'That Most Useful Body of Men' - Lecture on the First Fleet Marines

On the 13th of May, I was privileged to deliver the annual lecture for the Sydney-Portsmouth Sister City Committee at the Sydney Town Hall, on the subject of ‘”That Most Useful Body of Men” – The Marines in First Fleet Society’.

It was based on an article I have written with Glen Lambert, which is about to be published in The Great Circle, the journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History. Because of the large number of marine descendants present, I provided more social history than in the article – what the marines looked like and how they and their families lived while in the colony.

Many of the marine records have been lost, so that most of their descendants have no idea when or where their ancestor was born, when or where they joined the service, or, if they went home, what happened to them afterwards. And while there has been one book and a number of articles published over the years, no serious work has been done on why the marines were chosen and not the army or what they did day-to-day on the outward voyage and in the colony. What research has been done on how well they performed is superficial or simply wrong.

The forthcoming article will address some of these shortfalls, but I have decided to return to the subject of the marine commander, Major Robert Ross, a man who was deeply flawed, but who (in my view) has been misunderstood even by the historians have given him some attention.