Peter Hibbs
An able seaman on HMS Sirius, Hibbs was also one of few non-convict First Fleet members known to have settled in the new Colony of New South Wales in 1788.
[1][4] Hibbs also claimed to have come earlier to Australia in 1770 as a crewman on board HMS Endeavour with Captain James Cook,[4][5][6][7] and to have stepped ashore at Botany Bay with Joseph Banks.
[8] Hibbs also claimed to have taken part in an earlier expedition[4][7][10][11] in 1789 led by Governor Arthur Phillip which resulted in the discovery of the Hawkesbury River.
Mary Kenney and George Hibbs had married on 25 December 1760, at the parish church of St Laurence-in-Thanet, Ramsgate,.
[4] These claims were repeated in the newspaper the Windsor and Richmond Gazette of 3 May 1890 on the death of his son Peter Kenney Hibbs Jnr.
[4] Stephen Yarrow maintains, however, that secondary independent evidence does exist to support Hibbs' claim to have been aboard HMS Endeavour.
One moment she was the Berwick';, a burnt out hulk bought by the Royal Navy, fitted out "with refuse of the yard", renamed Sirius and next she found herself leading the First Fleet out of Portsmouth Harbour with the newly appointed Governor and Captain of the Flagship - Arthur Phillip.
Allen Maunder in his book Sailing on...The Hibbs Line describes the difficulty of the voyage:Imagine going around Cape Horn [sic] on a Sydney Harbour Ferry packed with one hundred and sixty men, bulls, cows, horses, sheep, hogs, goats, fowl, stores, plants and a piano (!)
It is a testament to the bravery and fortitude of the Captain and crews that the Fleet arrived intact and finally gained the shelter of Sydney Cove on 26th January 1788.
After leaving England with the rest of the fleet on 13 May 1787, stopping at Santa Cruz at Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Cape Town in South Africa, rounding the base of Tasmania and then travelling north up the east coast of Australia, HMS Sirius arrived in Botany Bay on 21 January 1788[26] to join some of the ships that had arrived just days earlier.
To make the distance travelled as short as possible (the infant Colony of New South Wales was starving and it was imperative that HMS Sirius return with supplies in the shortest possible time) the master, John Hunter, ordered the ship south into Antarctic latitudes, running terrible risks with ice-bergs.
[27][28] As a result of the damage to the ship during the trip to Cape Town, HMS Sirius was careened in Mosman Bay on its return to Sydney.
[29] During the time that HMS Sirius was careened, in June 1789, Governor Arthur Phillip lead an expedition which resulted in the discovery of the Hawkesbury River.
Fortunately, all goods that were presumed to float had previously been thrown overboard but much was lost on the reef or the shoreline over the next two weeks where some were looted.
An extract from a letter sent by a non-commissioned officer on HMS Sirius dated August 1790 describes the situation: From the time of the wreck to the latter end of April, we never let slip a single opportunity of working the Ship and by the 10th of the above month had preserved the under mentioned quantity of provisions which was all we had to depend upon and our sanguine Expectation of a relief given up until next Season, or by supposition of the supply bringing ships from some European Settlement, which, within the Bounds of probability, could not be sooner than six months.
[30] In desperation, the settlers began to take for food the local Mount Pitt birds, christened the "Providence" petrel.
It would be impossible for me to give an account of the number of birds and eggs...by the middle of May to the beginning of June there was no scarcity in any part of the Town and were bartered at a very cheap rate.
A letter from Lieutenant-Governor Robert Ross to Governor Arthur Phillip carried on that ship describes the conditions on Norfolk Island from the time of the wreck until the date of the letter: with respect to necessaries, not one of them [the detachment under my command] have a shoe to their feet, nor scarce a shirt to their backs; their situation at this juncture is truly deplorable, both men and women having lost almost everything by the wreck of the Sirius …The troops are also in great want of cooking utensils; there are but a few small pots among them all, which have been saved from the wreck of the Sirius...there is not a pot for every twelve men.
[30] Captain John Hunter was next made Governor of the young Colony of New South Wales when Arthur Phillip returned to England in late 1792.
[1] With Mary was her baby daughter Ann who had been born aboard the Lady Juliana in the days before it had anchored in Port Jackson on 6 June 1790 after a voyage of 10 months.
Ann, christened in Sydney on 20 June 1790, had been fathered by a seaman aboard the Lady Juliana, Edward Scott, who had been sent back with his ship on 25 July 1790.
Straight after the ship was confiscated by Governor Hunter, Hibbs' previous master of HMS Sirius, placed Hibbs back in charge of the Norfolk and gave him job of taking Matthew Flinders and George Bass on a voyage to discover if Tasmania was an island in 1798-99, and then later in 1799 of taking Matthew Flinders on a voyage to survey Moreton Bay and Hervey Bay.
[1][4][10][15][18][36][37][38][39] In October 1800,[37] while the ship was being used to carry locally grown produce from the Windsor area on the Hawkesbury River to Port Jackson (Sydney), the Norfolk was wrecked after being hijacked by convicts.
[1][4] To support his family Hibbs became a part-owner of the Trimmer, a small 20 ton sloop, which he sailed between Sydney and the Hawkesbury River, servicing the farms established there.
[4] On 11 August 1804[15] (Mollie Gillen records the date as September 1803[1]) Hibbs was granted 100 acres at Mulgrave Place, on the Hawkesbury River, where he established his growing family.
By 1816 Hibbs was owner of the small sloop Recovery, which he sailed between Sydney and the Hawkesbury River, servicing the farms established there.
The Sydney Gazette newspaper of 6 July 1816 carried the account of the wreck of this vessel: Hibbs next had to walk with his crew, his son George, and his female passenger[46] along the coast about 80 kilometres to the nearest settlement at Newcastle, but on the way they were stripped of their clothing by natives and exposed to the Winter weather: Having obtained passage on the sloop Windsor back to Sydney, Hibbs, George and his passenger were again wrecked at Long Reef (near Collaroy Beach) and again had to walk along the coast with the crew and other passengers of the Windsor until able to obtain a further passage to Sydney, there being none of the modern bridges across Port Jackson that today would have allowed them to walk all the way: In 1821 Hibbs received another grant of 60 acres[11] of land at Courangra Point at Haycock Reach, Hawkesbury River.
In 1824 Hibbs, "Of Lower Branch, Hawkesbury; mariner" was on a list of persons liable to serve as jurors in the District of Windsor.
On 12 September 1847, aged 90 years,[9] Hibbs died at Pumpkin (Creek) Point on the Hawkesbury River, where his step-son-in-law John (aka Joseph) Izard owned an acre of land.
[54][55] Both Peter Hibbs and his wife Mary are buried in the Wisemans Ferry Cemetery at Laughtondale, an area that was then known as Lower Portland Head.
