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The first fleet: the real story

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Matt Smith:

Welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I would be your host Matt Smith and the story of Australia began in 1788 when the First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay, full of convict prisoners. The country began as a convict settlement, a solution for England's burgeoning criminal problem, or so we've always thought. Alan Frost is an Emeritus Professor in La Trobe University's History Program and he spent many years uncovering the true story of the First Fleet and Australia's settlement. He joins me for today's La Trobe University podcast. Professor Frost, welcome to the program.

Alan Frost:

Thank you.

Matt Smith:

What started you on your path? Why did you go looking for this evidence? Or did you just find something that took your interest?

Alan Frost:

I was trained in English Literature and I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Captain James Cook's influence on the British romantic poets, because the major ones, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey were each born in the 1770s, the decade in which Cook sailed and their poetry is full of voyaging imagery. In reading for that dissertation, I read a great deal of geographical literature from the last decades of the eighteenth century, not only the primary narratives of the voyages, but also distillations into geography books, reports in magazines, even poems. And in that geographical literature I found many references to the prospect of obtaining naval materials from the islands of the South West Pacific.

When I was appointed in the English Department at La Trobe in 1970, I became aware of the controversy caused by Geoffrey Blainey's 1966 volume The Tyranny of Distance in which he argues that while the fact of the convicts may explain why the British government chose to use them in the colonisation, it didn't explain the choice of the site, and Blainey therefore argued that flax and timber were as important to naval power in the eighteenth century as steel and oil are to today's powers. But I was told my one prominent historian that nobody believes Blainey. But Blainey's explanation made sense to me because of what I read in the geographical literature, so I set out to see if I could uncover more evidence to support Blainey's views.

Matt Smith:

It sounds like he might have had a point then, from what you found.

Alan Frost:

He certainly did have a point. I've been able to establish that. In the mid 1780s there were severe shortages of supplies in masts, spars and the supply of hemp from Russia was under threat. And also in the preceding war, that is the war with the American colonies and France and Spain between 1776 and 1783, the operation of British squadrons in the West Indies and in the East Indies was severely affected by not having enough replacement materials. So there's no question but that Blainey was right. However, my work has also gone further than that in the sense that I seek to show that the Pitt administration had a plan to expand British commerce throughout East Asia and into the Pacific, and that a port on one of the major routes into the Pacific would also be very useful.

Matt Smith:

So what was the political situation?

Alan Frost:

France and England were inveterate enemies and in the aftermath of the American war, the British over a series of years received many intelligence reports that the French were planning a new war to drive them out of India. And then in late 1785 the French signed a treaty of defensive alliance with the Dutch, which had the effect of opening the Dutch ports at the Cape of Good Hope and Batavia principally to the French in case of a war. And this would have meant that Britain which had no port between England and India to speak of, would have been at a great disadvantage. So, what I see is that the idea of having a base in the Western Pacific and being able to obtain naval materials from there to India, was in part a response to the threatening political situation in Europe.

Matt Smith:

Australia as a continent was well known at that time, wasn't it? Well, the existence of it was well known. The common misconception is that James Cook was the one that discovered it.

Alan Frost:

He traced the eastern coast. The eastern coast hadn't been known until he sailed, but the western coast, the northwest and the southern coast into the Great Australian Bight and Tasmania had been discovered by Dutch navigators, yes, that's right.

Matt Smith:

So why wasn't it settled earlier by the Dutch?

Alan Frost:

That's a hard question to answer. I think that the British in the 1780s were the only maritime people who had the capacity to be able to colonise at such a distance from home. The Dutch East India Company was in severe financial difficulties. The French probably couldn't have supported such a colonisation – they didn't have the administrative or financial resources, and the Spanish Empire was in decline. But I think the point also is that it was in the aftermath of the American war that has shown up the disabilities under which the British squadrons had operated on the one hand, and on the other, the desire to expand commerce into the Pacific, that brought things together so that it seemed sensible to establish a naval base in Eastern Australia.

Matt Smith:

If Australia was more of a planned colony then, why were convicts used?

Alan Frost:

The sentence in law was transportation. Previous to the American rebellion, the convicts, about fifty thousand of them, had been sent across the Atlantic to the colonies to provide labour. The sentence of transportation was a peculiar sentence, that is, the punishment was being exiled from England and not being allowed to return until your sentence had expired, seven years, fourteen years or life, sometimes. In case of life of course, you weren't supposed to return. But when you got to the American colonies, you weren't put in prison. Your labour was sold to contractors, to merchants, for the unexpired term of your sentence.

