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Port
Jackson Painter fl. 17881972
[Australian Aborigine] c.1790
gouache; 30.5 x 24.3 cm
NK144/B |
Life
at Port Jackson
There
is pillicans, and ducks, and different kinds of animals, but the kangaroo
is the chief
The she have a fals belly
Jacob
Nagle, Able Seaman, HMS Sirius
The people
of the First Fleet spent their early months in Port Jackson clearing,
building, surveying, planting, stealing, flogging and being flogged. Relations
with the Australian Aborigines, characterised by mutual incomprehension,
gradually worsened. Although Captain Phillips attitude to the Australian
Aboriginals was relatively enlightened for the time, the Europeans proceeded
on an assumption that their right to the land was unquestionable. Inevitably,
misunderstandings and violence escalated.
For Raper,
his first months in the newly declared territory of New South Wales would
have been a time of hard work and hunger, excitement and homesickness.
March brought heavy rains, and life in the tents and huts of the muddy
settlement must have been miserable. The dreaded scurvy, absent on the
voyage from Cape Town, soon re-appeared, and Raper probably supplemented
his diet of salt meat and other ships provisions with the cabbages
from cabbage tree palms, berries and native spinach.
In his letters
home Raper would probably have struggled, as others did, to describe the
plants and animals that were so different from those of England, so different
even from those of South Africa. With no understanding of the role of
fire in the Australian bush, the people of the First Fleet apprehensively
attributed the burnt bark of gum trees to frequent strikes of the
fiercest lightning. Kangaroos were a matter of amazement with their
false bellies and heads which they turn right round.
Though the Europeans
were intrigued by the astonishing plumage of Australian birds, their descriptions
were also shaped by hunger: emus were well flavoured but sulphur-crested
cockatoos were very indifferent food.
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John
Hunter (17371821)
Rufous Night Heron (Nycticorax
caledonicus )
plate
9 from Birds and Flowers of New South Wales drawn on the Spot
in 1788, '89 & '90
sketchbook of 100 watercolours; 22.8 x 18.5 cm
NK2039/9
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In September
1788, the officers and crew of the Sirius were informed that they
were to be despatched to the Cape of Good Hope to fetch supplies for the
settlement. Though food supplies had been running dangerously low for
some time, the failure of the wheat crop planted in the poor soil near
Sydney Cove was the immediate trigger for HMS Siriuss journey.
Hunters
Circumnavigation
The Sirius, with
Raper onboard sailed from Port Jackson early in October 1788. Captain
Hunter made the controversial decision to take the eastern, rather than
the western, route to Cape Town, across the Southern Pacific and Atlantic
Oceans. This decision would be vindicated by the Siriuss arrival
in Cape Town in a record time of ninety-one days.
On the voyage
across the Southern Pacific, the growing of madness of Lieutenant Maxwell
became evident. One day, Maxwell ordered all sails to be set despite the
strong wind. Unable to contradict a Lieutenant, the crew obeyed. The ship
heeled over so much that it tipped Captain Hunter out of his bunk. Rushing
to the deck dressed in only his shirt, he demanded to know what Maxwell
was doing, presumably in a tone that was somewhat stronger than polite
inquiry. On receiving Maxwells garbled answer about a set
of damned rascals, the Captain ordered another officer to take the
watch.
Rounding
Cape Horn, the Sirius was accompanied by whalesup to twenty
at a time. Some came close enough to wet the men on deck with their spouting.
For a month, the ship passed through fields of icebergs, one towering
350 feet above them. Hunter, fascinated, described their colours, from
pure white to a beautiful sea-green, or bright verdigrease.
Bradley called them lumps of misery.
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Pelitjer
Shipping amongst Icebergs 18--
oil
on canvas; 31x51 cm
NK11011
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During the
voyage all the officers and crew, including Raper, suffered from varying
degrees of scurvy. A number of the crew died from it. As the Sirius approached
Cape Town, half of each watch from scorbutic contractions in their
limbs, were not able to go aloft. When given fresh fruit on arrival,
even the least-affected ate the fruit mixed with blood that oozed from
their gum. Raper may have used this opportunity to re-supply to purchase
new paper and watercolour pigments in Cape Town, since his painting, which
seems to have become less frequent in the previous year, resumed in 1789.
After taking
on supplies, the Sirius left Cape Town on 20 February 1789. Pursuing
a course very similar to the one she had followed fourteen months earlier,
the Sirius reached the vicinity of Van Diemens Land in mid-April.
