IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 279

In 1786 the British government took a decision that would reshape the history of a continent. For decades it had sent convicted criminals across the Atlantic to the American colonies, but that traffic had ended when those colonies became independent, and the prison hulks moored in English rivers were dangerously full. The naturalist Joseph Banks, who had sailed with Captain Cook, had recommended Botany Bay, on the east coast of New Holland, as a suitable site for a settlement, and in August 1786 the government announced that convicts would be transported there.

The fleet that assembled at Portsmouth consisted of eleven vessels. Two belonged to the Royal Navy: the Sirius, which carried the commander and served as the flagship, and the smaller Supply. Six were transports carrying convicts, and three were store ships loaded with provisions and agricultural equipment. Those on board numbered between 1,400 and 1,500. Of the roughly 700 convicts, about a quarter were women; the rest of the company included naval officers and seamen and some 250 Royal Marines, together with a number of soldiers' wives and children who were permitted to accompany the men.

Command of the expedition was given to Captain Arthur Phillip, a naval officer of wide experience who had served in the Mediterranean and had also commanded a ship in the Portuguese navy. He had never been to New South Wales. His instructions, issued in the name of King George III, required him to establish a settlement, to cultivate the land and to treat the Aboriginal inhabitants kindly; he was told to open friendly relations with them and to punish any of his men who did them harm. He was also expected to make the colony self-sufficient.

The fleet sailed from Portsmouth on 13 May 1787 and followed a route that took advantage of favourable winds. It called first at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then crossed the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, where fresh water and provisions were taken on board, and finally reached Cape Town in the middle of October. There the ships spent a month while livestock, including sheep, goats and pigs, together with plants and seeds, were loaded. From Cape Town the fleet crossed the southern Indian Ocean, and the voyage from England took some eight months in all.

Conditions on the transports were cramped. The convicts lived behind wooden bulkheads below deck, though they were allowed up for air in good weather, and Phillip and the surgeons insisted on cleanliness, fresh air and a varied diet. At Cape Town extra supplies of vegetables and preserved food were bought. Historians have put the number of deaths during the voyage at fewer than fifty, a remarkably low figure for a long sea journey of the period; most of those who died were already ill when they came on board.

The Supply, the fastest ship, reached Botany Bay on 18 January 1788, and the rest of the fleet arrived two days later. What the newcomers found was a bitter disappointment. The bay offered no secure anchorage, the soil was thin and sandy, and fresh water was scarce. Two French ships commanded by the explorer La Pérouse, who had been exploring the Pacific since 1785, reached the bay a few days later and stayed for several weeks, so the two expeditions met before the French sailed away.

Phillip explored the coast to the north and found a deep inlet that Cook had named Port Jackson but had never entered. On 26 January 1788 the fleet moved there, and the British flag was raised at a cove with a stream of fresh water; Phillip named the place Sydney Cove, after the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney. The site had a reliable water supply and deep water close to the shore, but the land behind it was poor and clearing it proved far harder than anyone had expected.

The first years of the colony were grim. Crops failed, tools wore out, and the settlement depended on food imported from England and on supplies bought at Cape Town; by 1790 the colony was suffering severe food shortages. Phillip sent the Sirius to Norfolk Island with convicts and stores, and in March 1790 the ship was wrecked on a reef there, leaving the settlement with a single naval vessel. Only the arrival of the Second Fleet in June that year prevented starvation, although it brought many desperately sick convicts.

Relations with the Aboriginal people of the area, the Eora, deteriorated as the settlement spread and the newcomers took fish and land. Phillip's instructions had urged friendship, but the two peoples understood the ownership of land in entirely different ways, and conflict was frequent. In April 1789 smallpox broke out among the Aboriginal population around the harbour and killed a large proportion of them. Its origin has been debated ever since; the disease may have been carried by the colonists, although nobody on the ships was visibly suffering from it.

