Arthur Phillip Read online

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players,

  They have their exits and entrances,

  And one man in his time plays many parts,

  His acts being seven ages.

  William Shakespeare,

  As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

  Botany Bay, it has been

  argued, was meant as a

  Gulag before Gulag …

  Nothing could be further

  from the truth.

  Alan Atkinson

  The Europeans in Australia

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preface

  Phillip’s Naval Ranks

  Phillip’s Ships

  Naval Education

  Junior Officer

  Gentleman Farmer

  Mercenary

  Captain of the Ariadne

  Captain of the Europe

  Secret Agent

  Pioneer

  Philosopher

  Commander

  Governor

  Society Gentleman

  Inspector

  Final Years

  Notes on Travel

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Conversion Table

  Copyright Page

  For Gillian Rose

  and

  Olivia, Harriet, India & Nick

  PREFACE

  My object in writing this book has been threefold – to convey something of the elusive character of Arthur Phillip, to bring to life his career in the Royal Navy and to explain the culture, values, fashions and features of the Georgian society in which he lived and died. I have endeavoured to do so with an eye to the picturesque and with appropriate focus on the scientific and natural world where it forms part of the narrative. This is not just a book about wooden ships and big guns, although they certainly feature. It is a story of privation and ambition, of wealthy widows and marriage mistakes, of money and trade, of espionage and mercenaries, of discovery and exploration, and of hardship and illness. It is also a story of the extraordinary idealism that inspired and accompanied the founding of Australia. Inevitably there is loneliness and desperation, war and disappointment. Eventually there were the rewards of re-marriage and genteel living in Regency Bath. At his peak, in mid-life, Phillip seemed almost perfectly suited to the role that history and circumstance presented to him. He was ‘a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of pluck, and plenty of common sense’. To those qualities he brought an uncommon amount of integrity, intelligence and persistence. He was after all a captain in the Georgian navy, the type to whom British governments so often turned two centuries ago when they wanted a job well done in a distant part of the world. At the end, however, Phillip’s story is one of loss of contemporary relevance and the painful decline into obscurity that comes with old age.

  Easter 2013

  Hawthorn, Mount Wilson

  PHILLIP’S NAVAL RANKS

  Captain’s Servant 16 October 1755

  Midshipman 3 February 1757

  Fourth Lieutenant 7 June 1761

  First Lieutenant 9 October 1778

  Master & Commander 2 September 1779

  Post Captain 30 November 1781

  Rear Admiral of the Blue 1 January 1799

  Rear Admiral of the White 23 April 1804

  Rear Admiral of the Red 9 November 1805

  Vice Admiral of the Blue 13 December 1806

  Vice Admiral of the White 25 October 1809

  Vice Admiral of the Red 31 July 1810

  Admiral of the Blue 4 June 1814

  PHILLIP’S SHIPS

  Buckingham 1755

  Princess Louisa 1756

  Neptune 1757

  Union 1757–58

  Aurora 1759

  Stirling Castle 1760–62

  Infanta (captured Spanish vessel) 1762

  Egmont 1770–71

  Belém (Portuguese) 1775

  Pilar (Portuguese) 1775–77

  San Agustin (captured Spanish vessel) 1777

  Santa Antonio (Portuguese) 1777–78

  Alexander 1778

  Basilisk 1779

  Ariadne 1781

  Europe 1782–84

  Sirius 1787–88

  Alexander 1796

  Swiftsure 1796

  Blenheim 1797

  CHAPTER 1

  NAVAL

  EDUCATION

  Phillip’s formative years – his parents, birth, education and apprenticeship

  Arthur Phillip was born in the City of London in October 1738 during the reign of Britain’s last foreign-born monarch, George II. It was a time of ebullient confidence, buoyant economic conditions and growing favourable trade balances. Englishmen exhibited a breezy, bigoted chauvinism towards the rest of the world. In 1707, their country had united with Scotland and became known as Great Britain but the new name was little more than a euphemism for greater England. France and Spain were the traditional foes. The citizens of the former were popularly seen as ‘starveling, barefoot, onion-nibbling peasants oppressed by a lecherous clergy and a callous nobility’. Those of the latter were regarded with perennial suspicion as mysterious, black-robed, papist idolaters. On the other hand, when the French philosopher Voltaire visited England in the decade before Phillip’s birth, he was dazzled by the extent of tolerance, political enlightenment and freedom of expression. But there was a darker side. London’s urban proletariat was the gin-sodden sump of Georgian society – mercilessly satirised by the artist William Hogarth and justly described by a later French visitor as ‘lazy, sotted and brutish’.

