First Fleet sets sail for Australia: And we’re bound for Botany Bay
PART 1: Told through the eyes of Australia’s youngest convict, eight-year-old John Hudson, this is the First Fleet as you’ve never seen it.
London bleeds. London breaks. This boy shivers. This boy shakes. October 1783. One hour past midnight. John Hudson assesses the dimensions of a glass skylight above a window to the well-appointed home in East Smithfield he has every intention of robbing. Only nine years old, young Hudson is not yet aware how dramatically notions of dimension and space and distance figure in his destiny.
He was born into a city with 1500sq km of space and one million souls burdened with the fate of squeezing into it. Sometimes history is only a question of size and space. The size of a pox sore on a young father’s forearm. The space between two kneecaps when the working girls of Drury Lane open their legs. The length of a shiv held to the chin of a wealthy gentleman. The 17,000 nautical miles and 252 days at sea separating young John Hudson from a great southern prison about 7.6 million square kilometres wide and long with vast blue oceans for walls.
The skylight is narrow but young Hudson’s stomach reminds him how slim his body has become, some pitiful width between a wire-thin chest and the lingering last gasps of England’s dead. His hands and feet are covered in black soot. Fine carbon powder on his lungs. He swallows a cough. The boy’s a seasoned chimneysweep, a miserable occupation that sees boys like Hudson fall regularly from snowy rooftops and slow-roast themselves alive in oven flues, with the singular self-educational fringe benefit of improving a budding thief’s ability to squeeze through tight spaces.
He takes one last look across the empty alleyways of London. King George III’s city of shadow and fog, disease and desperation. A crack in the cold, still night. The skylight glass falls away and the boy slips inside the house, scaling down the home’s internal walls to a table beneath his entry point. He scurries through the darkened home, fills his nervy hands with a linen shirt, five silk stockings, two aprons and a pistol. He exits the house quickly and undetected but leaves behind a fateful trace of his bold endeavours. A sooty footprint on the table beneath the skylight.
Young John Hudson doesn’t know it yet but he’s just secured himself a place in Australian history, his own small role in one of humankind’s most ambitious and bizarre social experiments. John Hudson will be the youngest convict to sail with the First Fleet, 11 small ships hauling 1500 souls and two years’ worth of food and supplies to a distant land that exists only in the imagination and the paper line drawings of a dead man named James Cook.
The boy will owe it all to John Howard. In 1777 the great British prison reformer publishes The State of the Prisons, an excoriating public assessment of his dark journey through the abyss of England’s overcrowded and overwhelmed prison system. He describes prison cells, 5m by 3m, filled with up to 24 starved and suffocating thieves breathing air through a few small holes in a cell door. He describes dens of disease and criminal knowledge-sharing and prostitution and rioting and scarce rehabilitation. He describes places doctors refuse to visit for fear of infection. He talks of turnkeys turning blind eyes to prison graft and debauchery. Itching and scratching and rotting scorbutic humans on floating prison hulks, less men and women than bipedal carcasses. Shoeless and semi-naked and crazed and doomed prisoners envious of their countless and throbbing vermin cellmates that can scamper to freedom through every crack in the empire’s faulty and collapsing prison system.
The boy will owe it all to Sir Joseph Banks. Here’s the great botanist now, still handsome and brash in his early 40s, standing before the House of Commons committee established to solve the escalating prison problem, urging the consideration of Botany Bay on the fertile and inescapable New South Wales coast of New Holland as a suitable destination for prisoner transportation. Published accounts of Banks’s jaw-dropping southern journey of discovery with Captain James Cook have turned the razor-sharp naturalist into a scientific celebrity of such renown that the respected Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus has suggested the great and vast southern continent be known forever more as “Banksia”.
“Joseph Banks Esq. being requested, in case it should be thought expedient to establish a Colony of convicted felons in any distant part of the Globe, from whence escape might be difficult … informed your committee that the place which appeared to him best adapted for such a purpose, was Botany Bay,” reads an account of Banks’s committee appearance.
“He apprehended there would be little possibility of opposition from the natives, as during his stay there in the year 1770, he saw very few and did not think there were above fifty in the neighbourhood … those he saw were naked, treacherous, and armed with lances, but extremely cowardly, and constantly retired from our people when they made the least appearance and resistance.