Here Raper had a close escape from shipwreck. Having been three days without
enough clear weather to fix their position by sun or star, Captain Hunter
and his officers estimated they were far enough south
to clear the tip of Van Diemens Land. When the heavy rain finally
stopped, they found they were still west of the land, and being driven
on to it by a violent onshore wind. For forty-eight hours the Sirius desperately
zig-zagged to avoid the capes and rocky islands that Raper had drawn so
calmly the year before. In gale-force winds, Captain Hunter had to order
more, not less sail, and each wave half buried the ship. Eventually a
slight shift in the wind carried the Sirius safely past Tasmans
Head.
Two weeks
later the storm-damaged Sirius arrived in Port Jackson delivering
flour and other provisions, and saving the settlement from starvation.
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George
Raper (17691796)
Van
Diemans Land, New Holland
watercolour
on paper; 7 x 16.8 cm
Pictorial
Collection PIC3312/4-6
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Repairing
the Sirius
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George
Raper (17691796)
Carreening Cove
coloured ms. map; 20.3 x 14.4 cm
Map Collection RM3459
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In June 1789
the Sirius was moved across Port Jackson to Careening Cove,
now known as Mosman Bay, of which Raper made an important chart. Over
the next five months the crew worked to repair the damage incurred off
the south coast of Tasmania, and leaks that had been discovered in Cape
Town. It was probably also around this time that Raper made a number of
other paintings that he dated 1789, of Port Jackson scenes and birds,
made sketches that he would rework later, and turned sketches from his
voyages into finished watercolours. Many of these paintings are now held
in the British Museum.
A number
of officers in the First Fleet had drawing skills, and Rapers interest
in natural history may well have been the result of his training under
Hunter. Similarities in style and subject suggest that Hunter, Bradley
and Raper worked on their drawings together, but while Bradley appears
only to have produced views and charts, Hunter displayed a great interest
in natural history. A comparison of the work of Raper and Hunter shows
that Raper quickly became the more accomplished artist.
During this
period, the Siriuss complement of officers began to shrink.
Lieutenant Maxwell, declared mad, was relieved of his duties and housed
in a hut in the Hospital garden at Sydney Cove with someone to attend
him. The Sirius crew, no longer under threat from his madness, followed
his behaviour with interest. Seaman Nagle reports that on receiving seventy
guineas from England, Maxwell
got holt of a how [hoe] and buried them singly all over the garden,
saying he would have a good crop of guineas the next year. When the
docter discovered what he had don, they endeavoured to find them, but
the garden being dug, they could not find one third of them.
Even more
disturbing was the disappearance of one of the young men of Rapers
circle, Midshipman Francis Hill. In early November 1789, returning by
boat from a night at Sydney Cove, he was dropped on the north shore. He
walked into the bush, headed for the Sirius at Careening Cove, and
was never seen again. The officers and crew of the Sirius searched
for him for three days.
Shortly after
Hills disappearance, the Sirius moved back to Sydney Cove,
where repairs to her upper works continued. Captain Phillip was willing
to invest such time and effort into her overhaul because, with the departure
of the other ships of the First Fleet, the Sirius and the smaller
Supply were now his only sure links with Britain. The
Sirius was being prepared for a critical dash to China for supplies,
with what was intended to be a brief stop at Norfolk Island.
Shipwreck
on Norfolk Island
There
is a reef of sunken rocks
John
Hunter
In February
1790, Governor Phillip had only five months worth of supplies left to
feed the settlement at Port Jackson. He decided to send two hundred of
the convicts, with marines to guard them, to join those already on Norfolk
Island, in the hope that the fertile soil of the island would allow them
to support themselves. The Sirius and the Supply would transport
them to the island.
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George
Raper (17691796)
Entrance
of Port Jackson When Close under the South Head
watercolour
on paper; 7.8 x 16.8 cm
Pictorial
Collection PIC3312/4-6
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On 5 March
the two ships left Sydney Cove and reached the heads around dusk. The
journals of the ships officers record an uneventful passage to Norfolk
Island, but seaman Nagle and a Lieutenant Clark of the Marines tell a
different story:
Just as
we came abreast of the outer South Head it fell calm and the swell was
setting us fast on the North Head which, had not a puff of wind filled
the Sails, we should have been drove on shore on the North Head, and everybody
on board thought of no other but that we should.
