Dancing with Strangers Read online

  By the end of these few lines we know both King and his situation better.

  Two days later he took himself off on an adventure, away from rats and housekeeping:

  I went up the Cascade which is beautifull but at the same time tremenduous [sic] we had to ascend some perpendicular rocks by going from the branches of one tree to another, when arrived at the Summit, we found a very pleasant levell piece of Ground watered by the Rivulet, which supplies the Cascade & which is large and deep.

  Part exploration, part jaunt, and altogether a glorious day. This time we glimpse not only his situation, but his sensibility.

  Lieutenant William Bradley of the Sirius was twenty-nine years old and married, but like his brother officers was compelled to leave his wife behind in England. Establishing settlements was a masculine affair, at least for officers. Bradley wrote a professional journal enlivened by the occasional personal aside. Even more usefully, he painted a sequence of careful watercolours which provide many of the illustrations for this book.

  Letters are another beguilingly informal source. Writing home must have filled many empty evenings, but it would rise to fever pitch when a ship was due to leave for England or the Cape. Then whole days could pass in writing letters, often in several copies (these men knew the perils attending long sea voyages). Despite shared experiences, the letters which survive are marvellously various in tone. Assistant-Surgeon Worgan from the Sirius had somehow contrived to bring his piano with him (he beguiled his fellow-officers with concerts in ports along the way), so he must have spent time on his music. Given the tough conditions in the new land, he must also have been much occupied by his work. Nonetheless, we see him writing vast letters to his beloved brother Dick, as if, as he wistfully says, he were sitting opposite him by the fire. His love for his distant sibling is as palpable as his loneliness. The eagerness of publishers brought the antipodean colony very close to those left at home—as its editor points out, the compilation known as An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, which appeared in London under John Hunter’s name at the beginning of 1793, described events to the close of 1791, a mere twelve months before. To the exiled colonists, home was very far away. Worgan reported on local affairs, he made a few scientific observations, but his main endeavour was to entertain that ghostly fraternal presence on the other side of the fire with running jokes and racy tales, especially about ‘the savages’.

  Marine-Lieutenant Ralph Clark wrote to his wife Alicia about his dreams (he tenderly recalls her interpreting his dreams as they lay in bed of a morning), his longing for her, and his frequent atrocious toothaches. He did not tell her about the baby girl borne him by a convict woman in 1791 during his year at Norfolk Island, although he named the child, presumably with some emotional confusion, ‘Alicia’. There are others, like Major Ross, commander of the marines, who these days exist mainly as writers of furious letters of complaint, and others again, for all we know more important to the evolving life of the colony, who do not exist for us at all because they wrote nothing, or nothing that survived. Getting into the historical record is a chancy business.

  These were impressive men. While an individual might acknowledge ignorance of a particular area (Captain Hunter allowed he didn’t know much about agriculture), the collective assumed its competence over a wide range of scientific and artistic endeavours. Some painted, most sketched, some botanised; some sang, some studied the stars; some constructed lexicons of Australian words and struggled to fathom Australian grammar; Worgan played his piano. And nearly all of them wrote: fine, flowing sentences infused with their own individual flavour, with nuances of judgment, mood and emotion effortlessly expressed. As we will see, this is true even of Marine Private Jonathan Easty, whose wildly ambitious spelling marks him as an untaught man, but one in love with words and their protean possibilities.

  The display of solidarity sustained through the hardest times is also impressive. It is true that the solidarity was to a degree self-interested. Senior officers could not afford a reputation of being unable to handle their men; junior officers needed the recommendation of their seniors for promotion. As the slow months passed there would be tensions enough in the cramped little society at Port Jackson, with every face familiar and caste divisions deep, but they are largely excluded from the public record. It is private letters which tell us most about such abrasions. When Lieutenant Daniel Southwell of the Sirius writes to his mother we hear his chagrin at being exiled and, as he thought, forgotten at the lookout at South Head for the best part of two years, from February 1790 until he went home at the end of 1791. He had to watch from the sidelines as young Lieutenant Waterhouse, more than a year his junior but always at the governor’s side, found daily opportunity to shine. (Southwell cheered up briefly when Phillip, noticing his sulks, distinguished him with marked cordiality.)

