Some Light on the Hidden Years of James Mario Matra

James Mario Matra is in general of little concern to anyone except Australian historians, who know him best either for his misbehaviour aboard James Cook's Endeavour in 1769-1770 where he was wrongly suspected of snipping of the earlobes of a drunken minor officer after stripping him naked while he was drunk, or for his recommendation that Britain should send American Loyalists and/or convicts to settle at Botany Bay in New South Wales. He pushed the latter plan partly because he had aspirations to become the first Governor of the new penal colony. Those aspirations were not shared by anybody in authority. [Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 5, 120]
Matra changed his name from Magra to Matra near the end of 1775. His biographer, Alan Frost, in 1995, noted that silence covered 'Matra's activities until March 1777', when he applied for leave from his post as consul at Teneriffe in the Canary Islands to deal with family matters in British occupied New York. He would later claim he had gone to New York 'to try if I could there be of any use to Government' [Frost, op. cit., p.84]; in fact he assiduously avoided volunteering for any Loyalist regiments that might be sent to fight the British.
Recent work by Wendy Moore on the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes has thrown some light on Matra's life from 1776 to 1777. With his brother, Perkins Magra, he seems to have been involved in the social set surrounding Britain's richest heiress, the 27 year old Mary Eleanor Bowes, the widowed Countess of Strathmore. [Wendy Moore, Wedlock. How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match, London, 2009, p. 193.] Perkins would inherit most of the small family fortune that James would travel to New York to save in 1777/8. [Frost, op.cit., p. 84.] In 1776, however, James Matra and his brother appear to have been involved in a sordid confidence trick to trick the extremely wealthy Mary Bowes intro marrying a penniless Irish ensign, Andrew Robinson Stoney. Stoney would succeed in entrapping Mary Bowes into a cruel and brutal marriage for eight years by pretending he was dying from a mortal wound as a result of a duel he had fought to protect Mary Bowes's honour. Perkins was supposed to have been Stoney's second in the duel, or so Mary Bowes believed, but he was nowhere to be seen when the duel allegedly took place. Matra had been part of an elaborate charade whereby Mary Bowes had been convinced to go to a well-known fortune teller, who would predict her marriage to Stoney. [Moore, op. cit., pp. 1-18; 145-6.]
Years later, Stoney would force Mary to describe Matra and his brother as 'people of such execrable and infamous principles' [Ibid., p. 193.], which was probably true. They did not compare, however, to Andrew Stoney, who within hours of his marriage to Mary turned into a violent controlling brute, adept at humiliation. Mary Bowes would eventually get redress from Stoney, and regain both her freedom and her fortune. Stoney himself would be perpetuated in the English language with the phrase 'stoney broke'. And Matra would languish in obscurity as consul at Tangier, Morocco, till his death in 1806, blind and toothless. He died before knowing the Pitt Government had awarded him a pension for having 'fill'd [his] situation for nearly thirty years [since 1787] with integrity and zeal.' [Frost, op. cit., p. 138.]
Ultimately, Matra's greatest claims to fame would be a maverick account of James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific, and his suggestions that the colony of New South Wales claimed by Cook for England should become a refuge for American Loyalists and British convicts.

"[T]wo beautiful young men ... devoted themselves to death".

