THE BEGINNING OF THE SEA STORY OF AUSTRALIA
By Louis Becke



THE BEGINNING OF THE SEA STORY OF AUSTRALIA

From "The Tapu Of Banderah and Other Stories"

By Louis Becke

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.

1901

To many people in England the mention of Australia conjures pictures of
tented gold-fields and tall, black-bearded, red-shirted bushrangers; of
mounted police recruited from "flaxen-haired younger sons of good old
English families, well-groomed and typically Anglo-Saxon"; of squatters
and sheep runs; of buckjumpers ridden by the most daring riders in the
world; and of much more to the same purpose; but never is presented a
picture of the sea or sailor folk.

Yet the first half-century of Australian history is all to do with the
ocean. The British sailor laid the foundation of the Australian nation,
and, in the beginning, more than any other class, the sailorman did the
colonising--and did it well. This, however, is the story of most British
possessions, and generally it is gratefully remembered and the sailor
duly credited and kindly thought of for his work. But in these days
the dry west wind from the back blocks seems to have blown the taste of
brine and the sound of the seethe of the curling "white horse" out of
the mind of the native-born Australian; and the sailing day of a mail
boat is the only thing that the average colonial knows or cares to know
about salt water.

To write on such a subject as this, one has to leave out so much, that
it is necessary to begin almost in the middle in order to reach an
ending. Sea exploration and coast surveying opened the ways; whaling--it
may surprise the reader, but it is nevertheless true--was once the main
support of Australia and New Zealand; and runaway sailors formed a
very considerable part of the back country population, such men making
handier and better farm labourers, stockmen, and, later on, miners,
by reason of their adaptability to strange surroundings, than
ticket-of-leave men or the average free emigrant.

The first four successive Governors of Australia--in the beginning, be
it remembered, the continent was one colony--were captains in the Navy.
Governing in those rough days was not a mere master-of-the-ceremonies
appointment, and Phillip, Hunter, King, and Bligh, if they made
mistakes, considering their previous training, the populations they
governed and the times in which they lived, amply justify Palmerston's
words that if he wanted a thing done well in a distant part of the
world; when he wanted a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of
pluck, and plenty of common sense--he would always send for a captain of
the Navy.

Phillip, the first of these Governors, was sent out to found "a penal
settlement at Botany Bay, on the coast of New Holland," and did the work
in such fashion, in spite of every discouragement from the forces of
nature, the Home Government, and his own officers, as to well entitle
him to a place among the builders of Greater Britain. What was known
of Australia, or rather New Holland--the name of Australia was still in
futurity--in 1788, when Phillip first landed on its shores?

Let us say nothing of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch voyages; of wrecks
and piracies; of maroonings, and massacres by blacks; of the discoveries
of Dampier and of Cook, but sum the whole up thus: the east coast of
Australia, from its northernmost extremity to its southernmost,
was practically unknown to the world, and was absolutely unknown to
Englishmen until Cook's first voyage. Cook, in the _Endeavour_, ran
along the whole east coast, entering a few bays, naming many points,
and particularly describing Botany Bay where he stayed some little time;
then he sailed through Torres Straits, and thence, _via_ Batavia, home
to England, where he arrived in June, 1771. The English Government took
no advantage of his discoveries until 1786, when Botany Bay was
fixed upon as the site of a new penal settlement; and this choice was
determined, more than anything else, by the advice of Sir Joseph Banks,
who, from the time of his voyage with Cook in the _Endeavour_ till his
death, took the keenest interest in the continent; and colonists are
more indebted to the famous naturalist for his friendly services than to
any other civilian Englishman of the time.