  The stress of maintaining a decent affability was also tested by cantankerous personalities like Major Ross, a social monster in any circumstances but close to intolerable in the claustrophobic confines of the settlement. We would expect him to be worse when Phillip seized the chance to send him to command Norfolk Island, but there he seems to have performed rather better. The fusses Ross provoked could not be kept out of official correspondence, but they were loyally excluded from the journals, and the loathing he inspired was revealed only in private letters. The normally discreet Collins confided to his father that he could have wished Ross drowned when a ship carrying him was wrecked on the reef at Norfolk Island, and that he would choose death rather than share a ship for the long voyage to England with the execrable major.

  For the few respectable females of the settlement social constrictions must have been even more painful. Pious Mrs Johnson was the only lady in Sydney until the arrival of lively young Elizabeth Macarthur in July 1790, and Elizabeth found her sadly dull. Later Elizabeth would lament every reduction in her tiny circle of friends when, with their terms of duty ended, her favourite officers went home: gaining Mr Worgan’s piano was no compensation for losing Mr Worgan, while the loss of Captain Tench was scarcely to be borne.

  While the letter-writers might have more immediate verve than the formal journal-keepers, it is the Big Five of Tench, White, Hunter, Collins and Phillip himself who provide us with most of our information regarding life in the young colony. This is our most reliable information too, because by publication they opened themselves and their accounts to contemporary challenge and correction.

  Initially I saw these men, members as they were of a self-conscious officer caste, as cut from much the same stern cloth, but with increasing familiarity their individual personalities insisted on asserting themselves. People always look most alike when we know them least. So let me introduce them to you.

  GOVERNOR ARTHUR PHILLIP

  Commander Arthur Phillip was a naturally cautious man, and having risen to the top of the naval hierarchy from its lowliest position (he had begun as ship’s boy), he was well-practised in presenting a controlled image in public and on the page. His personal journal has been lost, but I suspect it would not have been very personal. His style for all seasons and purposes was clear, concise and conscientiously free from flourishes or affect which, given the mass of necessary communications and the scant time he had to write them, was a sensible decision. Nearly all his writings from Sydney come to us at second hand as selections from his official dispatches made by John Hunter, who drew on Phillip’s official correspondence for the ‘narrative’ he incorporated into his An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea 1787–1792, which appeared in 1793, or by the publisher’s scribes back in London who put together the rather more crisply titled The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay to catch the market in 1789. It is clear from a comparison of their versions with Phillip’s extant dispatches that his scribes had sufficient respect both for the man and for official documents to follow the contours of the original texts closely. It is therefore possible to map the attention given pa
rticular topics and so to discover Phillip’s hierarchy of concerns.

  We see more of Phillip the man of action in the account of a lay outsider. Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon to the Lady Penrhyn, hired only for the voyage out, and as a landsman a nervous observer, thought Phillip was a hasty sailor. He noted on 10 December 1787, after Hunter had taken over the Sirius and the command of the rest of the fleet while Phillip hurried on ahead with the four fastest vessels, that the remaining seven ships kept together well, ‘as Capt. Hunter does not carry such a press of sail as the Commodore used to do’. Bowes Smyth was also distinctly disaffected when Phillip insisted on moving the whole fleet out of Botany Bay to Port Jackson on a day when the wind was up. (Phillip probably decided to overlook weather conditions and make a dash for the more favoured harbour after the astonishing arrival at Botany Bay of two ships, the Boussole and the Astrolabe, comprising an official French expedition under the command of Comte Jean de La Pérouse.) The British ships only got out of the bay with the ‘utmost difficulty & danger wt many hairsbreadth escapes’ and quite a lot of bumping into each other, ‘with everyone blaming the rashness of the Governor in insisting upon the fleets working out in such weather, & all agreed it was next to a Miracle that some of the Ships were not lost’.

