25/04/2004
History of New South Wales From the Records
VOLUME 1 - GOVERNOR PHILLIP 1783-1789G. B. Barton - 1889
PART I
Exploration By Sea
THE course of events at sea during Phillip's time is so much a matter of historical interest that, although not immediately connected with his own work, it is well to bear it in mind, if only for the purpose of obtaining a connected view of the progress of exploration and discovery.
In February, 1788, Lieutenant Ball, of the Supply, while on his way to Norfolk Island, discovered an island which he named Lord Howe Island. On his voyage to Batavia and back in 1790 he sailed round New Holland, and was the first navigator who did so (1).
In July, 1789, Captain Cox of the brig Mercury discovered a bay in the south coast of Van Diemen's Land, called Cox Bight; and also another bay, known as Oyster Bay, on the inner side of Maria's Island (2).
Towards the end of the year 1791, Lieutenant McCluer, of the Bombay marine, sighted Arnhem's Land and sailed along the coast, westward, till he reached Cape Van Diemen (2).
Two of the transports which arrived in Port Jackson in August, 1791, brought them intelligence of discoveries made during their passage. The ship Atlantic, on the evening before her arrival, ran into a harbour on the coast which the naval agent on board named Jervis Bay. The Matilda anchored in a bay of one of Schouten's Islands, of the east coast of Van Diemen's Land, which the master named Matilda Bay (3)
On the 21st August, 1788, Lieutenant Bligh, then in command of the Bounty, bound to the Society Islands on the bread-fruit mission, anchored in Adventure Bay, on the east coast of Van Diemen's Land, and remained there a fortnight, taking in wood and water, and endeavouring to obtain some knowledge of the country and its native population. He had seen the bay on a former occasion, when sailing with Captain Cook in the Resolution and Discovery, in January, 1777; but he found no sign of any European vessels having been there since their visit. During his stay a number of whales made their appearance in the bay, for several days together. He sailed away from it on the 4th September, after having made a very careful plantation of vegetables, grain, and fruit-trees (4).
Early in May, 1789, Bligh began that portion of his celebrated voyage in the Bounty's launch which took him along the north-east coast of New Holland. On the 27th - a month after he had been put over the ship's side by the mutineers - he recorded that "we passed much driftwood this forenoon, and saw many birds; I, therefore, did not hesitate to pronounce that we were near the reefs of New Holland," - known to him as the reefs on which the Endeavour struck in 1770. His reason for making the coast so far to the south was that he never doubted of numerous openings in the reef, through which he could have access to the shore. On the following day, "as we advanced within the reefs, the coast began to show itself very distinctly, in a variety of high and low land." Selecting one or two islands before him for a resting-place, he found a bay and a fine sandy point to land at;" and there they remained for two days, recruiting themselves with oysters, wild fruit, and fresh water. Keeping on his course till he had doubled Cape York, on the 3rd June he arrived at an island which he "found was only a rock where boobies resort, for which reason I called it Booby Island. Here terminated the rocks and shoals of the north part of New Holland;" and he adds:-
I have little doubt but that the opening which I named the Bay of Islands, is Endeavour Straits; and that our track was to the northward of Prince of Wale's Isles (5).
There is some interest in the passage in which Cook referred to this "opening," on the 23rd August, 1770:-
To this channel, or passage, I have given the name of the ship, and called it Endeavour Streights.
Cook, it seems, had not then read Dalrymple's Account of the Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean previous to 1764, published in 1767 - the year before the Endeavour sailed - in which he showed that Torres had sailed through the Straits in 1606.
