SMALLPOX – A LETHAL WEAPON- BOSTON 1775; ROBERT ROSS & DAVID COLLINS – SYDNEY 1789; MAJOR ROSS & CAPTAIN COLLINS
‘From time to time throughout history, peoples and governments around the world have used micro-organisms as efficient and cost-effective weapons of mass destruction’. Professor Dorothy H. Crawford, The Invisible Enemy, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
BOSTON
In 1763, in the earliest recorded deliberate release of a virus, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, British Commander-in-Chief in North America, authorized the distribution of smallpox-contaminated blankets to native Americans who were harassing European settlers around the garrison at Fort Pitt in Pennsylvania’. Crawford. op. cit.
1756-1763: General Thomas Gage served as second-in-command to General Amherst during the British North American Indian theatre of the Seven Years War.
‘We gave them [Indians] two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital, I hope it will have the desired effect’. Amherst, cited Professor Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana, The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, 2001
At Fort Pitt, present day Pittsburgh, General Gage was implicated in the distribution of these blankets to local Indian tribes.
“This act had the sanction of an impressive array of British officers, including Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief at the time, and General Thomas Gage, who replaced Amherst and signed off on reimbursements for the “Sundries” used ” to convoy the Smallpox to the Indians”. Fenn. op. cit.
Œ
1775 – Massachusetts,April: ‘In mid-April Governor Gage at Boston received specific instructions…beyond his resources…to put down the rebellion in [that] colony’. But he decided to seize the main dump of rebel supplies in the village of Concord’ J.R. Christie, Crisis of Empire, Great Britain and the American Colonies 1754-1783, Edward Arnold, London, 1966
Concord: To destroy the rebel’s cache of gunpowder and armaments Gage ordered seven hundred (700) troops march from Boston to Concord, a distance less than twenty (20) miles.
Lexington: En-route a small group of rebel Patriots challenged the British at Lexington.
Causalities were heavy on both sides. But Gage’s ‘column‘ was able to push onto Concord ‘where the British carried out its operations’.
‘The [rebellious] Americans had the inestimable advantage of the presence of a commander-in-chief, who, whether or not he was a great general, was assuredly a great man’. H. E. Egerton, The Causes and Character of the American Revolution, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1923
The Patriot rebels whose catch-cry ‘no taxes without [parliamentary] representation’, were led by General George Washington.
The colonists however were not as one. Loyalists remained faithful to the Crown and fought their fathers and brothers alongside English and German troops.
§
News of the Concord skirmish had spread like wildfire. As the British pulled out for the return to Boston they were harassed by local Patriot militia.
What begun as an orderly retreat very nearly turned into a rout. The British lost seventy-three (73) killed and one hundred and seventy-four (174) wounded.
Causalities among Gage’s officers and nco’s were particularly high. This the first major engagement of America’s Revolutionary war, known as the Battle of Bunker (Breeds) Hill ended in stalemate.
Boston: Among the four thousand (4,000) British troops now trapped in Boston were two (2) senior ‘First Fleeters’ Marine Lieutenant Robert Ross and David Collins then a young marine subaltern.
An army of Massachusetts [Patriot] militia swarmed to the siege of Boston’. The English remained holed-up in Boston for just on a year.
‘Nothing instilled fear in American soldiers and civilians so much as the prospect that the British might use smallpox as a weapon of war…[General] Washington’s unheralded and little-recognised resolution to inoculate the continental forces must surely rank with the most important decisions of the war’. Professor Fenn. ibid.
§
Inoculation: Boston had a very intimate relationship with smallpox inoculation. As early as 1721-23 ‘arm-to-arm’ inoculation using ‘variolous matter’ had been successfully practised there.
In 1721 smallpox struck Boston. The Reverend Cotton Mather, a man usually associated with the infamous ‘Salem Witch Trials’, was impressed when Onesimis his West African slave instructed him in the ancient art of inoculation to protect against the ‘speckled monster’.
The Chinese had for centuries sniffed dried smallpox scab matter with similarly successful outcomes. Although not perfect both methods saved many lives.
In 1723 Lady Mary Wortley Montague, wife of Britain’s Ambassador to Turkey based in Constantinople, present day Istanbul, was introduced to the practice of inoculation by ‘the ladies of the harem’.
Their method was to make a fine incision in the arm. A thread contaminated with a minute amount of pus from a smallpox vesicle was then passed through the wound. In the majority of cases there would be a mild fever and complete recovery.
