Joseph Foveaux took over after the Rum Rebellion but wouldn’t put Bligh back in charge
When Lieut. Col. Joseph Foveaux returned to NSW in 1808 he was forced to take command, but refused to reinstate the ousted Governor William Bligh
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When Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Foveaux arrived back in the colony of New South Wales after an absence of nearly four years, he was in for a shock. Expecting to find the colony in the hands of Governor William Bligh when he stepped ashore in Sydney, 210 years ago today, he instead found Bligh under house arrest and Major George Johnston running the colony.
Outranking Johnston, Foveaux reluctantly assumed power, prompting Bligh to hope he would be reinstated, but the governor’s hopes were soon dashed. Foveaux knew that if Bligh were put back in charge it could cause more chaos. Anyway, Foveaux’s sympathies were with the NSW Corps of which he was a member.
Foveaux is an enigma. In later years accounts of his cruelty blackened his reputation but at the time he was considered one of the best administrators in the colony. But if evidence of Foveaux’s commands in the antipodes is contradictory, records of his life are scarce. There are no known portraits and even his date of birth is in doubt. He was baptised on April 6, 1767, but family tradition says he may have been born nearly a year before. His father was a steward (some sources say a French cook) at the Ampthill Park Estate, the seat of the Earl of Ossory.
There is evidence Foveaux may have been a junior officer in the 60th Regiment of Foot, the King’s Royal Rifles before buying his commission to join the New South Wales Corp as a lieutenant in 1789. In 1791 he purchased his captaincy. Purchasing commissions was expensive, costing hundreds of pounds, which suggests he had a wealthy benefactor who may have also been influential in later promotions.
In 1792 he arrived in Sydney aboard The Pitt. On board he met fellow passenger, sergeant William Sherwin, and later began an affair with Sherwin’s wife Ann.
Once in the colonies Foveaux
was appointed commandant at Parramatta from 1792-93. Promoted to major in 1796 he was left in command of the NSW Corps when Major William Paterson returned to Britain, also becoming lieutenant governor, second in power to Governor John Hunter. During this time Foveaux took up land grants and began raising livestock. Within a few years he became the biggest holder of land and sheep in the colony.
When Paterson returned in 1799, Foveaux was relieved from his position as commander of the corps and as lieutenant governor but he looked for other opportunities and when the post of commandant of Norfolk Island became vacant in 1800, he volunteered.
Governor Philip Gidley King,
who had been the island’s first commandant, sent Foveaux there as acting lieutenant governor. Foveaux sold his sheep to John Macarthur and sailed to Norfolk. He found the island’s settlement run down and lacking order. His chief jailer Robert Jones (aka Robert Buckey), wrote: “Major Foveaux was one of them hard and determined men who believe in the lash more than the Bible.”
Foveaux set convicts to breaking rocks and punished transgressors with floggings that sometimes went too far.
Jones claimed one was stripped of flesh so that his collar “bones were exposed looking very much like two Ivory Polished horns.”
He also executed two Irish ringleaders of a thwarted mutiny by summarily hanging them without trial (for which he was later vindicated) and had a dubious practice of selling female convicts to free settlers.
Irish rebel Joseph Holt also complained that Foveaux took Sherwin’s wife as a lover and “confined the Serjeant: so the poor fellow seeing the danger he was in, thought it better to save his life, and to lose his wife, than to lose both”.
During his time on the island Foveaux was promoted again to lieutenant-colonel, but suffering badly from asthma, in 1803 he took four months leave to recover his health and in 1804 was forced to return to England.
In 1807 he was given orders to return, to either take over again on Norfolk and evacuate the island or, if the island was already evacuated, to take up a post in Sydney.
When he arrived in the colony on July 27, 1808 he was pressed into the role of acting governor, relieving Johnston, nominal leader of the “Rum rebellion”. He dismissed the self-serving Macarthur as colonial secretary, but refused to reinstate Bligh and in 1809 enticed Lieutenant governor Paterson, then serving as leader in Van Diemens Land, to take over.
Foveaux stayed on to help both Paterson and his replacement Lachlan Macquarie (who took over in 1810) both of whom spoke highly of him. He returned to England with Ann and they married in 1814, the same year he was promoted to Major-General.
He was given the rank of Lieut. Gen. on his retirement in 1830 and he died in 1846. Foveaux St, Surry Hills, is named after him.