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Beating France to Botany Bay: The Race to Found Australia
This book rewrites the history of the founding of modern Australia. It tells how the French had a jump start in the race for a Pacific empire, but English officials then launched their own pursuit around the globe. The contestants finally met in Botany Bay, with the French just five days too late. Behind the scenes, American explorers, spies and a future US President made contributions that assisted the winners and prevented the continent becoming a French possession.
466 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 23, 2023
A brilliantly researched book that is highly engrossing throughout; fundamentally re-examining why The First Fleet was sent in the first place, detailing American involvement, the intentionally misleading intelligence released (or completely omitted) by the British government, and outlining just how close the French came to colonising Australia. The maps and photos included were also very helpful and intriguing too. This book should be shared and taught much more widely to dispel the myth that the rationale behind The First Fleet was that Britain needed somewhere to put her convicts (fully debunked in the book and the claim becomes extremely risible).
September 10, 2022
Sydney barrister and historian Margaret Cameron-Ash completes her revisionist and exhilaratingly new history of the mapping and founding of modern Australia with Beating France to Botany Bay (2021), which, like its predecessor Lying for the Admiralty (2018), marshals considerable convincing evidence to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the British settlement of what then was called New Holland and is now Australia was motivated primarily by Britain's rivalry with France.
Cameron-Ash's detailed research unearths facts previously ignored or passed over, most notably that the sudden decision by the British in August 1786 to send a substantial and very costly contingent to settle New Holland was triggered by intelligence that the French expedition of discovery led by Lapérouse in the Pacific intended to complete the mapping of New Holland and claim it for colonisation.
The French in turn learnt of the British decision. They sent new orders in December 1786 to Lapérouse's ships, which were then investigating the remunerative fur trade based in North America. Lapérouse was instructed to head immediately to Botany Bay, to forestall British claims. Lapérouse received the orders in Russia in September 1787, and reached New Holland 5 days after the British ships under Captain Phillip entered Botany Bay in January 1788.
Intriguingly, Lapérouse's entry into Botany Bay was greeted with the seemingly perplexing exit of Phillip's ships, which were headed for what we now know as Sydney Harbour, there to proclaim British settlement at Sydney Cove, and claim possession of the whole of New Holland, from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Tasmania, and as far west as the 135th degree longitude, which bordered what then was suspected might be a fabled sea passage that bisected New Holland into two separate lands.
Phillip's actions are completely explicable when considered with the findings of Cameron-Ash's Lying for the Admiralty. She contends that Phillip knew of the existence of Sydney Harbour from secret reports lodged with the British Admiralty by Captain Cook after his mapping expedition of New Zealand and New Holland in 1770.
Phillip's foreknowledge of the Harbour is evident in a private memorandum he wrote for the Admiralty before leaving Britain, in which he describes the Harbour and its small islands, and notes that he intended to inspect it after arriving at Botany Bay to assess its suitability as the prime settlement.
The Harbour's waters were unsounded, given that Cook had bypassed the entrance to the Harbour. Instead, he moored at Botany Bay for a week in 1770, from where, Cameron-Ash surmises, he walked the short distance to the Harbour for a detailed inspection. She argues that concealment of this most valuable and unique naval harbour was a key element in British strategy for the Pacific after Cook's 1770 expedition, pending settlement and development of a military capacity to defend it.
Cook's bypassing of the Harbour entrance was presumably intended to conceal its existence from his crew. Sailors on the many exploration expeditions in the 18th century were a valuable store of information for foreign intelligence gatherers at the time, and could earn substantial sums retailing the findings of their arduous, lengthy, and poorly paid journeys.
Cameron-Ash argues also that Cook similarly concealed the existence of Bass Strait, and Tasmania's island status, given the strategic value of islands in contesting possession of land masses, a lesson he learnt in his youth mapping the French possessions in North America during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), which substantially altered European holdings in that area in Britain's favour.
