Blogetty Blog 9: A Far Away Island

My family has an early connection to Oz in the person of Nathaniel Lucas, a cousin many generations removed who arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 on the First Fleet. The continent had been discovered and claimed by Captain Cook during his circumnavigation, but was completely unexplored when the British Government decided, on the basis of zero knowledge of suitability, to appoint Captain Philip as Governor in charge of a large penal colony.

In May 1787 eleven ships sailed from Portsmouth carrying crew, Marine guards, civil administrators, free volunteers, 505 male and 192 female convicts, 7 horses, 7 cattle, 29 sheep, 74 swine and 6 rabbits. After crisscrossing the Atlantic and stopping at Rio and Cape Town for supplies and repairs and battered by storms, the Fleet reached its destination. It was one of history’s greatest sea voyages. 1483 people travelled 15,000 miles in 252 days. Governor Philip did not like the intended situation at Botany Bay and soon moved the endeavor north to the fine natural harbor now Sydney.

Nathaniel was not one of the volunteers. He was tried at the Old Bailey in 1784 and found guilty of ‘feloniously stealing clothing worth 40 shillings’ from his next-door neighbor in Red Lion Street, Holborn. His plea that he had borrowed a coat for his sick wife was not accepted and he was sentenced to 10 years transportation. He was in prison when his wife died of her unidentified sickness: London was a most unhealthy place, black from coal smoke, insanitary and subject to frequent outbreaks of disease and choking fogs, so the early mortality rate was high.

After the main settlement was established in Sydney Governor Philip sent a party under Lieutenant Gidley King on the ship ‘Supply’ to claim the uninhabited Norfolk Island which was thought to be a source of flax – vital to the Navy’s need for cordage and sail-cloth.

Nathaniel was one of the party and so was Olivia Gascoigne. It was another hop of 850 miles due east of the continent. Nathaniel and Olivia must have wondered what strange fate had brought them to so remote and isolated a destination. They married on 5^th November 1791. They would have 15 children, all of whom survived but two-year-old twin daughters who were tragically killed when a large Norfolk pine fell on their house, 120 grandchildren, and an estimated 150,000 descendants in Australia.

Nathaniel was trusted as a convict of good behavior. He was not merely an excellent tradesman, but industrious and inventive. He designed and built a wind-driven Mill and quarried the grinding stones from local rock: a remarkable feat with only his limited hand tools and untrained assistance. 

He farmed a fifteen acre land grant together with sixty acres purchased from a former Marine so successfully that in August 1802 he was able to sell £450 worth of wheat, maize and pork to the Government store on the island. In 1802 he was appointed the island’s Master Carpenter. Despite the island’s “wonderfully fertile soil”, the scheme to establish a flax supply came to nothing when abundant and more convenient supplies were discovered in New Zealand.        

Nathaniel returned to Sydney in April 1805, a free man, aboard the ‘Investigator’. The ship carried the materials for a windmill he was to erect for the government and another for his own use, and several pairs of millstones. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser announced news on June 23^rd 1805:

“An excellent Post Mill, the first that has been erected in the settlement is now completed by Mr. Nathaniel Lucas. It was undertaken and finished within the space of six weeks; has been for several weeks at work, is capable of grinding, with a sufficiency of wind, upwards of six bushels per hour, which last week was accomplished for 12 hours successively.”

In 1818 Nathaniel’s history turned less favorable again. Francis Greenaway, the architect of St. Luke’s Church, Liverpool – a Sydney suburb named after the English port – alleged that Lucas was much addicted to the bottle and accused him of using poor stone in the Church construction. Unfortunately his addiction to alcohol increased – rum was a pernicious plague in the early NSW colony – and on May 9^th 1818 the Sydney Gazette carried sad news:            

          “On Tuesday last the dead body of Mr. Nathaniel Lucas, for many years known in this colony and at Norfolk Island as a respectable builder, was found left by the tide at twenty yards distance from Moore Bridge; which unhappy catastrophe appears to have proceeded from his own act, owing to a mental derangement. He had been six days absent from his family on a pretext of going to Parramatta: but his long absence, connected with other circumstances that gave rise to apprehension, naturally induced his family to go in quest of him, the result of which was that he was by one of his own sons found.”

Australia’s surprising role in the family story does not end there. My niece Siobhan made her home in Melbourne working in entomology research and then five years in plant pathology for ICI. And my brother Rupert and his wife Diana somehow found their way to the seaside town of Merimbula, NSW, where they met a tribe of cousins descended from our great uncle Herbert and including Esme Lucas Havens.

They bought a holiday house there – so convenient from their home in Derbyshire – where I had the pleasure of visiting them and the flock of wild white cockatoos, which arrived daily to be fed and destroy the upholstery on their balcony furniture with their big strong beaks.

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