Arthur Phillip Read online

  By 1748 there were a hundred poor boys housed in a dormitory in the attic of the Queen Mary Court – the last of the four great buildings to be completed. All around them were the injured, aged and frequently decrepit pensioners. By day, the boys attended school at nearby Weston’s Academy, where the headmaster in Phillip’s time was the Reverend Francis Swinden. The boys were constantly supervised and could not leave the hospital grounds unless in the company of the official guardian or his assistants, who escorted them to and from the school, whipped them when required and presided at their table in the dining hall.

  Phillip’s entry to the school is recorded in the entry register and his departure appears in the binding out. In the former, his father is described as ‘steward’ – a likely occupation for a man with no particular seafaring skills who may have been pressed. In the latter, his father’s occupation is listed as able seaman. Whether steward or seaman, Phillip satisfied the first criterion for admission, namely that he was the son of a seaman. The other criteria were that he be between eleven and thirteen years of age, of sound body and mind, and able to read. And of course, he must have been an ‘object of charity’ whose father had been ‘slain or disabled in the Sea Service’. These conditions for admission were required to be proved ‘by proper Certificates’ and one of the school’s articles provided that, ‘If any Boy shall get in by false Testimonials, or other indirect means, upon Discovery thereof, he shall be stripped of his clothing and turned out of the hospital, never to be re-admitted.’

  Once admitted, the boys were lodged, clothed and maintained at the expense of the hospital for up to three years. A nurse was appointed for every 30 boys to keep them clean, to ensure their hair was combed and free of vermin, to take care of their clothes, to make their beds if they were unable to do so, and to attend to their meals. Each boy was supplied with a bible, a book of common prayer and other books and instruments necessary for education. All the boys received instruction from the chaplains in the principles of religion and from the schoolmaster in writing, arithmetic and navigation. As for necessities, the boys were given linen and woollen clothing of the same quality as the pensioners, as well as a pair of hard-wearing ram skin leather breeches. They slept in hammocks rather than beds, presumably as practice for sea life.

  The articles prescribed the routine of the boys’ daily lives with resolute strictness. Each day followed the familiar, well-recognised patterns of institutional living that Charles Dickens later depicted in Nicholas Nickleby. The boys’ diet was parsimonious: four ounces of bread and one of cheese for breakfast; five ounces of bread and one of cheese for supper; a daily quart of beer, of which half a pint was for breakfast, a pint for dinner and half a pint for supper; mutton with broth on Sunday; beef with broth on Tuesdays and Thursdays; and pease pottage on Fridays. Saturday’s dinner was particularly spartan – water gruel with sugar and currants.

  Education focused on arithmetic and navigation – the extraction of square and cube roots, trigonometry, plain sailing and oblique sailing, the doctrine of currents, sailing by middle latitude, Mercator sailing and, not the least important, the times of high water at various ports. Drawing was also central to the curriculum. The ability to draw landscapes and coastlines accurately was a crucial skill for naval officers and those involved in engineering and artillery. Indeed, training apprentices to become good artists as well as good seamen was a standard commitment to which masters agreed in their indentures. In his later life, Phillip would display a graphic talent in his chart work that must have been fostered at an early age. In the classroom, and if one account can be accepted, Phillip appears to have been a good student. In his report of 22 June 1753, the Reverend Swinden is reputed to have made the observation that ‘Arthur Phillip is noted for his diplomacy [and] mildness. [He is] nervously active, unassuming, reasonable, business-like to the smallest degree in everything he undertakes, always seeking perfection’. These traits would be apparent throughout Phillip’s life.

  Upon completion of his education, each boy was bound out with a sea chest, all necessary clothing and the books and instruments he used at school. He was fitted with a double-breasted pea jacket, a serge waistcoat, a Kersey waistcoat, good cloth breeches, ordinary shag breeches, a Drugget coat and further breeches, white shirts and cotton check shirts, yarn and worsted stockings, silk handkerchiefs, shoes and hat. In the usual case, this would have been the extent of each boy’s worldly possessions. When a master could be found to take him on, the boy’s apprenticeship would begin.

