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State Library of New South Wales
A Voyage to Sydney in New South Wales in 1798 & 1799

A Voyage to Sydney in New South Wales in 1798 & 1799

1798–1799
Manuscript
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DLMS 32

In 1797 at the age of 43, William Noah was sentenced to death for being an accessory after the fact of robbing Mr Cuthbert Hilton. The sentence was commuted to transportation for life, and Noah was taken from Newgate Prison to the transport ship Hillsborough.

In his ‘Narrative’ to his sister, Noah notes many incidents relating to the behaviour of the convicts and their treatment in the long wait between sentencing and sailing. He also wrote two notes to the captain, asking permission to see his wife; she came to see him at Gravesend and again when the Hillsborough had moved to Portsmouth.

The ship finally sailed from Portsmouth on 20 December 1798, with 300 convicts on board. According to Noah’s account, a convict died nearly every day. Discontent was rife, and the voyage was so uncomfortable that ‘indeed Death would have been a welcome friend’.

Noah arrived in Sydney on 26 July 1799. In 1815 he received a conditional pardon and an absolute pardon in 1818, after which he become a clerk in a government lumberyard.

The 764 tonne merchantman and convict ship Hillsborough was dispatched from England in 1798 and arrived in Sydney on 26 July 1799. Before then, from 1783 and 1798, it was used by the East India Company.

In a letter to Under Secretary King, Governor John Hunter described the ship’s inmates as being ‘a cargo of the most miserable and wretched convicts I ever beheld’.*


Footnotes

* Gov Hunter to Under Secretary King, 28 July 1799, Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, vol 2, 1797–1800, p 378

On board transport ships, the convicts were housed below deck, and further confined behind bars. Cramped conditions would have contributed to the spread of disease. The death rate onboard the Hillsborough – 95 of its 300 convicts died of typhoid – was the worst recorded on a convict transport to Sydney.