  The fear that France and Spain might unite under one Bourbon monarch was the reason for the war that marked the beginning of the century – the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14). In 1738 the country was on the verge of another conflict with Spain. For years London merchants had been looking to expand their commercial interests in the Spanish territories of the Americas. Fuelled by avarice, their campaign was reinforced by discontent with Spain’s use of guarda costas to board, search and frequently harass British merchant vessels on the high seas. One English captain named Robert Jenkins claimed that his ear had been sliced off when his ship was boarded. Reputedly, he produced his pickled ear to a committee of the House of Commons. The prominent Whig statesman, William Pitt the elder exhorted the government: ‘Where trade is at stake, we must defend it or perish’. The whole tumultuous year was marked by loud and increasing demands for war. When it came in 1739, it was known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The British public enthusiastically assumed that victory would be ‘easy, glorious and profitable’ and that there would be little more to do than usher Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver into home ports. And within a month the City bells tolled to celebrate Admiral Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello on the Spanish Main – an event that was so joyous it led to Thomas Arne’s song Rule, Britannia! and Portobello Road. English boys ached to go to sea.

  Phillip was born amid this din and clamour for war. But the circumstances of his birth were inauspicious. His father Jacob is a mystery who has been repeatedly cast as an ‘obscure German wanderer, teacher of languages and native of Frankfurt’. Phillip himself was once likened in appearance to ‘a kapellmeister in some little Bavarian court’. Another writer referred to his ‘un-English physiognomy’, and another, surely lapsing into parody, to his ‘long hooked fleshy nose and dark eyes with a hint of the orient about them’. Some have pointed to the Palatine migration as the occasion for Jacob Phillip’s arrival in England. In 1709, many thousands of mostly Protestant refugees did come to London from the R
hineland Palatinate. But the evidence that Jacob was among them is speculative. The lists of Palatine refugees include Schneiders and Schaeffers, Hermanns and Mullers, but there is no surname similar to ‘Phillip’, except possibly Pfeiffer. John Jacob Pfeiffer is recorded in the first list of 6 May 1709. He was 42 years old and arrived with his wife, eight-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. But the conclusion that the son of John Jacob Pfeiffer, who arrived in London with his family in 1709, is the same person as Jacob Phillip, the father of Arthur Phillip born in London in 1738, rests on coincidence and the rudimentary anglicisation of Pfeiffer to Phillip. This is too slender a reed.

  More is known about Phillip’s mother. She was Elizabeth Breach, born in 1707 in the London parish of St Botolph without Aldgate. From his mother Phillip acquired an English lineage and a modest naval connection. Her family lived in Stoney Lane, around the corner from St Botolph’s Church near the old gateway leading from the City of London to Whitechapel. The Everitt family also lived in Stoney Lane, and Elizabeth’s cousin Michael Everitt would in due course be influential in her son’s early career. At the age of 21 Elizabeth Breach married a seaman named John Herbert. There were no banns, no public announcement, and the marriage was short-lived. He was an ordinary seaman destined for foreign service in what was then the most dreaded foreign station of all – the West Indies. When he made his will on 6 February 1729, a few months after the wedding, its timehonoured opening words betrayed a sense of foreboding – ‘Mindful of the perils and dangers of the sea and other uncertainties of this transitory life’.