Phillip's commission ordered him to proceed to Botany Bay, but
authorised him to choose another site for the settlement if he
considered a better could be found. He arrived with his fleet of
transports in 1788, after a voyage of many months' duration, so managed
that, though the fleet was the first to make the passage and was made
up of more ships and more prisoners than any succeeding fleet, there was
less sickness and fewer deaths than on any of the convoys which followed
it Phillip made a careful examination of Botany Bay, and finding it
unsuitable for planting, the settlement was removed to Port Jackson.
After landing the exiles, the transports returned to Europe _via_ China
and the East Indies, and their route was along the north-east coast of
Australia. The voyages of these returning transports, under the
navy agent, Lieutenant Short-land, were fruitful in discoveries and
adventures. Meanwhile Phillip and his officers were working hard,
building their homes and taking their recreation in exploring the
country and the coast for many miles around them. And with such
poor means as an indifferent Home Government provided, this work of
exploration went on continually under each naval governor, the pressing
want of food spurring the pioneers ever on in the search for good
land; but that very need, with the lack of vessels, of men who could be
trusted, of all that was necessary for exploration, kept them chained in
a measure to their base at Sydney Cove.

Phillip, white-faced, cold and reserved, but with a heart full of pity,
was responsible for the lives of a thousand people in a desolate country
twelve thousand miles from England--so desolate that his discontented
officers without exception agreed that the new colony was "the
most God-forsaken land in the world." The convict settlers were so
ill-chosen, and the Government so neglected to supply them with even the
barest necessities from Home, that for several years after their landing
they were in constant distress from famine; and disease and death from
this cause alone was an evil regularly to be encountered by the silent,
hard-working Phillip. The only means of relief open to the starving
settlement was by importing food from Batavia and the Cape of Good
Hope, and to procure such supplies Phillip had but two ships at his
disposal--the worn-out old frigate _Sirius_ (which was lost at Norfolk
Island soon after the founding of the settlement) and a small brig of
war, the _Supply_--which for many weary months were the only means of
communication with civilisation.

The Home Government, when they did despatch a second fleet, instead of
sending supplies for the starving people under Phillip's care, sent more
prisoners, and very little to eat was sent with them. The authorities
seem to have had an idea that a few hundred shovels, some decayed garden
seeds, and a thousand or two of Old Bailey men and women criminals, were
all the means needed to found a prosperous and self-supporting colony.
How Phillip and his successors surmounted these difficulties is another
story; but in the sea history of Australia the work of the naval
governors occupies no small space in it. Remember, too, that the Torres
Straits route and the Great Barrier Reef, now as well charted as the
Solent, were only then being slowly discovered by clumsy old sailing
craft, whose masters learnt to dread and avoid the dangers of the
unknown coast as children grow cautious of fire, by actually touching
it.

Hunter, the second Governor of New South Wales, and King, the third
Governor, both did remarkable surveying work on the coast while serving
under Phillip, and both made still more remarkable voyages to England.
Hunter was the senior naval officer under Phillip, and was in command of
the _Sirius_ when she was lost on Norfolk Island.

This is how the dauntless Hunter got home with the crew of the _Sirius_,
after waiting six months on Norfolk Island for the chance of a passage.
The _Waaksamheyd_, a Dutch snow{*} of 300-tons burden, which had brought
supplies to Sydney from Batavia, was engaged to take Hunter and his
shipwrecked crew to England. She was _thirteen months_ on the voyage,
and here are some extracts from Hunter's letter to the Admiralty,
written from Portsmouth on the 23rd of April, 1792:--

"I sailed from Port Jackson on the 27th of March, 1791, victualled
for six months and with sixty tons of water. We were one hundred and
twenty-three people on board all told" (remember this vessel was of
three hundred tons burden). "The master was directed to call at Norfolk
Island to receive despatches, but contrary winds prevented us carrying
out these orders. We steered to the northward and made New Caledonia,
passing to the westward of it, as the master (a Dutchman) did not feel
himself qualified to navigate a vessel in these unknown seas. He had,
upon leaving Port Jackson, requested my assistance, which I gave him. In
sailing to the northward we fell in with several islands and shoals, the
situations of which we determined, and it is my intention, if the Navy
Board will permit me, to lay a short account of this northern passage
before the Board, when the discoveries will be particularly mentioned.
No ship that I have heard of having sailed between New Britain and New
Ireland since that passage was discovered by Captain Carteret in
Her Majesty's sloop _Swallow_, I was the more desirous to take that
route.... We passed through the Straits of Macassar and arrived at
Batavia after a tedious and distressing passage of twenty-six weeks."

     * A snow differed somewhat slightly from a brig. It had two
     masts similar to the fore and mainmasts of a brig or ship,
     and, close abaft the mainmast, a topsail mast.

