Watkin Tench

Watkin Tench (born c. 1758, England?—died May 7, 1833, Devonport, Devonshire, Eng.) was a British army officer whose two books about early Australia have become classics.

Commissioned a lieutenant in the British army (1778), Tench shipped out for Australia nine years later as a captain lieutenant of marines, arriving in Botany Bay on Jan. 20, 1788. A year later he published in London A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, in which he described his voyage and life in the settlement. An immediate popular success, the book went into three editions and was translated into several languages. He sailed for Europe in 1791, and his Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson appeared in 1793. Made a prisoner of war by the French in 1794, two years later he published an account of his captivity, Letters Written in France to a Friend in London.