Now, in the mid 1780s, the British government had a choice. Transportation had ceased to North America. They hadn't been able to locate another suitable placed to send their convicts to. They had a choice – they could have altered the sentence to make it something like five years labour on harbours, or they could have built modern jails in our sense, or they could resume transportation. Now the Pitt administration chose to resume transportation. The question is really, why did they choose Australia? And there's a striking difference between the earlier transportation across the Atlantic and that to New South Wales, which is, that in the earlier transportation, the central government's role ceased once the convicts were taken out of Britain. But with New South Wales, the government itself comes the agent which transports, and also which employs the convicts. So you have a striking development, and from my point of view, what is happening because there's a great deal of contemporary criticism about transport convicts being not transported, the government makes a policy decision to employ them in the hope of getting some benefit for the nation, because the setting up of the colony in New South Wales was a very expensive business, and even if governments are incompetent, they do tend to think that we should get something back for our money.

Matt Smith:

Let's dwell on the cost then for a moment. How expensive was it to transport convicts to Australia? Essentially, you're sending them to the other side of the known world at the time.

Alan Frost:

That's right. It was costing about 23 to 28 pounds to keep a male convict on one of the prison hulks in the Thames in the mid 1780s.

Matt Smith:

Really?

Alan Frost:

The final cost of transporting the First Fleet convicts to New South Wales, this is a cost spread over five years, was somewhere between 65 and 80 pounds, so it was a very expensive business. Now, the government naturally thought that as the colony became established, as it became self sufficient in food supplies, the cost would diminish and therefore it would become acceptable. But it was a very expensive business and precisely for the reason you suggest – that the First Fleet took eight months to get from Portsmouth to Botany Bay. The voyage across the Atlantic was something like six weeks. There's massive differences in the scale involved in these operations. The hulk system it's true, went on for decades. I think there were still hulks being employed in the 1840s. Did the colonisation achieve some of the objectives? Probably not. But we shouldn't judge what the motives for the colonisations were. From the outcomes that we know in the present, that is, the British never succeeded in getting a supply of naval material from Norfolk Island or New Zealand, but that doesn't mean that in the 1780s they didn't think this was a sensible move to take.

Matt Smith:

Another common belief is that the First Fleet and the early colonies were ill-prepared, both in supplies and skilled labour that they brought with them. Is this an accurate belief?

Alan Frost:

No. The First Fleet was very carefully prepared. It's certainly true that the Second and Third Fleets were not well prepared. The death rates on those fleets was horrendous. The death rate on the First Fleet was something like 2%. The average death rate of a convict voyage across the Atlantic was 14%. So this is one sign of how carefully the government prepared for the voyage. It's true that the government officials initially didn't approach the business properly, that is, the Navy Board set about equipping the ships in terms of a voyage of soldiers to the West Indies, but Phillip and his surgeons insisted that the thinking had to change, that is, on a six weeks voyage, scurvy might not appear, but on an eight months voyage it was certain to appear unless the convicts were properly fed and prepared for the voyage. So what we see is at Portsmouth in March and April of 1787, all the people on the ships are fed fresh foods. And this is building up their source of vitamins, particularly vitamin C, the deficiency of which causes scurvy. And then when Phillip stopped en route at Tenerife, particularly at Brazil, and at the Cape of Good Hope, he sees that everybody has fresh food again. I say particularly at Brazil because citrus fruits were very cheap there and he had boatloads rowed out to his ships every day. So this is the explanation for why there's such a low death rate on the First Fleet. After the First Fleet it's hard to resist the conclusion that the government tried to save some money because the First Fleet had been so expensive. But that's not the whole story either, because on the Second and Third Fleets the captains were responsible for serving out the food to the convicts, whereas on the First Fleet there was a government agent who was responsible for that. It seems that the captains tried to save money by not supplying the convicts properly with food.

Matt Smith:

That's for the voyages themselves. What about in terms of setting up a new colony? Did they bring the right supplies with them? Did they have the right sort of skilled labour?

Alan Frost:

The answer to that question is not entirely clear still. There does seem to have been some selection. I can say there was no selection of women convicts. But there was a selection of marines and the people chosen were chosen partly because they had certain skills as carpenters or bricklayers. There seems to be some selection of the Royal Navy crews. It's said that Phillip was able to choose all his sailors and there is documentation to show that at Plymouth, when crews needed to be replaced, men with certain skills were selected. Whether there was any selection of male convicts I haven't been able to establish.

Matt Smith:

Was Australia an attractive prospect for resources? How strategic were they in choosing the sites in Australia for what they could get out of it?

Alan Frost:

Well, when the British went to India, they went to a country where there was an established population who had established food supplies. In coming to New South Wales, the British knew that they had to bring almost all of their food supplies with them. Cook's voyage in 1770 had shown that there were things like stingrays in Botany Bay and ducks, but the aboriginal people had not established a large scale food production. They were hunter-gatherers. The British knew that they had to bring their foods with them. There was an expectation that Botany Bay had a good climate and that people wouldn't die of cold or privation, but they had to establish their food supply from scratch really.

