As a career military officer Watkin Tench was competent, but not particularly distinguished. He claims posterity's attention as the writer of two books chronicling the first four years of Australia's founding European settlement: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay; With an Account of New South Wales, Its Productions, Inhabitants, &c. (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales, Including an Accurate Description of the Situation of the Colony; of the Natives; and of Its Natural Productions (1793). Tench's vivid first-person narrative style, his ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor, and his compassion for the convicts and the Aboriginal people have given these books an enduring, jewel-like quality. His undeservedly obscure 1796 booklet Letters Written in France to a Friend in London between the Month of November 1794, and the Month of May 1795 is an account of revolutionary France as he experienced it while a...