Charlotte's poor sailing qualities forced a tow down the Channel, and the fleet discovered only after two days that her third mate had been left at Plymouth. HMS Hyena supplied a replacement, exposing weak merchant administration inside a naval-led expedition. The transport carried William and Mary Bryant, whose later escape became one of the best-known stories of the penal settlement; William and both children died during the ordeal that followed. At Port Jackson, convict Thomas Barrett made the Charlotte Medal for surgeon John White, turning the voyage into an early material record of European settlement in Australia. The East India Company initially disliked Charlotte's slow pace but valued her cargo capacity enough to use her on the China tea run. Her later service in the 1806 British expedition against the Dutch Cape Colony raises a counterfactual: possession of the Cape before 1788 might have simplified the First Fleet's route.
Chapter · 55:11-59:48
Charlotte: missing mate, convict memory, and later naval service
Charlotte exposes weak merchant administration, preserves the voyage through the Bryants and the Charlotte Medal, and later reappears in the British capture of the Cape Colony.