Curio

State Library of New South Wales
First Fleet journal

First Fleet journal

1787–93
Manuscript
Bequest of Sir William Dixson, 1952
DLSPENCER 374

John Easty’s original manuscript journal provides a rare and at times shockingly frank account of the earliest years of the colony. Much of our recorded history of the First Fleet and the first European settlement comes from official records and from the small minority of men and women of education and social status who kept journals. It is therefore particularly interesting to read the story of those early days in the blunt and untutored words of an ordinary soldier. Although some of his account was based on hearsay and some was written long after the events, we hear the voice of ranks other than officers and superiors.

Beyond this account however, we know little about John Easty. Neither his birth nor death dates are known. He probably served in France and Spain before being sent to NSW as one of the marine detachment in the First Fleet. Easty was appointed to Captain-Lieutenant Meredith's company on 4 November 1787. In December 1790 he was a member of two punitive expeditions sent against the Aboriginals around Botany Bay. He returned to England in December 1792 on the Atlantic, the same ship that conveyed Governor Arthur Phillip home. In September 1794 he was employed by Waddington & Smith, grocers, in London and spent some years petitioning the Admiralty for compensation for short rations in the years he was in NSW.

The same as slaves

In handwriting cramped by the small notebook, Easty describes the pattern of life in the first years of the penal colony – the landing at Sydney Cove, the hazards of the wilderness, the increasingly troubled relationship with the Aboriginal inhabitants as their resentment against the white strangers grew, the founding of Parramatta, the comings and goings of ships bringing more convicts to the already overcrowded colony.


The arrival of the Fleet is described as a straightforward affair: ‘Entered the mouth of Port Jackson itt is a very Copleat harbour…Came to anchor oppisite a little Cove now named Sidney Cove’. Soon, however, Easty’s emphasis turns to the punishments, so frequent and savage, meted out in an attempt to maintain law and order, and many of his diary entries show a lively sense of injustice when noting the punishments inflicted on others. On 11 February he records the punishment of 200 lashes dealt out as a result of a court martial, and the following day 150 lashes for mutiny. Floggings were not only for male offenders, with Easty noting that two women convicts each received 25 lashes for theft. As a private in the Marines, Easty was subject to harsh discipline himself, and his diary entry for 8 March 1788 records that he was confined to his quarters for bringing a female convict into camp.


The celebrations to mark the king’s Birthday bring a momentary touch of ease to the grim life, with the firing of the Royal Salute, battalions marching with their colours, a ration of port allocated to the marines, and an invitation to dine with the governor for the officers.


Easty describes the departure of Governor Hunter and the Sirius crew in 1791 with genuine emotion. The marines assembled in farewell, with cheering and a nine-gun salute as the ships sailed down the harbour. He writes of the early stirrings of mateship, ‘and thar was two partys of men Saparated which had Spent 4 years together in the greatest Love and frindship as Ever men did in Such a distant part of the globe’.


There is a glimpse of the compassion he feels for the convicts when nine make a desperate attempt to flee the colony in an open boat, ‘but the thoughts of Liberty from Such a place as this is Enoufh to induce and Convict to try all Skeemes to obtain it as thay are the Same as Slaves all the time thay are in this Country’.


Easty returned to England in 1793, landing from his ship with ‘unspeakable Joy’ after an absence of six years.