About this project

Botany Baymen were the ships which carried convicts and cargoes to and from the British penal colony at New South Wales in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – in the same way that ships engaged in trade with the East Indies were known as East Indiamen. The terms ‘Botany Baymen’, ‘Botany Bay ships’, or simply ‘Bay ships’ appear in a number of contemporary sources.

Botany Bay is a small inlet on the south-east coast of Australia, named by the maritime explorer, James Cook, in 1770. It was the preferred location when the Pitt administration resolved in August 1786 to establish a penal settlement in the south-west Pacific. When it proved to be unsuitable for a settlement of around one thousand people, the Governor-elect, Arthur Phillip, selected a site in Port Jackson, nine miles to the north, the location of Sydney today.

But the name stuck, and by 1800, ‘Botany Bay’ had become a synonym for any remote penal settlement: in the 19th century, French Guiana was described as 'a French Botany Bay', and an island in the eastern Pacific claimed by the Chilean government was referred to as ‘a sort of Botany Bay’.

So when British children in the late 19th century played the memory game, ‘Here Comes an Old Soldier from Botany Bay’, they meant someone who had returned home from the former penal colony. And when Australian primary school children in the late 20th century sang ‘Bound for Botany Bay’, they were not referring to the stretch of water which lies immediately to the south of Sydney’s airport.

This website is concerned with the ships which made their way to and from New South Wales in the years between 1788 and 1800 – naval transports commissioned to carry out convicts and stores, ships of the Royal Navy and other European powers, merchant vessels which arrived with consumer goods for sale, whalers and traders who came into port to wood and water – and the economy which developed to service them.

About the author

Gary L. Sturgess AM is an academic and former public servant from Sydney, Australia. He has a number of convict ancestors, including a great-great-grandfather transported for stealing books.

After leaving government in 1993, Sturgess spent 25 years studying public service contracting. When he relocated to London in 2000, he started researching the contractual arrangements used for transporting convicts to Australia in the early years of European settlement, and the legal, financial and managerial systems which underpinned it.

He has delivered a number of academic papers, and published articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as The Mariner's Mirror, The Great Circle and the Australian Economic History Review, and essays on the operation of this system. Sturgess has appeared several times on the Australian edition of the television documentary series, 'Who Do You Think You Are?'

In tracking down the descendants of those involved in the early years of the Botany Bay system, he has located several significant artefacts from the period, including a miniature of a NSW Corps captain who arrived on Australia's Second Fleet (now in the possession of the State Library of NSW), and a silver cup presented by Governor Arthur Phillip to the captain of the first ship to catch a whale off the NSW coast. He currently has a series of 'research notes' being published in The Great Circle, the journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History.

In 2012, prompted by a conversation with Wayne Johnson, then the archaeologist at The Rocks (the site of the original settlement in Sydney Cove), Sturgess started detailed research to establish the place where the founding Governor of Australia, Arthur Phillip, came ashore in Sydney Cove on the morning of the 26th of January 1788. Among other reasons, this matters because Sydney Cove (and not Botany Bay) is the site where European invasion began. His research is based on documents, maps and drawings that have come to light in the more than 50 years since the question was last seriously considered. He also led a media campaign, which resulted in a port-a-loo that had been erected next to the landing site being removed.