On this day in 1788, The main part of the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay. The First Fleet were eleven British ships which transported a group of settlers to mainland Australia, marking the beginning of the European colonisation of Australia. It consisted of two Royal Navy vessels, three storeships and six convict transports under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip.
Governor Arthur Phillip rejected Botany Bay choosing instead Port Jackson (Now Sydney Harbor), to the north, as the site for the new colony; they arrived there on 26 January 1788, establishing the colony of New South Wales, as a penal colony which would become the first British settlement in Australia.
The fleet sailed from Portsmouth to Rio de Janeiro to Capetown and then across the vast Southern Ocean to Australia. This was one of the world’s greatest sea voyages – eleven vessels carrying about 1,487 people and stores had traveled for 252 days for more than 15,000 miles (24,000 km) without losing a ship. Forty-eight people died on the journey, a death rate of just over three percent.
Abbreviated post today. Battle with influenza continues…
♫ This I tell you brother, you can’t have one without the other ♫
Today is the birthday, in 1924, of American country music, western music and folk music artist singer-songwriter Slim Whitman. He had the 1955 UK No.1 single ‘Rose Marie’. Known for his yodeling abilities and his smooth, high, three-octave-range falsetto in a style christened as “countrypolitan”. In the 1990s and 2000s a new generation was exposed to Whitman through his songs featured in the film Mars Attacks!; his famed ‘Indian Love Call’ would kill the invading Martians every time the record was played. He died of heart failure on June 19, 2013 aged 90. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBuk1HXcz1k
