CHAPTER 12Phillip’s return voyage to England, the recovery of his health, his second marriage and life in Georgian Bath
On 10 December 1792 Phillip embarked on the Atlantic, saluted by a guard of honour from the New South Wales Corps. On the following morning, in the pre-dawn light, the ship weighed anchor and slipped out of Sydney Cove. All of the principal officers of the colony accompanied the Atlantic to the Heads, the entrance to the harbour through which Phillip had first nudged in a longboat on 21 January 1788. The officers then gave three cheers before parting and returning. Also on board the Atlantic was a remarkable coterie. Phillip brought with him four fine kangaroos that were accustomed to sleeping beside the fire in his kitchen at Government House. He also brought dingoes, birds, other animals, plants and timber samples. In addition, he was accompanied by two Aboriginal men, Bennelong and his younger friend Yemmerrawannie. They boarded the ship willingly, despite the distress of their wives and the dismal lamentations of their friends. Another passenger was returning marine private John Easty, who privately recorded in his journal that ‘the state of the colony at this present time seems far better than at any time since the settlement was made’.
Even for the fit and able-bodied, the homeward passage via Cape Horn was arduous and not without considerable danger. For Phillip, ill and in pain, it must have been a sufferance. Ships such as the Atlantic sailed south from Port Jackson towards Stewart Island at the tip of New Zealand. There at latitude 47°;S, they turned east and ran more or less within the ice zone, staying as far south as possible and seeking the strongest winds until they reached Cape Horn, where they kept the rocky, barren and southernmost headland of Tierra del Fuego on the port bow. In the Drake Passage, between Cape Horn and the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, the unimpeded westerly winds of the Southern Ocean and the waters of the Antarctic circumpolar current funnel together, surging in the same direction. The result is a matchless intensity of atmospheric phenomena that causes the sailing conditions to be frequently hazardous and often violent. The winds moan and keen and the waves and icebergs sometimes dwarf passing ships. But for all its dangers, when travelling east, the Drake Passage was preferred to the treacherously narrow in-shore routes known as the Strait of Magellan and the Beagle Channel that thread between the archipelago of islands to the north.
The Atlantic made rapid progress, reaching the latitude of 47°S by 19 December before changing course and steering east by south into the ice zone. Keeping more or less to the 55th parallel, the latitude of Cape Horn, she bowled along with the westerly winds, encountering much rain, snow, hail and storms, as well as icebergs. In fact, in early January 1793 the passengers and crew had the surreal experience of encountering at least 60 or 70 icebergs. It was like the ice scene in the Southern Ocean graphically depicted five years later in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).
By 8 January 1793 the Atlantic had sailed 4500 miles and was still 1300 miles from Cape Horn. A week later she cleared the snowcovered headland and beat up through the South Atlantic against the wind, into the teeth of rain and squalls, reaching Rio de Janeiro on 7 February. We know not what Phillip did at Rio de Janeiro or where he stayed, although it has been suggested that he was ‘honoured with extraordinary attention’. This seems likely given his reception there in 1787. Easty was given shore leave and recorded in singular and amazed detail the ‘grand and magnificent Romish churches, the statuary, the altars, the candlesticks and the constant blessings and genuflections by the citizens’. This had a familiar ring. The observations of Collins, White and Watkin Tench when the First Fleet visited Rio de Janeiro in 1787 were similar but Easty’s observations have the hilarious intolerance and refreshing frankness of a simple man. He thought their practices were ‘a thing so absurb that is Enough to make a prodstant Shuder’ [sic]. He worried that ‘so Great is thier idolatry thay kneel down when Ever any Images Pass them in the street’ [sic]. And he felt sorry for them, saying that ‘the Ignorance of the Lower Class of people makes me to pity them’.
