Two Ships Too Many

Michael Flynn is an Australian historian, and among other things, the author of The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790, published in 1993. He is a friend and colleague, and we agree on many things – but one topic where we agree to disagree is the size of the Second Fleet.

Apart from the Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize, Michael includes the Lady Juliana, which carried out female convicts in 1789, and the Justinian, commissioned at the last minute to transport stores. He does this (I think) because he started the project while living in Australia, and these five ships arrived in Port Jackson within four weeks of one another.

I started my research while living in England and I was focused on the contractual arrangements for the various ships, so I was paying a great deal more attention to how they were commissioned and when they sailed.

The Lady Juliana left Plymouth in July 1789, six months before the other four – the Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize sailed from Portsmouth, and the Justinian from Falmouth.

But the Lady Juliana had been commissioned in November 1788 and taken into pay in mid-December. The advertisement for the Second Fleet wasn’t published until nine months later, and the contract signed in August 1789. Approval wasn't given to commission a storeship until early November, when it became clear that there wasn’t sufficient tonnage in the Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize to carry out all of the convicts and necessary stores. So the Justinian’s charter party wasn’t signed until twelve months after the contract for the Lady Juliana.

The contractor responsible for the Lady Juliana was the First Fleet contractor, William Richards. The broker for the Second Fleet was George Whitlock, acting as an agent for the mercantile partnership of Camden, Calvert & King, who supplied two of the three ships. The charter party for the Justinian was signed direct with her owner, William Hamilton.

Moreover, the contract for the Lady Juliana was structured differently. Richards was paid a rate of 9/6d per ton per month for the ship, and 6d per convict per day for the sea provisions. By contrast, Camden, Calvert & King agreed to a flat rate of £17.17.6 per convict for every convict embarked on the Neptune, Scarborough and Surprize, which meant that they had a strong financial incentive to complete the voyage as quickly as possible, and to feed the convicts only what was strictly necessary.

There can be no question that the contractual conditions contributed to the very different outcomes of their respective voyages: the Lady Juliana lost only one of her convicts, while the Second Fleet had an average mortality rate (for the voyage itself) of 26%. Because she was carrying stores and not convicts, the charter party for the Justinian was completely different.

The Lady Juliana had a slow voyage, the Justinian a fast one, which is why they arrived off the coast of NSW within days of each other. Donald Trail, the master of the Neptune, was the de facto commodore of the Second Fleet; the masters of the Lady Juliana and the Justinian had nothing to do with him or with each other in the course of the voyage.

And contemporaries didn’t think of them as one fleet. William Richards was appalled by the mortality on the Second Fleet, writing to Sir Joseph Banks about the low price which the government had agreed with Camden, Calvert & King. And when Elizabeth Macarthur, the wife of NSW Corps Lieutenant John Macarthur, arrived on the Scarborough, she wrote to her mother, describing the arrival of the Lady Juliana on the 3rd of June, the Justinian on the 21st, and ‘our fleet’ by the 29th.

I appreciate that for the residents of the infant colony, the arrival of these five ships within weeks of one another was a momentous occasion, but viewed through a contractual lens, there’s no question that the Second Fleet consisted only of the Neptune, the Scarborough and the Surprize. Michael and I continue to disagree.

Anthony Calvert, Managing Partner of Camden, Calvert & King (detail), Trinity House, Tower Hill, London.