The First Fleet: Arthur Phillip's 250-Day Voyage to Australia

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In 1787 eleven ships left Portsmouth carrying more than 1,400 people toward a coast almost none of them had seen. The First Fleet spent 250 days at sea, its holds crowded with convicts, rats, and bedbugs, on a mission born of two British problems: prisons overflowing after the American Revolution closed off transportation across the Atlantic, and anxiety about French expansion in the Pacific. This episode tells the story through Captain Arthur Phillip, the man responsible for keeping the whole enterprise alive.

Phillip packed as if nothing would be waiting: seeds, tools, medical supplies, handcuffs, even a prefabricated frame for a government house. He restocked fresh food at Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, loaded livestock until convicts were squeezed aside for the pens, and lost only 48 people on the way. Then Botany Bay turned out to be shallow, dry, and unworkable, and he went looking for something better. The episode also covers the Eora people who watched the ships arrive, and the epidemic of 1789 whose origin is still debated.

• Most convicts were unskilled petty offenders, yet James Ruse later worked out how to grow wheat in Australian soil and Mary Bryant escaped in an open boat to West Timor.
• In Rio, lice-ridden clothing was burned and replaced with garments sewn from rice sacks, while a convict and a marine cast fake coins from pewter spoons.
• Phillip rejected Botany Bay, rowed 12 kilometers north, and found Port Jackson, which he called the finest harbor in the world.
• Two French ships under La Perouse appeared off Botany Bay on January 24, rested for a few weeks, and were never seen by Europeans again.
• Pemulwuy led resistance against the settlers, and convict John Limeburner, who helped pitch the first tent at Sydney Cove, lived until 1847.