The Friendship: a First Fleet ship
The First Fleet was eleven ships, and each one carried its own crowd of stories. The Friendship was a small brig — two masts, about 278 tons, some seventy-five feet from stem to stern — under her master Francis Walton. She was not the flagship and she was not the largest. She matters here because she carried Henry Kable, Susannah Holmes and their baby out of England.
The voyage
The Fleet left Portsmouth on 13 May 1787. The Friendship put in at Tenerife in early June, then made the long haul to Rio de Janeiro, and on to Cape Town by mid-October. It was slow, cramped, and often wretched work — a brig that size was never meant to be a floating gaol for months on end.
At the Cape the ships took on livestock for the colony, and space had to be found for it. The women and infants aboard the Friendship, the Kables among them, were transferred to the Charlotte for the last leg. So the family that started the journey on one ship finished it on another, reaching Botany Bay on 18 January 1788 and Port Jackson on 26 January.
What became of her
The Friendship did not last much longer. On the way home in 1788 her crew had been so thinned by illness that there were not enough hands to work her, and she was scuttled in the Makassar Strait, her surviving sailors taken aboard another ship. The vessel that had carried a convict family to the far side of the world never saw England again.
For the fuller family story around that voyage — the marriage that followed within a fortnight of landing, and the court case that came after — see the Kable family history. Son of the First Fleet by Tony Gaudry follows their son Henry Kable Junior from the deck of the Charlotte into a life at sea of his own.
Common questions about the Friendship
What was the Friendship?
The Friendship was a two-masted brig of around 278 tons, one of the eleven ships of the First Fleet that sailed from Portsmouth in 1787. She carried convicts to New South Wales, among them Henry Kable, Susannah Holmes and their infant son.
Did the Kables sail the whole way on the Friendship?
They began the voyage on the Friendship. At Cape Town the women and infants were moved to the Charlotte to make room for livestock taken on for the colony, so the family completed the journey to Port Jackson on the Charlotte.
What happened to the Friendship afterwards?
On the return voyage in 1788, so many of her crew had died that there were not enough hands to sail two ships. The Friendship was scuttled in the Makassar Strait and her remaining crew transferred to another vessel.