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Let’s be real, the voyage from England to Australia wasn’t some romantic sea adventure. It was brutal, ugly, and dangerous for pretty much everyone, whether they were free settlers or convicts chained below deck.
Before we even talk about landfall, just getting through the voyage was a battle for survival. The conditions were so grim, it’s a miracle anyone arrived at all. My fifth great-grandmother Mary made the trip on the Lady Juliana, and it took 309 days to finally crawl into Sydney. Over ten months stuck on a ship. Madness.
Mary was part of the infamous Second Fleet, better (and not-so-lovingly) known as the “Death Fleet” because of the shockingly high death rate. But here’s where things get interesting: Mary lucked out. She was on the Lady Juliana, the only ship actually operated by the government. As a result, the female convicts aboard were decently looked after (and by “decently,” I mean “only 2% died,” which somehow counts as a win back then).
Meanwhile, the poor souls on the male convict ships? Totally different story. Those ships were run by private contractors, men who’d once turned a profit in the Atlantic slave trade. Their paychecks were based on how many convicts got on the ship, not how many got off. See the problem?
Even worse, the contractors were told they could sell any leftover food once they got to Australia. So guess what? They hoarded the rations, starved the men half to death, and planned to cash in big once they landed. It’s no wonder 26% of the male convicts didn’t even survive the trip, and within six months of landing, 40% were dead.
And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse: the HMS Guardian, the store ship loaded with over 1,000 tons of livestock, farming equipment, plants, and seeds? Yeah, it slammed into an iceberg off South Africa and never made it. No food, no supplies, no hope.
Imagine being one of those first fleet settlers. You’re hanging on by a thread through famine, drought, loneliness, and hostility, just waiting for backup to arrive… and what rolls in? A load of sick and dying men, a ship full of female convicts, some of them pregnant and not a single store ship to save the day. Talk about a punch in the gut. The colony was dragged right back to the edge of starvation until the Third Fleet eventually rolled in.
The fallout from the disaster? Reports of the disgusting conditions on those Second Fleet ships finally forced the government to step in. Naval-trained surgeons were put on transport ships to “supervise” (make sure people didn’t drop dead en masse). Later, when death rates climbed again, they sweetened the deal for ship captains by offering bonus payments for landing convicts alive and relatively healthy.
It’s hard not to sit back and marvel at the sheer chaos and cruelty our ancestors survived. Honestly, the fact that any of us are even here is a miracle. One wrong step, a bout of typhus, a shipwreck, a war, a simple change in sentencing, and our entire bloodline could have blinked out like it never existed.
Makes you think, doesn’t it? We’re the end product of centuries of people who just barely dodged death at every turn. Maybe we owe it to them to make the most of it.
Picture: My 4th time great-grandmother’s transportation records (Mary Leigh)