This painting depicts the landing at Sydney Cove. Click on the image to open a larger image in a new window.
Image courtesy of The Mitchell Library, the State Library of New South Wales.
Some of you may have visited the NASA site and seen those ingenious little NASA Mars Rovers tooling around on the surface of Mars. I mentioned in the first piece how England was a World Power for so long because they led the World in virtually every facet of human endeavour.
Well those two Mars Rovers should give every American reason to be proud. They landed on Mars, each with a three month time frame to work to. They use solar panels to generate a tiny voltage to drive the wheels, operate the camera, and the small computer system and transmitter/receiver to digitise any photographs and send them back to Earth. They are radio controlled, in a manner similar to those little model cars and planes you may see.
The problem with travelling to a place as close, and yet so distant at Mars is the speed factor, so the idea is to calculate the travel when Mars is at its closest, a distance of 36 million miles, and not when it is at its most distant of 240 million miles.
Space travel is restricted by the time taken, and this can only be achieved by using the technology we have available right now. The maximum speed we can reach is around 17,000MPH which is the velocity required to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull. Once in the vacuum of space there is no way (yet) to accelerate hence that terminal speed is about the maximum. Any increase is of a minor nature. That means that the time taken to physically travel to Mars is around 85 to 90 days when Mars is at its closest.
However, any information transmitted by radio travels at the speed of light, so at it’s closest, any signal only takes two and half minutes to travel to Mars, now gradually increasing as Mars moves further away from Earth.
So, the guy actually driving those little Mars Rovers has to watch the camera out front, calculate the small speed with respect to distance travelled and anticipate how far in advance he needs to be changing direction.
This US ingenuity sees those Rovers still moving around relatively trouble free four years after they arrived on Mars for a three month main mission, hoping they might get a little more out of them. One has even racked up travel of nearly ten miles, which is incredible when you really think of it. Any maintenance has to be carried out from an incredible distance, hoping against hope that it actually works.
Now, why I mentioned this at all with respect to the settlement of Australia, is I want you to consider a hypothetical.
Let’s pretend that those Mars Rovers found the surface was indeed able to support human life in a normal manner as on Earth, there was water freely available, and the air was okay to breathe normally. (Incidentally none of which is true, but after all it is only a hypothetical)
Excited, people back here on Earth mount an expedition. Clean out nearly a thousand people from the jails around the country, some basic tools and shoot em off to Mars with best wishes, tasking them with setting up a viable settlement.
Absolutely impossible to even consider in this day and age.
In 1788, the situation was exactly the same as the perception of settling Mars might be today.
English jails creaked under the weight of prisoners, most of whom committed misdemeanours that would hardly warrant a fine these days.
The American War of Independence was lost (depending on whose side you were on) and now the English had nowhere to exile their prisoners to.
In 1786 the English Government decided to actually send people to The Great Southern Continent discovered by Cook sixteen years previously. This was basically to serve two purposes. The first was to explore the possibility of using it as a dumping ground for prisoners, and the second to set up a colony there before any of the other countries did so, namely, the French.
The details were worked out about how to proceed. The expedition was to take enough supplies to hopefully tide them over for two years, but in the main, it was all just guesswork. The bulk of the work was to be done by the captive work force, namely the convicts themselves, with Marines to guard them, an administrative element and no private citizen settlers at all.
Two Royal Navy vessels were provided for the escort and the administrative people and nine further ships were hired by the Government for the transport of the convicts, ships specially fitted out for the task, a forerunner of the slave traders.
It’s not like going on a cruise when you turn up at the ship the day prior to leaving port.
Some of the convicts were actually on board the transports for up to seven months prior to departure. In that interim, seventeen convicts died, and some actually reached their release date or were freed
.
For a perspective as to the size of the ships, step out 40 paces, the distance of two ordinary house frontages. That was the longest of the eleven ships, roughly the size of a harbour ferry.
The man chosen to lead the fleet was a full Naval Captain the fifty year old Arthur Phillip.
This choice was somewhat out of the blue really, as others were eminently more qualified. Why Phillip was chosen is that he led a fleet of convicts from Portugal to Brazil, convict transportation not the sole province of the English. Phillip had a remarkably low death rate of convicts during that voyage, and this could be the reason behind his choice, borne out when later fleets had significantly higher death rates for the voyage.
On Sunday 13th May 1787, at three o’clock in the morning those eleven ships sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour for the journey to Botany Bay on the other side of the planet, the furthest place away from home that there was. On board those eleven ships were the Marine Guards numbering 213, 27 of them with their wives, and with 19 children. There was Phillip himself with his staff, servants, doctors, a judge, a chaplain and a surveyor. The ships themselves totalled 443 men as masters, officers and crew. Then there were the convicts themselves, 778 in all made up of 586 men and 192 women. These convicts were mostly chained between decks for the journey, excepting time they were allowed on deck to exercise.
They were chained to the side of the ship …………… FOR EIGHT MONTHS.
All up, on eleven tiny ships, there was close 1500 people.
They sailed to the island of Teneriffe, then on to Rio de Janeiro, and from there across to The Cape Of Good Hope, the site of modern day Capetown. The longest part of the journey lay ahead in the run across to Australia, a trip of approximately eight weeks.
Captain Arthur Phillip was aboard HMS Sirius and at the Cape, he decided to transfer to the smaller and speedier HMS Supply, hoping to make it to Botany Bay sooner than the rest of the fleet, scout out the land and find a good place to come ashore and set up.
As it turned out, the Sirius arrived on the 18th January 1788, the next three ships a day later, and the remaining ships a further day later.
Phillip was not really enamoured with Cook’s recommendation of Botany Bay, and he decided it as being unsuitable. He left the fleet at anchor in Botany Bay, and set off to find a place more suitable. Not much further to the North was the entrance to a harbour that Cook noted but did not enter. Phillip sailed through the Heads into a harbour he described as ‘one of the finest harbours in the World.’ He scouted the harbour for two days and found an excellent place to come ashore and start a settlement. He sailed back to Botany Bay, and the Fleet moved to the small cove inside the Harbour. Phillip, some marines and a small group of convicts were the first ashore. A tree was felled and shaped into a flagpole and Phillip officially raised the Ensign on the 26th January 1788, a day celebrated each year as Australia Day.
He named the place Sydney Cove in honour of the man who dreamed up this hare brained scheme. This was at Port Jackson in what is now known as Sydney Harbour, and the site was where Sydney stands today.
The most outstanding thing to come out of this voyage was that during those eight months at sea, Phillip only lost 23 convicts, an incredibly small percentage that was not approached for decades to follow, proving Phillip to be a humanitarian, as well as a truly great navigator.
Remember the Mars hypothetical at the top of the article. All those people arrive on Mars, and find that they need something to keep them going. The send a request back to the Earth which takes around three minutes to arrive. The missing piece can then be sent to Mars aboard a relief craft, and that might take a further four months to arrive at Mars.
With this first fleet at Sydney Cove, if they need something, then the return message goes back aboard the return journey of the ship taking 8 months, and after that message arrives, the return trip takes a further eight months, so basically, if they needed something from Home, it took two years to arrive.
It may just be easier to colonise Mars than it was for these people to colonise a place on the other side of our own Planet, literally sailing off into the unknown.
