Archive for the ‘Intent’ Category

MOON VERSUS MACHINE

Tuesday, January 5th, 2021

‘John Harrison, the man who solved longitude in 1759’. Peter Ackroyd, Revolution, Macmillan, London, 2016

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‘With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time….He wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket-watch’. Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, London, 1998

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‘Compared with that of Banks, Mr. Green’s [Endeavour] equipment was comparatively modest’. H.C. Cameron, Sir Joseph Banks, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1966

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Who was Mr. Green? Charles Green was  Assistant Astronomer to Rev. James Bradley and Rev. Nathaniel Bliss, Astronomer Royals of Britain’s Greenwich Observatory.

Following his authorised participation in an official timed-voyage to Barbados aboard HMS Tarter,  Green was convinced of H-4’s reliability.

Yet, as designated astronomer in 1769, he was denied John Harrison’s chronometer for the Endeavour voyage with James Cook and Joseph Banks. See The Third Man – Charles Green

‘H-4 [was] bolted to a window seat in the Observatory’.  Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, London, 1998

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‘On May 5th, 1768, at a meeting of Council of the Royal Society it was resolved that the [Banks] instruments for the use of the Observers of the South Latitudes be the following:

Two [2] reflecting telescopes of two [2] foot focus…[1] brass Hadley’s sextant, [1] barometer bespoke of Mr Ramsden, [1] Journeyman’s Clock bespoke by Mr Skelton, two [2] Thermometers of Mr Bird, [1] Stand for Bird’s Quadrant, [1] dipping needle bespoke by Mr Ramsden’.  Cameron. op. cit.

Tahiti: After the Admiralty rejected Alexander Dalrymple, member of the influential Scots ‘Dalrymple Dynasty’, first choice of the Royal Society, that august body engaged Charles Green to represent them at Tahiti.

He would assist Lieutenant James Cook RN in observing and recording the Transit of Venus due to take place at Tahiti on 3rd June 1769. See: The Third Man

‘John Harrison, the man who solved longitude in 1759’. Peter Ackroyd, Revolution, Macmillan, London, 2016

So why ten (10) years after the longitude problem had been solved was Harrison’s marine chronometer ‘H-4 bolted to a window seat in the [Greenwich] Observatory’ and not aboard HMS Endeavour when Green set off in 1769 with Lieutenant James Cook for Tahiti. See: Captain Cook, John Harrison, Charles Green – Three Yorkshire Men Walked Into A Bar

No doubt H-4 sat under the watchful eye of Rev. Nevil Maskelyne Britain’s fifth Astronomer Royal.

Appointed to that high post in 1765 on the death of Rev. Nathaniel Bliss Maskelyne held a conservative stranglehold over the position until 1811.

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ARTHUR PHILLIP’S NEW HOLLAND – ‘FROM CAPE YORK TO SOUTH CAPE’ A SPECIAL PROJECT

Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

London -1786,  October 12: ‘To Captain Arthur Phillip; ‘reposing especial trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage, and experience in military affairs, do, by these presents constitute and appoint you to be Governor of our territory called New South Wales…from the northern extremity…called Cape York…to the southern extremity…South Cape’. Court of St. James,  By Command, His Majesty’s [George III] – 12 October 1786, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1

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‘Four [4]  companies of marines landed [1788] with the first Europeans…Twenty five [25 regiments of British infantry served in the colonies between 1790 and 1870…[they] participated in the great struggle at the heart of the European conquest of this continent’. Dr. Peter Stanley, The Remote Garrison, the British Army n Australia, Kangaroo Press, 1964 

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Sydney Cove – 12 December, 1790: ‘At headquarters…the governor pitched up me [Tench] to execute the…command…those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay…put ten [10] to death…bring in the heads of the slain [and] two [2] prisoners.

I am resolved to execute [them] in the most public and exemplary  manner in the presence of as many of their countrymen as can be collected……and my fixed determination to repeat it whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side, shall render it necessary’. His Excellency Governor Arthur Phillip, Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench. Governor Phillip, cited Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961

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‘Military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries…These raids had commenced by December 1790‘. Professor Bruce Kercher, History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1995.

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United Kingdom – 3 April 1889:  Privy Council Cooper V Stuart [1889] 14 AC, Lord Watson, Lord Fitzgerald, Lord Hobhouse, Lord MacNaghton, Sir William Grove ruled ‘it [New South Wales] was peacefully annexed to the British Dominion’. Professor Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child, History of Law in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 1995

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Portsmouth – May 1787: Captain Arthur Phillip RN, commander of a large expeditionary force of eleven (11) ships, known in Britain and Australia as the ‘First Fleet’ sailed from Portsmouth, England on 13 May 1787 bound for the invasion of New Holland now Australia.