After burying an officer and two seamen at Batavia, Hunter left that
place on October 20th, reached the Cape on the 17th of December, and
was driven to sea again after the loss of two anchors, till the 30th.
So weak and ill were his men from the effects of their stay in the
unhealthy climate of Batavia, that he had to remain at the Cape till the
18th of January, when he again put to sea and sailed for England.

Hunter's brief and precise official account of his voyage discloses
little of the great distress of that thirteen months' passage; but it
shows how the spirit of discovery was in the man; how, in spite of the
care of one hundred and twenty-three people in a 300-ton vessel, and
half rations, he had time and energy enough to think of surveying. One
result of his voyage was his strongly expressed opinion that the proper
route home from Australia was _via_ Cape Horn--now the recognised
homeward route for sailing vessels.

The name of King ought never to be forgotten, for the services of father
and son in Australian waters were very great. King, the elder, came
out with Phillip as second lieutenant of the crazy old _Sirius_. He had
previously served under Phillip in the East Indies, and soon after the
arrival of the first fleet in "Botany Bay," as New South Wales was
then called, he was sent with a detachment of Marines and a number of
convicts to colonise Norfolk Island. His task was a hard one, but he
accomplished it in the face of almost heartbreaking difficulties.

Phillip, finding that his despatches failed to awaken the Home
Government to a sense of the deplorable situation of the colony he
had founded at Port Jackson, determined to send home a man who would
represent the true state of affairs. He chose King for the service.
Every other officer--both naval and military--was ready to go, and would
have eloquently described the miseries of the colonists, and harped on
the necessity for an instant abandonment of the settlement--they were
writing letters to this effect by every chance they could get to forward
them--but this was not what Phillip wanted. He, and he alone, recognised
the future possibilities of New South Wales, writing even at the time
of his deepest distress: "This will be the greatest acquisition Great
Britain has ever made." All he asked was for reasonable help in the way
of food and decent settlers who could work. All he got in answer to
his requests was the further shipment of the scum of the gaols and the
hulks--and some more spades and seeds. King believed in his chief and
cordially worked with him--and King was the silent Phillip's one friend.

So King went home, his voyage thither being one of the most singular
ever made by naval officer. He left Sydney Cove in April, 1790, and
after a tedious passage reached Batavia. Here he engaged a small Dutch
vessel to take him to the Cape of Good Hope, sailing for that port in
August Before the ship had been a week at sea, save four men, the whole
crew, including the master, were stricken with the hideous "putrid
fever"--a common disease in "country" ships at that time. King, a quick
and masterful man, took command, and with his four well men lived on
deck in a tent to escape contagion. The rest of the ship's company,
which included a surgeon, lay below delirious, and one after another of
them dying--seventeen of them died in a fortnight.

King tells how, when handling the bodies to throw them overboard, he and
his men covered their mouths with sponges soaked in vinegar to prevent
contagion. In this short-handed condition he navigated the vessel to the
Mauritius, where, "having heard of the misunderstanding with the French"
the gallant officer refused to take passage in a French frigate; but
procuring a new crew worked his way to the Cape, where he arrived
in September, reaching England in December, after a passage which
altogether occupied eight months--a letter from England to Australia and
a reply to it now occupies about ten weeks.

In England King was well received, being confirmed in his appointment as
Commandant of Norfolk Island, and he succeeded in getting some help for
his fellow-colonists. Upon his return to his island command the little
colony proved a great worry. The military guard mutinied, and King armed
the convict settlers to suppress the mutiny! This act of his gave great
offence in some quarters. Phillip had resigned the command at Sydney,
and the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, who was in charge, was the
commanding officer of the New South Wales Regiment--more celebrated in
the records for its mutinies than its services--and the degradation
of the Norfolk Island detachment by King was never forgiven by the
soldiers, but the Home Government quite approved his conduct.

But King made one very serious mistake. He had sent a vessel to New
Zealand, and from thence had imported certain Maori chiefs to instruct
the settlers on Norfolk Island in flax cultivation.

