Pembroke - Arthur Phillip: Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy

All the worlds a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare,
As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

Botany Bay, it has been
argued, was meant as a
Gulag before Gulag
Nothing could be further
from the truth.

Alan Atkinson
The Europeans in Australia

CONTENTS

For Gillian Rose

and

Olivia, Harriet, India & Nick

My object in writing this book has been threefold to convey something of the elusive character of Arthur Phillip, to bring to life his career in the Royal Navy and to explain the culture, values, fashions and features of the Georgian society in which he lived and died. I have endeavoured to do so with an eye to the picturesque and with appropriate focus on the scientific and natural world where it forms part of the narrative. This is not just a book about wooden ships and big guns, although they certainly feature. It is a story of privation and ambition, of wealthy widows and marriage mistakes, of money and trade, of espionage and mercenaries, of discovery and exploration, and of hardship and illness. It is also a story of the extraordinary idealism that inspired and accompanied the founding of Australia. Inevitably there is loneliness and desperation, war and disappointment. Eventually there were the rewards of re-marriage and genteel living in Regency Bath. At his peak, in mid-life, Phillip seemed almost perfectly suited to the role that history and circumstance presented to him. He was a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of pluck, and plenty of common sense. To those qualities he brought an uncommon amount of integrity, intelligence and persistence. He was after all a captain in the Georgian navy, the type to whom British governments so often turned two centuries ago when they wanted a job well done in a distant part of the world. At the end, however, Phillips story is one of loss of contemporary relevance and the painful decline into obscurity that comes with old age.

Easter 2013

Hawthorn, Mount Wilson

NAVAL
EDUCATION

Phillips formative years his parents, birth, education and apprenticeship

A rthur Phillip was born in the City of London in October 1738 during the reign of Britains last foreign-born monarch, George II. It was a time of ebullient confidence, buoyant economic conditions and growing favourable trade balances. Englishmen exhibited a breezy, bigoted chauvinism towards the rest of the world. In 1707, their country had united with Scotland and became known as Great Britain but the new name was little more than a euphemism for greater England. France and Spain were the traditional foes. The citizens of the former were popularly seen as starveling, barefoot, onion-nibbling peasants oppressed by a lecherous clergy and a callous nobility. Those of the latter were regarded with perennial suspicion as mysterious, black-robed, papist idolaters. On the other hand, when the French philosopher Voltaire visited England in the decade before Phillips birth, he was dazzled by the extent of tolerance, political enlightenment and freedom of expression. But there was a darker side. Londons urban proletariat was the gin-sodden sump of Georgian society mercilessly satirised by the artist William Hogarth and justly described by a later French visitor as lazy, sotted and brutish.

The fear that France and Spain might unite under one Bourbon monarch was the reason for the war that marked the beginning of the century the War of Spanish Succession (170114). In 1738 the country was on the verge of another conflict with Spain. For years London merchants had been looking to expand their commercial interests in the Spanish territories of the Americas. Fuelled by avarice, their campaign was reinforced by discontent with Spains use of guarda costas to board, search and frequently harass British merchant vessels on the high seas. One English captain named Robert Jenkins claimed that his ear had been sliced off when his ship was boarded. Reputedly, he produced his pickled ear to a committee of the House of Commons. The prominent Whig statesman, William Pitt the elder exhorted the government: Where trade is at stake, we must defend it or perish. The whole tumultuous year was marked by loud and increasing demands for war. When it came in 1739, it was known as the War of Jenkins Ear. The British public enthusiastically assumed that victory would be easy, glorious and profitable and that there would be little more to do than usher Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver into home ports. And within a month the City bells tolled to celebrate Admiral Vernons capture of Porto Bello on the Spanish Main an event that was so joyous it led to Thomas Arnes song Rule, Britannia! and Portobello Road. English boys ached to go to sea.

Phillip was born amid this din and clamour for war. But the circumstances of his birth were inauspicious. His father Jacob is a mystery who has been repeatedly cast as an obscure German wanderer, teacher of languages and native of Frankfurt. Phillip himself was once likened in appearance to a kapellmeister in some little Bavarian court. Another writer referred to his un-English physiognomy, and another, surely lapsing into parody, to his long hooked fleshy nose and dark eyes with a hint of the orient about them. Some have pointed to the Palatine migration as the occasion for Jacob Phillips arrival in England. In 1709, many thousands of mostly Protestant refugees did come to London from the Rhineland Palatinate. But the evidence that Jacob was among them is speculative. The lists of Palatine refugees include Schneiders and Schaeffers, Hermanns and Mullers, but there is no surname similar to Phillip, except possibly Pfeiffer. John Jacob Pfeiffer is recorded in the first list of 6 May 1709. He was 42 years old and arrived with his wife, eight-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. But the conclusion that the son of John Jacob Pfeiffer, who arrived in London with his family in 1709, is the same person as Jacob Phillip, the father of Arthur Phillip born in London in 1738, rests on coincidence and the rudimentary anglicisation of Pfeiffer to Phillip. This is too slender a reed.