First fleeters married to a future of promise
PART 6: Arthur Phillip had a brilliantly simple idea for turning the colony from a prison to a community.
John Hudson dreams of England. The young chimneysweep who found himself swept up among the 780 convicts exiled to Botany Bay would take the icy winter sleet of any London gutter over the motionless oven of the Friendship’s crowded prison deck in the high summer of the Great South Land.
It’s midday in Botany Bay, January 25, 1788. The kind of New South Wales summer swelter the fleet will come to realise often precedes a storm.
Young Hudson’s ears tune to the murmurings of two older male cons.
“Two ships spotted at the mouth of the bay,” one convict grumbles.
“Where from?”
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe they come from home? Maybe they’ve come to bring us a message?”
“What message?”
“King George the Turd has pardoned the lot of us. All is forgiven. He wants us to come home!”
Laughter fills the prison deck. Young John Hudson closes his eyes and dreams of England.
On the deck of the Supply, second lieutenant Philip Gidley King points a spyglass to the mouth of Botany Bay.
“At daylight two strange ships were seen standing in for the bay,” he writes. “One of which had a white broad pendant at her main top mast-head and the other a common white pendant from which circumstance we judged them to be the two ships under the orders of Monsieur de La Perouse.”
Jean-Francois de Galaup La Perouse is a French explorer with a list of wartime achievements and near-death adventures as long as his name. Arthur Phillip knows of his skill and his daring: his wounding in the Seven Years War; his commanding of ships in North America; and his successful battles against the British in Hudson Bay, northeastern Canada, in which, Phillip is quick to recall, La Perouse showed himself to possess a compassion not unlike his own when he left the surviving English enough arms and provisions to survive a brutal winter.
“In the course of the day (an) officer returned and brought intelligence that the ships were the Boussole and Astrolabe, sent out by order of the King of France and under the command of Monsieur La Perouse,” writes Captain Watkin Tench. “The astonishment of the French at seeing us had not equalled that we had experienced, for it appeared that in the course of their voyage they had touched at Kamchatka (in Russia’s far east) and by that means learnt that our expedition was in contemplation.
“They dropped anchor the next morning, just as we had got under weigh to work out of the bay, so that for the present nothing more than salutations could pass between us.”
‘Europeans are all fellow-countrymen at such a distance from home’
When they were boys, most of these British marines and sailors learned to hate the French before they learned to love God, but here, in the waters of the great unknown southern land, old hostilities are put aside in favour of something both La Perouse and Phillip value above all else: knowledge. A dozen of La Perouse’s men have been attacked and killed in the islands of Samoa. He needs safe harbour.
“Europeans are all fellow-countrymen at such a distance from home,” writes La Perouse, who will spend six weeks in Botany Bay making repairs on his ships that have criss-crossed the Pacific and ventured as far north as Alaska. His men will construct an observatory and plant gardens in their brief settlement in the area Sydneysiders now call the La Perouse peninsula.
So enthralled by La Perouse’s odyssey is its benefactor and co-planner Louis XVI that five years from now, in January 1793, on his way to be executed by guillotine — a key event in the French Revolution — he will famously ask, “What news of La Perouse?”
There will be no news to give the soon-to-be-headless king after La Perouse and his crew depart Botany Bay in the direction of France but then vanish without trace somewhere inside the vast and deadly belly of Oceania.
Phillip is anxious to have the British colours raised. He has a secret in his head he instructs his men to withhold from La Perouse. That secret is Sydney Harbour, the gleaming azure gateway to the new nation he saw in his bright mind 17,000 nautical miles back across the world in Portsmouth.
History, like life, unfurls in infinite perspectives. Every member of the First Fleet will watch this day — January 26, 1788 — unfold from unique and distinct vantage points. Some might remember this day for the weather, the ceaseless and enraged winds the fleet must fight against on its laboured exit from Botany Bay. Some officers, years from now, will look back upon this day and recall how nervous their great Captain Phillip had grown about the French leaving Botany Bay before him; that they might beat him to Port Jackson and become the first to raise colours in Sydney Cove. The Eora people standing on shore will recall how the British ships left and the French ships stayed. Some will remember the calamitous flurry of fleet ships being swept off course in that January 26 blow, how Charlotte nearly smashed against rocks; how the Lady Penrhyn later nearly ran aground; and all the anger subsequently directed at Arthur Phillip.
