Being a History Head and other things

The Madness of Major General Eyre Massey - Halifax, Nova Scotia- 15 May 1777.

2011-09-04T00:58:00.000-07:00

On the morning of 15 May, a day of pouring rain, while the ever-active Commodore Sir George Collier was absent on a naval cruise, David Collins received a a very disturbing order from the garrison's commanding officer, Major-General Eyre Massey to pass on to the Surgeon of Marines. Massey had decided to fortify St. George's Island, the site of the King's Naval Hospital in Halifax Harbour. All the Hospital's sick were to be removed to the mainland immediately.and all its 'Medicines, Instruments, Beddings and other Stores' taken out of the Island's storehouses were to be thrown out into the street for the inhabitants of the island to plunder if not removed within 'three or four days.' Dutifully he passed it on. Thus, at noon, with the downpour still raging, the 'Town sergeant', a lieutenant, and Hill, the Surgeon of Marines landed with their empty boats and a contingent of marines on St. George's Island and turned the sick seamen out of their beds. Some were 'at the point of death, others with fevers & various other disorders', others 'with wounds still open & dangerous.' They were forced onto the waiting boats, wet, cold and shivering, and rowed across to 'the Gun Battery', where they were abandoned in the teeming rain. No shelter was found for them by the town's surgeons 'for twenty-four hours.' To the anger and horror of the townsfolk these walking wounded were left to 'wander about the Streets' seeking cover from the drenching wet where they could, reliant on the pity of civilians and soldiers alike. ;This cruel Treatment must be fatal to them', complained one doctor, frantically looking for a place to house them. The townspeople turned their anger on the 'Bedlamite' general, and would, Collier later wrote, have 'torn him limb from limb' if they had got their hands on him. Collier demanded Massey's recall, to no effect, but by the end of the month did put an end to the madness with the return of the Hospital to the island,

1Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts,pp. 60-61; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat,p. 43; Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor,pp.113-114.

Tracing Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer III

2011-05-22T19:14:00.000-07:00

Some further evidence has come to light about Philip Schaeffer. Unfortunately none of it is particularly conclusive so the reader should be aware that whatever tentative conclusions I have made about him and his daughter Elizabeth in this post are more based on assumptions than firm historical evidence. This is partly due to the contradictory nature of some of that evidence.

A Phillipe Scheffer is listed as a sergeant in the company of Captain Germann, a Hanau company mustered at Njimegen on 23 March, 1776. [Bruce E. Burgoyne (trans.) Hesse-Hanau order Books, a Diary and Rosters. Heritage Books, 2006, p. 238.] If this Scheffer is our Philip Schaeffer, a possibility as Scheffer is a variant spelling of Schaeffer in the 18th century Hessian records, it means he possibly served in Canada from about mid-1776. At this stage of my research into the Schaeffers this is inconclusive, but if so, it may mean he served at Saratoga in 1777 and was captured there after Burgoyne's defeat there later that year. If that is the case he would have ended up a prisoner in Virginia, and still been a prisoner when he married, in which case Elizabeth Schaeffer may have been born in an American prison camp, assuming his wife, not yet identified, was with him. These conclusions are all based on as yet non-evidential assumptions which have yet to be tested.

Another (or the same) Philipp Schaeffer is listed as a second lieutenant in the Free Battalion of Hesse Hanau 1782, 1783, enlisting on January 15, 1781. [Max von Eelking, The German Allied Troops in the North American War of Independence, 1776-1783, (trans. J. G. Rosengarten), Albany, NY. 1893, p. 349] in which case Schaeffer came late to the war and his daughter Elizabeth was born probably near Frankfurt probably in 1780. [Michael Flynn, The second Fleet. Britain's Grim Convict Armada of 1790,North Sydney, 2001, p. 581].

On the other hand, there is clear evidence that some Hesse-Hanau troops did not depart for North America until after those regiments that left in 1776, probably in early 1777. These Hessians belonged to a Jaeger Corps, as did Schaeffer and they served first in New Jersey, then in the Philadelphia campaign. [von Eelking, op. cit.,pp. 100-105.] Schaeffer may well have been with this group. If so, he would have been part of the British occupation force in Charleston, South Carolina in 1780, and Elizabeth could have been born in Charleston, assumimg Schaeffer was accompanied by his wife.

Maria Stuart Proctor's War - Halifax, April 1775-March 1776

2011-05-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

When undeclared war broke out on 19 April 1775 at Lexington/Concord, three Royal Navy vessels were in the Halifax careening yard. Immediate instructions were sent to the 28-gun HMS Tartar to remain in Halifax Harbour 'for the protection of the King's Yard and Stores.' Still, those more knowledgeable about Nova Scotia, aware that the 9,000 odd New England Yankees in the colony were not liable either to support or rebel against British policy, had little else to worry about than the sudden, single torching of hay meant for the military garrison. Their real fears centred on the possibility of the Americans invading or rebel pirates from Machias, twenty miles south of the province. For Maria Proctor, about to reach the marriageable age of twelve, in a world where marriage for a woman was 'an economic necessity', the departure of four companies of the 65^th Regiment for Boston, leaving behind only three companies, totalling sixty-seven officers and men, seemed to promise a bleak future. There was no immediate prospect of gaining a potential husband with the immediate dearth of officers available. The arrival of the first refugee Loyalists from Boston or news that two Loyalist regiments were soon to be stationed in Nova Scotia^¹ did little to raise her spirits.

The capture of HMS Margaretta by the Machias privateers and the news of Bunker Hill had an effect on Nova Scotia's Governor Francis Legge that spread through the town and could not have escaped notice by the Proctors. He proclaimed loyalty oaths be administered to all newcomers from the American colonies, the first of a long series of proclamations ranging from a six month ban on the export of arms, ammunition and saltpetre, a prohibition on aiding the rebels in New England to a ban on the distribution of American newspapers sympathetic to the rebel cause. The net effect of his suspicions, which, in June 1775 were not entirely well-founded, was to alarm the Halifax population and offend the Nova Scotia Yankees on the out-settlements. For Maria it must have been an uneasy time, especially if, in moments of solitude, she displayed the intense anxieties which dominated her adult life.^²

To add to her unease, late June, 1775 saw an outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in Halifax. The pastor of St. Paul's, the Proctor family's church, exhorted his congregation to have themselves inoculated. Maria was probably among the first of his parishioners to heed his advice on July 1, when two of the town's doctors inoculated two hundred civilians and nineteen orphans. She may have known some of the first smallpox victims buried at the church on 23 July. These probably were Amerucabs possibly known to her father through his Yankee origins. One hundred and forty people had died of the disease by December 1775 and about 200 soldiers fell ill with it.^³

Among the merchant class a panic erupted over the activities of the Machias privateers in the Bay of Fundy, the sea approach to Halifax. One merchant refused to let his three vessels, loaded with hay for Boston, leave the harbour. '[W]e could not suffer the loss ourselves', he wrote in explanation to Boston, a sentiment undoubtedly sympathised with by the Proctors, failed merchants themselves. Further reminders of war came at 'about ½ past 10' on the night of 8 July, when a fire broke out at the naval dockyard in the 'Paint [Section] of the Boat-house'. The sparks swirling from the flames spiralling into the night air alarmed the town; fire was the greatest dread imaginable for colonial wooden towns of the eighteenth century. Maria Proctor probably stood in the crowd on the Halifax hillside watching the ominous red sky with great apprehension. Fortunately the fire was brought under control quickly but the morning after rumours spread it had been lit deliberately by rebel sympathisers in an attempt to destroy the yard's powder magazine. The sense of menace over Halifax grew as, thereafter, militia patrolled the streets at night looking for non-existent rebels. Governor Legge increased the guard around the ordnance store in the yard, leaving his own quarters without a sentry. Perturbed by the report of Halifax's lack of fortification, crumbling batteries, and that out of the 65^th Legge had only thirty effective men, the rest being unfit for service, Admiral Graves sent orders from Boston that a marine guard be used to defend the naval yard.^⁴

Halifax began to change in ways that Maria Proctor could notice. One hundred and forty two artificers arrived from the home dockyards of Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. These shipwrights, caulkers, house carpenters, joiners and labourers mounted 'guard every night for the protection of the yard &c.' One day in early September the children of the town, the young Proctors among them, were delighted by the sudden appearance of a recruiting sergeant and drummer beating up the main street. They were raising local recruits for the Loyalist Royal Highland Emigrants. Seven young men joined. Governor Legge, who had his own plans for raising one thousand men across Nova Scotia, quickly put an end to such efforts. Men-of-war began arriving in the harbour with prizes of rebel privateers captured in the Bay of Fundy. Workmen, hurrying against the frost and rains of the coming autumn, could be seen building temporary timber 'Block houses & Palisades' outside the Navy Yard. These would form a retreat for 'the People of the Town' should Halifax come under attack, and could easily be defended by them.^⁵

The first snow, brought by a nor-wester, arrived about early October and had well and truly set in by the end of the month. Halifax was used to Royal Navy personnel but the increased numbers from the 64-gun Somerset, stationed to protect the dockyard and stores during the winter, the smaller Cerberus, there for careening, and the dismasted Orpheus, soon joined by the Fowey, carrying two small contingents of Loyalist troops raised in Boston, would not have escaped Maria Proctor's attention. It was common knowledge, too that the HMS Scarborough was patrolling the Bay of Fundy 'interrupting the American privateers. As in Boston, the navy was always short of crew. Press-gangs boarded Halifax merchantmen in the harbour and scoured the town streets, taverns close by the dockyard. The Proctor family, like everybody else in Halifax, feared a possible shortage of fuel 'and other necessary Supplies' should seamen shun the port to avoid impressment. The General Assembly made a special appeal to the Governor that 'Seamen belonging to the Vessels in Nova Scotia ma y not be impressed', a plea which would be ignored by the new Commander-in-Chief of the Port and Commissioner of the Dockyard, Commodore Marriott Artbuthnot, when he arrived in the Roebuck on 31 October, since more men-of-war meant the need for more presses.^⁶

Thoughwith Arbuthnot's arrival much work was immediately begun on improving the Naval Yard's fortifications, the only signs of preparation Maria might have seen were the stationing of a naval schooner at the harbour mouth to signal an attack by sea and the positioning of the Somerset and Roebuck to cover the shore before the yard and a hill close by its wall. Somewhat worrying for the people of Halifax was news from the Chignecto Isthmus connecting Nova Scotia to the mainland, of 'a large body of Rebels' led by Jonathan Eddy and John Allen, former members of the National Assembly. '[T]heir direction,' Commodore Arbuthnot remarked dismissively, 'was unknown.' For the moment, nothing came of this discontent. Much more alarming was the news in early December, as troops from Ireland brought the total strength at Halifax to six hundred men, that Montreal had fallen to the rebels on 13 November.. That great fear of the Nova Scotians that the army of Generals Philip Schuyler and Richard Montgomery would turn east to Halifax was re-awoken. Partly in response to these fears and partly because of the increasingly frequent depredations of American privateers along the Nova Scotia coast Governor Legge instantly declared martial law throughout the province.^⁷

Apart from the ubiquitous presence of a supposedly more vigilant military, 384 of whom were stationed in Halifax, (though eighty-three of those were already ill when they arrived), one of Governor Legge's proclamations was perhaps more noticed by Maria Proctor. Thomas Proctor, probably a relative, was one of the Justices of the Peace to whom any and every visitor from the American coilonies had to 'report ... to signify their names' and addresses and give an explanation of their business in town. If they failed to do this within two hours of arrival they were to be 'treated as spies.' With such sentiments Maria undoubtedly heartily concurred. Years later she would describe the French revolutionaries as 'that infernal crew' because of their regicide. On Christmas Eve another troop transport from Ireland carrying three companies made its way into the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy, now 'hazardous and dangerous' with ice floes, to dock at last in Halifax Harbour. On Boxing Day the Proctor children watched saoldiers struggling with cannon 'without Carruages', dragging them from various points around the town toward the naval yard.They felt safer from the enemy, like the other townspeople, assured the sudden influx of troops would 'totally prevent any situation that may have been meditating against us either at present or in the future.' Halifax was now crowded with troops and the camp-followers that came with them. With the Loyalist Royal Hughland Emigrants arriving in early to mid-Januarythere were 300 women with their baggage with nowhere to put either. The barracks were falling down in parts with no means to repair them. Even so, the Proctors had not yet again boarded officers. Of the fresh troops arriving in Halifax 'not more than 500' were 'very sickly.' Governor Legge's attempts to raise a militia and taxes to pay for them prompted 'universal ferment.' It was not a task that Thomas Proctor as a J.P. would have relished. The plan was so resisted it was abandoned. Civilian fears in the town were not assuaged, either, by the return of the Somerset to England or the despatch of the Roebuck to Virginia, leaving only the Savage and the Cerberus in the harbour, with the Cerberus being careened beacuse it had twice run on rocks. ^⁸

Probably the most noticeable activity through the winter was the floating of logs out of the adjoining wilderness by yard workers and sailors down streams into the harbour for the dockyard to turn into spars and mainmasts. By early February though 'the harbour was totally froze up.' On the dinner table Maria would have found meat running short. Little news came from the thirteen rebellious colonies. Perhaps with some relief the townspeople noticed the influx of loyalists from the south had 'been much lower than was expected' and those who had come had proved mainly self-sufficient. By the end of March, however, the first of the troop and refugee stransports from Boston began to anchor in Halifax Harbour. Among the military was Maria Proctor's future husband, David Collins.⁹

1 John R. Elting, The Battle of Bunker's Hill, Monmouth Beach, NJ, 1975, p. 18; Vice Admiral Samuel Graves to Philip Stevvens, Preston,Boston, July 28, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 1, p. 997; Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire,p. 77, Tiley, The British Navy and the American Revolution, p. 37; Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, pp. 102, 105, 276, f/n. 34; Liza Picard, Dr. Johnston's London. Life in London, 1740-1770, London, 2001, p. 188; Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts, p. 165; Bridget Hill, Women,work and sexual politics in eighteenth century England, London, 2003, p. 192

2Mancke, The Fault Lines of Empire,p. 87; Currey, David Collins, pp. 73-75, 120-121.

3Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, pp. 108, 103, 106.

4Day & Saoult to William Sherriff, Halifax, July 28^th, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR.Vol. 1, p. 993; Admiral Graves to Philip Stevens, Preston, Boston, July 28, 1775 in Clark, ibid.,p.997; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia, to General Thomas Gage, Halifax, July 26^th, 1775, in Clark ibid., p. 975; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, July 31^st, 1775 in Clark, ibid., p. 1014; Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts, p. 231; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, p. 19.

5Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, p. 25; Minutes of the Executive Council of Nova Scotia, 28^th September, 1775, in William Bell Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, Washington, 1966, p. 224; Captain Alexander McDonald to Col. Allen McLean, Halifax, 18^th Sept., 1775 in Letter Book of Captain Alexander McDonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, americanrevolution.org; Diary of Simon Perkins, Liverpool, 30^th September, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 246.

6John Ferling, Almost A Miracle. The American Victory in the War of Independence,New York, 2007, p. 93, for contiguous weather details; Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts, pp. 57-58; 'Narrative of Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, RN, Halifax, October 31^st, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, pp. 855-657; Address of the Nova Scotia General Assembly to Francis Legge in Clark, (ed.) ibid.,p. 657' Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, HMS Roebuck,Halifax, 6^th November, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) ibid., p. 900.

7Commodore Narriot Arbuthnot to Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, [8 November 1775[ in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 2, p. 926; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Philip Stephens, [18 November, 1775] in Clark, (ed.) ibid.,pp. 1083-1084; Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts,p. 231; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, Halifax Yard, 7 November, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 2, p. 912; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Philip Stevens in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, Washington, 1068, p. 251; Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, p. 107; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, Octr. 17, 1775, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 485; Francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, December 5^th, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) ibid., p. 1280.

8 Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor, pp. 276-277, f/n. 44, 148;Proclamation by the Governor of Nova Scotia [5^th December, 1775 in Peter Force, (ed.) American Archives,S4,v,4,p. 722; Maria Collins cited in Currey, David Collins, p. 121. ; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Philip Stephens, Halifax Yard, 26^th December, 1775in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, p. 251' Governor Francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 22 december, 1775 in Clark, (ed.) ibid.,p. 303; Captain Alexander McDonald to Major Small, Halifax, 9^th January, 1775 in Letter-book of Captain Alexander McDonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, americanrevolution.org ; P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires. Britain, India and the Americas,1750-1783,Oxford, 2005, p. 3565; Governor Francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, January 12^th, 1776 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, pp. 742-743; Commodore Marriot Arbuthnot to Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, Jany 15^th, 1776 in Clark, ibid. p. 792.,

9Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, pp. 104-105; Journal of Bartholomew James, February 10, 1776, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, p. 1192; Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman on board HMS Orpheus,dated Halifax, 15^th February, 1776 in Clark, ibid., p. 1300; Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1934, p. 571; Governor francis Legge to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, 1`8^th March, 1776, William Bell Clark, (ed.) NDAR, vol. 4, Washington, 1969, p.358; Robinson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, p. 32; Currey, David Collins, p. 23.

Maria Stuart Proctor's Halifax, Nova Scotia

2011-04-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

Maria Stuart Proctor was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia to Captain Charles Proctor and Margaret Proctor, one of the youngest of seven children. By the time of her birth her father was a well-established shipping merchant, a member of the Halifax Legislative Assembly, a justice of the peace, a surveyor of highways had served on the grand jury and was a trustee of the Halifax Common, as well as a major, and then lieutenant-colonel in the local militia and warden of St. Paul's Church. He had but recently finished service as a commissioner for laying out the naval dockyards. The town this Protestant New England officer had helped found as one of General William Shirley's veterans of the 1744 Louisbourg campaign by the early 1760s had become the British Navy's main bases in North America.^¹

Halifax had replaced the old capital of Annapolis Royal on the Bay of Fundy. A diverse collection of over one thousand mainly British and Central European Protestants, intended to swamp the French Catholic native Acadians, settled on a site which provided 'a very safe and commodious [harbour] for shipping.' The town was slow to grow and not well-protected, but its presence ensured New England would face little danger from the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. The rapid establishment of the rudiments of a naval base did not make the British settlers feel any more secure about the loyalty of the surrounding French-speaking Acadians who were determined to maintain a studied neutrality ct between the French and the British. As war with the French loomed in 1754, the British determined to expel the Acadians. Somewhere between 6 and 7,000 men women and children, their farms, barns and houses plundered and burnt, were driven off the peninsula by the end of 1755, never to return. Charles Proctor was probably one of those involved in this ethnic cleansing. Women and men were loaded on to different transports. Families were carelessly separated. 'I fear some females were divided and sent to different parts of the globe', one young British official lamented. Many were never re-united.^²

Maria's childhood perceptions were shaped not by the peninsula wilderness where the few Acadians remaining had fled, and after them the New England Yankees who had supplanted them on primitive out-settlements, but by the town of Halifax and its harbour and by the great naval base a mile or more from the houses of the prosperous on the bay's northern shores. It is unlikely that Maria, her siblings or her friends saw little of what went on in the dockyard. It was closed in by 'a stone wall about eight feet high.' In any case it was a place for the young and for respectable women to avoid. As far back as Maria could remember, the notorious grog shop of Mrs. Gunnel and Mrs. Haws had stood on a rise near the dockyard walls or when its license was withdrawn, had continued business in a nearby alley, where it catered for 'the lower class of people.' 'Drunkenness was prevalent at this place' one Admiral of the North American Squadron complained. The huge consumption of rum there by sailors working at the dockyard and by the riff-raff of the town bred violence, robbery, house-breaking, even murder.^³ It was not a place for the likes of the Proctors'.