New Holland – 18/20 January 1788: All ‘First Fleet’ vessels, after eight (8) months voyaging 13,000 miles (21,000 km) of ‘imperfectly explored oceans’ by way of Spanish Tenerife, Portuguese Rio and Dutch Cape Town, were safely at anchor in Botany Bay. 

Botany Bay: HMS Supply, smaller of the two (2) king’s ships with Phillip aboard, was first to arrive. He immediately assessed Botany Bay, ‘so very wide open’ -difficult to defend unsuitable therefore for permanent settlement.

21 January:  Next morning, armed with Captain James Cook’s charts from April 1770, he set out with Captain Hunter commander of the fleet’s flagship HMS Sirius with surveyors to investigate the surrounding country-side.

Port Jackson: Later that day, nine (9) miles (14km) north of the initial beachhead, one (1) of the group’s  (3) cutters came across Cook’s notation, an entry ‘a quarter mile across’  into Port Jackson’.

‘Here’ Phillip wrote ‘a Thousand Ships of the Line may ride in perfect security’.

22 January:  The following day the English rowed around its vast harbour.  From a myriad inlets and bays hep chose a ‘snug’ deep-water cove; ‘so close to the shore that at very small expense quays may be made in which the largest ships may unload’.

Sydney Cove:  Phillip ‘honoured’ [it] with the name Sydney’. See: Botany Bay , Lord Sydney , Arthur Phillip & ‘Christopher Robin’ Mark 2

23 January: ‘We returned to Botany Bay on the third day’ with news. The ‘First Fleet’ had found a home.  ‘It was determined the evacuation of Botany Bay should commence the next morning’.  Tench. ibid.

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LIEUTENANT WILLIAM DAWES – THE ‘ETERNAL FLAME’ & THE SHOCK OF THE NEW SOUTH WALES CORPS

Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

‘When leaving Botany Bay [for Sydney Cove 25 January 1788] Phillip noticed two French ships in the  offing….there would seem to be “some justification for the saying that England won Australia by six days”. Edward Jenks, History of the Australian Colonies, cited H.E. Egerton, A short History of British Colonial Policy, Methuen, London 1928

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‘Our wealth and power in India is their [France ] great and constant object of jealously; and they will never miss an opportunity of attempting to wrest it out of our hands’. Sir James Harris cited, Michael Pembroke, Arthur Phillip Sailor Mercenary Governor Spy, Hardie Grant Books. Melbourne, London, 2013

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‘English clockmaker John Harrison, a mechanical genius who pioneered the science of portable precision timekeeping…invented a clock that would carry the true time from the home port, like an eternal flame, to any remote corner of the world’. Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, 1998

Harrison H-4 Chronometer

‘Military and police raids against dissenting Aboriginal groups lasted from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries…These raids had commenced by [on 14th] December 1790’.  Professor Bruce Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child, A History of Law in Australia, Allen & Unwin, 1995.

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‘Bring in six [6] of those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay; or if that should be found impracticable, to put that n umber [6] to death…bring back the heads of the slain’. Governor Arthur Phillip RN, General Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench, 13 December 1790. Cited Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, L. F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961

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‘Lieutenant William Dawes whose tour of duty it was to go out with that party refused that duty by letter’. Professor G.A. Wood, Lieutenant William Dawes and Captain Watkin Tench, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal; Vol. 10, Part 1, 1924

Australia knows little of the ‘eternal flame’ or the remarkable role it played in the invasion of New Holland, and dispossession of its First Peoples.

Warranne – 26 January 1788:  K I – a faithful replica of John  Harrison’s  H-4 a ‘sea-going pocket watch’, given by Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne into the care of marine  Lieutenant William Dawes, fetched up at one particular ‘remote corner of the world’  – Sydney Cove – aboard HMS Supply one (1) of the First Fleet’s eleven (11) ships.

It was the essential ingredient in both the survival of the British invaders and near destruction of Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples.

‘He [Dawes] was the scholar of the [First Fleet] expedition, man of letters and man of science, explorer, mapmaker, student of language of anthropology, teacher and philanthropist’. Professor G. Arnold Wood, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society Vol. X, 1924, Part 1

However, aside from Daniel Rooke, Kate Grenville’s star-struck cardboard cut-out hero of The Lieutenant, non-indigenous Australians know almost nothing of him.