It was in Rio de Janeiro that the first indication emerged of another war with France. On 23 February Captain Colnett, who was six weeks out of England, gave an account of ‘great disturbances’ in England and ‘every preparation of war with the French’. During Phillip’s absence in New South Wales, France had been torn apart. In July 1789, while he was puzzling over the smallpox that struck the Aboriginal population, a Parisian mob had stormed the Bastille in Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And only a few weeks before the Atlantic arrived at Rio de Janeiro, Louis XVI had been executed at the guillotine. Then on 1 February 1793, the French revolutionary government declared war on Great Britain and the Dutch republic. Neither Phillip nor anyone on the Atlantic knew of these dramatic events and would not learn of them until they encountered a Portuguese ship in April. Wisely nonetheless, the Atlantic’s captain proceeded with caution, exercising the ship’s great guns with increasing frequency as she moved into the waters of the North Atlantic. When the ship crossed the Equator, the crew amused themselves with the usual equinoctial ceremonies. And if Easty can be believed, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie were convinced that Neptune was a king who lived in the sea. But the reality soon hit home when the Atlantic was fired upon by a French privateer in the approach to the English Channel. It is not difficult to imagine Phillip’s depth of feeling a few days later when the English coast was sighted. Easty recorded in his journal ‘our unspeakable Joy [at landing] in old England’. On 19 May 1793, almost exactly six years after he had sailed from Portsmouth with his complement of 800 convicts, Phillip returned to England with two Aboriginal men of the Eora people. They went ashore at Falmouth, Cornwall and took the coach to London.
Phillip’s first priority on his return was the restoration of his health. He had been travelling at sea for almost six months and the long coach trip from the Cornish port of Falmouth to London was gruelling. For Falmouth is only a little less distant from London than Penzance, England’s most westerly town. The journey along the coaching road from Falmouth to London, frequently used by returning naval officers, involved over twenty stops to change horses at coaching inns. On arrival in London, Phillip needed to rest, to make arrangements for Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie and to attend to his financial affairs. He was anxious about his wife’s will and the obligations that he had entered into upon marriage and separation. In particular, he had been concerned for several years about the two annuities he had secured. These were the ‘private affairs’ to which he referred in his unofficial letters to Sydney and Nepean in April 1790, when he sought leave of absence to return to England for twelve months. To make matters worse, the onset of war had caused great uneasiness in London’s financial district, resulting in many failures, especially among firms trading with North America. John Lane’s banking firm, Lane, Son & Fraser, was one such casualty.
In London, Phillip consulted his physician and his lifelong friend and banker, John Lane. And he learned that his wife Charlott had died during the previous year. Phillip must have read her will anxiously. It contains many references to him but the terms of the will could only have given him solace. After recounting Phillip’s financial commitments under the marriage agreement dated 18 July 1763 and the separation deed dated 22 April 1769, Phillip’s eyes would have lit upon the comforting words ‘I well and sufficiently release and discharge the said Arthur Phillip’. They were repeated, with excessive lawyerly thoroughness, several times. Charlott released Phillip from the obligations that he had entered into when they married and separated; freed him of the requirement to secure the annuities and to repay his debts to the estate; and left him a legacy of £100 – all on condition that he did not challenge any other provisions of the will, which he did not do.
When well enough, Phillip attended to official business. In late June 1793 he reported to the Home Secretary, Dundas. And afterwards he discussed the colony’s agriculture and natural products with Banks and Hawkesbury, the President of the Board of Trade, explaining that he would have presented his returns earlier ‘but that I have been much indisposed for several days’. In late July he discussed the formal resignation of his commission as Governor of New South Wales and sought from Dundas the grant of a lifetime pension in recognition of his service. Dundas promised to speak to Pitt on the matter. In due course the administration approved Phillip’s pension effective from the date of his departure from New South Wales, namely 11 December 1792. The pension was half Phillip’s salary as Governor: £500 a year in addition to his naval pay, which would continue to rise as he advanced in seniority. Nor would the pension cease on Phillip ‘attaining any one of those places to which officers look up as rewards for past services’ or to which a commanding officer might in due course expect to be appointed. Phillip had himself suggested the possibility of appointment to a seat on ‘either of the Naval Boards, Colonel of Marines or Greenwich Hospital’. The honour of election as one of the governors of the Greenwich Hospital would have had a touching symmetry given his early education there, but Phillip may have overreached and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty demurred to his request.
