Louis Becke

“ What I am suffering in promotion, peace of mind, fortune, fame, and everything that man holds dear, it is not my intention to detail, or have I room; but when added to shipwreck and its subsequent risks, they make no very common portion of suffering. How much I deserve all this may be left to your friendly judgement to decide. It is impossible for me to guess how long I am to be kept here, since the French despatches, as well as the letters I have been permitted to write, will probably be thrown overboard on the ship meeting with our cruisers. ”

“ Here then was a declaration of war—MacArthur, too much of a trader to be a soldier, and politician enough to have enlisted on his side the English Government—which had announced its will that he should be encouraged as a valuable pioneer colonist—versus Bligh, so much of a warrior as to have fought beside Nelson with honour and so impolitic as to have lost his ship to a body of 1807 mutineers, some of them officers, of whose discontent, according to his own showing, he was unaware until the moment of the outbreak. ”

“ This book does not pretend to be a history of Australia; it merely gathers into one volume that which has hitherto been dispersed through many. Our story ends where Australian history, as it is generally written, begins; but the work of the forgotten naval pioneers of the country made that beginning possible. Four sea-captains in succession had charge of the penal settlement of New South Wales, and these four men, in laying the foundation of Australia, surmounted greater difficulties than have ever been encountered elsewhere in the history of British colonization. ”

“ It will take nothing from the fame of Cook to call his connection with the discovery of Australia an accident. He himself says that, having circumnavigated New Zealand, "we intended to return home by the Cape of Good Hope or by Cape Horn to determine the question of a southern continent," but the season of the year was against this course, and "we ultimately resolved to return by the East Indies. With this in view, we resolved to steer west till we should fall in with the coast of New Holland, and then follow that coast to the north till we should arrive at its northern extremity." ”

“ The history of Australia up to, and until the end of Bligh's appointment, can be summed up in half a dozen sentences. Phillip, during the term of his office, had repeatedly urged upon the home Government the necessity of sending out free men. Convicts without such a leaven could not, in his opinion, successfully lay the foundation of the "greatest acquisition England has ever made." Time proved the correctness of his judgment. The population of the colony, from something more than 1000 when he landed, had been increased at the close of King's administration to about 7000 persons. ”

“ King, Phillip's right hand, when a lieutenant, makes a voyage to England in fashion heroic; he commands Norfolk Island at a critical time, when no one but a man could have controlled its affairs; he is appointed to the supreme command in New South Wales, and before he has been many months in office becomes a laughing-stock.
It is due to the first governor's successors to remember that they had no force behind them. Phillip's marines were soldiers; the New South Wales Corps were dealers in rum, officers and men were duly licensed to sell it, and every ship that came into the harbour brought it. ”

“ In the direction of reformation the experiment of turning felons into farmers was not a success. Few free emigrants had arrived in the colony, and those who came out were by no means the best class of people. Nobody worked more than they could help; drinking, gambling, and petty bickering occupied the leisure of most. This was the state of affairs which Captain Bligh was sent to reform, and we have seen how his mission succeeded.
In the case of the mutiny of the Bounty, it is reasonably believed that the mutineers were, at any rate, partially incited to their crime by the seductions of Tahiti ”

“ If I do not prove myself worthy of your patronage, Sir Joseph, let me be thrown out of the society of all good men. I have too much ambition to rest in the unnoticed middle order of mankind. Since neither birth nor fortune have favoured me, my actions shall speak to the world. ”

“ It is still often written that the "open bay" was so named after a seaman by the name of Jackson on board the ship; but Sir George Jackson, who afterwards changed his name to Duckett, was at this time, with Mr. Philip Stephens, joint secretary to the Admiralty. Cook named Port Jackson and Port Stephens after these two officials, and there was no seaman named Jackson on board the Endeavour. Cook did not enter Port Jackson, and the discovery of the finest harbour in the world was left for another less well remembered, but no less efficient and zealous, naval officer. ”