‘Dawes whose tour of duty it was to go out with that [14 December 1790] party [refused that duty by letter’. Wood. ibid.

Australia either knows nothing of, or turns a blind eye, on Lieutenant Dawes’ pivotal role in revealing the how ,why and wherefore of the ‘war nasty and decidedly lacking in glory’ Britain waged against Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples. See: The Big Switch

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SHOCK AND AWE – ‘INFUSE UNIVERSAL TERROR’ ‘MY MEN HEARD A CHILD CRY’

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

Sydney Cove – 1790 June 1 : ‘We had now been [thirty-six] months from England in which long period …we had been entirely cut off, no communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th May, 1787, the day of our departure from Portsmouth.

Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail…at every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardige, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961

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Sydney – 1790, June 3: ‘Great change came with the  Second Fleet of the first companies of the New South Wales Corps.[among them] Lieutenant John Macarthur  – a central figure in the military ‘mafia’ which quickly established itself as Australia’s first governing and property owning elite’. Nigel Rigby, Peter Van Der Merwe & Glyn Williams, National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Pacific Explorations, Voyages of Discovery from Captain Cook’s Endeavour to the Beagle, Bloomsbury, Adlard Coles, 2018

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Sydney Headquarters – 1790,  December 13:  ‘The governor pitched upon me [Tench] to execute the…command…those natives who reside  near the head of Botany Bay….put ten [10] to death…bring in the heads of the slain [and] two [2] prisoners to  execute in the most most public and exemplary manner;…my fixed determination to repeat it, whenever any future breach of good conduct on their side, shall render it necessary’.  His Excellency Governor Arthur Phillip RN, General Orders to Marine Captain Watkin Tench

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Botany Bay – Lord Sydney, Arthur Phillip & ‘Hush Christopher Robin’ – Mark 2

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

Rio de Janeiro – 3 September 1787: ‘Dear Nepean, this is my last letter, as I hope to sail [for Botany Bay] tomorrow. You know how much I was interested in the intended expedition against Monte Video [1783], and that it was said that the Spaniards had more troops than I supposed’. Arthur Phillip to Evan Nepean Under Secretary to Lord Sydney, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, Parts 1 & 2.

Brazil – September 1787: As the First Fleet ‘bound for Botany Bay’ prepared to sail from Rio for New Holland (Australia) via Cape Town, Captain Arthur Phillip RN ‘Sailor Mercenary Governor Spy’ was able to supply Evan Nepean, his long-time ‘handler’ at the Home Office, with vital information.

Skin in the game; to further understand Phillip’s ‘interest’  – not only had he drawn up Mark 1, the strategic plan for the failed Monte Video expedition, he captained HMS Europa in the 1783 expedition under overall command of Sir Richard Kingsmill.

‘The combination of French and Spanish naval power had proven fatal for Britain in the American War 1775-1783]…as Lord Sandwich admired frankly’. Lord Sandwich cited R.J. King, The Secret History of the Convict Colony, Sydney, 1990

Kingsmill’s ‘failure to act’ in 1783 had robbed the Royal Navy of much needed ‘glory’. That failure rankled. Phillip was determined to make amends. The conquest of New Holland would go a long way to restoring ‘lost glory’.

If Phillip succeeded he knew he would have an opportunity to prove Spain’s ‘treasure’ colonies on the Pacific Coast of  South America would be vulnerable to attack by the Royal Navy.

Rio – September 1787:  Phillip went on to provide Evan Nepean with up-to-date intelligence ‘obtained from a person who was there [Monte Video] all of the war [1775-1783] on the number and disposition of troops, ‘and I am certain that the account is exact’. Phillip to Nepean, 3 September 1787. Historical Records. op.cit.

New Holland – Sydney Cove 26 January 1788 – was about invasion, dispossession of a Sovereign Peoples and stealing stuff.

New Holland strategically was about global warfare. See: Why New Holland – Britain + America + India + France + Spanish South America = European Australia

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Monte Video – Lord Sydney, Arthur Phillip & ‘Hush Christopher Robin’ Mark 1

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

London – 4 July 1782: Lord Sydney inherited the office of Home Secretary from William Petty, Lord Shelburne, along with a mountain of unfinished business.  Included were the bare bones of what became known as the Dalrymple Plan. See: Proximity not Tyranny of Distance

Whitehall – House of Commons:  In March 1782 Lord North had resigned as Prime Minister. He was succeeded by Lord Rockingham who died in July 1782 when the position  passed to Lord Shelburne. He held the office for a year, until July 1783.

