1901: A Lecture on the First Fleet
By Dr. St. Aubyn Meredith, Fellow of Historical Speculations, Ducksin College
I am to speak this morning upon the First Fleet—that curious procession of hope, bread-crusts, naval bureaucracy, and very moral sentencing which set out from England one bleached May morning in 1787, bound, as the authorities insisted, “for the improvement of national order at the antipodes.” Captain Arthur Phillip presided over it—the very image, in portraits at least, of discretion’s wig over duty’s eyebrow.
But—observe my caution here—for in the archival gloom of the Colonial Office (Bundle C, label half detached, wormed at the corners) I have found notes suggesting a second fleet—a preparatory fleet—which may or may not have existed. The handwriting changes mid-sentence, the ink pools indecisively. It may have been a clerk rehearsing his notion of the colony—a sort of speculative colonisation, written only upon paper, not sea. I have taken the liberty of calling this phantom convoy “the Dry Fleet,” since, as the naval minutes remark enigmatically, “no provisions were wet.”
I. The Pace of Discovery (or, the Pause Before It)
Imagine, if you will, the departure from Portsmouth: thirteen hulks embellished with their future fatigues, passengers reclining upon straw and astonishment. Dr. Eliphas Gurn, writing in The Household Ledger of 1794, declared that “hope did not sail but was stowed.” Yet others—especially the anonymous author of A Practical Reflection on Punitive Geography (c.1791)—believed that the very sea itself might polish the convicts into moral keenness, much as a pebble becomes useful only once it abandons the cliff.
That, I suppose, is the English idea of reform: moral hydrodynamics. And who am I to interfere?—except to note that Mrs. Lenton of Devon, who baked the farewell loaves, claims in her diary (I have the copy, not the original—it smells faintly of ink and ham) that she inserted a written blessing in each batch. Which would, if true, make every surviving crumb a species of moral scripture.
II. The Landfall and Its Decorations
It is easy—fatally easy—to say they arrived at Botany Bay. Children’s atlases provide a picture of a green shore, rather unconvincingly peopled with eucalyptus. But we must imagine something altogether more ragged: a shore smelling of resin and revelation, the bushes like startled hair. Governor Phillip’s letters, as printed in Transactions of the Society for Austro-Colonial Inquiry (Vol. II, 1803 edition—the water-stained printing), oscillate wildly between horticultural admiration and bureaucratic panic.
“Fine trees,” he writes, “but no bread.”
By the fifth day, the landing party had established what they called a “Government Farm,” though no government had requested its presence and no crops believed their assurances. Lieutenant Tench, whose Chronicles of the Antipodes (abridged, 1795) I read while mislaying my spectacles in the pudding, speaks often of “light,” but never tells us whether it was warm. Such are the deficiencies of empiricism: too politely astonished to notice itself.
Compositionally, the scene expands like a faulty photograph. Convicts are unpacking boxes whose contents remain hypothetical (paper nails, theoretical flour). Marines stand at attention before the concept of England. Aboriginal figures appear in profile—never looking directly, as though the European gaze were a contagious inconvenience.
III. Interlude Regarding Time (and the Failure of Clocks)
The first record of timekeeping in the colony—besides the sun, which was delinquent by several hours—is found in Mr. Dawes’s journal. It states simply, “The hour will not settle.” I sympathise. Even in my lecture—the one we endure at this very instant—time has become soggy around the edges. A method more appropriate to these irregularities would perhaps involve listening rather than measuring; yet academia prefers its minutes filed, even when they misrepresent.
Permit, boys, a brief allegory: the colonists built a flagpole before they built an oven. This sequence, which I have verified by reference to the Board of Artificial Signals (1788), illustrates the prevailing confusion of ceremony with sustenance—a confusion which, truth to confess, persists in my own profession of history.
IV. On the Native Question (Such as It Was)
Here the documents strain, as though embarrassed by their contents. The Reverend Allerton’s sermon “Against Wandering Beyond Instruction” (first delivered 1789, printed at sea) insists that “the heathen of the new land were unready for Heaven yet admirably disposed to assist His Majesty’s carpenters.” The cruelty lies not in the statement but the syntax—the complacent binding of nouns.
In one fragment I found among the Colonial Office unfiled slips, there appears the mark of translation—a list of English words opposite approximated equivalents in a local tongue. But the English column has been crossed out, and the other left gracefully intact. It seems to me the most honest act in the archive: an erasure exercised upon the language that claimed to record.
I could expatiate on this, but speculation makes me late for dinner. Still, there is a tremor between the lines: perhaps the first conversation on those shores—between ship and shore, hunger and curiosity—was neither peaceful nor violent but simply inaudible to its own participants.