Halifax itself was 'built on the slope of a hill', and 'sheltered by woody hills on each side 'on the West side of the Harbour', most of its houses one-storied wood structures. Its most prominent buildings were its three churches, one of them, St. Paul's, where Charles Proctor was the warden and where Maria Proctor would marry Lieutenant David Collins in 1777. Seamen and soldiers who came to this military base found it 'very sterilr' and unprepossessing with its unpaved streets and the compacted road running a mile's length through its centre, despite the bulky citadel on a hill above the town with twelve 24-pounders and the brick barracks, both in the upper part of the town. There were different quarters fir English, Irish and Dutch, the Dutch spreading out behind the dockyard. Several batteries lay in or about the town but over the years these would end up 'in ruins.' The few gardens and orchards looked 'insignificant' in a treeless landscape. On market days, such as they were, 'Indians' came out of the nearby woods. Those trees closest to the town were burnt during the Seven Years' or French and Indian War, and were still 'living rotten in the ground.' '[N]ot far from the Town' a strong square battery of twenty cannon on George's Island at the harbour mouth defended its approach, but this, too, would fall into disrepair. Maria Proctor, 'born and bred a gentlewoman' with a fascination for literature and writing shared the visitors' distaste for her home town but with her it extended to the very idea of colonial life. New South Wales, where her future husband would serve as Judge-Advocate, she described as 'that infernal place, Port Jackdon',though she had never been there.^⁴

Naval activities dominated Halifax, from the careening yard and like facilities at the dockyard the ever-present flotillas of frigates, sloops and men-of-war 'in the Harbour opposite the Dockyard' and its wharves. Every night Maria saw ships' lanterns bobbing in the dark heard ships' bells and the creaking of wood and rope, sailor's voices carrying on the air. The long beam from the light house set on a rock near the harbour entrance pierced far out to sea in the gloom, through the thick morning fogs so much a part of Nova Scotian life. An abundance of fish, 'cod, haddock, mackerel, hallebut, cheart, ...' and the like was readily available in the harbour. Probably schooled at home by a tutor or her mother, Maria's recreations were limited to play on the town common, strolling through the weekly market and the days of public celebration, such as the plethora of royal anniversaries and Guy Fawkes' Day, with bonfires and illumination along the shore and the constant recurring booms of naval salutes. The latter so much a part of her daily life that they became almost unnoticed background noise.^⁵

A small child in 1765. on market day Maria Proctor may have occasionally seen the brawny matser's mate from the Launceston, John Hunter, at the town market, just as her elder siblings in the first years of the Seven Years' War may have spotted the nondescript ship's master, James Cook, whose claiming of New South Wales for Britain and descriptions of Botany Bay just south of Port Jackson in 1770 would have a fateful effect on her later life. Though at the time Maria Proctor never dreamt it, if she saw him, the twenty-eight year old Hunter would be post-captain on Governor Phillip's Sirius, the ship that would carry her future husband as Judge-Advocate to Botany Bay. Together, with Phillip, Hunter and Collins would discover Port Jackson, 'a noble and a spacious harbour, equal if not superior to any in the world', the place that would become David Collins's home for nine long years from her side. Hunter would serve as a naval officer on the criminal court in New South Wales over which her husband would preside, share his interest in the study of Aboriginal Australians and their language, and, perhaps most devastatingly for Maria, would persuade Collins to remain yet another year longer than was originally intended when he, Hunter, succeeded Phillip as Governor. On his return to England in 1800, he would secretly provide Collins with letters and notes from which Collins would fashion the second volume of his great annals of early colonial life, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, published in 1802. The work went some way to restoring Hunter's reputation, ruined by his financial mismanagement of the convict colony and the spite of his enemies in its uncontrollable soldiery.^⁶

There was a darker side to Halifax life. Soldiers and sailors pursued single women to their front doors., and attempt forced entry to further their acquaintance. A general fear of house-breaking by the town's criminal element had householders far too ready to resort to firearms sometimes with tragic consequences. Flogging of military offenders was public and commonplace though sometimes held in abeyance in the harsh winter lest the lacerated flesh of the offender mortify. Hanging for capital crimes was frequent.^⁷

The first tangible sign of the coming revolution in the thirteen colonies to the south came in 1763 when the passing by the British Parliament of the Proclamation Act of 1763,forbidding European egress to Native American lands west of the Appalachians saw a sudden influx of Yankee migrants to Nova Scotia, mainly to the out-settlements, replacing the banished Acadians. The colony's population nearly doubled from 9,000 to about 18,000. The vast majority of these New Englanders did not protest the Stamp Act in 1765 or the later Townshend duties. More peaceable, they accepted that the local establishment of unruly town governing bodies would not be indulged by the Governor in Halifax or those merchant traders like Charles Proctor who dominated the Legislative Council and the local Assembly.^⁸

More noticeable to Maria was the constant presence of ships in the harbour - her father's merchant sloops and other ships and up to twenty-one men-of-war who were stationed at Halifax from August 1763, though the majority of the latter would have been patrolling for smugglers in Massachusetts and southern waters. Soldiers passing through the garrison, sent off to the out-settlements or further north to Newfoundland were also an every day sight. Maria may have picked up intimations of trouble for the faraway King and his Government emanating from New England, but the most fearful experience of her early childhood when she was perhaps about eight years old, came in the great hurricane of April 1768. Over twelve hours the careening yard and wharves at the dockyard were seriously damaged. Houses were flooded to at least a depth of three feet, but most significantly for the Proctor family 'more than fifty ships and shallops ' within the harbor 'either sank at the wharves or beat to pieces. ... not a single wharf but is in great measure destroyed. This,' one mariner remarked 'is truly deplorable in so poor a place as Halifax. Many families are totally ruined.' Among those families was probably the shipping merchant's, Charles Proctor. Proctor would never recover his fortunes. When Maria married David Collins in 1777 she brought little financially to the marriage.^⁹

Despite the fall in family fortunes Charles and Margaret Proctor ensured that all of their children were well-educated and the girls, Maria and her sister Sara, 'delicately brought up.' From the half-repaired wharves, under the direction of the new commodore, Samuel Hood, regiments embarked at Halifax were dispatched to Boston at the end of 1768 to quell civilian unrest there. Halifax saw several changes of commander of the North American Squadron as well as changes to the extent of the squadron's jurisdiction. Neither event would have had a great impact on Maria. The pressure on naval resources in Massachusetts meant that by 1774 smuggling along the coastline of Nova Scotia became endemic, to the disgust of the Governor Francis Legge. The Yankee smugglers probably were unneeded competition for Charles Proctor, struggling to restore his shipping business after the hurricane. The business failure was too much for him. By mid 1774 Proctor was dead, devastating his family, including the ten or eleven year old Maria. To make ends meet her mother began to take in military lodgers. Apart from the presence of officers about them, though, the only indications of the troubles across the border the Proctors might have noticed was a sudden shortage of bread in town (which was more serious than might at first be thought to modern eyes, as bread was the daily staple diet of rich and poor, military and civilian alike) and less ships in the harbour. 'We have but one small Vessel twice this Winter to Trade with us' complained Governor Legge. The fishermen working out of the port, he said, 'were the very refuse ... who could not get employ at Newfoundland.' ¹⁰

1John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, Melbourne, 2999, p. 11; Brian Cuthbertson and Gillis Architects, 'Thomas Scott and the Scott Manor House', Research Paper Produced for Halifax Historical Council, pdf, not paginated; Nova Scotia Historical Society, History of Halifax City, Halifax, 1895, pp. 62, 60-61, 69; Ronald Rumpeky, (e.) Expeditions of Honour, The Journal of John Salisbury, 1962, p. 173; Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia A History. Volume One. Beginnings, Oxford, 1998, pp. 43-44.

2Atkinson, Europeans in Australia, Vol. I, p. 43; Julian Gwyn. Frigates and Foremasts. The North American Squadron in Nova Scotia Waters, Vancouver, 2001, pp. 23-24; Elizabeth Mancke. The Fault Lines of Empire. Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, c.1`760-1830. New York. 2005, p. 11; Joseph Lee Boyle, (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel. The Thomas Sullivan Kournal, Bowie, 1997, p. 41; J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, Stanford, 1974, p. 37; George A. Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts. A Study in Massachusetts=Nova Scotia Relations, 1630-1784, Montreal, 1973, pp. 201, 211; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles. American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, New York, 2011, pp. 153-154.

3John Grenier, The First Way of War. American War Making on the Frontier, New York, 2005, p. 65; Boyle. (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel, p. 42; Neil R. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775, Annapolis, 1973, pp. 57-58; Julian Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat. The British Navy and the Halifax Dock Yard before 1820, Ottawa, 2004, p. 11.

4Boyle, (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel, pp. 41-42; Currey, David Collins, p. 25; Archibald Robinson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, 1762-1780, New York, 1930, p. 82' Maria Collins to Under Secretary Peel, Ham, 11 May, 1011 in Currey, David Collins, p. 310; Maria Collins to David Collins, London, 9 October, 1792 in ibid., p. 72.

5Robertson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, p. 82; Boyle, (ed.) From Redcoat to Rebel, p. 41; Extract of A Letter from a Midshipman on Board the Chatham, dated Nantasket Road, March 23, 1776 in Clark (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 4, pp. 473-474; Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, p. 34.

6J. J. Auchmuty, 'Hunter, John 1737-1821' in Australian Dictionary of Biography On Line. Despite its age and brevity Auchmuty's biographical sketch of Hunter is far superior to the recent full-length book biography, Robert Barnes, An Unlikely Leader. The life and times of Captain John Hunter, Sydney, 2009; Beaglehole, Life of Captain James Cook, Chapter III, passim; Currey, David Collins, pp. 32, 43-44, 108-109, 127, 161-162; David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. I, (ed. B. H. Fowler, Sydney, 1975, p. 5.

7Nova Scotia Historical Society, History of Halifax City, pp. 60-61; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, p. 11; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, pp. 57-58; Beaglehole, Life of Captain James Cook, pp. 34-35; Letter Book of Captain Alexander McDonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, 1776, americanrevolution.org

8Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles, p. 156; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775, New York, 1952, p. 119; Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts, pp. 216-217.

9Robert W. Tucker and David Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire. Origins of the War of American Independence, Baltimore, 1982, pp. 128-129; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, pp. 29-30; Gwyn, Ashore and Afloat, pp. 14-15; Currey, David Collins, pp. 29-30.

10Currey, David Collins, p. 25; John Shy, Toward Lexington. The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution, Princeton, 1965, p. 336; Stout, The Royal Navy In America, . 127-8, 137; Allen Everett Marble, Surgeons, Smallpox and the Poor. A Study of Medicine and Social Conditions in Nova Scotia, 1749-1799, Montreal, 1993, p. 95; John A. Tolley, The British Navy and the American Revolution, Columbia, SC, 1987, p. 11; Francis Legge, Governor of Nova Scotia to Lord Dartmouth, Halifax, March 6^th, 1775, in William Bell Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. I, Washington, 1964, pp. 126, 128.

Some Thoughts on Maria Proctor Collins

2011-04-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Maria Proctor was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, probably about 1763, though her actual birth date is unknown. She married David Collins in late 1777 in St. Paul's Church, Halifax.. I suspect she was probably about 14 at the time of her marriage, mostly because of an extraordinarily difficult childbirth in England a year or so later. The child did not survive and Maria's health was wrecked for the rest of her life. Henceforth she aged swiftly and became a semi-invalid, suffering from severe chest comp;aints and eventually, epilepsy.

From all accounts she was a very lively young girl with a deep interest in literature. This interest in writing was one of the reasons, apart from the physical, she found the dashing young David Collins attractive. Another was a deep distaste for colonial life. Collins was a way away from Halifax, and Halifax was indeed a place to be away from. Throughout her childhood and young adulthood she had known little else than rumours of rebellion from the thirteen colonies to the south, then, after April 1775, fears of invasion and the threat of actual rebellion in 1777 from a small clique of Nova Scotia Yankees. Though Collins was not involved in putting down this revolt on the Chibucto Peninsula north of Halifax, some of his comrades almost certainly were.

Maria Collins brought practically nothing as a marriage settlement to her union with Collins. It is clear from all her letters to him over the years that he was indeed the great love of her life. She deeply resented his time away from her, at the siege of Gibraltar in 1782, and later, during the years that he spent in New South Wales as Judge-Advocate. Though she never came to Sydney, or for that matter, later Van Diemen's Land where Collins was Lieutenant Governor,, she hated the convict colony with a passion. In the first place she thought it was disastrous for Collins's career advancement; and it is likely she felt some resentment at Collins's relationship with the convict woman Ann Yeats who bore him two children and was thereby a taunt to Maria's own childlessness.

Separated from her husband she fashioned a career for herself as a novelist. No copies of the novels survive (the family collection was destroyed in World War II) and if she used a nom-de-plume we do not know it.) All indications are that she was very skilled at her craft and wise in the ways of publishers. It is possible she helped David Collins write his An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. She certainly edited a later shorter edition which Collins's biographer, John Currey, noted was of a superior literary standard to the first.

Maria Collins had come from a well-to-do colonial family. Her father, Charles Proctor, was, among other things a successful shipping merchant, though his business suffered in the economic fluctuations emanating from the revolutionary fervour to the south and it collapsed shortly before his death in 1774. To keep her in the manner to which she had been accustomed since birth, David Collins borrowed heavily, ultimately a disastrous course of action, as he was a hopeless financial manager in the first place. At his death in 1810, Maria was plunged into penury, that even a government pension granted a few years later did not entirely relieve. She died blind and with few possessions near Plymouth in 1830.

Tracing Phillip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer - II

2011-04-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

Further research into Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer has caused me to revise some of my conclusions in my earlier post on them. It seems likely that Schaeffer arrived in North America about August 1776 and certainly no later than October, and that he was posted to New York with the Hesse-Hanau Jaegers. Details of his military activities between 1776 and December 1779 are still to be researched, but I am pretty sure most of them will either be in the Hesse-Hanau Orderly Books and Letters aforementioned and in Johann Ewald's Diary of the American War. A Hessian Journal which I have yet to buy.

There is now much more clarity about Schaeffer's personal life. It is now reasonable to assume that Schaeffer married in New York some time between August 1776 and probably September or October 1778, which would place Elizabeth Schaeffer's birth somewhere around the middle of June 1779, making her about ten in 1789-90. As noted in the earlier post it is possible her mother was either English or an American Loyalist because of Elizabeth's bilingual skill in both English and German; or , if her mother was a German camp follower, she could have simply began to pick up English from growing up in New York between 1779 and 1783.

Lieutenant Schaeffer definitely took part in the South Carolina campaign of 1779-1780. He is mentioned by name several times during the 1780 siege of Charleston in both Letters and Diary of Captain John Ewald, and the Diary of Captain Johann Hindrich. After his service in the South he returned to New York where he was stationed in Brooklyn and later on Long Island. He almost certainly went to Quebec in Canada, arriving there on 15 September 1781. From about the 22nd of that month he served at various posts along the St. Lawrence, though I have not yet fully researched his later Canadian service. Almost certainly, he had Elizabeth and his wife with him. We have evidence of women and children being on (and dying on) the transport ship Montague that took the Hessians to Quebec. It is likely he returned to England from Canada in 1783, where he settled with his family. He did not return to Hanau. When Elizabeth's mother died*, Schaeffer decided to begin life afresh. Probably through influential contacts he had made in the British Army in North America, he gained an appointment as a convict supervisor in the recently founded convict colony at Port Jackson, New South Wales. With his poor English, no one could have been less suited to the task. In September 1789 he embarked with Elizabeth on the Guardian bound for Botany Bay, via Cape Town.

*The Schaeffers must have been reasonably well off during their time in London. I have not been able to find any record of Elizabeth Schaeffer's illness or death in the various London records of the poor, assuming she shared the same first name as her daughter's.

Poem #3

2011-04-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

POEM FOR CORNELIS VLEESKENS.

You haven't changed.

The years went by, and you didn't change.

Oh, the hair is thinner,

but the voice is still distinct,

the poems as good, or better.

(One I read the other day

almost moved me to tears -

only good poems do that.)

Poetry's in our DNA,

some elusive thread

making us see the world

differently.

Its in the eyes.

People see it in your eyes,

eyes unmasking everything.

That's why we're looked at strangely.

People admire poets,

but they fear them too.

I don't have to tell you that.

This poetry writing business,

you can't rip it out once it gets inside your head.

A muse turns up.

something makes you angry,
you glimpse a leaf about to fall
from an English beech misplanted
in the Antipodes,

the past creeps back

and wants you to remember,

so it all starts off again,

one line comes and then another

and then another

and words come tumbling from your mouth

in the middle of the night

as you stumble to find the light-switch

and paper and pen

to get it all down before its gone.

After that,

you can breathe.

Sometimes I sit crying at the computer,

trying to get this stuff out.

And I can hear the gods laughing in the sky

or wherever they're kept nowadays.

Tracing Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer I

2011-04-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

I had not expected to be working on the career of Philip Schaeffer for the chapter on the British in Halifax for which I am now completing the research, but a reference on Hessians stopping over in Halifax about July 1776 sent me off in search of him. Schaeffer was a Jaeger (light infantryman) with the Hesse-Hanau contingent sent to North America. We know an infantry regiment, including light infantry left Hanau at the end of March, 1776, bound for Portsmouth, England, but as yet I have not been able to ascertain whether this was Philip Schaeffer's regiment or whether his regiment was a later regiment that departed in May 1776. Presently I'm waiting on Hesse-Hanau Orderly Books and Letters which I hope to receive shortly.which will, I hope clarify this confusion. It is possible Schaeffer was in one of the three Hanau infantry regiments that campaigned with General John Burgoyne and was among those taken into captivity after Burgoyne's defeat at the battle of Saratoga in October 1777. On the other hand, Schaeffer may have belonged to Hanau regiments that arrived in America at a later date and fought in the West Indies. Hanau regiments do not appear to have been involved in the 1780 siege and capture of Charleston. [cf. Bruce E. Burgoyne, Georg Pausch's Journal, Bowie, 1996.]

Where Schaeffer was in 1779/1780 is a matter of some significance because in either 1779 or 1780 he had a daughter, Elizabeth. It would appear, since the girl became fluent in English, that her mother was either English or a Loyalist American. Schaeffer's English was notoriously poor and in later life Elizabeth seems to have translated for him. Even if Schaeffer was imprisoned in Virginia or Maryland it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he married as a prisoner to a Loyalist supporter. What is clear is that some time between 1780 and 1783 Schaeffer returned to England with Elizabeth and his wife, whom at this point I have not been able to identify. Some time before 1789 she died. [Michae lFlynn, The Second Fleet. Britain's Grim Convict Armada of 1790, Sydney, 2001, p. 531; Sian Rees, The Floating Brothel. The extraordinary story of the Lady Julian (sic, Juliana) and its cargo of female convicts bound for Botany Bay, Sydney, 2001, p.163.]

In 1789 Philip Schaeffer was appointed a superintendent of convicts in New South Wales. In September 1789 he boarded the Guardian, bound for New South Wales, with his daughter Elizabeth, now ten years old. Elizabeth was the only female on the frigate. It would appear she was a mature looking ten year old, as the Guardian's master thought she was fourteen years old. Captain Riou, RN, who would have known, since she evidently dined with her father at the captain's table, recorded her age as ten in his log.The Guardian reached Cape Town on 24 November, 1789 and after taking on stores and livestock departed for New South Wales on 11 December. [Flynn, op. cit., p. 531; M. D. Nash,(ed.) The Last Voyage of the Guardian, Lieutenant Riou, Commander, 1789-1781,Cape Town, 1990, p. xxiii, f/n.2; Flynn, op. cit., p. 25.]

On Christmas Eve she struck an ice-berg. For two days, with her pumps working desperately, Riou struggled to save his ship. On the twenty-sixth, having jettisoned half of his cargo, Riou put 60 of his crew as he could into life-boats. Of these only fifteen survived. Philip and Elizabeth Schaeffer remained on board the stricken ship which was taken in tow by a passing American ship and brought back to Cape Town. There, on 19 February, 1790, Elizabeth, Schaeffer and the other convict superintendents were ordered on board the Lady Juliana, which had arrived in Table Bay. [Flynn, op. cit., p. 25; John Nicol, Life and Adventures, 1776-1801, in Tim Flannery (ed.) Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration,Melbourne, 2000, p.128; Nash, op. cit., p. 168 and f/n. 19.]

The Lady Juliana arrived at Sydney Cove on 6 June, 1790. There is no further record of Elizabeth. Schaeffer was not successful as a convict superintendent because of his lack of English. Before long he was given a grant of land near Rose Hill, where in December 1791 he was visited by the marine captain Watkin Tench. Though Schaeffer told Tench he came to Sydney with a ten year old daughter, Elizabeth appears to have been no longer with him. It is the last record of her in the sources. Schaeffer was not a successful farmer, though he did produce the colony's first wine. He died in poverty in his eighties in the Sydney Benevolent Home, apparently abandoned by his second aged convict wife. He had no more children. [Flynn, op. cit., p.19; Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in Flannery, (ed.) op. cit., pp. 220-222; Flynn, op. cit., pp.531-532.]

Marine Private Edward Odgers at Nantasket Road

2011-03-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

Marine private Edward Odgers aboard the 4^th rate 50-gun Centurion, who would survive for little more than a year after he arrived at Sydney Cove fifteen years later, watched that first squadron go, as did Ensign Francis Grose, who with the 52^nd Light Infantry on one of the remaining transports. Later that day Odgers may have seen H.M.S Hope fire on and run a rebel privateer into the land. The prize turned out to be the Resolution, a captured coal ship, now regained by the British. If there were ragged cheers across the water from the Navy ships who could appreciate a good chase with a professional eye, or from the crowded troopships and other transports , the cramped conditions in the latter two would have made them very ragged indeed. Used, by now to convoys and crowded ports, the young private, probably in his mid to late teens (like George Johnston or Francis Grose) mat have looked with some wonder at the unusual fleet surrounding him,. the Centurion's companion 50-gun ship, Chatham, the 20-gun Lively, and 62 overloaded transports crammed with soldiers, fleeing civilians, provisions and materiel. If the company he kept in New South Wales is any guide. Odgers may have had a propensity for trouble, or at least was easily led. Private Michael Tolden, his only known associate in the First Fleet Marines, had been court-martialled on the convict womens' transport, the Prince of Wales, for abusive and drunken behaviour. Sentenced to 300 lashes, he received only 175.Odgers' war record is silent about his conduct. He did not come to any superior's notice for good or ill, the norm for service personnel from the lower ranks.^¹⁼

Shuldham's squadron sailed from Nantucket Road on 27 March. The Centurion did not leave without incident. She ran foul of H.M.S. Niger carrying away her own ;Main= Yard.' The Niger lost her 'Topgallant Mast ... Stay and Jibb Stay.' Both captains blamed each other for the collision. Though the Centurion appears to have had right of way, according to her captain's journal, it was commonplace for captains to minimise their responsibility for an accident in the logs which were returned to the Admiralty at the end of a voyage. Indeed, Captain John Hunter, later New South Wales's second Governor, was a master at obfuscation about his foulings, near-misses and shipwrecks while Governor Arthur Phillip's propensity for collisions and groundings in home waters possibly did some damage to his reputation, leaving Admiral Lord Richard Howe wary about Phillip's appointment as as the convict colony's first Governor. Centurion's damage was quickly repaired to on 2 April, 1776 Admiral Shuldham could report that which his squadron reached Halifax 'not the lest accident had happened during the passage.'^²

1Master's Log of HM Sloop Hope, 24^th March, 1776, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 5, Washington, 1970, p.231; Extract of a letter from Edmund Quincy Foster to Cdr. Miff;in , Stoughtonham, April 13, 1776, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 4, p. 610;;Journal of HMS Niger,Captain George Talbot, Wed. 27^rd March, 1776 Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 4, p. 592; Gillen, Founders of Australia, p. 359.

