Australia’s First Fleet
On this day, 13 May, in 1787, the First Fleet departed Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, destined for Australia. Captain Arthur Phillip was a forty-nine year old Royal Navy officer who had been a captain for nearly six years when he was appointed to lead this fleet of eleven ships and 1,400—1,500 various people including crew, officials, convicts and free settlers, of which approximately forty-eight people lost their lives on the voyage.
Included on the journey, not including government officialsand naval personnel, were:
Marine Officers and Men 212
Marines’ wives 30
Marines’ children 22
Male Convicts 559
Female Convicts 192
Convicts’ children 17
In addition, there were fifteen children born on the voyage, one of which died. Other deaths included nine male convicts, two female convicts, and one male child of a convict.
The journey covered over 24,000 kilometres, travelling via Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope. The first ships arrived at Botany Bay on 18 January 1788, with the last ships arriving two days later. It wasn’t the best location to establish a new settlement as the soil wasn’t adequate and there was limited fresh water. The fleet moved to Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788; the date now associated with Australia Day.
The purpose of this voyage was to establish a penal colony. British prisons were severely overcrowded, and transportation to the American colonies was no longer possible following the American Revolution between 1775 and 1783. Britain also had strategic reasons for establishing a presence in that region of the world before other nations did.
The Dutch had, in fact, been there first. Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Queensland as early as 1606, but deemed the country uninhabitable. Dirk Hartog landed on the west coast in 1616, and Abel Tasman first reached Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, in 1642. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had mapped much of the coastline, but they did not establish permanent colonies, still believing the land conditions made it unsuitable. Throughout this period, Australia was known as New Holland.
That Dutch withdrawal left the door open for British colonisation. The groundwork had been laid by Captain James Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks, who had sailed together on HMS Endeavour in 1770. They landed at Botany Bay and determined this stretch of the east coast suitable for colonisation. Banks recorded his first impressions in his diary at the time: “The country this morn rose in gentle sloping hills which had the appearance of the highest fertility, every hill seemd to be cloth’d with trees of no mean size.” It was Banks’s recommendation, drawn from that 1770 voyage, that directed the First Fleet to Botany Bay seventeen years later.
When the fleet left Portsmouth in May 1787, conditions were fair. What awaited them at Botany Bay was rather different. According to research from the University of Melbourne, the weather on arrival was tumultuous and stormy, hot and humid, and described at the time as “perfect hurricane” conditions.
The Convicts
There were 780 convicts on the First Fleet: 587 male and 193 female. Just over half, 54.9%, or 428 convicts, had no occupation recorded. Of those with occupations, the most dominant were labourers (80) and servants(75). After that came twenty-seven seamen, followed by a range of trades people including shoemakers, weavers, bricklayers and brickmakers, carpenters andshipwrights, plasterers, watermen, blacksmiths, chimney sweeps and tailors. A handful of more unusual occupations also appeared, including silversmiths,ivory turners, watchmakers, law clerks, a surgeon, jewellers and printers.
Among the female convicts, servant was by far the most common occupation, recorded by 66 of the 118 women for whom an occupation was noted. Others included hawkers, dressmakers, milliners, needleworkers, lacemakers, laundresses, and nurses. Some of the more unusual entries were book stitcher, glove maker, barrow woman and artificial flower maker. It is worth noting that the proportion of women with no occupation recorded was higher than for men, which likely reflects how women’s work was, or wasn’t, documented at the time, rather than an absence of work itself.
Taken together, these were the working poor in Britain at the time: people in service, on the streets, in the trades, and on the water. Those with no recorded occupation would have been put to work establishing the colony regardless, and those with existing skills put to use accordingly.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Australiansare descended from the First Fleet. That sounds like a large number, but in proportion to the population it remains small. The First Fleet convicts representless than 1% of the approximately 164,000 convicts transported to Australia intotal.
Tracing a First Fleet Ancestor
As with all genealogical research, the starting point is yourself. Work backwards to identify the first ancestor present in Australia, then establish how they arrived. Once you have identified that person, the next step is to determine whether they were convicts or arrived by other means. Convicts tend to have the most accessible records, and naval and military personnel are also well documented.
For convicts, a good early source is the marriage record. These can include convict details such as a convict number and the name of theship they were transported on. Copies of marriage records can be obtained from the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages for the relevant state and from parish records where available. Bear in mind that not every record will include convict details. Some convicts who relocated to a different state chose not to disclose their past, and records vary in the level of detail they contain.
If a convict number and ship name are known, it becomes possible to follow the individual through convict muster records. For New South Wales, these can be found on Ancestry in the record set New South Wales Convict Ship Muster Rolls and Related Records, 1790—1849, provided by Museum of History NSW. Tasmania records are held on Libraries Tasmania, and Western Australian records can be found on Ancestry in the record set Western Australia, Convict Records, 1846—1930, provided by the State Records Office of Western Australia.
The convict record itself will typically detail the nature ofthe conviction, including where the individual was tried, the offence, the sentence, and their place of origin. For those from smaller villages, the nearest town is often listed. That information then opens up research back in Britain.
For those tried at the Old Bailey, records are available both through The National Archives series HO/26 and via the Old Bailey Online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/), which is fully searchable and free to access. For those tried elsewhere, calendars of prisoners held at the relevant County Record Office can provide further details of the case and sentencing, often searchable via The National Archives Discovery catalogue.
Newspapers are another valuable source. Trove(trove.nla.gov.au), the National Library of Australia’s digitised newspaper database, can be searched by surname and ship name to find references to tickets of leave, marriages, crimes, and other life events. Newspapers in the United Kingdom, accessible through the British Newspaper Archive (https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/) or Find My Past, may contain details of the original crime or prior offences that would not appear in Australian records.
Convict records themselves are often richly descriptive, recording age, height, complexion, hair and eye colour, and any distinguishing marks or scars. In an era before photography, that level of physical detail offers a rare and vivid glimpse of an ancestor.
Finally, it is worth consulting the ships’ surgeon journals. Each vessel carried a surgeon, responsible for the health of those on board, and the journals record both the progress of the voyage and any medical matters that arose. Even if your ancestor does not appear by name, these journals provide an invaluable picture of conditions on board and the experience of thejourney.
Key Resources
- National Archives of Australia – https://www.naa.gov.au/
- Trove – https://trove.nla.gov.au/
- Ancestry – https://www.ancestry.com/
- FindMyPast – https://www.findmypast.co.uk.co.uk/
- The National Archives – https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
- British Newspaper Archive – https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
- The Old Bailey Online – https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
- Libraries Tasmania – https://libraries.tas.gov.au/family-history/
- First Fleet Fellowship – https://firstfleetfellowship.org.au/
A Final Thought
Two hundred and thirty-nine years ago today, eleven ships left Portsmouth carrying hundreds of people who had little say in where they were going or what awaited them. Many were young. Most were poor. Some were guilty of serious crimes; others had stolen food, clothing, or goods worth a few shillings. A handful were almost certainly innocent. Very few would ever see Britain again.
For their descendants, finding them in the records is often one of the most significant moments in a family history journey. Unlike many ancestors from the same period, convicts left a paper trail, not by choice, but because the state required it. That documentation, born of punishment, has become a gift to genealogists two centuries later.
If you suspect you may have First Fleet ancestry, it is worth pursuing. The records are there, they are increasingly accessible, and the story they tell, of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, is one worth knowing.