One clear inference drawn by Cameron-Ash from her research is that the repeated British references to Botany Bay from 1770 onwards, and radio silence as it were in regards to the Harbour, were a decoy and a ruse to outsmart potential rival European claimants, most particularly France, to the newly discovered and valuable territories in New Holland and surrounding Pacific territories. Cook was alert to these political intrigues, and made a substantial and professional contribution in the spirit of the times.
The contention that rivalry with the French motivated the settlement of Australia explains a number of previously somewhat mystifying elements of this momentous event. Why, for example, had the British spent four times as much settling Australia than it would have cost to build new quarters in England for its expanding list of convicts? Why did the early colonists prioritise the settling of Tasmania, when more amenable sites were much closer to their first settlement? Why was the settling of the forbidding territory of Norfolk Island a priority? Why was the settlement at Sydney Cove administered under civil law, rather than military law, if a penal settlement was the principal objective?
These questions have been raised before. Historian Geoffrey Blainey noted in his seminal 1967 work The Tyranny of Distance that the motivation for such an expensive venture could not be fully explained by the rationale of convict transportation. Historian Alan Frost's Botany Bay and the First Fleet (a conflation of works published in 1994 and 2011) contested the penal colony thesis, on the basis of substantial research of contemporary British government papers dealing with arrangements for the new settlement. Frost argued convincingly that Britain's broader commercial and strategic interests were the dominant factors.
The mystifying elements of the British settlement at Sydney Cove are much enlightened by Cameron-Ash's work. Establishing a commanding position in New Holland was an overriding priority in the struggle for dominance in the Pacific. A well administered civil settlement would have a much better chance of surviving and flourishing than a rudimentary penal settlement. Control of the islands of Tasmania and Norfolk was necessary to prevent foreign incursions. Claiming the whole of New Holland was a similar strategic priority.
The French did later explore the southern coast, and claimed land between what is now Adelaide and Melbourne, but offsetting exploration and claims by Mathew Flinders and others ended French territorial ambitions in Australia, and once the notion of a sea dividing Australia was scotched, and its unitary mass established, British settlements followed in close order in what are now the states of Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland.
Cameron-Ash's work is not yet broadly accepted. Many particularly query her inference that Cook deliberately concealed the existence of Bass Strait. However, it seems strange, to say the least, that the most proficient and applauded explorer and mapper of the 18th century would make such an elementary error as locating the southern tip of New Holland some 50 miles east of its actual position, and ignoring the strong winds and currents associated with the strait. (One initial motivation for Cameron-Ash's work was amazement and disbelief among modern yachting and sailing interests in the area that Cook could have missed patently obvious geographical features such as Bass Strait and Sydney Harbour.)
More importantly, the rivalry between Britain and France for territory and resources was a dominant factor in the history of the 18th century. The Seven Years War (1756-1763) realigned power relations in Europe, and the related contest in North America resulted in France ceding its territories in that region to Britain. After the American War of Independence, in which France assisted the American colonies, Britain of course no longer held territories south of Canada.
The Pacific became a key focus for supremacy in this continuing power struggle, making Britain's sudden decision in 1786 to launch a major venture in New Holland a logical step. Attention undoubtedly was diverted from Australia once the Napoleonic wars were underway in the early 1800s, but by that time the colony in New South Wales was well on its way to permanency and, by 1900, nationhood and self government in Australia were a reality.
Cameron-Ash's work is certainly an enthralling read. The dramatic events leading up to the momentous decision in 1786 to settle New Holland make thrilling reading. Much of the drama centres on the activities of the American mariner John Ledyard. He sailed on Cook's third voyage (the search for a North West Passage from 1776 to 1779, during which Cook was killed on Hawaii), and later was involved with Thomas Jefferson in Paris, where Jefferson was the American Ambassador.
Jefferson was concerned that the French were going to claim territory on America's west coast. He commissioned a fellow American to spy on the French naval activities in Brest, and learnt that their primary interest was New Holland, information which relieved his concerns, but which he passed on to Ledyard. The latter was engaged by others to undertake exploratory activities on the American west coast, and while in London preparing for this venture, Ledyard met with Sir Joseph Banks, whom he knew through his connections with Cook.
