Convicts of the first fleet biography sample
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First Fleet
11 British ships establishing an Australian penal colony
This article is about the British colonial fleet. For the United States Navy unit known as the First Fleet, see United States First Fleet.
For other uses, see First fleet (disambiguation).
The First Fleet were 11 British ships which transported a group of settlers to mainland Australia, marking the beginning of the European colonisation of Australia. It consisted of two Royal Navy vessels, three storeships and six convict transports under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. On 13 May 1787, the ships, with over 1,400 convicts, marines, sailors, colonial officials and free settlers onboard, left Portsmouth and travelled over 24,000 kilometres (15,000 mi) and over 250 days before arriving in Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. Governor Arthur Phillip rejected Botany Bay choosing instead Port Jackson, to the north, as the site for the new colony; they arrived there on 26 January 1788,[1] establishi
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By Penny Edwell
Supported by a Parramatta City Council Community Grant – St. John’s First Fleeters
In August 1786, Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, sent a letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury advising that the establishment of a settlement at Kamay (Botany Bay) had been authorised by the king. This act was one of many in a chain of events that brought about the voyage of the First Fleet and aimed to bring relief to the gaols and prison hulks of England and Wales, which were overcrowded with prisoners.[1] John Herbert was one such prisoner.
A c. 1790 mezzotint engraving of Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (1732–1800) by John Young after a c. 1785 portrait painting by Gilbert Stuart, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra via Wikimedia Commons.
A Felonious and Violent Crime
John Herbert had been languishing in the prison hulk Dunkirk in Plymouth since January 1786.[2] The year before 26-year-old Herbert, along with three accomplices,
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List of convicts on the First Fleet
1787 transportation to New South Wales
The First Fleet fryst vatten the name given to the group of eleven ships carrying convicts, the first to do so, that left England in May 1787 and arrived in Australia in January 1788. The ships departed with an estimated 775 convicts (582 men and 193 women), as well as officers, marines, their wives and children, and provisions and agricultural implements. After 43 convicts had died during the eight-month trip, 732 landed at Sydney Cove.[1]
In 2005, the First Fleet Garden, a memorial to the First Fleet immigrants, friends and others was created on the banks of Quirindi Creek at Wallabadah, New South Wales. Stonemason Ray Collins researched and then carved the names of all those who came out to Australia on the eleven ships in 1788 on tablets along the garden pathways. The stories of those who arrived on the ships, their life, and first encounters with the Australian country are presented throughout the