An escapee in Cape Town.
When surgeon John White first landed, he wanted to examine
the local wildlife, but he was busy at first, setting up sick-tents. For a
while, the only natural history work he could do was by looking at what others
caught or shot.
In the course of the last week, all the marines, their wives
and children, together with all the convicts, male and female, were landed. The
laboratory and sick tents were erected, and, I am sorry to say, were soon
filled with patients afflicted with the true camp dysentery and the scurvy. [1]
Later on, White acquired an artist, but only because Thomas Watling
was charged with forgery in Scotland. He was, to be blunt, less enthusiastic
about being in Australia, even if the authorities were keen to send him there.
He was a competent artist, and he probably used his skills to forge guinea
notes.
After denying the charge and then considering the evidence and
knowing that the punishment for being found guilty was death, Watling asked to
be allowed to submit voluntarily to transportation. This was a plea bargain of
sorts: it guaranteed him some world travel, but ensured that he would not hang,
as he might have done if he had gone to trial and been found guilty.
The authorities agreed, he made his plea and he was sentenced. He
and other prisoners were being moved on a small ship to a Plymouth hulk, but
when the others plotted to take over the ship, he informed on them.
This was risky, because he would be known as an informant. He
got away with informing, but the act of tattling failed to pay a dividend,
because he failed to win the remission he asked for. It was denied by Hay
Campbell, the Lord Advocate, who wrote to Evan Nepean in about 1789:
As to Watling…his crime was deeper, viz., forgery. He will be
an acquisition to the new Colony at Botany Bay, tho’ perhaps it may be right to
recommend him to the attention of those in Command there on acct. of the merit
he had in this late affair. [2]
In other words, Watling was a criminal who might make good
in the new colony, and he was sent to Sydney in the transport Pitt in July 1791. Then he escaped at
Cape Town, which was a Dutch colony back then, though he was soon recaptured by
“the mercenary Dutch”, as he called them.
They held him for seven months before handing him over to the
next suitable British ship, and he finally arrived in Sydney on 7 October, 1792
in the transport Royal Admiral. Then
he got lucky, because he was assigned almost immediately to Surgeon John White,
who badly needed a skilled artist.
As chief surgeon of the First Fleet, White’s had first to treat
the colony’s sick, but in his spare time, he was naturalist to Arthur Phillip
when the governor went exploring. By April in 1788, most of the First Fleet’s ill
were out of danger, and White travelled with Phillip, several officers, three
soldiers and two seamen, to Manly Cove. Heading north, their path was blocked
by swamps and thick bush.
This is my home territory, so I can assert that the swamps must
have been where Manly Golf Club is now. Going along the coast they went north
to a “small salt-water lagoon, about two miles [3 km] away”, where they saw
black swans. This was probably Curl Curl Lagoon, now usually called Queenscliff
Lagoon.
They saw a kookaburra (which White correctly recognised as a
kingfisher) and White admired Aboriginal rock engravings, but that was about
it. Until Sir Joseph Banks sent out some of his chosen young men, collecting
would be haphazard. White sent many drawings and specimens back to England, and
in late 1788, he sent back the journal he had been keeping since he joined the
First Fleet.
It was edited and published in 1790 as Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, with 65 engravings,
apparently created in Britain from sketches and preserved specimens. White may
also have been responsible for the specimens and drawings used in Arthur
Phillip’s The Voyage of Governor Phillip
to Botany Bay. That came out in 1789, and both books sold well.
Until White left Sydney at the end of 1794, Thomas Watling was
his convict servant. In a letter to his aunt, Watling said his work involved
painting the “non-descript productions of the country”, meaning he was painting
the undescribed species, as and when they were found.
There is a puzzle, though. White’s book came out in 1790, and Watling only arrived in Sydney in 1792, yet some of the book’s engravings have matching paintings in the “Watling Collection” which now rests in the zoological library of the British Museum (Natural History).
Watling’s task was to deal with the way dried herbarium
specimens change or lose their colour. Before photography was invented,
painters would prepare a nice water-colour picture, with accurate colours. An
engraver would copy the painting onto a metal plate that could be used to print
black-and-white images. Then young women and girls would set to work with
water-colours, adding the same colours, referring to the original painting. [3]
However it happened, the painting always came first, but many
of the paintings in the collection have been extensively annotated in John
White’s hand-writing, so White probably gathered up the collection and took it
to England in 1794.
But how could Watling have created the paintings before he reached Australia? The answer,
said Rex and Thea Rienits [4],
is easy: they argued that Watling was no use as a natural history painter when
he arrived, so White would have set him to work, copying the plates as
paintings.
When White returned to Britain, he wanted to stay there, but he
was told either to return to Sydney or resign his colonial post. He chose to
resign and planned a second book, for which he probably wrote a manuscript,
since lost. Probably today’s “Watling collection” would have become the
drawings in that book.
White served as a surgeon in the Sheerness and Chatham
shipyards until 1820, but back in Sydney, Watling was still a convict, at first
assigned to David Collins, the Judge-Advocate. In September 1795, Governor John
Hunter became the second governor of the young colony, and Watling’s prospects
looked up, because Hunter, also an able artist, took him over.
After a year of service to the governor, Watling had a
conditional pardon which was made absolute seven months later. He was free to
go, and so he left, taking with him a child whose mother is unknown. He
probably went to Calcutta, where there was a miniature painter called Thomas
Watling for a while.
He was certainly in Scotland in about 1804, where he was charged
with forging seven five-pound notes in 1806, but he got off with the Scots
verdict of ‘not proven’. He later went to London, where he sought assistance
from the former Governor Hunter, by now an admiral.
You have to wonder what his life might have been, had he, on escaping
in Capetown, fallen in with a Dutch naturalist who needed a painter?
[1] John White, Journal
of a Voyage to New South Wales, 1790, entry for January 29, 1788, available
as http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00092.pdf, on page 70.
[2] Ilay Campbell, in a letter
to Evan Nepean. (It was in my files with no source.)
[3] For an excellent free example, see John White, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales,
1790, available as http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/p00092.pdf
[4] Rex and Thea Rienits, Early artists of Australia, 47.
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