  Phillip left the Charity School at the end of 1753. William Readhead, master of the 210-ton whaling ship Fortune, bound himself to instruct Phillip in ‘the best Way and Manner for making him an able Seaman and as good an Artist as he can’. The indenture of apprenticeship was dated 1 December 1753 and was for a term of seven years. It included a further promise by Readhead not to ‘immoderately beat or misuse’ his apprentice. Depending on the master, an apprenticeship at sea could be onerous. But an apprenticeship on a whaling ship in the Arctic was particularly tough. The rations were austere, the physical conditions unhealthy and the work dangerous. And the apprentice could expect the worst and the last of everything.

  Phillip embarked on his first whaling expedition in the spring of 1754 to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard) in the Barents Sea – within the Arctic Circle between 76° and 80°N. Apart from the far northern extremities of Greenland and Ellesmere Island, there is almost no land quite as close to the North Pole. The whaling ships went to Spitsbergen in the eighteenth century because its unique location made it a cradle of life for large numbers of whales, especially the Greenland Right whale or bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), which feed on the massive plankton that blooms in spring. For centuries these feeding grounds were a stopping point on the whales’ circumpolar migratory route through the northeast Atlantic and Russian Arctic. Of all the whales, bowheads were the most valuable as their blubber was the thickest. And they were easy to hunt and harvest: they moved slowly, swimming languorously, feeding near the surface, sometimes literally basking in the seasonal warmth. Their immense quantity of blubber also meant that they floated readily when killed.

  It is no surprise that Phillip’s apprenticeship was on a whaling ship. At that very time, British whaling had emerged from a period of slumber to become a major industry operating from northern coastal ports such as Whitby, Hull and Yarmouth and from the Greenland Dock at Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames. From these places, dozens of whaling ships and hundreds of men were despatched to the Arctic each year. Their business was to bring back cargoes of blubber and baleen. The latter, often mistakenly described as ‘whale bone’, was much in demand in the eighteenth century for corset stays and skirt hoops, among many other things. The whale oil on the other hand, obtained by boiling and reducing the blubber, was an elemental necessity of life. It was the fuel for lamps and the primary substance from which soap and candles were manufactured. But what made British whaling sufficiently commercially attractive to generate its resurgence was the government bounty. By 1750 the owner of a whaling ship of 200 tons or more became entitled to £2 per ship ton. In the case of the Fortune, this amounted to £420 – enough to underwrite the basic cost of a whaling expedition and payable irrespective of the quantity of baleen, blubber or oil carried home. Although the apprentice’s role in the whaling process was limited, the fifteen-year-old Phillip would have seen it all from the ship’s rails. More often he would have been employed in fetching and carrying. Whenever necessary he would have been required to wash the deck clear of slippery and hazardous whale blood.

  Only the strongest and fittest men manned the small boats known as ‘whalers’ that were despatched to hunt, harpoon and lance the whales. The work was too dangerous and physically demanding for a boy apprentice. A whaler needed to come close, very close indeed, to its quarry and great strength and power were needed to hurl the harpoon. At the right moment, the bow oarsman would draw in his oar, move forward and stand poised with the ha
rpoon. It was about three feet long, made of iron with a wooden handle and attached to a hemp rope approximately 120 fathoms long. Each whaler carried six of these ropes, making well over 4000 feet in all. A hatchet was always on hand to cut the rope in case of entanglement. When a strike occurred, the whale might flick its tail perilously. Frequently it dived. Barring mishap, there would then follow a long and arduous process, over many hours, of wearing down the whale. When the whale was exhausted, it was repeatedly lanced until its death was certain. Other whalers would come to assist. The lances were thin and exceedingly sharp and penetrated deep into the whale, into its lungs and liver, causing blood to spout high in the air. The sea would become the colour of vermillion. As its life drained away, the whale sometimes let out a mournful groan, lashing the water with its tail before it expired. Sometimes it raged, battering the sea with its fins and tail before losing all strength and turning over on its side.