Banks, of course, was Cook's botanist on the 1770 voyage to New Holland, and, as a wealthy and influential figure in Britian, had been the celebrity figure when he returned from that voyage. He had been a long time promoter of the merits of establishing a British settlement in New Holland.
When Ledyard met with Banks in August 1786, Banks was president of the Royal Society, and alert to the political significance of Ledyard's intelligence on French intentions in New Holland. Banks met urgently with Prime Minister Pitt the next day. Pitt immediately convened a Cabinet meeting which resolved on that day to commence substantial preparations for a major venture to Botany Bay.
Previous government considerations of managing the convict overflow with penal colonies in south west Africa and New Holland had foundered on logistic difficulties, but the Ledyard intelligence obviously reignited interest in the Botany Bay option, and the secret information lodged by Cook on the existence of a magnificent harbour close to Botany Bay likely swung opinion in favour of exploiting the area for what then were pressing strategic and commercial interests in the Pacific.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Or it would be, but that the convenient story that New South Wales was primarily a dumping ground for unwanted convicts took hold, and became the dominant motif in histories of Australia.
That in turn encouraged militantly negative interpretations of the nation's early settlement and fortunes, prominent among which were the works of noted left wing historian Manning Clark, and most notoriously, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's darkly dystopian account of the effects of convict transportation.
Cameron-Ash's work is likely over time to have the substantially beneficial effect of disinfecting the dim and dark corners of historical assessments of the founding of modern Australia. Her research can have the effect of scrubbing away much of the idealogical detritus of conventional accounts of the nation’s origins, and popularising a much more intelligent and strategic rationale for its genesis.
It is noteworthy that she records the opinion of a German academic writing presciently in 1791 that the substantial British settlement in New Holland represented 'a totally new concept', one without 'modern parallels or precedent', which 'could only have been thought up by a people oriented towards the sea and possessed of a great naval power.'
Cameron-Ash's work on the actual events and struggles that led to the British settlement of Australia reminds us that the continent could easily have become a divided territory shared by French, English, and possibly Dutch and other interests, riven by competition for supremacy, with a short term focus on resource exploitation, and with little chance of a unifying and prosperous future. Instead, serendipitously, Australia became a single, stable and flourishing parliamentary democracy of increasingly strategic importance in Oceania and beyond.
Finally, Beating France to Botany Bay reminds us of some details of the time relevant to modern appreciations of Australia. Among these are the influence of the Enlightenment on the commissioning instructions prepared by the British Government for Governor Phillip and by Louis XVI's government for Lapérouse, both of which urge benign and humane treatment of the original inhabitants of New Holland.
Phillip's instructions also required that the convicts were to remain under government control, rather than being sold to private land owners, as had occurred in other settlements, and Phillip took additional precautions to ensure slavery was not an option in the new settlement. Later governors, such as Macquarie, were instrumental in developing civilising town planning in the new settlement, and in satellite settlements in Tasmania.
One element of black comedy remains relevant: Lapérouse had some crew who believed strongly in the Rousseauean philosophy of the noble savage, and were keen to practice it in their interchanges with locals on various islands. Lapérouse would have none of it, and was darkly rewarded for his caution when some crew members ventured onto an island, and were promptly butchered by the inhabitants.
Sadly, Lapérouse, his two ships, and all crew were lost when, after leaving Botany Bay after six weeks of exploration, botanical souveniring, and several amicable interchanges with Governor Phillip and his people at Sydney Cove, they foundered on a reef in the Solomon Islands, and, it is conjectured, were slaughtered by the locals.
The papers from the expedition were never found, Lapérouse having declined Phillip's offer of despatching expeditiously to France on returning English ships many of what would have been interesting and instructive documents. An apocryphal anecdote suggests that one of Louis XVI's last remarks on 21 January 1793 on the scaffold before being guillotined as part of the theatrics of the French Revolution was 'any reports of Lapérouse?'
