2    Emigration – Hostile Ships, Storms and Mutinies

If William and Rebecca had a dream when they emigrated, which there is every reason to believe they did, that dream of a new life in the colony had to endure elements of a savage nightmare en route to its realization. Mutiny, hostile ships and storms plagued the long first sector of the voyage via Rio de Janeiro, not to mention the entertainments of 16 informal ‘marriages’ between female convicts and crewmen.

It is fortunate that two men on board recorded what happened during this near-epic 139 day voyage. Many of the convict transports suffered from storms and plots. What their voyages usually lacked were such accounts as those of the young Irish ship’s surgeon John Washington Price, who was 21 when appointed, and the Irish rebel ‘General’ Joseph Holt gave of the Minerva’s journey. Although this voyage established William Cox’s early reputation for humane treatment of convicts, and also some of his own hopes for the future, he himself appears to have left no notes about it, so his actions are seen only through the other’s men’s eyes and his thinking has to be deduced from his actions.

Joseph Holt, the Irish rebel ‘General’ who became William’s farm manager

Holt had his wife and two children with him. His Memoirs were not collated and edited until 39 years later and are more than a little selfserving, while memory is not always an accurate tool.1 Price described him somewhat scornfully as ‘a quite illiterate man, but possessed of a deal of natural courage and abilities’ who had ‘made himself remarkable in this country [Ireland] for his disloyalty and villainy’.² He was not a convict, having negotiated a deal with the governor at Dublin to go into exile with his wife and children, instead of being tried for treason. His trial and probable execution would have caused more unrest than it was worth. He eventually left the colony in 1817, so could have had little ulterior motive for praising William Cox’s humanity 20 years later, which he also did in recounting his four years as William’s farm manager after they arrived. Holt has understandably been much quoted by historians, though seldom on the voyage.

Price’s detailed, neatly penned, not always daily, log had various accomplished watercolour illustrations pasted in and was amusingly idiosyncratic. ‘I do not mean to keep an exact daily journal,’ he wrote soon after he started it in December 1798, ‘but will give an account of all occurrences that are striking, remarkable or will be hereafter entertaining to my friends; in this facts will be related simply as they happen.’³ How they would be conveyed to his friends he did not explain. Of some 600 surgeons’ logs which have survived, few can be of such immediacy.⁴ An excerpt will give the flavour of his entries, which usually followed notes on the weather and the sick list. On 1 April 1799, long before they sailed, a convict named Kennedy died of fever. Price wrote ‘he was sentenced to transportation for life, but evaded that by escaping to eternity’.⁵

The surgeon had arrived by coach from Dublin in May 1798, only surviving an ambush by highwaymen when a troop of Dragoons chanced by and rescued him. This was after both sides had discharged their firearms and missed! He had also, mildly comically, though not for the woman concerned, got married when chafing at the delays in the Minerva’s sailing. ‘In the meantime,’ he recorded, ‘I took care not to disappoint myself, having got married [on] July 24th [1798] to a lady at Corke, with whom I am convinced I shall be happy in whatever situation fortune places me’. Sadly for her, that did not include sailing to Port Jackson. ‘Indeed,’ he explained to his log, ‘when I got married I did not intend going this voyage, but the Minerva arriving so soon after my marriage prevented me from sending in my intended resignation’.6 In reality the ship had arrived seven months after his marriage, so Price was deceiving only his own journal and its unlikely later readership.

Price and the Coxes were kept waiting by two problems. The Minerva had been lying in the Thames while a dispute raged between her owners and the East India Company, to which she was chartered, over her not having had a proper dry dock survey. The Company had a near-monopoly on transport shipping to the colony. This caused the first delays to her sailing. The sentencing of captives from the Irish rebellion of 1798 caused worse ones. She had originally been scheduled to sail to Ireland in August 1798, but the Coxes did not even arrive at the Cove of Cork until February 1799, on board the ship. They had left their two eldest sons, William and James, at the grammar school in Salisbury and in the care of friends as described in the previous chapter. In the end the ship was to be a year late sailing, so the officers took lodgings in Corke, a little distant from the Cove of Corke, and began what would be a long wait, albeit for Rebecca an eventful one. She was heavily pregnant.

On Sunday 17 March 1799 Price wrote: ‘I was called to see Mrs Cox and found her in strong labour. At ten past 1 AM she was delivered of her seventh son. Both the mother and child are in good health. The child is to be called Francis Edmund Cox, but ought to have been called Patrick being born on his day, but it seems our titular saint is no favourite with Capt. Cox from the unhappy disturbances … in this country.’ All did not stay well for Rebecca after the birth.

