1788
‘Brings to life the events and the major characters of this extraordinary
journey.’—Sydney Morning Herald
‘A must for your bookshelf' . . . the best book I have read all year.’
—News Mail
Index by Puddingburn
Set in 12/16 pt Adobe Garamond by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press, part of Ovato
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgements299
Notes 301
Bibliography 333
List of Illustrations 341
Index 343
ix
In its first turbulent and uncertain decades the colony also had
to survive a corrupt local military dictatorship, increasingly violent
conflict with the local Aboriginal people, the threat of invasion from
other European powers, an armed convict uprising and an overthrow
of the colonial government. In many respects it is truly remarkable
that the colony survived to become the nation of Australia.
Bound for
Botany Bay
‘. . . measures should immediately be pursued for sending out of
this kingdom such of the convicts as are under sentence or order
of transportation . . . His Majesty has thought it advisable to fix upon
Botany Bay.’
Lord Sydney
Vaux wrote of how each day the men would be taken ashore to
work supervised by brutal overseers:
There was also at this time growing pressure from prison reformers
who were campaigning against the appalling conditions in the gaols
and the prison hulks. Foremost among them was John Howard, the
wealthy son of a successful merchant, who became a well-known
advocate and campaigner. In 1777, after studying incarceration in
England, he wrote a book that painted a devastating picture of the
reality of prisons and brought into the open much of what for those in
genteel society had been out of sight and thus out of mind. Howard
wrote that healthy men who entered the system were often reduced to
illness and death. He said that disease was so rife that more prisoners
were killed by ill health than ‘were put to death by all public execu-
tions in the kingdom’.13
In some prisons, he wrote, there was no food allowance, and in
others no fresh water and no sewerage. In most gaols there was a
shortage of fresh air and ventilation, and of beds and bedding, with
the result that many prisoners were forced to sleep ‘upon rags, others
on bare floors’.14
Largely as a result of the agitation of Howard and other r eformers
legislation was passed in parliament for the building of two new
prisons but funding was not made available and construction never
began. To reduce the numbers of prisoners incarcerated in England
parliament legislated in 1777 for the reintroduction of the overseas
transportation of convicts, although the bill did not prescribe to which
countries the prisoners would be sent.
Banks went on to tell the committee that he thought the local people
would not offer resistance; there were also no ‘beasts of prey’ and ‘plenty
of fish’. He added that much of the soil was barren but enough of it was
sufficiently rich ‘to support a very large number of people’. The grass
‘was long and luxuriant’ and the country ‘well supplied with water’.
It was also well supplied with wild vegetables and there was an ‘abund
ance’ of timber for any number of buildings.18 Banks’s evidence finished
on the optimistic note that after a while the settlers might ‘undoubtedly
maintain themselves without any assistance from England’.19
Banks was not the first to argue for the establishment of a penal
colony in the Pacific. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, French
writer and statesman Charles de Brosses had suggested that France
settle a penal colony on the island of New Britain, where felons could
be purged from society.20 Englishman John Callander proposed
the same solution for Britain in 1776. In his three-volume Terra
Australis Cognita he argued that Britain should found a convict colony
on New Britain and explore the possibility of annexing New Holland,
New Zealand and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).
Banks’s report to the parliamentary committee was strangely at
odds with his own far less enthusiastic journal entries at the time of
his voyage. On 1 May 1770, the second day after the arrival of the
Endeavour, Banks recorded that he had gone on a long walk with his
botanist colleague Daniel Solander:
Where we went a good way into the country which in this place is
very sandy and resembles something of our moors in England, and
no trees grow on it but everything is covered with a thin brush of
plants about as high as the knees.22
At the time the committee was hearing its evidence the commander
of the 1770 Endeavour expedition, James Cook, was on his third great
voyage in the Pacific Ocean. And when Banks was giving his evidence
to the House of Commons in April 1779 it was not yet known in
London that Captain Cook had been killed. In February Cook had
been searching for a passage linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
when he was murdered in Hawaii.
Back in 1770 Cook had recorded his own assessment of Botany
Bay. He noted that the soil was ‘generally sandy’ and otherwise made
no enthusiastic assessment as Banks had done.23
But even if Cook had been available to give evidence in London
he had far less sway than Joseph Banks. While Cook had been the
commander of the Endeavour expedition, the aristocratic Banks was
far more influential in England, where he had the ear of the govern-
ment, the Admiralty and the King. He would be a hugely prominent
figure in England over the first twenty years of British settlement in
New South Wales, the person everyone turned to for advice about the
colony. Even though he had only spent six days there eighteen years
before the arrival of the First Fleet he was regularly consulted on a
wide range of matters, including botany, earthquakes, sheep breeding
and exploration. Over many years he corresponded with the colony’s
deferred for several years. It seems that some of the British ruling
elite were still hopeful that the American insurrection could be put
down and the transportation of convicts to the American colonies
resumed. As late as 1783 George III was adamant that ‘unworthy’
British convicts should be sent there.24
As the issue dragged on unresolved the community concern at
the ever-increasing prison population increased. In 1784 the House
of Commons debated and passed a bill titled An Act for the Effectual
Transportation of Felons and Other Offenders, which, like its predeces-
sor in 1777, urged the reintroduction of transportation but did not
specify any sites to which they would be sent.
A petition delivered to the government on 5 March 1785 by
the high sheriff and grand jury of the county of Wiltshire typified the
widespread and growing concern about the overcrowded prisons
and hulks:
and commit them to a life of crime. The usual destinations were again
presented, including Africa, but these were rejected largely because
of evidence that convict settlements there were unlikely to be able to
sustain themselves.
Earlier in the year attorney-general Richard Arden had sent to his
colleague Lord Sydney a detailed proposal for the transportation of
convicts to Botany Bay. Arden had been sent the idea by Sir George
Young, an admiral in the Royal Navy, who had added his own highly
qualified recommendation:
It had taken years, but now that the decision had finally been
made the British civil service and the Royal Navy began the challeng-
ing task of organising the world’s biggest overseas migration fleet at
Portsmouth. In a little over nine months it would be ready to sail.