“The climate, he apprehended, was similar to Toulouse in the South of France … there were no beasts of prey, and he did not doubt oxen and sheep, if carried there, would thrive and increase ... The grass was long and luxuriant, and the eatable vegetables, particularly a sort of wild spinach; the country was well supplied with water; there was an abundance of timber and fuel sufficient for any number of buildings, which might be found necessary.”
“Where?” whispers young John Hudson to an old cellmate in the bowels of the Dunkirk, the floating prison hulk moored in Plymouth Harbour, southwest England, where the boy has languished for three years amid men, some hopeless, some half-dead, carrying every venereal disease moonlight London can manufacture. “Botany Bay,” his cellmate barks.
It’s March 1787. The boy never read about Cook’s Pacific odyssey — the great navigator’s world-changing walk across the shores of Botany Bay — because the boy can’t read. Most of his fellow convicts on the First Fleet will build an image of their final destination out of whispers and rumours. The great southern land. Terra Nullius. No man’s land. A searing barren hell, some whisper. There are naked savages there, they whisper, because they have no possible insight into the complex, possibly 60,000-year history of the prisoner island’s inhabitants; their connection to place; their dreaming. Paradise, whisper others. Wild fruits the size of your fist. Fresh fish as silver as the moon with flesh as white as your eyes. Golden sand beaches and hills that roll across the country’s endless coastline like the curves on a costly Covent Garden toffer.
‘Do you know where the earth ends, lad?’
For three agonising years in the sweltering, suffocating Dunkirk, the boy’s been stewing on his one great error in judgment: robbing the East Smithfield home of a man with half a brain. The homeowner, a chemist named William Holdsworth, spotted Hudson’s sooty toe marks on the table beneath the skylight.
“They were small toes,” said Holdsworth, giving evidence in the Old Bailey where young Hudson was dragged before Justice Wills around Christmas 1783. “I took the impressions of the foot and of the toes that were on the table upon a piece of paper as minutely as I could.”
Another witness, Sarah Baynes, said she spotted Hudson vigorously scrubbing himself clean in a boarding house washtub. Canny Ms Baynes knew that young London chimneysweeps welcome a wash like they welcome a slow-roasting death inside a chimney flue. They eat and sleep in soot, wear the warm black chimney dust in winter like a snug-fitting coat. Their reticence to scrub themselves clean is part of the reason why they so often die of testicular cancers from the build-up of toxic soot that collects around their genitals. Ms Baynes later found Hudson’s stolen goods bundled in the corner of the boarding house.
A third witness, a pawnbroker named John Smith, said Hudson was the boy who tried to sell him an expensive linen shirt on the morning of October 17, 1783.
“He said it belonged to his father,” Smith told the court. “I asked who had sent him. He said his mother. I stopped him.”
The court turned its attention to young Hudson. “How old are you?”
“Going on nine,” stout Hudson replied.
“What business were you bred up in?”
“None, sometimes chimneysweeps,” Hudson said.
“Have you any father and mother?”
“Dead.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know.”
Justice Wills was reluctant to convict. “One would wish to snatch such a boy, if one possibly could, from destruction, for he will only return to the same kind of life which he has led before,” he said.
But this was the life John Hudson was born into. The boy was sentenced to seven years’ transportation.
“Where’s Botany Bay?” a confused Hudson asks his Dunkirk cellmate.
His cellmate laughs.
“Do you know where the earth ends, lad?” the old con asks.
“I think so,” says the boy.
“Well, it’s a little further south than that.”
Spring 2017. The glorious 24/7 metropolis of Sydney. The restless and heaving concrete beast that has spread outwards over 230 years from Circular Quay.
When this rare and beautiful monster was only three months old in April 1788, it was a series of huts and camps identified not by street names but letters of the alphabet.
The 1500 members of the First Fleet turned this place into the most populous city in Oceania where, today, five million souls squeeze into 658 suburbs stretching 70km to the Blue Mountains in the west, Hawkesbury in the north and the verdant hills of Macarthur to the south.
A short walk from Circular Quay is the State Library of NSW on Macquarie Street. Curator Elise Edmonds pads through a corridor in a secure floor of the library. She swipes a security access card and opens a doorway to the history of modern Australia’s birth. With rubber-gloved hands she has carefully laid this history out on a long rectangular reference table.
She smiles. “It’s all there,” she says. “The whole story.”
