The First Fleet and London's Dark Satanic Mill

When the British government decided in August 1786 to establish a penal settlement in the south-west Pacific, the Industrial Revolution was still in its early stages.

Some of the occupations of the First Fleet convicts suggest industries that belong to the early Industrial Revolution – silk winder, silk weaver, stocking weaver – but not very many. The vast majority belong to an earlier time – sailor, waterman, shipwright; butcher, baker, fishmonger; mantua maker, shoemaker and milliner; carpenter, cooper, blacksmith.

In August 1786, the first mill in the world to be powered by a (coal-fired) steam engine had been operating for only four months. Located on the banks of the Thames on the southern side of Blackfriars Bridge, the Albion Mill (as it was known) was five storeys high, the mill stones driven by a double-acting rotary engine designed by one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, Boulton & Watt.

It was hailed as a technological revolution: ’In the whole world of Mechanics and Mechanical Architecture, there is no object of greater curiosity than this.’ As Matthew Boulton, the Birmingham-based entrepreneur who commercialised James Watts’ steam engine, explained to James Boswell in 1776, he was selling what the whole world wanted – power.[1]

Albion Mill drove most of London’s water-powered mills out of the market, and when the building burned down in 1791, it was widely thought to have been the result of arson. For William Blake, who lived a short distance away, it was the original ‘dark satanic mill’, Satan being the ‘Miller of Eternity’.

The mill was connected to Australia’s First Fleet in two ways. One of the earliest promoters of the project was the Wapping biscuit baker and London alderman, William Curtis, although he withdrew in early 1784 when the mill was partly built, possibly out of concern at the controversy it would cause. Curtis was the owner of the Lady Penrhyn, which carried female convicts to Botany Bay in 1787, and he and his brother Timothy would invest in a number of the Second and Third Fleet ships owned by the contractors Camden, Calvert & King.

One of the founding partners of the Albion Mill, who joined around the time that Curtis withdrew, was William Matthews, the London agent and financial backer of Matthew Boulton. Boulton and Watt were also major investors. Matthews was the principal owner of the Charlotte, another First Fleet ship, which he sold in 1789, on her return from Botany Bay, to finance his ongoing dealings with Boulton.

Yet another reminder that we need to look at the foundation of the penal settlement in a wider context.

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[1] ‘Mechanics of the First Rank’, The World, 7 February 1787; James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) 22 March 1776.