On returning to England Lady Mary, who had lost a brother to the virus, and herself bore its disfiguring pock-marks worked to have the practice accepted.
She had some success among her own educated class. At Sunday services Protestant Rectors and Catholic Priests however preached God was simply punishing the lower classes for their sins.
So progress towards widespread acceptance of inoculation was slow.
But in America General Washington who too bore pock-marking from an earlier encounter with smallpox made what Elizabeth Fenn characterised as the ‘the most important decision of the war…his] unheralded and little-recognised resolution to inoculate the continental forces must surely rank with the most important decisions of the war’. Professor Fenn. ibid.
During the year-long Siege of Boston General George Washington recruited local and overseas fighters and inoculated them.
1776 – July: After America’s formal Declaration of Independence in July 1776 many experienced French officers, led by Marquis Lafayette and Frederick Von Sterben the Prussian ‘drill-master’, joined Washington’s Continental Army’.Fenn. ibid.
He insisted the ‘Continental Army’ be inoculated (invariolated) against the Speckled Monster.
Boston: At the end of the Siege, to save Boston from obliteration by artillery bombardment, Washington permitted the British undertake an orderly evacuation by sea to Nova Scotia.
‘Military and naval experience started new ideas of hygiene…Smallpox inoculation [ Britain] began to have significant results from about 1760’. Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 1983.
Inoculation: It is highly likely Major Robert Ross, commander of the Sydney marine garrison and, Captain David Collins the Sydney settlement’s judge-advocate, although no lawyer its senior law man, benefited their earlier experience at Boston and brought with them knowledge of inoculation and the the yin and yang of smallpox ‘variolous matter’.
Yin-yang smallpox inoculation played a dual role; infect to protect – infect to destroy. In the British army, by the mid -18th century inoculation, invariolation, using either arm-to-arm or dried scab-matter, was established practice.
§
‘The final battles of the American Revolution were fought not in North America but in India, another theater where Britain and France were vying for political dominance. In both the United States and India as well as throughout the developing world legacies of that distant war persist‘ .Essays in the American Revolution – A World War, Ed.???????
In October 1781 Britain’s loss to Washington’s army at the Battle of Yorktown marked the beginning of the end. By the end of 1782 the shooting war was over in the American theatre.
Paris – 1783: After lengthy negotiations the American War of Independence came to a formal end with the Treaty of Paris signed at the palace of Versailles in September 1783.
Britain lost her ’empire in the west’ North and South Carolina, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia.
Under the treaty terms Britain also lost the right to export convicted criminals to America
Previously, between 1718 and 1775 twice yearly, tied to Assize and County Court Sittings, Britain had exported approximately fifty thousand (50,000) convicted criminals reprieved death on condition of exile from the realm…for transportation to America’ where their ‘service’ was sold to plantation owners.
Paris – 1784: At least two (2) attempts to resume the lucrative convict trade were made before the Treaty of Paris was ratified in May of 1784.See: Mutiny on Swift and Mercury.
After eight (8) years of war and two (2) years searching for a suitable place to send those sentenced for ‘banished from the kingdom‘…‘His Majesty [George III] has thought it desirable to fix upon Botany Bay’ on the island continent of New Holland.
There their ‘service was for the state’. That ‘service was as combatants. All male convicts on the ‘First Fleet’ were rationed as troops serving in the West Indies.
§ From Boston – Sydney – smallpoxssssss end here
1718-1775: Between 1718 and 1775 Britain exported approximately fifty thousand (50,000) convicted criminals to America.Twice yearly, tied to Assize and County Court Sittings, some convicts reprieved death on condition of exile ‘from the realm’, were sentenced ‘for transportation to America’.
There they were sold at regular ‘slave scrambles’ to plantation owners. Most men were unskilled. They served their sentence labouring alongside African slaves shipped to America to work the tobacco and cotton fields.Women and children were purchased as house-servants.
Paris – September 1783: After lengthy negotiations the conflict ended formally in September 1783 with the Treaty of Versailles. Under its terms Britain lost her thirteen (13) ‘New World’ colonies; North and South Carolina. Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia.
After eight (8) years of war, three (3) years of inertia, Brexit-like argy-bargy and, a failed assassination attempt, ‘His Majesty [George 111] has thought advisable to fix upon Botany Bay [New Holland ] to replace America as its primary penal destination.