We are by now all familiar with the 'modern' terrorist tactic of the suicide attack in the Middle East. Suicide attacks, of course, are nothing new. All Australians are familiar with the stories of the Japanese kamikaze bombers in the Pacific War last century. In 1144, the Shi'ite splinter group known as the Assassins operated from the Nosairi mountains, their swift, secretive knife-wielding attacks the horror of the Franks. [Christopher Tyerman, God's War. A New History of the Crusades, London, 2007, p. 198ff. ] The British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth century dubbed soldiers sent on suicide missions in the course of a battle, usually as a a last resort to achieve victory in the storming of a fort, as 'The Forlorn Hope.' So esteemed was the role of these volunteers, (and they were always volunteers) that officers would compete for a place in the squad. Sergeants fought as temporary privates. Soldiers offered their comrades as much as 20 pounds to take their place, so sought after was the honour. [Richard Holmes, Redcoats. The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, London, 2001, p. 383.] During the early stages of the siege of Boston in the early stages of the War for American Independence there was one such suicide attack by two young American Patriots. We have two accounts of it; one British, one American.
First, a bit of background, which will make this narrative a little easier to place. After the British defeat in the battle of Lexington-Concord on 19 April, 1775, the British in Boston were besieged on all sides by thousands of rebels. Boston was cut off on the north on the Charleston Neck on the Charleston peninsula and on the south, leading to Roxbury and Dorchester Heights, at the Boston Neck. Though, at a terrible cost, over a thousand dead, the British set up an outpost on Bunker Hill after the battle of that name on 17 June, 1775, the town's only relief was from the sea.
The American troops to the south of Boston, in the town of Roxbury, and around Jamaica Plain and Dorchester Heights, under the command of General Thomas, had not taken part in the Battle of Bunker Hill because they were committed to the defence of the commanding Dorchester Heights. Those soldiers who had were greeted with elation on their return to Cambridge, the rebel headquarters four miles northwest of Boston, more like victors than troops 'depressed with defeat.' The troops around Roxbury had not been ignored during the Bunker Hill attack, The British had shelled them vigorously, but they had not taken any real part in the action. [Margaret Wheeler Willard, Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, Washington point, N.Y. 1968, p. 142.] A planned British attack on the three thousand odd troops there, expected after Bunker Hill, had been abandoned because the British simply did not have enough men to carry it out. [Ibid., p. 145.] perhaps it was this lack of opportunity for military glory that partly inspired these 'two beautiful young men, between 25 and 30 years of age ...' [Ibid., p. 152.] to undertake their suicidal mission. The provincial officer who recorded this event attributed the young men's mission to anger about a pompous and insulting proclamation written by General John Burgoyne, who considered himself a dab hand with a pen (he was a minor English playwright) for the British Commander-in-Chief. General Thomas Gage, which declared the Americans in rebellion. The day the proclamation was issued, the American rebels had it burnt by 'the common hangman at Cambridge,' [Ibid., pp. 149} Roxbury and Dorchester, though this was probably done more in insolence than rage.
The American source does not indicate whether their superior officers knew what they were about to do, or, if they did, whether they attempted to stop them. A report from the British lines of their action purportedly said the two young men had told the British soldiers at the outpost at Brown's House on the Boston Neck, just outside the British works on the Neck, '"the King's ministers had treated them as slaves, the King's officers had reported them as cowards, that they came to shew the falsity of both reports and the weakness of the proclamation, by sealing with their blood their firm belief in the justice of their cause, upon which they were ready immediately to appear before the presence of God."' [Ibid., pp. 152-153.] It is impossible to prove the young men did say this. The best that can be said about it is that it is entirely characteristic of the overblown revolutionary rhetoric of the time.
We do know that according to Lieutenant John Barker of the King's Own Regiment, who, though a bit tetchy at times, and occasionally careless with his dates, is generally a thoroughly reliable source, that probably on the nineteenth of June, [Ibid., p. 152] (recorded on the 23rd in Barker's diary) two days after Bunker Hill, 'two Men came in as far as Brown's House, when a Serjt. and a Party was sent to meet them, as it was thought they wanted to deliver themselves up, but when the party got near, the 2 men fired and run away, but were shot by the Party and their Arms brought in.' [The British in Boston. The Diary of Lt. John Barker, Cambridge, Mass, 1924, p. 63.]
The American account, a letter eventually published in the London Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, which usually supported the British parliamentary faction opposed to the Lord North ministry, gives a somewhat more detailed and bloodthirsty account. The young men 'fired and killed two of the enemy; they were immediately fired at again, and one was instantly killed and the other desperately wounded, but he told the King's troops he did not desire to live and demanded they should kill him also, which was soon complied with.' [Wheeler, op. cit., p.153.] Essentially, though it is not explicit, the American version accuses the British soldiers of committing a war crime, something that would have been immediately obvious to most of the Morning Post's readers. It is unclear from the sources if the young Americans pretended to surrender, then fired at the British soldiers coming to greet them. If they had behaved that way, it would have been considered a breach of the code of honour. But then again, the Regulars did not expect the rebels to behave honourably.
To place this in its context, claims of war atrocities flew thick and thin during the Boston campaign. The Americans were accused of scalping British soldiers: (they did not) ;of tarring and feathering loyalists and generally treating any suspected loyalists who fell into their hands with savagery (which they did, sometimes); the British were accused of desecrating the body of the revolutionary leader, Dr. John Warren, killed at Bunker Hill: (they probably did); of mistreating American prisoners kept in captivity in Boston after Bunker Hill (which they certainly did). The British too were deeply suspicious of rebel drafting of the Christianised Stockbridge Indians (though, in this instance, without good reason; they always behaved "honorably", that is according to the British code of honour, rather than the more horrific Indian one, during the Boston campaign). Despite their Christianisation, the British feared the Stockbridge Indians might fight with what they saw as Indian barbarity. [Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country:Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, New York, 1995, pp. 91-92.}
In conclusion, the surprising thing about this incident is that two young men went on a suicide mission, inspired by their belief in American revolutionary ideals, knowing they would kill only two of the enemy at the most, knowing, in the words of their chronicler they had 'devoted themselves to death.' [Wheeler, op. cit., p. 152.] Barker says nothing of the impact of the young men's mission on the morale of his comrades, though this is not entirely surprising. Though he was rarely complimentary about the rebels, he tended to reserve most of his spleen for the shortcomings of his commanders. As to why the British soldiers shot the surviving American soldier, many in Boston were still angered by the carnage of Bunker Hill. Most had lost comrades. A war crime, or simply a sordid fact of war? I leave it to the reader to decide.

