Arthur Phillip
British naval officer and first Governor of New South Wales (1738-1814)
Arthur Phillip (11 October 1738 – 31 August 1814) was a Royal Navy officer who served as the first governor of the Colony of New South Wales.
Phillip was educated at Greenwich Hospital School from June 1751 until December 1753. He then became an apprentice on the whaling ship Fortune. With the outbreak of the Seven Years' War against France, Phillip enlisted in the Royal Navy as captain's servant to Michael Everitt aboard HMS Buckingham. With Everitt, Phillip also served on HMS Union and HMS Stirling Castle. Phillip was promoted to lieutenant on 7 June 1761, before being put on half-pay at the end of hostilities on 25 April 1763. Seconded to the Portuguese Navy in 1774, he served in the war against Spain. Returning to Royal Navy service in 1778, in 1782 Phillip, in command of HMS Europa, was to capture Spanish colonies in South America, but an armistice was concluded before he reached his destination. In 1784, Phillip was employed by Home Office Under Secretary Evan Nepean, to survey French defences in Europe.
In 1786, Phillip was appointed by Lord Sydney as the commander of the First Fleet, a fleet of 11 ships whose crew were to establish a penal colony and a settlement at Botany Bay, New South Wales.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q311548. VIAF identifies the subject as 73911137. The Library of Congress control number is n50043690. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1738, 1814, 1751 and 1753.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arthur Phillip” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.