Free Down Under by Bill Bryson

as an afterthought, he stepped ashore at a place he called Possession Island, planted a flag and claimed the east coast for Great Britain.
    It was a remarkable achievement for a man who had been born a labourer’s son in inland Yorkshire, hadn’t been to sea until he was eighteen, and had joined the Navy only thirteen years before at the advanced age of twenty-seven. He would return twice more to the Pacific on even greater voyages – on the next he would sail 70,000 miles – before being murdered (and possibly eaten himself) by natives on a beach in Hawaii in 1779. Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.
    The significance of this misapprehension became evident when Britain lost its American colonies, and, deciding it needed a new place to send its less desirable subjects, plumped for Australia. Remarkably, the decision was taken without any attempt at reconnoitring. When Captain Arthur Phillip at the head of a squadron of eleven ships – known reverentially ever after as the First Fleet – set sail from Portsmouth in May 1787, he and the 1,500-odd people in his care were heading off to start a colony in a preposterously remote, virtually unknown place that had been visited just once, briefly, seventeen years before and had not seen a European face since.
    Never before had so many people been moved such a great distance at such expense – and all to be incarcerated. By modern standards (by any standards really), their punishments were ludicrously disproportionate. Most were small-time thieves. Britain wasn’t trying to rid itself of abody of dangerous criminals so much as thin out an underclass. The bulk were being sent to the ends of the earth for stealing trifles. One famously luckless soul had been caught taking twelve cucumber plants. Another had unwisely pocketed a book called A Summary Account of the Flourishing State of the Island of Tobago. Most of the crimes smacked either of desperation or of temptation unsuccessfully resisted.
    Generally, the term of transportation was seven years, but since there was no provision for their return and few could hope to raise the fare, passage to Australia was effectively a life sentence. But then this was an unforgiving age. By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’. In such circumstances, transportation was quite a merciful alternative.
    The voyage from Portsmouth took 252 days – eight months – and covered 15,000 miles of open sea (more than would seem strictly necessary, but they crossed the Atlantic in both directions to catch favourable winds). When they arrived at Botany Bay, they found it wasn’t quite the kindly refuge they had been led to expect. Its exposed position made it a dangerous anchorage, and a foray ashore found nothing but sandflies and marsh. ‘Of the natural meadows which Mr Cook mentions near Botany Bay, we can give no account,’ wrote a puzzled member of the party. Cook’s descriptions had made it sound almost like an English country estate – a place where one might play a little croquet and enjoy a picnic on the lawn. Clearly he had seen it in a different season.
    As they stood surveying their unhappy situation, there happened one of those coincidences in which Australianhistory abounds. On the eastern horizon two ships appeared and joined them in the bay. They were in the command of an amiable Frenchman, Count Jean-François de La Pérouse, who was leading a two-year journey of exploration around the Pacific. Had La Pérouse been just a little faster, he could have claimed Australia for France and saved the country 200 years of English cooking. Instead, he accepted his unlucky timing with the grace that marked the