‘If it had not been by the greatest good luck we should have all drowned’
“Every one blaming the rashness of the Governor in insisting upon the fleets working out in such weather,” writes surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth. “And all agreed it was next to a miracle that some of the ships were not lost, the danger was so very great.”
Writes officer Ralph Clark: “If it had not been by the greatest good luck we should have been both on shore on the rocks and the ships must have been all lost and the greater part, if not the whole, on board drowned.
“We should have gone to pieces in less than a half of an hour but how good the Almighty is to us. I return Him my most sincere prayers for his kindness to us.
“Thank God we have got clear out, as have all the ships and hope to be in the course of a few hours at Port Jackson.”
Phillip is already in Port Jackson with a small group of marines and skilled convicts, who will act as a work party to immediately clear land for the settlement. Phillip’s ship, Supply, was agile and tough enough to depart Botany Bay yesterday afternoon despite the menacing weather. Around sunset he had drifted into the jewel of Sydney Cove.
Standing with him was an awed Philip Gidley King.
“The settlement lies about six miles from the entrance of the harbour,” he writes. “The safety and extent of this harbour makes it the first port in the world … A stream of fresh water runs into the head of Sydney Cove, which appears sufficiently large for culinary purposes.
“In the harbour are eight or nine small islands which are covered with rocks and trees and these islands, with the headlands of the different coves and the rocks, form a picturesque appearance which has a pleasing effect. We anchored in Sydney Cove at seven in the evening of the 25th.”
At daylight on January 26, while the rest of the fleet is still negotiating its exit from Botany Bay, Phillip and his early work party rows to shore.
“The marines and convicts were landed from the Supply and the latter began clearing away a piece of ground to erect the tents on,” writes King.
Phillip needs encampments for the guards and their willing convicts, who set to work in earnest, relieved to be on land, relieved to be doing something useful with their weak and long-idle hands. Axes swing. Blades cut through the untouched Sydney undergrowth. Thoughtful judge advocate David Collins watches a tall tree fall and is struck by a moment of existential clarity, pondering how long these trees have stood along this golden shore before the arrival of men possessing inventions cunning enough to fell them in minutes.
“The spot chosen for this purpose was at the head of the cove, near the run of fresh water, which stole silently along through a very thick wood,” he writes. “The stillness of which had then, for the first time since the creation, been interrupted by the rude sound of the labourer’s axe, and the downfall of its ancient inhabitants; a stillness and tranquillity which from that day were to give place to the voice of labour.”
The 10 remaining fleet ships drift gradually into Sydney Cove. Tench is struck immediately by the “scene of business” evolving before his eyes.
“In one place a party cutting down the woods; a second setting up a blacksmith’s forge, a third dragging along a load of stones or provisions,” he writes. “Here an officer pitching his marquee, with a detachment of troops parading on one side of him, and a cook’s fire blazing up on the other.
“Through the unwearied diligence of those at the head of the different departments, regularity was, however, soon introduced and, as far as the unsettled state of matters would allow, confusion gave place to system.”
It’s some time “after noon”, according to King, to the sounds of fortified wine being poured into glasses and joyous rifle fire, that modern Australia is informally born. “The Union Jack was hoisted on shore and the marines being drawn up under it, the Governor and officers to the right and the convicts to the left,” writes King.
“Their Majesties and the Prince of Wales’ health, with success to the Colony was drank in four glasses of Porter, after which a feu-de-joie was fired and the whole gave three cheers.”
Phillip sees what others can’t see in this place. Some standing beneath that flag see a fledgling penal colony in development.
