Not long ago I was doing an exploratory walk around “The Rocks” precinct, one of the first parts of Sydney Cove settled by the 1788 colonists and an area much changed since the PT (pre-tourism) days when it was a considerably less congenial and decidedly un-swanky part of town to dwell in. At Dawes Point, on the hill immediately under the southern pylons of the Harbour Bridge, I noticed an information stand next to the old battery site and erstwhile observatory which makes reference to an 18th century conflict between the empires of Britain and Spain that had an association with that very spot, Dawes Point.

The stand contains a timeline which includes the following short narrative:
1790 Britain fears an attack on the colony from Spain, which disputes Britain’s claim to New South Wales. Spain backs down in the dispute.

This curious snippet of information came as a surprise and prompted me to look further into this little known chapter in early Australian colonial history. I was aware of course of the French interest in New Holland (as it was known in the 18th century) with the explorations of Botany Bay by La Perouse in the 1780s, but the idea of a Spanish connection with the earliest days of European settlement in Australia was completely new to me.

(Former) Officers’ Quarters, Dawes Pt ⬇️

Dawes Point née Maskelyne

The Dawes Point story begins with the arrival of the First Fleet in Port Jackson in 1788. Naval engineer Lt William Dawes came on the Sirius as the colony’s astronomer with orders to construct an observatory, optimally located on a narrow promontory near Sydney Cove. Dawes named the point (which now bears his name) Point Maskelyne after the then Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, London. The peninsula Dawes chose in 1788 for the designated lookout had been home to the local, indigenous Cadigal clan for 1000s of years and known to them as Tar-ra.

Anglo-Spanish flashpoint

The incident that triggered a new crisis in 18th century Anglo-Spanish relations with ramifications for the fledgling colony in Botany Bay is known as the Nootka Sound incident. Nootka Sound was an important Spanish trading base on Vancouver Island on the North American north-west coast. In 1789 the Spanish commander at Nootka seized two British merchantmen (ships) anchored in the Sound and arrested the crews for infringing the sovereign territory of Spain. As far as Spain was concerned the British ships had unlawfully transgressed upon its imperial sphere of influence. Madrid had long claimed the entire Pacific Ocean region as a Spanish mare clausum (Legal Latin = “closed sea”). This was a double source of annoyance to the Spanish Crown with the British already earning Spain’s ire by establishing the colony in Nueva Holanda two years earlier. The Spanish claim of the Pacific as its mare clausum was based on the 1494 Papal-sanctioned Treaty of Tordesillas which allocated everything west of a meridian point drawn through the Americas to the Spanish Crown. Madrid viewed the recent British foothold on the “Great Southern Land” as a potential and very real threat to Spain’s existing Pacific colonies (Philippines, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Peru) [King 1986; Johnson 2003].

The British colony at Port Jackson at the time was far from securely rooted. On Malaspina’s visit to Sydney in 1793 (see below), the Spaniard noted the widespread opinion within the colony that it would be closed down. Displeasure among the early fleeters were rife, many were unhappy with the deprivations and daily struggle and wanted out. London newspapers were not optimistic about Sydney’s prospects. Until the colony got on its own two legs, it was quite a close-run thing [Hall 2000].

The 1494 treaty divvying up the Americas between Spain and Portugal ⬇️

Spain had good reason to worry about the threat Britain posed to its diverse Pacific possessions, but it was also concerned about Tsarist Russia’s imperial ambitions in the region. Russia had established settlements in Alaska which had spread south as far as California (also in Hawaii) and it appeared likely to encroach on Spain’s American territories.

Britain at the time was determined to get in on the lucrative North American fur trade (seal and especially sea otter pelts). American fur traders (and sailors on Captain Cook’s 3rd Expedition) achieved very high prices for North Pacific otter pelts in Canton (Guangzhou)[Johnson 2003]. A British trading base on the north-west Pacific coast would obviate the need to make the long haul from Calcutta to reach these rich fishing waters. The recent, successful colonisation of both Botany Bay and Norfolk Island also encouraged Britain to establish a presence at Nootka Sound [King 2010]. Accordingly the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, realising that Britain had a pretty weak legal claim to the territory that was to become British Columbia, played the bluff card and belligerently demanded redress from the Spanish for ‘illegally’ holding the British crewmen and allegedly mistreating them. Parliament mobilised for war and made plans to attack the Spanish at Nootka Sound.

(Source: Pharmaceutical Journal)

The part of these developments which connected back to the Botany Bay colony is that Britain’s strategy involved using Port Jackson as a cog in the war operations. The Admiralty redirected frigates bound for New Holland to the conflict zone on the north-west coast. Governor Phillip was instructed to replenish supplies for the Nootka Sound military expedition from Sydney Cove [Gough 1980].

During the period of the war crisis there were also plans to have a small contingent of marines and convicts from Botany Bay travel to Nootka Sound on The Discovery to establish a settlement on the north-west coast [King 2010].

The recently independent United States also had commercial ships in and around Vancouver Island at the time of the Nootka Sound incident, and was an interested onlooker in the Spanish-British conflict. The American government expressed the view that in the event of war Britain would target Spanish ports on the Mississippi including New Orleans which would bring the conflict dangerously into the vicinity of US territory [Niles Weekly 1817].