The Dalrymple mission aimed to launch marauding hit and run raids on Spain’s colonial possessions firstly Monte Video, present-day Uruguay, then  Buenos Aires, present-day Argentina,  on the Atlantic Coast of South America.

Brazil: Lord Sydney tasked Lieutenant Arthur Phillip RN design a strategy that would achieve this end. Phillip had spent nigh on three (3) years in Brazil seconded to the Portuguese Navy.

Rio: Phillip was an exceptionally effective spy. Based in Rio, fluent in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew and Portuguese, he had access to a myriad of anti-Spanish dissenters ripe for rebellion and reported directly to Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty.

1783: Britain, driven by the humiliation that followed on from her defeat in the War of American Independence and loss of her ‘Empire in the West, the thirteen (13) American ‘middle colonies’, was determined to penetrate Spain’s ‘treasure‘ colonies in South America.

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Proximity – Not Distance – Drove Britain’s Invasion of New Holland

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

Port Jackson – 1788: ‘Here a Thousand Ships of the Line may ride in Perfect Security’. Governor Arthur Phillip RN to Lord Sydney, Historical Records of New South Wales Vol. 1, Parts 1 & 2

England – May 1787: Captain John Hunter RN commander of HMS Sirius, flagship of the ‘First Fleet’ a fully funded naval expeditionary force and, second-in-command to Captain-General Governor Arthur Phillip RN, departed Portsmouth on the 13th May 1787 to invade the island continent of New Holland, now Australia.

Botany Bay – 1788: By the end of January 1788, after a voyage of eight (8) months by way of Spanish Tenerife, Portuguese Brazil and Dutch Cape Town, the eleven (11) ships with a complement of 1500 – 1300 men – 221 women, approximately 50 free children, were at anchor in Botany Bay. See: Botany Bay – Lord Sydney, Arthur Phillip & ‘Christopher Robin’ Mark 2

Port Jackson: Governor Phillip deemed Botany Bay difficult to defend. Hunter supported relocating to Port Jackson nine (9) miles to the north ‘[w]here’a thousand Ships…’

Sydney Cove – January 1788:  From myriad of bays and inlets Phillip chose a ‘snug’ cove deep within the vast harbour. He named it Sydney after Home Secretary Lord Sydney. By the end of January the entire fleet were anchored there.

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STEALING STUFF

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020

‘Since the Age of Elizabeth 1, the British had had global ambitions in which possession of Central America offered the prospect of opening a path between the Atlantic and Pacific’. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America, Yale University Press, New Haven, London 2013

Spanish South America: From the time of Tudor Elizabeth 1558-1603, despite determined efforts by the Queen’s buccaneers – Sir Jack Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and, a myriad privateers, England failed to oust Spain from her conquered territories, strung tantalisingly along the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts of South America.

England: To fill Elizabeth’s dwindling coffers Treasury came to rely on loot taken at the point of the sword by swarms of English pirates as they hit ‘treasure laden  galleon’s en-route from Peru, Panama and Chile to Spain.

New Holland: When the ‘First Fleet’ sailed from Portsmouth for New Holland, now Australia in May 1787, Governor Captain Arthur Phillip RN took with him ‘secret plans’ to attack Spain’s fabled ‘treasure’ colonies in Central and Southern America. See: Botany Bay – Lord Sydney, Arthur Philip & ‘Hush’ Christopher Robin’ Mark 2

London: The plans were Phillip’s own, drawn up in 1782 at the behest of Thomas Townshend Lord Sydney, the newly minted Home Secretary, while Britain was actively engaged in the America’s Revolutionary War of Independence 1775-1783. See: Monte Video – Lord Sydney, Arthur Phillip & ‘Hush’ Christopher Robin’ Mark 1 

Jamaica: Phillip’s ‘secret‘ plan had its genesis in the failed 1779 San Juan Expedition the brain-child of John Dalling the military Governor of Jamaica.

Canada: Earlier, in the North American theatre of the Seven Years’ War 1756-63, Governor Dalling served under General James Wolfe. Despite his wounding in the scaling of the Heights of Abraham from where the British bombarded the French General Joseph Montcalm’s men camped on the Plains below, Dalling was present when Britain captured Quebec from the French in 1759

No doubt driven by that past glory Dalling devised a plan to attack Spanish Nicaragua.  If successful he hoped to break Spain’s domination of Central and South America.

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