The Sirius and
Supply reached Norfolk Island on 13 March 1790. Norfolk Island has
no natural harbour. Sailing ships had to dodge the wind, using either
Cascade Bay on the north side or Sydney Bay on the south, neither of which
were easy anchoring places even in favourable weather. When the two ships
arrived the wind was south-westerly and the ships chose Cascade Bay. There
it was possible to land all the marines and the convicts, by rowing them
to a projecting rock and having them jump onto it when the waves and tide
permitted. No sooner had the convicts and marines been landed than the
wind changed to an easterly and banished any thought of landing supplies
in Cascade Bay.
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George
Raper (17691796)
Principal
Settlement on Norfolk Island
1790
watercolour;
23.8 x 33.8 cm
R247
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For four
days the Sirius and Supply sailed back and forth off the island,
waiting for winds that would allow them to approach the shore safely.
On the Sirius, Captain Hunter was feeling the pressure:
We had
put on shore from the Sirius and the Supply 270 people,
and had no opportunity of sending any stores with them, as we were now
driven out of sight of the island. I knew the exhausted state of stores
there; I was also acquainted with the many difficulties which Lieutenant
Ball, commander of the Supply, had met with in the different
voyages he had made from Port Jackson to this island, with provisions;
and the length of time he had, in some of those voyages, been obliged
to cruize, before he could have any access to the shore; so continually
does the surf break all round it. These considerations gave me much
anxiety and uneasiness.
On 19 March
the wind changed, now coming from the south-east. This made landing at
Sydney Bay a possibility. First the Supply and then the Sirius anchored
in the bay, encouraged by a signal flag from the shore which indicated
that the surf was low enough for small boats to land. The crews began
unloading provisions into boats. At first, all seemed well. It was a fine
pleasant day with only a light breeze in the bay. and those seamen
not organising the provisions for the boats were fishing from the decks.
But Sydney Bays two arms of rock could serve as a trap for ships,
drawing them towards scattered rocks and a maw of reefs that lie parallel
to the shore. Hunter had anchored the Sirius with her bow pointing
seawards, ready to dash to the safety of the open sea if the wind or surf
rose.
The danger
came, however, not from wind or wave but from the unnoticed tide. When
they started unloading, the tide had been ebbing for two hours. An ebb
tide, which if necessary could be used to pull the ships seaward, gave
a margin of safety. This margin was a good one in Sydney Bay, where the
tidal flows were strong. According to Bradley and Hunter, they had been
given full assurance that ebb tides at Norfolk Island lasted
for nine hours. This meant that they had a further seven hours to complete
the unloading. On 19 March 1790, however, the ebb tide lasted only two
hours.
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Unknown
Portrait
of Lt. Henry Lidgbird Ball, Commander of Supply
c.1792
ink
drawing; oval image 7.8 x 6.5 cm in rectangular frame 14.1 x 12.1
cm
T3376
NK6805
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The sudden
change of tide was first noticed by Lieutenant Ball, commander of the
Supply, who alerted the Sirius. Sending a boat away half-loaded,
the Sirius set off immediately on the only seaward course the wind
would allow herdiagonally across the bayfollowing the quicker
and more agile Supply. Near the far side of the bay the Supply had
to go about, to start zigzagging out of the bay.
As she prepared
to go about to avoid the reef on the west arm of the bay, the wind shifted
to the south, so that it was blowing the Sirius directly back into
the bay. The Sirius attempted to go about, but in mid-turn the
wind baffled and baulkd the ship in stays and she had to start
the turn again, losing ground towards the shore all the while.
With the
wind shift, Captain Hunter had given up hope of tacking safely out of
the bay; he decided to aim for a desperate gap between a small island
and rocks that formed the eastern arm of the bay. On the second attempt
to turn in the direction of the gap, the ship came round, but by now the
wind was forcing her to sail straight across the bay, not at the angle
that would take her out towards the gap. Drifting rapidly towards the
reefs that lined the inner shore of the bay, Hunter tried to turn the
ship again, but the Sirius lacked enough momentum to complete the
turn. For some moments she was in stays again, hovering helplessly
with her bow into the wind that continued to push her backwards.
Hunter used
his last resort, dropping an anchor, but the wind and tide were implacable,
and the Sirius struck a rock about 750 metres from the shore.