  Two years later, on 18 October 1731, John Herbert died in the British naval hospital at Port Royal, Jamaica. Yellow fever was almost certainly the cause of his death, as it was for thousands of other British soldiers and sailors in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century. In Port Royal, the slave ships brought West African mosquitoes and larvae bearing the yellow fever virus from across the Atlantic. Newly arrived seamen with no immunity, crowded in damp and fetid places, did not stand a chance. In June 1732, John Herbert’s ship returned to England without him. Elizabeth Breach could not have known of her husband’s death before the ship’s arrival. But when she did, she moved quickly to realise his meagre effects and collect his pay. By 1 August 1732 she had obtained probate of his will.

  Just how Elizabeth Breach came to meet Jacob Phillip, or when they married, is uncertain. But two children, Rebecca and Arthur, were baptised in 1737 and 1738 at All Hallow’s Church in Bread Street in the City of London. Bread Street is one of those lanes running off Cheapside in the shadow of St Paul’s that still carry the names of the trades and enterprises that were once undertaken there – bread, wood, honey, milk and poultry, among others. There is even a Friday Street where fishmongers congregated. The church of St Mary le Bow is around the corner, from where its ‘Bow Bells’ could be heard daily, sounding a curfew at night to mark the end of the working day for the City apprentices. St Mildred’s church was also in Bread Street, as well as the Three Cups Inn from where the stagecoach to Bristol would depart and return three times each week. Nearby was the parish workhouse for the poor. From Cheapside a labyrinth of narrow alleys and lanes led down to the broad River Thames. To the west of St Paul’s, just a few streets away, was that place of misery and despair, the old Newgate Prison. Its stench pervaded the neighbourhood. The Italian chronicler and adventurer Casanova described Newgate as ‘a hell such as Dante might have conceived’. Daniel Defoe, the English writer and author of Robinson Crusoe, thought it ‘an emblem of hell itself’.

  Jacob Phillip was a tenant of Martha Meredith’s house in Bread Street. His contributions to the parish poor fund suggest that, at least for a few years, the family’s circumstances were modestly comfortable. In 1736–37 his contribution was 19s 6d and in each of the next two years it was £1.19s. These amounts indicate an income that compared favourably with the rates of pay for farm labourers, ordinary seamen, weavers and teachers. Poor funds were administered by parishes, of which there were more than a hundred within the walls of the City of London. Some, like All Hallows, built workhouses to accommodate the poor. There, the infirm and elderly, the sick, senile, diseased and mad, were all housed together as objects of charity, supported by the parish with contributions from the residents.

  After 1739, Jacob Phillip’s name ceased to appear in the All Hallows poor rate register and he is never heard of again. Elizabeth’s subsequent movements can be traced to Whitechapel and then to Rotherhithe, a docks area on the south side of the Thames, upstream from the naval yard at Deptford. It is reasonable to infer Jacob’s death or disablement in the Sea Service, as the navy was then commonly called, because this was the primary qualification that entitled his son to be admitted some years later to the Charity School of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. Entrance was limited to ‘the Sons of disabled Seamen, or whose Fathers were slain, killed or drown’d in the Sea Service’, and who were ‘objects of charity’.

  It is more difficult to be certain about the precise cause of Jacob Phillip’s death or disablement. But dockside areas like Rotherhithe were notorious hunting grounds for press gangs, a fact that might explain his disappearance and subsequent death during a time of recruitment for war. Press gangs were usually led by a junior naval lieutenant who reported to an officer of the Impress Service known as a ‘regulating captain’. Often the press gang was just a group of rouseabouts who sallied from a rendezvous, usually an alehouse, with clubs, short curved cutlasses and the questionable authority of an Admiralty press warrant. Some regulating captains were failed officers and navy derelicts. The system was open to abuse and injustices were certainly perpetrated. Admiralty lawyers were kept busy defending the numerous legal challenges brought on behalf of pressed men. But the system was regarded as a necessary public policy and the only practical expedient for ensuring that there was sufficient manpower to man the fleets and protect the realm.

