The Third Fleet comprised 11 ships that set sail from the Kingdom of Great Britain in February, March and April 1791, bound for the Sydney penal settlement, with more than 2,000 convicts aboard. The passengers comprised convicts, military personnel and notable people sent to fill high positions in the colony. More important for the fledgling colony was that the ships also carried provisions.
The first ship to arrive in Sydney was the Mary Ann with its cargo of female convicts and provisions on 9 July 1791. Mary Ann had sailed on her own to Sydney Cove, and there is some argument about whether she was the last ship of the Second Fleet, or the first ship of the Third Fleet, or simply sailing independently, as was HMS Gorgon. The vessels that unambiguously belong to the third fleet all left together.
The ships that make up each fleet, however, are decided from the viewpoint of the settlers in Sydney Cove. For them, the second set of ships arrived in 1790 (June), and the third set of ships arrived in 1791 (July–October). The Mary Ann was a 1791 arrival.
The next ship to arrive just over three weeks later, on 1 August 1791, was Matilda. With Matilda came news that there were another nine ships making their way for Sydney, and which were expected to arrive shortly. The final vessel, Admiral Barrington, did not arrive until 16 October, nearly 11 weeks after Matilda, and 14 weeks after Mary Ann.
Ship | Master | Dep. England | Arr. Sydney | Duration | Male convicts: arrived [deaths] (boarded) | Female convicts: arrived [deaths] (boarded) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mary Ann | Mark Munro | 16 Feb 1791 | 9 Jul 1791 | 143 days | 141 [9] (150) | |
HMS Gorgon | Commander John Parker, RN | 15 Mar 1791 | 21 Sep 1791 | 190 days | 30 [1] (31) | |
Matilda | Matthew Weatherhead | 27 Mar 1791 | 1 Aug 1791 | 127 days | 225 [25] (250) | |
Atlantic | Archibald Armstrong | 27 Mar 1791 | 20 Aug 1791 | 147 days | 202 [18] (220) | |
Salamander | John Nichol | 27 Mar 1791 | 21 Aug 1791 | 148 days | 155 [5] (160) | |
William and Ann | Eber Bunker | 27 Mar 1791 | 28 Aug 1791 | 154 days | 181 [7] (188) | |
Active | John Mitchinson | 27 Mar 1791 | 26 Sep 1791 | 183 days | 154 [21] (175) | |
Queen (came from Cork, Ireland) | Richard Bowen | 19 Apr 1791 | 26 Sep 1791 | 160 days | 126 [7] (133) | 22 [-] (22) |
Albemarle | George Bowen | 27 Mar 1791 | 13 Oct 1791 | 200 days | 250 [32] (282) | 6 [-] (6) (arrival of females is a mystery) |
Britannia | Thomas Melvill | 27 Mar 1791 | 14 Oct 1791 | 201 days | 129 [21] (150) | |
Admiral Barrington | Robert Abbon Marsh | 27 Mar 1791 | 16 Oct 1791 | 203 days | 264 [36] (300) | |
TOTAL | 1716 [173] (1889) | 169 [9] (178) |
Atlantic, Salamander, and William and Ann departed from Plymouth; their naval agent was Lieutenant Richard Bowen. Albemarle, Active, Admiral Barrington, Britannia, and Matilda departed from Portsmouth; their naval agent was Lieutenant Robert Parry Young. Queen departed from Cork, Ireland; she had her own naval agent, Lieutenant Samuel Blow.
After having delivered their convicts, Active, Admiral Barrington, Albemarle, and Queen sailed for India. French privateers captured Active and Albemarle as they were almost home. Pirates murdered most of Admiral Barrington's crew near Bombay, but she was apparently recovered. A French privateer captured her in 1797.
Britannia, Mary Ann, Matilda, Salamander, and William and Ann went whaling. Britannia was wrecked off the coast of New South Wales some years later, in 1806. Matilda was wrecked on a shoal in February 1792.
From the above table it can be seen that 173 male convicts and 9 female convicts died during this voyage. Though this death rate was high, it was nowhere near as high as that which occurred on the Second Fleet. Convict arrivals on the Third Fleet included: [1]
Arthur Phillip was a British Royal Navy officer who served as the first governor of the Colony of New South Wales.
The First Fleet was a fleet of 11 British ships that took the first British colonists and convicts to Australia. It comprised two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict transports. On 13 May 1787 the fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, with over 1,400 people, left from Portsmouth, England and took a journey of over 24,000 kilometres (15,000 mi) and over 250 days to eventually arrive in Botany Bay, New South Wales, where a penal colony would become the first British settlement in Australia from 20 January 1788.
HMS Sirius was the flagship of the First Fleet, which set out from Portsmouth, England, in 1787 to establish the first European colony in New South Wales, Australia. In 1790, the ship was wrecked on the reef, south east of Kingston Pier, in Slaughter Bay, Norfolk Island.
Scarborough was a double-decked, three-masted, ship-rigged, copper-sheathed, barque that participated in the First Fleet, assigned to transport convicts for the European colonisation of Australia in 1788. Also, the British East India company (EIC) chartered Scarborough to take a cargo of tea back to Britain after her two voyages transporting convicts. She spent much of her career as a West Indiaman, trading between London and the West Indies, but did perform a third voyage in 1801–02 to Bengal for the EIC. In January 1805 she repelled a French privateer of superior force in a single-ship action, before foundering in April.
