The suburb of Mosman derived its name from Archibald Mosman (15 October 1799 – 29 January 1863), a Scottish-born merchant. With his twin brother George, the duo presided over a successful, but short-lived, import-export business in Sydney before Archibald established a lucrative whaling operation in the cove that took his name.
By Alec Smart
Archibald’s whaling venture was established in Great Sirius Cove – now known as Mosman Bay – then a forested, tidal inlet, with upper reaches that ended in shallow sandflats, an easy place to drag massive leviathan carcasses ashore to dismember.
The adjacent Sirius Cove was then known as Little Sirius Cove, both named after the flagship HMS Sirius of the First Fleet, captained by Governor Arthur Philip.
The Mosman brothers, originally from Lanarkshire in the Scottish Lowlands, arrived in Sydney aboard the chartered ship Civilian on 24 August 1828 after a successful career in the West Indies growing and exporting sugarcane.
During this era, slavery was still rife in the French and Anglo-American-administered Caribbean islands, the latter centred in Jamaica. What probably motivated the Mosman brothers to abandon sugar and move into wool export in the rapidly expanding colony of Australia, was the impending end of slave labour, as the Caribbean sugar industry went into economic decline from the mid-1820s.
In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire. The British Caribbean sugar industry and its related rum distilleries were excluded from the original 1807 legislation due to their lucrative international trade.
Slavery in the American West Indies did not end until June 1866 after a bill for its abolition had been passed by Congress the previous January.
Shortly after their arrival in Sydney, the Mosman brothers utilised a warehouse on George St for the export of wool to their distributor in Liverpool, England. The 40-year-old British colony was then being administered by Governor Ralph Darling, a military disciplinarian who encouraged commerce whilst ruthlessly suppressing performing arts, even banning the construction of a theatre. (Ironically, Darling Harbour, now a major entertainment precinct, is named after this joyless tyrant.)
Sirius venture
The partnership between the brothers was dissolved in July 1829 – presumably a business arrangement, not a family fall-out – then in 1831, a 4-acre (16,000m2) land grant was obtained by Archibald Mosman to establish a whaling business on the foreshore of Great Sirius Cove.
American whaling ships had been anchoring at nearby Chowder Bay since the 1820s, and the Mosmans capitalised on what was then a flourishing industry, which also relied on Indigenous Australians to help locate and catch migrating whales.
Merchant John Bell, a Director of the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land, also obtained an 1831 land grant on Great Sirius Cove to operate a whaling station.
Bell previously gained notoriety in December 1819 after commanding a convict transport to Australia from Ireland aboard the East India Company-chartered Minerva, which, upon landing, revealed many of the shackled human cargo were stricken with debilitating illnesses. This was attributed to their being poorly fed. However, Bell sought and was granted, an exoneration after a formal Inquiry.
The Mosman brothers’ George St warehouse was sold in July 1832, while George Mosman moved into grazing. Archibald employed convict labour to construct a sandstone and timber house with a veranda on the eastern slopes of Great Sirius Cove overlooking the bay, which came to be known as ‘The Nest’.
The Nest was situated on 30 acres and included landscaped gardens, a vineyard and an orchard.
Demolished in 1921 during the subdivision of the estate, it was located at what today would be approximately 17 Badham Ave (due east of the Mosman Bay Marina).
By 1833, Archibald and Bell had constructed a 600-foot (182m) wharf in Great Sirius Cove (the stonework has since been incorporated into modern seawall defences) and five sandstone buildings for their fledgling whaling enterprise.
Among the five, a barn built on the eastern foreshore is still in place – the oldest surviving building on Sydney’s North Shore – and today used as a meeting hall for the 1st Mosman Scout Troop.
Archibald Mosman bought Bell’s whaling business and property and purchased adjacent land to eventually own 108 acres (43.7 hectares) across the cove. In 1835 the Mosman firm was operating two whaling ships – the 192 tons Tigress and the 221 tons Jane - and in that year they purchased a third vessel for import-export trading with New Zealand.
Australian Whaleways
Sydney and Hobart became the two main ports of the Australian whaling industry, which until the 1830s peak, provided the main income to the colonial economy before wool replaced it as whale populations plummeted.
There were 42 whaling ships based in Sydney in 1837, employing around 1300 crew, one of whom, American Herman Melville, later wrote the classic whaling novel Moby Dick.
Whale oil and baleen (filter teeth) were extracted by bay whalers in small boats who hunted southern right whales found breeding in sheltered coves during the winter months. Baleen was used for women’s corsets and hooped skirt frames and men’s shirt collars, as well as umbrella frames, hat brims and whip handles.
Migrating sperm whales were the primary targets of ocean whalers because, in addition to their insulating blubber that was rendered into lamp oil and candle wax, they had a reservoir of ‘spermaceti’ oil in a cavity in their heads that was prized for engine lubrication, and ‘ambergris’, a substance produced in their stomachs that was added to perfume to preserve the exotic scent.
In 1838, now a business leviathan with stakes and investments in a variety of companies, Archibald Mosman sold his whaling venture to investors and landholders Hughes & Hosking (business partners John Hosking Jnr and John Hughes), although he continued to receive an annual fee in dividends.
The cove itself had diversified into a major ship careening and refitting operation and the inlet was renamed Mosman’s Bay.
Bankruptcy
John Hosking later became the first Mayor of Sydney and a magistrate. Unfortunately, in 1843 the Hughes & Hosking company was bankrupted in the Great Depression, simultaneously bringing down the Bank of Australia due to their being major shareholders.
In August 1844 Archibald Mosman was also bankrupted and had to sell assets to stay afloat, although the Great Sirius Cove whaling operation was already in decline.
Archibald Mosman left the forested bay he transformed into a thriving industry and purchased Furracabad Station, a ranch near Glen Innes in northern NSW – which is still operational as a cattle stud – and settled into life as a livestock farmer. There his fortunes recovered and improved.
He had two families, to sisters, the first of whom, Charlotte Farquharson, a domestic servant of his brother George, he fathered three children. Their eldest son Hugh was born in The Nest in Mosman Bay in 1843, when she was aged just 15. Their youngest son, Archibald junior, was born in August 1846, when she was 18, and they separated shortly afterwards. Charlotte had four more children to her next partner, but died young at the age of 33.
At the age of 48 Archibald married Charlotte’s elder sister, Harriet, aged 26, in December 1847 and fathered another 8 children, six of whom survived into adulthood.
Archibald Mosman died at Byron Lodge, Randwick, in January 1863, aged 63. He is buried in Randwick Cemetery. His wife Harriet outlived him by another 20 years.
Author Dimity Mortensen, in her biography Archibald Mosman: The Field of the Faithful Man (Boolarong Press, published 1 Jan 2024) alleges Mosman was a member of The Black Association, a group of wealthy white landowners that funded a formidable legal defence team to represent those accused of murdering Aboriginals in the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre.
For a man who made substantial income from working slave plantations in the British West Indies early in his career, supporting racist killers isn’t too far a stretch of the imagination.
The Myall Creek Massacre, which involved the killing of at least 28 unarmed Wirraayaraay Aboriginals by eight British settlers, took place 115km west of Glen Innes. Seven of those indicted were found guilty and hung, four were acquitted, while the ringleader, John Fleming, evaded arrest and lived freely until the age of 78 in Wilberforce, attributable to his brother Joseph being Chief Constable of Hawkesbury Region Police.
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