1788: The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet

In 1788, 11 small ships set sail from England on an eight-month-long voyage over the roughest of seas, carrying 1,500 people, food for two years, and all the equipment needed to build a colony of convicts in a land completely beyond their experience and imagination. In Portsmouth, the fleet’s preparation was characterized by disease, promiscuity, and death. The journey itself was one of unbearable hardship, but also of extraordinary resilience. Upon their arrival, however, the colonists faced their biggest challenges of all: conflict, starvation, and despair.

Combining the skill of a vigilant journalist with the magic of a master novelist, this entrancing history brings the sights, sounds, sufferings, and joys of the “First Fleeters” back to life. Journals, letters, reports, and pleas to England are all interwoven here with the author’s own insight, and together they convey the innermost horrors and joys of the very first European Australians. The result is a narrative history that is surprising, compelling, and unforgettable.against the backdrop of Georgian England with its peculiar mix of elegance, prosperity, progress, and squalor, the story of the First Fleet is one of courage, short sightedness, tragedy, but above all, extraordinary resilience.

Separated from loved ones and travelling in cramped conditions for the months-long journey to Botany Bay, the first European Australians suffered the most unbearable hardship upon arrival on Australian land, where a near famine dictated that rations be cut to the bone.