Why was Watkin Tench’s writing about the early New South Wales colony popular in Europe?

Watkin Tench’s writings about the early New South Wales colony were immediately popular in Europe because they satisfied a strong public interest in the details of the "new" country’s strange flora and fauna.1

While the public was less interested in the routine aspects of convict life, Tench’s prose—along with other early literature of discovery—exhibited the inquiring, scientific mind of the 18th-century Enlightenment. His works, such as A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793), provided Europeans with fascinating reports on the novelties of the new world, effectively catering to the European appetite for natural history.12