When the news of Bligh's voyage reached the settlement at Sydney Cove, it inspired some of the more daring convicts with fresh hopes of escaping from their prison (6). The most adventurous of the many attempts made for this purpose was that of a man named William Bryant, who, accompanied by his wife and two children and seven men, sailed away from the port in a cutter which had been placed under his charge for fishing purposes. This event took place on the night of the 28th March, 1791. Bryant and two or three of the men with him had some knowledge of navigation as well as the management of a boat; and having obtained a compass, quadrant, and chart from the Master of a Dutch vessel lying in the harbour, they steered for Timor. Tench obtained the following account from one of them:-
They coasted the shore of New Holland, putting occasionally into different harbours which they found in going along. One of these harbours, in the latitude of 30° south (7), they described to be of superior excellence and capacity. Here they hauled their bark ashore, paid her seams with tallow, and repaired her. But it was with difficulty they could keep off the attacks of the Indians. These people continued to harass them so much that they quitted the mainland and retreated to a small island in the harbour, where they completed their design. Between the latitude of 26° and 27°, they were driven by a current thirty leagues from the shore among some islands, where they found plenty of large turtles. Soon after they closed again with the continent, where the boat got entangled with the surf and was driven on shore, and they had all well nigh perished. They passed through the Straits of Endeavour, and beyond the Gulf of Carpentaria found a large freshwater river which they entered, and filled from it their empty casks.
Until they reached the Gulf, they saw no natives or canoes differing from those about Port Jackson; but now they were chased by large canoes, fitted with sails and fighting-stages, and capable of holding thirty men each. They escaped by dint of rowing to windward. On the 5th of June, 1791, they reached Timor (8).
Hence they were received with kindness by the Dutch, until the arrival of Captain Edwards, of H.M.S. Pandora, at Timor, led to their detection, when they were immediately arrested, lodged in prison, and afterwards handed over to him to be conveyed to England. Tench notices, as a peculiar coincidence, that the woman and one of the men were in the same ship as himself when the First Fleet sailed for Botany Bay; and that on the arrival of H.M.S. Gorgon, in which he was a passenger, at the Cape of Good Hope in March, 1792, they were put on board that ship to be taken back to England for trial.
On the wreck of the Pandora during her voyage in search of the Bounty mutineers, the officers and crew who had escaped from the wreck, to the number of ninety-two, with ten prisoners, made a voyage of eleven hundred miles in four of the ship's boats, from the reef on which the ship struck along the northern coast of New South Wales to Coepang. The wreck took place on the 28th August, 1791, and the boats reached Batavia on the 16th September (9).
The expedition, comprising the ships Recherche and Espérance, sent out by the French Government under the command of Rear-Admiral Bruni d'Entrecasteaux and Captain Huon de Kermadéc, for the purpose of ascertaining the fate of La Pérouse, anchored in Storm Bay on the 21st April, 1792; and during their stay there, which lasted until the 16th of May, the Frenchmen surveyed and named various places on the coast, including d'Entrecasteaux Channel, the entrance to the rivers Huon and Derwent, Bruni Island, Port Espérance, and Recherche Bay - names which have since retained their places on the map.
It was in September, 1791, while Phillip was exploring the country around Rose Hill, that Captain Vancouver sighted the south-west coast of New Holland and discovered King George's Sound. He remained there for some weeks; and after having explored the Sound and done full justice to the oysters, he sailed away to the east - thus losing the opportunity of making those discoveries which afterwards moved the ambitious spirit of Flinders. The dangerous nature of the navigation along the coast, added to want of time for prosecuting the work of discovery in these seas, are the reasons given by Vancouver for abandoning it at the very time when it seemed to promise good results for his labour. It was in much the same way that Captain Furneaux, after his separation from Captain Cook in 1773, contented himself with a few days' sailing along the coast of Van Diemen's Land from Adventure Bay, and then bore away to New Zealand - leaving it to Bass to discover the straits which have made his name immortal. "It is my opinion," said Furneaux, "that there is no straits between New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, but a very deep bay;" and yet he had left Adventure Bay only four days before, "intending to coast it up along shore, till we should fall in with the land seen by Captain Cook, and discover whether Van Diemen's Land joins with New Holland." A still more singular opinion was left on record by Captain Cook after he had passed some days in Adventure Bay, on his third voyage in January, 1777. As if he felt it necessary to offer some reason for not having made further exploration while on the coast, he wrote:- "Van Diemen's Land has been twice visited before;" (by Tasman and Furneaux) (10). "I need hardly say that it is the southern point of New Holland." When he sighted Point Hicks, in 1770, he was in doubt as to whether Van Diemen's Land formed part of New Holland or not, and accordingly said:- "I cannot determine whether it joins to Van Diemen's Land or not." Between that date and 1777 he seems to have made up his mind on the point, relying on the report made by Ferneaux.