David Collins and Robert Ross

David Collins, who rose from second lieutenant to adjutant and deputy paymaster for the 2nd Marine Battalion, entirely through his family connections during the time he was enduring the siege of Boston (1775-1776) initially got on well with his Scottish marine comrade, Captain Robert Ross. Ross was a comrade of Collins's father, Lt. General Tooker Collins, by whose side he'd fought at Louisburg in 1758. He appears, at that time, to have been a friend of the Collins family. Young David records sociable times with him when they were garrisoning Charleston Heights across from Boston in the weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill. In 1775, Ross was not yet the 'social monster' he was to become.
Events during the siege of Boston may indicate why Ross eventually turned into the curmudgeon renowned to Australian historians. One English officer records that there was great discontent in Boston among the corps at 'the advancement, insolence and self-sufficiency of a number of Scotch officers'. '[S]everal common soldiers were reprimanded, and threatened with the most exemplary punishment, for swearing they ought to be commanded by Englishmen, and that they would not sacrifice their lives in an attempt to butcher their friends and fellow subjects for any interested North Briton on earth.' [Margaret Wheeler Willard, Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, New York, 1968, p. 190.]
Even as late as 1775, some 30 years after the Jacobite Rebellion, there was still a deep 'Scotophobia' within English society, probably not as intense as it had been in the early years of George III's reign, when the Stuart Lord Bute had been the King's first Minister, and the radical John Wilkes was stirring up popular resentment against the Scots, and Bute in particular, across London, but lingering, still. The American revolutionaries used an empty boot hanging from a tree as a symbol of their discontent with the home government. Colonial Governors, like Gage in Boston, and later Phillip in New South Wales, before they took office had to swear the Oath of Abjuration, wherein they affirmed their belief that no descendants of the Stuart James II who claimed to be the Prince of Wales had title to the British throne. This was followed by a further Oath of Assurance which was yet another declaration against the descendants of the Pretender. [John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, Melbourne. 2000, p. 50.]
For loyal Scots like Robert Ross, who had spent their whole lives in service of the Crown, such anti-Scots feeling no doubt rankled. It is not surprising, then, that Scots officers tended to stick together. Ross's career path, and that of his compatriot, Captain William Campbell, after the American Revolution, was to a great extent dependent on the patronage of the English Tooker Collins. They were friends of the family both and owed their advancement to Tooker Collin's benevolence. Senior British officers in the latter quarter of the 18th century frequently looked kindly on recruits from Scotland, who were recognised for their fighting qualities. General Gage had gone out of his way to recruit Scots migrants straight off the ship from New York and had them brought back to Boston to fight for the British. [General Thomas Gage to Captain Duncan campbell and LieutenantSymes, Boston, 18 July, 1775 in William Bell Clark (ed.) Naval Documents of the American Revolution, Vol. I, washington, 1964, p.912.] Such consideration was not always returned
It is not my intention to outline all the reasons why David Collins fell out with Robert Ross in this post. They are many and various ranging from professional jealousy and hurt pride at the favour shown to Collins by Governor Phillip to sheer bloody-mindedness on Ross's part. [cf. Currey, op. cit, chs. 3,4,5, and 8] David Collins believed Ross no longer paid him due deference, as he had got all he could out of Tooker Collins now that he had been appointed Lieutenant Govertnor of New South Wales. (Collins was mistaken; Ross's appointment had been made by Evan Nepean, under-secretary at the Home Office and Tooker Collins had had nothing to do with it. [Currey, p.39 and 323.]) Beyond these personal reasons , there was also, I would contend, on Ross's side, a simmering resentment at the way he was treated, as a Scot, in the Royal Marines, possibly reaching back as far as the siege of Boston at the beginning of the War of American Independence, and possibly even as far back as the Seven Years' War. Such rancour ate into his soul changing him into the bitter, obstreperous man familiar from First Fleet documents and journals.
In modern parlance, while we do not know the specific occasions when, or for that matter where Robert Ross was taunted about his Scottishness, we can safely conclude it is highly likely he was a victim of a peculiar kind of English racism. Like many victims of racism he was angered and soured by that experience of racism, to the point that it was detrimental to his army career.