London – 21 August 1786: ‘Orders had been issued [6 August] for the transportation of six hundred and eighty (680) males and seventy (70) female convicts to New South Wales [with] two [2] companies of marines to form a military establishment’. Historical Records of New South Wales
Numbers were later amended. Four [4] companies of two hundred and forty-five (245) marines accompanied five hundred and eighty-three (583) male convicts and one hundred and ninety-three (193) female convict camp-followers.
‘When able Feign Inability, When deploying troops, Appear not to be’. Sun-Tzu Penguin ed. 2002
‘In determining the daily ration no distinction was drawn between the marines and the [male] convicts…the standard adopted was that of troops serving in the West Indies’. Wilfrid Oldham, Britain’s Convicts to the Colonies, Library of Australian History, Sydney, 1990
‘To form a military establishment’. A Riddle – When Was an invasion fleet not an invasion fleet? When it was the First Fleet
That 583 were convicts is neither here nor there. However that they were young males is of utmost importance. See G is for Genocide – Colonial Breeders
§
cccccc1787 – Portsmouth – May 13: Commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip RN Britain’s ‘First Fleet’, a large armed convoy of eleven (11) ships, with an overwhelmingly male complement of 1500 souls (1300 male 221 female) sailed from England on the 13th May 1787 bound for Botany Bay, New Holland now Australia.
1788 – Botany Bay, 20 January: Within 36 hours between 18-20 January the fleet reached Botany Bay.
Sydney Cove: 21 January: Phillip set off to explore the surrounding country-side and found a vast harbour with a ‘snug’ cove and a permanent supply of fresh water.
24 January: ‘Consternation‘ the English fleet was about to weigh anchor at dawn when two (2) French ships La Bousolle and L’Astrolabe, appeared at the entrance to Botany Bay.
The sight of Sirius her gun-ports open, cannon at the ready, delivered La Perouse a message not to be ignored. That, plus bad weather, forced La Boussole and L’Astrolabe back out to sea.
Captain Arthur Phillip as a serving ‘Secret Foreign Service’ – present day MI 6 spy – knew them well. Hidden in shadows (August 1785) he watched Comte Jean Francois La Perouse shepherd them out of Brest Harbour.
Phillip was fully aware La Perouse’s wide-ranging voyage. Modelled on those of Captain James Cook RN, it was to include New Holland as a site for settlement.
‘Phillip was alarmed’ before leaving Sydney Cove on the 23 of January he had omitted to raise English Colours’ the Union Jack.
‘Raising the flag was one of the acts recognised as an assertion of a prior claim against other colonial powers eyeing off the same land’. Professor Larissa Behrendt, Settlement or Invasion, The Honest History Book, ed, David Stephens & Alison Broinowski, New South Publishing, 2017
§
‘He [Phillip] ordered a party of marines to be sent to Point Sutherland to hoist English colours. He also stipulated that the [fleet’s] move to Port Jackson be kept secret, and that no one was to go on board the French ships…he thought it wise to delay the fleet’s departure till the following day’. Moore. ibid.
Sydney Cove, 25 January: HMS Supply with Phillip aboard prepared to make a desperate dash for Port Jackson. Bad weather held up departure until after mid-day As night fell Supply dropped anchor in Sydney Cove.
26 January: At first light a detachment rowed ashore. From a ‘hastily erected flagstaff’ Phillip hoisted the Union Jack of Queen Anne. By sundown the entire fleet was moored alongside HMS Supply. See: ? Aside from seagulls, how many white birds were at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 – None
‘Owing to the multiplicity of pressing business necessary to be performed immediately after landing, it was found impossible to read the public commissions and take possession of the colony in form, until the7th of February.’ Tench. ibid§§
Next morning the marines and male convicts disembarked and began to find get their land-legs after eight (8) months at sea.
They set about preparing a settlement.
27 January: ‘For the first time since creation the stillness [had] been interrupted by the rude sounds of the labourer’s axe, and the downfall of its ancient inhabitants; a stillness and tranquillity which from that day were to give way to the voice of labour…and the busy hum of its new possessors’. David Collins, Vol. 1, An Account of the Colony of New South Wales
§
February – 6: ‘At five o’clock, this morning, all things were got in order for the landing the whole of the women and three of the ships longboats came alongside us to receive them’. Bowes-Smyth, Surgeon Lady Penrhyn, cited Jack Egan, Buried Alive, Allen and Unwin, 1999
February – 7, Proclamation Day: Surrounded by red-coats with fixed bayonets the English men, women and children sat in a circle on the newly prepared parade ground to hear read the Letters Patent, Act of Parliament 27, Geo. 3, cap. 56 and commissions issued according to the ‘rules and disciplines of war’.