2Sir John Fortescue, The War of Independence and the British Army in North America, London, 2001, p. 30; Journal of HMS Centurion, Captain Richard Brathwaite, 27^th March, 1776 in Clark, (ed.) NDAR Vol. 4, p. 539; Journal of HMS Niger, Captain George Talbot, Wed. 27^th March in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 4, p. 592; Robert Barnes, An Unlikely Leader. The life and Times of Captain John Hunter, Sydney, 2009, Chapter 5, passim; Lord Howe to Lord Sydney, 2^nd September, 1786 in Historical records of New South Wales, ]HRNSW] Vol/ 1, Pt.2, Mona Vale, 1978, p. 22; Alan Frost, Arthur Phillip, 1738-1814. His Voyaging, Oxford, 1987, pp. 98-99; Vice-Admiral Shuldham to Philip Stephens, Chatham, in Halifax- Harbour, 15^th April, , 1776, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 4, p.842.

Evan Nepean, Francis Grose and the Fall of Boston

2011-03-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

Evan Nepean became Under-Secretary to the Home Department in 1783. As such he had responsibility for organising the transportation of First Fleet Convicts to New South Wales in 1786 and had considerable say in the selection of personnel. Partly through his influence Arthur Phillip was appointed Governor of the new penal colony and Major Robert Ross was given the post of Lieutenant-Governor and commandant of the Norine contingent that, theoretically, was supposed to help Phillip police the convicts at Botany Bay. Nepean first met Robert Ross during the siege of Boston, probably in late 1775.

Vice-Admiral Molyneux Shuldham's arrival could hardly have passed unnoticed by anyone since he had been greeted with the customary thirteen gun salute. His flagship, HMS Chatham moored northwest to the Long Wharf and south-south west off the formidable bastion of Castle Island. He was to take command of the North American Squadron from Admiral Graves, to the joy of every loyal subject in Boston. As Lord Percy observed, in sentiments undoubtedly shared by his young protege George Johnston and his future New South Wales colleagues, 'We wanted a more Active man than [Graves], for really the Service suffered material damage during his Command.' Graves would delay handing over to Shuldham until the end of the month, and that 'most unwillingly'. Once in charge Shuldham would, to the relief of the garrison,attempt a much more aggressive policy against the marauding privateers and the Americans' nascent Navy, keeping the sea approaches to Boston clear of any threat, but he was frustrated by their range along the New England coastline.

Under cover of the last night of a three night long night-long barrage on Boston and aided, despite the bright moon, by a heavy haze coming off the water, riflemen, and up to three thousand men, accompanied by 'three hundred loaded carts' carrying chandeliers, abbatis, gabions and fascines made over the previous half-month, sixty pulled by oxen, crossed the Dorchester peninsula. They climbed the Dorchester Heights. to the town's south on 4/5th of March 1776. Throughout the night they worked without stopping, able to throw up a works before sunrise strong enough to resist enemy shot. Atop the steep hills they surrounded the shallow breastworks with barrels of earth to be rolled down on the British as they made the steep ascent to take the fort. It was expected these rolling barrels would throw 'the assailants into the utmost confusion, and have killed and wounded great numbers.' Finally the big guns brought 300 miles from from Tconderoga by Colonel Henry Knox were slowly dragged up and mounted. Three hours after the operation began Brigadier-General Francis Smith, who had led the disastrous march on Concord in April 1775, was told 'the Rebels were at work on Dorchester Heights. Incredibly, he ignored the warning. Thus, on the morning of the fifth as the rebel bombardment sputtered to an end those who could sleep among the British garrison woke to find themselves threatened with complete destruction from encircling rebel batteries. One over-hopeful artilleryman burst 'three or four shells in the air' in the direction of the suddenly threatening southern heights

Howe's immediate response was to launch an artillery barrage against the new rebel stronghold. After two hours of fruitless attempts to elevate their guns high enough to reach the steep Dorchester Heights the general called an end to it. It was a waste of ammunition. By then, Vice-Admiral Molyneaux Shuldham, probably accompanied by his twenty-four year old secretary, Evan Nepean, had arrived to tell Howe that the Navy could not stay in Boston Harbor under the rebels' heavy guns. The fleet would be destroyed. Nepean did some quick calculations and concluded 'not less than 10-12,000 Men could have been employed in compleating such' an extensive breastwork. They must have, he thought, '7000 Men in the Intrenchments and as many to fall in from Roxbury.' Later that month, never one at this stage of his career one to annoy a potential patron, he passed the same information on to a discontented Admiral Graves. At an emergency War Council, at which Nepean may have been present, and which Shuldham certainly attended, though some were cautious, one senior officer urged Howe to storm Dorchester Heights and kill every rebel in sight, then burn Boston to the ground and go. At home Brattle Street deacon and selectman Timothy Newell fell to his knees and praised God,; 'for our redemption is near.'

The Marine Battalions did not take part in the proposed attack on Dorchester Heights; they were left to protect Boston's northern shores. At 11.30 a.m. five regiments began embarking on board five transports readying to drop down to Castle William, from whence they would cross to the Dorchester Peninsula. Howe himself, after rendezvousing with these transports would lead a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats, assaulting the heights from the south while the rest would attack on the north. The total number of troops engaged at this point was 2,500. By early afternoon the general decided to employ Lieutenant Colonel Musgrave's and Lieutenant Colonel Clark's regiments of Light Infantry, an extra 1,100 men. Ensign Francis Grose was with the 52^nd in Clark's regiments. They spent the afternoon assembling at Barton's Point, marching to the Long Wharf so they were ready to embark by 7 p.m. At five Admiral Shuldham, Nepean close by, ordered a gun-boat and schooner in position to help protect the Army landing. Theoretically, the regiments were to be ready off Castle William to launch a full-frontal attack at 9 p.m. It was not a prospect that excited either officers or men, all of whom well knew breaching such commanding heights could only mean a death-toll worse than Bunker Hill, even under the cover of night. Francis Grose perhaps wondered if he would live through this night.On the hills around Boston 'Spectators in Abundance' gathered, waiting for the slaughter of the hated enemy. It began to rain, and with the rain came a rising wind, sleet and flurries of snow. From the rebel stronghold not ' shot or a shell' was fired as they hurried to further strengthen their redoubt before the British came.

A strong headwind slowed the expedition's progress to Castle William, and of those that reached there, some were driven aground. The surf dashing on the Dorchester Peninsula beaches was so high and rough it was impossible for the flat-bottomed boats to beach. By midnight this 'hurricane from the south' was blowing in windows around the harbor and tearing down sheds and fences. Howe had no choice but to delay his landing. Evan Nepean, on the Chatham, was not the only one who believed it fortunate it had been called off. One officer recorded with some relief that this 'wind more violent than anything I have seen ... saved the lives of thousands', a sentiment surely shared by Francis Grose.

The storm did not end until about sunrise the next morning. Aboard the Chatham Nepean was woken at three in the morning by the crash of the top mast with its yard, sail and rigging crashing to the deck in the 'hard gales and heavy Squalls.', damage not repaired til eight the next morning. On land, that morning, Howe explained in general orders that 'the intended expedition last night was inevitably put off by the badness of the weather.' All knew, as they watched the fortifications on the small hills grow stronger by the hour that Boston was becoming 'untenable.' Everything was to be embarked.
Everything could not be embarked. Howe had been ordered to evacuate Boston as early as October 1775 but he had delayed because of a shortage of transports. By the end of January he had a tonnage of 19, 765. For a complete embarkation he needed 8597 tons more. Expectations that he could make up the shortage with more transports out of provision ships were dashed when, instead these ships had been driven by storms to the West Indies. They were not due to arrive in Boston any time soon.

In the two or so days it took the Light Infantry to beat up from Castle William most of the heavy equipment and artillery was loaded onto waiting transports. Once back on land Grenadiers and Light Infantry were solely employed in loading the waiting ships.

On the tenth of March the first of the transports, crammed with panicked Loyalists, women, children and the wounded, worked down to King's Road near Castle William under the protection of the Chatham .There they would wait in the utmost discomfort for one more week before the fleet was ready to depart. The Americans viewed the movement with suspicion and rushed a detachment to Dorchester Neck against any proposed landing party. A few shots were exchanged. The rebels relaxed. From the quarterdeck of the Chatham. Evan Nepean probably watched, appalled by the waste and touched with compassion, as the various transport officers tossed 'All Household Furniture and ... useless Luggage' belonging to Loyalists overboard to make room for more essential items. With many transports crowding at King's Road it was not surprising accidents happened. HMS Centurion and the transport Senegal carried away the Chatham's 'Ensign Staff, Poop lanterns and a stove on the larboard Quarter Galley' tossing Nepean out of his hammock in the middle of the night.The ship's carpenter was busy for days making repairs, adding to the flagship's overcrowded unpleasantness.

Not until 4 a. m on 17 March with the Light Infantry on rear guard, did he embarkation finally get underway. As the vessels slowly moved away from the wharves at 9 a. m. toward the rendezvous at King's Road, one officer grumbled 'Never was an Army so Crowded in Transports owing to the want of Shipping.' Aboard thirty-eight transports were 8908 troops, 924 Loyalists, and much baggage and equipment. Left behind were many spiked cannon, scuttled brigantines and schooners at every wharf, including one 'newly-built', A 'Chariot' belonging to General Gage lay smashed on the Long Wharf. Much other equipment and stores were strewn around Boston, but apart from a plethora of timber and tons of sea-coal, there was little of much value.

As the evacuation fleet assembled at King's Road, the British blew up Castle William, determined to render it useless to the Americans. Howe and Shuldham, much to Washington's suspicion and impatience, lingered at King's Road until the 21^st. They had discovered to their disquiet that much of the cargo had been badly stowed, making many ships dangerous to sail in anything but the calmest conditions. The Admiral realised they could not remain under the American guns without great hazard. At eight that morning he 'made the signal for all the fleet to sail down to Nantusket' Road, at the entrance to Boston Harbor. For those officers able to glimpse Boston as the transports drew away there was a sadness and an anger about what they had endured for so little purpose. Several thousand of their compatriots lay buried at Concord and Bunker Hill and in Boston itself. Few of the living would ever see Boston again. Thus, three hours after leaving King's Road, Shuldham's fleet moored at Nantusket Road.

Crime and Punishment in Boston - January 1776

2011-02-21T17:04:00.000-08:00

Crime was always prevalent in Boston under British occupation but in the first half of January 1776 it became a crime wave. The shortage of provisions provoked large scale plundering. Howe determined that 'Robberies and housebreaking have got to such a height ... that some examples must be made.' Such examples began with the conviction for stealing of a marine from the First Battalion, who was given 500 lashes. Another court-martial sentenced two men to death, a decision which probably appalled David Collins, who, later, as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land was frequently lachrymose at convict hangings. A private and his wife who had enterprisingly gone into the business of receiving stolen goods were court-martialed. (The woman as the spouse of a serving soldier and official camp-follower was deemed to come under military, not civil justice.) The husband received 1,000 lashes and the woman was tied to a cart's tail, dragged through the Boston streets and given '100 lashes on the bare back ... in the most conspicuous part of the Town', after which the pair were imprisoned for three months. Two other soldiers were sentenced to 800 lashes for housebreaking and stealing. Two more got 800 lashes each for stealing 'a piece of limen.' Another got 500 lashes for shoplifting. Francis Grose had seen floggings before at Bunker Hill, but nothing like this fortnight's orgy of punishment. Probably at this time he developed that aversion to flogging that later would gain him a reputation for mercy among the convicts of New South Wales when he trimmed back the cat-o'-nine-tails to lessen its severity.^¹

1Howe cited in Michael Pearson, These Damned Rebels. The American Revolution as seen through British Eyes, New York, 1972, pp. 142-143; Howe, General Sir William Howe's Orderly Book ... pp. 187-188; Currey, David Collins, p. 239; Carr, After the Siege, p. 31; Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia. Volume One. The Beginning, Oxford, 1998, p. 259.

HMS Boyne Leaves Boston 5th December 1775

2011-02-18T16:26:00.000-08:00

On 5 December 1775 HMS Boyne left Boston for England, taking home General Johnny Burgoyne. Burgoyne would return to North America in May 1777 eventually to end his military career in ignominy. Evan Nepean, a clerk to the Boyne's Captain Evan Hartwell, remained in Boston. It is possible between then and January 1776 when he became secretary to Vice-Admiral Molyneus Shuldham , who replaced the cantankerous Graves, he first made the acquaintance of Captain Robert Ross.. As Under secretary to the Home Department from 1783 Nepean would remember him and play a major part in 1786, in securing his appointment in New South Wales. Vice-Admiral Samurl Graves commanded 'our Invalids, together with a Number of American Seamen, whom ave ordered to be borne on a supernumary list for Wages and Victuals' to board the Boyne. Hartwell was instructed, once back in England, to distribute them throughout the Royal Navy, 'so they may not serve in any Numbers together in America.'^¹ Among them was probably young James Proctor, of whom we know no more until he joins the Sirius bound for Botany Bay in 1786.

1Roberson, His Diaries and Sketches in America, p. 90; Narrative of Admiral Samuel Graves, Boston, 25 November, 1775 in Clark (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 1129; Richard J. Hargrove, Jr., General John Burgoyne, East Brunswick, 1983, p. 113; Vice-Admral Samuel Graves to Philip Stevens, 30 November, 1775, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 1203; Washington was told by an informant at Chelsea, within the American lines, who did not have full knowledge of the situation that 30 Masters of Vessels Pasheners on board.' -cf. [Enclosure] Captain Richard Dodge to George Washington [Chelsea] Dec the 16^th, 1775 in Clark (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, p. 122] but this contradicts Vice-Admiral Graves's advice to London, and I have accepted the latter.

Theatre in Boston 1775 and Sydney Cove, 1789 Compared

2011-02-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

Some time between September and December 1775 David Collins probably went to a play for the first time in his life.Probably by early October he was now stationed in Boston as a Deputy-Adjutant Marines under the keen eye of his father and General Howe who supplanted Gage as Commander-in-Chief on October 10. A performance of an English adaptation of Voltaire's Zara was taking place every week at Faneuil Hall. General John Burgoyne, himself a dramatist of some note, had fitted out the Hall's upper floor, once the meeting place for the Sons of Liberty, 'very Elegantly for a Theatre', much to the chagrin of Boston Puritans, who, since 1750, had banned the performance of plays because 'they caused great mischiefs', mi;itated against industry and frugality, and most importantly, increased 'immorality, impiety and a contempt for religion.' Lord Rawdon gave the prologue, written by Burgoyne, and a ten year old girl delivered his epilogue to the play. Probably to Collins's and the rest of the audiences' delight, 'The Tragedy ... was Performed beyond Expectation [with] Zara by Miss Flucker and Ormon by Lt. Medham of the 47^th Regt.' Fourteen years later Collins would attend, not a theatre or palatial hall, but 'a hut fitted up for the occasion' at Sydney Cove, New South Wales, with 'three or four yards of stained paper and a dozen farthing candles stuck around the mud walls.' where convicts put on a rough performance of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer with their own humourous prologue. It, too, was 'an opportunity of escape from the dreariness and dejection of [the] situation.'.'^¹

1Despite French's arguments -cf. Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1934, p. 537 and Richard J. Hargrave Jnr., General John Burgoyne, East Brunswick, NJ, 1983, p. 82; For dating of Collins's appointment Collins as Deputy Adjutant cf. Journal of the Cerebus, Captain John Symonds, 26 Sept. 1775 in William Bell Clark, (ed.) Naval Documents of the American Revolution,{NDAR} Vol. 2, Washington,1966, p. 210 and John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, Melbourne, 2000, p. 23. Currey places Tooker Collins's arrival in Boston in October, 1775 For Howe becoming C-in-c, John Richard Alden, General Gage in America, Being Principally A History of His Role in the American Revolution, New York, 1948, p. 283; Lieut. William Feilding to Lord Denbigh, Boston, Jany 19, 1776, in Marion Balderston and David Syrrett, (eds.) The Lost War. Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution, New York, 1975, p, 58; Jacqueline Barbara Carr, After the Siege. A Social History of Boston, 1775-1800, Biston, 2005, p, 199; Edward Barrington de Fonblanque, Politicak And Military Episodes In The Latter Half Of The Eighteenth Century Derived From The Life And Correspondence Of John Burgoyne, General, Statesman, Dramatist, London, 1876, pp. 88-86; Francis Hjtcheson to Major-General Frederick Haldemand, Boston, December 4, 1775, in Clark, (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 2, pp. 1267-1268; David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales with Rtemarks on the Dispositions, Customs, Names, etc., of the Native Inhabitants of that Country,Sydney, 1975, pp. 57-58; Watkin Tench, 'A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson' in Tim Flannery, (ed.) Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration, Melbourne, 1996, p. 109.

John Shea

2011-02-09T15:26:00.000-08:00

When on 11 February 1788 just beyond the Sydney camp Captain John Shea blasted a kangaroo with his musket, he probably did not care that the well-known portrait of the marsupial famed from Cook's 1770 voyage was inaccurate. He was glad enough to be fit enough to hunt, for death had haunted him since the age of twenty-one when his father was killed at the battle of Bunker Hill. Of his four children, all boys, two do not appear to have survived to adulthood. On the voyage to Botany Bay Shea had nearly died of tuberculosis, but he seemed well enough now. That afternnon Shea sat for the first time on the Criminal Court with Judge Advocate, David Collins and others. He, like Collins, had served in Boston in mid 1775.

Re-routed there from New York Shea probably had 'thoughts of loin of veal and lemon sauce' as he neared the Harbor, rather than the 'hard as wood, ... lean as carrion ... and rusty as the devil' fare on offer. He probably did not learn of his father's death until he landed at Boston. Shortly thereafter Captain Shea's effects were sold off, the proceeds going to his wife and her large brood of children. His son undoubtedly bid in the street auction for mementoes of his father, but beyond that grief it is as difficult to trace his life in Boston with certainty apart from noting that he was probably on sea-service. He was possibly part of the marine complement of the men-of-war, 'several schooners and armed ships' policing the port. These naval forces were in addition to those of the Army, the latter comnprising now 6767, excluding two uncounted regiments and the marines, in Boston and on Charlestown Neck. Six thousand of these were effectives. According to its critics, the Royal Navy had been supremely inactive ; ... whale-boats ... have insulted and plundered islands immediately under the protection of our ships ...' These moonlight raids by several hundred men had stolen stock, taken hay and burnt down barns on Long and Moon Islands over several nights, and once during the day. They greatly discommoded the newly arrived Light Cavalry forcing them to send their horses temporarily to Charlestown 'where alone there is any chance of grazing.'By mid to late July fresh meat was so scarce that Lord Percy 'killed a foal , had it roasted and invited a party to dinner.' 'Major Musgrave's fat mare was stolen and sold at the market for beef.' To counter this chronic 'scarcity of meat' 'eight sail of transports and a frigate' went to Fisher's Island to collect livestock. Shea may have been on this expedition..

On 19 and 20 July the rebels in their whaleboats attacked the Nantasket Light-house on Brewster Island at the entrance to Boston Harbor. They carried away '1,000 bushels of barley, all the hay, the lamps', some small cannon and some boats. 'The wooden parts of the light-house' they burnt. In the calm the man-of-war, moored 'but a mile from the light0house, nor the navy longboats could catch the Massachusetts whale-boats, 'remarkable for moving quick.' Cannon fire was blocked by 'a small island lying between them and the ship.' Marines from Collins's battalion were sent to protect the artificers sent to make repairs and suffered casualties and imprisonment at the end of the month.

When not in combat marine officers on sea service had little to do. Too frequently they distracted sailors on watch or disturbed them with rowdy drinking sessions, a problem more pronounced in Boston because of the easy availability of the debilitating Massachusetts rum.Conditions on board Royal Navy ships were an improvement on those suffered by troops ashore. Sailorsand marines were 'coolly and cleanly lodged' below decks and there was 'always a little sail of wind in the water that is not upon the Shore.'

By mid-August transports had arrived from Quebec with yet more salted meat, more flour, oats and entrenching tools. Days later a transport ''with about 2,000 sheep and some oxen', was greeted with 'bells ... set to music to the no small joy and comfort' of the besieged. At month's end some drunken British soldiers celebrated by cutting down the Liberty Tree, Boston's centre of 'political Heat', for winter firewood.

In October John Shea was promoted to first lieutenant. Further sea-service saw him advance to captain-lieutenant by 1779. By 1780 his war was over. He married Susannah Linzee, daughter of an official at the Plymouth Naval Base and sister of Captain John Linzee, whom Shea may have met in Boston. Probably to escape a miserable existence on half-pay, in December, 1786 Shea enlisted for service in the New South Wales penal colony. Captain John Shea, as he was then, may have had the strength to bag several kangaroos and hear court cases but the energy to supervise his Company in the building of a barracks at Sydney Cove was beyond him.It was not 'any part of his duty.' Whatever tuberculatory lassitude convinced him of this, by 2 February, 1789, it had killed him. He 'was buried the next day in Miliatry form very Neat and handsom.' In the unseemly negotiations after Shea's death the then Major Robert Ross's attempt to embarrass the colony's Governor Arthur Phillip and his Judge-Advocate, David Collins, came to nought. Lieutenant George Johnston was promoted to Captain-Lieutenant. Ross's nine year old son gained a lieutenancy, which may have caused Johnston, now twenty-five, to reflect with some piquancy on his earlier North American career.

