Ultimately, of course, the Botany Bay proposal was adopted and once it was embraced the former Mercury mutineers waiting on the Dunkirk hulk were among the first to be earmarked for the new scheme. Once again, Limpus was among those chosen. For transportation to his third intended continent of banishment he was sent aboard the Charlotte in early 1787. Many other Mercury veterans were also embarked on the vessels of the First Fleet. Among them were Robert Sidaway who would later part-own Sydney’s first theatre; the youngest of the male convicts on the First Fleet, John Hudson, who had been only nine years old when convicted at the Old Bailey in 1873; and James Cox, who would later daringly escape Sydney with the Bryant party.^[34] Also embarked on the First Fleet vessels were John Ruglass and Samuel Woodham, Limpus’s old Den Keyser shipmates who had avoided the Mercury fiasco but now were again in chains awaiting shipment.

It is only at this point, then, that Thomas Limpus fits into the usual stories of early Australia. Yet this was clearly not a man who shrieked with fear at the noises of the First Fleet weighing anchor, or who necessarily lamented his homeland fearing he would never return. So how was the long First Fleet voyage experienced by a man like Thomas Limpus? Firstly, it becomes clear that the differences the Botany Bay scheme had from earlier plans, such as the idea to form a settlement in the Gambia River at Lemane Island, were not merely abstract arguments. Certainly to those like Limpus, Ruglass and Woodham, and probably also to many who had narrowly escaped the fate of being abandoned in the Honduran backwoods, it would have been apparent from the outset that this scheme was different. They would not just be deserted, for if that was the plan, surely the British government would not have gone to so much trouble outfitting the fleet, and providing personnel for it. Among the arguments as to whether the penal colony in the southern hemisphere was founded for strategic reasons or merely as a place to get rid of the convicts crowding the gaols, few would disagree that before the felons embarked on their vessels, the plan had become one of colonisation.^[35]

The scale of the arrangements for the First Fleet undoubtedly gave Thomas Limpus a view of this venture different from that of his two earlier convict voyages. It would have been apparent in the time spent outfitting the fleet, the presence of soldiers and even the fact that there were women convicts, that this was a different type of venture. New South Wales was, to be sure, an unknown quantity and was much further away than Africa or America, but from the first the experience must have been different to being put on a slave ship where the crew had no instructions but to dump them where they could. Compared to being abandoned to Africa’s deadly disease-ridden environment and feared native peoples, Thomas Limpus’s role in the new venture perhaps seemed oddly certain. He was, at least, wanted alive, and his labour power had value.

The organisation, peopling, medical care and victualling of the First Fleet were in large part due to Arthur Phillip, who clearly intended the voyage of the First Fleet ships to have a very different function from oceanic passages made in earlier eras of convict transportation. He aimed to deliver men and women as potential colonists, people who would be useful to Britain from afar. This approach was the origin of the horror at the time of the arrival of the Second Fleet in 1790 – a fleet infamously outfitted by slave traders. Phillip’s complaint at the condition of the Second Fleet is telling, for his objections were practical as well as humanitarian. ‘Many of those now received are in such situation from old complaints, and so emaciated from what they have suffered in the Voyage, that they never will be capable for any Labour’, he wrote.^[36] At a time when the fledgling colony desperately needed supplies and a fresh input of workers, he was greatly alarmed that the merchants and captains of the Second Fleet had misunderstood what was required of convict transportation. Its primary function, he seemed to be saying, was not to punish men and women, but to deliver workers.

What this meant on an individual level was that because the nature of the voyage was different to his prior experiences as a transported felon, Limpus could almost certainly negotiate a different space for himself than he had previously. Neither the kind of freedom he had claimed after his abandonment in Africa, nor the slack control which had allowed the mutiny on the Mercury would be found during the First Fleet’s journey, but there were other advantages. In a colony which would depend on those who were sent off in chains, men like Thomas Limpus who had seafaring experience were perhaps the most immediately useful of all. Throughout the era convict men were repeatedly put to work in assisting the seamen during the long voyage to Australia. The skills Limpus had gained, or honed, during the years of his banishment were now of use in the new settlement.

In negotiating these particularised spaces, a new ‘Australian’ culture began to be formed. It had roots between the wooden walls of the convict transports as they crossed the seas, and it borrowed from seafaring culture, not abandoning those traits when it reached the shore. This was partly because of Phillip’s rule, for as a naval man he knew that seamen’s ethics could not be overlooked. But maritime culture was also adopted by the convicts, among whom those who had been seamen often had positions of privilege or esteem.^[37] Seafaring skills would be a nexus through which status could be bargained and which could often grant personal latitude on the edges of the close control of the new settlement, and former convicts with seafaring skills were often put in places of authority.

Thomas Limpus did not succeed in returning to his homeland a third time – he died on Norfolk Island prior to 1801 – but we can suspect that he never gave up hope that he might.^[38] Certainly his trans-oceanic voyages as a British convict had not been blank periods of time; rather they had been part of his formative experiences. He embarked on the First Fleet vessel Charlotte not as a landlubber forced to sea for his trifling crimes, but as a man who had already experienced two other convict voyages which were destined not only for separate continents, but which had different intentions altogether. By the time he arrived in Botany Bay he could well have learned to use the sea as a site of refuge, a means of rebellion, and to see seafaring culture as a source of alternative authority. He was one of those who ensured that New South Wales was a sailortown in its earliest years. Far from having descended on Port Jackson to forever lament the distance of his homeland, the salt water which rushed through the heads and lapped the shores of Sydney harbour had been his home for some time and he had carved out for himself a status at sea. To Thomas Limpus, the sea definitely had a history, for it was an integral part of his own life story. It is time that historians of the convict trade examined the extent to which that maritime life story was replicated in various ways throughout the early colony. In so doing they might begin the process of unlocking the sea’s untold history.