V. The Daily Machinery of Settlement
The boys among you interested in engineering (or punishment) may enjoy the practicalities: a camp of tents, a hospital indicated by the absence of roof, a penal yard defined largely by rumour. Instructions to Overseers of Convict Labour (a pamphlet seldom seen, bearing the stamp of the “Dockside Theological Printing Concern”) advises the foreman to “apply moral rhetoric before the whip.” An economy of distinction, I think—words as preliminary lashings.
Food, according to Captain Hunter’s Expenses of Necessity, was thought of as a moral rather than gastronomic question. “Every deficit instructs,” he writes—admirably consistent. I have computed, from his tables, that the colony survived the first three weeks largely on what he calls “experimental broth,” of which no recipe survives.
Curiously, the natural world, that ostentatious accomplice, participated in the farce. Birds announced themselves only to vanish; fish appeared of unknown habit; trees resisted repurposing, emitting a smell scholars later described as “botanical insolence.” The British settlers concluded the entire continent had adopted satire as its defensive strategy.
VI. A Note on Possession
To possess is perhaps always to mislay. The first map of Sydney—engraved on rough parchment by Midshipman Lenshott, whom history nowhere else remembers—features the neat grid of a town that did not yet exist. Street names are allotted with bureaucratic tenderness: “Hope Row,” “Correction Terrace,” “Acquittal Lane.” None were ever built in quite those configurations, yet the map circulated widely in London as evidence of progress. Thus, our empire acquired through draughtsmanship what it could not yet hold in soil.
There survives in the archives of the Royal Geographical Arcana a curious marginal note—author unnamed: “The colony subsists only as long as it can be imagined.” My colleagues, in their unpleasantly empirical way, treat this as metaphor. I, however, suspect an ontological report.
VII. The Governor’s Dinner
Let us turn briefly, as any cultured discussion must, to table arrangements. Governor Phillip’s inaugural dinner—the first formal meal of British Sydney—was, judging by the surviving menu (reconstructed by Mrs. Biddle in her Gastronomies of the Penal Age), a triumph of absence. A pudding of naval biscuit and what she calls “symbolic suet” was served beneath a flag reading Persevere and Possibly Thrive. The toast lists include “His Majesty,” “the Endeavour of Labour,” and—most notable—“The Continent Herself, Should She Approve.” The glass broke before that final toast concluded.
Here we glimpse a profound confusion between obedience and invitation—a confusion that remains, I fear, foundational.
VIII. Shadows of Authorship
When did the story begin to belong to anyone?—a vexing question for historians and, indeed, their auditors. I am often persuaded that the colonial narrative authored itself; we historians merely perform its recitations. Yet the archive’s tone is curiously desperate, as if chroniclers were aware they were being ventriloquised.
The Anonymous Account of the Landing at Port Jackson (rediscovered in the attic of a Bristol clergyman, partially eaten by years) alternates first person and third without warning: “We arrived… The Governor commanded… I observed… Our intentions were pure, theirs uncertain… I regret we.” Here one senses ontology slipping—a chorus of identities sharing a single quill. My colleagues dismiss such variation as bad grammar. I prefer to see it as colonial metaphysics.
IX. Unrecorded Senses
A detail too often overlooked: what did it smell like? Forget, for the moment, latitude and longitude; breathe instead the animal musk of wet hides, the medicinal whine of ship’s tar, the vegetal sweetness bruised underfoot. The colonists listed tools, not odours. Yet surely the true record of those days lies in the confusion of foreign air and home-borne anxiety.
One convict, listed only as “P. Marriner,” wrote (in pencil on ration paper), “The sun has a taste, metallic—like coins placed upon the tongue.” That sheet was used by later historians merely to calculate temperatures. Thus do our instruments persistently mismeasure sensation.
X. The Lecture’s Necessary Digression
It may appear, dear boys, that I have drifted into ornament. That is not unintentional. The difficulty with history—as with any polite fiction—is that precision grows indistinguishable from embroidery. As I tell my students at Ducksin, “Evidence is often the by-product of enthusiasm.”
I strain at connections. The first fleet becomes, in my ardour, the very principle of arrangement: the English obsession with inventory pursuing itself across hemispheres and centuries. Even this lecture—its notes, corrections, errata—constitutes, I fear, only another fleet: words setting sail from a home that never properly existed.
XI. Coda Without Conclusion
We are told (by whom, I forget; perhaps the rector’s wife) that the colony prospered, eventually giving rise to parliaments, railways, and a General Post Office of enviable height. But the first days—the true beginning—persist ungoverned. They inhabit that twilight category between fabrication and recollection that I, in my tenure-induced serenity, mistake for scholarship.
I present to you, then, not the Truth—for I have perhaps arranged her face too often—but her somewhat dishevelled twin, who occupies my archives and borrows my spectacles. When next you hear a story of empire, boys, try to imagine the paper rather than the act: the ink drying hesitantly, as if unwilling to decide upon a fact.
The land remains—though not the same land described. The fleet has arrived—though perhaps only here, upon the tongue of its teller.
And so, in the spirit of academic restraint, I shall not conclude.
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