Eventually, Spain backed down to the bellicose British. Negotiations followed resulting in a series of Nootka Sound Conventions. Spain acquiesced to British demands, conceding that all nations were free to navigate and fish in the Pacific, and to trade and settle on unoccupied land. The conflict’s resolution was a coup for British mercantilism and diplomacy.

There were several developments that affected the dissipation of Spain’s resolve to oppose the English incursion into the realm of “New Spain”. Madrid has anticipated support from Bourbon France, however this proved to be not forthcoming. The onset of the French Revolution in 1789 dissuaded France in its state of turbulence from embroiling itself in a war against Britain at the time. Spain found itself further isolated after Prussia and Portugal allied themselves with the British on the issue.

Dissipation of tensions

Ultimately, war between Spain and Britain was averted. By the late 1790s the growing threat to Europe was Napoléon…tensions between Britain and Spain dissolved when the two enemies became allies in the new, common fight against the über-ambitious French general.

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By 1795 a weakened Spain had completely abandoned its trading post at Nootka Sound, leaving Britain free to do business in the north Pacific. Vancouver Island and the whole territory (British Columbia) eventually became a crown colony of Britain (1849).

Malaspina scientific and spying mission

The averting of the war crisis over Nootka Sound did not remove Spanish anxieties over the British presence in the Pacific. In 1793 a large Spanish expedition undertaking maritime scientific exploration reached the shores of Sydney harbour. Funded by the Spanish crown, the expedition had set out from Cadiz in 1789 visiting South America, the Falkland Islands, Mexico, Alaska, the Philippines, Tonga and New Zealand, in addition to the infant New South Wales colony. The catalyst for the expedition, proposed and led by Alessandro Malaspina, was the knowledge that Russia was hatching similar plans for a scientific exploration of the Pacific. The Mulovsky Expedition, as it is known, was also intended to annex the North American littoral region from Vancouver to Alaska in the name of the Russian empress. The expedition however was cancelled due to the outbreak of the Second Russo-Turkish War in 1787.

The Spanish expedition carried with it an elite collection of scientists and artists but Malaspina’s mission had a secret, political purpose as well. Madrid was anxious to learn what Britain’s real purpose was in establishing the colony in New Holland. Malaspina’s instructions were to also ascertain how advanced the Port Jackson settlement was. Malaspina respectfully courted and charmed the authorities in Sydney (Lt Gov Grose) as a cover for his spying activities during the month the frigates were anchored in the harbour. His men collected botanical specimens and other scientific knowledge and sketched drawings of the scenery and the townsfolk including the local Eora (Aboriginal) people [King 1986].

Upon his return home Malaspina reported back to the Spanish government that the New South Wales settlement was well established and warned that it posed real dangers to Spain’s Pacific possessions. Malaspina noted that Port Jackson could be used as a base for privateers to cut the colonial lines of communication between Manila and Spanish America, and to launch raids on the Peru and Chile colonies from. He concluded that Spain had no real chance of supplanting the British in Port Jackson [Olcelli 2013].

Britain’s foothold in the western Pacific was an ongoing concern for the Spanish, so much so that they considered a pre-emptive strike on the NSW colony. Proposed by José de Bustamante (military governor of Paraguay and Montevideo) and approved by King Carlos IV in the early 1790s, the Spanish scheme was to launch an 100-boat assault on Port Jackson from its base in Uruguay. The armada, armed with the new, “hot shot” cannon, ultimately did not proceed [Pearlman 2015].

PostScript: British eyes switch from Spain to France
By around the turn-of-the-century, 1800, with Spanish imperial power on the wane, Britain had much more reason to be concerned about the aggression of Napoléon in Europe … France had supplanted Spain as the focus for British security at Dawes Point and the fledgling and distant New South Wales outpost.

Dawes Pt battery ca.1875 ⬇️

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✽ the storage room still exists, located under the Harbour Bridge southern pylon, where in the formative years of the colony a secret stock of explosives was kept for use in defending the town against enemy warships [Compagnoni 2015]

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References:

BM Gough, Distant Dominion: Britain and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1579-1809, (1980)
AW Johnson, ‘Showdown in the Pacific: a Remote Response to European Power Struggles in the Pacific, Dawes Point Battery, Sydney, 1791-1925’, (Sydney Harbour Authority 2003) www.sha.org/uploads/files/sha
RJ King, ‘Eora and English at Port Jackson: a Spanish View’, (1986), www.press.anu.edu.au/2016/02/articles054
RJ King, ‘George Vancouver and the Contemplated Settlement at Nootka Sound’, The Great Circle, 32(1), 2010
L Olcelli, ‘Alessandro Malaspina: an Italian-Spaniard at Port Jackson’, Sydney Journal, 4(1), 2013
J Pearlman, “Spanish plan to ‘invade’ the British colony in Australia in the 1790s with 100-vessel armada”, 26-Jan 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk
Niles Weekly Register, No 19 of Vol XII, 5 July 1817
T Compagnoni (video), ‘Gunpowder Magazine Hidden Beneath Sydney Harbour Bridge’, 07 September 2015, www.huffpost.com

Richard Hall, Sydney: An Oxford Anthology, 2000