and anyway, they hadn’t followed it up by properly occupying the great island. It remained quite unoccupied when Cook landed in 1770 and quite rightly hoisted the Union Jack.
Well, that is to say, it wasn’t occupied by any civilised people. There were natives there of course – but they didn’t really count as civilised, since they did no apparent sailing about on the high seas, or planting flags, or anything like that. Thus ran the ingenious legal doctrine of “Terra Nullius” – which asserted that if there were no white Europeans living there, then the place was to all intents and purposes uninhabited – meaning Britain was quite within its rights to march in and take it.
While the colonising officers were under instructions to establish “friendly relations” with the indigines, one cannot remain friendly on an indefinite basis with people who refuse to accept their proper subservient position. After all, as one senior chap in the Colonial Office sagely observed, “If the Almighty had intended the blasted natives to have the place, He would have given them the muskets and us the spears and clubs.”
Even worse, He might have given them the lawyers.
So Britain’s First Fleet arrived in the South Land in 1788 to begin the arduous business of establishing a penal colony. Soon more ships followed, as the Mother Country began to see the possibilities of expanding her fledgling outpost beyond mere felonious dumping ground and into potentially prosperous free settlement. Within a decade, British toeholds had begun to spread around the more temperate southern fringes of the continent to virtually all navigable areas of its coastline.
One notable exception was a particular location, passed over by all explorers to date as being quite unsuitable for human habitation.
From the brief accounts available in the Admiralty records, together with various correspondence sent to my mother and myself prior to my rather forced departure, I had been able to glean a certain amount of information upon the history of Port Fortitude. It was not exactly an encouraging read.
The settlement appeared to have been founded quite by accident - and not, it had to be said, in the most auspicious of circumstances.
The colony had its origins in the early autumn of 1800 - when a British naval vessel, the HMS Fortitude, under Captain George Strickleigh, a Master and Commander of apparently questionable mastery and negligible command, had taken a wrong turning somewhere south of Tahiti and finished hundreds of nautical miles away from its intended destination: the established settlement of Sydney Cove.
Caught in one of the sub-tropical storms abounding in that part of the South Pacific, the Fortitude ricocheted gracelessly off one of the many jagged reefs on this portion of the coastline, and ran aground upon a rocky headland – where it sustained a gaping hole in its hull and was soon battered to pieces by the high seas.
Poor Captain Strickleigh was never seen again. It was believed that he had been asleep below – the written accounts provided no further details of this. In any case the surviving crew, together with a handful of hardy (or possibly foolhardy) settlers, and a smallish gaggle of convicts and their guards, managed to stumble ashore and set up camp with enough provisions to ensure their temporary survival.
Word of this soon reached Sydney Cove by means of reports from passing trading vessels. While perhaps wisely unwilling to negotiate the perilous reefs or hazard a nip into the shallow harbour, they at least passed word to the larger settlement of the evidence they had seen from a distance of some living European presence there – a presence which could only have consisted of the survivors of the Fortitude.
The authorities saw this possibility, if true, as quite fortuitous. The inhospitable nature of the place, remarked upon by explorers and traders - its reefs too hazardous, its bay too exposed and too shallow, its soil too sandy, its insects too profuse, and so forth - had meant that the authorities had been so far unable to persuade anyone to establish any kind of settlement there. Indeed, no settlements existed for some distance either to the north or south. Anything to the west, of course, was assumed to be total wilderness and quite uninhabited – except, perhaps, for natives, who were most likely hostile.
The colonial authorities, then, were eager to grasp this new opportunity of gaining another coastal foothold upon the massive continent – since they lived in constant fear of it being taken away from them by the French. Consequently they had rushed an Acting Governor, a small garrison of troops and a contingent of hardened convicts around the coast from Sydney Cove.
They arrived at the starving survivors’ camp in the nick of time, and duly proclaimed it to be from thenceforward His Majesty’s Penal Colony of Port Fortitude.
Slowly, like a local sapling snaking raggedly upwards from sandy soil, the settlement had begun to grow.
Unfortunately, by the time I had read these accounts, and forged from their unwelcoming lines even greater misgivings than I had previously held as to what might await me in this forbidding place, it was altogether too late to turn my mother from her singleminded determination to send me there. I pleaded eloquently, apologised profusely for my past failures, promised sincerely to redouble my efforts, and finally questioned with the greatest respect whether it might not be just a tad excessive to compound an offspring’s failings and to deny him a chance at redemption by condemning him to the probability of an untimely death – whether from the perils of the voyage, or from a native attack, or perhaps from some dreadful tropical disease. Or indeed all of the above.
Alas, it was to no avail. Mother was unmoved and quite resolute. My place in the family heritage must be salvaged, she determined, and salvaged it would be; and if I should perish in the attempt, then it were better to perish bravely than to live on in lily-livered disgrace.
I had no choice, then, but to grit my teeth and accept my fate. I was to be transported to this God-forsaken spot, for - who knows? - possibly the term of my natural life. Given what I had read of Port Fortitude, most likely a term of no great duration.
Still, at least I had survived the blasted voyage. So far, as they say, so good.
On the craggy headland above the grey mist stands a solitary figure – the first to view the arrival of the ship.
She is Polly Dawes, a convict maidservant in plain sturdy working dress, apron and cotton bonnet. She has been up and about already for some hours, rising before daybreak to pump water from the well, to be used in the washing of clothes and the watering of chickens and pigs.
She’s just completed this last chore, and has emerged onto the grassy headland between Government House and the cliffs, full washing basket under one arm, empty scrap tin in one hand, empty water bucket in the other.
Bleedin’ pigs, she thinks with annoyance. Third one this month that’s got out, an’ I don’t suppose we’ll ever see that one again, run off into the bush like the others. So there’s one more dinner that’ll have to be filled out with potatoes an’ greens an’ whatever else we can grow in this rubbish soil. Oh well. Nothin’ to be done.
Now she stops as something in the distance catches her eye. She squints towards the horizon and her eyes widen slightly. She takes a step towards the clifftop and puts down the bucket and tin, one grubby sleeve mopping sweat from her ruddy cheek.
Ah,