King had pledged his word to these noble savages to return them to their
native country, and in order to do so, and make sure of their getting
there, he himself embarked in a vessel, leaving his command for a few
days to the charge of his subordinate, while he sailed the thirteen
hundred miles to New Zealand and back. For this he was censured, but
was notwithstanding afterwards appointed the third Governor of New South
Wales, succeeding Hunter.

King's son, who was born at Norfolk Island in 1791, entered the Navy
in 1807, and saw any amount of fighting in the French war; then went to
Australia in 1817, and surveyed its eastern coast in such a manner that,
when he returned to England in 1823 there was little but detail
work left for those who followed him. Then he was appointed to the
_Adventure_, which, in conjunction with the _Beagle_, surveyed the South
American coast. In 1830 he retired and settled in Australia, dying there
in 1856. His son in turn entered the service, but early followed his
father's example, and turned farmer in Australia. He still lives, and
is a member of the Legislative Council or Upper House of the New South
Wales Parliament.

Here is a family record! Three generations, all naval officers, and all
men who have taken an active share in the founding and growth of Greater
Britain; and yet not one man in a thousand in Australia, much less in
England, has probably the remotest idea of the services rendered to the
Empire by this family.

The fourth and last naval Governor, Bligh, is more often remembered in
connection with the _Bounty_ mutiny than for his governorship of New
South Wales. He was deposed by the military in 1808, for his action in
endeavouring to suppress the improper traffic in rum which was being
carried on by the officers of the New South Wales Regiment. This second
mutiny, of which he was the victim, certainly cannot be blamed against
the honesty of his administration; and the assertion, so often repeated,
that he hid himself under his bed when the mutinous soldiers--who had
been well primed with rum by their officers--marched to Government
House, can best be answered by the statement that Nelson publicly
thanked him for his skill and gallantry at Copenhagen, and by the
heroism which he showed in the most remarkable boat voyage in history.
He may have been the most tyrannical and overbearing naval officer that
ever entered the service, but he was not the man to hide himself under a
bed.

There were other naval officers of the early Australian days whose
services were no less valuable to the infant colony. Think of the men
associated with this time, and of the names famous in history, which
are in some way linked with Australia. Dampier, Cook, La Pйrouse, Bligh,
Edwards and the _Pandora_, Vancouver, Flinders, Bass--all these are
familiar to the world, and there are others in plenty; for example,
Grant, who in his vessel, the brig _Lady Nelson_, did such work in
Australian waters as, if performed nowadays say in Africa, would have
been recorded in hundreds of newspaper interviews, many process-work
pictures and a 21s. book with cheap editions!

What a story is that of Bass and Flinders! Such noble, disinterested
courage! Such splendid service to English colonisation, and such a sad
ending to it all.

Bass and Flinders, in their tiny open boat, the _Tom Thumb_, and in the
sloop _Norfolk_, dotting the blank map of Australia with the names of
their discoveries--it is not necessary surely to remind the reader
that Bass began, and together the two men completed, the discovery and
passage of the straits between Van Dieman's Land and the main continent.
Bass surveyed something like six hundred miles of the Australian coast
in a whaleboat with a crew of six men! And one _cannot_ summarise
Flinders' work in the _Norfolk_ and in the _Investigator_ before the old
ship was condemned and converted into a hulk to rot in Sydney Harbour.

How were these men rewarded for their services, and what has posterity
done to keep their names in remembrance? In 1803 Flinders started for
England, was wrecked, and making his way to the Mauritius was there,
to the everlasting disgrace of Napoleon's Island governor, detained
a prisoner for more than six years. Of course the English Government
ultimately procured his release, but it took them all that time to do
it; and when he did get back they promoted his juniors over his head.
When he died in 1814, a broken heart was as much as anything else the
cause of his death.

Bass, after leaving Australia, went to England and sailed in an armed
merchantman bound to South America. At Valparaiso the Governor of the
town refused to allow the vessel to trade. Bass, who was then in
command of the ship, threatened to bombard the town, and the refusal was
withdrawn; but, watching their opportunity the authorities seized
him when he was off his guard, and it was supposed he was sent to the
interior. As the years passed by there were one or two reports that
he was seen working in the mines, but it seems to have been no one's