Matt Smith:

Did they bring the right sort of seeds with them to set themselves up for that sort of thing?

Alan Frost:

Sir Joseph Banks put an extraordinary array of foodstuffs on the ships of the First Fleet, let's say four or five varieties of wheat, there's early York carrots, there's spring cabbage, and then there are things like vines, fruit trees. If those things together had flourished in New South Wales, then there would have been a more extensive food resource than existed in any single English county at the time. You can say this is something like a shotgun approach, but if something didn't grow then there should be something else that did grow. And then Governor Phillip at Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town took on more plants and animals, so that this is a very careful preparation.

Matt Smith:

Where did you go to look for the evidence? And how much of it did you find?

Alan Frost:

Most of the evidence comes from the Public Record Office in London, but the papers of various politicians of the time have become scattered and Banks' papers for example, some of Banks' papers are held in a library in San Francisco, some are held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, some are held in New Zealand. There are papers of politicians as well as in London in the National Library of Scotland. There are papers in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. I think I've looked at something like forty archives in eleven countries.

Matt Smith:

And you found something like, was it 2,500 documents at one point.

Alan Frost:

I recovered about 2,500 documents, yes. There's a deal of repetition in them, for example, the question of what size guns should be carried on the Supply, whether they should be six pounders or four pounders or then the decision was for three pounders. That generated twenty two separate letters. The 2,500 makes it seem grander than it is in one way, but on the other hand, it's only when we have that extensive record that we can make a proper analysis of how the First Fleet was equipped. You see, before I started my work, much of what had been written about the founding of the colony at Botany Bay had been based on about a hundred documents published in the historical records of New South Wales. And you can see immediately that one hundred documents will tell you isolated things but a thousand will give you a much broader picture. And the best example of this is, amongst those one hundred documents are several letters from Phillip and others complaining that the clothing for the women convicts hasn't arrived at Portsmouth, and Phillip says, well, if it doesn't come, I'm going to sail anyway. And he does. And the clothing hasn't arrived. Now if you'd just take those letters from the historical records of New South Wales you think, well, how badly was the fleet equipped? Because they didn't even have clothing for the women. But the point is, that the clothing shortfall developed for two reasons. One is, the number of women to be sent was increased from 80 to 150, and then to 180, and the second thing was, when the women were brought from local prisons and assembled in London to be put on board the Lady Penrhyn, they were in very poor condition. They'd been badly treated in the local jails, they were stripped of their filthy clothing, they were washed, they were given proper food, they had their illnesses and ailments addressed by surgeons. In order to clothe these poor people, Phillip and the surgeons drew on the two year supply of clothing that had been loaded for the colony. Now, it's not as though the First Fleet ships sailed with no clothing for the women, they didn't sail with a full two years supply for the initial period in the colony.

Matt Smith:

So, the documents that are in New South Wales present a very different picture on how the colony was started, and doesn't reflect the full extent of the planning that went into it.

Alan Frost:

That's right.

Matt Smith:

It sounds like it looks very different from the records that you found in England.

Alan Frost:

The record I have assembled is much more extensive. You see, another example would be Phillip's complaints about the ships being equipped for voyages as though it's for eight weeks across the Atlantic rather than for eight months to the other side of the world. If we just take that letter, we think again, this shows incompetence and it shows that the British didn't really care about the people – they just wanted to dump their convicts. But what that letter by itself, that complaint, doesn't show, is how the problems were then rectified, how the convicts were given fresh food. Medicines were loaded on the ships. How items that were thought to prevent scurvy were loaded. So if you only have the one letter, you have the illness identified, but you don't have any sense of how the illness was cured.

Matt Smith:

Is it also a problem of, whenever you write a letter that's going to go back to England, you're generally going to be complaining and saying these things need to be fixed and you never hear about the good things?

Alan Frost:

I think that's true.

Matt Smith:

So is it a documentation problem as well?

Alan Frost:

Yes. But I think it's also … there are gaps in the records still, so in some cases we can't be sure that we have the complete record.

Matt Smith:

What are some of the extraordinary achievements that you think deserve better recognition then?

Alan Frost:

Well, first of all, the accomplishment of completing that voyage with 1,200 colonists and only having about 34 of them die in the course of the voyage. I think that's an extraordinary achievement. And then I think it's also extraordinary that Governor Phillip was somehow able to get the convicts to come together, to coalesce into a society where they could work for the common good. I don't mean for a minute that everybody worked for the common good. But when you think of how easily that colony could have fallen apart and they could have fought with each other, and they didn't. Over three years, Phillip was able to get most of the people to start working, growing crops, building houses and I think this is an extraordinary achievement too.

Matt Smith:

Alan Frost, you have two books in print from Black Inc Books. They are Botany Bay: the Real Story and The First Fleet: the Real Story. Thank you for your time today.

Alan Frost:

Thank you.