Upon arrival in London, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie were outfitted in accordance with the fashion of the time, for which Phillip paid the £30 bill. Each was supplied with two coats – one green and one of pepper and salt mixed cloth – a blue and buff striped waistcoat, slate-coloured ribbed worsted knee breeches, silk stockings, two pairs of fine cotton under-waistcoats faced with spotted muslin dimity, a double-breasted spotted quilted waistcoat and a pair of drab-coloured striped breeches. To complete their transformation, hats, shoes, buckles, shirts and cravats were also added to their wardrobe.
William Waterhouse, the father of Henry Waterhouse, the young man who had cradled the bleeding governor in the boat after his spearing, assisted Phillip in the care of the Aboriginal men. Waterhouse must have been an enlightened and liberal man of his time. He lived in Mount Street, in the heart of Mayfair, one of London’s finest residential precincts. For much of their time in England, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie lodged there. Sydney, who had retired in 1789, also had a town house nearby. Waterhouse allowed his home to be used as the venue for what now seems to have been a bizarre process of acculturation. Language tutors were assigned to the Aboriginal men to improve their reading, writing and spoken English. And Edward Jones, a classically trained musician who lived two doors away and was a favourite of the Prince of Wales, patiently recorded their music and their words while they sang to him in Waterhouse’s drawing room. Waterhouse hired carriages for them, took them to the theatre at Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells, provided each of them with a new pair of gloves and a walking stick, and endeavoured to expose them to many facets of English life. They were taken to visit the sights of London – St Paul’s Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower arsenal and the Woolwich Docks. They were even taken to the biggest news story of the day – the trial of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India.
This curious social experiment obviously had approval from the highest levels of government and Phillip and Waterhouse were duly reimbursed for all of the expenses of food, clothing, entertainment and lodging they incurred. The Aboriginal men were not taken to meet the King but they did meet Sydney, if not in Mayfair, certainly when they stayed at rural Eltham, near Sydney’s country house at Chiselhurst southeast of London. When Yemmerrawannie sickened, Phillip arranged for the leading naval physician Sir Gilbert Blane to ‘bleed and blister’ him. And when he died on 18 May 1794, Phillip ensured that he received a respectable funeral and entry in the burial registry at Eltham Parish Church. Naturally it was a Christian funeral conducted in accordance with the Anglican rite. And Phillip ensured that there was a modest tombstone, which, like Blane’s fees, was paid for by the Crown.
In retrospect, the whole sorry exercise was marred by pathos and incongruity. Unlike the fanfare that greeted Omai, the South Sea islander brought to London by Sir Joseph Banks in 1774, Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie never excited the interest of Londoners and appear to have attracted remarkably little attention. Perhaps Londoners had become more worldly in the preceding twenty years. More likely they were distracted by the war with France and the social upheaval, financial instability and political agitation that accompanied it. They were not so distracted, however, that they ignored the kangaroos that Phillip brought with him. One was placed on display at the Lyceum Museum in the Strand and was on show every day from morning until 8 o’clock in the evening. Many hundreds swarmed to view this curious marsupial – for the not inconsiderable entry price of one shilling.
In July 1793 Phillip asked Dundas whether he was ‘at liberty to leave town’ for Bath. He said that he had given up hope that the Bath waters might remove the pain in his side but he thought that they might ‘in other respects be beneficial’. Each day in Bath a seemingly unending supply of hot water ascends from below the earth’s crust. This iron-rich water originates as rain in the nearby hills, percolates to a great depth through limestone aquifers, and then, under pressure from geothermal energy, rises to the surface along fissures and faults in the limestone. The Celts built a shrine to the hot springs at Bath but the Romans went further and constructed a temple and bathing complex, including a caldarium (hot bath), tepidarium (warm bath) and frigidariuim (cold bath).