These are curious instances of the indifference felt with respect to the exploration of the coast of new Holland. The discovery of a north-west passage, or a supposed continent towards the South Pole, was looked upon as the only object that could seriously deserve attention on the part of the Governments as well as the great geographers of the time. In 1745, an Act of Parliament offered a reward of £20, 000 for the discovery of a passage from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific through Hudson's Bay. When it became known that no such passage existed, another Act, passed in 1776, offered the same reward for the discovery "of any northern passage for vessels by sea between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans." Cook's second voyage was made for the purpose of determining "whether the unexplored part of the Southern hemisphere be only an immense mass of water, or contain another continent" - a question of speculative geography, which, as he states in his introduction, "had long engaged the attention, not only of learned men, but of most of the maritime powers of Europe." In pursuit of this object, he sailed south among the icebergs with as much prospect of discovering another continent as Frobisher had of finding the "golde mynes" he was sent to search for in the northern seas. Judging from this instance, speculative geography in the days of George the Third seems to have been no wiser than speculative gold-mining in the days of Queen Elizabeth.
It seems to have been assumed by the geographers, after the publication of Cook's Second Voyage, that the question whether Van Diemen's Land formed part of New Holland or not had been satisfactorily settled by Captain Furneaux. The introduction to the account of that voyage, published in 1784, after quoting Cook's statement that he could not determine the question, proceeds to say:-
But what was thus left undetermined by the operations of his first voyage, was, in the course of his second, soon cleared up; Captain Furneaux, in the Adventure, having explored Van Diemen's Land from its southern point along the east coast, far beyond Tasman's station, and on to the latitude 38°, where Captain Cook's examination of it in 1770 had commenced.
This statement, however, is not supported by Furneaux's account of his voyage. He tells us that he discontinued his northerly course at latitude 39° and steered for New Zealand, by doing which he just missed the discovery of the straits.
In the latitude 40° 50´, the land trends away to the westward, which I believe forms a deep bay, as we saw from the deck several smokes arising aback of the islands that lay before it, when we could not see the least signs of land from the mast-head.
Thus, while Furneaux was making up his mind that "there is no straits between Van Diemen's Land and New Holland, but a very deep bay," the straits in question lay right before him. Had he been really intent on settling the matter, he could have done it in a few days. It was an easier thing, no doubt, to write "there is no straits between New Holland and Van Diemen's Land," than to sail along the coast and prove it. But if it is difficult to understand how a professional explorer could so easily satisfy himself on such a point, it is not less surprising to find the geographers of the day readily accepting such a statement as a satisfactory settlement of the question. How little attention was devoted to the matter may be seen from another singular assertion in the introduction to Cook's Third Voyage, published in 1784:-
It is no longer a doubt that we have now a full knowledge of the whole circumference of this vast body of land, this fifth part of the world.
