The Young Robert Ross

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.