Water immediately
flowed into the hold, filling it to head height. The first priority now
was to save lives. Hunter ordered the masts to be cut away to lighten
the ship, hoping that the waves would then push her further towards the
shore. His action had the desired effect, and, in what must have been
a terrifying ride, the Sirius surfed and bumped her way across the
reef, coming to rest in calmer water. It was still only around midday,
on a fine and sunny day.
Lieutenant
Ball from the Supply, which had narrowly succeeded in sailing out
of danger, returned in a longboat to offer assistance. The Sirius crew
set about bringing the provisions up on deck, in case an opportunity arose
to get them to shore. A line attached to a cask was floated ashore and
a hauling arrangement put in place by which the ships company was
dragged to safety over two days, with not a life lost. For several months
after the loss of the Sirius, her crew was able to retrieve stores,
guns and any useful thing from the wreck, returning again and again when
conditions allowed.
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George
Raper (17691796)
The
Melancholy Loss of H.M.S. Sirius off Norfolk Island March 19th
1790
watercolour
on paper; 18 x 22.8 cm
Pictorial
Collection PIC3312/1
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Although
the journals of the Siriuss officers, and even of Seaman Nagle,
are tight-lipped on the subject of blame for the wreck, the nature of
the tides at Norfolk Island would have been widely discussed after the
disaster. In his letter to the Admiralty reporting the wreck, Captain
Hunter stressed the wrong information he had received about the timing
of the ebb tide. The person who provided this information is not named
by Hunter or Bradley, suggesting it was a high ranking officer. On Saturday
20 March, the day after the wreck, Lieutenant Ball told Lieutenant Bradley
that
...
both Friday & Saturday the Tide set to the W.ward [i.e. flooded]
the whole of each Day except about 2 hours, a circumstance he had never
met with before at this Island.
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John
Hunter (17371821)
Snapper of Norfolk Island (Lethrinus chrysostomus)
plate 66 of Birds and Flowers of New South Wales drawn on the Spot
in 1788, '89 & '90
sketchbook of 100 watercolours; 22.8 x 18.5 cm
T1224 NK2039/66 |
Perhaps Lieutenant
Ball was apologising. Another possible source of the information about
the tide was King, former officer of the Sirius and now Lieutenant-Governor
of Norfolk. The entry in his diary about the wreck is astonishingly brief:
Very good
Landing all the Day
Received every thing from the Supply. At Noon
the Sirius having twice missed Stays & being embayed, struck on the
outer part of the Reef Received a Small Quantity of Provisions
from her by the boats, but the Surf being much increased along side her
& the Wreck of her Masts having staved some of the Boats, no more
Could lay along side.
Whether his
terseness was defensive, or understandable anger, he may well have felt
that Hunter had delivered the problemthe convictsand then
failed to deliver the solutionthe supplies.
Marooned
George Raper
would have begun his eleven months of forced stay on the island in an
atmosphere of gloom and tension. He certainly reflected on the wreck,
and painted it from more than one angle while on the island. By August,
however, he wrote a letter home that showed cheerful good spirits. The
one letter by him that is known to have survived, in a copied form among
the Banks papers of the British Museum, conveys a generous and optimistic
character. He was, for instance, able to refer to the authoritarian and
merciless Major Ross, who took over as Lieutenant-Governor from King shortly
after the wreck, as our good friend
who spared no pains to
make us comfortable in our situation. By August, Raper was referring
to the shipwreck only as our sad and melancholy Catastrophe.
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George
Raper (17691796)
Norfolk
Island
coloured
ms. map; 15.8 x 9.8 cm
Map Collection RM 3460
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A few days
after the wreck, the Supply had set sail for Port Jackson, carrying
some of the Siriuss company with her. Captain Hunter had remained
on the island as did Lieutenant Bradley. Raper also remained, and with
Masters Mate William Bryant and Midshipman John Shortland, rolled
up his shirt sleeves and dug a quarter acre garden. They planted potatoes,
French beans, cabbages, lettuces and other vegetables. Like the rest of
the people on the island, they also supplemented their dwindling supplies
by catching the Mt. Pitt birds. Raper writes of their food
gathering activities in a light-hearted way:
...
we were not bad hands at either Birds or Cabbages (the Head of the Palm
Tree) and returned from the Woods with our Loads on our Backs with all
the Sans Froid imaginable.
Though Raper
wrote in an optimistic tone, the journals of Hunter and Bradley make it
clear that the settlement was only a few days away from starvation when
supplies arrived in August.
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