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MARITIME TRAVEL
Exploring Maritime Sydney The female passengers of the oceanweary vessels looked a sorry, tattered lot as they stumbled ashore from longboats. After six months at sea their feet were unsure, and their senses reeled with the intoxicating effects of open space. About them lay a small patch of land cleared by their male counterparts in the preceeding six weeks. Beyond that lay unbroken , inhospitable land, unsuitable for agriculture and bereft of water. All about, girding the pri stine harbor, a dense green cover, broken in places by sandstone cliff faces , ran down to the water's edge. This was Sydney Cove on 7 February 1788, some 15,000 miles di stant from these people 's homeland in the British Isles. The deep cove and its immediate environs would be home for the complement of officers, sai Iors, marines and convicts that comprised Australia's "First Fleet" of E uropean arrivals . Little could they imagine the loneliness, hunger and despondency that would soon be upon them as they labored for survival, and, in the case of the prisoners , freedom, in England's farthest colony. Two hundred years later, modern Sydney sprawls outward from Sydney Cove. But the image of Sydney Harbour as the coloni sts saw it is not entirely erased. The history of settlement in Australia is a short one, and for visitors fascinated with the history of beginnings, the trail is stil l fresh . The vantage point for my first excursion on Sydney Harbour was from beneath square sails on the deck of the Bounty, a replica of Bligh's famous vessel. Under the stewardship of our captain , John Sorenson, we sailed eastward out of Sydney Cove, first rounding the blinding white arches of the Sydney Opera House. On our starboard side lay Farm Cove and the Botanical Gardens, the site of the colony's first farm; on our port side, once-active Careening Cove. Further along we passed the sandstone ramparts of the early island fortifications on Fort Denison, one of the original lookouts for the fledgling colony. Many of the sites possessed names which stirred up memories of early settlers ' encounters on a foreign shore: Rushcutter's Bay, where First Fleet convicts' hard labor consisted of thrashing reeds for the roofs of Sydney Cove's first houses; Mrs. Macquarrie 's Chair, a finger bluff dedicated to the memory of a homesick governor's wife who waved from thi s SEA HISTORY 67, AUTUMN 1993
Explorers, settlers, and seafarers left their mark on Australia's first city by Kevin Haydon
Sydney Cove's Circular Quay from an 1886 engraving by J. R. Ashton .
point to each homebound vessel; Collins Flat Beach, where First Fleet Commander Arthur Phillip was injured by an Aboriginal spear during an early reconnoiter of the harbor's coves and inlets. As a matter of record , Phillip was actually very pleased with Port Jackson. He jubilantly described it as "the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of line may ride with the most perfect security." What's more, it was a vast improvement over the first anchorage he led his 11-ship fleet to, Botany Bay- next on my itinerary. Botany Bay enters the Pacific Ocean some 12 miles south of Sydney Harbor. It can be reached overland by a twenty minute bus ride south and east of Sydney Cove. This wide oval bay is the site of Captain Cook 's only landfall on the eastern coast of Australia. Cook's survey was tentative, his estimation of the fertility of the land inaccurate. Nevertheless, it was the record of his visit that put into motion the chain of events that lead to British colonization. Here, as in Sydney Harbour, the headlands have been thoughfull y preserved as greens pace. On the southern headland is Captain Cook's
Landing Place, a part of Botany Bay National Park , where time travelers can explore the sandy beach and campsite of the exploration party, visit the stream Cook used to replenish his ships' water, and view the anchorage buoy marking the spot where the Endeavour laid to. It was to this frightfully little known or understood location on Cook's chart, that Captain Phillip brought with temerity his fleet of ships stuffed with the raw materials needed for colonization. Within six days he recognized the potential folly of establishing his community in sandy soil that could only support low heath and open woodland in a bay that was not favorably sheltered. He would discover and depart for Sydney Cove presently. But before he cou ld , the colonists were thunderstruck to see, far out on the c loudy horizon , two large and clearly European ships trying to beat into shore. They were the ships of Laperouse. The story of Laperouse is, by a tragic twist of fate , as much a part of Botany Bay as that of the British colonists. The intrepid French explorer was two-anda-half years out of Brest on a celebrated voyage of Pacific discovery. This meeting, by weird coincidence, of two nations so very distant from European shores remains the last record of Laperouse's bold expeditionary force. After a six-week stay, his ships, La Boussole and L' Astrolabe, sailed towards New Caledonia, never to be seen again. The new Laperouse Museum on the north headland of Botany Bay is a mustsee for the nautical traveler. It occupies the former Tasman Sea Cable Station, built in 1881, on a gentle, grassy slope that runs down to Frenchrnans Bay, where Laperouse camped. Moving through the museum's small rooms furnished with antique maps, early navigational instruments, prints and records of the careful provisioning of the Laperouse expedition, I was struck by the remarkable fortitude of the early explorers; it was a vocation that presented risk to life far and away more menacing than 20th century expectations could imagine. The French captain had already lost 21 men in a boating accident in the Pacific Northwest, and 12 more to natives in the Samoan islands. The complete loss of Laperouse, his ships and men deeply shocked the French public. Interest in the fate of the expedition never waned . Louis XVI, the patron of the expedition, 31