HMS Supply sights Lord Howe Island
- When
- 17 February 1788
- Where
- Lord Howe Island, Tasman Sea
On 17 February 1788 Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commanding HMS Supply en route from Botany Bay to Norfolk Island with nine male and six female convicts, made the first reported sighting of Lord Howe Island.
HMS Supply, the oldest and smallest ship of the First Fleet, was carrying convicts from Botany Bay to found a penal settlement on Norfolk Island when Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball made the first reported sighting of the uninhabited Lord Howe Island on 17 February 1788. On the return journey of 13 March 1788, Ball observed Ball's Pyramid and sent a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession.
Sources
- Lord Howe Island Wikipedia, revision of 2026-07-14
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.