It was eighteen years after Cook's formal act of taking possession that New South Wales was followed by occupation. The English had just acquisitioned the Falkland Islands in 1770 after a dispute with the Spanish which almost brought the two to war. They had considered the Falklands provided a strategic outpost to the Pacific which had also lessened the urgency of establishing a settlement so soon.
New South Wales was not the 'Terra Australis' that everyone had expected, or had come to believe it was, and until Captain Cook returned from his second voyage, there was still a big hope that a continent many times richer, even along its more attractive eastern coast, might yet still be found.
The loss of the American colonies did not fit with the British too well at all. Their jails were still over-crowded and the problem was only getting worse. Two years after the recognition of American Independence, Pitt the Younger admitted to the House of Commons that it was necessary to find a new settlement where they could send the 'dangerous rogues and such as will not be reformed of their roguish course of life.' That is to say, the people whom the American colonies would no longer receive.
The English had been using transportation as a method of punishment and as an answer to overcrowding jails ever since the reign of Elizabeth. The authorities had grown so accustomed to relieving the country of its criminals by shipping them out overseas that the closure of the American colonies caused them considerable embarrassment.
While the war was going on, a new law was duly passed, the Hard Labour Act of 1776. By this Act those liable for transportation were to be lodged in hulks and employed 'in raising sand, soil and gravel from, and in cleansing the River Thames, or any other services, for the same term of years as the transportation.'
Even though this was a temporary measure, this caused an uproar when many of the convicts died of jail fever, and those who survived were certainly not reformed by their punishment. Two proposals were put forward. One for a new type of penitentiary, and the other for a new colony to which offenders might be sent to make a fresh start.
The proposal of a convict colony to be established was chosen. In 1779 a select committee of the House of Commons, headed by Lord Beauchamp, was appointed to consider the question of the treatment of the prisoners. It reported that:
'the plan of establishing a colony or colonies of young convicts in some distant part of the globe, and in new discovered countries, where the climate is healthy and the means of support attainable, is equally agreeable to the dictates of humanity and sound policy, and might prove in the result advantageous both to navigation and to commerce.'
Joseph Banks had personally recommended Botany Bay to the Committee. Being far away, return would be difficult. There was more barren soil than there was fertile, the climate was mild and the rainfall was good. There were no savage animals found and only a sparse population of natives to contend with. 'It was not to be doubted that a tract of land such as New Holland, which was larger than the whole of Europe, would furnish matter of advantageous return.'
You can read the committee's report here.
Given all this information, the committee refused to recommend any place in particular so the Government sent the Nautilus to discover some healthier site somewhere along the African coast.
The Government decided to try with a new colony at Gambia on the west coast of Africa but of '746 convicts sent there in 1775-76, 334 died, 271 deserted and nothing was known of the remainder.'
Had the country around Walfisch Bay or Agra Pequena been less unattractive there is little doubt that a settlement would have been formed in one or other of these regions. Any farther south and this would have upset the Dutch who had been long settled at the Cape.
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