In Georgian England, taking the waters became a fashionable pastime for the wealthy and the well-to-do. The water cure involved the repeated imbibing of the unpleasant-tasting mineral waters and a certain amount of discreet bathing, selective immersion and douches of various strengths and concoctions. But drinking was the key. In 1781, John Elliott published an influential account of the medicinal properties of the mineral waters of Great Britain and Ireland. He advised that, ‘The usual method of drinking the water is a glass or two before breakfast and about five in the afternoon. The next day, three glasses before breakfast and as many in the afternoon.’ Of the waters at Bath, Elliott said that they had a slight saline, bitterish and iron taste and sometimes a somewhat sulphurous smell. Although these do not seem to be attractive features, he told his readers that the waters were beneficial in treating many maladies including ‘the stone and gravel’, complaints of the stomach and bowels, disorders of the head and the nerves, and gouty and rheumatic complaints. Kidney stones were a frequent target of the water cure. And it is not inconceivable that the drinking of copious amounts of Bath’s mineral-rich water flushed out the renal stones with which Phillip was probably afflicted. Certainly there is no further reference to the pain in his side suffered in New South Wales.
Not everyone went to Bath for the cure. This Georgian spa town was fashionable throughout most of the century because of its beautiful buildings, its amiable society and the galvanising effect of royal patronage. It had none of London’s squalors and all seemed to be as the architects intended. The Circus, inspired by the Coliseum, actually made you feel as if you were in ancient Rome. And when war with France started in 1793 and European spas became inaccessible, Bath’s popularity increased further. The social life that whirled around the city extended beyond the curative effects of its water. It was all to do with the opportunities for social interaction that it provided, especially in the winter season from October to Easter. These were glamorous events attended by like-minded and often eligible people – fashionable and beautiful as they thought of themselves. Central to the social whirl was the building known as the Upper Assembly Rooms. In his retirement, Phillip would become the owner of an elegant terrace house just along from this emblematic centre of social activity.
The Upper Assembly Rooms were the venue for orchestrated dancing, cards, tea-drinking and a great deal of polite flirtation. Each night the master of ceremonies presided over dancing. Every week there were dress balls and fancy balls. Charles Dickens knew of the allure of these balls. And Jane Austen attended them. Writing decades later, Dickens said that the balls in the Upper Assembly Rooms at Bath ‘are moments snatched from Paradise; rendered bewitching by music, beauty, elegance, fashion, etiquette’. In the ballroom, he explained, and in the long card room, the octagonal card room, the tea room, the staircase and in the passages, in fact everywhere throughout the Upper Assembly Rooms, ‘dresses rustled, feathers waved, lights shone and jewels sparkled … brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectation, gleamed from every side; and look where you would, some exquisite form glided gracefully through the throng’.
The physician Dr Hutton Cooper carried on practice in Bath and Phillip placed himself under his care. By August Phillip had taken up residence at No. 3 South Parade, a grand terrace situated on one of Bath’s better streets. Hutton Cooper was not the only reason for Phillip’s visit. Also in town were members of the Chapman family, at least the mother and several sisters of the young William Chapman, the boy who had written home from New South Wales in May 1792 on the sad state of Phillip’s health. He was regarded, at least by his family, as Phillip’s protégé. Phillip had certainly tried to assist the young William by offering him a place in the First Fleet in 1787 but his mother thought him too young and made him wait another four years. What is clear, however, is that Phillip was much admired by the Chapman family and was on affectionate terms with them. They pursued genteel leisure activities together, including cards and reading.
Reading was both a fashionable pastime and an indirect means of social introduction. The latest novels were available from circulating libraries. Like the Upper Assembly Rooms, the circulating library in Bath was an important feature of the cultural and social life of its residents and visitors. Subscription libraries focussed on scholarly materials but circulating libraries developed to serve general reading interests – in line with popular literature. In fact, the rise of the novel coincided with the rise of the circulating library. For a small fee, readers who belonged to a circulating library could have access to a wide selection of fiction writing, magazines and newspapers. These new libraries proliferated in most major centres, especially in resort and spa towns like Bath, Ramsgate and Cheltenham, where visitors came in the pursuit of leisure. For in truth, the circulating library was a fashionable daytime lounge for ladies and gentlemen that was as indispensable by day as the local assembly rooms were by night. The contemporary Guide to All the Watering & Sea-Bathing Places said that circulating libraries ‘are frequented by all fashionable people’. Indeed, it continued, ‘the taste and character of individuals may be better learned in a library than in a ball-room; and they who frequent the former in preference to the latter, frequently enjoy the most rational and the most permanent pleasure’.