Robert Ross at the Siege of Louisbourg, 1758.

I'm currently engaged in researching the early career of the First Fleeter Lieutenant Governor Robert Ross. The research has already taken about a week and I expect it to take about a week more, even though the end result of it all will probably only be a few paragraphs in the first section of the chapter on his experiences during the battle of Bunker Hill.

Mollie Gillen in her Founders of Australia implies the tenuousness of detail about 2nd. Lieutenant Robert Ross's service in North America during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) when she notes that he was 'said to be present at the siege of Louisbourg ... in 1758 and at the capture of Quebec in September 1759.' (p.314.) We know he probably left Plymouth (England) aged 18, in late February 1758 for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he arrived about the end of the first week of May. He wintered in Halifax and was probably part of the naval blockade of Louisbourg from March 1758. (John Robson, Captain Cook's War and Peace, Sydney, 2009, pp.48-51.) Undoubtedly, he played some part in the landing at Garbarus Bay near Louisbourg on 7 June 1758, including the driving back of the French from outlying works and posts. (William Charles Henry Wood, The Great Fortress. A Chronicle of Louisbourg, 1720-1760. Vol. 8, Chronicles of Canada, Glasgow, 1920, p.110.) He was probably also involved siege preparations from 13 June, including the setting up of batteries. (Robson, p. 55.) though possibly mainly in supervising picket duty; use of marines this way freed up soldiers for duty of the siege works. Brigade Commander James Wolfe noted that 'all the officers of the Navy in general have given us their utmost assistance, and with the greatest cheerfulness imaginable.' (cited in Robson, p. 58.) This inter-service co-operation was to say the least, unusual, especially from the Royal Navy. Naval personnel thought more highly of dogs than they did of anybody from the Army.
Ross probably took part in the burning and capture of French ships in Louisbourg Harbour on 26 July, the day before the British imposed harsh surrender terms on the garrison (Fred Anderson, Crucible of War, London, 2001, pp.254-255). Indeed, he may have been wounded, (A list of the Additional manuscripts of the French and Indian War in the library of the Society, prepared from the originals under the direction of the library committee, http://www.archive.org/details/listofadditional00amer ) though that is unlikely. Ross probably viewed with equanimity the New Englander provincials' pursuit and massacre of the Native American allies. The New Englanders and Scottish Highlanders decapitated and scalped as many Indians as they could find. giving 'no quarter to anyone, and are scalping everywhere so you cannot know a French from an Indian scalp.' (Frank McLynn, 1759. The Year Britain Became Master of The World, London, 2005, p. 318.) The cause of this savagery was a desire for revenge for an Indian massacre of New Englander prisoners and others, men, women and children, following the British surrender to the French at Fort William Henry in August, 1757. (Anderson, Crucible of War, pp.196-199.) That suspicion of indigenous people would carry over for Robert Ross when he was Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales. Early on he thought Sydney's Aborigines, were by no means 'that harmless, inoffensive race they have in general been represented to be ...' (Ross, cited in Keith Willey, When the Sky Fell Down, Sydney, 1985, p. 69.) Growing Aboriginal hostility to the white presence at Sydney Cove evoked memories of the savagery of Amerindians during the Seven Years'War and the War for American Independence.
In later life Ross was something of 'a social monster' (Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Melbourne, 2003, p. 17) burdened by a large family and financial problems. (Major Ross to Under Secretary Nepean, Portsmouth, 27th April, 1787 in HRNSW, Vol. 1, Pt.2, Mona Vale, 1978, p. 93) His material problems blinded him to the beauty of the world around him. We have no record of his reaction to the Canadian wilderness, but in New South Wales in 1788 he was almost alone in denouncing the colony as 'vile' and of wretched prospect.' (Ross to Nepean, 16 November, 1788, in Tim Flannery (ed. and intr.) The Birth of Sydney, Melbourne, 2000. p. 82.)