Had Lapérouse followed the initial instructions signed by Louis XVI, to map New Holland before going north to investigate the fur trade, the history of Australia very probably would be materially different. However, Lapérouse inverted the instructions, and, as Cameron-Ash has it, Britain beat France to Botany Bay.
Cameron-Ash's detailed research unearths facts previously ignored or passed over, most notably that the sudden decision by the British in August 1786 to send a substantial and very costly contingent to settle New Holland was triggered by intelligence that the French expedition of discovery led by Lapérouse in the Pacific intended to complete the mapping of New Holland and claim it for colonisation.
The French in turn learnt of the British decision. They sent new orders in December 1786 to Lapérouse's ships, which were then investigating the remunerative fur trade based in North America. Lapérouse was instructed to head immediately to Botany Bay, to forestall British claims. Lapérouse received the orders in Russia in September 1787, and reached New Holland 5 days after the British ships under Captain Phillip entered Botany Bay in January 1788.
Intriguingly, Lapérouse's entry into Botany Bay was greeted with the seemingly perplexing exit of Phillip's ships, which were headed for what we now know as Sydney Harbour, there to proclaim British settlement at Sydney Cove, and claim possession of the whole of New Holland, from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Tasmania, and as far west as the 135th degree longitude, which bordered what then was suspected might be a fabled sea passage that bisected New Holland into two separate lands.
Phillip's actions are completely explicable when considered with the findings of Cameron-Ash's Lying for the Admiralty. She contends that Phillip knew of the existence of Sydney Harbour from secret reports lodged with the British Admiralty by Captain Cook after his mapping expedition of New Zealand and New Holland in 1770.
Phillip's foreknowledge of the Harbour is evident in a private memorandum he wrote for the Admiralty before leaving Britain, in which he describes the Harbour and its small islands, and notes that he intended to inspect it after arriving at Botany Bay to assess its suitability as the prime settlement.
The Harbour's waters were unsounded, given that Cook had bypassed the entrance to the Harbour. Instead, he moored at Botany Bay for a week in 1770, from where, Cameron-Ash surmises, he walked the short distance to the Harbour for a detailed inspection. She argues that concealment of this most valuable and unique naval harbour was a key element in British strategy for the Pacific after Cook's 1770 expedition, pending settlement and development of a military capacity to defend it.
Cook's bypassing of the Harbour entrance was presumably intended to conceal its existence from his crew. Sailors on the many exploration expeditions in the 18th century were a valuable store of information for foreign intelligence gatherers at the time, and could earn substantial sums retailing the findings of their arduous, lengthy, and poorly paid journeys.
Cameron-Ash argues also that Cook similarly concealed the existence of Bass Strait, and Tasmania's island status, given the strategic value of islands in contesting possession of land masses, a lesson he learnt in his youth mapping the French possessions in North America during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), which substantially altered European holdings in that area in Britain's favour.
One clear inference drawn by Cameron-Ash from her research is that the repeated British references to Botany Bay from 1770 onwards, and radio silence as it were in regards to the Harbour, were a decoy and a ruse to outsmart potential rival European claimants, most particularly France, to the newly discovered and valuable territories in New Holland and surrounding Pacific territories. Cook was alert to these political intrigues, and made a substantial and professional contribution in the spirit of the times.
The contention that rivalry with the French motivated the settlement of Australia explains a number of previously somewhat mystifying elements of this momentous event. Why, for example, had the British spent four times as much settling Australia than it would have cost to build new quarters in England for its expanding list of convicts? Why did the early colonists prioritise the settling of Tasmania, when more amenable sites were much closer to their first settlement? Why was the settling of the forbidding territory of Norfolk Island a priority? Why was the settlement at Sydney Cove administered under civil law, rather than military law, if a penal settlement was the principal objective?