Transportation to New South Wales continued long after Phillip's departure in 1792, and by the time it ended in 1868 about 162,000 convicts had been sent to Australia. The name 'First Fleet' was not used at the time; it came into general use much later. The anniversary of the flag-raising is now celebrated as Australia Day, though many Aboriginal Australians regard the same date as a day of mourning.

In medieval Europe a market and a fair were not the same thing. A market was held regularly, usually once a week in a town that had been granted the privilege, and it served the surrounding countryside: farmers brought grain, animals and wool, while townspeople offered cloth, tools and food. A fair took place once a year and lasted not a morning but several days, or in some cases several weeks. Many fairs were timed to coincide with the feast day of a local saint, when crowds of pilgrims were already on the road, and the presence of those crowds helps to explain why commerce and religion came to share the same calendar.

Nobody could simply announce a fair. The right to hold one, and to collect the tolls that went with it, was granted by charter, either by the king or by a great lord such as a bishop or an abbot. The privilege was valuable. The holder provided the ground and the stalls, kept order among the traders, and in return took a fee from every merchant and a toll on the goods brought for sale. Because a charter drew visitors and their money into a town, neighbouring towns often quarrelled over the right to hold a fair, and the crown was occasionally asked to settle the dispute.

Travel in the Middle Ages was slow, and a merchant carrying cloth or silver across Europe faced robbers, tolls levied by every local lord and the suspicion of towns that did not welcome foreign competition. A charter therefore promised more than a pitch for a stall. It offered protection, and kings sometimes issued merchants letters of safe conduct that allowed them to cross borders without hindrance. Many traders travelled in company for mutual defence, and the more important fairgrounds were guarded by the holder's men.

Disputes were unavoidable where large sums changed hands among strangers, so fairs developed their own courts. Cases were heard under the law merchant, a body of custom that crossed national boundaries, rather than under the ordinary law of the land. In England the tribunal was known as the court of piepowder, from the French for 'dusty feet', a reference to the travelling traders who appeared before it. Its defining feature was speed. A case had to be heard and decided within a day, because merchants could not afford to wait, and a debtor's goods could be seized and sold before the fair closed.

The most celebrated of all European fairs were held in the county of Champagne, in north-eastern France. There were six of them, in four towns, and each lasted about six weeks, so that for most of the year one fair or another was open. Their position between the cloth towns of Flanders and the wealthy cities of Italy made them a meeting place for goods that had travelled immense distances: wool and cloth from the north were exchanged for silk, spices, dyes and alum from the Mediterranean. Italian merchants, above all from Genoa and Florence, came in growing numbers. Because coins were heavy and risky to carry, the fairs also became a place where debts were settled between merchants, and the credit arrangements made there are often described as an early form of the bill of exchange.

The Champagne fairs declined in the early fourteenth century, and historians have offered several explanations. The county passed into the hands of the French crown, whose officials taxed the fairs heavily and offered less in return. War made the roads unsafe. At the same time Italian ships began to sail from the Mediterranean directly to the ports of northern Europe, so that goods which had once crossed France overland could travel by sea. Which of these causes weighed most is still argued over, and some scholars maintain that the fairs had already begun to change before the crown intervened.

England had its own great fairs. St Giles's Fair at Winchester was granted by William II at the end of the eleventh century and ran for sixteen days around the feast of St Giles in September, drawing merchants from Flanders, Germany and France. Stourbridge Fair, held on common land outside Cambridge, was described in detail by Daniel Defoe after his visit in the 1720s. The most famous of all, Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield in London, was granted by Henry I in 1133; over the centuries it became as well known for plays, acrobats and roast pork as for cloth, and it survived until 1855, long after it had lost any commercial importance.

