Whaling Voyages Round the World

John Melville, a descendant of Thomas Melvill, the master of the Third Fleet whaler, Britannia, has recently published a journal kept by his ancestor’s surgeon, David Brown, dealing with a later voyage to NSW in another whaler, the Speedy.

While the Speedy did not carry convicts, Brown’s journal is important to scholars of early European settlement for a variety of reasons.

· Brown does make passing reference to the voyage of the Britannia. We are informed, for example, that they had an outbreak of typhus before they had passed the Bay of Biscay, although it was managed well, and they only lost one 74-year-old man. Since the journal of the Britannia has not survived, this information in invaluable to scholars of transportation in this period.

· There are several chapters describing his time in NSW, with particular focus on the indigenous inhabitants and the flora and fauna. It is Brown who informs us that by the time of the Third Fleet, convicts and emancipists were selling quolls to the visiting ships, which were much more effective than cats in clearing out the rats. (see Catspaw, Native Cats and Ships’ Rats)

· Brown gives us one of the earliest assessments of the founding Governor, Arthur Phillip: ‘he was circumspect, he was principled, and he was persevering’.

· And the journal provides one of the most detailed accounts of whaling in the Pacific in these early years.

John Melville had been studying his illustrious ancestor for some years and was sent a copy of my April 2023 newsletter on the silver cup presented to Captain Melvill by Arthur Phillip for catching the first whale off the NSW coast. The existence of this cup had been known to the vast Melvill/Melville family for some years, but few of them knew where it was until I tracked down its custodian in 2022.

I had mentioned the surgeon’s journal in one of the endnotes to the newsletter and listed the author as D. Brown. To that point in time, the State Library did not know the name of the author. John contacted the library, and when they reached out to me in April 2024, I provided them with my sources. (See News Item, A Surgeon Found.)

John then worked with a Specialist Librarian at the State Library, Janelle Collins, to track down Surgeon Brown, establishing that his first name was David, and then pulling together the details of his life. Janelle has documented her role in this story in an article entitled ‘Doctor Who?’ in the State Library’s magazine, OpenBook, June 2025, pp.89-91. John tells his story in the introduction to ‘Whaling Voyages Round the World’.

In addition to transcribing the handwritten text, John has provided valuable context in his introduction and given us footnotes and an index.

John Melville (trans. & ed.), ‘Whaling Voyages Round the World in the Britannia and Speedy (Capt. Thomas Melville, by David Brown, Surgeon’, Wandsbeck: Reach Publishers, 2025.

The book can be purchased at https://whalingvoyages1791.org/