These questions have been raised before. Historian Geoffrey Blainey noted in his seminal 1967 work The Tyranny of Distance that the motivation for such an expensive venture could not be fully explained by the rationale of convict transportation. Historian Alan Frost's Botany Bay and the First Fleet (a conflation of works published in 1994 and 2011) contested the penal colony thesis, on the basis of substantial research of contemporary British government papers dealing with arrangements for the new settlement. Frost argued convincingly that Britain's broader commercial and strategic interests were the dominant factors.
The mystifying elements of the British settlement at Sydney Cove are much enlightened by Cameron-Ash's work. Establishing a commanding position in New Holland was an overriding priority in the struggle for dominance in the Pacific. A well administered civil settlement would have a much better chance of surviving and flourishing than a rudimentary penal settlement. Control of the islands of Tasmania and Norfolk was necessary to prevent foreign incursions. Claiming the whole of New Holland was a similar strategic priority.
The French did later explore the southern coast, and claimed land between what is now Adelaide and Melbourne, but offsetting exploration and claims by Mathew Flinders and others ended French territorial ambitions in Australia, and once the notion of a sea dividing Australia was scotched, and its unitary mass established, British settlements followed in close order in what are now the states of Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland.
Cameron-Ash's work is not yet broadly accepted. Many particularly query her inference that Cook deliberately concealed the existence of Bass Strait. However, it seems strange, to say the least, that the most proficient and applauded explorer and mapper of the 18th century would make such an elementary error as locating the southern tip of New Holland some 50 miles east of its actual position, and ignoring the strong winds and currents associated with the strait. (One initial motivation for Cameron-Ash's work was amazement and disbelief among modern yachting and sailing interests in the area that Cook could have missed patently obvious geographical features such as Bass Strait and Sydney Harbour.)
More importantly, the rivalry between Britain and France for territory and resources was a dominant factor in the history of the 18th century. The Seven Years War (1756-1763) realigned power relations in Europe, and the related contest in North America resulted in France ceding its territories in that region to Britain. After the American War of Independence, in which France assisted the American colonies, Britain of course no longer held territories south of Canada.
The Pacific became a key focus for supremacy in this continuing power struggle, making Britain's sudden decision in 1786 to launch a major venture in New Holland a logical step. Attention undoubtedly was diverted from Australia once the Napoleonic wars were underway in the early 1800s, but by that time the colony in New South Wales was well on its way to permanency and, by 1900, nationhood and self government in Australia were a reality.
Cameron-Ash's work is certainly an enthralling read. The dramatic events leading up to the momentous decision in 1786 to settle New Holland make thrilling reading. Much of the drama centres on the activities of the American mariner John Ledyard. He sailed on Cook's third voyage (the search for a North West Passage from 1776 to 1779, during which Cook was killed on Hawaii), and later was involved with Thomas Jefferson in Paris, where Jefferson was the American Ambassador.
Jefferson was concerned that the French were going to claim territory on America's west coast. He commissioned a fellow American to spy on the French naval activities in Brest, and learnt that their primary interest was New Holland, information which relieved his concerns, but which he passed on to Ledyard. The latter was engaged by others to undertake exploratory activities on the American west coast, and while in London preparing for this venture, Ledyard met with Sir Joseph Banks, whom he knew through his connections with Cook.
Banks, of course, was Cook's botanist on the 1770 voyage to New Holland, and, as a wealthy and influential figure in Britian, had been the celebrity figure when he returned from that voyage. He had been a long time promoter of the merits of establishing a British settlement in New Holland.
When Ledyard met with Banks in August 1786, Banks was president of the Royal Society, and alert to the political significance of Ledyard's intelligence on French intentions in New Holland. Banks met urgently with Prime Minister Pitt the next day. Pitt immediately convened a Cabinet meeting which resolved on that day to commence substantial preparations for a major venture to Botany Bay.
Previous government considerations of managing the convict overflow with penal colonies in south west Africa and New Holland had foundered on logistic difficulties, but the Ledyard intelligence obviously reignited interest in the Botany Bay option, and the secret information lodged by Cook on the existence of a magnificent harbour close to Botany Bay likely swung opinion in favour of exploiting the area for what then were pressing strategic and commercial interests in the Pacific.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Or it would be, but that the convenient story that New South Wales was primarily a dumping ground for unwanted convicts took hold, and became the dominant motif in histories of Australia.
