Arthur Phillip
Arthur Phillip was a British naval officer and the first governor of the Australian penal colony, known for his leadership during the establishment of Sydney. Born in 1738 in London to a German father and an English mother, he began his maritime career at a young age, joining the Royal Navy in 1755. His early experiences included serving during the Seven Years' War and later farming for over a decade before returning to naval service.
In 1787, Phillip commanded the First Fleet, which transported convicts to Australia, successfully navigating a challenging 16,000-mile journey. Upon arrival at Botany Bay, he quickly recognized the area's inadequacies and moved to establish a settlement at Sydney Cove, facing numerous challenges, including food shortages and conflicts with indigenous Australians. Phillip's governance was marked by a commitment to discipline, agricultural development, and attempts to build relationships with the local Aboriginal people. Despite his initial successes, the settlement struggled, and he returned to England in 1792, having laid the foundational stones for what would become a burgeoning nation.
Phillip continued to advocate for the colony until his death in 1814, but his contributions were often overlooked in history. Today, he is recognized as a pivotal figure in Australia’s early development and a symbol of its complex colonial past.
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Arthur Phillip
English admiral and administrator
- Born: October 11, 1738
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: August 31, 1814
- Place of death: Bath, Somerset, England
An officer in the British navy, Phillip served as the first governor of Australia from 1788 to 1792. To this prudent and judicious head of the struggling convict colony, the modern nation of Australia owes its existence.
Early Life
Arthur Phillip was the son of a language teacher, Jakob Phillip, who had emigrated to England from Frankfurt, Germany, and married an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Breach. After attending school in London, Phillip went to sea at age sixteen and completed his mercantile marine apprenticeship a year later. In 1755, he joined the Royal Navy, starting as a midshipman and retiring as an admiral.
On active duty during the Seven Years’ War against France, Phillip was promoted to lieutenant. In 1763, the war over, he retired on half pay and for eleven years was a farmer. During this period he was married, not happily, however, for in 1769 he and his wife were formally separated; they had no children. Tired of country life at Lyndhurst, Phillip obtained permission from the British Admiralty in 1774 to join the Portuguese navy. Four years later, the British and French again at war, he returned to the Royal Navy and attained the rank of captain in 1781. Retired once more on half pay, he went back to his farm and probably would have spent the remaining years in obscurity had it not been for his appointment in 1786 as the governor of the proposed penal settlement in Australia.
Portraits of Phillip show him to have been slightly built and far from handsome—all too ordinary looking for the founder of a nation. Little in his outwardly lackluster career had indicated that he would at almost fifty years of age undertake so formidable a venture or meet it with such daring and enterprise. Although Phillip recorded in official correspondence and journals detailed accounts of his public life, he revealed little about his personal side. The diaries of others who shared the Australian experience with him provide scant evidence of their leader’s personality; they do suggest that he was a solitary man devoted to duty, sometimes in their eyes stubbornly so.
The reason Lord Thomas Townshend Sydney, the home secretary, decided to choose Phillip first as captain of the First Fleet of convicts and then as their governor is not known. Yet during Phillip’s tenure with the Portuguese navy, he had served as captain of a ship that transported four hundred Portuguese convicts safely across the Atlantic to Brazil; not to lose even one person on such a dangerous voyage was impressive for that time. Phillip’s superiors must have considered this ordinary officer to be a reliable and competent leader, a man firm yet equitable in his actions.
Phillip had spent the first forty or so years of his life as a prelude to the morning of May 13, 1787, when he took the First Fleet out of Portsmouth, the flagship Sirius leading the eleven vessels bound for a perilous 16,000-mile journey to an unknown land.
Life’s Work
Once appointed as the captain general of the First Fleet, Phillip proved his efficiency, attending to every possible detail, especially in regard to supplies. His years of experience at sea had taught him that survival might well hang on the humblest of items; he soon discovered, however, that his superiors, anxious to be rid of the convicts, failed to share his concern for the safety and health of this human cargo. After endless confrontations—some lost, others won—the fleet departed, holding in its cramped quarters 736 male and female convicts, along with about 300 marines and their dependents, a few servants, and a handful of civil officials.
Captain Phillip, as he is generally known in Australian history, had plotted what appears at first sight to have been an indirect course but which was actually one along which sailing ships could take advantage of prevailing winds and currents. En route to its antipodean destination, the fleet stopped at the Canary Islands, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town, each time adding to depleted supplies. Finally, on January 20, 1788, during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, the ragged assembly landed at Botany Bay on the eastern coast of Australia. Although recommended by Captain James Cook after his earlier explorations there, this location soon proved to be dismal, its anchorage exposed, its water undrinkable, and its soil poor. Phillip and his close associates explored the nearby coast, sailing before long into a harbor that Phillip described in his journal as “the finest in the world.” Along the shore of one of the numerous coves, christened Sydney in honor of the home secretary, Phillip established the settlement.
Under his expert direction, the 252-day voyage may well be one of the most remarkable in history: every ship safe; convict rebellions prevented and discipline maintained among the marines; only forty-eight people dead in spite of overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and unhealthful diet; and an almost mythical destination reached. Still, Phillip, now governor, faced an even greater challenge once his motley crew had moved from sea to land. On February 7, with all the convicts finally ashore and assembled before him with the marines on guard, Phillip read the official proclamations giving him unlimited power to govern this penal colony as he saw fit to ensure its survival.