On Reading About The Battle of Bunker Hill

So far I have about four or five small plastic containers that once used to hold chicken stir fry or kiwi fruit, crammed with cards containing notes about the Battle of Bunker Hill and these are mostly though not entirely from secondary sources - e.g. :
Elting's The Battle of Bunker's Hill : very, very good, but too hard on General Gage, who was a bit slack but not that slack - there were factors beyond his control like wind, currents and tide, which frequently stuffed up generals' plans in eighteenth century wars; not hard enough on Admiral Graves, who really was as corrupt and inefficient as the majority of historians paint him - he was in charge of the British fleet in Boston Harbor on 17 June, 1775 - though he did write a wonderful primary source, shorthanded as Graves's Conduct, written to justify his abysmal dereliction of duty while in Boston.)
Thomas J. Fleming's Now we Are Enemies : very well written. Among other things it is especially good on the American artillery and on General William Howe's grand strategy. I found his argument that it was Howe's intention to take Bunker/Breed's Hill swiftly and then move on to take the rebel headquarters and stores at Cambridge, only a couple of miles from the Charlestown Peninsula, quite convincing. As well, it more or less puts paid to the idea that Howe's only strategy was a brutal frontal attack on Breed's Hill. Annoyingly it has no footnotes.
Richard M. Ketchum, Decisive Day. The Battle for Bunker Hill: Also very well written, also without footnotes, and, I think, the last writer to suggest the American rebels used their very inefficient cannon to blast holes in the redoubt walls so they could shoot at the advancing British. Even though it's written after Fleming, who, to my mind, successfully debunks many of the Bunker Hill myths, Ketchum makes no use of him, reiterating all the hoary old stories. (But what else would you expect of an American, (ie Ketchum) who, during the Cold War wrote a book titled What is Communism? I can't bring myself to think of reading it, let alone ordering it via the Net.) His Bunker Hill book needs to be used with considerable care.
So far I've checked through a few general histories for some details, like Ward's The War of the Revolution and MiddleKauff's The Glorious Cause but I've got a few more to go. Then there is the gloriously old History of the Siege of Boston And Of The Battles Of Lexington, Concord And Bunker Hill by Richard Frothingham, published in 1872. He is invaluable for the primary sources in his appendices and footnotes. His telling of the Bunker Hill battle is confused, but really, it doesn't matter; newer secondary sources make the necessary corrections and he just didn't have available to him some of the primary sources we have today.
Some primary sources I've managed to trawl through, like Percy's letters and Drake's edition of British letters from Bunker Hill, Force's American Archives, and a few minor documents I've found on-line. I've ordered Charles Coffin's History of the Bsattle of Breed's Hill By Major Generals Heath, Wilkinson and Dearborn, but its taking Amazon ages to send it to me; and I've been through the relevant parts of Sir Henry Clinton's The American Rebellion. Today I just got in the post Political And Military Episodes In The Latter Half Of The Eighteenth Century Derived From The Life And Correspondence Of John Burgoyne, General, Statesman, Dramatist, (1876). There's quite a few I've yet to get: Heath's Memoirs, the Massachusetts Historical Society's collection of documents on Bunker Hill, (which I trust are more than the few I've downloaded from them on the Net) and various others.
So, you can see, I've been having fun.

Reflections on an Ancient Book.