Whether it was to enjoy the most rational and most permanent pleasure of other persons or simply to read books, Phillip joined one of Bath’s circulating libraries on 12 August 1793, probably Marshall’s in Milsom Street. On the following day, Isabella Whitehead joined the same library. It was the custom to subscribe to the library upon arrival in such a place as a means of announcing one’s presence. Phillip and Isabella may not have known each other, and their joining on consecutive days may have been a coincidence, but sooner or later they would inevitably have encountered each other in Bath. Phillip was an eligible and distinguished naval officer whose reputation as the Governor of New South Wales no doubt preceded him. Isabella Whitehead was 43 years of age, unmarried and the daughter of a gentleman of affluent means who was in Bath for the recovery of his heath. In the small community of visitors to Bath, it would have been difficult for Phillip and Isabella not to meet. Each of them represented a slight variation on Jane Austen’s universal truth. He may not have been the archetypal ‘single man in possession of a good fortune’ who ‘must be in want of a wife’ but at her age, Isabella was in need of a husband and she may have been the one with a fortune.
Her parents were both from prominent families involved in the cotton and linen weaving trade in the industrial northwest around Blackburn, Preston and Manchester. The region was littered with hundreds of collieries and produced most of the world’s manufactured cotton. The prestige of Isabella’s father Richard Whitehead was such that in 1759 George II appointed him as the high sheriff of Lancashire, making him the monarch’s sole representative in the county. Fate thus ordained that Phillip and Isabella Whitehead would meet and marry. Like Phillip’s first wife Charlott Denison, Isabella was probably too old to have children but still young enough to enjoy the companionship and comforts, not to mention the respectability, that usually accompany marriage. Their wedding took place on 8 May 1794 at St Marylebone in London, a few weeks before Phillip buried Yemmerrawannie. Within months of the union, Richard Whitehead was also dead. Isabella may not have been her father’s only child, but there is every reason to assume that she was comfortably provided for. And Phillip, it seems, inherited some of his personal effects.
Whatever the precise level of affluence they enjoyed, Phillip and Isabella appear to have spent the first two years of their married life enjoying a charmed social existence, oscillating between Bath and London, entertaining and being entertained, attending card parties, concerts and balls. For card games, they would have played whist, piquet and casino, possibly also commerce, speculation and loo depending on their inclination. They would have listened to music by Handel and Haydn, Corelli, Albinoni and Gluck, as well as that of John Christian Bach – the English Bach. The music of his ultimately more famous father, Johann Sebastian Bach, was not then fashionable. And at the Upper Assembly Rooms, if they chose to participate, Phillip and Isabella would have danced in formation the quadrilles and cotillions of the day. Fashions had changed since the 1760s. The heights of fantasy and outrageous ornamentation to which the French aristocracy adhered before the Revolution, and which the English copied, slipped out of favour. There was a movement towards simplicity, at least relatively speaking. To a greater or lesser extent, powdered wigs, rigidly boned bodices, extravagantly low-necked gowns and ostentatious hoops receded from fashion. The elaborately embroidered silks and velvets of which gentlemen were previously fond gave way to woollen cutaway tail coats in plainer colours, short satin waistcoats, breeches and stockings.
As to transport, this was still the pre-industrial era in which everyone depended on a horse-drawn carriage of one sort or another, or they walked or rode a horse. The 100 mile trip from London to Bath was usually undertaken either by the public stagecoach over several days with multiple changes of horses or in a private coach. Better still was a chaise, a smaller carriage where the horses were controlled by boys riding postilion on the nearside horses. Chaises could be hired, but an Englishman’s dream was to own his own. For shorter distances, and around town, there were lighter vehicles such as the two-wheeled curricle, the pretty landaulet and the barouche. The last was a somewhat superior vehicle suitable for a dowager or a duchess. The phaeton was the young man’s sports car of the horse age. Sedan chairs still existed of course and served a useful purpose within the limits of the strength of two men. They had right of way over pedestrians but they would soon pass out of fashion.
