Dancing with Strangers Read online

  More damningly, and, as time was to show, most damagingly, he believed these people to be bereft of formal rules to live by, and so confidently assumed that his greatest gift to them would not be British manners or cooking techniques, desirable as they were, but the gift of British justice mediated by British law. In time he would learn, slowly, painfully, that Australians were rather less teachable than he had thought. It would be on deep disagreements regarding the moral foundation of law that his dreams of enduring reconciliation would founder.

  CAPTAIN JOHN HUNTER, COMMANDER OF HMS SIRIUS

  Jane Austen exclaimed that her naval-officer brothers ‘write so even, so clear, both in style and penmanship, so much to the point, and give so much intelligence, that it is enough to kill one’. In her novels she allowed herself to become positively girlish in her effusions of admiration for naval men like Fanny’s brother William or Anne Elliot’s Captain Wentworth, and quite lost her characteristic irony when she considered the nobility of their profession.

  I confess that as I read John Hunter’s journal I felt something of the same flutter. I liked what he said, and I liked his silences, too. He was silent as he watched his big, beautiful Sirius pounded to pieces on a reef at Norfolk Island in February 1790, knowing he would have to face a court-martial for its loss; knowing its loss to be unavoidable; knowing that he and his men would be marooned on the island for unknown months to come (eleven, as it turned out), being treated as so many extra mouths to feed and ignominiously subordinate to a mere marine. He was silent regarding his loathing of that marine, Major Ross, new governor of the island: officers do not denigrate their fellow-officers. But he was unhesitatingly brisk in his criticism of unseamanlike behaviour, as when a ship’s captain en route to China decided not to waste valuable time calling in on the forlorn little sub-colony of Norfolk, leaving the islanders bereft of provisions, news, and the hope that they had not been forgotten. Here was the very model of an eighteenth-century British sea captain.

  I especially liked watching how his few mannerisms fell away when he wrote on matters nautical. Reading the accounts of those naval officers today, we recognise a shared view of what mattered and how what mattered should be ordered. New territories like Port Jackson were described in accordance with a formula: geographic form, terrain, bays, rivers and creeks; human inhabitants considered under the headings of economic organisation, social organisation, political organisation (if discernible), religious thought (if decipherable); local fauna, local flora. Their laconic recording of events in stern chronological order derived from their habituation to the grid-form of ships’ logs, with their topics typically following the model of the journals of the great Cook. They also acquired a daunting array of skills. They were responsible for their own charts, maps and ‘views’ (exaggerated profiles of coastlines for easy visual identification), and their written sailing directions would be crucial guides for all later mariners entering those waters. That training in naval draughtsmanship meant that once landed they could supply land maps, sketches, landscapes, and even carefully precise drawings of previously ‘non descript’ creatures and plants. There were three especially skilled draughtsmen on board the Sirius: Captain Hunter himself, his first mate Lieutenant Bradley, and young George Raper, appointed midshipman on the voyage out, possibly the most gifted of the three, who would never see England again. He would die of fever off Batavia when he was twenty-four.

  These men were sons of the English scientific enlightenment, and proud of it. But they were seamen first of all. On all professional matters—the location of reefs, shoals and currents, the seasons and habits of treacherous winds—Hunter’s easy exactitude reminds us of something we landlubbers forget. For men like Hunter, as for Phillip, the ‘trackless oceans’ were well-signed thoroughfares linking familiar ports and provisioning centres, and thick with memories, familiar to them in ways the land spaces of the colonies could never be.

  Hunter’s unusual insouciance regarding land-based catastrophes presumably derived from his conviction that worse things happen at sea. On land he used his fine measuring eye to assess, for example, the accuracy and the killing power of native spears, crucial information to the intruders and also, as we will see, to us, as we struggle to retrieve Australian intentions from British accounts of their aggression. (Preliminary example: did spears which fell short or wide miss deliberately, or through lack of skill or power?) Hunter could recognise the strategic deployment of Australian warriors in situations which to less experienced eyes would look like savage chaos.

  He was also, by his own confession, rather too quick to resolve ambiguous situations by force. During an apparently friendly encounter with some of the local people, but after several British stragglers had been speared by unknown assailants, a warrior suddenly flung a spear. It whistled a good six feet over the startled Britishers’ boat, so the gesture was probably theatrical, but Hunter snatched up his gun, intending to discharge it into the midst of the clustered Australians. The gun misfired, the men fled, and no permanent damage was done, but Hunter knew he had been hasty: ‘It was perhaps fortunate that my gun did not go off; as I was so displeased by their treachery, that it is highly probable I might have shot one of them,’ which would have been directly contrary to Phillip’s requirement of restraint. Hunter was normally obedient to his superiors, but he was not of a temperament to give second chances.