Poem #2

2011-01-30T23:33:00.000-08:00

THAT LIVER THING.

I can remember the day the e-mail came

that said that you were dead.

I knew it was happening, of course;

there was nothing I didn't know about you:

the scars on your knees, from falling drunk in barbed wire at fifteen,

the multi-coloured butterfly on your buttock

put there as a dare years ago, when I told you

it was a symbol for the working girls one night as we strode

like maniacs through King's Cross.

That sudden wonderful snow-weary winter,

when you followed me half way across mountains,

after swearing to me you'd finally left, this time,

forever, as you always swore you would

and swore once more you'd stay forever.

But you didn't.

Not that I minded. The next year I followed you

eight hundred miles. You laughed, and smiled,

and said "Come in. What the fuck took you so long?"

as you poured beers for us both in schooner glasses

you'd knocked off from the local pub that very day.

You always were a thief of hearts or something.

That awful summer day, years later,

that awful, awful summer day,

when dry white in hand, drinking through a cask all on your own

you told me twenty times how we first met

and how much you loved me at first sight,

using the exact same words each time;

and I knew that you were gone from me forever.

Oh, how I loved you, how you loved me,

how I miss the roughness of your cowgirl's hand in mine,

the bridle of your laughter, your eyes from outer space,

the softness of your words that put me fast asleep

when I gave up; the gold-dust of the sun within your hair.

And that promise, that broken promise,

That awful, weeping, broken promise:
"Now you have cancer - We can die together."

It was too much to ask, of course,

I would not/could not kill you, even though you woke at night,

screaming with the pain and drank some more,

then vomited and said that beer was better for your stomach.

I would not kill myself. You would not kill me,

Though you knelt one night above and around me on the bed

holding a Block-buster two-handed above my head,
to bring down close on the pillow by my ear
and then fell on me and kist me,murmuring,

"It will have to be poison. No cup of coffee you ever drink
will be safe while I'm around, Paul Burns."
And laughed, and laughed, and I laughed with you
and that's how we laughed Death away.

In the morning you said, "It will be big on the other side
without you. I'll wait until you come.
You're sure to get lost
without me.'

You left again; just went away without a word

So far I couldn't find you - I waited for a letter

to find out where you were.

("One day you'll teach me the computer, eh?"

And you threw up all over the keyboard.)

Oh, you never forgot that. You never ever forgot that.

("You a poet, are you? I can type. Where do you live?

I'll come round tomorrow, type all your poetry.

You do have a typewriter?")

("It was your words I loved, Burnsey, just your words.

Remember that poem you wrote, for me.

Nobody had ever done that to me before.")

(I put that last line in a poem, years later,

and it wasn't about you. But I loved you still.)

The e-mail said that you were dead. That liver thing.

And on the night you died you whispered through my head

"I beat you to it!" We had a deal, first one across
would tell the other one what the hell was there.
"There's nothing here! Not a bloody thing."

Still, in the quiet of night, your voice comes,

"Do want another beer? Do you want some more wine?

I'll knock up a mince, eh?" And sometimes it sings so clear,

You even wake me.

Chasing Down James Proctor II

2011-01-20T22:12:00.000-08:00

James Proctor first enters the historical record as quarter gunner on HMS Sirius in 1786. He is recorded as having come from Boston, where he would have been fourteen or fifteen years old at the time of the siege of Boston. My original hypothesis about Proctor's ending up on the British side during the American War of Independence was that he came from a Loyalist branch of the noted Massachusetts Proctor family, despite my not having been able to find a record of his birth c. 1761 to any branch of the family listed in the copious genealogies of the Massachusetts Proctors that can be found on-line. A more intensive search of my notes on life in Boston in 1775-1776 has led me to draw a different conclusion. But first, some necessary background.

By 1775 Boston was one of the major maritime centres of colonial America. It had an extensive ship-building industry and was a major employer of seamen to sail the ships that were built there. As Jacqueline Barbara Carr notes in her After the Siege: A Social History of Boston, 1775-1800, 'Before the Revolution "about one hundred and forty-five vessels had been launched in Massachusetts" annually, with Boston claiming a substantial part of that number.' When war broke out in April 1775 the massive workforce necessary to maintain that industry was still available in the town. Since it was not unusual for boys to go to sea at an early age it is likely then that James Proctor was a young seaman in that workforce. Many of those employed in the shipping industry by June 1775 were roaming the streets of Boston unemployed as a consequence of the local economic collapse brought on by Britain's imposition of the "Coercive Acts" on the town after those responsible for the Boston Tea Party refused to pay compensation for the hundreds of cases of tea they had emptied into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773.

(It is worth noting, given the considerable amount of nonsense claimed for the Boston Tea Party in the past few years that the Tea Party was not a protest against taxation by the godless British, but a desperate attempt by the revolutionary leaders Sam Adams, Paul Revere and others to revive a flagging revolutionary movement that had come almost to a stop by the end of 1773. As history records, they were indubitably successful.) [cf. Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party, London, 1963, passim.] But back to James Proctor.

As early as February 1775 Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, the Commander of the Royal Navy's North American Squadron was deeply concerned that the '[s]hips at Boston are beginning to be sickly ... they have lost several men to deaths and as deserters...' Graves ordered 'to raise men for the Squadron' that 'thirty seamen be pressed at Marblehead' where the British were having problems with recalcitrant seamen. The press did not happen because the people of Marblehead would not allow the press-gang to disembark. A further press of 100 men was ordered in Virginia. [Vice Admiral Graves to Philip Stephens, Secretary of the British Admiralty, 2oth February, 1775 and May 13, 1775, William Bell Clark, Naval Documents of the American Revolution, Vol. I, Washington, 1964, pp. 98 and 177.] In Boston, Graves pressed crews of British transports, an action which appalled the military Governor, General Thomas Gage. Graves, whose skills in dealing with the Army and Boston civilians can only be described as sadly lacking, justified his behaviour on the grounds that ''from Ill usage [the seamen] will not stay in the Transports ... And if they are not allowed to Enter on board the Men of War, so many Men as are determined to leave the Transports will be lost to the Service.' [Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves to General Thomas Gage, Boston, June 11, 1775 in Clark, NDAR, Vol. I, p.656.] Such was Graves's bad reputation, Gage can hardly have found this explanation convincing. (Some time later the Admiral had his drawn sword broken by the Commisioner of Customs in a street scuffle, outraged because Graves had stolen some hay from his farm on one of the Bay islands and was selling it on the black market at inflated prices.The two had to be separated by bystanders before blood was shed.) [Captain Francis Hutcheson to Maj. General Frederick Haldemand, Boston, August 19, 1775 in Clark, NDAR, Vol I,p.1182.]

Understandably enough, the carnage of the battle of Bunker Hill changed Gage's attitude towards impressment of local seamen somewhat. On the very day of the battle, Admiral Graves ordered his captains 'to impress as many Seamen as possible.' [Narrative of Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves, Boston, 17th June, 1775 in Clark, NDAR, Vol. I,p. 704.] The next day, when '[m]ost of the Artificers in Boston refused to work on a Brig building for the Crown' he sent out four press-gangs 'to secure all the Shipwrights, Caulkers and Seaman they could lay hold of and send them on board the flag Ship.' Two to three hundred men were impressed, 'among whom were found many Sailors.' [Narrative of Vice Admiral Samuel Graves,18 June, 1775, in Clark, NDAR, Vol. I, p.714.] (Graves may have had other reasons besides lack of manpower for his mass impressment of local sailors. When discontented they were notoriously prone to riot. Growing out of resistance to the press-gangs, these violent outbursts were sometimes destructively directed against the King's shipyards, a real danger in 'the Metropolis of Sedition'. Keeping the local seamen under control was essential to Boston's internal security against rebels within the town.} [Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of Revolutionary Action, Boston, 2000, p.211.] James Proctor may very well have been among them, or was caught up in later presses.On the basis of his later career in gunnery one can surmise he may have worked below-decks as a powder monkey in one of the men-of war in the harbor, during the frequent barrages on rebel positions ashore. Powder-monkeys were young boys responsible for running with powder barrels to the guns when the ship was in action.

Like Jacob Nagle, his fellow First Fleeter, who had been at the battle of Brandywine in September 1777, an was later for a brief time a rebel privateer, and was impressed into the Royal Navy as part of a prisoner exchange after the disastrous French defeat at the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782, Proctor appears to have cheerfully accepted his lot and made a successful career with the British. As noted in a previous post, he eventually established himself as a relatively prosperous settler on Norfolk Island in 1792. He died there in 1801.

Chasing down James Proctor

2010-12-29T00:35:00.000-08:00

James Proctor was a New Englander from Boston who was a quarter gunner on the Sirius, which he joined at Portsmouth on 20 December, 1786, aged 25. The Sirius initially had an armament of six cannonades and four six-pounders but Governor Arthur Phillip demanded she be fitted with 'ten more of the six-pounders ... and the iron-work necessary for the carriages. Having the ironwork, the guns can at any time be mounted, and may, I presume, in future be of great use to me on board or on ashore, as the service may require.' [Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia. A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet, Sydney, 1989, pp. 294-295; Governor Phillip to Secretary Stephens, [London] October 31, 1786, in Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, Pt.2, Mona Vale, 1978, p.28.]

As a quarter gunner, Proctor was probably a former common seaman and was responsible for the working of four guns. His main task was to assist the gunner's mate in the maintenance of his four guns, and, unlike the gun captain who was responsible for the gun crew while in action, was on the official establishment. He received a wage of two shillings more than an able seaman. [N. A. M Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815,London, 2004, p.393; N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World. An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, New York, 1996, p.26.]

James Proctor's career in New South Wales is easy enough to trace. There is no record of him before the wreck of the Sirius at Norfolk Island on 19 March 1790, though he undoubtedly went on the seven month voyage to the Cape of Good Hope with Captain John Hunter which departed Port Jackson on 2 October 1788 for desperately needed flour. Proctor was so impressed by his time on Norfolk Island despite the hardships, that he sought and gained a discharge from the Sirius after nearly a year's sojourn on the island and received a 60 acre grant for farm, ten hilly and the rest level. By 1 October, 1792 he had cultivated twelve of his acres, and by the following year was able to employ John Read for twelve months as a labourer. Tantalisingly, I have to date been unable to find any further record of this John Read, though presumably he was a convict. By 25 May, 1794, Proctor was selling grain to government stores and had rented four acres to William Wright.

Wright was a convict who had made good. Convicted in London for stealing a watch and gown in an occupied house from a woman who first mistook him in the night for her husband, he was sentenced to seven years transportation in September 1784, and was very lucky not to be sent to Africa. Instead he spent nearly two and a half years on the London hulks. Sent out to Botany Bay on the Scarborough, he was able to prove himself once he was dispatched on the Supply to Norfolk Island in January 1790. Given a small plot to support himself on. By April 1792 he was off government stores and working for the island's free settlers., whence he saved enough capital to rent farm land off James Proctor.

By June 1794 Proctor was living with Mary Allen alias Conner, who had been convicted, aged 27 at the Old Bailey for stealing a cocked hat from a hatter in Bloomsbury. When the shop owner's son tried to arrest her she hit him on the head with a sieve while her friend gave him a good kicking, all to no avail. Just over two weeks after her arrest, she was delivered to the women's transport, the Lady Penrhyn. Ann Davis, the first woman to be hung in Sydney Town ,shared a hut with her., Allen was a witness at her trial for theft, and with every other convict, a spectator at the hanging, where Davis was dragged drunk, barely able to stand, to the scaffold. Mary Allen had been sent to Norfolk on the Sirius on 4 March 1790 and, like Proctor, endured its shipwreck. Probably she was with Proctor for the whole of his time on the island, but i this is not recorded. anywhere [The details of the persons mentioned above are taken from the relevant entries in Gillen, op. cit.]

Tracing Proctor's earlier life before he came to New South Wales is far more difficult. At the time of the siege of Boston in 1775-1776 he would have been fourteen or fifteen. It is probable his father was the Boston Loyalist Thomas Proctor of Marblehead, who had been a fervent supporter of the disgraced Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutcheson as far back as 1774, While we know that family almost certainly left Boston in March 1776 for Halifax with the British fleet, little else in certain about them. It is unlikely the Thomas Proctor who may have been James's father was the same Thomas Proctor who was identified in 1784 as a lieutenant in the loyalist Second American Regiment, attained of treason and had his property confiscated. [Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, Vol. 3, 1864, p.568.] The 2nd American regiment was originally the Irish Catholic regiment, the Volunteers of Ireland, raised in Philadelphia in 1777. It isimprobable that James Proctor was of Catholic descent, since the Proctors were a famous Massachusetts Puritan family. Indeed, the New England Puritans, whether Patriot or Loyalist, were vehemently anti-Catholic.He was not related to the Proctors of Nova Scotia, from whence Deputy Adjutant David Collins of the Second Battalion Marines would find a wife in June 1777. [John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, Melbourne, 2000, p.25.]
It is probable James Proctor joined the Royal Navy in America at some time during the War of American Independence, but I have not as yet found any record of him. He had progressed from ordinary seaman to quarter gunner and at war's end seems to have decided to remain in the navy, probably because there were few jobs ellsewhere because of a post-war depression. We know, too, that he was one of those seamen from whom Governor Phillip 'took his pick, all young men that were called seamen, 160 in number, no boys or women allowed.' [John C. Dann, (ed.) The NagleNagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841, New York, 1988, p.77.] Evidently, James Proctor was well thought of by somebody, since we know Phillip chose his crew with great care.

While in New South Wales, Proctor clearly performed his duties as a seaman well, as can be inferred from the ease with which he was given his discharge and a land grant on Norfolk Island. Proctor and Mary Allen remained together until his death on 21 October, 1801. The property he left Mary was worth 60 pounds when she left Norfolk Island for Van Diemen's Land in May 1808. By then it consisted of a large two storey house, a second building 10 by 12 feet, a one storey wooden and floored barn, four thatched log houses, 28 acres of cleared land and 21 acres uncleared land. At her leaving, the authorities rated her, as a woman convict, a '2nd class settler.' At the time she was living with another convict, William Atkins, and caring for his three children by his previous marriage. [Gillen, op. cit., p. 5.]

Christmas in and around Boston - 1775

2010-12-18T19:17:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve 1775, a Sunday, the whole of New England was in the grip of a heavy snowstorm. Around Boston a foot of snow had fallen and temperatures dropped to the low twenties. [Captain Francis Hutcheson to Major General Frederick Haldemand, Boston, December 25, in Clark (ed.) Naval Documents of the American Revolution, Vol. 3, Washington, 1968, p.237; David McCullough, 1776. America and Britain at War, London, 2005, p.67].No pre-Christmas celebrations are recorded for that day or night in either British or American sources that I have seen. Perhaps the blizzard stopped them, though more likely it was in keeping with. the low-key celebration of Christmas that seems characteristic of the eighteenth century.

In Boston General William Howe, the British Commander-in-Chief, laboured that day over a letter to Vice Admiral James Young at the British naval base at Antigua in the West Indies. Boston was chronically short of provisions because of 'the Hazards which Ships run in coming upon this Coast with Supplies when the Winter Season is so far advanced'. In desperation he had decided to send two transports to Antigua to purchase provisions there. He understood 'the markets there to be very full at this time.' If both ships could not be filled, he begged the Admiral 'to lade the smallest 'and to send her off immediately to this Place. after having provided Seamen and Guns for her Protection' or 'a Ship of War to convoy her to this Post.as the early arrival of a Vessel with Provisions may be of the last Consequence to His Majesty's Garrison in this Quarter.' He sought, too, a convoy of victualling Ships from Young. [Major General William Howe to Vice Admiral James Young, Antigua, Boston, 24 December, 1775 in Clark (ed.) NDAR,Vol. 3, Washington, 1968, p.224.]

Christmas Day broke 'clear, bright and cold.'. [Scheer and Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats, Cleveland, 1957, p.103.] It was a disastrous day for the Boston schoolmaster John Leach. Leach was suspected of rebel sympathies, having been earlier imprisoned for communicating with General George Washington's besieging army. The British Light Dragoons had been allotted Leach's wharf. He woke to find them tearing it down for firewood for winter fuel. The wharf destroyed, the soldiers threatened his school-house. The schoolmaster's protests to General Howe met with little sympathy. Leach denied his disloyalty and as an Englishman, demanded 'the protection of my property, and if my House was pulled down, I would follow him to England, or to China (Leach had been to China) for satisfaction.' To Leach's surprise Howe's response to this outburst was 'friendly.' The general referred Leach to his subordinates. That subordinate may have been Deputy Adjutant David Collins, who would later sail and serve with Governor Arthur Phillip in the convict colony of New South Wales, since Collins was on duty in Boston for Christmas Day. Whoever the subordinate was, they delayed giving orders for the destruction at Leach's wharf to stop until after the soldiers had broken into the school-house. The school-house was saved, but the Light Dragoons plundered 'valuable Books and Instruments, Drawings, Colours, Brushes, several Curious Optick Glasses and sundry things of Value that I brought from India and China, that I cannot replace for money.' [Allen French, The Siege of Boston, New York, 1911, pp.115-117. (General Books Edition.); William Howe, General Sir William Howe's Orderly Book, London, 1690, p.178.] We know that David Collins was a man with a deep interest in anthropology and it is hard not to conclude that he may have profited out of the morning's looting if he was the subordinate to whom Leach had been referred.

Collins had long been spared the rigours of the posting at Bunker Hill through the influence of his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Tooker Collins who had been in Boston for several months. This was not the case for other soldiers stationed under tents in the freezing outpost, where detachments were now stationed for a fortnight at a time to spare them the hardship of the Boston winter. Their past fortnight had been 'very Quiet without any insult from the Rebels.' Like the rest of the regiments that Christmas Day, they were provided with 'one Butt of Porter ...to make they Men Keep Christmas day.' [Captain Frances Hutcheson to Major General Frederick Haldemand, December 25, 1775 in op. cit., p.238.]

The storm's end meant the resumption of normal activities. With the bitter easterly wind gone two hundred marines embarked on board the Scarborough for Savannah, Georgia, their hope to pick up much needed supplies of rice. Their destination was not general knowledge. Rumours circulated the town that they were bound for the Bermudas 'where it is said the Rebels have a Magazine of Military tores' or for Rhode Island. [Lt. William Feilding to Earl of Denbigh, Boston, Jany 19th, 1776 in Balderston and Syrett, The Lost War, New York, 1975, p.59.]

Of particular interest to the British was the fact that the rebels had stopped working on the redoubt they had been constructing at Lechmere Point. The bitter cold had brought a temporary end to Patriot exertions.[Captain Francis Hutcheson to Major General Frederick Haldemand, Boston, December 25, 1775 in Clark, op. cit., p.237.] It did not occur to the British that Christmas celebrations might also be occurring in the American camp.

General George Washington's Christmas pre-occupations were as grave as General Howe's. A lack of ammunition prevented him from using what little cannon he had. His only hope was that with the icy winter the Boston Harbour would freeze over, enabling his troops to make a land approach. This did not happen. [Annual Register, 1776 in David H. Murdoch (ed.) Rebellion in America, Moreover, he was faced with a continuing shortage of men, as the militia slipped away, their terms of enlistments ending, or absenting themselves for Christmas furlough. He had but 8,500 men left along a greatly extended line to face a superior British force.of 10,000. [George Washington to John Hancock, Cambridge, 25 Decr 1775 in Clark (ed.) NDAR, Vol. 3, Washington, 1968, pp.232-233; Robert Middlekauf, The Glorious Cause. The American Revolution, 1765-1789, New York, 2007, p.302.]

According to William Gordon, the contemporary historian of the American Revolution, who at the time was the Congregationalist Minister to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Watertown, some miles from the camps around Boston, one American soldier spent his Christmas Day making 'a note of the numbers killed by the firings of the enemy on both the Cambridge and Roxbury sides of the rebel camp. This soldier calculated the British had fired 'upwards of 2,000 shot and shell' since the beginning of hostilities at Charlestown Heights, and lately threw more than 300 bombs at Ploughed Hill and 100 at Lechmere's Point. All up this curious militiaman decided that the British had killed no more than nineteen patriots, giving himself a peculiar kind of Christmas cheer.

Thus ended Christmas in and around Boston in the year of the siege.

China and North Korea - An Historical Perspective

2010-11-26T23:04:00.000-08:00

This post is an attempt to bring some perspective into the current debate about the relationship between China and North Korea. I intend to demonstrate that the relationship between China and Korea, especially North Korea goes back for more than a millennium and needs to be understood in that context. This synthesis is based on material in John Keay's China. A History, London, 2008., though the conclusions drawn are my own

The first firm evidence for Chinese Korean relationships dates from about the first century AD.from the Han Dynasty. under the emperor Wudi. Han relationships with North Korea brought adaptiation to Chinese ways, notably in paper-making and literacy and, probably most significantly, Confucianism. While there was clearly some military conquest by China, relationships were mostly peaceful, since in this era there was no threat to China from the south. The Hans appear to have been forced out of the Korean peninsula some time in the latter part of the first century or second century AD.

During the late sixth-early seventh century the Sui dynasty mounted several disastrous invasions of North Korea, the most significant being the three failed invasions under the emperor Yangdi in 614. For a whole host of reasons Yangdi was, to put it mildly, a most unpopular emperor. His defeats in North Korea ultimately resulted in his assassination in 618, the end of the Sui Dynasty and the rise of the Tang Dynasty.

