2005 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Coda: John Freeth, Botany Bay (1790)
Botany Bay (discovered and annexed by Cook on his first expedition) was identified by the expedition’s botanist Joseph Banks as particularly fertile ground for colonisation. By 1786 schemes for transporting convicts there were being noisily debated, and in January 1788 the first convicts arrived. It is now difficult to reconstruct the strategy or motives behind this colonisation, but Freeth acutely grasps the mood as the British empire turns away from its losses and looks to another potential new Eden.1