Miriam Estensen - The Letters of George and Elizabeth Bass

THE LETTERS

of

THE LETTERS

of

MIRIAM ESTENSEN

First published in Australia in 2009

Copyright Miriam Estensen 2009

Map by Ian Faulkner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Estensen, Miriam

The letters of George and Elizabeth Bass / Miriam Estensen.

978 1 74175 681 4

Includes index.
Bibliography.

Bass, George, 1771-1803.
Bass, George, 1771-1803 --Correspondence.
Bass, Elizabeth.
Bass, Elizabeth--Correspondence.
Explorers--Family relationships.
Australia--Discovery and exploration--British--Biography
Pacific Ocean--Discovery and exploration--British --Biography.

910.92

Typeset in 12/15 Adobe Caslon Pro and Caslon Twelve by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed in China by Everbest Printing Co.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Freya Leontine Estensen
with love

CONTENTS

PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Exploring the oceans of the Australian and Pacific regions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British naval men sent letters home to their wives in England, some of which have survived to the present. Considered important, they were preserved by the families, sometimes for generations. The letters written by the women fared less well. Collected sporadically by men who were at sea much of the time, they more readily went astray. Some women regarded their own letters as less important than those of their husbands, and in later years destroyed them, as did Ann Flinders. Similarly James Cooks widow, Elizabeth, destroyed her letters, but, in this situation, his as well.

In the case of George and Elizabeth Bass such correspondence as was not lost at the time was preserved by members of Elizabeths family and their descendants. We have therefore an exchange of letters written by a young couple separated by half the world after just three months of marriage. They are letters of avowed devotion, yearning, anxiety and hope, as the expected separation of eighteen months lengthened heartbreakingly into years and eventual silence. Elizabeths letters also mirror the lives of an upper middle class English family at a time when Britain was in almost daily expectation of a Napoleonic invasion. Georges letters are windows into life in Englands faraway colony of New South Wales with glimpses of contacts with such diverse places as Brazil and the Pacific islands in the first years of the nineteenth century. We have, then, an unusually revealing set of letters, a tragic story of two young people with the worlds oceans between them and, finally, the undoubted loss to the sea of George Bass.

Short biographies of George and Elizabeth Bass briefly describe their lives before and, for Elizabeth, after the period covered by their correspondence.

The letters written to each other by George and Elizabeth Bass, which constitute the principal content of this book, are held at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, and I gratefully acknowledge my debt to the Trustees of the State Library of New South Wales for the opportunity to publish these documents in this book. I am grateful, too, for the generous assistance of many kinds I have received at the library, with my very special thanks to Jennifer Broomhead, Martin Beckett and Mark Hildebrand, and to Paul Brunton, whose erudition provided important direction in interpreting various aspects of the story of George and Elizabeth. I am much indebted to William F. Wilson of Bass River and Melbourne, for sharing with me once again his unique material on George Bass. I owe appreciation as well to the South Australian Maritime Museum; the National Maritime Museum, Sydney; the Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library; the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland; the Museum of London; The British Library; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK; The National Archives, Kew, Richmond; and the City of Westminster Archives, UK. Pursuing the possibility that Bass reached South America, I received valuable assistance from the Asociacin de Historia Martima y Naval Iberoamericana and the pertinent departments and staff of the Archivo General de la Nacin, of Lima, Peru.

My gratitude once again to my family for encouragement and forbearance, to my editor, Rebecca Kaiser, for her always warm and enthusiastic support and to my publisher, Allen & Unwin, for the interest and cooperation that has made this book possible.

Length

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Modern values for currency used in the past can only be estimated.

The Bass/Waterhouse letters were secured by the State Library of New South Wales at auction on 8 April 1998. These include all known existing correspondence between George Bass and his wife Elizabeth, 22 letters written from 9 January 1801 to 19 October 1803, which in this book have been transcribed in their entirety. Each letter is headed with the names of the writer and the recipient. Date and place of writing, where given, salutations and signatures are represented as in the original. The text of each letter retains the spelling, punctuation and other details as they were written, with one exception. Abbreviations were used extensively, the omitted letters indicated with a full stop surmounted by a very small final letter of the word. Here the simpler modern apostrophe has been substituted for any omitted letters. The present location of the original letter is noted at the end of each.