She’s nodding at the most exhaustive collection of original First Fleet documentation in the world. Of the 11 known First Fleet journal manuscripts in existence, nine are held in the Mitchell and Dixson library collections of the State Library of NSW. The original and breathtaking private manuscript journals written by the men who were there, the men who survived the great experiment and handed their personal reporting over to history: John Hunter, second captain, and Philip Gidley King, second lieutenant; William Bradley, first lieutenant; Jacob Nagle, a seaman; and George Worgan, surgeon, all serving on the fleet ship Sirius; Ralph Clark, second lieutenant of marines on the Friendship; James Scott, sergeant of marines on the Prince of Wales; John Easty, private marine on the Scarborough; and Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon on the Lady Penrhyn.
On the reference table, amid these doorstopping and yellowed journals, are handwritten letters home to wives, parents and superiors; elaborate drawings, maps and charts. “It’s their eyewitness accounts of the experience,” Edmonds says.
The collected material resting on this table is so rare and essential to history that each fragile piece of paper before us has been heritage-listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for its “world significance and outstanding universal value”.
Spend enough time with this collection, Edmonds says, and the story of the First Fleet comes alive. It becomes so real through the words of our dauntless flotilla journalists that you can feel it, smell the flapjacks they’re eating for lunch, taste the desiccated salted beef and pea porridge they’re slurping for dinner; feel the sting of saltwater when it runs into a lash wound; stomach the stench of the human shit mixing with the bilge water down below where John Hudson will spend his long journey to a magical land called Oz. But where does one start this story?
Edmonds’s gloved hands reach for a thick and precious library manuscript. One starts from the top, of course.
“Arthur Phillip,” she says.
She turns to the manuscript’s title page. It takes 20 seconds to say the title aloud. The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay With an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, Compiled from Authentic Papers, Which Have Been Obtained from the Several Departments to Which Are Added the Journals of Lieuts. Shortland, Watts, Ball and Capt. Marshall with an Account of their New Discoveries. Edmonds turns to chapter two of Arthur Phillip’s own epic First Fleet account. And the story begins.
16 March 1787
“The squadron destined to carry into execution the above design, began to assemble at its appointed rendezvous, the Mother Bank, within the Isle of Wight, about the 16th of March, 1787. This small fleet consisted of the following ships: His Majesty’s frigate Sirius, Captain John Hunter, and his Majesty’s armed tender Supply, commanded by Lieutenant HL Ball. Three store-ships, the Golden Grove, Fishburn, and Borrowdale, for carrying provisions and stores for two years; including instruments of husbandry, clothing for the troops and convicts, and other necessaries; and lastly, six transports, the Scarborough, and Lady Penrhyn, from Portsmouth; the Friendship, and Charlotte, from Plymouth; the Prince of Wales, and the Alexander, from Woolwich. These were to carry the convicts, with a detachment of Marines in each, proportioned to the nature of the service; the largest where resistance was most to be expected, namely, in those ships which carried the greatest number of male convicts. Altogether they formed a little squadron of eleven sail.”
She’s named after the southern star, the brightest star in the night sky. HMS Sirius. Her gundeck is 33m long, 10m across the beam. She carries the brightest star in the British Navy. Captain-General Arthur Phillip stands by the man on the wheel of the fleet’s flagship vessel. He scans the waters of Portsmouth harbour on England’s southern coast where the captains of 10 more ships under his command await his signal.
The whole grand First Fleet experiment has cost the British government about £84,000 and every spent pound weighs on the shoulders of this stout, determined, reasoned, compassionate, multilingual, hook-nosed, dark-eyed perfectionist orphan divorcee former spy. Here stands a man the viceroy of Brazil, Luis de Almeida, calls “very clean-handed; an officer of great truth and bravery”.
His mother, Elizabeth Breach, warned him of the perils of sea travel. Her first husband, John Herbert, was a professional seaman who died of yellow fever in a British naval hospital at Port Royal, Jamaica, in October 1731. Herbert’s will opened with the words: “Mindful of the perils and dangers of the sea and other uncertainties of this transitory life ...” Elizabeth’s second husband, German-born Jacob Phillip, most likely died in “Sea Service”, later entitling his orphaned son — Arthur — entry into the Greenwich Charity School of the Royal Hospital for Seamen for “the Sons of disabled Seamen, or whose Fathers were slain, killed or drown’d in the Sea Service”.