The Tang emperor Taizong was, unfortunately, driven to emulate his Sui predecessor when it came to North Korea. His two attempts to impose Chinese suzerainty on North Korea failed, the first invasion barely getting into the peninsula before being driven back. The second in 647 suffered a similar fate. Not until 669 would Tang troops enter Pyongyang. Then, under Wu Zetian, protectorates were established over the northern part of the peninsula with only the southern Korean kingdom of Silla surviving. The Tangs remained in northern Korea until 672, and were completely expelled by the resurgent Silla kingdom in 672, according to Korean sources. Nevertheless, Silla would acknowledge Chinese suzerainty and pay tribute to all dynasties up to the Southern Song in 1259.

The Mongol invasion of China and the encirclement of the Southern Song by the Mongol hordes in the same year saw a bloody invasion of the Korean peninsula and forced Korean submission and a new acknowledgement of Mongol suzerainty. The Koreans appear to have been left in relative peace until 1274, when they were forced to be the reluctant staging point of Khubilai's disastrous attempt at invading Japan. The Japanese did not forget. In the 1590s they invaded Korea, forcing the Ming Dynasty into a long, unwanted war.

The next significant involvement of Korea with the Chinese came under the victorious Manchus in 1620 when the Manchu Hong Taiji transformed Chinese military strategy via artillery and siegecraft, and the formation of the famed Manchu Bannerman, who recruited many Koreans for their regiments.

In the sixteenth century Western observers at the Chinese court, like the Jesuit Matthew Ricci, were appalled by Sino-Japanese warfare on the Korean peninsula, but they were bystanders. By and in the nineteenth century, Korea had sent regular missions to the Manchu emperors, but essentially they maintained their independence. Japanese attempts to follow Western example and establish treaty ports on the Korean peninsula, as the West had done with China, led to the various Western powers, with Chinese encouragement, seek to open their own treaty ports on the peninsula. An internal Korean rebellion in 1894 resulted in the Korean king seeking Chinese troops. The Japanese responded by sending larger forces of their own. The result was war between the Quing court and the Japanese. For the Chinese the war was a complete disaster, leading to a Japanese invasion of China and a humiliating peace in 1895, which virtually made Korea a Japanese protectorate. Chinese influence in Korea was at an end, or so it seemed.

To understand what happened next we have to fast forward to the end of the Pacific War in 1945. As Japanese defeat seemed certain Soviet Russia and the United States rushed to occupy Japanese territory in Korea. At war's end the peninsula was partitioned along the line of occupation, the 38th parallel. In June 1950 North Korea, now Communist and sharing an ideological brotherhood with the victorious Chinese Communists who had established the People's Republic of China in 1949, invaded the American supported south in the name of Korean 'integration'. The subsequent Korean War was fought to a stalemate, with the Peoples' Republic backing Northern Korean Communists with the participation of up to a million soldiers from the People's Liberation Army. Korea, when the armistice finally came in 1954, was divided into communist and capitalist blocs. China maintains its support of its intransigent southern ally to this day.

But, looking back over the millennium of history what can we conclude about the Chinese-North Korean relationship? Clearly, it goes back much further than a sympathy between two Communist allies. China has shed much blood over and in support of Korea, including an invasion of their own soil by the Japanese, followed by a humiliating capitulation (1895). For centuries the Korean kingdoms were tributaries of Imperial China. To a limited extent, Korea was acculturated by its giant northern neighbour, in much the way, say ,that modern Australia was acculturated by Great Britain. It is not a bond that will be easily broken. North Korea in particular has always been viewed by the Chinese, Imperial, republican and Communist, as a legitimate Chinese sphere of influence. This brief essay is an attempt to explain why, regardless of the antics of the North Korean Communist dictatorship, such a strong bond exists between the two nations.

And as to their joint future? that is speculation, and speculation is not the business of history.

The Interrupted Performance of General Johnny Burgoyne's 'The Blockade of Boston' January 8, 1776

2010-11-11T17:47:00.000-08:00

Boston under siege in January 1776 was a most unpleasant place to be. Fuel was scarce, so scarce that the British Commander-in-Chief, William Howe had authorised the pulling down and burning of the houses and wharves belonging to rebel supporters. There were no fresh provisions. Expected storeships from Britain had failed to arrive. Smallpox had broken out, but fortunately had not reached epidemic proportions. In the bitter winter, though not so bitter as to freeze up Boston Harbor and allow the Americans rebels under Washington to stage an attack to the Boston peninsula's Back Bay from the west, the greatest danger for the British was boredom. To the town's north east, soldiers froze in their tents on the Charlestown Peninsula on the redoubt on Bunker Hill, secured with much blood the previous June and in the outposts on Charlestown Neck, beyond which was rebel-held territory.

British officers and the town's wealthier Loyalists tried to boost morale with balls, concerts, and most importantly, plays, which were performed twice a week on the upper floor of Faneuil Hall, former meeting place of the rebel Sons of Liberty, now 'fitted up very Elegantly for a Theatre' [Lieut. William Feilding to Lord Denbigh, Boston, Jany. 19, 1776 in Marion Balderston and David Syrett (ed.) The Lost War. letters from British Officers during the American Revolution, New York, 1975. p. 58] much to the chagrin of Boston Puritans.

Though theatre had flourished in other major colonial towns, even Philadelphia, to the scorn of the Quakers, since 1750 the Massachusetts General Court had banned the performance of plays because they caused 'great mischiefs', militated against 'industry and frugality' and, most importantly, increased 'immorality, impiety and a contempt for religion.' [Jacqueline Barbara Carr, After the Siege. A Social History of Boston, 1775-1800, Boston, p.199]. This all changed with the arrival of General Johnny Burgoyne, who had set up the Faneuil Hall theatre by about December 1775.

Burgoyne was not only a noted soldier and inept politician. He was also a celebrated playwright. His two-act musical comedy, The Maid of Oaks, (later staged in Boston) had opened to a very mixed reception at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on November 12, 1774. Horace Walpole thought it 'as dull as the author could not help making it' though Burgoyne's modern biographer notes the 'work became a prototype of a new form of musical comedy, which reflected the influence of middle-class tastes upon dramatic productions.' [Richard Hargrove, Jr. General John Burgoyne. Newark, 1983, pp.63-64]. And Boston was nothing if not middle-class.

So, on the night of January 8, 1776, the British officers off-duty and the Boston Loyalist elite flocked to Faneuil Hall for performances of Susanna Centlivre's The Busy Body (a 1709 farce) and the premiere of Burgoyne's The Blockade of Boston. The latter was looked forward to with much enthusiasm, as a biting satire on the besieging rebels with all the roles being performed by officers. It was not to be. Across the water the same rebels were planning a raid on the Charlestown peninsula, timed for 9 o'clock, the exact time the curtain was due to rise on Burgoyne's musical fare.

Major Thomas Knowlton with one hundred men had orders 'to go and burn some houses which lay at the foot of Bunker's Hill and at the head of' the now ruined village of 'Charles Town' and 'to bring of the Guard which we expected consisted of an officer and thirty men.' The guard was not there, but with much noise the rebels did burn 'eight houses and brought with them a' drunken 'Sergeant and 4' inebriated 'privates of the 10th regiment, and a woman they were entertaining in one of the deserted houses' A fifth man was killed because he resisted. On Bunker Hill the flashing of the musketry from every quarter of that fort showed the confusion of its defenders - firing some into the air, some in the Mystick river; in short, they fired at random and thought they were attacked at every quarter.' [George Washington to Continental Congress, January 11, 1776 in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript sources, 1745-1799, John C. Fitzpatrick, Editor, American Memory, The George Washington Papers of the Library of Congress, 1741-1799, http://memory.loc.gov 6/8/06; Extract of a letter from Cambridge, January 9, 1776, in Peter Force (ed.) American Archives,S4-V4-p.612] General Howe was deeply angered when he heard of the confused British reaction but their confusion was nothing compared to what happened at Faneuil Hall.

An orderly sergeant outside the theatre raised the alarm crying 'Turn Out! Turn Out!' but the audience burst into applause at his appearance, mistaking him for a character in the play. When the applause died down 'he again cried out, 'What the d---l are ye about? If ye won't believe me ye need only to go to the door, and there ye'll hear and see both!' ' Finally convinced the alarm was serious, the officers rushed to their alarm stations, 'one officer was running to his Corps in his petticoats, and another with his faced blacked and in a Negro dress.' Others 'calling out for water to get the paint and smut off their faces, women fainting, etc.' Ensign Martin Hunter believed 'The enemy knew the night it was to be performed and made an attack on the mill at Charleston at the very hour the farce began;' [General Martin Hunter's Journal in G. D. Scull (ed.) The Evelyns in America, Oxford, 1881, pp. 189-190, f/n; Lieut. William Feilding to lord Denbigh, op. cit.,; cited in David McCullough, 1776. America and Britain at War, London, 2005, p.75] In fact, the Americans did not hear about the play's premiere until three days after the raid. [Cambridge, January 11, 1776 in Peter Force (ed.) American Archives, S4-V.4_p. 613, f/n.]

The piece was finally performed without interruption at the end of January, along with Marlowe's Tamerlane. One member of the audience thought '[t]he Characters of the Yankee General [Washington] and the Figure of his Soldiers is inimitable, the Genl: a man who cant Read but can Speachifye, and tell his soldiers they are to obey the Voice of the people in the streets, the Joy the Rebels are in, in reading the Resolve of the Mayor and City of London in favour of the Con-ti-nen-tal Congress in Ph-li-del-phia pa-per is truly Characteristick.' Another thought 'the Audience Expected something better from the Abilities of the Authors. its but a poor performance.' [Lieutenant William Feilding to Lord Denbigh, Boston Jany 28th, 1776 in Balderston and Syrett, op. cit., p.64; Francis Hutcheson to Major General Frederick Haldemand, Boston, January, 25th, 1776 in William Bell Clark, (ed.) Naval Documents of the American Revolution, Vol. 3, Washington, 1968, p.970.

Within less than two months, the despised rebel general would drive the British from Boston, never to return, Legal theatre would not return to Boston until 1794. [Jacqueline Barbara Carr, op. cit., p.221.]

The Travails of Robert Gordon Menzies in the 1940-41 Minority Government

2010-10-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

In my last post I considered the relationship between Labor's John Curtin and the United Australia Party's )UAP) Robert Menzies during the Menzies' minority Government of 1940-41. In this post I am going to concentrate on Menzies; difficulties within the UAP over the period of his minority Government. My intention is to show how recent Liberal Party claims that Curtin refused Menzies a pair to travel to London in 1941 are disingenuous, at best, if not completely untruthful.

The election debacle of September 1940 had grave ramifications for the conservative Coalition. Within the Country Party there was a fight for the leadership between 'Black Jack" McEwen and Earle Page. Artie Fadden was elected to the leadership as a compromise candidate and the former United Country Party (UCP) leader, Archie Cameron, not even nominated for the leadership, left the party in high dudgeon and joined the UAP. Arthur Coles, elected as aVictorian Independent, also joined the UAP. In his reconstruction of the UAP Cabinet, Menzies gave the post of Treasurer to Fadden, much to the ire of the UAP's Percy Spender, who had been Treasurer in the former Menzies Government. He had gained the post because in April 1939 Earle Page had taken the UCP out of the Coalition because of his dislike of Menzies whom he had blamed for hounding the UAP's founding Leader, Joe Lyons, to his death. Spender, instead, was made Minister for the Army.

Negotiations with Labor and Lang Labor after the September election led to the formation of the Advisory War Council (AWC). Most significantly, for the argument I am currently advancing, John Curtin, the Labor Opposition leader guaranteed not to use Labor's numbers in the Parliament to embarrass the Government in its war effort. On 24 January, 1941, accompanied by Frederick Shedden, the Secretary for Defence, Menzies departed Australia for London via the Netherlands East Indies, Singapore and the Middle East. He was determined to induce Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, to be specific as to how he intended to reinforce Singapore and draw up a plan for the defence of the Far East. He wanted, too, an exact explanation from Churchill as to how he would make good his pledge of defending Australia from Japanese invasion.

Much of the detail of Menzies' discussions with the British Government and British defence authorities need not concern us. However, one detail is significant for its effect on politics back in Australia. In discussions with the British Foreign Office Menzies was shocked to discover the British had reservations about reinforcing Singapore with aircraft to guard against war in the Far East because the planes could be ill-spared from the European war. Nor would they engage in war with Japan unless American intervention was guaranteed. He warned the British that if the Japanese invaded the Netherlands East Indies , 'the whole Australian defence policy and plans would have to be recast.'

In an attempt to change Foreign Office thinking, Menzies gave a luncheon speech to the Foreign Press Association on 3 March. He reiterated publicly the views he had expressed to the Foreign Office and called for frankness with Japan and a 'proper blend of friendliness and plain statement'. Australia, he warned, he warned would nevertheless defend herself and her vital interests.

Back home, Curtin, Beasley and the press accused him of minimising the seriousness of the position in the Pacific and contradicting warnings the AWC had issued in February about the Japanese threat. This response disgusted Menzies and reinforced an unfortunate (and untrue) perception in the Australian electorate that he was, somehow, an appeaser of Fascism. By April Spender, concerned by Australian defeats in Northern Africa and Greece did not augur well for the Government's popularity or for Army morale, tried to persuade the War Cabinet to appoint a Commander-in-Chief of the AMF (Australian Military Forces) to be designated "Commander-in-Chief Australia'. Because of opposition from the Military Board and Defence Committee, he was forced to compromise with the appointment 'of the GOC (General Officer Commanding) of the Field Army'. His suggestion was adopted to counter strong political pressure being applied in the Advisory War Council by Labor members about the need to give Australian defence priority over Imperial commitments. This strategem temporarily squelched Labor protests. The appointment was not made until 11 July, but did not clearly define the lines of authority and command within the military bureaucracy for the appointee, General Sir Iven Mackay.)
Menzies, now in Washington, was not impressed when Fadden cabled him about the decision. Perhaps he became suspicious that Spender had pretensions to the leadership of the UAP. On the trip home on 25 April the thought of political rivalries in Canberra gave him 'a sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension.' On 13 June, following a further Australian defeat in Crete earlier that month, Menzies decided to free himself from the pressure of administrative duties to 'better exercise a general supervision over the wart effort on the military and economic fronts.' This culminated in his public broadcast on 17 June, exhorting the Australian public to an 'all-in' effort. On 26 June he re-organised his Cabinet. But the Cabinet reconstruction brought into the open dissension within the UAP about Menzies' leadership, especially from those who had been passed over for a portfolio.
The political pressure for the Government to be seen doing something for the defence of the continent had intensified since April. On 28 July, a joint Franco-Japanese protectorate was declared over Indo-China. Australia, following the lead of Britain and the United States, froze Japanese assets. Forde and Makin in the Advisory War Council, on 29 July forced the Government on the defensive about its policy of concentrating Australia's defence in the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the face of Japanese bellicosity. Spender pointed out that the Government had despatched brigades of the 8th Division to Malaya and Darwin, had taken steps to call up 35,000 men in the home forces for full-time duty, including four detachments at Rabaul and Thursday Island, and had instituted a more efficient training programme for the militia less than a week before. Spender's argument ignored the chronic equipment deficiencies within the AMF about which the Labor men had recently been informed.
Menzies, meanwhile, was having serious problems within the UAP. At the end of July he had fended off a challenge to his leadership exacerbated by calls within the Labor Party for him to be deposed.and grew more and more preoccupied with attempts within his own party to topple him and was less able to give full attention to his Ministerial obligations. In a desperate attempt to salvage his leadership he suggested that he might go once more to London where, through the British War Cabinet he might be able to better influence decisions that would affect Australia's defence. The former World War I Prime Minister, the ancient Billy Hughes, who once more had visions of himself as Australia's war-time leader, strongly urged this idea on his threatened leader. Labor would have none of it. Convinced that the Menzies Government was close to derelict in its responsibility for the nation's home defence, and confident that they alone could save Australia from the looming Japanese threat, Curtin refused to give Menzies a pair for what he believed was a second useless trip to London. They knew Menzies would fall if he remained in Australia.
On 28 August Menzies resigned as Prime Minister, leaving the way open for Fadden, a candidate thought more acceptable to the electorate. Fadden had no illusions about the task before him. He made no changes to the Menzies Cabinet, and determined to use Meanzies' expertise, allowed him to retain the portfolio of Defence Co-ordination.
It is clear from the above that Curtin refused to pair Menzies' second trip to London because he believed the Coalition was unfit to manage the war, a view that was shared by Arthur Coles, again an Independent, who in October crossed the floor of the House and put the Labor Party into Government. When the current shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey, claimed Curtin had refused Menzies a pair to go to London, he can only have been referring to this latter occasion. That he neglected to explain the circumstances behind the refusal of a pair, namely that in time of great peril, Australia was being governed by a disunited party incapable of dealing with the threat of Japanese invasion in the near future, and which had left the country in a state on unpreparedness to meet such an invasion, at the very least puts his assertion in the realm of a half-truth, to say the least.

The Curtin Opposition and the Menzies Minority Government of 1940-41

2010-09-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days the Abbott Opposition to Gillard's minority Government has been putting around the furphy that somehow John Curtin, Australian wartime Opposition Leader, was involved in attempts to destabilise Robert Menzies' wartime Government, as a justification for its current obstructiveness. It is time to put this outrageous lie to rest. I propose to do that by examining in some detail the Curtin Opposition's relationship withe the Menzies 1940-41 Government.

After the 1940 election Menzies, seeking a way out of the political difficulties created by the Independents holding the balance of power, approached Curtin to form a National Government. Curtin responded by suggesting the Labor proposal of an Advisory War Council. After some negotiation the parties arrived at an agreement. The Labor Party promised to co-operate with the Government in its attempts to strengthen the war effort, to deal with internal security matters and in preparations for the immediate postwar period. It would not use its numbers in the Parliament to embarrass the Government in its war effort. (This last condition is worth noting. It puts the lie to Joe Hockey's claim that Curtin did not pair Menzies when Menzies went to London and Washington in January 1941.) All members of the Council, Menzies, Fadden, Spender and Hughes for the Government, Curtin, Forde, along with Makin for Labor and Beasley for Lang Labor were sworn in 'to respect all confidences.'

On 13 February, 1941, after an Advisory War Council meeting held about two and a half weeks after Menzies had departed for London to impress on Churchill the potential danger Australia faced from Japan, Curtin issued a joint statement with the acting Prime Minister, Artie Fadden that 'effective preparatory measures' were being taken to put Australia on a war footing. Curtin faced severe criticism within the Parliamentary Labor Party for his association with the joint warnings when Fadden was forced to justify his statements against the charge that he was a panic merchant. Eddie Ward, the Labor member for East Sydney, labelled the warnings a hoax. To counter this, Fadden called a secret session of Parliament to discuss the impending Japanese threat, and the measures taken to counter that threat. This was not achieved without drama. Eddie Ward refused to give an undertaking to keep secret matters disclosed at the closed session and was ejected from the House. His behaviour resulted from his conviction that the Menzies led .coalition was not fit to govern and should be attacked on any grounds regardless of the danger to national security.

Menzies returned to Australia at the end of April, 1941 On 27 June Eddie Ward seconded a Caucus motion 'that in the interests of the people and for the safety of the nation' the Labor Party pledge itself to defeat Menzies in the House 'not later than the next Budget.' This gave the Party just over a two month deadline. The motion was nullified by a Curtin supported amendment.

Menzies was having serious problems within his United Australia Party. At the end of July he had fended off a challenge to his leadership exacerbated by calls from within the Labor Party for him to be deposed. Despite pressure from Dr. H. V. Evatt, who had pronounced himself Curtin's natural successor when it appeared the Labor leader might lose his seat in the 1940 election, and from Beasley, Curtin refused to commit himself publicly to Menzies' overthrow.

At the suggestion of some of his Cabinet colleagues Menzies put forward the idea that he might go again to London, so the Australian voice could be 'directly heard in the place in which the major decisions are inevitably made' - the British War Cabinet. Hughes, his eyes on the Prime Ministership yet again, was one of the most forceful advocates of this plan. But Labor, with the balance of power in the House of Representatives, would not give their assent to the visit. They believed the Prime Minister should be in Australia to direct the administration of the war effort and knew Menzies would fail if forced to stay in Australia. (This is the only instance where Curtin denied Menzies a pair, and, under the circumstances facing Menzies, Labor's attitude is perfectly understandable politically.) On 28 August, after consulting his wife and parents, Menzies bowed to intra-party pressure and resigned.

George Johnston at Bunker Hill -Reflections on New Evidence

2010-09-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

A little while ago I did a post on eleven year old George Johnston's experiences at Bunker Hill. My interpretation of the evidence for Johnston's action was based on several assumptions implied in the evidence I had gathered to that date: 1) that Johnston was in Boston with his parents 2) that he had not yet joined the Marines 3) that consequently he was a spectator not a participant in the battle of Bunker Hill 4) that because he was with his wife in Boston, Johnston's father, Captain David Johnston was nursed by his wife in their rented residence in Boston.

New evidence that has come to light has overturned all these assumptions. Young George actually joined the Marines as a ten year old in October 1774 and came to Boston alone with his father in January 1775. His father went went with Lord Percy's First Brigade to relief Lt. Colonel Francis Smith at Lexington after the latter's disastrous retreat from Concord. Young George remained in Boston.

Bunker Hill was George's first experience of battle. He was in the rear line of the third attack against the Breed's Hill redoubt, where, according to the Johnston family tradition, he took the regimental standard from the hands of a dying ensign and rushed to the front of the battle. It is unlikely he saw his father, seriously wounded in the chest during the storming of the Breed's Hill redoubt, until he was brought down to the beach at the battle's end. David Johnston's wound was most likely treated in one of the hastily established regimental hospitals in Boston town., Though the wound was serious, he did recover, leaving his son behind in Boston when he was returned to England with the rest of the wounded several months later.

