Commonwealth Nations
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Commonwealth Nations’
Having brought hundreds of convicts to New South Wales, Arthur Phillip then had to conjure order out of their chaos.
The first British settlement in Australia was established at Sydney Cove on January 26th, 1788, and named after the Home Secretary. The policy of penal transportation was barbarity, but out of it Captain Phillips and his successors conjured civilisation — and began by disobeying orders.
The Dutch explorer ran across two islands in the Pacific of which Europeans knew nothing, but his chief desire was to get past them.
New Zealand came under British control with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; James Cook had charted its coasts in the 1770s, but Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had set the first European eyes on the islands, over a century before. As William Reeves notes, however, he was interested only in getting past them.
Captain Cook’s friend and ship’s surgeon David Samwell gives us his impressions of the great explorer.
Welsh poet and doctor David Samwell was Captain James Cook’s surgeon on his third voyage, aboard HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery. Samwell accompanied him from Plymouth in 1776 to Hawaii, where he saw the impulsive Cook killed in an altercation over stolen stores on February 14th, 1779.
Abdullah Abdul Kadir gives us his first-hand impressions of the Founder of Singapore and of his first wife, Olivia.
In 1808, young colonial secretary Stamford Raffles went down the Malaysian coast from Penang to the formerly Dutch colony of Malacca as a rest cure. There, Raffles and his wife Olivia made the acquaintance of Abdullah Abdul Kadir, a local teacher of Malay, who left us his pen-portrait of them.
The busy trading hub of Malacca was to be consigned to history, until Stamford Raffles saw that history was one of its assets.
Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is known today as the founder of Singapore, but his first foray into statecraft came when he was still in his late twenties. In 1808, as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang he penned an impassioned report which saved Malacca, modern-day Melaka in Malaysia, from oblivion.
David Livingstone relives the historic moment when he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
In 1852-56, David Livingstone mapped the course of the Zambesi, hoping that agricultural trade along the river would crush the horrible trade in slaves (recently outlawed in the British Empire). On November 16, 1855, he was transported by canoe to a magnificent cataract named Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, so becoming the first European to see the Victoria Falls.