In the blazing heat of mid-day, with all the ‘pomp and circumstance of glorious war’ in the name of King George 111 of Great Britain , Captain-General, Governor Arthur Phillip RN, without consent or treaty, took formal possession of New South Wales ‘from Cape York…to South Cape’ .
hhhhh 24/10
Meantime the English fleet prepared to make what turned out to be an extremely dangerous exit from Botany Bay that put lives and ships at risk- two ( 2) collisions and a near miss.
Sydney Cove – 25 January: .January 24: at dawn two (2) French ships the entrance to the bay.
§
ggggggg‘The latter part of 1788 and the first four [4] months of the following year was one of the darkest ever experienced in the history of the settlement’. Samuel Bennett, Australian Discovery & Colonisation, Vol. 1 to 1800, Currawong Press facsimile ed. 1981.
Abandoned the fleet’s ‘Robinson Crusoes’ were callously left to starve. They survived to the extreme detriment of Australia’s First Peoples whose foods they stole. A Plague of Locusts – The Englishmen of the First Fleet
‘The main battle was about having enough to eat’. Don Watson, The Story of Australia, 1984
‘It is true that our [First Fleet] surgeons had brought variolous [smallpox] matter in bottles’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L. F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961
Ø
1787 – Portsmouth – May 13: Commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip RN Britain’s ‘First Fleet’, a large armed convoy of eleven (11) ships, with an overwhelmingly male complement of 1500 souls (1300 male 221 female) sailed from England on the 13th May 1787 bound for Botany Bay, New Holland now Australia.
1788 – Botany Bay – January 18/20: Within thirty-six (36) hours the entire squadron reached Botany Bay. See: Lieutenant William Dawes & the ‘Eternal Flame’
Wide open Botany Bay, exposed to contrary winds and criss-crossing-currents, would be difficult to defend. Captain Phillip deemed the site unsuitable for permanent settlement.
Sutherland – 21 January: Next morning taking Captain Cook’s Endeavour (1770) charts Phillip set off with surveyors to explore the surrounding countryside.
Their three (3) jolly boats rowed south as far as Sutherland before retracing and sailing nine (9) miles (17km) north of the original beach-head.
Port Jackson: Late that afternoon the towering headlands Cook had marked ‘Port Jackson’ were spotted. Their tiny craft rowed through an entrance ‘a quarter-mile across’ into what Phillip described ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security’.
Phillip settled on a ‘snug’ deep- water cove where ‘ships can anchor so close to the shore that at a very small expense, quays may be made at which the largest ships may unload’.
He named it for Lord Sydney the then Home Secretary. Lord Sydney, Arthur Phillip & ‘Hush’ Christopher Robin Mark 2
Botany Bay – January 23: By evening on the 23rd the group were back in Botany Bay. The ‘First Fleet’ had found its home; ‘it was determined the evacuation…should commence the next morning’.
January 24: ‘consternation ‘ at dawn two (2) French ships La Bousolle and L’Astrolabe, appeared in the entrance to the bay.
Captain Arthur Phillip as a serving ‘Secret Foreign Service’ – present day MI 6 spy – knew them well. Hidden in shadows (August 1785) he
had watched Jean Francois La Perouse shepherd Bousolle and Astrolabe out of Brest Harbour.
Phillip was fully aware La Perouse’s wide-ranging voyage. Modelled on those of Captain James Cook RN, it was to include New Holland as a site for settlement.
‘Raising the flag was one of the acts recognised as an assertion of a prior claim against other colonial powers eyeing off the same land’. Professor Larissa Behrendt, Settlement or Invasion, The Honest History Book, ed, David Stephens & Alison Broinowski, New South Publishing, 2017
‘Phillip was alarmed’ before leaving Sydney Cove he had omitted to raise English Colours’ the Union Jack.
Botany Bay, 24 January: The sight of Sirius her gun-ports open, cannon at the ready, delivered La Perouse a message not to be ignored. That, plus bad weather, forced La Boussole and L’Astrolabe back out to sea.
But had the French sailed north or south?