Of the whole circumference in question, one portion only could be said to have been at all known - the strip of coast-line explored by Cook. So far as the rest of it was concerned, the knowledge possessed in his day was confined to the very meagre information obtained from Dampier and the Dutch navigators who had touched at different points of the coast - north, north-west, and south. But they did not pretend to give the world anything like a full knowledge of the country they had visited. Even Dampier's narrative, precise as it is when compared with the accounts left by the Dutchmen, is more like the composition of a traveller seeking to gratify the curiosity of his readers with strange tales, than the journal of an explorer devoted to geographical discovery. He seems to be largely responsible for the indifference with which the exploration of New Holland was regarded in Europe, even down to the days of Captain Cook. The picture he had drawn of the country was discouraging in the extreme; and yet his examination of the north-west coast was but a superficial one at best, extending over a very limited time and confined within a narrow range of observation. The prevalence of an unfavourable opinion with respect to the character of the country will probably account for the neglect of its exploration. If it had been regarded as a matter of any importance, instructions would have been to Captain Cook, or to some of his contemporaries, to explore those portions of the coast-line which had not been visited by the Dutch. But no such instructions were given; and, as it turned out, the exploration of the eastern coast was rather a matter of accident than design. Before he sailed in the Endeavour, he was instructed to explore New Zealand after the astronomical observations at Otaheite were completed, and then to return to England by such route as he should think proper (11). When he had completed the examination of the islands, he had to determine which of the three routes before him he should take on his voyage home.
I had myself a strong desire to return by Cape Horn, because that would have enabled me finally to determine whether there is or is not a southern continent; but against this it was a sufficient objection that we must have kept in a high southern latitude in the very depth of winter, with a vessel which was not thought sufficient for the undertaking; and the same reason was urged against our proceeding directly for the Cape of Good Hope with still more force, because no discovery of moment could be hoped for in that rout; it was therefore resolved that we should return by the East Indies, and that with this view we should, upon leaving the coast, steer westward, till we should fall in with the east coast of New Holland, and then follow the direction of that coast to the northward till we should arrive at its northern extremity; but if that should endeavour to fall in with the land, or islands, said to have been discovered by Quiros (12).
NOTES:
(1) Tench, Complete Account, p. 72. Phillip's Voyage, p. 189, contains an account of Lieutenant Shortland's discovery of a reef, which he named Middleton Shoals. See Collins, vol. i, p. 76; vol. ii, p. 137.
(2) Flinders, Introduction, pp. xci, xv.
(3) Tench, Complete Account, p. 136; Collins, pp. 171-3.
(4) Bligh, Voyage to the South Seas, pp. 45-53.
(5) In 1792, Captain Bligh, in H.M.S. Providence, explored a passage through Torres Straits on his return voyage from Tahiti to the West Indies. Lieutenant Flinders served on this expedition, and left an account of it in the introduction to his work, p. xix.
(6) "After the escape of Captain Bligh, which was well known to us, no length of passage or hazard of navigation seemed above human accomplishment." - Tench, Complete Account p. 108. The facts relating to Bryant's escape are related by Collins, pp. 156, 218, and also by Tench.
(7) Either Shoal Bay, latitude 29° 43´ south, discovered by Flinders in 1799, or Port Macquarie, latitude 31° 25´ 45¨ south, discovered by Oxley in 1828.
(8) Complete Account, p. 108.
(9) Hamilton, Voyage Round the World in H.M. Frigate Pandora, pp. 104-137; Flinders, Introduction, p. xvii; plate xiii.
(10) And by Captain Marion in 1772; but the account of his voyage was not published in Paris until 1783. - Voyage towards the South Pole, p. xxiii.
(11) Voyage towards the South Pole, general introduction, p. xx. Cook passed nearly six months - from the 6th October, 1769, to the 31st March, 1770 - in exploring the coasts of New Zealand, during which he sailed round them and ascertained the existence of the islands it comprises. But he was only four months on the coast of New South Wales, nearly two of which were passed in the Endeavour River; so that his available time for exploration was limited to two months - one-third of the time devoted to New Zealand. The reason for his careful examination of that country may be found in "a favourite opinion amongst geographers," since Tasman's time, that New Zealand was part of a southern continent. The existence of such a continent was contended for by de Brosses and Dalrymple on the ground that the ascertained body of land in the northern hemisphere required a similar extent of it in the southern, in order to balance the globe.
(12) Hawksworth, vol. iii, pp. 432-3. Compare Sydney Parkinson's Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 1784, p. 124.
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