My narrative of George Johnston's time in Boston changed because new evidence came to light. This raises interesting questions about the nature of history. How can two completely different narratives, both based on reasonable evidence, arise out of the same sequence of events. The first narrative, in an earlier post, obviously was partly, though not entirely, fiction. The second narrative is probably the more accurate. So how close to fiction can history get? Or, to put it another way, when is history wrong and when is it right, if it is ever right, once you stray beyond the basic established facts of a narrative? These are among the questions about the philosophy of history I have pondered most of my adult life, but as is ever the case with philosophy have never been able to come up with a definitive answer.They are worth pondering, even if they are irresolvable.

Independents in the Australian Federal Parliament - A War-time Case Study

2010-09-11T20:51:00.000-07:00

The 21 September 1940 Australian federal election did not augur well for the conservative parties with dissension in the United Australia Party (UAP) and a United Country Party much discontented under the rambunctious leadership of Archie Cameron who had succeeded Earle Page. Both the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the UAP-UCP campaigned on the issue of who was best fitted to lead the nation in war. However, there were significant side issues of petrol rationing and a defence of the sectional interests of wheat growers in the Wimmera. The latter campaign resulted in the election of Alex Wilson as an Independent. He was accompanied into Parliament by Arthur Coles, another Independent, who was determined to goad the major parties to a more effective and united war effort. When the poll was declared, Labor and the coalition had gained 36 seats each, with the Independents holding the balance of power in the House of Representatives. John Curtin, the Labor leader, narrowly held his seat of Fremantle where the poll was in doubt for some days. The UAP retained power in the Senate.

The election debacle resulted in a fight for the leadership within the Country Party. Artie Fadden became compromise acting leader over John McEwen and Page, and thus Deputy Prime Minister. Not even nominated for Country Party leadership Cameron left the party in disgust and joined the UAP. Coles, a fervent supporter of the UAP Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, joined the UAP.

The intra-party infighting in mid to late 1941 that led to Menzies resigning the UAP leadership in August 1941 need not concern us greatly. His resignation left the way open for Fadden to become Prime Minister because he was thought a candidate more acceptable to the electorate. On 3 October Arthur Coles, -who had again turned Independent after Menzies' fall - dissatisfied with the defence policies of the coalition and disillusioned with UAP disloyalty to their former leader, crossed the floor of the House giving Curtin a majority in the House of Representatives. He supported the Curtin Government in no confidence motions and the provision of supply until June, 1943. The circumstances that led him to withdraw that support in that month are worth examining in some detail.

In October 1942, during the Victorian state election campaign, Eddie Ward, the Labor member for East Sydney, alleged that under the Menzies Government there had been 'a plan in existence ... for the abandonment of an important part of Northern Australia without firing a single shot.' Over the succeeding months Ward turned this allegation into an attack on the Menzies Government's lack of defence preparedness, which in turn changed to the more serious allegation that Menzies had a plan to abandon all of Australia north of a line drawn from Maryborough in Queensland diagonally to Adelaide and/or Albany in Western Australia to the Japanese in event of invasion. Ward's claims (which were inaccurate) were vigorously denied by Menzies. Ward though, continued to make the claims and Curtin did nothing to stop him. Eventually Opposition anger grew so fierce that Ward's claims of a Brisbane Line formed the major part of an Opposition no confidence motion against the Curtin Government beginning in the afternoon of 22 June, 1943. During that debate Eddie Ward, pressed for evidence of his allegation, made the extraordinary assertion that he had been 'reliably informed that there was a document missing from official files' that pertained to the Brisbane Line.In his speech on the no confidence motion, Coles made no reference to the issue.

In private discussions with Curtin Ward refused to disclose the name of his informant. The controversy surrounding Ward's allegation of a missing document grew so intense, both inside and outside of Parliament, that Curtin soon realised there would have to be an investigation into its accuracy. Menzies and the Opposition demanded a Royal Commission, and that Ward stand down from Cabinet. He repeated this demand the next day in during a debate that the no-confidence motion be adjourned,that there should be a Royal Commission into the Brisbane Line allegations. Cole hesitated before voting in support of the Labor Government. Earle Page, speaking for the Opposition in a subsequent Budget Estimates debate, urged the refusal of Supply in the Opposition controlled Senate until Curtin agreed to a Royal Commission. At this point, Coles, who had come under considerable pressure, privately informed Curtin that he intended to vote to refuse Supply.

Curtin, ever the clever politician, relieved Ward of his Cabinet post and announced a Royal Commission. Because he had acceded to the Royal Commission rather than having it voted on from the floor of the Parliament Ward could claim parliamentary privilege when he testified before it, and he had kept Coles's vote.

The UAP-UCP Opposition were not finished with the issue yet though. They decided to block Supply in the wartime Senate unless Curtin consented to a dissolution of Parliament. Curtin did so, later that night before an almost empty House.
In the subsequent election on August 21, Labor won 49 seats to the Coalition's 23. Both Independents retained their seats, though Coles had to go to preferences. His influence over the Government of the day was at an end.

On Finding Books

2010-08-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since I've posted on my blog. I've been in the throes of researching the Siege of Boston (1775-1776) and have actually begun writing chapter 6 of my book. The chapter is about the first months of the siege of Boston from June 1775 after the battle of Bunker Hill to the point in December 1775 where the Americans ready to make the final blow on the besieged British. Have also been researching the British in Halifax from April to May 1775, and the chapter on the Ethiopian Brigade in Virginia in 1775-1776. At the moment I'm waiting for about twenty one books to arrive, one on Halifax, which will almost complete my research on that chapter apart from some documents and a journal I've found on line which is not in print in book form.

One book I've been able to find which I've been trying to get for several years and have finally located at a reasonable price is Lieut. Williams Discord and Civil Wars .. And I've finally been able to afford to buy Alan Frost's The Global Reach of Empire, recommended to me by my ex-supervisor for this book. It will, I hope be very useful for setting the exploits of the First Fleeters in the American War of Independence in a wider global context. (And I very much like Frost's work anyway.) I'm also getting Allen French's The Siege of Boston. I don't know if it will simply reiterate material in his magisterial The First Year of the American Revolution, which was written after he'd completed the former book, but I can't take the risk of missing something out. I'm also getting Volume 5 of the Naval Documents of the American Revolution, which will be very useful for both my research into Halifax and the latter stages of Lord Dunmore's failed Virginian campaign. Another book which will be infinitely useful is Stedman's The History of the Origin, Progress and Termination of the American War. So far I'm only getting volume one. It is the only contemporary history written from the British side, and I hope it will be very useful.

On the American side I'm getting Thacher's Journal, three journals by ordinary soldiers in the Continental army, (though I'm not sure if one of them deals with Boston. I bought it on spec as it turned up in a sidebar in the bookseller's confirmation of a purchase); and a book on Washington's Navy and another on his generals. I;m also getting Selby's history of the American Revolution in Virginia, which I expect to be very good. So I have more than enough to keep me busy for a while, and that I'll be able to get back to writing chapter 5 pretty soon.

George Johnston at Bunker Hill

2010-05-06T18:06:00.001-07:00

At the North Battery Wharf the embarkation of the 63^rd Foot and 2^nd Battalion Marines had began. The same slow clamber down the wharf ladder, weighted with arms and equipment, the same cautious stepping into the bobbing boats that had so slowed the 52^nd Light Infantry and those first marine reinforcements plagued an impatient General Clinton. 'The moment was critical; ... if that army ... [was] ... beaten there would have been an end to his Majesty's dominion in America.' Among those rowed impatiently across the Charles River were the superintendent, adjutant and deputy pay-master, to the second battalion, David Johnston and his son, George. Grown to manhood the boy would served for a time at Norfolk Island as Captain-Lieutenant and eventually become aide-de-camp to both New South Wales Governors, Arthur Phillip.and John Hunter, play a leading role in the suppression of the convict rebellion at Vinegar Hill just outside Sydney in 1804 and in January 1808 was the figurehead for the rebellion against Governor William Bligh. By then, as acting Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales he had married his stunningly beautiful convict mistress, Esther Abrahams. For his part in the Rum Rebellion on 26 January, 1808 he was eventually court-martialled in London and cashiered. Returning to his family in Sydney he became one of the town's wealthiest property owners, in a palatial mansion decked with the local red cedar. Now, as he stepped onto the shores of the Charlestown Peninsula he was but a boy destined for a military career..^¹

They had passed boats going back to Boston full of wounded but little prepared them for the scene before Breed's Hill as they stumbled out onto the beach. The smoke and blistering heat rolled across from Charlestown, from where a few snipers still fired at soldiers, though more infrequently than before. All around them blue musket smoke lingered on the battlefield. The grass was soaked with blood which smeared the bright white gaiters of the officers. George Johnston stood beside his father as he barked orders to non-commissioned officers to form the marine rank and file into columns. A short distance away the boy saw in front of him the bodies piled up against the fences, some trodden down into the field and that cloud of flies that surround the dead.. Above this long, wide carpet of corpses the Americans waited behind the redoubt walls or along the rail fence sure of defeat in the face of Howe's four refreshed infantry regiments and the new marine battalion. The air was punctuated only by the screams and moans of the wounded left out of reach but within range of American muskets. In the blazing heat men sat in their shirt-sleeves, dripping perspiration, waiting for the order to move, calmed by surviving sergeants and corporals, their senior officers slain. They all knew they must 'Fight, conquer or die!'^²

For eleven year old George Johnston once this final attack was launched, left among the walking wounded and the near-dead on the beach, many of whom he probably knew, the spectacle of death on Breed's Hill undoubtedly engendered intense fears about whether David Johnston would be alive or dead at the end of it. He watched General Clinton cajoling and berating stragglers and walking wounded, drummers and fife-players, into the semblance of a column, then march them as noisily as he could up the hill. When Clinton arrived at the redoubt the butchery was over, but not the chase. .

Prescott had barely escaped. Doctor General John Warren, the prominent Boston revolutionary, was dead. Clinton, oblivious to the carnage around him, tried to bring order out of the milling confusion around him, but this took time. With Howe's permission he organised some of the light infantry, and eventually marched them to a now abandoned Bunker Hill. 'The blockheads had done nothing to it – on the contrary had left it in the only state which could annoy them. By now the majority of the rebels were retreating in an orderly fashion across Charleston Neck. Some, though, ran toward Bunker Hill from the Neck in a final attack on Clinton's contingent despite the heavy continuing cannonade from the sea. A twelve bound cannon-ball fell among them. Orders came from Howe to cease the chase. '[t]he business was finished.' The battle of Bunker Hill was over.

At the end of a great battle the first priority was always to tend to the wounded and count the dead. After the battle of Bunker Hill nineteen officers and 207 men lay dead on the battlefield, seventy officers and 738 rank-and-file lay wounded, a total of 1034 casualties. Another twenty would die of their wounds. Of the marines, one major, two captains and three lieutenants were killed, four captains and three lieutenants wounded, two sergeants and seventy nine privates wounded. Over one and a half hours the flower of the British Army in North America had been wiped out. Total British and American dead was 1,500, nearly half the British who took the field.
The first task was to bury the hundreds dead. Privates were buried 'in holes' where they fell. The bodies of the officers were taken back to Boston for church burials.The wounded were taken down to the beach, where George Johnston waited for his father. Because he was an officer David Johnston was one of the first brought down from Breed's Hill. Boats from the men-of-war and transports were dragged up on the sand to carry the wounded back to Boston. Young George watched as they went out onto the battle-field to search amongst the trampled grass and in fence corners for officers. Some sailors stopped to rifle the dead for valuables. Men from the Somerset rolled eighty gallon casks of water ashore for the wounded and the thirsty. On the choppy ride back to the Boston-side ferry wharf the boy had time to examine his father's serious wound, most likely a jagged rip from a musket fired at close range. Others had wounds crammed with rusty nails and bits of broken glass, the rebels' last resort when they ran out of powder and ball. (From this the rumour spread around Boston's hospitals and camps that the Americans had used poisoned bullets, so absolute was the death toll from these projectiles.) Once lifted onto the ferry wharf, Johnston probably found a chaise and attendants to carry him and his son to his lodgings, a privilege reserved for officers.There he was tended by his wife and a surgeon. Beyond the windows the rumble of 'coaches, chariots, ... even hand-barrows' entered from the street outside where 'the piercing Groans of the dying & those whose painful Wounds extorted the Sigh from the firmest Mind.' But at least for George's mother her husband and son were alive. Not for her the keening, sobbing and praying of the wives of the common soldiers, some of whom would not see their husbands until the following day, if they saw them at all.

Grose, Collins and Ross and the taking of the Redoubt at Breed's Hill

2010-04-30T23:24:00.000-07:00

Howe's plan was for the grenadiers of 5th and 52nd Battalions who had taken the worst of the previous two attacks against the rail fence, to wheel at the point where it would seem to the rebels they were almost committed . The 5th would overrun the three small fleches, the 52nd storm the northern part of the breastwork after it had been raked with grape by Howe's 6-pounders. The Light Infantry, now numbering only 150 to 200 men out of eleven companies, (including Grose in the 52nd), would protect the flank of the 6-pounders and in a feint against the fence, occupy the militia regiments stationed there. The marine battalions would take the breastwork and redoubt from the southern, Charlestown, side. Howe, impatient to begin less the mass of rebel reinforcements gathered on Bunker Hill came to the little fort's aid, ordered his attack before marines of the 2nd battalion were properly ready. As usual things did not quite go as planned. The men would not fight. 'The officers ... were observed to goad [them] forward ... with renewed exertion.' 1

The one hundred and fifty to two hundred officers and men left of the eleven light infantry companies approached the rail fence in a tight column. At 200 yards they deployed into a thin skirmish line meant to hold the New Hampshire and Connecticut rebels behind the rails should they try to help their comrades on the breastwork and in the redoubt. Howe's 6-pounders ripped into the breastwork forcing those militia behind it either to flee back to Bunker Hill or into the next door redoubt. A brief and savage artillery duel ensued between the British and two American cannon stationed at the gap between the breastwork. The British won by demolishing one of the Yankee's guns. The militia from the fence then took aim at the British gunnery, only to be distracted by a ragged volley from the light infantry which had advanced another fifty yards. Stark reduced their nuisance value by turning his long-range marksmen on their remaining officers. Again Grose was lucky and left unharmed, though not so all the British artillerymen. The rebels wounded all of their officers and nine of their men. The British gunnery's success was in no small measure due to the protection afforded them by the shattered band of light infantry. Young Francis Grose, near this battle's end, could finally hold his head up with some pride. And nothing would stop the rapid bayonet charge of the 5th Battalion on the breastwork, ditch and redoubt beyond.2

While the grenadiers attacked the breastwork and redoubt 'with great loss of men' from the right and rear, the marines advanced towards the redoubt from the left. In columns, with bayonets, under orders not to fire, a feat achieved 'with difficulty', they marched measuredly closer to the redoubt, the grenadiers to their left and both marine battalions formed into lines, the marine companies on the right of the line.Over the intervening fences, the line kept together. All the while the rebels, their 'ammunition being nearly exhausted, kept up a scattering fire.' Scattering it might have been, but for the British approaching the redoubt from whatever side, it was 'so heavy a fire that the oldest officers [said] they never saw such sharper action.' Man after man toppled to the ground. The marines were stopped briefly but the grenadiers grimly pressed on. Over the parapet and from the rear they burst into the redoubt. Ross's and Collins's companies were not in the forefront of the marine bayonet charge, begun again and gathering pace. First Lieutenant Jessie Adair of the Second Battalion led the charge up and over the parapet with a courage that inspired all. At his side, First Lieutenant John Shea, father of Captain John Shea of the yet-to-be-created New South Wales Marines, who would arrive in Boston the coming July as a Second Lieutenant, 'rece'd his mortal wound.' George Johnston's father, the deputy paymaster-adjutant, fell, 'much wounded.' Yelling, their brothers-in-arms followed, over the parapet and into the blinding smoke and dry dust of the redoubt that had allowed many of the rebels to flee. Experienced combatants though they were, many were shaken at 'the Horror within the Redoubt when [they] entered it. It was streaming with Blood and strewn with dead & dying men.' The marines, seamen used to hand-to-hand fighting as they boarded enemy ships or fired down from the tops of men-of-war, were appalled at the sight of 'the Soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the Brains of others, a sight too dreadful ... to dwell on.' Nowhere, though, is it stated that they did not join in the butchery.3

It is probably at this point, or soon afterwards, that Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins lost their stomach for war. Collins would go into an administrative career, and Ross would, it has been suggested, lose his nerve. Here we see the origins of that Lieutenant-Governor Collins of Van Diemen's Land who stood for hours sniffing snuff, as close as he could be to convicts being lashed on the triangle, never leaving his post until each recreant had received his full measure of punishment. Here too, was planted that dark seed in the heart of Captain Ross, the New South wales Marine major renowned for his rage against his fellow men not of the marine service, masked only by a nervous garrulousness, the only saving graces in his life his bonding with fellow Scots and his love for his wife and children.4

Francise Grose at Bunker Hill

2010-04-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

The British General William Howe's plan for the battle of Bunker Hill was simple. Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Pigot's division, including the First Battalion Marines to which Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins belonged, would march against the redoubt and breastwork as a distraction from the attack of the Welch Fusiliers, and the Fifth and Fifty-Second Light Infantry against Stark's men at the low stone wall on the beach. These Light infantry companies would overrun Stark's barricade by bayonet and take the rail fence from the rear by which time the grenadiers would be taking the fence from the front, also in a bayonet charge. With the American left demolished, the redoubt and breastwork on Breed's Hill would be isolated and overwhelmed from all sides.^¹ It did not work out that way.

The 52^nd Light Infantry marched from the small depression in front of Moulton's Hill onto the hill where the British force of near one and a half thousand nen had gathered. General Sir William Howe addressed the troops, assuring them he knew they would 'behave like Englishmen' by which he meant he was certain they would stand 'undaunted in the open field to be shot at.' Their courage encouraged, the eleven companies ordered to Mystic Beach advanced in that direction as the sixteen British six pounders began a bombardment of the entire rebel line as a prelude to the infantry advance. To this accompaniment young Francis Grose set out. His company formed in a column near the beach, the 52^nd after the King's Own, the formidable Royal Welch Fusiliers at its head. At the third round the British cannon fell silent. They had been given the wrong sized cannon balls in their side boxes. Fife and drum echoed over the battlefield, the slow tramp of feet muted by the soft grass. The light Infantry columns wheeled on to the narrow Mystic Beach. Ordered not to use their muskets, they were meant to take the small stone fence half a mile away by bayonet, a flying wedge four abreast that would make a concentrated mass assault But they were nervous, uncertain. Of all the companies on the battlefield this day, they alone were utterly untrained in the tactic of a frontal assault. They were skirmishers, not an assault force. Still, they quickened their pace to a run along the smooth flat beach, their charge hidden from the rebels at the rail fence above by the ten foot high embankment, who, in any case were focused on the slow, dreadful march of Howe's oncoming grenadiers across the fields. .^²Francis Grose could smell the sudden swift victory in the tangy salt air as the column rushed faster and faster , bayonets thrust forward, along the narrow shore toward the felt-capped rebels huddled behind their low protective wall of stone.

Stark had formed his men in three ranks behind the stone wall so they could loose uninterrupted succeeding volleys at the oncoming redcoats. He ordered them 'not to fire until the front of the enemy reached ' a stake which he had driven into the ground at eight or ten rods distance' (about fifty yards). The British column rushed on 'with the coolness and precision of troops upon parade,' closer and closer. The New Hampshire men kept their discipline. Not a sound came from the American ranks until the first row of the Welch Fusiliers reached Stark's stake in the sand. With the crackling of musket fire, in a haze of blue smoke ball after relentless ball ripped into the British front. As each redcoat fell, another stepped forward to take his place, stepping over the body in front of him, only to be smashed bleeding to the sand himself.

Ahead of him all Grose could see was the column bunching up, man after man toppling under the ferocious American fire. All he could hear was the roar of never-ending musket volleys, agonising screams and shrill cries of wounded and dying men, foul-mouthed cursing of a few well-disciplined redcoats urging each other forward, the soft, trembling whine of men starting to lose their nerve. Almost all of the famed Welch Fusiliers had been wiped out. Now the King's Own stepped into the breach over the crowd of dead along the beach and on the river's edge. They too were decimated. It was the Fifty-Second's turn to step into the withering fire. Instead, they turned heel and ran back along the beach. Screaming officers beat at the running men with their swords. Grose was pwerless before the surge of panicked soldiers, a lone boy standing and yelling at the men to turn and fight, sword waving in one hand, clutching the colours in the other, ankle-deep in the shore-lapping river as Yankee bullets whizzed round his head. No order could hold back that fear or flight, no sword-point turn it. Howe's crucial flanking movement, his plan to sweep down on his enemy from the rear in a crushing blow as the rest of his forces pushed at them from the front was now a complete shambles. Ninety-six men, not counting the wounded, 'lay as thick as sheep in a fold' before Stark's stone wall. The rest fled back towards the boats on the beach. One civilian watching from Boston claimed they had pushed over each over to clamber into the boats, screaming at the tars to row them back to the safety of the North Battery. With the flanking movement driven back, Stark's men were left 'unassailed and unoccupied.'^³

1Ward, The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, p.90; Fleming, Now We Are Enemies, p. 235.

2Official Account of General Gage, published by the London Gazette, in Frothingham, Siege of Boston ..., p.287; Ward, The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 89, 90-91, 94; Don Higginbotham, The war of American Independence. Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1780, Boston, 1983, p. 73; Major Henry Dearborn, 'An Account of the Battle of Bunker Hill', in Coffin, (comp.) History of the Battle of Breed's Hill,p. 19; Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, p. 285; Fleming, Now We Are Enemies, p. 156; Urban, Fusiliers,p. 38.

