Anthony Rope
Anthony Rope (1756–1843) was a First Fleet convict sentenced to seven-years transportation in 1785, and arrived at Sydney Cove, New South Wales in January 1788.
[1] His parents were established tenant farmers, as witnessed by ornate gravestones in St Mary church cemetery that are still in good condition today, but they were not landholders.
Documents about him first appear in 1784, when, aged 28, he was found guilty of stealing goods valued at 58s 6d in Rochford, Essex, over 100 miles from his home village of Norton Subcourse.
Convicts from the London prisons and hulks were loaded there and most transports sailed directly to Portsmouth where they anchored at the Spithead outside the harbour.
After six-months delay the flotilla of eleven ships (the First Fleet) finally set sail for NSW on 13 May 1787 with Captain Arthur Phillip in command.
The fleet then sailed onto Cape Town, where some female convicts were transferred from the Friendship to the Prince of Wales to make space for sheep.
After a month they set sail for New South Wales across the rough and bitterly cold Southern Ocean driven on by the Roaring Forties winds.
Two weeks into this leg, Phillip divided the convoy into two divisions so that faster ships would reach Botany Bay earlier to prepare for the landing.
Botany Bay proved unsuitable for the settlement and Captain Phillip moved the ships to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson.
Rope met his future wife Elizabeth Pulley for the first time when the female convicts disembarked in Sydney Cove on the stormy afternoon on 6 February 1788.
For the colony not to starve in the early years, Phillip needed well-behaved convicts and ex-convicts to become farmers and to grow cereal crops.
The movement of the Rope family to different farm districts over these years indicates how settlers growing grain needed to find richer soils and safer locations.
As Anthony and Elizabeth had only met on 6 February 1788 it is claimed that Robert Rope was 'the first European child conceived and born in the colony'.