At times that survival seemed doomed. Although more promising than Botany Bay, the land around the harbor proved unyielding, the weather unpredictable, the unfamiliar animals and landscape frightening. The convicts, most city-bred and long debauched—“reluctant pioneers” as they have been called—showed a lack of enthusiasm for constructing their own prison settlement, determined instead to pursue the shiftless and degenerate ways they had always known. Quarrelsome, homesick, frequently jealous and uncooperative, sometimes ill, the marine guards and other officials contributed to the chaos. The indigenous Australians, aborigines who had lived on the continent for centuries, at first expressed curiosity but later hostility when they realized that the visitors intended to stay and appeared set on disturbing the natural environment.
At times, Phillip, faced with such a multitude of problems, must have despaired. To combat the near starvation that plagued the settlement, he rationed food and put his own portion into the common store, insisted on continuing agricultural development in spite of repeated failures, and sent ships to Cape Town for supplies. To ensure discipline among the convicts as well as the marines, he dispensed punishment with a severity tempered by his well-defined sense of justice. To learn something of the land beyond the fringes of the coast and to secure it for the Crown, he dispatched exploration parties into the interior and established a settlement on Norfolk Island, 1,000 miles to the east. To form friendly relations with the aborigines, he ordered that they not be harmed and attempted to befriend them, although he understood neither their culture nor the crippling effect of European civilization on it.
Through the force of his leadership, the colony maintained itself for two years. In June of 1790, the Second Fleet arrived, bringing many convicts but few supplies. The subsequent ships, with their pathetic cargoes, compounded a situation that often verged on the hopeless. When Phillip, by then in ill health, sailed for England at the end of 1792, however, the worst days had passed. Sydney Cove, still a shabby outpost, was destined to become a great city, the land beyond a nation.
Significance
Arthur Phillip was never to see Australia again, even though he lived for another twenty years, during which he continued to serve in the navy, married again, and received the rank of admiral shortly before his death. After retiring in 1805, he campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the colony he had founded, to the extent, in fact, that his pleas annoyed the authorities, who thought of Australia as a convenient dumping ground for England’s undesirables.
Even as he supervised the creation of the rude penal colony, he foresaw a time when this land would be a home to free settlers. He encouraged the convicts who worked and reformed to take their place in the democratic society he envisioned. For those who did not, he had little sympathy. He believed, too, that the aborigines should have a place in this new state, giving up what he saw as their primitive ways and adopting the mores of white civilization. Above all, though, he looked toward the day when free English immigrants would come, not to exploit and leave, but to stay and build.
When Phillip died in 1814, his role in the new colony had been largely forgotten, even belittled by his detractors, and few took notice of his death. As the years passed, he remained a shadowy figure in Australian history. Now that Australia has begun to claim its history, recognition—so long deserved—has come to Captain Phillip: Australia’s first governor, indeed its first patriot.
Bibliography
Barnard, Marjorie. A History of Australia. New York: Praeger, 1963. A general history that covers in detail and with clarity the events leading up to the formation of the First Fleet, its voyage, and the early settlement, stressing Phillip’s important role. By giving the complete history of Australia, the book offers a look at the course taken by the nation Phillip envisioned.
Clark, C. M. H. A History of Australia: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie. Vol. 1. Melbourne, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1962. A scholarly work that provides excellent background on not only the founding of the penal colony but also the continent’s history prior to European settlement. The chapter devoted to Phillip gives a detailed account of his background and his important role in the colony, along with an evaluation of his contribution. Subsequent chapters trace the colony’s development.
Dark, Eleanor. The Timeless Land. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Although a novel, this work follows the historical events faithfully. The partially imaginative approach to Phillip’s character succeeds in drawing a picture of what he may have been like in his day-to-day life. Treatment of the aborigines and Phillip’s relations with them is especially revealing.
Eldershaw, M. Barnard. Phillip of Australia: An Account of the Settlement at Sydney Cove, 1788-92. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972. As the title indicates, this study tells little of Phillip’s life before or after his time in Australia, but it covers those years in minute detail. A well-researched book that relies on many unpublished diaries and official records; shows Phillip’s interactions with the civil and military officials involved in the founding of Sydney Cove.
Frost, Alan. Arthur Phillip, 1738-1814: His Voyaging. Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 1987. Frost has written several books about early Australian history and has collected and edited documents pertaining to the First Fleet and the colonization of New South Wales. His biography of Phillip goes into great detail about his life before he founded the Australian colony as well as describing Phillip’s best known achievement.
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. May well be the most readable of any book on Australia’s founding. Although it does not concentrate on Phillip, the text surveys his career and attempts to define the nature and extent of his contribution. Covers the events that follow Phillip’s tenure up to the time the penal colony was disbanded in the mid-nineteenth century and Phillip’s idea of a free colony started to be realized fully.
Moorhouse, Geoffrey. Sydney: The Story of a City. New York: Harcourt, 1999. This history of Sydney includes information about Phillip’s discovery of the site and founding a colony at Sydney Cove.
Taylor, Peter. Australia: The First Twelve Years. Winchester, Mass.: Allen & Unwin, 1982. Aimed at the general reader rather than the historian, this lively account depends heavily on primary sources written by those in the colony with Phillip. Unfortunately, these sources are not documented. Reproduces paintings and sketches from the period and includes photographs of historical places.
Tennant, Kylie. Australia: Her Story. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959. A general history of Australia from its beginnings to the mid-1950’s. The chapter “The Reluctant Pioneers” offers a succinct rendering of Sydney Cove’s pioneer days under the guidance of Phillip. Excellent source for a quick overview of the period.