  As an artist Hunter drew with stern devotion to accuracy. Although we might feel that his representations of, for example, the platypus or the wombat fall far short of capturing the creatures’ distinctive forms of life, we have to remember he was often drawing from a corpse or even from an emptied skin—although we have to remember too that the great George Stubbs, also working from a skin, could re-create a marvellously vivid kangaroo back in England. But Hunter’s birds are unfailingly marvellous and his written account is alive with images no one else thought to mention. Painted dancers at a little distance ‘appeared accoutred with cross belts’; others, with ‘narrow white streaks around the body, with a broad line down the middle of the back and belly, and a single stripe down each arm, thigh and leg’, gave the wearers ‘a most shocking appearance; for upon the black skin the white marks were so very conspicuous, that they were exactly like so many moving skeletons’.

  Despite his artist’s eye we might judge Hunter to be unpleasantly haughty in his accounts of the Australians, rather like a squire observing the doings of a beagle pack. He was eager to control situations, and rather too fond of taking calculated liberties. One example: when on one occasion he suspected that the local women were being deliberately kept at a distance, he exerted himself to lure them closer, and was triumphant when he succeeded—or was permitted to succeed. He took little interest in Phillip’s civilising mission; he thought the Australians physically repellent because they were ‘abominably filthy’, and he describes their filthiness with his usual visual exactitude:

  they never clean their skin, but it is generally smeared with the fat of such animals as they kill, and afterwards covered by every sort of dirt; sand from the sea beach, and the ashes from their fires, all adhere their greasy skin, which is never washed, except when accident, or the want of food, obliges them to go into the water.

  And he gives no hint that he thought the Australians even potentially educable: when ‘passion’ overcame them, he said, ‘they act as all savages do, as madmen’.

  Were this all we knew of him, we would not like him. But there was good humour in him, and male competitiveness, too. To return to dancing: Hunter was one of the white guests invited to the corroboree staged by Baneelon and Colbee early in 1791, just after the ‘coming in’. He was particularly impressed by a remarkable feat performed by the male dancers, achieved by ‘placing their feet very wide apart, and, by an extraordinary exertion of the muscles and thighs, moving the knees in a trembling and very surprising manner’. Then he adds, casually, ‘which none of us could imitate’, and suddenly we know that at some stage of the evening Hu
nter and other Englishmen were on their feet and in the ring, furiously wobbling their knees. I have a subliminal vision of tourists visiting indigenous territories nowadays being pulled to their feet and made to stumble through a parody of an Australian dance, to the covert giggles and overt shouts of encouragement of the locals.

  Hunter also chose to report an apparently trivial episode in detail. In June 1789 ‘the Governor, Captain Collins (the judge-advocate), Captain Johnston of the Marines, Mr White, principal surgeon of the settlement, Mr Worgan, Mr Fowell and myself, from the Sirius’ plus ‘two men, all armed with muskets’, set off for Broken Bay to explore the Hawkesbury River. Notice that these imperialists had to do without the glamour and ease of horse-borne exploration, the one stallion and three mares belonging to the colony being far too precious to risk in such adventures. They had to walk, and to carry their own supplies, in this case ‘several days provisions, Water, Arms and ammunition’, and we wonder what Australian warriors, moving so lightly over the land, would have made of these grotesquely burdened travellers.

  This time the tents and poles and extra provisions could be ferried to the agreed beach rendezvous by boat, and by afternoon the walkers were setting up their base camp. Then someone stumbled upon a girl, still weak from the smallpox epidemic which had swept the area a month before, crouching in the wet grass close by the camp. The whole party trooped off to look at her, scaring her even further out of her wits. Hunter reports: ‘She was very much frightened on our approaching her, and shed many tears, with piteous lamentations.’

  The gentlemen went into a flurry of action. A fire was made, grass dried, birds shot, skinned and laid on the fire to broil ‘along with some fish’, and water, of which she was in great need, given her. Then they stacked up fuel for her fire, put her to bed by covering her with warm dried grass, and retired contentedly to their tents.

  The next morning the girl was rather less frightened, and when the British party returned from their day’s walking late that afternoon they found she had moved to a little bark hut on the beach. Now she had a little girl with her, whom she was trying to protect from falling rain by covering her with her body. The child was, in Hunter’s bachelor opinion, ‘as fine a little infant of that age as I ever saw’, but desperately afraid of the strangers: however much they coaxed ‘it could not be prevailed on to look up; it lay with its face upon the ground, and one hand covering its eyes.’ (Note again the visual detail.) Again they plied the mother with meat, fish and fuel, this time heaping dried grass over her hut to keep her warmer, and in the morning, when they visited again, the baby was ready to hold a British hand. I hope it was Hunter’s. He has just betrayed an unexpected tenderness towards small children. Then, leaving the mother with good supplies of fuel, food and water, they set off on their expedition upriver. When they returned after a few days’ (inconclusive) exploring, their friend and her child had gone.