  Bowes Smyth was also a touch sardonic regarding Phillip’s onshore performance. He gave a full account of the governor’s formal reading of his commission, embellished with bands and marching and the processing of colours, and then the gentlemen gathered at the centre, with the convicts around them sitting on the ground and the soldiery forming an outer circle. Listening to the commission, Bowes Smyth judged it to be ‘a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any Governor under the British Crown’, Phillip being accorded ‘full power and authority’ to do whatever he needed to, with no requirement to take any counsel of anyone.

  Bowes Smyth reports that the governor proceeded to outline his regimen. Phillip was admirably direct. He warned the convicts that he had reason to think most of them incorrigible, and that his discipline would be accordingly stern: that anyone attempting to get into the women’s tents at night would be fired on; that if they did not work they would be let starve; that given their situation any stealing of ‘the most trifling Article of Stock or Provisions’ would be punished by death. Then came a gentler conclusion: they would not be cruelly worked, and ‘every individual shd. contribute his Share to render himself and Community at large happy and comfortable as soon as the nature of the settlement would permit it’. It was, given the circumstances, as encouraging a harangue as could be expected. But Bowes Smyth swiftly realised the governor’s court would be exclusively an officers’ club, noting crossly that only officers were invited to the governor’s tent for supper while he and the other free men come from England were left to fend for themselves.

  Nor was he impressed by Phillip’s on-shore discipline. Within a month of disembarkation he thought the convicts out of control and already carving out their own territory, the men being ‘ready to seize on any Sailors on shore who are walking near the Women’s Camp, beat them most unmercifully, & desire them to go on board’. (Sailors had used their opportunity to establish alliances with some of the convict women on the long voyage out.) He also thought the ‘justice’ dealt out in the governor’s courts was no justice at all. A marine who got in among the convict women and bashed a girl who had been his lover (‘a most infamous hussy’, splutters Bowes Smyth) was given a hundred lashes with a hundred more to come, while a convict who had struck a sentry received a mere one hundred and fifty. His comment: ‘The severity shewn to the Marines and Lenity to the Convicts has already excited great murmurings & discontent among the Corps & where it will end, unless some other plan is adopted, time will discover.’ He was even more outraged when Phillip ordered a naval steward who had bought ‘an animal of the squirrel kind’ from a convict and paid him in rum to suffer one hundred lashes, reduced to fifty when ‘several gentlemen’ urged greater leniency. (The steward had bought the ‘squirrel’, presumably a possum, on an officer’s behalf; trade with convicts was forbidden.) He had no complaint about the death sentence imposed on three convicts found guilty of stealing bread, pork and other provisions, or the three hundred lashes awarded a fourth man who had been their accomplice. In the event only one of the three died, being hanged before the assembled convicts on 26 February. The two others were twice granted a stay of execution for twenty-four hours, and finally reprieved once more, which might seem to us a purely sadistic display of power, but which was intended to impress its victims with the mercy lurking within the terrible justice of the Crown. The two men were condemned to be ‘transported’ yet again when somewhere could be found to send them, and another convict who had stolen food and wine in the interim was granted his life only if he would take on the hideous role of public executioner.

  All this and more, within a month of landing. Bowes Smyth’s agitated cluckings give us some sense of the challenges Phillip faced in bringing each level of this unruly new society to hear and to heed his words. Phillip’s own correspondence is notably smoother, largely having to do with the anxious business of housekeeping and the balancing of eroding provisions against reducing rations.