On 23 March the surgeon recorded: ‘Mrs Cox worse this day than she has done since she lay in, the milk in her left breast having ceased and every symptom of mastodymia appears … I have put her on a strict anti-phologistic regimen … the child is in good health’. By 31 March he had to cut open her breast and release ‘a very considerable quantity of pus’, which made her easier. She was unable to feed the child except on ‘pap’.7 Strangely, there is nothing more recorded about the baby. It is not mentioned in Price’s subsequent manifest of all on board, though convict babies are. He only lists Rebecca as ‘Captain’s wife’ with Charles, George, Henry and Frederick.⁸ Nothing is said about the child in family records either, but Price was always meticulous about details. The main significance of this birth is that, as suggested in Chapter 1, the child would have to have been conceived the previous July, which undermines the family claims that William first went out to the colony in 1797.

Meanwhile an initial batch of 137 convicts, 19 of them women, had arrived from Dublin on the brig Lively on 19 January 1799 in conditions that displayed the worst aspects of convict transportation. Price found them in ‘the most wretched, cruel and pitiable condition I ever saw human beings in … they were all lying indiscriminately in the ship’s holds on the damp, wet and uneven planks without any sort of covering … half naked some even without the shirt’. He thought that if they deserved death they should have been hung or shot, prior to their departure from Dublin, not treated like this. He immediately had them washed, the men shaved, and provided with clean clothes.⁹ Those conditions were just as bad as that to which the slave traders of the first and second fleets condemned their cargos, vividly described by Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore.¹⁰

Sending criminals to New South Wales (New Holland), America being closed off by Independence, was proposed by Lord Sydney in a letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury dated 10 August 1786.¹¹ Between 1787 and 1868 transportation to the colonies involved 806 ships.¹² The First Fleet, under Governor Phillip, was well organized, but considered expensive. The more cheaply organized Second Fleet was contracted to professional slave traders. It reached Port Jackson in June 1790, involved great brutality and an appalling death rate of 256 men and 11 women, many of whom had already been weakened by imprisonment on the hulks in the Thames estuary.13 Following this, the Home Office paid only for convicts who had been checked and approved on arrival, with a bonus of £4 10s 6d for each convict who arrived safe and sound. Even so the Third Fleet of 11 ships in 1791, organized by the same contractors, saw a toll of 184 dead out of approximately 2000, or 9 percent. Selling the convicts’ food was common – Holt noticed that Salkeld sold some of the Minerva’s at Rio – as was confining them more closely in order to fit in private cargo to sell in the colony. But no financial reward could eliminate the risk of disease, as befell another ship in the Minerva’s small convoy, the Friendship, where crew members as well as convicts died.¹⁴

The brutality declined and the shipboard conditions improved (marginally) after 1801, making most of the later voyages less sensational. In any case, every ship was in some way different, as was every master – however brutal and corrupt – and so was every voyage. Whereas the Hillsborough’s in 1798 has had whole books devoted to it,¹⁵ the relatively humane voyage of the Minerva is seldom mentioned. Its success has presumably gone against the grain of the ‘brutality incarnate’ historians. Even in the quite comprehensive Bound for Botany Bay published by the British National Archives in London, in which watercolours from the surgeon’s log are reproduced, there is not a word about the voyage itself.¹⁶ Yet its extremely low death rate established William’s reputation for humanity in dealing with convicts, even though Price was if anything more responsible for alleviating the conditions. The voyage also provided William with his first direct experience of managing convicts, an aptitude he would refine throughout his life.

The Minerva eventually sailed on 20 August 1799. On the afternoon of the 19th, Price and William became involved in an incident with some locals ashore which displayed tempestuousness in both of them, as well as physical bravery and a touch of arrogance. ‘Captain Cox having spent this afternoon on shore with me, we were insulted by a number of the Cove blackguards and obliged to fight very hard.’ Helped by a soldier and a seaman with them, they ‘procured some sticks and completely beat off a dozen or more of them from the beach’. Price boasted that the locals would ‘remember the Botany Bay men for some time’.17 As throughout his life, William was a man of action, but in this instance seized a boat which Price admits had ‘in some measure created the dispute’. Reading between the lines of Price’s account, it sounds suspiciously as though the two of them, aided by the soldiers, had decided to have a final afternoon’s amusement. The local men had objected and wanted their boat back. The soldiers’ reaction was typical. They gave the locals bloody noses for their cheek.