The Second Fleet was a convoy of six ships carrying settlers, convicts and supplies to Sydney Cove, Australia in 1790. It followed the First Fleet which established European settlement in Australia on 26 January 1788.
Justinian was launched in 1787 at Rotherhithe as a West Indiaman. Between 1789 and 1791 she served as a storeship, carrying provisions to the convict settlement at New South Wales. From there she sailed to China via Norfolk Island. She returned to England from China.
Admiral William Carnegie, 7th Earl of Northesk was a British naval officer who served during the American Revolutionary War, French Revolutionary War, and Napoleonic Wars. While in command of HMS Monmouth he was caught in the Nore Mutiny of 1797 and was the officer selected to relay the demands of the mutineers to George III. He most notably served as third-in-command of the Mediterranean Fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in HMS Britannia. He later became Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom and Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth.
The following lists events that happened during 1791 in Australia.
Henry Lidgbird Ball was a Rear-Admiral in the Royal Navy of the British Empire. While Ball was best known as the commander of the First Fleet's HMS Supply, he was also notable for the exploration and the establishment of colonies around what is now Australia and New Zealand. Specifically, Ball explored the area around Port Jackson and Broken Bay, helped establish the Norfolk Island penal settlement, and discovered and named Lord Howe Island.
HMS Gorgon was a 44-gun fifth-rate two-decker ship of the Adventure class of 911 tons, launched at Blackwall Yard in 1785 and completed as a troopship. She was subsequently converted to a storeship. She also served as a guardship and a hospital ship at various times before being broken up in 1817.
Britannia was a 301 burthen ton full-rigged whaler built in 1783 in Bridport, England, and owned by the whaling firm Samuel Enderby & Sons. She also performed two voyages transporting convicts to Port Jackson. She was wrecked in 1806 off the coast of New South Wales.
Captain Henry Waterhouse was an English naval officer of the Royal Navy who became an early settler in the Colony of New South Wales, Australia. He imported to Australia the continent's first Spanish merino sheep, whose wool became one of the colony's best exports.
HMS Albemarle was a 28-gun sixth rate frigate of the Royal Navy. She had been built as the French merchantman Ménagère, which the French Navy purchased in 1779. A British squadron captured her in September and she was commissioned into service with the Royal Navy. Amongst her commanders in her short career was Captain Horatio Nelson, who would later win several famous victories over the French. The Navy sold her in 1784. She subsequently became a merchant vessel again. In 1791 she transported convicts to Port Jackson as part of the third fleet. She then sailed to India where she picked up a cargo on behalf of the British East India Company. As she was returning to England a French privateer captured her.
Eber Bunker (1761–1836) was a sea captain and pastoralist, and he was born on 7 March 1761 at Plymouth, Massachusetts. He commanded one of the first vessels to go whaling and sealing off the coast of Australia. His parents were James Bunker and his wife Hannah, née Shurtleff.
Admiral Barrington was a ship built in 1781 in France and was employed as a French West Indiaman, though under a different name. She was captured in 1782 and was later sold to Godfrey Thornton. Thornton renamed her Admiral Barrington. She then made one full voyage for the East India Company (EIC) from 1787 till 1788. Her most notable voyage was as a convict ship in the third fleet to Australia. On her return voyage in 1793 pirates attacked her near Bombay and murdered almost her entire crew. She was apparently recovered, only to have a French privateer capture her in the West Indies in 1797. The privateer took her to Bordeaux, where she was sold.
Active was a ship built in 1764. Active was almost rebuilt in 1785. The next year her trade was given as London-Jamaica. She transported convicts to Australia in 1791. She returned home via Bombay, carrying a cargo for the British East India Company (EIC). A French privateer captured her in May 1793 as she was returning to Britain.
The British Royal Navy purchased HMS Shark on the stocks in 1775. She was launched in 1776, and in 1778 converted to a fireship and renamed HMS Salamander. The Navy sold her in 1783. She then became the mercantile Salamander. In the 1780s she was in the northern whale fishery. In 1791 she transported convicts to Australia. She then became a whaling ship in the southern whale fishery for a number of years, before becoming a general transport and then a slave ship. In 1804 the French captured her, but the Royal Navy recaptured her. Although she is last listed in 1811, she does not appear in Lloyd's List (LL) ship arrival and departure (SAD) data after 1804.
Matilda was a ship built in France and launched in 1779. She became a whaling ship for the British company Camden, Calvert and King, making a whaling voyage while under the command of Matthew Weatherhead to New South Wales and the Pacific in 1790.
Speedy was a whaler launched on the Thames in 1779. She also made voyages to New South Wales, transporting female convicts in 1799. She made two voyages transporting enslaved people in 1805 and 1806, and was captured in January 1807, on her way into London after having delivered her captives to Antigua in 1806.
Camden, Calvert and King was an eighteenth-century partnership that traded in London from 1760 to 1824, transporting slaves and later convicts. The partners' profits from slave trading created capital to fund other ventures including the East Indies trade, supplying the British army and navy with food, insurance underwriting and the status to obtain positions in important London organisations including the Corporation of London, Bank of England, East India Company, African Company of Merchants and Trinity House.