‘He [Phillip] ordered a party of marines to be sent to Point Sutherland to hoist English colours. He also stipulated that the [fleet’s] move to Port Jackson be kept secret, and that no one was to go on board the French ships’. Moore. ibid.
following day’.
The weather and, in case La Perouse made another attempt to enter the bay, ‘he thought it wise to delay the fleet’s departure till the following day’.
Sydney Cove – 25 January: As night fell Supply dropped anchor in Sydney Cove.
‘When no flags flew, when no armies stood, [your] land was’………. Benny Andersson, Tim Rice, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Anthem.
1788 – 26 January: At first light a detachment rowed ashore. Phillip hoisted the Union Jack of Queen Anne from a ‘hastily erected flagstaff’. See: ? Aside from seagulls, how many white birds were at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 – None
Meantime the English fleet prepared to make what turned out to be an extremely dangerous exit from Botany Bay that put lives and ships at risk- two ( 2) collisions and a near miss.
By sundown the entire fleet was moored alongside HMS Supply.
27 January: ‘For the first time since creation the stillness [had] been interrupted by the rude sounds of the labourer’s axe, and the downfall of its ancient inhabitants; a stillness and tranquillity which from that day were to give way to the voice of labour…and the busy hum of its new possessors’. David Collins, Vol. 1, An Account of the Colony of New South Wales
§
‘Owing to the multiplicity of pressing business necessary to be performed immediately after landing, it was found impossible to read the public commissions and take possession of the colony in form, until the7th of February.’ Tench. ibid
February – 6: ‘At five o’clock, this morning, all things were got in order for the landing the whole of the women and three of the ships longboats came alongside us to receive them’. Bowes-Smyth, Surgeon Lady Penrhyn, cited Jack Egan, Buried Alive, Allen and Unwin, 1999
February – 7, Proclamation Day: Surrounded by red-coats with fixed bayonets the English men, women and children sat in a circle on the newly prepared parade ground to hear read the Letters Patent, Act of Parliament 27, Geo. 3, cap. 56 and commissions issued according to the ‘rules and disciplines of war’.
In the blazing heat of mid-day, with all the ‘pomp and circumstance of glorious war’ in the name of King George 111 of Great Britain , Captain-General, Governor Arthur Phillip RN, without consent or treaty, took formal possession of New South Wales ‘from Cape York…to South Cape’ .
Norfolk Island – February 14: Without doubt the most ‘pressing business’ was what to do about La Perouse. Phillip was certin he had eyes on Norfolk Island two (2) weeks sailing time away.
To stymie that ambition Phillip sent Lieutenant Phillip Gidley King RN with approximately thirty (30) including nine (9) male convicts and six (6) females with two (2) physicians to Norfolk Island to establish a satellite settlement and develop a white population.
Botany Bay – March 10: La Perouse, denied Norfolk Island, having rested his crews and repaired his ships, sailed for home on the 10th of March. The French were never seen again. See: A Band of Brothers and Mortal Enemies
ccccccc
Norfolk Island – February 14: Without doubt the most ‘pressing business’ was La Perouse’s intention to claim the island for France.
To stymie that ambition Phillip sent Lieutenant Phillip Gidley King RN with a small number of marines, male and female convicts, with two (2) physicians to Norfolk Island and establish a satellite settlement and populate the island.
Botany Bay – March 10: La Perouse, having rested his crews and repaired his ships sailed for home on the 10th of March. The French were never seen again. See: A Band of Brothers and Mortal Enemies
§
‘The main battle was about having enough to eat’. Don Watson, The Story of Australia, 1984
Governor Phillip estimated approximately 1500 Aborigines lived in the Sydney area when the ‘First Fleet’ arrived. Two (2) peoples – one ‘existing in a land at dawn of history’ competed for the same resources but without equity.
The latter part of 1788 and the first four [4] months of the following year was one of the darkest ever experienced in the history of the settlement’. Samuel Bennett, Australian Discovery & Colonisation, Vol. 1 to 1800, Currawong Press facsimile ed. 1981.
Britain abandoned the ‘Robinson Crusoes’ of the First Fleet. Callously left to starve the white population survived to the extreme detriment of Australia’s First Peoples whose foods they stole. A Plague of Locusts – ThCe Englishmen of the First Fleet
‘The colony was thrust largely upon its own resources in a wholly strange physical and social environment whose chief redeeming feature was the absence of exotic disease’. Dr Bryan Gandevia and Dr Simon Gandevia, Childhood Mortality and its social background in the first settlement at Sydney Cove, 1788-1792, Australian Paediatric Journal, 1975
Governor Phillip had been told convicts and supplies would ‘follow shortly’ but none came. By the ‘latter part of 1788’ Phillip could wait no longer for supplies from England.