Arthur Phillip wasn’t raised in a stable and privileged family environment but his faith in the notion of family will soon figure dramatically in the making of a country the world will come to call Australia.
He’s 48 years old. He’s been sailing since he was a naval boy servant, aged nine. He steeled his teenaged sea legs on whaling ships in the gloomy and terrifying Arctic Circle. At 17 he began a formal naval career that took him through the Seven Years War; through the explosive Siege of Havana in 1762, which saw 2700 British soldiers fall to Spanish guns. At 25 he married Margaret Charlotte Tybott, the wealthy 41-year-old widow of a London merchant, who insisted her new husband sign a prenuptial agreement the day before their wedding. The couple ran a farm in the Hampshire countryside, near Portsmouth. It was here he finessed the agricultural skills he’ll use a year from now to establish farms in New Holland.
He was 31 years old when he left Margaret for his one true love, the cold blue sea that an extraordinary Yorkshireman 10 years his senior, Lieutenant James Cook, was then mapping in the name of Britain aboard an unlikely coal ship called the Endeavour.
The following decade saw the intrepid Arthur Phillip serve in the American War of Independence and reportedly sail into the highly charged world of naval espionage, using his fluency in French, Portuguese and his father’s native German tongue to gather global intelligence on France’s naval expansions, a kind of sea-bound sleeper agent not averse to prowling the ports and dockyards of South America and France, snake-charming state secrets from unsuspecting local sailors.
By the time he clambered up the accommodation ladder to stand on the deck of the Sirius, wrote military engineer and historian George Landmann in the mid-1800s, he “had doubled every cape, had navigated every sea, had been tossed by the severest hurricanes and … been longer on the seas than on the land”.
He’s already the governor of a land he’s never seen. He received his commission as governor of New South Wales on October 12, 1786. He has authority over the land mapped by Cook from Cape York in the wild continent’s deep far north to Van Diemen’s Land in the south. All he has to do is make it there alive, mindful of what his mum’s first dead husband called “the perils and dangers of the sea”.
‘There shall be no slavery in a free land’
In his modest private cabin below deck, among his clothing and personal effects, is a document outlining his instructions from King George III, composed and approved by home secretary Lord Sydney (Thomas Townshend), the driving political force behind this bold Botany Bay experiment.
“You are to endeavour, by every possible means, to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence.
“You will endeavour to procure an account of the numbers inhabiting the neighbourhood of the intended settlement, and report your opinion to one of our secretaries of state in what manner our intercourse with these people may be turned to the advantage of this colony.”
Phillip sees a future in Australia others can’t see. Many of his naval contemporaries see only doom in the experiment, great folly and bloody disaster. Some London press reports have predicted as many as 80 per cent of his convicts will be dead by the time Phillip sights New Holland’s east coast. But he sees something grand in that barren place across the globe, something closer to nationhood. “There shall be no slavery in a free land,” he fiercely declares.
He has scribbled copious notes on his plans for the colony; sent endless correspondence to Lord Sydney detailing his clear vision of how the fleet will survive in such a wild foreign land.
Modern Australia will be constructed from a tool cargo of 300 chisels, 175 hand saws and hammers, 140 drawing knives and augers, 100 wood planes, 50 pickaxes, 40 wheelbarrows, 12 ploughs and 10 forges.
The first settlers of Botany Bay will build a place called home out of 2000 spikes, 1000 squares of glass, 200 hinges, 100 locks and 10 barrels of nails. They’ll eat cattle and hogs and stores of grain purchased along the voyage in the Cape of Good Hope.
Phillip had hoped the government would endeavour to fill the convict transports with men with labouring, building, woodwork and farming experience who could greatly assist the establishment of the colony in Botany Bay. But it’s mostly thieves that occupy the fleet’s convict transports. Useless lifelong criminals, weak-boned men better at cutting purses than pine. Spindly burglars and pickpockets, disease-carrying prostitutes.
More than 60 per cent of the convicts have been sentenced for stealing food or goods of little value. Most of the remaining transported felons were tried for breaking and entering and highway robbery, or more ambitious offences such as forgery. An average age of 27. There are 14 pregnant female convicts who will give birth on the long voyage south. Most convicts have languished in chains and shackles aboard the fetid floating prison hulks eating ox cheek soup.