  Although the usual form of Admiralty press warrant empowered only the pressing of ‘seamen, seafaring men and persons whose occupations and callings were to work in vessels and boats’, others who strayed into the path of a press gang could be swept away. And typhus, known as ship fever or jail fever, was the scourge of impressment. It proliferated where men, lousy and in rags, were crowded together in confined spaces lacking proper ventilation and sanitation. In fact, 1740 saw the worst naval typhus epidemic of all time. Although 15,000 men were quickly recruited at the outbreak of war, only 1000 men could be mustered six months later – and no fewer than 25,000 were sent to hospital ships, sick quarters and hospitals.

  In an age before widow’s pensions, Elizabeth Breach was again left without a husband. Stoney Lane near St Botolph’s Church was familiar home territory. The Everitt family was there, including Michael Everitt, who in 1747 would be appointed to the rank of post captain in command of a rated naval vessel. In this capacity, Everitt was entitled to a number of ‘servants’ – four for every 100 of the ship’s authorised complement.

  A captain’s servant was not a servant in the conventional sense but a boy bred up for seafaring life, almost as an apprentice to his master. The naval regulations stated that officers’ servants should not be younger than eleven, but it was a regulation often ignored and boys as young as six were known to be at sea. A captain’s servant could come from any background, and not all were noted in the muster books. Some were young gentlemen; others were not. Many were relatives and some were taken on as a favour to master shipwrights and dockyard officials. It was a small favour to grant, for the only risk a captain ran was that he would be given a troublesome or useless boy who would have to be returned to his parents. For many boys, it was the making of them, but the quality of their education and instruction at sea depended on the captain. A benevolent and enlightened captain would arrange tuition in mathematics, astronomy, reading, writing and drawing; a schoolmaster might even be part of the ship’s complement. But on the worst ships, a boy might receive more gin than instruction, and pass his
time sleeping and playing, or walking the decks with his hands in his pockets.

  We know that Phillip went to sea in a British naval vessel at nine years of age. A testimonial about Phillip’s service from the Viceroy of Brazil noted that Phillip’s practical experience began at the age of nine as a ‘guarda de Pavilhâo’. This was the Portuguese equivalent of the most junior rank of cadet officer. At that age, Phillip could only have done so in the capacity of an officer’s servant. And the source of the Viceroy’s information must have been Phillip himself. The inference that he was taken on by Captain Everitt in 1747 has a reasonable basis. Not only did Phillip turn nine in the year that Everitt received his first command but it seems likely that by that time he was fatherless. Elizabeth Breach no doubt encouraged her cousin Michael Everitt to take her orphaned only son under his wing, and the official naval records show that Phillip spent a large part of his subsequent early naval career on ships under Everitt’s command.

  Everitt may have been one of the better captains. His portrait, painted in 1747 by Richard Wilson, a founder member of the Royal Academy, hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria. It suggests a corpulent, confident and self-satisfied man of his time. The Admiralty records indicate that his punishments of difficult and unsavoury seamen were frequent and severe, much more so than Phillip’s would ever be, but not unusual among his contemporaries. There is no official record of Phillip’s service with Everitt in the 1740s, though this is not surprising given that the system existed on patronage and preferment. Record keeping was often deliberately incomplete and it would not have been prudent to include in the muster book a boy younger than the minimum age prescribed in the naval regulations.

  On 22 June 1751 Phillip commenced a more formal process of naval education when he was accepted for admission to the Charity School of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. The hospital, situated on the south bank of the Thames about five miles east of the City, was the dream of Queen Mary. As joint sovereign with her husband William of Orange, she made the hospital ‘the darling object of her life’. When she died suddenly from smallpox in December 1694, William carried on the project in her memory, commissioning the celebrated architects Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor to design and build the four main buildings. Their prospect from the river, so famously painted by the Venetian artist Canaletto, is regarded as ‘one of the most sublime sights that English architecture affords’. In this magnificent setting, Britain’s sick and disabled seamen were housed and cared for, and the ‘orphans of the sea’ – the boys whose fathers were slain or disabled in the Sea Service and who were objects of charity – were maintained and educated.