“ Such foundation was really laid by his successors, who encouraged the emigration of free men who presently demanded that Australia should no longer be used as a place of punishment, and its lands as a reward for felons; that it must be a British colony in the fullest and freest sense. It is to these men, marching forward upon ways cut for them by the naval pioneers, we owe the fulfilment of Phillip's prediction that "this would be the most valuable acquisition England ever made." ”

“ The condition of affairs ought to have been well understood at home. Hunter and King had both harped upon it in their despatches, and lamented their inability to remedy the abuses that had grown up. They had made it no less plain that the New South Wales Regiment, so far from being a force with which to back authority, was one of the most dangerous elements in the rum-trading community of the settlement. ”

“ Dampier's voyage was made solely for discovery purposes; Anson, who forty years later went into the South Seas and so near to Australia as the Philippines, had gone out to fight; Byron, Wallis, and Carteret, who immediately preceded Cook, had sailed to discover and chart new countries; but Cook, who made the greatest discovery and did more important charting than all of them put together, sailed in the Endeavour for the purpose of making certain astronomical observations, and exploration was only a secondary object of the voyage. ”

“ At the last moment, according to Bligh, Christian, in reply to a question as to what sort of treatment was this in return for all the commander's kindness, said, "That, Captain Bligh, that is the thing: I am in hell"; according to the evidence at the court-martial, not of mutineers, but of the master and other officers who were cast adrift from the Bounty, what Christian did say was in reply to entreaties to reconsider what he was doing, when his words were—"No, no. Captain Bligh has brought all this on himself: it is too late; I have been in hell for weeks past." ”

“ His surveying work on the St. Lawrence at the siege of Quebec was so carried out that the Admiralty saw in him one of the most promising officers in the service; and Sir Hugh Palliser, one of the first men to "discover" Cook, was from this time, his best friend, giving him, in 1764, an appointment as marine surveyor of Newfoundland, where Palliser was governor. Cook was then a good seaman and a clever navigator, but there is no doubt his special talents were by this particular service afforded an opportunity for full development, and so he became the best scientific man in the navy. ”

“ The design of Government is, we hope, to have a feeling for the calamities we must encounter. So, as to induce them to provide in a moderate and reasonable degree for our maintenance and preservation, we beg leave to tender our most dutiful assurances of executing to the utmost of our power our several abilities in the duty assign'd, so that we remain in every respect loyal subjects to our king and worthy members of society. ”

“ With a thousand people to govern, in the fullest meaning of the word, and a desolate country, absolutely unknown to the exiles, to begin life in, Phillip's work was cut out. But, more than this, the population was chiefly composed of the lowest and worst criminals of England; famine constantly stared the governor in the face, and his command was increased by a second and third fleet of prisoners ”

“ Phillip went home, Grose took charge at Sydney, and King returned to his island command, which during his absence had been under Major Ross, of the Marines, and martial law. Then began serious trouble. In England, curiously enough, no thought of New Zealand had been taken yet. Some of the masters of transports to New South Wales, who were already beginning to experiment in whaling (whales in plenty had been seen from Dampier's time) , had visited the coasts of New Zealand, and King himself was strongly of opinion that a settlement should be attempted there. ”

“ But although Hunter's despatches are full of complaints of the soldiers, of the want of stores, and the need of honest, free men to cultivate the soil by way of a leaven to the hundreds of convicts who were arriving every year, he, like Phillip, believed that New South Wales would ultimately become a prosperous colony. More than this, it was under Hunter that Bass and Flinders did most of their surveying; that Shortland discovered Newcastle; and to no governor more than to Hunter is credit due for the interest he took in exploration. ”

“ Bligh's character for courage and resolution may have led to his selection as a proper person to lick things into shape. It never seems to have occurred to his superiors that a man whose ship was taken from him by a dozen mutinous British seamen, if he were more forceful, resolute, tyrannical, what you will, than diplomatic in his methods, might lose a colony in which the colonists were not British sailors, but criminals and mutinous soldiers. ”