  Phillip was also the patriarch of an expanding community: managing his officers, sustaining the morale of the soldiery in a hardship post, struggling to restore the health of diseased and ailing convicts and then to get useful work out of them, and then, when he was able, finding new land, establishing new settlements. Given the urgency and the consequence of all these concerns, the energy Phillip expended on his relationship with the Australians is to my mind remarkable. I have come to think him close to visionary in his obstinate dream of integrating these newly discovered people into the British polity.

  Phillip had arrived burdened with an armful of instructions on how to handle natives. As early as 1768, when Cook’s Endeavour was about to embark on its voyage, the Earl of Morton, President of the Royal Society, presented Cook with a list of ‘hints’ for dealings with native peoples met along the way. The hints have the whiff of the candle about them; of pleasurable hours spent in desk-bound explorations. Beautifully clear principles were enunciated. The shedding of native blood was prohibited as ‘a crime of the highest nature’, these people being equal in the eyes of their Maker to ‘the most Polished European’. Nor could they be deprived of their land without consent. Moreover, they could justly resist invaders whom ‘they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether the apprehension be well or ill founded’.

  Morton realised that this last principle might be difficult to maintain, given that the British would have to get water and fresh food where they could. How to communicate the innocence of their intentions? So he set himself to devising a basic-needs alphabet in sign language. We watch his imagination take fire as he wrestles with this delightful problem:

  Amicable signs may be made which they could not possibly mistake—Such as holding up a jug, turning it bottom upwards, to shew them it was empty, then applying it to the lips in the attitude of drinking, [or] opening the mouth wide, putting the fingers towards it, and then making the motion of chewing, would sufficiently demonstrate a want of food.

  A question arises. Will the chewing always be understood to mean, ‘We want to eat?’ Might it not, under certain circumstances and in certain company, mean, ‘We want to eat you’? But Morton does not falter, and proceeds smoothly to the next phase. Music, but only music of a soothing kind, should be employed. The natives should not be alarmed ‘with the report of Guns, Drums, or even a trumpet’, but rather ‘be entertained near the Shore with a soft Air’. Thus, with savage breasts calmed, a landing could be effected and a few trinkets (‘particularly looking Glasses’) laid upon the shore. The newcomers would then tactfully withdraw to a small distance to observe the locals’ response before a second landing was attempted. Furthermore, ‘Should they in a hostile manner oppose a landing, and kill
some men in the attempt, even this would hardly justify firing among them.’

  Then, at last, comes the crucial qualifier: ‘till every other gentle method had been tried’. In the last resort, the landing must be effected whether the natives resisted or not. Why? Because the expeditions’ aims were scientific, and therefore virtuous. The British could land, even in the face of resistance. They could trade. All they could not do was to occupy the land without consent.

  There is something disarming about these solemn lessons in mannerly imperialism, but as we would expect the ‘hints’ proved somewhat wanting as guides to action. Cook’s first landing in New Zealand ended with his men withdrawing to their ship leaving their gifts of nails and beads on the corpse of a chief pierced through the heart by a musket shot. Cook already knew something the noble deskman did not: a lot of ‘savages’ enjoyed fighting. His New Zealand experiences were only some among many initially peaceable encounters which had swirled into violence: as he coolly observed of the chief-killing episode, ‘Had I thought that they would have made the least resistance I would not have come near them, but as they did not I was not to stand still and suffer either my self or those who were with me to be knocked on the head.’ For once, Joseph Banks agreed with him. He thought the Maori were shockingly eager to fight, almost making a game of it: ‘They always attacked, though seldom seeming to mean more than to provoke us to show them what we were able to do in this case. By many trials we found that good usage and fair words would not avail the least with them, nor would they be convinced by the noise of our firearms alone that they were superior to theirs.’ The only thing to do was to fire to wound, because ‘as soon as they had felt the smart of even a load of small shot and had time allowed them to recollect themselves from the effects of their artificial courage…they were sensible of our generosity in not taking the advantage of our superiority’. For Banks gunfire, not music, was the way to the savage heart.