Historians have several kinds of evidence for fairs, and each has its limits. Charters show what was granted, while the accounts of the lord's officials and the records of the fair court show what was collected and disputed. Archaeology adds the objects that merchants dropped or discarded — coins, pottery, leather and metal fittings — and can sometimes locate a fair whose site has been lost. But these sources were created to collect money or settle quarrels, not to measure trade, and they survive far better for large, well-organised fairs than for small ones. There is also continuing disagreement about how much fairs mattered, some economic historians treating them as engines of long-distance commerce and financial invention, others arguing that most exchange in this period was local.

Autobiographies sell. Every year brings a fresh shelf of memoirs by politicians, soldiers, actors and survivors of terrible events, and readers buy them for much the same reason that historians read them: because they promise an inside view of a life that no other kind of document supplies. Yet the question of whether such books can be trusted as history has never been more awkward. A survivor's account may be deeply moving and, in its details, quite mistaken. The difficulty is not that autobiography is unreliable, but that it is unreliable in ways we do not always recognise.

The case for taking autobiography seriously is strong. For most of the past, the people who appear in official records are those with property, office or power; servants, labourers and women are usually visible only through the eyes of others. When such people write their own lives, or dictate them to someone else, they become witnesses to a world that would otherwise be silent. Autobiographies also tell historians something no administrative record can: how people understood themselves, what they thought a life was for, and what words they used for their own experience. In this sense a memoir is not merely a report on the past but a piece of it.

The problems begin with memory. Psychologists describe remembering as reconstructive: we do not play back a recording but rebuild an event each time we recall it, filling the gaps with expectation and later knowledge. Experiments in which people are asked about a dramatic public event show that confidence and vividness are no guarantee of accuracy. Vivid memories are often held with great certainty, and they change. Autobiographers, moreover, write with the ending in view. The narrator knows how the story turned out and arranges earlier episodes as steps towards that conclusion, which gives a life a shape it never had at the time.

There is also the matter of justification. A memoir is written for readers, and writers rarely present themselves as they were on their worst afternoons. Some episodes are quietly omitted, others are given a flattering emphasis, and the conduct of other people is often judged more harshly than the author's own. This is not necessarily dishonest. Sometimes the author is protecting other people; sometimes the author is genuinely mistaken about the past, though few of us notice our own inconsistencies. Yet the shape of the story is evidence in itself: the way a memoir explains a failure, blames a colleague or passes over a period in silence tells the historian what the writer needed the past to mean.

Occasionally the problem is more serious than selective emphasis. Books have been published as memoirs and later exposed as inventions. A volume presented as the recollections of a child who survived the Nazi camps was shown in the late 1990s to have been written by a man who had spent the war years in Switzerland, and the publisher withdrew it. Such cases are rare, but they are a reminder that the label on a book is a promise, and that a promise can be broken.

None of this means that historians should set autobiography aside. For people with no access to pen and paper, a spoken reminiscence recorded by someone else is sometimes the only testimony that exists, and such accounts have been used to reconstruct the history of slavery, of migration and of working-class communities. The alternative to an imperfect witness is usually no witness at all.

The practical response is corroboration. Historians compare an autobiography with letters, diaries, newspapers, photographs and public records, and with accounts written by others who were present. Where the sources agree, confidence grows; where they disagree, the disagreement is itself interesting. The historian also asks what the writer gained by telling the story in this way, who the intended readers were, and what could not be said at the time of writing. The silences of a memoir, as much as its assertions, can be evidence.

My own view is that the question is badly framed. Asking whether autobiographies can be trusted as history assumes that there is a single standard of reliability, and that a source either meets it or does not. But historians do not use documents in that way. A tax roll and a memoir answer different questions. The memoir is unreliable evidence of what happened, and excellent evidence of how someone came to understand what happened. To discard it because it is not a ledger is to mistake the purpose of the source.

What follows is not that anything goes. A historian who repeats an autobiography's errors without checking them has done poor work, and a publisher who presents invention as memory has done worse. But the sensible aim is not to decide whether a life story is true in general; it is to establish what, precisely, it can be relied on for. Read that way, autobiography is not a rival to the archive but a companion to it, and a deeply revealing one.