By contrast, William had not hesitated a few weeks earlier, in June, to go armed aboard a troopship to arrest two deserters. He then exercised a combination of firmness and humanity, Price considering that ‘were it not for Captain Cox’s exertions, they both would have been severely punished’.¹⁸ Throughout the voyage, William would display an inclination to talk tough, but be lenient in his punishments. Thus he warned the convicts that any attempt ‘to contest the command or to force their escape, should be punished with instant death’, yet in the event of the attempted mutiny he only gave the offenders six lashes.¹⁹

The episode with the locals shows that the relationship between William and Price, though amiable, was unstructured. William was an officer. Price was a civilian under contract, not subject to military discipline. In practice this does not appear to have caused problems. It would not be until 1815 that the transport commissioners rectified this by giving the surgeons naval rank as surgeon-superintendents and therefore subservience to the officers.²⁰

On the day of their sailing, Price left his new wife behind, not telling her until that very morning. ‘With a heavy heart I tore myself away from the arms of my dearest wife.’ Only many months later, after the Minerva had gone on from Post Jackson to India, did he whimsically send her a message: by attaching one to the neck of a seabird, a tern, which had briefly rested on board.

Between them, the accounts of Price and Holt enable a good picture to be established of William Cox in his role as officer in charge of the convicts. They reveal something of his character and give indications that he might have already been to the colony and expected to buy a farm, although the conception date of the baby makes this improbable. He is referred to throughout as Captain Cox, and continued to be so-called intermittently after he left the army, to the annoyance of his former fellow officers. This rank is not recorded in the Army Lists.

The most probable explanation is that there was another lieutenant named Maundrell on the ship, junior to William. It would have been logical therefore for William to have been given the local acting rank of captain for the voyage. The absurdly eulogistic Memoirs confirm this by saying: ‘his commission was really that of Lieutenant, but he had command of the troops’.21 However, William managed to be known as Captain Cox for the rest of his life, though not by Governor Macquarie. Price incidentally had an exceedingly low opinion of Maundrell, who on 6 May 1799 took some opium, saying he needed sleep. ‘But in my opinion he has been asleep since he came on board of this ship,’ the surgeon suggested.²² Indeed when the armed confrontation at sea, described below, took place Maundrell discovered himself to be unwell.

The Minerva was a typical three-masted freight ship, built in Bombay in 1773 for charter to the East India Company and not designed as a convict transport.²³ The convicts were held, Price says, in ‘a clear airy prison, being eight feet between decks, with a scuttle to each birth [sic]’ of five men. This deck height was completely exceptional and must have helped to keep the prisoners healthy.²⁴ The ship had a line of square ports on each side and was armed with eight guns, which she was going to need. In order to avoid extra taxation, she was narrow hulled, which meant she rolled in rough seas.

Although Commissioner Bigge wrote his report on the colony 20 years later, some of his observations about transportation are relevant. In his ‘Preface about the Condition and Treatment of Convicts during the Passage to New South Wales’ he considered that a berth of 18 inches for each convict was ‘sufficient’, but that the space allocated to seamen and military guards was ‘scarcely adequate to their accommodation for so long a voyage’. He commented on the captains and surgeons being ‘much interrupted by commercial speculations of their own’ and the ‘temptation for a fraudulent abduction of the Government provisions’. Bigge was referring to what captains did with the convicts’ food on arrival, rather than their selling it off en route, as Salkeld did. But the principle was the same.25 There is no indication that Price so profited, in fact he spent his own money on extra food for the prisoners.

When she finally did sail the Minerva carried 165 male and 26 female convicts, plus three convict children. Another child was born on the voyage and three men died. This extremely low death rate came at what proved to be a turning point in the death rate from conditions on transport ships. The ship’s complement included the Cox family and William’s personal servant, a marines detachment of two sergeants, a drummer and 17 privates, 7 soldiers’ wives, 6 soldiers’ children and several political exiles.²⁶ Two of the exiles were to figure largely in William’s future life. Holt, who has been already been mentioned, had paid for his family’s passage – over which the Commander, Joseph Salkeld, attempted to defraud him – and was acutely conscious that he was not a convict. None the less Price listed him as one, with his wife and children as passengers.

