Marie Antoinette

She was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and of Navarre. 

Initially charmed by her personality and beauty, the French people generally came to dislike her, accusing “L’Autre-chienne” (a pun in French playing with the words “Autrichienne” meaning Austrian and meaning Other bitch) of being profligate and promiscuous, and of harboring sympathies for France’s enemies, particularly Austria, her country of origin.

Marie Antoinette was an early lesbian icon. Rumors about her relationships with women circulated in pornographic detail by anti-royalist pamphlets before theFrench Revolution. In Victorian England, biographers who idealized the Ancien Régime made a point of denying the rumours, but at the same time romanticised Marie Antoinette’s “sisterly” friendship with the Princesse de Lamballe as – in the words of an 1858 biography – one of the “rare and great loves that Providence unites in death.” By the end of the nineteenth century she was a cult icon of “sapphism”; her execution, seen as tragic martyrdom, may have added to her appeal.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette ;  http://www.deviantart.com/  by BlackvelvetSITC

Captain James Cook

Cook (7 November 1728– 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer who ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy. 

He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.

Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager and joined the Royal Navy in 1755. He saw action in the Seven Years’ War, and subsequently surveyed and mapped much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec.

In 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast of Australia, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain.  Cook’s discoveries prepared the way for establishment of a new penal colony. (=A penal colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general populace by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory.)

Between 1788 and 1850 the English sent over 162,000 convicts to Australia in 806 ships. The first eleven of these ships are today known as the First Fleet and contained the convicts and marines that are now acknowledged as the Founders of Australia.

The First Fleet  sailed from Great Britain in 1787 consisting of 10 Civil officers, 212 marines, including officers, 28 wives and 17 children of the marines, 81 free persons, 504 male convicts and 192 female convicts to establish the first European colony in Australia, in the region which Captain Cook had named New South Wales.

In fiction

The 1979 musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” written by Stephen Sondheim and based upon Christopher Bond’s 1973 play of the same name, begins with its protagonist,Sweeney Todd, returning to London in 1846 having spent fifteen years in an unnamed British penal colony in Australia.

Sources:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia#History ; http://www.australianhistoryresearch.info/the-first-fleet/

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