To Sail, to Stop

I’m on a bit of a journey, if you haven’t noticed.  Since leaving the military, a few times people have asked me: “where will you end up?”  The question of settling is one that I still have to answer.  Cities, for the most part, seem roughly the same to me: a strange concoction of banality and history, a smashing together of people (now from all parts of the world), museums, falafel, bars and clubs, expensive apartments, and traffic.  Still, at this point in my life I see myself ending up in a city.  I’m too interested in people to live in the wilderness, too fascinated by diversity (not of skin color, but of experience) to live in a small town, and too enamored by the possibility that a city represents.  Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, I flee to the city to lose myself, and to find myself.

Were I born two hundred years ago, there would, obviously, be no planes on which to travel, not buses or trains.  What there would be is ships.  Ships were the first form, other than beasts of burden, of human transportation.  On ships, humans populated the thousands of islands of the Pacific, including the great big one: Australia.  Artifacts discovered at digsites across the continent tell us that the Aborginals landed, settled, and began their civilization here over 60,000 years ago.  Some surely sailed on, or went back, but there were some, perhaps most, who stopped.  They had found their settling place, as I one day will.  And unlike the Europeans who came later, the land they found was unclaimed by man.

Then, 230 years ago, Briton arrived.  Sydney, the city I’m in now, was named for the British Home Secretary, Thomas Townshend, a name I assume you’ve never heard.  And anyway, it doesn’t explain at all why the city is called Sydney.  In fact, there are two cities in the world named Sydney (in Australia and Nova Scotia, Canada), after this Townshend fellow, and for the same reason: he was a rare politician, a man of character.

I’ll insert my disclaimer here: I’m a completely amateur historian.  My research has been minimal, and my views on this are not nuanced or by any means complete.  They may not even be fully accurate.  So if, while reading, you find something to be grossly in error, please feel free to contact me and let me know.  With that said, let’s move on.

Baron Sydney

Thomas Townshend was born to a noble family, but was not himself a noble at birth.  This is because in the British peerage, nobility comes not from heredity, but from title.  Elected to the British House of Commons in 1754, he rose to the peerage in 1783 as a Baron, and here’s where my understand falls apart a bit.  Apparently, when you become a member of the British nobility, you can kind of just…pick a name.  So he picked Sydney, and became Baron Sydney.

So…why Sydney?  Well, it turns out that Townshend had a distant relation to a man named Algernon Sydney, a man who, two hundred years prior, had been executed for treason for a book he wrote criticizing the monarchy.  Back then, in the 1600s, the monarchy was a big deal, and people still took the idea of Absolute Monarchy very seriously.  Sydney’s treatise, Discourses Concerning Government, was an answer to Sir Robert Filmer’s book Patriarcha.  Patriarcha argued in favor of an Absolute Monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings, ideas that now seem absurd.  In Algernon Sydney’s time, though, disloyalty to the King was a crime, and though he came down on the right side of history, he was executed for it.

In Townshend’s time, the name Sydney was basically a synonym for liberal values and opposition to tyranny and absolute rule.  So Townshend’s move to take the name Sydney was not only due to his relation to Algernon Sydney – it was also a political statement, akin to Ron Paul naming his son Rand (a clear reference to Ayn Rand, who’s interminable writings basically converge on the statement: every man for himself).  Just to drive home the point, Algernon Sydney was a contemporary of John Locke, the man famous for his dictates on “life, liberty, and property”, which were basically plagiarized (as this post is basically plagiarized from wikipedia) in the American Declaration of Independence.  Likewise, Algernon Sydney’s Discourses Concerning Government contains the following phrase: “General consent…is the ground of all just governments”.  Compare this with Thomas Jefferson’s words, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.  Jefferson probably would have failed if he’d submitted the Declaration at any respectable university.  Sydney and Locke were both studied by the founding fathers in school, and to close up my belabored point, Discourses Concerning Government has been called “the textbook of the American Revolution” by historian Caroline Robbins.  Both texts are also strongly advocated by Ron and Rand Paul.  Okay, you get it.

What Sydney Did

So Townshend, now Baron Sydney, was a member of the Whig party, who opposed Absolute Monarchy, and were kind of like the equivalent of people like Ron and Rand Paul: for their time, they were those crying out against “big government” (probably using the phrase “big crown”).  And he took a few actions that resulted in those cities being named after him.  For one, though he didn’t support the American Revolution, he had arguably the most moral stance on the issue from a man still loyal to Briton.  He spoke out against what he saw as a pointlessly protracted conflict, and when the war was won by America, his influence assisted British citizens in America to flee to Canada, and safety, from vengeful Americans.  Hence the city in Nova Scotia being named for him.

This wasn’t his only humanitarian act, though.

Baron Sydney believed in people’s ability to make something more of themselves.  When he was charged with the responsibility for establishing a British colony in New South Wales (e.g. Australia), he came up with an innovative idea.  Rather than try to convince a thousand British citizens in Briton to go to this new, and very foreign and far away, land, he would conduct a grand experiment: he would send convicts.  It was kind of a crude win-win, as well as being in my opinion a moral victory.  The British government would save money and prison space by sending the prisoners away; the prisoners would get a second chance at life (they were granted freedom in the colony, which is how Australia day got one of its names: Emancipation day).  If the prisoners all died, no real loss to the crown.  I don’t think he was that cruel in his thoughts, but that sentiment surely passed through the minds of many of his peers in the House of Lords.

So Sydney dispatched Arthur Phillip with just under a thousand convicts, male and female, to the other side of the world.  And there, on 26 January 1788, Phillip became governer of the new colony, and named his new harbor Sydney harbor, and his new town Sydney town.  After sailing across the world, from the Northwest of Europe to the Southeast Pacific, a journey a six months at sea, he stopped.