A second exile was the Reverend Henry Fulton, with his wife and two children. A clergyman of the established church, Fulton had been accused of political crimes. Once in the colony, where there was a shortage of Protestant clergy, he was quickly appointed to Norfolk Island as chaplain and rehabilitated. William is thought to have later helped to secure him a living at Castlereagh. There was also a Mrs Davis, a returned ex-convict who was, in Price’s words, ‘now going out again, having got some property in the country’. She was an early example of a convict discovering that life in the colony was more promising than as an ex-convict in England. She and everyone else on the ship are meticulously listed in Price’s log.²⁷

The Minerva’s five-ship convoy sailed in the year before the system of transportation was reviewed in 1801. Her voyage was therefore on the cusp of reform, underlining the ameliorations which William and the surgeon did achieve. It was a period of relatively few sailings. Between the Third Fleet and 1801 only 18 transports sailed and the death rate, despite the Hillsborough’s hideous percentage, fell to around 2 percent. Even so Minerva’s rate of 1.5 percent was notably low. In fact Price considered that two of the three men who did die would have done so anyway, being elderly and unfit, had they remained on land. This is not to suggest that conditions in the prison were anything other than squalid, despite the eight foot headroom. Convict ships were usually infested with lice and vermin. A stench of rot and excrement rose from the bilges. Yet Holt remembered the Minerva as being ‘well found and fitted for her voyage. Everything appeared clean, orderly and proper on board.’ Salkeld had ‘fitted up a little cabin for me, Mrs Holt and my son, off the steerage and we were most comfortable’.28 Price was less lucky, being once thrown out of his bunk during a storm. The Coxes’ cabin was not described.

The August sailing date meant that the hottest season was encountered in the tropics, with all the stifling discomfort which that entailed. On Saturday 8 September Price recorded: ‘All the convicts were crying and complaining of the excessive heat in the prison … those I found most distressed I ordered on deck’.²⁹ William saw to it that the convicts were allowed up in turns for regular exercise and fresh air on deck, despite Salkeld’s opposition on the grounds that there was no quartermaster available to keep watch on them. At William’s request, Holt stood in for the quartermaster. It can only have been this fresh air and exercise that did the trick for the men’s survival. Even so, later on in the voyage, on 11 October, despite all precautions, a fever began to appear. It was typhus of a ‘putrid, malignant tendency’, Price wrote. He isolated the victims and had the prison ‘cleaned, washed and some parts of it rubbed over with oil of tar’.³⁰

Curiously, William thought some convicts were being too leniently treated. When they were two weeks out, at Lat. 30.50N, he ordered the men to be put back into irons, ‘as they were all now in good health and spirits’.³¹ On 12 September Price recorded, in his neat handwriting: ‘We began putting in irons those whom illness and indulgence kept out of them these six months past … they were now all in good health and spirits, there were a few left without irons and a few in single irons to clean the prison and attend those who should be ill.’32 This seems, today, a perverse reaction on William’s part and is out of character with Holt’s descriptions of him. Life was not easy in the prison, with the fit men lying in irons on crowded bunks in sweltering heat. Nonetheless the sick list averaged only 27 to 30 per day, out of the 194, a tribute to Price. Their diet saved most from scurvy.

The women convicts did not lie in irons. Sixteen of the 26 lay with the soldiers or the crew. One area of the ship’s life over which neither Salkeld nor William exerted any more than minimal discipline, probably because in practical terms it would have been too difficult, was the sexual relationships of the women. Price wrote on 5 September: ‘the sailors were claiming a wife each from amongst the female convicts and in a little time sixteen of the women got husbands for the voyage amongst the sailors and soldiers, on the conditions that for the first offence they would be put down and confined for the remainder of the voyage [presumably on either William’s or Salkeld’s orders]’. Price continued wryly ‘It is singular that in all these matrimonial engagements, they dispensed with the usual ceremonies even to a man, they drank a good quantity of grog on the occasion’.³³ It seems odd that they were able to obtain liquor, presumably from the crew.

