badly equipped’.⁴ Robert Hughes found that the planning of the expedition was marked by ‘muddle and lack of foresight’.⁵ John Molony spoke extravagantly of ‘criminal negligence’.⁶ Mollie Gillen first pointed to ‘muddled’ preparations and ‘real deficiencies in preparing for the settlement’, then reached a crescendo with the view that the very colonization was a ‘monstrous crime’.⁷ Charles Wilson strained to equal her in hyperbole:

The execution of everything essential … to the satisfactory despatch of the Fleet and its successful transportation of its passengers and their settlement on arrival in New South Wales rested more [than with Phillip] with an ill-chosen, ill-organized, contentious and unwilling body of what passed for public servants in a dozen ministries and institutions, and a venal and corrupt body of private contractors.⁸

*

Underlying such comments are the same instinctive assumptions and lack of attention to detail that characterized the historians’ treatment of the decision to colonize New South Wales.

There is also a myriad mistakes. Clark wrote luridly that, at Portsmouth, ‘the women convicts lolled on the decks in indescribable filth and their all too scanty clothing’.⁹ This false assertion is based on something Governor Arthur Phillip wrote: ‘the situation in which the magistrates sent the women on board the Lady Penrhyn stamps them with infamy – though almost naked, and so very filthy, that nothing but clothing them could have prevented them from perishing’.¹⁰ But Phillip was commenting on the condition of the women as they arrived from regional jails to the holding one in London before being put on board the Lady Penrhyn in the Thames. It is not a description of how they were neglected at Portsmouth. Once under the supervision of the First Fleet officers and surgeons at Plymouth and Portsmouth, the women were bathed, clothed, fed properly and had their ailments treated. Clark grossly misrepresented the real situation.

Mind you, he has some distinguished company. Hughes thundered that ‘the Fleet was under-victualled by its crooked contractor, Duncan Campbell’.¹¹ He was wrong on three counts here. As I show in Botany Bay: The Real Story, Campbell was not ‘crooked’.¹² Neither was he the contractor for the First Fleet: William Richards Jr was; and he did not stint the rations. William Bowes Smyth, the surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn, wrote that ‘few marines or soldiers going out on a foreign service under government were ever better, if so well provided for as these convicts are’. The marine officer Watkin Tench recorded that ‘the provisions served on board were good, and of a much superior quality to those usually supplied by contract’. When the colonists were at last on land at Sydney, David Collins, the deputy judge-advocate, wrote: ‘the high health which was apparent in every countenance was to be attributed not only to the refreshments we met with at Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope, but to the excellent quality of the provisions with which we were supplied by Mr Richards Jr, the contractor’.¹³ Whom should we rather believe – the art critic whose historical research was inadequate; or people on the spot who knew what they were taking about?

Shaw, too, comprehensively panned the organization of the venture: ‘No farmers were sent out, no skilled craftsmen or mechanics, no person “knowledgeable in flax-dressing” … no anti-scorbutics … insufficient surgical supplies, even for the marines … overcrowding on the ships’.¹⁴ The trouble is, none of these charges is true, as I shall show.

There’s an obvious way of showing up the falseness of these views and assertions. Altogether, the people on the First Fleet numbered at least 1420 on embarkation; and with deaths and births en route, about 1373 reached Sydney.¹⁵ David Collins wrote:

Thus, under the blessing of God, was happily completed, in eight months and one week, a voyage which, before it was undertaken, the mind hardly dared venture to contemplate, and on which it was impossible to reflect without some apprehensions as to its termination. This fortunate completion of it, however, afforded even to ourselves as much matter of surprise as of general satisfaction; for in the above space of time we had sailed five thousand and twenty-one leagues;¹⁶ had touched at the American and African continents; and had at last rested within a few days sail of the antipodes of our native country, without meeting any accident in a fleet of eleven sail, nine of which were merchantmen that had never before sailed in that distant and imperfectly explored ocean: and when it is considered, that there was on board a large body of convicts, many of whom were embarked in a very sickly state, we might be deemed peculiarly fortunate, that of the whole number of all descriptions of persons coming to form the new settlement, only thirty-two had died since their leaving England, among whom were to be included one or two deaths by accident; although previous to our departure it was generally conjectured, that before we should have been a month at sea one of the transports would have been converted into a hospital ship.¹⁷

Now, Duncan Campbell said that a good result for a convict voyage across the Atlantic Ocean was a 10 per cent death rate, but that the average over an extended period was about 14 per cent.¹⁸ Yet, during a much longer and more difficult voyage, the First Fleet death rate was about 2 per cent. It would have been impossible for Phillip and his officers to have achieved this success if the ships were as poorly equipped and provisioned as the historians have claimed.

Behind such individual errors lies an abiding fault in the writing of history in and of Australia. All too often, later writers have simply accepted what earlier ones have said without ascertaining its accuracy, so that mistakes have been passed from one generation to the next.

The identification of the Sirius as an East Indiaman offers one good example of this habit. This characterization was evidently first made by M. Barnard Eldershaw (the nom-de-plume of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw) in Phillip of Australia in 1938.¹⁹ It was thereafter frequently repeated, including by me, when I simply followed what those before me had said.²⁰ Graeme Henderson and Myra Stanbury corrected it in 1988, when they pointed out that Philip King’s description of it as an ‘East country man’ meant that it was built for the Baltic rather than the East India trade, a point confirmed by details of its construction. Yet still the mistaken characterization goes on, most recently by David Hill in 1788.²¹

Let me give a more serious example of this persistent failure to assess evidence rigorously. In 1935, W.S. Campbell published a very short article, in which he announced confidently that he had ‘solved’ the puzzle of why Arthur Phillip was appointed governor of the Botany Bay colony: he felt ‘sure that Phillip’s appointments were due to the influence of Sir ...