I'd alway thought the first book that I'd read on the American Revolution was some book by Henry Steele Commager, the title of which I have forgotten. I was a kid, ten or eleven and had somehow managed to get a copy out of the Adults' Library Section at Earlwood, NSW, near where I grew up. Except that was not the book I remember. The same book that I got out of Earlwood library so long ago, arrived at my place from the USA yesterday. It was Christopher Ward's The War of the Revolution, a 2 Volume boxed set, published by MacMillan in New York in 1952. I recognised it the moment I saw it.
I don't know what it was started me off reading history at such an early age, though I'm sure my father had something to do with it. He brought home a poster of the pictures of the kings and queens of England one day, and I pored over that poster for months, maybe even years, examining every picture in minute detail, wondering about each particular king and queen. I quickly learnt from my father that Henry VIII was a bad king, but somehow, despite the fact that she was Protestant, Elizabeth II was a good queen. The medieval kings were endlessly fascinating especially Richard Coeur de Lion and King John, because they had something to do with Robin Hood, (as played by Cornel Wilde, who I think also played John Paul Jones.) When I was thirteeen or younger I wanted to go and see a movie about Martin Luther (not the one based on the play by John Osborne) but I was forbidden it, quite vociferously. So, secretly, I became intrigued by this dreadful thing called the Reformation.
The other very early memory of history I have, apart from Robert Taylor in Ivanhoe and The Knights of the Round Table, and some engraved pictures in a wonderful edition of Walter Scott's Kenilworth, (which I never got around to reading until I was an adult) was the presence on the family bookshelf of Scott's red-covered A History of Australia, the title printed one the spine in black, font unknown. I remember determinedly ploughing through it at quite a young age, and getting bogged down with the NSW Robertson Land Acts of the 1870s. Up to that point I had been enthralled. So, I learnt early, that not all history is necessarily "interesting."
Amazing what the sight and smell of an old dark blue book with its blue spine and faded gold title in a red diamond square can evoke, a book which I have to thank for my perennial fascination with the War of American Independence, which, after all these years, I finally have on my bookshelf.

Ensign Francis Grose and the Battle of Lexington Concord

This is the conclusion from the third chapter of my book on the First/Second Fleeters and their association with the American Revolution. Enjoy.

At this distance in time it is difficult to assess the adverse psychological impact that the experience of the Lexington-Concord conflict had on the young Francis Grose. Alan J. Guy has argued convincingly that traumatic stress had a major impact on the eighteenth century British soldiery.⁴⁷ Grose must have been affected adversely in some way by the devastating slaughter at 'The Bloody Angle' in particular, and the militia's harried pursuit of the Concord espedition from Concord to Lexington. He was almost certainly involved in the bloody hand-to-hand and house-to-house combat at Menotomy. It is very likely that he may have killed his first man at Menotomy. He would certainly have been traumatised both by the sight of the apparently scalped British private near Concord's North bridge, and by the normal onset of fear soldiers experience in battle - '... I never had such a tremor come over me before -' Those experiences may have been heightened for him because he went into battle with very little training compared to many of his fellow officers.

Nevertheless, Grose's experiences on this police action turned murderous were nowhere near as severe as many of his comrades. To state the obvious, he was neither killed nor wounded. He was not at the first fight in Lexington. He missed the battle at the North bridge in Concord. At Barrett's Farm, though he was in a situation that engendered tension, he was one of the officers treated with a strained courtesy and dined on bread and fresh milk. At Mrs. Brown's Tavern he had a further opportunity to quench his thirst after a long, hot march, an opportunity not given to many of his peers. Basically, he missed the actual beginning of the War of American Independence.

One series of events do seem to have had an impact on his impressionable mind: the impunity with which the rank and file, along with some officers, were allowed to loot the houses of possibly innocent colonists. It is probably drawing a long bow to argue from this that his witnessing of the looting and its lack of punishment alone planted the seeds for his later attitudes of leniency toward the New South Wales Corps seventeen years later in Sydney. A long-formed regimental loyalty and the tradition that soldiers were entitled to land to settle on in the colonies in which they served undoubtedly also informed his attitudes in that instance.⁴⁸

47 Alan Guy, 'The Army of the Georges, 1714-1783' in The Oxford History of the British Army,p. 107; Samuel Blacheley Webb to Joseph Webb, Cambridge, June 19, 1775, in John Rhodehamel, (ed.) The American Revoluition. Writings from the War of Independence,New York, 2001, p. 37, for an 18C. Expression of fear in first battle.

48 Manning Clark, A New History of Australia, Sydney, 1963, p. 29; Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. I, p. 183.

As this post has been transposed directly from the original manuscript, the original numbering of footnotes has been retained.