Other commanders and Commissioner Bigge (later on) had plenty to say about this sexual activity. Captain Ralph Clark, writing about such conduct during an earlier voyage of the Friendship, said ‘These damned troublesome whores. I would rather have a hundred men than have a single woman’.³⁴ Bigge was more analytical, also referring to the Friendship, and hitting the nail on the head so far as the Minerva was concerned as well: ‘No precautions were adopted by the captain or surgeon to prevent an improper intercourse between the crew and the convicts … In consequence of this neglect, a very general intercourse took place between the crew and the female convicts.’ Attempts to restore authority were ‘opposed by the vicious inclinations of the women themselves’.³⁵ The worst punishment available was to cut off their hair, although a few were flogged on other voyages. This said, there is no hint in Price’s log that there was any unpleasantness involved. But without doubt, Salkeld, Cox and he never exerted control, or perhaps felt that the crew and soldiers had a right of access to the women. Many years later William’s evidence to Bigge showed that he regarded the primary function of women in colonial society was as wives, definitely not as whores.

The historian Joy Damousi has made some interesting points about this, observing that before 1816 women convicts did not have a rigidly supervised and structured routine on board. ‘Convict women [then] would certainly have had more opportunity to enter into sexual liaisons with their officers and seaman.’36 In the Minerva’s time the ships carried a mix of sexes, while her study is primarily about a later period. However, on female convict ships, ‘a concern with order and potential chaos was a concern with the interaction between the “public” and the “private” [space] on ships’. A private space, such as the crew enjoyed, became ‘the arena of chaos and disorder … through sexual promiscuity’.³⁷ This gave the women power. At the same time, ‘domesticity was conflated with femininity’. It seems likely that a combination of these factors resulted in the Minerva’s ‘marriages’. But as the log establishes, there is no hint of disorder in Price’s account, rather an air of tolerant detachment.

The voyage suffered numerous alarms en route, as already mentioned. On 26 September they had ‘repeated information of different plots by convicts to take the ship from us’ and kill an informant. The most treacherous were transferred to the strong room. Price commented that the information ‘would have hung many of them in a Court of Justice, yet we still wishing to bring them to Botany Bay without flogging any of them’.³⁸ The actual mutiny attempt came to a head a few days later, curiously triggered by an encounter with hostile warships.

On 30 September they encountered ‘two strange sail’ at Lat 6.48N, and a charade of flying false colours ensued, in which each side attempted to bluff the other. This was in the same latitude as Recife (Pernambuco) in Brazil although, no longitude being given, it is not clear how far offshore they were. The strange ships apparently assumed the Minerva might be worth capturing, while Salkeld was rashly imprudent in preparing to fight, given the relative strengths of their armaments. He hoisted a Danish flag on the Minerva and fired a gun, whereupon the strangers ran up English colours and fired back, though at a distance. When within ‘gun and a half shot’ range Salkeld changed to the English flag and the strange ships took down their English colours and hoisted Portuguese. They were now close enough to each other for the Minerva’s crew to see that the two enemy ships were either Spanish or Portuguese and well armed. The larger had 30 guns and the other ship 14.

If they were Spaniards, and enemies, they were too powerful to take on. If they were Portuguese and allies, in Price’s phrase: ‘we had nothing to do with them’. The Minerva therefore made all sail to escape, the enemy’s shots fell far short, and ‘night coming on we never saw them again’. Price commented: ‘we showed more courage then wisdom’ and stood to gain nothing, because if the Minerva had taken them, she lacked letters of marque to be a privateer and would not have been able to profit.39 It had been a risky confrontation, probably motivated by Salkeld’s greed.

This appears to be the incident related by Holt in his Memoirs, when he was requested by the chief mate, Harrison, to man a swivel gun on the poop and asked if he would fight. ‘I answered “yes”,’ said Holt, ‘but I answered with mental reservation.’ His plan was to turn the gun on the ship’s crew, had they been boarded, in the hope of freeing his fellow Irish prisoners. Harrison became suspicious afterwards, but Holt managed to talk his way out of it, even though he had chosen those who should mutiny and ‘they knew my mind by a secret signal’.⁴⁰

Holt had a more convoluted character than William may have realized. One of the curiosities of the voyage was the warm relationship which blossomed between them. One of the Irish rebel’s numerous tributes to William’s humanity was followed after 8 October when a further conspiracy by nine convicts to seize the ship and murder the officers was discovered by Price. ‘We have had very great hopes,’ Price wrote, ‘that in no instance during the voyage … we should have any occasion to punish these too unfortunate men.’ The ‘we’ can only mean William, at whose discretion convicts would be punished. He ordered four of the plotters to be tied to the capstan and given six lashes each by the boatswain – an extraordinarily modest sentence for actions that might have earned them the yardarm on other ships. Price commented: ‘it was but a slight punishment, but we hope it will have the effect.’41

