The Botany Bay Medallion

‘Pitt’s  [Seven Years ] war strategy set the pattern of colonisation for the next one hundred years’. Vanessa Collingridge, Captain Cook, Ebury Press, 2003.

1788 – Australia: Britain’s invasion of New Holland, now Australia, must be seen in context of the Elder Pitt’s ‘war strategy’.  In reality ‘one hundred years’ of war and conquest 1763 – 1868.

‘The decision to colonise New South Wales cannot be isolated from the strategic imperatives of the world’s first truly global struggle, the Seven Years’ War (1757-63)’.  Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, Third Ed. Cambridge University Press, 2008

The North American theatre of the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 1763) saw Lieutenant James Cook RN distinguish himself as a talented mathematician, a brave navigator and exceptional map-maker.

‘It was on that expedition that Cook first learned from a British army officer [ Samuel Holland] how to make maps….He mastered the technique of translating the three [3 ] dimensions of landmarks, shores, rocks and shoals precisely and exactly onto two [2] dimensional charts’. Arthur Herman, To Rule The Waves, Hodder and Stoughton, 2005

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Sydney Cove – 1790 June 1 : ‘We had now been [thirty-six] months from England in which long period …we had been entirely cut off, no communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th May, 1787, the day of our departure from Portsmouth.

Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail…at every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardige, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961

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Sydney – 1790, June 3: ‘Great change came with the  Second Fleet of the first companies of the New South Wales Corps.[among them] Lieutenant John Macarthur  – a central figure in the military ‘mafia’ which quickly established itself as Australia’s first governing and property owning elite’. Nigel Rigby, Peter Van Der Merwe & Glyn Williams, National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Pacific Explorations, Voyages of Discovery from Captain Cook’s Endeavour to the Beagle, Bloomsbury, Adlard Coles, 2018

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Sydney Headquarters – 1790,  December 13:  ‘The governor pitched upon me [Tench] to execute the…command…those natives who reside  near the head of Botany Bay….put ten [10] to death…bring in the heads of the slain [and] two [2] prisoners to  execute in the most most public and exemplary manner;…my fixed determination to repeat it, whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side, shall render it necessary’.  His Excellency Governor Arthur Phillip RN, General Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench

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