Tinian, 'Nearly a Terrestrial Paradise'

What is the link between Australia’s First Fleet and the B-29s which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

An article had just been published in the Sunday Times which argues that the bomb-aimer on the Bockscar, the B-29 which dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, probably saved several hundred thousand lives by refusing to release it over the primary target, the industrial city of Kokura, and dropping it at the edge of the secondary target. The official story is that Kokura was obscured by cloud, but the author, Bernard Clark, found no evidence to support that claim. A recording of the mission has the bomb-aimer, Kermit Beahan, saying ‘Never again’ after fulfilling his duty. [2]

What caught my attention in this article was that the Bockscar and the Enola Gay (which dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima) both took off from Tinian, an island in the Northern Marianas where there was an American  airfield. Tinian features prominently in the story of the Charlotte and the Scarborough, two First Fleet ships which made their way to China after offloading their human cargoes in Sydney Cove.

The historic voyage of these two ships has been little studied by historians, who have mostly been interested in the passage to New South Wales with convicts. Three First Fleet transports had been taken up by the East India Company to carry home a cargo of tea, and these were two of them. To enable them to meet their contractual obligations, Governor Arthur Phillip arranged for them to be unloaded first, and in early May 1788, barely four months after they had arrived, the Charlotte and the Scarborough sailed out through Sydney Heads to make their way north through western Pacific.

No one had traversed the Pacific from south to north before, and the two masters, Thomas Gilbert and John Marshall, had no real idea of what lay ahead. Captain Gilbert wrote of the challenges he knew they would encounter:

'. . . in a passage through a track never before explored; difficulties apparently the more insurmountable, because the sickly state of the crew scarcely permitted me to indulge the hope of being able ever to gain the coast of China.'

And then under an entry for the 8th of May:

'I now launched into the Pacific Ocean, with an extensive space of sea before me, through which, as the track I was to pursue had never been explored, there was no chart to guide me, and with the dangers of which I was entirely unacquainted. Whether I should be able to procure any of those refreshments such a passage may render needful, or which obstructions might arise to impede my progress, was equally a matter of uncertainty. The attempt, in a ship of so small a size, and with a crew not exceeding thirty in number, several of whom were boys, carried with it a discouragement unknown to navigators whose purpose it is to explore new regions, and who are properly prepared for it.' [3]

The sickness Gilbert referred to was scurvy. The men of the Charlotte and the Scarborough had had very few fresh provisions since the Cape of Good Hope in October, there being insufficient edible greens and other anti-scorbutics in the bush surrounding the settlement at Sydney Cove to refresh the convicts, their guards and overseers and the crews of 11 ships.

And as Gilbert well understood, it was dangerous for the crews of European ships to make their way ashore on unfamiliar Pacific Islands since they might well be attacked by the inhabitants. He would have been thinking particularly of the Astrolabe and the Boussole of the La Perouse expedition, which had lost 12 men, including the commander of the Astrolabe in a confrontation while loading water and fresh provisions at Maouna in the Navigator Islands (now known as Tutuila, part of American Samoa) in December 1787, shortly before their arrival at Botany Bay.

Gilbert and Marshall briefly touched at Lord Howe Island on their way, where they caught fish and fowl, and collected ‘cabbages’, coconuts and eggs, making sail again within 24 hours. They proceeded north-east, heading well out into the Pacific to skirt around the Philippines, passing to the south of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and encountering and naming the Marshall and Gilbert Islands on their way north. (The Gilbert Islands are known as Kiribati today, but it is the islanders’ pronunciation of Gilbert.)

They sailed close to numerous islands and had fleeting exchanges with some of the inhabitants who came out in canoes. In a couple of places, islanders were coaxed on board, but in spite of their crew members being laid up with scurvy, neither captain was keen to test the islanders’ hospitality by going ashore. As Gilbert wrote of the Marlar Islands, in what is now Kiribati:

'I saw upwards of a hundred of the natives assembled on the point, but whether to greet, or to obstruct our landing, I shall not pretend to say; notwithstanding that appeared so friendly, I did not judge it prudent to put their intentions to the test. . .' [4]

Captain Marshall’s brother, who was suffering badly from scurvy, passed away several weeks later. And by the time they arrived at Tinian in early August, the Charlotte had 11 men down out of 28, and the Scarborough had 15 out of 25 unable to move from their hammocks, with the rest scarcely able to navigate the ships.

At this point in time, Tinian was uninhabited, so there was little risk of an ambush. And Gilbert was aware of what George Anson had said about paradisical Tinian in his trans-Pacific voyage of 1742-43, having discovered wild cattle and hogs, duck, teal and curlews, ‘fruits and vegetables, which were most happily adapted to the cure of sea-scurvy; for the woods produced sweet and sour oranges, limes, guavoes, vast quantities of cocoa-nuts, with the cabbages growing on the same tree. . .’ [5] Anson's heavily scorbutic crew were saved by Tinian's abundance.

While Tinian was not quite the paradise that Anson had described, the men of the Charlotte and the Scarborough did encounter ‘great abundance of cocoa-nuts, cabbages, bread-fruit, wild hogs, fowls, fish, &c. &cc’. They saw several large herds of white cattle but were too weak to take more than a couple of calves. Nor were they strong enough to fetch fresh water from the numerous springs which lay at some distance from the landing place.

Too weak to fully benefit from this cornucopia, they sailed for China five days later. Both crews were still weak and the boatswain of the Charlotte would pass away shortly after they arrived in the Pearl River a month later. But once again, Tinian had saved lives.
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[1] From Thomas Gilbert, Voyage from New South Wales to Canton in the Year 1788, London: J. Debrett, 1789.

[2] Bernard Clark, ‘Did the Nagasaki Bomber “Miss” on Purpose to Save Lives?’, The Sunday Times, 3 August 2025.

[3] Gilbert, op. cit., pp. iv & 4.

[4] Ibid., p. 31.

[5] George Anson, The History of Commodore Anson’s Voyage Round the World, London, 1764, pp. 153-154.

The Charlotte and Scarborough in the Chatham Islands en route to China [1]