With these dangerous events behind them, the Minerva reached Rio de Janeiro on 19 October, staying to obtain provisions until 7 November. Here was revealed a commercially exploitative side to William’s activities, recorded by Holt but not remarked on by Price. ‘Captain Cox brought with him,’ Holt says, ‘watches, beaver hats, calicoes, shawls, glass of various kinds, cutlery etc.’ During the voyage he had had the watches, which were cheap ‘London’ ones, embellished by a jeweller convict on board. This was a craft William knew all about. He sold the various goods ‘at an incredible profit … one day his servant was so loaded with dollars, the produce of Capt Cox’s dealings on shore, that it was with difficulty we brought him into the ship’. In this account Holt interjected the caveat ‘but this gentleman’s traffic was fair and honourable’.⁴² It might have been more truthful to say that officers of the New South Wales Corps were renowned for their commercial dealings on the side and that William must have already absorbed the tradition. Whilst in Rio he bought a heifer and a calf to take to the colony. This could be an indication of his farming plans, although it was not an uncommon thing for officers to do.⁴³

The purchase could also be held to substantiate the unproven family correspondence, which states that William had visited the colony in 1797. The possibility is supported by such circumstantial evidence as his being sufficiently knowledgeable to take that stock of cheap goods with him on the Minerva to trade in Rio de Janeiro, as could the rapidity with which he offered Holt as job as farm manager on their arrival in Port Jackson. ⁴⁴ Equally, he might have been given a few tips on how to exploit the voyage out by other officers.

Price, on the other hand, bought tea, sugar and portable soup to help keep the sick alive on the second leg of the voyage to Port Jackson – presumably at his own expense. This again emphasizes the 22-year-old surgeon’s concern for his convict charges. This second leg was uneventful, apart from stormy weather, which pitched Price out of his berth four times. The third death took place on 2 December, of a 67-year-old of ‘decay of nature’. Price had noted on 16 November that ‘the old men among the convicts, some of which are 70, 80 and 85 years old continue very weak and languid’.45

When they reached Port Jackson on 11 January 1800, after an overall voyage of 139 days, Price’s sick return was minimal. No soldiers were ill, one was convalescent, one wife was convalescent. Nine convicts were sick and eight convalescent. Only the three male convicts had died, while one convict child had been born. The eulogistic references to this voyage by William’s grand-daughters in the Memoirs are justified, which say that the health of the prisoners ‘was due beyond a doubt to the influence of Captain William Cox’.⁴⁶ The only incident to mar the ship’s arrival happened when a small boat came alongside and its occupant, taking no notice of a sentry’s warning, was shot through the heart. Interestingly, even though some convicts had plotted to run him through with his own sword in the mutiny, Price had got to know the others well enough to be aware that they expected to get farms and lodgings on arrival. ‘I did not distress them, by contradicting them,’ he wrote.⁴⁷

Three days after their arrival, William made an offer to Holt. ‘The Governor has promised me six men’, Holt quotes him as saying, ‘and you may be one of them, if you please, not to labour, but to superintend.’ Holt angrily rejected the offer, since he was not a convict. He had lodged his family with another Irish exile friend, Maurice Margarot, but rapidly realized that he needed a job and a house or he was likely to be homeless and unemployed. He acquiesced a week later when on 22 January William said he ‘was in treaty for the purchase of a farm of one hundred acres from Mr John Macarthur’. Would Holt (who had been a farmer) look it over? ⁴⁸

In summary, William had arrived at his chosen destination for a new life. He had successfully brought his wife and children with him. He may have shipped out the family portraits, now at Clarendon, as testimony to his lineage, in the way that a twentieth-century age of settlers shipped their antiques to African colonies when the Great War was over. He had also, though he probably did not yet realize it, made a reputation for himself for both humanity and ability. Next he had to acquire a farm: and from Holt’s account, wasted no time doing so, if it was not already arranged.

One of the last New South Wales entries in Price’s log, while he was waiting for the Minerva to leave again for India, describes a trip to Parramatta and ‘the plantations and inclosures [sic] belonging to a few houses on each side the river’. Among them was ‘a little box belonging to Mr Cox, a small distance from the water’.49 There can only have been one ‘Mr Cox’ in Price’s mind. This ‘box’ appears to have been Brush Farm, where the original farmhouse, although some way from Parramatta at Ryde, was close to the river, suggesting that William was already either the owner or the prospective one. Of his future military duties, he does not seem to have spoken. A paymastership was not a career move, but it was a financial one.