Spanning a period from 9 March 1787 to 17 June 1792, although with occasional gaps, Clark's diaries are some of the most personal writings still in existence from the early history of the colonisation of Australia. His original journal is thought to have contained three notebooks, although the second of these, spanning the period from 11 March 1788 to 14 February 1790, is thought to have been lost. Clark also had a letterbook, in which many of his letters, both to his family and to other officers, were pasted. These letters were generally written in a more formal style. After his death, Clark's diaries and papers were preserved by his wife's family in Devon. They were auctioned by his great-nephew, Frederick Adolphus Trevan, at
Sotheby's in London in May 1914, along with some of the letters of
Captain Cook. Purchased by the
State Library of New South Wales as three separate volumes, the journal was disbound during the 1920s and compiled into a single volume. However, in 2002, funded by the Nelson Meers Foundation, the pages were removed from their mounts and rebound into four volumes with soft
vellum covers. The diary was also digitised. The journal is written in ink on thin, unruled diary paper, and is 312 pages in length. Like many of his fellow officers, he was aggrieved at the level of comfort and support offered to the convicts, noting
"I believe few Marines or Soldiers going out on a foreign Service under Government were ever better, if so well provided for as these Convicts are". On arrival in
Botany Bay, Clark was dismayed at the unsuitable conditions, which were far from what had been promised in England:
"if we are obliged to settle here there will not a soul be alive in the course of a year". With the site for settlement subsequently moved to
Sydney Cove, Clark remained distressed by the living conditions experienced by himself and his fellow officers, expressing in a letter to his family in England:
"I never slept worse, my dear wife, than I did last night, what with the hard cold ground, spiders, ants and every vermin you can think of was crawling over me". During the colony's early years, little food was produced, and the rations brought from England were soon consumed, leaving the colony in near starvation. Clark wrote
"God help us. If some ships dont [sic]
arrive, I dont know what will". Supplies finally arrived in June 1790, on
Lady Juliana. Clark often expressed pleasure at the flogging of convicts, although rarely performed the punishment himself. After one incident, in which a particularly troublesome female convict, Elizabeth Dudgeon, was punished for insulting a guard officer, he noted ''"she has long been fishing for it, which she has at last got to her heart's content"
. He did, however, occasionally empathise with the convicts, especially when they were mistreated. Shortly after landing on Norfolk Island, Clark and Robert Kellow came across some convicts, including some women with their children, who had been forced to sleep in the open far from the main townsite, adequate accommodation being lacking: "on the Road we met a great many of the Convicts both Men and Women Particular the women that have young children Who told me that the[y] have been obliged to Sleep in the woods all night for the[y] could not get into Town, poor Devils how they are Kick[ed] about from one place to another"''. Unusually for the time, Clark was effectively a
teetotaller, preferring to drink only lemonade. He often privately chastised his fellow officers' drinking habits, boasting in his diary that he had only been intoxicated once—at his wedding. ==See also==