‘You are to endeavour, by every possible means, to open an intercourse with the natives’
Phillip sees a nation in development: a complex land he will turn into a home for the 1500 members of this indefatigable fleet. He will govern this commonwealth of thieves in accordance with King George III’s orders.
“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.”
But his resolve will be tested nightly and his great vision for New South Wales will be broken by the weight of the extraordinary social experiment he will wake to daily — building a prison for the unwanted 17,000 nautical miles from the place of their petty crimes. Blood will spill. Disease will spread. The lash will crack. Dead men will swing.
Some 230 years from now, Australians will speak of a “gap” that exists between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, a social chasm, a complex space between two races that will first widen here, in the increasing distance the Eora people keep from that raised flag and this redcoat colony they cannot understand, spreading deeper into the lush Sydney bush with every cut gum tree.
Crops will die and provisions will vanish. The fleet will starve but the fleet will carry on. That deadly voyage from Portsmouth has taught these convicts how to live through times when dying seems the wiser option. Supplies will be sent from England and more convicts will be sent with them. Farms will begin to flourish. A second fleet will arrive, bringing British army officer John Macarthur with it. Six years from now, on a farm on the upper reaches of Parramatta River, Macarthur will begin experimenting with wool production, crossbreeding sheep imported from the northern hemisphere.
And the world will come to realise the great south land is something far greater than a home for hungry London thieves like John Hudson.
Morning, February 7, 1788. Thirteen-year-old Hudson sits among the convicts of the First Fleet, encircled in a makeshift parade ground by armed marines. The boy is watching Arthur Phillip make a speech that reflects on the events of last night when a severe lightning storm appeared to give rise to an impulsive night of unbridled passion between landed sailors and female convicts, some strange atmospherically charged orgiastic purging of eight months of collected fear and tension forged by all who sailed that sea.
“What a scene of whoredom is going on there in the women’s camp,” wrote officer Ralph Clark, battling primal urges in private. “No sooner has one man gone in with a woman but another goes in with her. I hope the Almighty will keep me free from them as he has hither to done.”
“The men convicts got to (the women convicts) very soon after they landed,” writes Bowes Smyth. “And it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.”
Australia does strange things to a person.
“Licentiousness was the unavoidable consequence and their old habits of depravity were beginning to recur,” writes Tench. “What was to be attempted? To prevent their intercourse was impossible, and to palliate its evils only remained.”
‘The greatest reward: a life of purpose in a land of endless possibility’
But Phillip has a solution. From the huddle of convicts, Hudson looks up at the tireless voyager. The boy hangs off the captain’s every word. They’re both orphans, John and the governor. London boys born into nothing who somehow found themselves here, in this raw utopia a little further south of the end of the world.
Phillip speaks in this moment about bright futures. The potential of this strange experiment. He gives an impassioned public reading of the king’s commission. He then speaks about how wrongdoers in the colony will be punished with the heaviest hand of execution.
In England, he says, thieving poultry is not punishable by death, but here it is because one single fowl is of “the utmost consequence” to the settlement. Those who don’t work, don’t eat, he says.
But hard work and good behaviour will be granted the greatest reward: a life of purpose in a land of endless possibility. In the subtext of his oration rests the wonder of turning one’s life around, making something out of nothing. Turning a monumental negative — 780 convicts exiled 17,000 nautical miles to a prisoner island — into the undeniable positive that is this land called Australia in 2018.
“Marriage,” Phillip says.
It’s his most perfect and plainest solution. Formal relationships among the convicts through the sanctity of marriage. Love and devotion and loyalty and faithfulness. Notions so powerful they could stop the spread of disease; make a man want to go to work; make a seasoned London toffer want to make something out of nothing.
Within days of Phillip’s speech, a series of convict marriages take place in the settlement. Within a month, about 30 couples are wedded to one another for life and Phillip’s watchful eyes like what they see because he knows, heart and soul, that it won’t be wood and nail that will form the nation he sees in his mind.
That place in his head will be built on something far more profound, something this thoughtful and solitary captain is yet to find in all his endless and brave voyaging. Family.
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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.
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.