Despite grave doubts HMS Sirius could survive such a perilous voyage it was decided Captain Hunter would return to Cape Town for food.
Africa – 1788, October: HMS Sirius departed Sydney on a course that took her through the Southern Ocean’s ‘islands of ice’ via Cape Horn to Cape Town to buy flour and medicines from the Dutch. See: Proximity Not Distance Drove Britain’s Invasion of New Holland
ggggggggggTraditional hook and vine versus the invaders’ trawling nets capable of hauling ‘four hundred weight of fish’.
1789
1789 – January: ‘At the end of January 1789, there was no single vessel in the harbour’. Bennett. ibid.
HMS Supply had taken additional supplies to Norfolk Island 1650 km away. Hopefully HMS Sirius had reached Africa safely. .
‘Famine was approaching with gigantic strides…men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections and adopted the most extravagant conjectures’. Tench. ibid.
March- 1789: It was discovered a gang of seven (7) marines, using counterfeit keys had, over many months systematically robbed the government store-house.
‘Six (6) marines, the flower of our battalion, were hanged by the public executioner…for at various times they robbed the public stores of flour, meat, spirits, tobacco and many other articles’. Tench. ibid.
One (1) marine ratted, the other six (6) were ‘turned off’ at the end of a rope slung over a tree branch. See: The Ketch Connection
James Freeman played the role of ‘public executioner’ . Earlier (February 1788) the young convict had, in a Faustian bargain – hang or be hanged – accepted the role of hangman. See: Catch 22
§
April – 1789: A smallpox epidemic struck the Aboriginal population round Sydney. Inexplicably, the epidemic did not affect the European population, but [Governor] Phillip estimated that it resulted in the death of 50% of the local Aboriginal community. People of Australia, Macquarie Series, Ed. Bryce Fraser, 1998.
Just when it seemed nothing but death awaited, did an action born of ‘the most extravagant conjectures’ alter the supply-demand equation at Sydney?
‘It is true that our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles, but to infer that it [smallpox] was produced from this cause was a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration’. Watkin Tench, ibid.
At the time of the outbreak nothing in storage was secure as an unknown number of counterfeit keys were still in circulation.
‘Not one case of the disorder [smallpox] occurred among the white people either afloat or on shore although there were several children in the settlement’. Australian Discovery and Colonisation, Vol. 1 to 1810, Samuel Bennett, facsimile ed. 1981
Smallpox affected only one (1) of two (2) available populations. Tench’s proposition ‘a supposition so wild’ suggests many in the settlement held exactly that opinion; ‘variolous matter…from England’ was the source of the outbreak.
See: Joseph Jefferies, From New York to Rio – One, Then There was None.
§
‘But how a disease to which our former observations had led us to suppose them strangers could at one have introduced itself, and have spread so widely seem inexplicable. Whatever might be the cause, the existence of the malady could no longer be doubted. Tench. ibid.
Why ‘Strangers’ ? Eighteen (18) years earlier, April 1770, Lieutenant James Cook RN and Joseph Banks, the Royal Society’s respected botanist, put into Botany Bay aboard HMS Endeavour.
Banks made much of the Aborigines’ nakedness. Both Cook and Banks remarked on ceremonial and battle scarring neither made mention of smallpox pitting.
Aside from material evidence; ‘variolous matter in bottles’, there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence.
1) The absence of pock-marks, given the cyclic nature of smallpox, indicates the 1789 outbreak was a ‘virgin’ event.
2) Statistical improbability; ‘not one case of the disorder occurred among the white people’. This despite the abysmal nutritional status of both English and Indigenous populations at the time of the outbreak.
3) Disease presentation; sudden onset, pattern of distribution and mortality – all ages were affected.
Taken together they make ‘a ‘wild supposition’ very worthy ‘of consideration’.
Was the smallpox outbreak of 1789 engineered to save the lives of Englishmen who, according to Samuel Bennett, were ‘sent to the end of the world by their government and abandoned to starvation’?