3Elting, The Battle of Bunker's Hill, p. 31; Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson, ' A rapid sketch of the Battle of Bunker Hill' in Coffin, (comp.) History of the Battle of Breed's Hill, pp. 12-13; Caleb Stark, Memoirs and Official Correspondence of Gen. John Stark, with notices of several other officers of the Revolution, also a biography of Capt. Phineas Stevens and of Col. Robert Rogers, with an account of his services in America during the 'Seven Year's War', Concord, 1860, p. 29, http://www.archive.org/details/memoirofficial00starrich ; Fleming, Now We are Enemies, pp. 246-249; French, The First Year of the American Revolution, pp. 237-238.

Boston on 16 June, 1775.

2010-03-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

On morning of 16 June, 1775, though Charlestown was by now practically deserted, anyone glancing across the Charles River from Boston to the Charlestown Peninsula might have seen the owners of the fields around the village mowing and slashing the grass under the hot sun and piling it along a rail fence below Bunker Hill, as was the normal practice. Despite false rumours that the rebels had got some of the guns from the fort at Ticonderoga in upper New York, captured on 18 May, before Boston, the British in the garrison town were 'all in high spirits.' That afternoon each regiment in turn, including Grose's 52nd Light Infantry and the First Battalion Marines, had practice in marksmanship at 'fixed figures of men, as large as life, made of thin boards...' Each soldier fired six shots, the best receiving 'a Premium', though it is most unlikely many were dispensed on this particular day. An officer concluded after this unhappy exhibition that 'recruits and Drafts who never having seen service foolishly imagine that when danger is feard they secure themselves by discharging their muskets with or without aim.'.2 To the men, though, it was a clear sign that action was not long away.

General Thomas Gage, however, would not be the commander who determined the time and place of that action. Rather, at six in the evening up to twelve hundred rebels had assembled on Cambridge Common four miles to the west 'with one day's provisions and Blanket, ready to March somewhere but we knew not where.' Accompanied by a Massachusetts artillery regiment , commanded by Captain Thomas Gridley, made up of forty-nine men and two field pieces, they comprised three Massachusetts militia regiments, one of which was commanded by Colonel William Prescott. There were two hundred men from Colonel Israel Putnam's Connecticut regiment, making up a fatigue party tending wagons loaded with fascines and gabions (the latter were dirt-filled wicker baskets meant to absorb musket shot and cannon balls), entrenching tools and some empty barrels. Putnam was assisted by an able youngish militia captain, also from Connecticut, named Thomas Knowlton.
At Harvard College, now turned into a barracks for the rebels, its elderly President had delivered a lengthy sermon and bestowed blessings on the American enterprise.The army marched from Cambridge to the beat of drums, two sergeants with dark lanterns (lanterns enclosed on all sides except the rear) led Gridley and Prescott to the road running eastward which connected to the northward road to Bunker Hill. As the columns approached Charlestown Neck, the drum-taps ceased. There, the slow-moving wagons under the care of Thomas Knowlton, and probably Israel Putnam, reached them, piled high with barrels, gabions, fascines and entrenching tools, groaning and creaking their way past Prescott in his wide coat of military blue, 'lapped and faced', a three-cornered hat perched on his head. Behind them were the two hundred Connecticut men who now joined this motley army. An observer might have thought it an odd procession; old men carrying muskets from the time of Queen Anne, seventy years past, younger men with Spanish fusees and 'old French pieces' left to them by their fathers, and a few swords rough-hewn by local blacksmiths. There were few bayonets. Eleven barrels of powder was all there was to supply them all and last out against any concerted British attack. They crossed in silence onto the peninsula and marched on to Bunker Hill.5
Bunker Hill, the highest hill on the Charlestown Peninsula and furthest from Boston, which would be almost impregnable if properly fortified, was where Prescott and Gridley wanted to throw up 'some works on the north and south ends ...' before beginning work on the lower Breed's Hill, which Israel Putnam favoured, since a small cannon placed on that hill would threaten Boston and the Royal Navy in its harbour. It would certainly provoke an immediate attack by General Gage, as Putnam intended. After much time-wasting, Putnam prevailed. Breed's Hill was finally chosen as the place to make a stand.6
The digging was done by several hundred men, farmers inured to heavy labour, under the light of dark lanterns along the lines that Gridley had laid out by midnight. The redoubt was six feet high and eight rods (1 rod = c. 5 metres) square, strongest on the side facing Charlestown where a redan ( a v-shaped earthwork) projected outwards pointing at the village. To the north, facing Bunker Hill was an open entrance for ease of retreat. A small ditch 'was dug at [its] base' but would be 'in a rude or imperfect state' when the fighting began. Nobody expected to hold this place. The men 'worked undiscovered until about four in the morning' piling up the redoubt in the soft dry earth, but that they were undiscovered was more a matter of good luck, that good fortune that oft determines the course of a battle. Across the water in Boston sentries heard the scrabbling of shovels and picks on the hill 'without making report of it.' When the HMS Lively, (20 nine-pounders), moored in the Charles River at the Charlestown ferry way, discovered the redoubt at dawn and the first cannon-balls fell on the fort, these same sentries discussed over breakfast how they had heard noises in the night but thought nothing of them.Earlier that night General Sir Henry Clinton, who had come over on the Cerebus with Howe and Burgoyne, thought he too saw shapes across the water, but his report to Gage in the dead of night was dismissed. Clinton claimed Howe supported his urging of an immediate attack. 'The first knowledge the General [Gage] had of it was by hearing one of the ships firing at the workmen, and going to see what occasioned the firing,' Howe later insisted.7
That same pounding cannon from the Lively that caused the generals to cover their backs woke the town, shaking the white A-frame houses, and woke Ensign Francis Grose of the 52nd. Light Infantry, and Captain Robert Ross and Second Lieutenant David Collins of the First Battalion Marines with a start out of their tents in the breaking dawn on Boston Common.

The Young Robert Ross

2010-03-11T18:49:00.000-08:00

Robert Ross, a Scot, was probably born in 1740. By his late teens he had migrated to England and at seventeen had purchased himself a commission in the 80^th company of the Marines at Chatham. Ross was always conscious that the Marines were looked upon as a lesser arm of the British armed services. (Marine lieutenants, for example, were not allowed to use the wardroom quarter galley latrines, but had to use the heads [the crews' latrines], like common sailors, surgeons, pursers and chaplains.) As he had remarked in 1787 to one of his patrons, Evan Nepean, Undersecretary for the Home Department, they moved in 'subordinate obscurity.' His first service abroad was during the Seven Years' War at the siege of Louisbourg in June 1758 when he was aged about eighteen.^¹

At Louisbourg Ross first met Captain Arthur Tooker Collins. Bonded by a three week siege where 'the cannon balls passed very fast on us ... yet could do no more than come ... very near' and where they spent more than three weeks without sleep and in unwashed uniforms, Ross would go on to take part in the siege of Quebec. Tooker Collins would be part of a force that assaulted Belle Ile off the southwest coast of Brittany in April 1761. He would come to the notice of Admiral Howe at the 1762 siege of Havana, and go on to a very successful administrative career with the Plymouth Marines. A lieutenant-colonel by 1765, Collins moved his family of two sons and a daughter to Exeter, Devon, about forty miles northeast of Plymouth.

At the Collins house in Grundy Lane, Ross was apparently a frequent visitor. There he met the nine-year old David Collins. The passing years made David so convinced of Ross's reliance on Tooker Collins's patronage that he incorrectly believed Tooker Collins was responsible for Ross gaining the post of Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales in 1787. (He owed it to Nepean and Sir John Jervis, with whom he would serve in the American War.)

His low status as a marine may have rankled Ross, and he would discover a deep Scotophobia among his comrades to nourish bitterness and resentment while he was in Boston. He had not yet met the wife whom he would dearly love, and deeply lament being separated from while in the Antipodes. Nor did he have any of the 'very small tho' numerous family,' the worry about whose welfare so plagued him in his late forties and early fifties. He appeared quite personable and as yet showed no signs of being the 'social monster' he would eventually become.²

1Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia. A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet, Sydney, 1989, p. 319; David S. MacMillen, 'Ross, Robert, (1740?-1794)' in Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm; N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World. An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, New York, 1996, p. 67; Major Ross to Under Secretary Nepean, Portsmouth, 27^th April, 1787 in A Britten (ed.) Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. I, Pt.2, Mona Vale, 1978, p. 93; Francis Parkman, The Battle for North America, (ed. John Tebbel), london, 1948, pp. 619 ff.

2Tooker Collins, cited in Currey, David Collins, p.11; ibid., pp. 13, 22, 39; McMillen, 'Ross, Robert, (1740-1794), ADB Online; Major Ross to Under Secretary Nepean, Portsmouth, 27^th April, 1787 in HRNSW, Vol. I, Pt. 2, p. 92;Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Melbourne, 2003, p. 17.

Some Light on the Hidden Years of James Mario Matra

2010-02-09T16:43:00.000-08:00

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 Cook's drunken and alcoholic clerk 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 into 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 manipulative 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".

2010-01-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-28T15:22:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-12-05T19:04:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T15:55:00.001-08:00

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 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.

2009-10-27T15:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Burnsey's TV Dinners et al.

2009-10-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (ie last Wednesday) on Larvatus Prodeo on the condemn thread, there was a discussion on food, partly prompted by me admitting I cook up shop bought chili con carne. Whereupon I was asked to expatiate here on my experiences with TV Dinners. Obviously, as some-one who lives half or all of the fortnight on pre-prepared meals I ain't no food critic. Nevertheless, here goes.
Best to start with the real TV dinners; the stuff in cardboard boxes you put in the microwave oven and cook for 30 seconds to one minute more than they say on the packet.
McCain's Roast Turkey Dinner. Slices of turkey covered with a combination of gravy and cranberry sauce. With vegetables, namely, thinly sliced carrots, peas, and roast potato. Eaten with bread thickly margarined on a plate beside the black plastic plate ready to mop up what's left of the gravy after I've eaten everything else. Appeals to my sweet tooth (sweet teeth why I haven't got any teeth; tho genetics played a part as well - an inherited calcium deficiency - though it might have something to do with the fact I don't drink milk, except for the powdered stuff you get in instant Mocha coffee.) much recommended because of it varying taste sensations.
McCain's Veal Cordon Bleu. I kid you not. Veal wrapped in ham and crumbed. Carrots as above. Beans - I think they're string beans. Some sort of cheese sauce, I think. Sometimes the ham the veal is wrapped in comes away from the ham. Crunchy. I'm not big on cheese sauce, but it does for variety.
McCain's Roast Chicken. Vegetables as above. Roast potato pieces and beans, I think. Don't have a packet in the fridge to check at the moment. Lots of gravy. Size of the chicken breast varies. Sometimes its big, sometimes, well, not so big. On those latter days I get annoyed. Gravy mopped up with bread and margarine. Usually recommended but if you don't put it in the microwave long enough the chicken isn't heated through.
Mccain's Steak Diane. This one's a bit more expensive so I don't get it very often. I don't like beef much so anything I say about this particular dinner can't be trusted.
McCain's Roast Lamb. Peas, carrots, chunks of roast potatoes. Gravy and mint sauce. Up there with the turkey and roast chicken, for the same reasons.
Mccain's Chicken Parmagiana. A TV Dinner gourmet's delight. Peas, carrots, pieces of baked potato. And that sauce! What can I say? Don't have to go out to Italian restaurants. Besides, I don't know where the one in Armidale is.
McCain's Lamb Cutlet With Gravy. Peas, carrots, instant mashed potato. Have to keep it in the microwave a minute longer to cook through the cutlets.
McCain's black plastic plates Sometimes they crack round the edges when they're stacked on the supermarket shelves. Its a bugger getting the plastic cover of the plate then and you have to pick out little bits of sharp black plastic from the meal before you eat. I could return them, I suppose but I live two miles from Bi-Lo and I don't have a car. Can't drive in fact. So, I pick out the sharp bits of black plastic.

Bird's Eye Create-a-Meals. All you can get at the moment at Bi-Lo's in Armidale are Honey Soy, Black Bean, Teryaki and some Green Ginger gunk. They're named after the rather large sauce packets in them which you melt over the cooked chicken with a tablespoon of water. Sometimes I sprinkle a very little bit of sugar on them.They used to have Chili Con Carne and Sweet'n'Sour. But they don't any more. Capsicum, water, chestnuts, beans, carrots etc, etc. all very good for you. Cook up with fried stir fry chicken in a frying pan - my wok is rusty - and serve on steamed long grained white rice. Lasts two days. Good stuff. Except you have to cook it on the stove. I suppose I could microwave it but sometimes I get a bit traditional, if you know what I mean.

Lean Cuisine Meals. Like Meatball Arrabiatta, Satay Beef, beef and Mushroom. I'm sure you know them. Heat and shake the sauce packets, add vegetable packets, mostly rice or pasta and some few vegetables. Cook in four minutes. All wonderful, but very spicy. Go for it.

Tuscan Style Baby Potatoes. I have them in the microwave right now. Potatoes in some kind of Italian herbs. Cooking for 9 minutes, it says 7, but what the hell. And I did sort of bust the plastic on top when I tried to pierce them with a fork. Never tried it before. Was looking for strawberries and chocolate dip, and there they were. We'll see.

Post-script. Reporting on Tuscan Style Baby Potatoes. A bit bland. I ended up eating most of them cold. Tasted better that way and I could use my fingers instead of struggling with a fork. I mean ... well ... nobody was watching.

Researching Barrett's Farm and Widow Brown's Tavern.

2009-09-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's jejeune to remark on the amazement one sometimes experiences when undertaking historical research, but I guess I'm not world-weary enough, world-weary as I am, not to get some excitement out of the things I find.

Presently, as I remarked in an earlier post, I'm in the process of writing about the experiences of Ensign Francis Grose in the battles of Lexington/Concord on 19 April, 1775. In the process of this battle the British soldiery battered on several house and tavern doors in their search for weapons, and later, out of anger and a desire for revenge, because one of their own had apparently been scalped, and had his ears and nose cut off after the skirmish at the North Bridge near Concord. ( He hadn't been scalped, whatever the British thought, nor had his ears been cut off, but he had been cleaved with a tomahawk by a young teen while he lay dying of his wounds on the Concord road.) Grose, who was fortunate enough to miss the battle at Lexington and the deadly clash on the North Bridge, through no fault of his own, had been sent to search the Barrett's Farm some miles out of Concord for weapons and ammunition. James Barrett was head of the Concord militia and Loyalist spies had reported his farm was one of the main storage depots for weapons in Concord.
There was much tantalising material about Barrett's Farm in the secondary sources, but I still didn't really have a good idea of what actually went on there until I came across a little gem of a book which had all the American first hand accounts of events at the farm and a good deal of Concord local tradition. (There is a British narrative by Ensign John De Berniere, but it didn't have much in it for this part of the Concord expedition; and its reliability is suspect in any case.) That little gem was Ellen Chase's The Beginnings of the American Revolution based on contemporary letters, diaries and other documents, compiled in the nineteenth century. It can be found at http://www.archive.org/details/beginningofam03chas The same work gave me quite a bit of information about how Grose's detachment behaved on their way back from Barett's Farm when they stopped at Widow Brown's Tavern a mile away from the North Bridge. Basically, with the encouragement of three of their officers they sat under a tree tippling. Because of young Francis Grose's propensity for the grog I like to think he was one of the officers who encouraged this moment of quiet relaxation. A thirteen year old boy who was in the tavern at the time, years later made a deposition about the soldiers' behaviour, and that is in Chase's little pamphlet in its entirety. The boy heard the musket fire at the North Bridge, but it seems none of the British did. Or if they did, they ignored it.
There are no pictures of Widow Brown's Tavern. From what I can work out it did not survive the ravages of time. However, there are a plethora of images of Barrett's Farm and you can get an idea of what the place looked like inside and and out here:
http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=18064
Apparently his bedroom walls were painted a "Red Indian red."
The Barrett family had hid musket balls in barrels of feathers in their attic, ploughed kegs of powder, muskets and cannon into the fields near their house, hidden food meant for rebel soldiers on an ox-driven wagon in the swamp etc., if the local tradition is correct. And there is no reason to suppose it isn't in this instance. All that were found were some gun carriages in the barn. When the soldiers proceeded to set fire to them in the middle of the barn, Mrs. Barrett insisted they burn them out in the middle of the road, as they had promised they would preserve private property. [at this point the writer is tempted to be a socialist smart-alec about the radicalism of the American Revolution, but he refrains.] She fed the soldiers bread and milk after they had finished their searching, because "we are commanded to feed our enemy if he hunger", refused to dole out any spirits she may have had hidden away in a cupboard and told them they were giving her blood money when an officer tried to pay for the food. At 58, which was old for those days, she was quite a spirited ancient.
I reckon the whole story of Barrett's farm and the drinking session afterwards under the trees at Widow Brown's Tavern will be one of the many good stories in my chapter on Grose and the battles of Lexington/Concord.

History Minutiae: Lexington and Concord

2009-09-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

Presently I'm deep in the throes of writing chapter 3 of my book on the Australian connection with the American Revolution and the War of American Independence. The chapter is about 20 year old Ensign Francis Grose (Commander of the New South Wales Corps in 1792 and Lieut. Governor of New South Wales from 1792). And in the process I've got bogged down (briefly) in some historical minutiae which by itself is vaguely purposeless, but for purposes of historical accuracy one sort of has to get right.

The first of these was the vexed question of how many officers and rank and file went on the Concord expedition. We know it was somewhere between 700 to 800 troops overall but I got this bug trying to work out exactly how many troops were in the detachment of the 52nd. Light Infantry (Grose's company) that went to Concord. Helpfully, David Hackett Fischer provided some records in the appendices of his excellent Paul Revere's Ride. According to one list which was partly drawn from pay rosters there were 2 officers and 35 other ranks in the 52nd. Light Infantry. But another list provided in Fischer's appendices which showed the Returns of of Strength of the British Army in Boston which did not include commissioned officers, sergeants or musicians showed that in April 1775 there were 299 soldiers fit to march, 30 unfit, and that the company was down 61 effectives. Finally, looking at British casualty figures a captain and 2 lieutenants were killed along the Battle Road, which, one might note is more than the total complement of officers supposed to be attached to the 52nd. according to the pay rosters. At this point, I just threw my hands up in the air, and gave up. (I hate numbers anyway, even if I do have to deal with them sometimes.)

The second piece of minutiae I became temporarily obsessed with was why was there such a negative and angry reaction from the Americans in the powder scares in late 1774, (which partly arose out of the fact that one of the things the British were out to destroy at Concord was gunpowder.) when the British confiscated American powder in Massachusetts. The answer to that one was easy enough to find. It was in one of the books I have here, Robert Harvey's A Few Bloody Noses. The main ingredient to gunpowder was saltpetre, mined in Bengal and exported to Europe. The Americans had to import all their gunpowder as they didn't have all the ingredients to make it. (And, from early December, 1774, importation of gunpowder into the thirteen rebellious colonies, but especially Massachusetts was prohibited.

The final piece of minutiae I got caught up with was - exactly where in Boston was the 52nd. Light Infantry stationed? This was actually of some significance for the paragraph I was currently working on as I wanted to know the time it took Grose's 52nd. Light Infantry to march from their quarters to Back Bay where the Concord expedition began. It could have been from near Back Bay, from the Long Wharf or from various other places. It turns out they were encamped on Beacon Hill only ten minutes march from their embarkation point, but they were probably one of the last regiments to reach the beach, because Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welch Fusiliers does not note their arrival at the beach.

And if you wondering what's happening to the chapter on Bunker Hill, discussed in an earlier post, I'll be starting on it after I've completed the research and have finished chapter 3.

Book Review: Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke. The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

2009-08-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

This book review is published in Green Left Weekly.

Here is the link:

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/807/41520

(You can comment here, if you like.)

Cheers,
PB.

Poem #1

2009-07-17T22:55:00.000-07:00

THIS GREAT, GAUNT CITY.

These things I see,

each day,

as I wander round this great, gaunt city.

Mornings I hear her.

and the wail of those hungry tired children,

shadows beyond the frost cracked windows

of her battered Toyota.

When its rusted rear door swung open

as I passed by,

I glimpsed her, with sickly kids

in ragged clothes and shoes unpolished,

that sudden pale of fear, flitting like the shadow of a bird

across her face,

all of them shivering in the dull morning chill

amidst bright multi-coloured rugs,

hues of stark red and green and purple,

some yellow,

reminders of happier days,

and the scent of stale chocolate milk cartons,

hitting the day from the car's inside.

I've seen that fear before on women's faces,

as some man stands not far from them across the street,

the clenched anger,

old hopelessness,

the bitter eyes of blasted hope,

refugees from clenched fists,

a face of fury,

memories of dinners late-prepared

flung across the kitchen table.

I do not approach.

I am a stranger, male,

and doubly dangerous.

In the bright, cold sun of the later morning

the car is empty, locked.

A passer by, not a woman,

tells me, "She's been there for months,

with those kids, too.

Somebody should do somethin'."

And I think,

"Why don't you?

Why don't I?"

II.

Beggars don't walk up to me.

I look like one.

Tangled hair, long unkempt beard,

battered country hat,

cracked glasses.

There's this bloke,

a young fella,

dancing with sores on his bared arms,

bugs crawling along his veins (he thinks),

flesh torn through days of tearing, trying to make them come out,

Come out!.

People run from the park to get away,

to run, to hide,

to not see the dancing pain,

fingernails ripping across the skin,

terrified he might strike out,

but he sees no one,

not the sun, the bright breeze.

