David Andrew Roberts and Cathy Dunn, ‘Directory of the Norfolk Island First Settlement, 1788-1814’, Open Access Dataset, University of New England, March 2024, DOI: 10.25952/x2y6-sw49 https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/57760

This project identifies the majority of individuals associated with the ‘First Settlement’ phase of the colonial occupation of Norfolk Island, from the arrival of the small advance party on the Supply from Port Jackson in March 1788 to the final evacuations of the Island in February 1814. The population of the island is believed to have peaked at around 1,150 persons between May 1792 and July 1794. However, based on extensive archival research, we have identified a little under 3,650 unique individuals in over seventy key historical documents, suggesting a highly fluid population and a preponderance of short-term residents.

Those individuals are named here, with our preferred spelling and each given a unique alphanumeric identifier (UID). This is intended to facilitate the development of a relational database for students and community researchers interested in employing big data approaches to the study of this unique and intriguing colonial enterprise. A range of options are currently being explored for public facing outputs to showcase the value of the Directory and the document transcriptions which have informed it.

This research was undertaken with support from the University of New England, with some input from students and volunteers (including Hayley Odgers). Broadly, our Directory owes much to years of granular (and relatively manual) research undertaken by Australian History Research, some of it published in numerous works since 2012. [Picture left: Footstone for ‘T E’, c.1833 or 1835, believed to be a recycled headstone from the First settlement period]

Our effort expands the pioneering work of historian, Reg Wright, whose studies of what he called ‘The Forgotten Generation’ of Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land remain highly regarded for their detailed investigations of the people and places of the Island’s early history. Wright’s remarkable ‘List of Residents of Norfolk Island 1788–1814’ was included in Raymond Nobbs’ Norfolk Island and its First Settlement (Sydney, 1988, pp. 186-209). That list named 2,773 individuals. The prodigious Biographical Database of Australia (BDA), by ‘adding in aliases and cross referencing of connected individuals mentioned’, has expanded Wright’s list to 3,187. James Donohoe’s Norfolk Island 1788-1813: The People and Their Families (Sydney, 2011) claims to have located ‘3000 people and their families on Norfolk Island to late 1813’.

Significantly, we have extended Wright’s list by some 30%, adding around 870 new names. This was achieved mostly by consulting a greater range of materials. The best and most used sources for reconstructing the population of Norfolk Island are the so-called ‘Victualing Books’. There are records of this type for the years 1788, 1792 to 1796, and for 1802 and 1803, and then for every six month-period until March 1810. Unfortunately, there are no surviving books for the years 1797–1801. There are in addition a number of ‘general musters’ held in the State Archives and Records Authority New South Wales, and numerous ‘lists’ of settlers and convicts that were sent, for various purposes, to the Colonial Office in London. Some of these were also used by Wright (and the BDA), although again there a notable gap for the years immediately either side of 1800.

Our research, however, is drawn from records (some of the digitised and online,) found across a greater range of repositories, including:

• National Library Australia
• State Archives and Records Authority New South Wales
• Mitchell Library Sydney NSW
• State Library NSW
• Tasmania Archives Heritage Collection
• The National Archives (UK)

Subsequently, we have incorporated shipping records, population and landholder lists, and data gleamed from accounts kept by Lieutenant-Governor Phillip Gidley King, the convict clergyman Reverend Henry Fulton and the ‘First Fleet’ officer and diarist Ralph Clark. Our work includes the first known use of the Papers of Thomas Jamison, 1797-1809, held in the Records of the Chancery and now available online via the National Library of Australia. Amongst these papers is a list of farmers on Norfolk Island (free men and expired convicts) who between 1797 and 1798 supplied pork and maize for commercial trade. These records have provided new identities ― marines, NSW Corps, prisoners, families and settlement staff ― not noticed in the standard sources.

Of particular value are the Royal Navy Ships’ Musters, maintained by The National Archives (for England and Wales) in the Admiralty series in (ADM36), also available via the National Library of Australia. These record the presence of persons on board a number of ships that moved people and goods between Sydney and Norfolk Island, notably the Supply (1 and 2), Reliance, Porpoise, Buffalo and Lady Nelson. We have not exhausted this body of records, focusing for now on shipping lists which identified new individuals for database, but yielding over 1,800 rows of data pertaining to 1,334 individuals, including 77 individuals who worked in the settlement’s ‘boat’s crews’ between 1796 and 1805. These Ships’ Musters can only be described as messy and chaotic in places, but they nonetheless highlight, among other things, the fluidity and movement of the population of early Norfolk Island.

Extract from the Royal Navy Ships Musters for the Supply, Port Jackson to Norfolk Island on March 1790, recording the mustering of supernumeraries, in this case Marines from 'The First Fleet'..

We have also used a newly discovered record (in the Tasmanian Colonial Secretary’s Correspondence) of the late East Indiaman sloop/barque Hunter, which was shipwrecked on Norfolk Island in 1799, depositing a number of stranded seamen who became settlers. There is more to gleamed from these records about the coming and going people from the Island. Some of these records are also important sources of information on a period, notably between 1796 and 1800, which many historians have thought to be largely bereft of documentation.