  The next stage was the strenuous and bloody business of stripping and flensing – the process of separating blubber from bone using large curved blades attached to long wooden handles. The blubber was then cut into strips and packed into barrels or ‘blubber butts’ to be transported to port. There the blubber was boiled and reduced to a fine waxy oil in grimy Georgian factories known as ‘blubber boiling houses’. In London, they proliferated around Rotherhithe.

  This was the experience of Phillip’s Arctic apprenticeship. It was the toughest of schools in the harshest of environments. Phillip would have learned the rudiments of seamanship and seen firsthand the operation of a whaling ship. During the winter he would have had a different experience. Returned whaling ships such as the Fortune set off on the Mediterranean trade. This was a commercial circuit in which vessels sailed between the principal ports of northern Europe, the Iberian peninsula and the western Mediterranean, transporting goods and maximising revenue on each leg of the voyage. The winter voyage of the Fortune in 1754–55 conforms to this pattern of Mediterranean trading. The pass that William Readhead obtained from the Admiralty gave his first destination as Barcelona and the second as Livorno, or Leghorn as the English called it. Lloyd’s List records that the vessel then returned via Sète and Rotterdam. Its outward cargoes were probably cloth, grain, fish and manufactured goods. Its Mediterranean cargoes were likely olive oil, currants, salt and silk. On the Fortune’s return to London from the Mediterranean in April 1755, she set off on a second whaling expedition to Spitsbergen. In July, at the end of the summer whaling season, when the ship once again returned to London and the crew was paid off, Phillip quit his apprenticeship and was released from his indentures. He had not served his seven years but there were moves afoot to advance his career in other ways. And Captain Michael Everitt was well placed to assist him.

  CHAPTER 2

  JUNIOR

  OFFICER

  The Seven Years War and Phillip’s service in the Mediterranean and the West Indies

  The conflagration that became the Seven Years War (1756–63) was brewing throughout 1755. During that year Great Britain and France were engaged in constant skirmishing, moving publicly and ineluctably towards the first world war. Although formal declarations of war did not come until May and June 1756, the impending conflict had been inevitable for some time. In due course, Spain, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, Prussia and Hanover all joined in. Sensing the opportunities that lay ahead, some young Englishmen changed course and joined the navy. One such man, with a later connection to Australia, was James Cook, a seaman in the merchant service who signed up as an able seaman in June 1755. Another was Arthur Phillip, ten years younger than Cook, who abandoned his apprenticeship on a whaling vessel to join Captain Everitt on a ship of the line. He first appears in official naval records in October 1755 when he was entered in the muster book of the Buckingham as a member of the ship’s complement. This was the start of his formal naval career.

  Phillip was seventeen years old and one of Captain Everitt’s official servants. It was the beginning of the road to becoming a midshipman. The naval regulations required that a candidate for commission as a lieutenant must have undertaken six years service at sea, at least two as a midshipman. Phillip’s official time commenced to run from 16 October 1755 – ignoring what informal service he may have had with Everitt from the age of nine. Everitt’s other servants on the Buckingham included his two sons Robert and George and two young boys who were, it seems, relatives of Vice-Admiral Temple West. Phillip was fortunate to be in the company of these boys for Everitt was naturally mindful of their education. In June, a few months before Phillip joined the ship, he requested from the Admiralty a schoolmaster to assist in the naval education of his ‘young gentlemen’.

  From modest beginnings, the Seven Years War fanned rapidly throughout Europe, the West Indies, North and South America, Africa, India and the Philippines and its outcome would permanently alter the world map. The origins of the war lay in rivalry between Great Britain and France over their competing colonial and trade empires and in antagonism between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs, which pitted Prussia against Austria and the Holy Roman Empire. The antagonists and their allies coalesced into two camps: Anglo-Prussian and Austro-French. Portugal and some small German states aligned themselves with the former and Sweden, Saxony and later Spain with the latter. Throughout the war, Great Britain adopted a distinctive strategy, limiting her military commitment on the continent and subsidising her allies to engage the enemy on that front, while establishing naval supremacy on the high seas, controlling trade routes and plundering foreign colonies. But the campaign did not start well.