Phillip looks to the Portsmouth shoreline. The London friends and families of the departing convicts have descended upon Portsmouth to see the fleet off, creating a violent and perverse cesspool of localised drunken grief and crime. On the women’s transport, the Lady Penrhyn, keen-eyed ship surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth writes in his diary of the alarming sight of “a corpse sewed up in a hammock” casually floating by his anchored vessel. About 778 convicts, almost 200 of them women, are now spread across six fleet transports in cluttered lower prison decks with headroom as low as 1.3m.
“The Transports are fitted up for the Convicts, the same as for carrying troops,” writes Lieutenant Philip Gidley King in his journal. “Except the Security, which consists in very strong and thick bulkheads, filled with nails, and ran across from side to side of the ’tween decks abaft the Mainmast with loop holes to fire through, in case of any irregularities among the Convicts, the hatches are well secured by Cross bars bolts, and strong locks, they are likewise railed round with large oak stanchions from deck to deck. Sentinels are placed at the different hatchways and a Guard always under Arms on the Quarter deck. The Steerage of each transport is appropriated for the use of the Marines and every precaution is used to prevent any intercourse between them and the Convicts.”
Gidley King is a 29-year-old protege of Arthur Phillip’s. He’s second lieutenant on the Sirius and he’ll one day be the third governor of NSW.
The largest transports, the Alexander and Scarborough, carry more than 200 men each. The smallest transport, the Friendship, carries 80 men and 24 women. The Alexander is so dangerously festering with disease that 16 of its convict passengers have already died before the fleet has even left Portsmouth, prompting Phillip to have the ship “cleaned and smoked”. Some transport cells are so small that men in groups of four in chains and irons can’t lie down for sleep. Buckets for toilets. No portholes to see outside. Darkness upon darkness. Dirt upon dirt. Disease upon disease. For eight months they will crouch and kneel and lie among rats, cockroaches, bedbugs and lice. In the slimy celled darkness below the Alexander and Scarborough there are no journals to record the incidents of rape and sodomy and graft, the dangerous alliances formed, the unspoken hierarchies between those with jail smarts and influence and those who can crush a man’s larynx with a single hand.
Here’s two likely men now in the Scarborough prison deck: Phillip Farrell and Thomas Griffiths. They’re seasoned sailors. Farrell was a boatswain’s mate on the navy ship HMS Goliath. Griffiths sailed in the American War of Independence. Farrell was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing a handkerchief. Griffiths was sent to Botany Bay for stealing 80 shillings worth of cloth. These men saw enough of the Scarborough’s rigging on the way down to their cells to know, should the opportunity present itself, they themselves could sail her off to their own designated horizon were they to summon enough convict muscle to hold the ship’s marines at bay. These convicts are bright enough to form plans and Arthur Phillip knows that convicts forming plans leads to only one thing: mutiny.
In the bowels of the Lady Penrhyn, 29-year-old Mary Marshall — transported for stealing 10 handkerchiefs from a Piccadilly linen draper — jostles shoulder-to-shoulder with her female cellmates for space closer to the companionway to the upper deck, where the thick air is freshest.
Sharing this space with her is Dorothy Handland, a woman the ship’s surgeon, Arthur Bowes Smyth, will record as being 82 years of age, possibly the oldest convict transported in the First Fleet. Bowes Smyth sketches her portrait in his journal, looking every bit her age in her eyes, nose and chin. Two hundred years later some historians will call the death of Dorothy Handland the first registered suicide on Australian soil.
That version of her tragic tale says that somehow the old clothes woman from Camden, London, sentenced to seven years’ transportation for perjury, will survive the eight-month journey to Australia only to, in an apparent bout of depression, hang herself from a gum tree in Sydney Cove in 1789.
There’s a 32-year-old pickpocket down here with Dorothy named Tamasin Allen. There are thieves like Sarah Purdue, 23; Maria Hamilton, 33. Phillip writes to his superiors about the appalling physical health of these female convicts aboard the Lady Penrhyn.
“The situation in which the magistrates sent the women on board the Lady Penrhyn stamps them with infamy — tho’ almost naked, and so very filthy, that nothing but clothing them could have prevented them from perishing, and which could not be done in time to prevent a fever, which is still on that ship,” he writes.
