Botany Baymen or Botany Bay Ships?
It was conventional to speak of ships which routinely sailed to the East and West Indies as East and West Indiamen, but is it appropriate to use the term, ‘Botany Baymen’? I argue that it is, but Dan Byrnes, an Australian historian who has made a number of significant discoveries over the years, disagrees with me. The following is the evidence which justifies my position.
Gary L. Sturgess
7/16/20241 min read
The term ‘Botany Bay ships’ was so widely used throughout the 1780s and 1790s that there is no question about the appropriateness of that term. The earliest example I have been able to find is a list published in the Calcutta Gazette of the East India Company’s ships at China on the 20th of October 1788, which included ‘Three Botany Bay Ships’. Dozens of examples can be produced over the following decades, in private correspondence as well as newspaper reports: the latest I have found is in a speech to the House of Commons in May 1949.[1]
The earliest use of ‘Botany Bayman’ (that I have found) is in a letter written from Bombay in December 1792 by the agent of the Third Fleet contractors, Camden Calvert & King: ‘My last letters to You were by the Queen Bottany BayMan. . .’. In another letter around the same time, he referred to the Queen as a ‘Botany bay ship’.[2]
Two years later, when the British papers reported an attempted mutiny on the Surprize, they described her as a ‘Botany Bay man’. But the term was also used in the maritime community: two East India ship journals from 1797 employ this phrase. The latest I have located (thus far) is from 1801, when there were reports of another attempted mutiny on a ‘Botany Bay man’.[3]
Interestingly, by the 1840s, the convicts seem to have referred to Botany Bay as ‘the Bay’, and the transports as ‘bay ships’.[4]
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[1] Calcutta Gazette, 18 December 1788, p. 1; Bradford Observer, 21 May 1949, p. 2.
[2] John Tasker to John Hunter, n.d., but c. 22 December 1792, & John Tasker to Mr Holmes, 22 December 1792, Tasker Archives, Pembrokeshire Record Office, D/TE/2, pp. 72 & 78.
[3] Edinburgh Advertiser, 28 October 1784, p. 5; Journal of the Royal Charlotte, 10 January 1797, British Library, OPR L/MAR/B/150N; Journal of the Alfred, 20 July 1797, British Library, IOR L/MAR/B/140H; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 26 January 1801, p. 4.
[4] Linus W. Miller, Notices of an Exile to Van Dieman’s Land, Fredonia, NY: 1846, p. 241.
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