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master. During the French-English War for control of Canada, Cook led an expedition to
defeat the French forces. At the war's end, he was given a commission to make charts and
navigation almanacs of the Pacific Ocean. He confided in his ship's (called The Endeavor)
log: “I intend to go further than any man has gone before.” [252] Cook's three long voy-
ages were the great achievements of eighteenth-century discovery: Hawaii, New Zealand,
the Cook Islands, Tonga, New Caledonia, and most important, Australia. Cook had been
searching to confirm the existence of Terra Australis Incognita . He traveled south to the
Antarctic, and while despairing of finding the great southern continent, he found the south-
ern coast of Australia. He charted it northward, claimed it for Britain, and named the new
territory New South Wales (1768). [253]
AUSTRALIA'S CONVICT PAST
Few countries have endured as bleak a beginning. The date was January 26, 1788. Eleven
English ships dropped anchor first at Botany Bay and then at Port Jackson, today's Sydney.
The ships of the First Fleet were former slave and prison ships, not modified for their new
cargo. The cargo was 1,030 men, women, and children, sentenced by transportation to a
life of prison and exile. The youngest was John Hudson, nine years old. His offense was
stealing a suit of clothes. Eleven-year-old James Grace had stolen ten yards of ribbon. And
the oldest, seventy-year-old Elizabeth Beckford, had stolen twelve pounds of cheese. Each
had been convicted of a crime against property. There were no murderers here (murder
was a capital offense) and no prostitutes (prostitution was not an offense deemed worthy of
transport). The convict fleet had sailed 15,000 miles and 252 days from Portsmouth. The
prisoners were shackled; and in tropical heat and the filth of sailing ship bilge, forty-eight
died. The fleet was commanded by Captain Arthur Phillips, who held the power of life and
death over his cargo. Soldiers served as guards. Now they would have to survive an un-
known land.
THE PURPOSE OF TRANSPORTATION
When the First Fleet arrived, little or nothing was known about the interior of what was to
be a vast convict camp. But the convicts and their soldier guards were expected to create a
self-sufficient colony, even though almost none had the necessary skills of carpentry, weav-
ing, farming, herding, or masonry equal to their task. Never mind! The lash and the leg iron
would be their teachers. The great purpose of the settlement was what Robert Hughes calls
“social amputation”—removing from Britain an underclass whose very existence was seen
to threaten the established social order. Dickens's Oliver Twist tells the story of Britain's
urban poor, while Great Expectations is the story of a young man befriended by an Aus-
tralian convict who can never legally return to England.
 
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