Not for the first time will rumours of Phillip’s humanity spread through the fleet when he gives clothing issued for crew members to the ailing convict women. But to misread his compassion for weakness would be folly. Many of the convicts can’t read but they can hear just fine when Phillip’s orders are relayed to the convict sentinels about how any attempt to contest the command of the ship should be punished with “instant death”.
Over on the store ship, the Golden Grove, the 34-year-old First Fleet chaplain, the Anglican Reverend Richard Johnson, oversees the safe storage of the 4000 religious books and pamphlets he and wife Mary will carefully nurse to New Holland and disperse among sailors, marines and convicts alike. Some 100 Bibles and an endless stack of pamphlets with soul-correcting advice: Exercises Against Lying; Caution to Swearers and Dissuasions for Stealing.
The five missing convict women, Arthur Bowes Smyth notes aboard the Lady Penrhyn, are evidently yet to read the Reverend Johnson’s Exhortations to Chastity.
“Ten o’clock at night Lieutenants Johnston and Collins went into the hatches and called over the list of the female convicts,” he writes. “Found five women missing (four with the sailors) and one with the Second Mate (Squires). Had all the women put into irons and removed forward.”
In a quiet corner of the smallest convict transport, the Friendship, 32-year-old Scottish Lieutenant Ralph Clark stares into a small oval portrait of his beloved wife Betsey Alicia. He kisses Betsey’s framed face, runs his fingers along two locks of hair pressed into the rear of the portrait, possibly the hair of his three-year-old son, Ralph Stuart Clark.
“Oh Gracious God, what a task have I gone through last night in taking leave of the dearest and best of Wives and not seeing my Boy,” he writes.
Ralph Clark wasn’t born for such voyaging as this. He’s a lemonade drinker. He will yearn for his Betsey Alicia and he will bemoan the noise of the fleet; the wenches and the whoring and the secret rum drinking of his fellow marines.
“I never should have thought of leaving the best of women and the most sweetest of boys,” he writes.
‘… An ardent wish for the hour of departure …’
On the transport ship, the Charlotte, walks a curious man named Captain-Lieutenant Watkin Tench, quite possibly the deepest thinker among the fleet’s Royal Marines: a scholar of Shakespeare and Milton; an ethnographer, legal eagle, soldier and philosopher. His father and mother are dancers, they run a dance academy in Chester, near the border of Wales. There will come a time when his heart will soar when he is allowed to release the convicts under his charge from their fetters, but for now he walks among them, bound and huddled in the lower decks of the Charlotte.
“The convicts’ constant language was an apprehension of the impracticability of returning home, the dread of a sickly passage, and the fearful prospect of a distant and barbarous country,” he writes.
But he senses, all the same, that the convicts want to be off. “ An ardent wish for the hour of departure …”
And at daybreak on May 13, 1787, Arthur Phillip grants the convicts their wish for motion. He gives the signal to weigh anchor.
“We weighed and run through the Needles and by noon got a good offing with the wind at E.S. E,” writes Philip Gidley King aboard the Sirius.
“Oh my God, all my hopes are over of seeing my beloved wife and son,” writes the lovesick Ralph Clark, as the breathtaking fleet makes its way to the North Atlantic Ocean.
In the prisoner deck of the Friendship, the bonded convicts brace for the movement of their vessel under sail. Some older convicts rejoice. Amid the sweary bedlam of celebration sits a quiet boy. Head down, elbows resting on his kneecaps.
Young John Hudson does not shiver. Young John Hudson does not shake. He’s a teenager now. He entered puberty in prison. His voice is deeper; muscles harder, heart stronger.
He’s lived through starved and freezing London winters. He’s survived a perilous London boy’s life diving down suffocating chimney flues for food. He’s survived the big sweltering sick of the anchored British prison hulks. He sure as hell can survive Australia.
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PART 2: The fleet sets sail from England, a young child, would-be mutineers and a convict planning escape aboard.
PART 3: Becalmed on stifling oceans, officers record their low opinions of the female convicts and order hellish punishments for four of them.
PART 4: After a hellish, storm-tossed voyage, Arthur Phillip brings his ships into Botany Bay.
PART 5: Confronted by the limitations of Botany Bay, the First Fleet leader rowed north and discovered a body of water beyond his dreams.
PART 6: Arthur Phillip had a brilliantly simple idea for turning the colony from a prison to a community.