“ Half a dozen settlements had been formed at places within a few miles of Sydney; advantage had been taken of the discoveries of Bass and Flinders, and settlements made at Hobart and at Port Dalrymple; while an attempt (resulting in failure on this occasion and described later on) was made to colonize Port Phillip. A good deal of country was under cultivation, and stock had greatly increased, so that in the seventeen years that had elapsed some progress had been made, but the state of society at Botany Bay had grown worse rather than better. ”

“ At the time of these very early South Sea voyages the search, it should always be remembered, was for a great Antarctic continent. The discovery of islands in the Pacific was, to the explorers, a matter of minor importance; New Guinea, although visited by the Portuguese in 1526, up to the time of Captain Cook was supposed by Englishmen to be a part of the mainland, and the eastern coast of Australia, though touched upon earlier and roughly outlined upon maps, remained unknown to them until Cook explored it. ”

“ A captain of a man-of-war then, as now, began at the bottom of the ladder, learning how to do little things, picking up such knowledge of detail as qualified him to teach others, to know what could be done and how it ought to be done. In all professions this rule holds good, but on shipboard men acquire something more. ”

“ The lad served his apprenticeship, duly walked the hospitals, and his mother spent most of her small substance in starting him in business as a village apothecary in his native county. Then, like so many before and since his time, unable to overcome his first infatuation, he threw all his shore affairs to the wind and obtained an appointment to the Reliance.
Governor Hunter, it will be remembered, took a keen interest in the exploration of Australia, and he had for some time suspected the existence of a strait between Van Diemen's Land and the main continent. ”

“ The unfortunate termination of Bligh's first expedition to Tahiti, the imputations of harshness and cruelty for ever fastened to his name, and the disreputable agents he sometimes employed in his service made the position of the officers extremely anxious, if not insecure. Bligh had become popular with the expired settlers, who reckoned a long arrear of vengeance to their military taskmasters, and who, with the law on their side or encouragement from the governor, might have been expected to show no mercy. ”

“ For the reason that all the contemporary historians were officers, and their writings little more than official accounts of the colonization of Australia, the personality of the naval governors never stands out from their pages. The German blood in Phillip seems to have made him a peculiarly self-contained man; the respect due to Hunter, as a fine type of the old sea-dog, just saves him from being laughed at in his gubernatorial capacity ”

“ The voyage home was one of the most remarkable ever made. Five days after leaving Batavia the crew, including the master of the vessel and the surgeon, fell ill from the usual cause: "the putrid fever of Batavia." Only four well men were left. King took command of them, put up a tent on deck to escape the contagion, ministered to the sick, buried the seventeen who died, was compelled to go below with his respiratory organs masked by a sponge soaked in vinegar, and through all this navigated the vessel to the Mauritius in a fortnight. ”

“ The world is apt to judge of everything by its success; and whoever has ill-fortune will hardly be allowed a good name. This, my lord, was my unhappiness in my late expedition in the Roebuck, which foundered through perfect age near the island of Ascension. ”

“ All that is contiguous to us is so very barren and forbidding, that it may with truth be said, 'Here nature is reversed, and if not so, she is nearly worn out'; for almost all the seed we have put in the ground has rotted, and I have no doubt it will, like the wood of this vile country, when burned or rotten turn to sand ”

“ King's determination and honesty of purpose earned for him the hatred of the rum traders, and the New South Wales Corps was in such a state that in a despatch, after praising the behaviour of the convicts, he wrote that he wished he could write in the same way of the military, "who," says King, "after just attempting to set their commanding officer and myself at variance and failing, they have ever since been causing nothing but the most vexacious trouble both with their own commandant and myself." ”

“ No doubt there are families who have, so to speak, specialized their traditions for generations; and a naval family's traditions for the last two centuries would make a most entertaining book. Suppose, for instance, there were living at Portsmouth a man whose family for generations had prided itself on some one of its members having shaken hands with all the great sailors who at some time or other in their careers must have sailed from Spithead. This man could tell us how his father had actually shaken hands with Nelson. ”