Phillip’s early married life with Isabella was not all frippery. As persons who have held high Office are sometimes inclined to do, Phillip remained interested, even active, in the subject of his former responsibilities. For a time at least, he was frequently in London ‘on matters relative to the colony’. A new office had been established for Dundas, who became known as the Secretary of State for War and took with him the responsibilities of the former Home Office. Phillip volunteered advice to the administration, emphasising the need, among other things, to have a suitable naval vessel stationed permanently in New South Wales. And he communicated with Sir Joseph Banks, expressing his concerns about soldiers selling liquor and settlers profiteering. He was, as always, troubled by ‘individuals making fortunes at the expense of the Crown’ and distressed by the morals and commercial avidity of the ‘trading officers’ from the New South Wales Corps.
Phillip also took the opportunity to assist officers who had served under him, writing and making representations on their behalf. Foremost among them was Gidley King, for whom he sought valiantly and ultimately successfully to obtain an increase in his remuneration. Gidley King was also an intimate friend of the Chapman family and he and Phillip went back a long way together. It was Gidley King who wrote excitedly to the Chapman family when he was appointed to the Ariadne in 1781, informing them that the ship was commanded by Captain Phillip, which he said promised a great deal of happiness. This seems to be the communication that is the origin of the description of Phillip as someone in whom is blended the gentleman, the scholar and the seaman. Others whose interests Phillip sought to advance were Henry Waterhouse, in whose father’s home in Mayfair Bennelong and Yemmerrawannie had been lodged; a midshipman named Donovan who had behaved valorously at the wreck of the Sirius on Norfolk Island; George Johnson, whom Phillip regarded as the most deserving of all the marine officers to come out with the First Fleet; his loyal deputy Hunter, who became Governor of New South Wales in 1795; and Collins, who was the closest of all to Phillip and served as his secretary as well as the colony’s judge-advocate.
In the meantime, the wars waged by the French revolutionary government continued against a number of European states. Austria was the first opponent and from 1 February 1793, Great Britain and the Dutch republic were drawn in. After Napoleon seized power from the revolutionary government in 1799 there was a brief period of peace in 1802–03. But this ‘Peace of Amiens’, as it was known, was only a short interlude between a revolutionary storm that had blown itself out and a Napoleonic storm that was gathering. In May 1803 Great Britain resumed hostilities against France and continued them inexorably until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 and his eventual surrender and exile. This second phase was known as the Napoleonic Wars.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars represented a gilded period for Britain’s navy. The number of naval personnel and the extent of shipbuilding expanded rapidly. And enhanced opportunities for professional advancement proliferated. The figures provide a clear picture. When Phillip sailed for New South Wales in 1787, the number of officers and men borne in navy ships was only 14,514. By 1799 the number had increased almost tenfold to 128,930. The number of ships also increased dramatically – from 411 at the start of the war to 722 by 1799. This was the age of Nelson: a time when chivalric medievalism reached new levels of ambition, when popular culture idealised naval officers, and when Jane Austen’s heroine in Persuasion could say of Captain Wentworth that she loved him because he belongs to ‘a profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance’.
As he readjusted to married life, Phillip must have followed the newspaper accounts of the progress of the war with a keen eye. On the continent, the French mobilised huge armies, supported by mass conscription, and rapidly achieved military success, taking San Sebastian from Spain in 1794, occupying all of Belgium and the Rhineland, and in the following year seizing the Netherlands. By late 1795 Prussia and Spain had ceded substantial territories to France in return for peace. At sea, however, Great Britain prevailed. On 1 June 1794, a few weeks after Phillip’s wedding, the first and largest naval action of the war took place. It became known as ‘The Glorious First of June’. The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan even wrote a play by the same name. Although the battle was only a partial success, it stimulated British patriotism and must have made Phillip’s blood quicken. In the following months, his desire to return to active service could only have increased as newspapers reported that squadrons of the Royal Navy had progressively captured Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia in the West Indies. Then in 1795 other British squadrons captured the strategic ports of Cape Town, Trincomalee and Malacca along the route to the East Indies. Phillip, in the meantime, like every other half-pay Officer, waited to be called.