That in turn encouraged militantly negative interpretations of the nation's early settlement and fortunes, prominent among which were the works of noted left wing historian Manning Clark, and most notoriously, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's darkly dystopian account of the effects of convict transportation.
Cameron-Ash's work is likely over time to have the substantially beneficial effect of disinfecting the dim and dark corners of historical assessments of the founding of modern Australia. Her research can have the effect of scrubbing away much of the idealogical detritus of conventional accounts of the nation’s origins, and popularising a much more intelligent and strategic rationale for its genesis.
It is noteworthy that she records the opinion of a German academic writing presciently in 1791 that the substantial British settlement in New Holland represented 'a totally new concept', one without 'modern parallels or precedent', which 'could only have been thought up by a people oriented towards the sea and possessed of a great naval power.'
Cameron-Ash's work on the actual events and struggles that led to the British settlement of Australia reminds us that the continent could easily have become a divided territory shared by French, English, and possibly Dutch and other interests, riven by competition for supremacy, with a short term focus on resource exploitation, and with little chance of a unifying and prosperous future. Instead, serendipitously, Australia became a single, stable and flourishing parliamentary democracy of increasingly strategic importance in Oceania and beyond.
Finally, Beating France to Botany Bay reminds us of some details of the time relevant to modern appreciations of Australia. Among these are the influence of the Enlightenment on the commissioning instructions prepared by the British Government for Governor Phillip and by Louis XVI's government for Lapérouse, both of which urge benign and humane treatment of the original inhabitants of New Holland.
Phillip's instructions also required that the convicts were to remain under government control, rather than being sold to private land owners, as had occurred in other settlements, and Phillip took additional precautions to ensure slavery was not an option in the new settlement. Later governors, such as Macquarie, were instrumental in developing civilising town planning in the new settlement, and in satellite settlements in Tasmania.
One element of black comedy remains relevant: Lapérouse had some crew who believed strongly in the Rousseauean philosophy of the noble savage, and were keen to practice it in their interchanges with locals on various islands. Lapérouse would have none of it, and was darkly rewarded for his caution when some crew members ventured onto an island, and were promptly butchered by the inhabitants.
Sadly, Lapérouse, his two ships, and all crew were lost when, after leaving Botany Bay after six weeks of exploration, botanical souveniring, and several amicable interchanges with Governor Phillip and his people at Sydney Cove, they foundered on a reef in the Solomon Islands, and, it is conjectured, were slaughtered by the locals.
The papers from the expedition were never found, Lapérouse having declined Phillip's offer of despatching expeditiously to France on returning English ships many of what would have been interesting and instructive documents. An apocryphal anecdote suggests that one of Louis XVI's last remarks on 21 January 1793 on the scaffold before being guillotined as part of the theatrics of the French Revolution was 'any reports of Lapérouse?'
Had Lapérouse followed the initial instructions signed by Louis XVI, to map New Holland before going north to investigate the fur trade, the history of Australia very probably would be materially different. However, Lapérouse inverted the instructions, and, as Cameron-Ash has it, Britain beat France to Botany Bay.
July 31, 2023
This insightful book reveals a previously little known fact about Frances intention to claim and settle Australia as a French colony. Only though Cooks cunning and Banks persistence can we claim that Australia settled by the British.
This book goes into great detail about the background of the discovery, the eventual transport of prisoners to establish a penal colony at Port Jackson (Sydney), and the race between Arthur Phillip and the French Navy.
Anyone who is interest in truth telling and history will surely enjoy this book.
This book goes into great detail about the background of the discovery, the eventual transport of prisoners to establish a penal colony at Port Jackson (Sydney), and the race between Arthur Phillip and the French Navy.
Anyone who is interest in truth telling and history will surely enjoy this book.
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