Watkin Tench (1758(?)-1833) entered the Marines in 1776, and fought in the American War of Independence, where he captained a unit of marines, before volunteering to serve in the proposed Colony of New South Wales. He travelled out to Australia on board the transport Charlotte arriving at Botany Bay in 1788.
An acute and perceptive observer, he took careful note of the new experiences provided by the Australian continent and his fellows’ reactions to it, which he related in A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay… (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson… (1793). When not taking notes, Tench lead several expeditions into the interior, discovering amongst other things the Dawes river, which he traced to the Hawkesbury. He failed however to conquer the Blue Mountains, the expedition having to turn back at the Razorback.
On his return to England, following the publication of A Complete Account… Tench once again entered active service on board the Alexander under Capt. Richard Bligh. However, returning from escorting convoys to Lisbon and the Mediterranean, Tench’s ship was suprised by a French squadron on 6th November, 1794, and despite putting up “stout resistance” (DNB) was captured and taken into Brest, where he was held on the Alexander and Marat. In February 1795 Tench, along with his fellow prisoners, was transferred to Quimper and in May of the same year they were given their freedom and allowed to travel back to England. This period in Quimper, by comparison to the previous months, allowed him some freedom and as he had done in New South Wales he went about recording his surroundings and the people with whom he came into contact.
Tench kept a diary throughout his time in France and was well aware of the risks. In the third letter (7 Dec. 1794) he explains: “From a fear of being searched, I have used some extraordinary precautions… I have so transposed the order of sentences, and so intermixed the words from all the languages I could recollect (not excepting that of New Holland) that it would puzzle the interpreter of the convention to decypher them.” His diary was revised and published as this work. This is a very early published reference to a European using an Australian Aboriginal language outside of Australia in the eighteenth century.
There is a further reference to Australia in latter pages where Tench considers the state of mankind: “National prejudices and political antipathies I consider as a vile state engine, which, in the hands of a few crafty men, has for more than five thousand years wrought the misery of the human race. Englishmen and Frenchmen, the Charib and the Hindoo, the philosopher of Europe and the naked savage whose wanderings I have witnessed at Botany Bay, shall one day, I presume in humble confidence to trust, be assembled before the “living throne” of a common Father…”
Tench’s significance in the early history of Australia is beyond question. This work clarifies the lasting impression Botany Bay made on him. This is possibly further borne out, according to DNB, as “Tench may also have had a hand in the composition of an imaginary-voyage narrative, Fragmens [sic] du dernier voyage de La Perouse (Quimper, 1797).”Crittenden, ‘A Bibliography of the First Fleet,’ 244; Ferguson, 248.