If so, how was it achieved when; ‘the chief redeeming feature [Sydney] was the absence of exotic disease’. Dr Bryan Gandevia, Tears Often Shed, Pergamon Press, 1978
‘The origins of the smallpox epidemic of 1789 were debated at the time and have continued to puzzle historians ever since….Galgala [smallpox] determined the shape of the next few years of conflict, if not the outcome of the wars, and was a critical factor in the British military occupation of the Sydney region’. Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars 1788-1817, NewSouth Press, 2018
Major Robert Ross and Captain David Collins (Siege of Boston 1775) were familiar with the yin and yang of smallpox scab-matter; infect to protect, infect to destroy.
They brought to Sydney both knowledge of the disease and the ramifications if smallpox was introduced into a ‘virgin’ population. See: An Evacuation: My Brother’s Keeper – Saving Lieutenant William Collins.
§
‘The colony was thrust largely upon its own resources in a wholly strange physical and social environment whose chief redeeming feature was the absence of exotic disease’. Dr Bryan Gandevia and Dr Simon Gandevia, Childhood Mortality and its social background in the first settlement at Sydney Cove, 1788-1792, Australian Paediatric Journal, 1975
While the origin and nature of the 1789 smallpox epidemic are contested its devastating consequences cannot be disputed. Yet currently; ‘historians tend to avoid the subject as too complicated’.
Modern commentators within and without Australia are not so shy. Not only do they retreat from the diagnosis of smallpox, some have taken a giant leap, substitution – chicken-pox. DVD: Greatest Cities of the World, Griff Rhys Jones – Disc 2 Sydney/fwd 27 mins.
Yet nothing in the Historical Records of the time suggest highly infectious chicken-pox appeared in the Anglo adult or child population.
What was present; ‘the horror of’ profound isolation and prolonged creeping starvation ‘the misery cannot be imparted even by those who have suffered under it’. Tench. ibid. See: Abandoned and Left To Starve at Sydney Cove January 1788 to June 1790
‘Military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries…These raids had commenced by December 1790’. Professor Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child, A History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin
EPILOGUE
1789 – May 8: HMS Sirius returned from Africa at the beginning of May 1789 with medicines and ‘127,000 pounds of flour’ most intended for the kings ships and what could be spared for the settlement. See: Proximity – Not Distance Drove Britain’s Invasion of New Holland.
As Sirius sailed up the harbour Captain John Hunter RN was stunned to see Aboriginal bodies lying among the rocks. He wrote later; ‘Perhaps half of the [Aboriginal] population of the Port Jackson region died in a few months’.
CONCLUSION
‘We will never know what might have occurred around Sydney in the 1790s if Aboriginal society had no been devastated by disease’. Stephen Gapps, ibid.
Aside from the late Economics Professor Noel G. Butlin – Close Encounters of the Worst Kind, 1982– and Craig Mear’s essay: The origin of the smallpox outbreak in Sydney in 1789, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society Volume 94, Part 1, June 2008, little has been done to discover its origin.
Apart from the very convenient ‘Macassan Theory’, no responsibility has been ascribed for an event that had and continues to have profound cultural and biological implications for Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples. A Very Convenient Theory – Smallpox – It Was The Macassans Stupid
2020: In light of Covid 19 justice demands rigorous investigation of the 1789 smallpox epidemic
See: 1790 The Year of Living Dangerously (pending)
.
1718-1775: Between 1718 and 1775 Britain exported approximately fifty thousand (50,000) convicted criminals to America.Twice yearly, tied to Assize and County Court Sittings, some convicts reprieved death on condition of exile ‘from the realm’, were sentenced ‘for transportation to America’.
There they were sold at regular ‘slave scrambles’ to plantation owners. Most men were unskilled. They served their sentence labouring alongside African slaves shipped to America to work the tobacco and cotton fields.
Most women and children were purchased as house-servants.
‘There are two kinds of error: those of commission, doing something that should not be done, and those of omission, not doing something that should be done. The latter are much more serious than the former’. Kenneth Hooper and William Hopper, The Puritan Gift, I.B. Tauris 2009
‘Captain John Hunter, commander of the Sirius, wrote in his journal initially the tribes of the Port Jackson region met the settlers of the first fleet with almost unrelieved hostility. The British strayed from their settlement only in armed parties’. Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, The British Period 1788-1870, Cambridge University Press, 2001
Elapsed time renders evidence circumstantial. This holds as true for Sydney 1789 as it did for Professor Elizabeth Fenn in her award-winning expose – Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782.
Tags: biological warfare, colonies, convicts, First Fleet, first peoples, inoculation, smallpox, vacine, war of independence