  The opening sea battle of the Seven Years War occurred off the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean Sea. Minorca is the most northerly of the Balearic Islands, approximately 250 miles south of Toulon. It is rocky and sparsely cultivated and less well known today than its larger brother Majorca. But in 1756 it was a British frontier garrison, protected by a fort known as St Phillip at the entrance to its harbour. The township of Mahon was situated inside the harbour.

  Britain had seized Minorca from Spain in 1708 for essentially the same strategic reasons as the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and Catalans had invaded it in earlier times. In the eighteenth-century, most of the British inhabitants on Minorca were soldiers and sailors, support personnel and their families. The island’s strategic significance lay partly in its nearness to the French naval base and dockyard at Toulon and partly because it was at the crossroads of Mediterranean trade. As one contemporary British writer recorded: ‘All ships sailing up the straits of Gibraltar, and bound to any part of Africa, east of Algiers, to any part of Italy, or to any part of Turkey, either in Asia or Europe, and all ships from many of those places, and bound to any port without the straits-mouth, must and usually do pass between this island and the coast of Africa’. Control of Minorca meant that Britain could intervene in the commercial and naval activities of its major imperial competitors – France, Spain and the Ottoman Empire.

  In April 1756 the rumours about France’s intention to invade Minorca became a reality. This act of French belligerence before the declaration of hostilities marked the real beginning of the war. When the island was overrun by French troops, the British residents in the township withdrew inside the fort, sheltering behind its stone walls and in its dungeons and damp subterranean passages. For weeks the French besieged the fort with cannon and artillery, battering its walls and confining the entire population of men, women and children within it. To relieve the British residents and the garrison, the Admiralty despatched a dozen line-of-battle ships from the Western Squadron under the command of Admiral Byng, who had been patrolling in the Bay of Biscay. Among them was the 70-gun Buckingham on which Phillip served. She was the flagship of Vice-Admiral Temple West and was commanded by Michael Everitt.

  On 20 May, to the great relief of the besieged British residents, Byng’s ships appeared on the horizon off Minorca and that afternoon engaged with a slightly more numerous French squadron.
When the two lines of battleships engaged, the British line’s approach to the enemy was oblique, so that its vanguard or ‘van’ closed with the enemy before its centre and rear. The Buckingham, in the middle of the British van, and the Defiance, whose captain was killed and replaced by the dashing Augustus Hervey, were exposed to the most intense French fire. But the centre and rear of the line under Byng’s command remained out of range three miles back. The French fired high, as was their usual practice, seeking to dismast the British ships. But the British van under the command of Temple West aimed low and were faster and more effective.

  During the engagement, Phillip and the other servants, together with the lieutenants, most of the midshipmen and the majority of the seamen, would have been confined to the gun decks. Here amid the deafening noise and choking smoke of the great guns, boys like Phillip were the powder monkeys. Their role was to fetch the gunpowder cartridges from the magazines for the gun crews. Each great gun – weighing up to two tons each – was manned by a crew of six or more seamen who were supervised by a midshipman. Their barrels, about ten feet long, bellowed like a booming thunderclap; each explosion accompanied by a flash of light and billowing clouds of acrid smoke. After discharge the huge weapon would recoil with a force that could kill a man caught in its path. When the gun came to rest at the end of its breeching, the gun crew would begin a rapid and precisely timed series of movements to reload and fire again. The bore hole was swabbed. Gunpowder, bound in a cloth cartridge, was rammed into the muzzle. A wad was rammed on top of the powder. Then cannonball and another wad were rammed down on top of that. Priming powder was poured into the touch hole, then the gun crew heaved in unison on the tackle and ran the weapon out through its port. A match lit the primer, the gunpowder would ignite and the gun would roar, recoil and the process would begin again.