There are other exciting documents retrieved from the General Correspondence of the Colonial Secretary’s Office in the Tasmanian Archives, detailing the embarkation of Norfolk Island residents on vessels bound for the Derwent in 1807 and 1808. Further, we have consulted a General Muster of Norfolk Island taken on 14 August 1811, that was missed by Wright, and also a ‘List of persons left at Norfolk under the direction of Mr William Hutchinson Superintendent’ in 1813, located in State Archives and Records New South Wales, believed to be one of the last surviving records from the First Settlement of Norfolk Island. The latter contains the names and status of 34 men, some with wives and children, who were left behind ‘to assist in the final evacuation’. It was critical to the research undertaken by Dunn and Lambert and published as The Inhabitants of Norfolk Island Late 1808–1814 (2021).

The key challenge, once every name in every record set was compiled into a spreadsheet, was to establish a set of unique identities, determining, for example, the exact number of individuals who shared a name, and taking into account variations in spelling. This process at times required laborious cross-referencing, and considerable patience, given that, for example, there were at least 10 different individuals named John Smith, 9 named William Smith, 8 by the name of John Jones, and another 7 called Thomas Jones (just to note the more egregious examples). There were also identification problems arising from the use of aliases, and multiple variations in the spelling of names such as GODWIN v GOODING.

Further, it was necessary to combine or distinguish entries that were problematically similar — for example, establishing ABRAHAM JOHN as distinct from ABRAHAMS JOHN, KING FRANCIS from KING FRANCES, and GRIFFIN ELIZABETH from GRIFFITH ELIZABETH. (We have indicated many of these cases in a separate column in the Directory, mostly to confirm that the distinction has been checked and confirmed).

The quest however has been substantially advanced by even the most basic use of digital techniques. By converting documents into well-organised spreadsheets, the ability to display, manipulate and cross-reference data has enhanced our ability to distinguish and trace individuals across different record sets and through time.  

In the final product, individual names are usually rendered using the spelling found most consistently across the records (SURNAME / FIRSTNAME) although we have also aimed to ensure that each name is uniquely spelt. Sometimes we have taken account of multiple surnames and aliases, where they were used interchangeably — FISHER EDWARD (aka William Blatherhone) for example, a First Fleet convict who went by both names) or, more commonly, names that were changed on account of marriage (like ANSTEY MARY who became STANLEY MARY on her marriage in 1791).

Where there are multiple individuals with the same name, our Directory distinguishes them with a numeral in parenthesis. In some cases, where multiple individuals of the same name are known to have been present in the population at the same time but a document does not relate sufficient information to determine which is which, we have used the symbol (+) after a name. This also allows also for the occasional possibility that there may be another, as yet unidentified individual using that name. For example, we use HERBERT JOHN (+), because in a number of records we cannot distinguish between HERBERT JOHN (1), a convict who arrived on the HMS Sirius in 1790, and HERBERT JOHN (2), one of the prisoners who escaped Sydney on the Endeavour in 1795.

Occasionally we have used the same symbol where a record contains only a surname and no other distinguishing data — as in ANDERSON (+), which acknowledges the recording of two individuals listed in an ‘Account of stores and Slop Clothing from His Majesty Stores’ in 1802, by surname only, when there were 10 distinct individuals, 9 men and 1 woman, known to have that surname. Sometimes the practice reflects damaged documents where a full name can no longer be deciphered, such as the list of ‘Present proprietors of the Allotments on Norfolk Island, October 1796’ in the Colonial Office papers, although manual research frequently allows us to fill such gaps. Frequently the approach is applied to children such as BOND (+) recorded in the 1792-1796 Victualling Book as a ‘convict’s child [on] 1/2 rations’, who may be the child BOND ISAAC (recorded on the previous page of the same book), although we cannot be certain of that.

Thus, with a greater range of documents and more advanced technologies now available for compiling and analysing date, we have become more expansive, more granular and precise than our predecessors in identifying unique individuals. That includes, in some cases, distinguishing more people by a given name. For example, where Wright had two men called William Jones (which he identified as convicts per the Coromandel and Britannia), we can see three adults by that name, and another two children. Wright did not capture the individual we label JONES WILLIAM (2), a convict by the Pitt who appears in the victualing record from 1792. Further, there was a JONES WILLIAM who appears as an emancipist landholder in an 1805 list of residents ‘off the stores’, who was a convict of the second fleet ship Mary Ann and who in 1808 left Norfolk Island on board the Estramina schooner for Hobart Town.

Our closer analysis has also corrected previous misidentifications. We ascertained, for example, that Wright’s FROST MARY #3 was in fact the same person we identified as FROST-TIMMS MARY, who from the records after 1810 we know was in a relationship with Martin Timms. This and other confusions appear to have arisen from the known factual errors in the 1792–1796 Victualling Book which misattributed the ship upon which some women had arrived.

Fresh analysis based on new documents and digital techniques will continue to provide more precision and clarity in our Directory, resulting in the location of more double entries and revealing new names missed in this stage of our research. With more information, on departures and deaths especially (more data is need of the period October 1796 to January 1802 especially), we will likely be able to better distinguish between individuals with the same or a similar name.

We know also of individuals who were children on Norfolk Island but were not named in the records we have used (and to the best of our knowledge do not appear in the Norfolk Island paper trial at all) – especially children of soldiers of the NSW Corps who were not recorded in the Victualling Books. These are omitted from our Directory, for the time being. Others, like the convict Sarah Pitcher, was at Norfolk Island, according to a return of persons left on the island in 1813, although she is not actually named in that return, or in any other extant records that we have consulted, and so is presently omitted from the current version of the Directory.

The searchable and sortable database below contains the unqiue ID and preferred spelling of each individual, followed by the first and last date and event recorded in our datasets for each individual.