He's trapped in the blaze of his own mind.

Once, in the night,

I heard him screaming,

but I was well-hidden, and sort of snug,

behind bushes,

and did not come out.

III.

He sits alone on that city park bench,

every day,

week-ends too,

shirt ironed,

suit trousers pressed,

with some mysterious iron,

tie neatly knotted,

tailored coat pulled tight across his shoulders,

sleeves beginning to fray,

always clean shaved,

his despair growing with every evening's

five o'clock shadow,

shoes polished like a mirror.

Not old,

home gone,

wife gone,

kids gone.

He was a money-man.

That much I know.

Once those computers with their profit graphs crashed around him

life and the dollar-signs drained from his eyes.

Some days, there, on that park bench,

he sits and weeps all day,

clutching a paper-bag of cheap fried chips,

his only food.

Some days I sit across from him,

legs crossed on the heat-blasted grass,

a ragged reminder of what he might become,

feeling a strange compassion

for this one faded capitalist.

We never talk.

IV.

Some days I sit in those vast open planned offices

in Centre-link, somewhere.

(On days you have to pretend you're human,

and somebody out there in Internet-land

will want to give you a job.)

They were close to closing, close on four,

or was it five? It doesn't matter.

No home, no television to tell the time by.

Who cares?

Outside the rain was falling down like rats.

Truth be told, I think that's why I was there.

He was six foot tall,

thirty or thereabouts,

come through those magic glass doors,

hair wet across his face.

And he had no beard - I do remember that.

There was something odd about his teeth.

Maybe he didn't have any.

He was, I suspect, a man from the Bush,

Not quite out of a Henry Lawson poem,

but he did have a swag.

There was something he wanted at the counter.

The jumped up clerk was saying no.

(I tell yer, these places are worse than banks.)

Think it was a counter check.

Usually is, but you s'posed to come in

In the morning, if you want it that day.

And you got to have a good yarn.

Anyway, they weren't gonna give it to him.

Comes across to us. There were a few of us,

sitting there, out of the rain.

Sits beside me.

Picks at the cords of his furled sleeping bag.

"Bastards!" I say.

He gives me a smile.

I knew something was up.

It was one of those smiles people give yer.

when you know they're gonna cause trouble.

He stood up, shaking out the sleeping bag

"Move back," he says, "Move back."

So we shifted our chairs and gave him some room.

Blow me down if he doesn't put the sleeping bag

down on the floor and jump in it.

You shoulda seen that Centrelink lot.

They'd seen a lot of things,

but nobody'd ever done this to them before.

The clerk comes hurrying over,

(he was a bastard if you got him in the interview room),

He says, "You can't do that here."

The bloke from the Bush was polite,

Didn't do his block or nothin'.

He just says, "Well, where else am I gonna sleep?

You blokes won't give me a counter cheque."

Then he rolls over, on his side, like,

closes his eyes and goes to sleep!

Clerk goes back behind the counter.

Those clerks, they stood around talking a bit,

staring at the clock, pointing at the bloke

on the floor in the sleeping bag,

pointing at the clock.

I thought they were gonna call the cops.

But ten minutes later, they come back

with a bloody cheque.

The bushie leaves happy.

Well, bugger me, mate,

who woulda thought it?

The old men in their great-coats

sitting in the gutter outside Matt Talbot,

waiting for the night to fall,

never rooves above their heads.

They're used to the winter chill.

They look for corner shops

that keep the metho in the fridge,

behind the soft drinks.

Their flesh is paper-thin,

and bony.

They wear a different rage,

eyes clouded by the sun's glare.

You hear the rattle in their throats,

the rasping of their damaged voices,

that voice that no-one else has.

Sometimes they're in a cheery mood.

"G'day. mate," they'll say.

And bite you for a smoke.

More often they brawl,

rolling across the gravel,

drunker than you could ever imagine,

one on top of the other,

turn about,

punching weakly at each other's faces,

no breath to fight.

I saw them as a kid. I used to think

"I hope I don't grow up like you",

and something in me, child-like,

thought they were romantic.

(Well, you can't get everything you want,

can you?

Thoughts on writing about the Battle of Bunker Hill: Tales from the First Fleet II.

2009-07-04T23:37:00.000-07:00

As some of you know I'm researching and writing a book on the First/second Fleeters who fought in the War for American Independence. So, I thought I'd add to that plethora of stuff that emanates from teh Internet every July 4.

At the moment I'm researching the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. Two marines, David Collins and Robert Ross were in the Marines, who were sent in as reinforcements out of nearby Boston about two hours before the fighting finished.

So far as I can work out at this date,Collins ended up in both the First and Second Battalions, but was mostly a second lieutenant in the Third Company, First Battalion. He was an adjutant in the Second Battalion in Halifax, a job his influential marine father got him to keep him out of harm's way during the war. He ended up back in England in 1777.

Robert Ross was a captain in the Fifth Company, First Battalion. Ross was a recruiting agent in Ireland in 1778 and 1779. He was captured on board the Ardent out of Plymouth (U.K.) in 1780. Her crew were inexperienced and mistook the French fleet for an English one. Ross, though never formally charged, was believed to be responsible for ordering the Ardent's flag struck. He was briefly a prisoner of war, then was relegated to service on guardships at Plymouth for the rest of the war.

Francis Grose who was in the 52nd Foot was involved in the battle from the beginning. He later fought at Fort Montgomery, during the Saratoga campaign in 1777. He was sent home in 1778 after being severely wounded in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse.

All these men eventually ended up in New South Wales, Collins as Judge Advocate, Ross and Grose as lieutenants-governor.

At the moment I'm in the first stage of doing a battle analysis of Bunker Hill. It goes something like this - I've yet to fill in the detail. -
Midnight 17th June 1775. The American rebels build a redoubt of Breeds Hill opposite Boston Town, from where they can lob cannon balls into the town and onto Royal Navy ships. They meant to build it on Bunker Hill, but it appears they got lost in the dark and built it on the hill closest to Boston which was a pretty stupid thing to do, really, as it guaranteed the Brits were going to come powering out of Boston and knock them off the hill, because of the danger to the British garrison.
4 in the morning, when the sun comes up, the Royal Navy in Boston Harbour wakes up to the fact the Americans are up on Breed's Hill. After a bit of dithering around, they shell the American redoubt more or less ceaselessly, killing only one rebel, but scaring the hell out of the other 2000 odd.
2 in the afternoon - more American reinforcements arrive. They build some high rail fences to make life very hard in the expected attack from the British.
The British land on Moulton Point and slowly advance on Breed's Hill. Its taken them so long because they've had the wind and tide against them getting their boats on the Charles Town peninsula to effect a flanking movement. Grose is in this first wave of troops.
3.30 pm. The Americans repulse the first British attack at the rail fences. The battle toll for the Brits in particular is ghastly. Grose survives, but the father of the marine John Shea, who will arrive in Boston in July, is killed in the First Brigade Marines.
4.00 pm. A second British assault is repulsed at fleches and the redoubt. David Collins and Robert Ross, in the Second Battalion Marines take part in this equally bloody battle.
4.30 pm. A third, successful assault is made on the redoubt. The American retreat.
By 5.30 mopping up operations by the British are over.

Of course, there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the bones of it. I have to sort through the fog of war one is confronted with in the primary sources, and, much to my horror, there's two primary and two more secondary sources I have to buy yet. But, since one of the primary sources is dated 1775, and I haven't checked to see if there's a modern reprint, that one might be hard to get.

Basically though, I'll be able to follow the first stage of the battle through Grose in the 52nd Foot, and the rest of it through him, and through Collins and Ross in the Marines. Trouble is, Collins seems to be the only one whose accounts survive. So it'll take a bit of delicate footwork to tease out the full story.

Notes: For David Collins see - John Currey, David Collins. A Colonial Life, South Carlton, 2000, Chapter 2.
For Robert Ross, see biographical entry, Australian Dictionary of Biography On-Line and Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia, A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet, pp. 314-315.
For Francis Grose see see biographical entry, Australian Dictionary of Biography On-Line and Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, Pt.2 and Vol.2.
The literature on the Battle of Bunker Hill is voluminous. I have consulted a variety of texts to create the very brief analysis provided above.

Latest Book Review

2009-07-03T19:34:00.000-07:00

Below is the link to my latest book review for Review of Australian Studies.

http://search.arrow.edu.au/main/results?c_creator0=Paul+Burns&c_date0=2009&inst=Reviews+in+Australian+Studies&start=0

On the Discovery of Books

2009-05-30T18:48:00.000-07:00

On today's Saturday Salon at Larvatus Prodeo some-one asked if anybody had read Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad. (I had glanced at it briefly as a 17 year old but was, back then, put off by Pope's use of rhyming couplets.) This set me reflecting on the discovery of books - the first impressions books and authors of books make on one when you first discover them. Hence this post.

My parents were great lovers of books. My mother read to me from an early age and, by the time I got to school I was, for my age, a pretty accomplished reader. At the age of eight or nine my father gave me a copy of Dickens's Pickwick Papers as a birthday present. I dutifully read it. I was, of course, impressed by Dickens's literary genius, as opposed to comic genius, but I can't say I 'got' the book. I didn't get it until I got round to re-reading it about age forty, and that time I was bursting into uproarious laughter about every second page. I had a similar experience with Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, which I first read when I was about twenty. I simply got extremely annoyed and bored by the character of Nicholas Nickleby'ss mother, probably because in some was she cut too close to the bone in her resemblance to my much unlamented stepmother.

The next Dickens book my father bought me, the Christmas after he'd got me Pickwick, was Great Expectations. It took me almost a month to go back to the book after I'd read the first chapter. In my boyish imagination I was too scared to go further. And then, Uncle Pumblechook annoyed me. I simply thought he was a very nasty man. (Which he was.)

About this time my father started taking me to a wonderful second-hand bookshop in Castlereagh Street in Sydney - Greenwoods I think it was called. He bought books like John Halifax, Gentleman, the poetry of Mrs. Hemans - The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck' - Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, (I was brought up on stories from Ireland), Henry Lawson's short stories, the poetry of Paterson and Lawson, (Dorothea Mackellar I was discovering at school), and so on.

At age ten a friend of the family bought me the complete works of Shakespeare, a huge book with a red cover and a giant woodcut of Shakespeare as the frontispiece. I'm sure many grown-up back then hadn't read Shakespeare from cover to cover. I did. The Tempest was okay, parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI were enthralling, especially Jack Cade and the Maid of Orleans, but then I discovered that Shakespearian play of blood, death, mutilation and rape that surely must have been the secret delight of many a pubescent boy in that unenlightened era, Titus Andronicus. Then Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with its salacious opening scenes. I spent hours in the garage learning speeches from Julius Caesar, having been inspired by James Mason in the old MGM black and white movie. And Henry V's speech before the battle of Agincourt. (I tried to sound like Laurence Olivier.) I stumped around distorting my cerebral palsy, dragging my foot along the garage concrete floor, pretending I was Richard III. I was hooked for life.

In those days there were Classic Comics, which I devoured with avidity. (I particularly remember a very thick comic about Robin Hood, and being terrified by the comic version of R. H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.) But it wasn't long before I graduated to the books themselves. I struggled through Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and badgered my father for money to buy every work by Robert Lewis Stevenson I could find. He refused the money, but took me down to the local library and signed me up as a member. Of course, I loved Kidnapped and Treasure Island, but the two Stevenson books that made the greatest impression on me were The Master of Ballantrae (which almost gave me nightmares) and a collection of short stories, The New Arabian Nights. I can recall the first story in the book was particularly scary, about, I think, some sort of devilish poker game. Sadly, I've never come across the book since.

Enough of childhood reading. I need to get a little bit biographical here. I was brought up in a very strict anti-Communist Catholic family, with horror tales of the Stalinist gulag. By age 15 I'd decided I wanted to find out more about these ice-bound prison camps for myself, so I trudged off to the local library to see what I could find. There was this book about a writer who had spent time in a prison camp. His name was Dostoevsky and the book was Crime and Punishment. I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for, but I got it out rather eagerly. I remember the librarian giving me a very weird look as I booked the book out. There are some, very few books, that hit you in the guts. They take a little of your soul with them. The Master of Ballantrae was one. Crime and Punishment is another. It was the first truly adult book that I had read. I couldn't turn the pages quick enough. It left me emotionally fraught. I was shaking at the end of it, utterly overcome by its power. I had discovered the glory of reading, that thing you don't get with every book, but when you do get it, you know why books are written. As an adult I would experience it with other books, and I will post about those experiences here some time in the future. But Crime and Punishment was the first.

On Going to Book Sales and Stuff

2009-05-15T19:12:00.000-07:00

I've just come back from the Rotary Book Sale at the Armidale Race-Course. For a bibliophile like me walking into a capacious room filled with tables crammed with books is, I guess, a bit like going to Heaven (if such a place existed.)

Of course I headed straight for the history book table, eager to see what they had on the eighteenth century and the American Revolution. There was an incredibly wide range of books available: World War 2, World war 1, lots of stuff on Victorian England, a Marx-Engels reader, a few books on the English Civil War, several books on the philosophy and practice of history, some of which I might go back and pick up tomorrow, a fair whack of medieval and Tudor history, some books on Revolutionary Europe, a smattering of books on Chinese and Japanese history, by which I was sorely tempted, and by dint of searching, a few books on the eighteenth century. A veritable feast, really.

I ended up with the following: Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans, The National Experience - not exactly the period I'm researching and writing about, but I like his work; Ludwig Reiner's biography of Frederick the Great; Dorothy Marshall's Eighteenth Century England - I've read it, but the one I read was a library copy and its nice to have my own copy; Christopher Duffy's The Military Experience in the Age of Reason - which is intrinsically interesting, and I am writing a sort of military/social history of the late 18th century; and the original Oxford History of England volume of Basil Williams's The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760 - which means I now have all the volumes on eighteenth century Britain in both the original and new Oxford History of England series.

After that I searched round for the biography section, tucked away in a corner - there was the usual assortment - biographies of royalty, movie stars, politicians etc., etc., but there was one jewel - Frank McLynn's biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie - apart from it being eighteenth century, as an ex-Catholic I have a sneaking regard for the Jacobites, even if, on balance, the Stuarts were a bunch of incredibly inept monarchs.

Then back to the history table to pick up a copy of Bernal Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain- which I read years ago but want to have another look at. In my spare time when I'm not writing book reviews, researching my book on First Fleeters in the War of American Independence, and fart-arsing around on teh Internet, I've set myself a project of reading (or re-reading) the classic historians. I'm looking for a three volume copy of Gibbon.

My copies of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Ammianus Marcellinus (my favourite Roman historian), Bede, Froissart and Joinville/Villehardouin all disappeared years ago. I was leaving Armidale for a while and left all my books in my flat. In an act of foolish kindness I sublet my flat to a homeless old guy, but he didn't pay the rent, and was evicted. I didn't find out for months. Consequently the real estate agent, who thought I'd disappeared into smoke, either auctioned all the books off or threw them out on the tip. I'd had them for so many years and leafed through them so many times, they were almost falling apart.

Down at the local book shop there's an abridged copy of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion I've got my eye on, along with a copy of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. And it would be a pleasure to read Macaulay once more. Don't think I'll try Carlyle again though. There are limits.

There are some early Americans - William Bradford for one, I'd like to have a go at. Parkman is one of the few of their greats I've read, waiting for a re-read, and Richard Frothingham's delightful history of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, which cheers me every time I dip into it. I'd like to have another go at Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico again, too. Last time I found him quite a struggle, though that might have had something to do with the fact that the local library copy I was reading had a warped cover. I just found it annoying.

The book that's inspired me to go on this particular trope is John Burrow's A History of Histories. Well worth a read, though he's far too dismissive of the Marxist contribution to the theory and practice of history in my opinion. (Who can read Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Marcus Rediker or Peter Linebaugh without being inspired?)

I once said on another blog, don't get me going on history and books. You can't stop me. But stop I will - for now.

Update: Monday. Went back to the Rotary Book Sale this morning. Its one of those cold drizzly mornings that happen in Armidale, a usual precursor to the horror of an Armidale winter; or what used to be the horror of an Armidale winter before global warming kicked in. But books are one thing that can get me out of bed in winter.

On Saturday, going to the book sale was a bit like going to a David Jones Boxing Day Sale - well, not quite, but I'm sure you know what I mean. Today, though, there was hardly anybody roaming among those numerous tables of books.

I only looked at the history table. And the history god/goddess was with me, I think, because I found a couple of books I would've bought on-line eventually. Lawrence Henry Gipson's The Coming of the Revolution, which I'll start on almost immediately; and Barbara Tuchman's The First Salute. A View of the American Revolution. This book didn't get very good reviews, especially from maritime historians, who said she didn't know one end of a sailing ship from the other, but it will be interesting, nonetheless. Now I'll have to make up my own mind about it.

There were other treasures, too. J. H. Parry's The Age of Reconnaissance - one wonders, though, when the jacket reads 'Profusely illustrated' exactly what one's in for; Boxer's classic history of The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. And W. J. Eccles' France in America. Written from a Canadian perspective, I suspect, at the very least it will be intriguing.

As I was paying for the books, the Rotary bloke behind the counter where you pay said of the rain, "The spots hardly join together." And he was right. It was a pleasant walk home.

Afghanistan- The Graveyard of Empires

2009-05-04T22:56:00.000-07:00

Recently Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, told us that the Australian commitment in Afghanistan was likely to become deeply unpopular and that it was a long way from over. Rudd is recognised Australia wide as that rare phenomenon in Australian politics, an intellectual. And one presumes that as a former diplomat he has a fair knowledge of history. (If our diplomats are wanting in that department you could probably argue that when it comes to foreign affairs we'd be in more than a bit of a mess) But our Prime Minister seems somewhat lacking in his knowledge of Afghan history. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have sent more Australian troops there.

Okay, it wasn't his fault. We ended up there because Chimpo, aka The American Imbecile aka George W. Bush was running the U. S of A, and he didn't really have his eye on Afghanistan after 9/11. We all know now he was more interested at getting at Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq because, in Bush's immortal words, Saddam had tried to poison his Daddy. (One wonders about his morality of starting a ten year war because he was trying to stay in Daddy's good books, after wiping out his brains with cocaine for forty years but that's not the topic of this post, and Bush is gone, so ...) He only went into Afghanistan because that was where most Americans thought Osama Ben Laden was, and Ben Laden, not Saddam Hussein, was responsible for 9/11.

So that brings us to Afghanistan. At last count ten Australian soldiers are dead in Afghanistan, because John Winston Howard (let's put the blame where it really lies) invoked the ANZUS Treaty and followed America into Afghanistan, then concentrated all his attention on the Bush family feud in Iraq, to the grave detriment of the situation in Afghanistan. Those soldiers died fighting the Taliban. Bush, Howard, and probably Rudd and Obama would have us believe that the Taliban arose out of the Mujahadeen irregular forces that resisted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1975 onwards. (What they no longer wish to remind us of is that the Mujahadeen i.e. the Taliban and/or Al-Quaeda were cheerfully funded and supplied with arms by the CIA and once the Russians had gone said Mujahadeen turned round and bit their financial benefactors on the bum.)

What Howard/Bush/Rudd/Obama haven't told us is that Afghani bandits have been around for centuries, since the time of Alexander the Great, and that imperial forces invading Afghanistan ever since, with the exception of the Mughals, have had a really, really bad time there and have always lost. Its not for nothing its called the graveyard of empires. And that brings me to my narrative of that first European force, the British, who confronted the nineteenth century equivalent of the Taliban. The following is based on the account of the First Afghan War (1839-42) given by Boyd Hilton in A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846, Oxford, 2006.

Lord Auckland, India's Governor General (1836-1842) perceived an exaggerated Russian threat to India out of what is now modern day Iran and decided the best way to counter the Russians was to erect an alternative buffer state in Afghanistan. (This was part of what was known at the time and ever since as The Great Game). Unfortunately, this meant the British being involved in tribal warfare in Afghanistan, something they simply didn't understand, and in a series of rapidly changing alliances one might argue are analogous to the situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan today. Basically, just like the present Afghan War, the idea was that local forces should bear the brunt of most of the fighting, in a plot hatched to replace Dost Muhammad, the pro-Persian Emir of Afghanistan in Kabul. This was done easily enough by the British and their Hindu allies. The emir was replaced by a pro-British puppet. The British, however, could not leave well enough alone (a common problem in Victorian India) and they interfered with local tribal practices. The result was a riot and the British Consul at Kabul was shot, then hacked into pieces. The stranded British garrison opted for a retreat to the safety of Jalalabad.

Thus began one of the greatest defeats in British military history up to that time. Major-General William Elphinstone, the commander of the British forces, underestimated the effect of snow and frost-bite on his troops in the cold mountain passes of Afghanistan. Worse, he was surprised by the fanaticism of the supporters of the supplanted Emir Dost, who, in January 1842, attacked the British troops with knives, not guns, and wiped out 12,000 to 16,000 British troops in Jagdalak Pass. Only one white survivor, a medical officer, made it back to Jalalabad.

British honour was impugned. The British Army marched on Kabul, blew up the bazaar, randomly and collectively punished some nearby villages then left, leaving their puppet Shah Shuja without protection. He was, of course murdered and Emir Dost was back in Kabul.

As Hilton has noted, the Afghani bandits were 'oblivious to the conventions of chivalrous warfare.' (p.571.) The West, for the first time, had 'met the equivalent of today's suicide bomber'. (ibid.) A similar fate would meet the Russians in the twentieth century, though it took longer for the Afghanis to rid Afghanistan of them. One has to wonder what Kevin Rudd means when he tells us this new (well, relatively new) war is a long way from over.