  I cite this episode because it tells us a great deal about Hunter we would not otherwise know. It also reminds us how precarious are the edifices we build from surviving fragments from the past. Hunter might have left out the incident as trivial; or his publisher might have struck it out as behaviour unbecoming to serious-minded Britons. Instead he chose to memorialise it on the title page of the first edition of Hunter’s Historical Journal. There is the naked woman cowering with her baby in a curved grass shelter; there are the tall Englishmen standing protectively around her like a wall. The image provides no model for the future: not very much later, Australian women, and Australian babies too, would die of British bullets. Nonetheless, we have been permitted to see these men bustling about arranging for the comfort of a frightened woman.

  The accident of our knowledge of this particular incident also reminds us how many other Britishers, articulate in their own time, have been retrospectively struck as dumb as Lot’s reckless wife because no record of their actions happens to survive. The ‘historical record’, with its silences, absences and evasions, accidental and deliberate, is a most imperfect mirror of ‘what happened’.

  SURGEON-GENERAL JOHN WHITE

  By his own account Surgeon White enjoyed playing the gallant on the voyage out. Thirty years old and unmarried, he sought the company of women, whether Dutch or Brazilian, in the ports along the way and flirted zestfully with them. In Rio he was charmed to discover that the Portuguese, reputedly a jealous race, were so delighted by compliments paid their womenfolk that they were ready to grant a delightful degree of access to them, as he discovered when a gentleman asked him to help rebind the magnificent floor-length hair he had ordered his wife to loose so the charming English officer could properly admire its abundance. While other officers on shore leave no more than glimpsed feminine shadows behind latticed windows, White spent tender hours at convent grilles in halting conversation with the lovely novices within. He enjoyed every aspect of his stay in Rio except for the lack of coffee-houses, an odd absence to claim for Brazil, especially when we know that the masters of the different vessels ‘all adjourn’d to a Coffee house to Breakfast [where] they had Coffee in great plenty, sweatmeats [sic] & a great variety of rich cakes’ after they had done their marketing, a treat they enjoyed so much they described it in detail to Arthur Bowes Smyth, cooped up on the Lady Penrhyn.

  Surprisingly, White enjoyed Capetown nearly as well as exotic Rio. During three years spent in the West Indies he had been sickened by the British style of slavery: ‘The bare retrospect of the cruelties I have seen…there excites a kind of horror that chills my blood.’ By contrast the Dutch, cruel as they were to delinquent compatriots (they were slowly broken on the wheel) treated their slaves with ‘great humanity and kindness’. And if the Dutch ladies were not quite as fetching as the dark-eyed Brazilians, they were of a ‘peculiar gay turn’, cheerfully allowing liberties unthinkable in England. No tender sighings here: in Capetown he found he had to adopt more robust ways to be ‘the favourite with the fair’. The local style, he found, was to ‘grapple the lady’ (his italics), ‘and paw her in a manner that does not partake in the least of gentleness’. A gallant was also expected to ‘ravish kisses even in the presence of her parents’, as White gallantly did. Other countries, other customs.

  White was also a fine surgeon, and proud of it. In Rio he displayed his professional skills before a sceptical local audience by amputating a man’s leg by a new method, and silenced the scoffers when the stump healed in as many days as the weeks it usually took. And for all his playboy style in port, throughout the voyage he maintained an active concern for the health of the people in his charge, convict and free. When he joined the fleet assembling for the voyage to Botany Bay at Portsmouth he was told by ‘a medical gentleman from Portsmouth’ that a ‘malignant disease’ was loose among the convicts on the Alexander which would demand their immediate re-landing, a daunting undertaking. When White hurried below to test the truth of the story, he found several men suffering from ‘slight inflammatory complaints’ but badly frightened by gloomy prognostications, others physically and mentally debilitated by long imprisonment, and others again keeping to their beds ‘to avoid the inconvenience of the cold, which was at this time very piercing’. With a David Collins these diagnoses would have led to scoldings and angry rousings-out, but White thought the malingerers’ strategy perfectly sensible, given that their ‘wretched clothing’ gave them no protection from the cold. He briskly reassured the invalids that the prognostications were false and that they would surely recover, and on the spot promised the rest of his eager listeners that warm clothes would be found for those who needed them, and that the salt rations they had been living on for the last four months while moored in a British port would be immediately replaced by fresh beef and vegetables. He also arranged with the ship’s master for the convicts to be brought up on deck daily, ‘one half at a time…in order that they might breathe a purer air’. Then, with matters sorted out below, he hurried back to the quarterdeck to demolish the interfering ‘medical gentleman’, who was unwise e
nough to repeat his destructive nonsense.

  This energetic common sense made White an excellent surgeon for a convict fleet. He had been able to act so decisively because Phillip, who knew him from earlier voyages (remember how small a world this was), had given him authority to order what was necessary for the health and well-being of ‘the people’. We have an account from the lower deck of White’s precautions from the marine private Jonathan Easty, who records the time he spent scrubbing and whitewashing in the first days of the voyage. White continued alert to threats to his charges’ health, and was inventive in removing them: when the women convicts showed so pertinacious a desire to get into the men’s quarters that the hatches had to be kept closed, White prevailed on Phillip to have gratings made, which kept the sexes apart but at least let them breathe.