Possibly the first printed account of the new settlement todays Australia. Anonymous entry entitled "An authentic account has been received that his Majesty's ships the Sirius and Supply under the command of Commodore Phillips ...having the convicts

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on board for Botany Bay have made good their passage" appearing on pp. 273/274 of The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle Vol. LIX for the year 1789.With subsequent serial account of Captain Watkin Tench's Narrative as it appeared in the April and May 1789 issues. 8vo. Orig. full calf. Complete copy of Vol. LIX of the journal. There has been continuing conjecture as to the earliest printed record announcing the infant colony. The populace in England were hungrily awaiting news of the settlement there was a feverish competition to be the first to spread the ground breaking news of the infant colony. Debrett a London publisher had contracted Tench prior to his sailing with the First Fleet in May 1787 to publish his journal of the Expedition in spite of the fact that Debrett's competitor John Stockdale had been the more active proponent for the establishment of the settlement at Botany Bay. Stockdale had cultivated a closeness with the government in England and consequently felt duped when he realised he was not going to be the first to publish the account of the new settlement. Stockdale set about preparing a surreptitious account by gleaning information from crew members of the first ships to return to England with news (even though unsubstantiated) as well as from the then newspaper reports of the settlement. The 'Prince of Wales' cutter was the first berthing at Plymouth on the 23rd March 1789 (8 days before the above article appeared in print) with the 'Borrodale' transport docking the following day. Both ships carried news of the Botany Bay expedition. Newspaper reports appeared in the London Chronicle of the 24th and 26th March 1789 respectively as well as in a spate of articles in the English journal press including the anonymous report here offered in the March issue of 1789. It remains impossible to categorically chronicle in what order of precedence these articles appeared. All were issued within days and certainly before the two separately printed accounts the first of which being the Stockdale/Forster pamphlet issued on the 2nd April 1789 (Ferguson 45) and the second the Debrett publication of Tench's Narrative issued on the 24th April 1789 (Ferguson 48). The Botany Bay announcement here offered predates both these publications and remains as close to the birth of the first settlement as the printed word can take us.