Dancing with Strangers Read online

  Tench was a marine, but his journals do not follow the naval model. It is true that on the voyage out he gives triumphantly precise measurements of latitude and new-fangled longitude, that marvellous fruit of the new science, and like any young man involved in grand affairs he brims with advice: potential settlers may buy their poultry, wines and tobacco in Tenerife, the Madeiras, the Cape of Good Hope, anywhere—but they must buy their sheep and hogs in England, and bring all their clothing, furniture and tools with them. But that was on the voyage. Once arrived in Australia he left such matters to others, nor did he bother with visual illustrations beyond a single map. While he was astonished by the weirder fauna and delighted by some of the flora, his natural tendency was towards philosophising rather than science, and his descriptions of the land’s human inhabitants come sequined with reflections and anecdotes. An example: while he, like his competitors, provided the conventional description of the physical attributes of the Australian—long-muscled, skin char-black, hair wavy, beards scant—only Tench thought to tell us that the Australians’ ‘large black eyes are universally shaded by the long thick sweepy eyelash’. He finished with a dancing-school flourish which does not quite come off—‘[the sweepy eyelash is] so much prized in appreciating beauty, that perhaps hardly any face is so homely that this aid can to some degree render interesting; and hardly any so lovely which, without it, bears not some trace of insipidity’—which leaves us slightly dizzy. But we will not forget those eyelashes.

  Tench also had a sharp eye for what the anthropologists call ‘material culture’. He was especially intrigued by the Australians’ canoes, as James Cook had been in his time. In New Zealand Cook had been impressed by the ‘great ingenuity and good workmanship in the building and framing of [Maori] Boats or Canoes’, which he described as ‘long and narrow and shaped very much like a New England Whale boat’, that universal model of fine small-boat design. They were also splendidly large, the largest being capable of carrying up to one hundred men along with their arms. By contrast, he was outraged by the sheer effrontery of Australian canoes: ‘The worst I think I ever saw, they were about twelve or fourteen feet long made of one piece of the bark of a tree drawn or tied up at each end and the middle kept open by means of pieces of sticks by way of thwarts.’

  Bradley of the Sirius recorded his contempt for the flimsy craft, so unlike the sleek double-hullers he knew from Tahiti—no more than a narrow strip of bark, he said, inelegant, unstable, and propelled by ludicrous paddles ‘in shape like a pudding stirrer’ held one in each hand. Nonetheless, Bradley had to allow that in these apologies for canoes the local men went astonishingly fast: sitting back on their heels with knees spread to hold out the sides, with bodies erect and paddling furiously with their pudding-stirrers, they could slice through a heavy surf (and we know how big the surf around Sydney can be) ‘without oversetting or taking in more water than in smooth seas’.

  In these same horribly unstable craft men would leap to their feet and proceed to spear fish with four-metre-long spears, or alternatively lie athwart the canoe, heads fully submerged to get a clear view, spears at the ready, while a companion did his best to keep the craft balanced for the thrust. Thinking of Sydney Harbour we think of sharks, but the Australians kept themselves out of the water unless there was no help for it—and what use would a heavier canoe be against a white pointer with murder in its heart? (Tench: ‘Sharks of an enormous size are found here. One of these was caught by the people on board the Sirius, which measured at the shoulders six feet and a half [two metres] in circumference.’)

  Tench recognised the élan of these men, paddling kilometres into the open sea in mere twists of bark. But (typically) he looked beyond male flamboyance to the women, and they impressed him even more. A woman would go out in her skiff, ‘a piece of bark tied at both ends with vines, and the edge of it just above the water’, with a nursling child precariously perched on her shoulders and gripping her hair. The baby would be swung down to the breast when its grizzling grew too loud, and then swung up again so the mother could get on with her hook-and-line fishing in woman’s style. Hunger being a close companion, both men and women nurtured small fires on clay pads in the bottom of their canoes, cooking and eating the first fish as they were taken, and taking the rest of the catch back to shore to be shared.

  Captain Hunter of the Sirius also recognised seamanship when he saw it, even in women, and again we see his endearing concern for the well-being of infants. A mother, he said, might take out two or even three tiny children with her, all of them packed into ‘a miserable boat, the highest part of which was not six inches above the surface of the water, washing almost in the edge of a surf, which would frighten even an old seaman to come near in a good craft’, but with the smallest baby tucked between her breast and her raised knees, ‘where it lay secure and safe as in a crib’.

  Where Tench excels is in the reporting of encounters, moods, and above all conversations. He conversed with everyone—or, more exactly, with everyone who interested him: fellow-officers, settlers and (long before he had any of the language, and intensely) with the Australians, who, with his American experience behind him, he nonchalantly called ‘Indians’.

  Consider his first meeting with the local people.

  Late in January 1788, after three days at anchor in Botany Bay, Tench was walking for the first time on an Australian beach. He had the company of a few friends, and he was hand-in-hand with a little boy of about seven who had also been cooped up too long. (There were seventeen children belonging to the officers and men on the First Fleet, and sixteen children of convicts. On the Charlotte, Tench’s ship, there were only three: two children belonging to convicts, and one ‘free’ child. Was this Tench’s small friend?)

  Tench tells us that as the British party strolled along ‘we were met by a dozen Indians, naked as at the moment of their birth’, also out for a stroll. The two groups, one clothed, one naked, both armed, and presumably neither ready to give the advantage to the other, advanced warily. Tench had seen ‘Indians’ during his American sojourn; he had read Cook and the others on the blessed inhabitants of Polynesia, but he was not prepared for what he saw that day: naked black men, with wild hair and scrubby beards, hair, faces and bodies shining with fish oil, and every one of them hefting a businesslike spear. This was Encountering the Other with a vengeance.

  Tench seems not to have turned a hair. Noting that the sight of the little boy roused particular interest, Tench, with the confident intuition and the quick invention which were to characterise his contacts with the Australians, opened the lad’s shirt so the strangers could appreciate the dazzling whiteness of his skin, and continued to walk steadily towards them. One ‘hideously ugly’ old man was especially charmed by the child: drawing close, ‘with great gentleness [he] laid his hand on the child’s hat and afterwards felt his clothes, muttering to himself all the while’. When the boy grew restless under the handling, Tench contrived to send him back to the rest of his party ‘without giving offence to the old gentleman’, who he was confident would understand his protectiveness because ‘some youths of their own, though considerably older than the one with us, were kept back by the group’.

  This is probably about as good as it gets in encounters between strangers. The recognition that ‘natural’ impulses—curiosity, tenderness towards the young, a nervous good will—were probably shared by both naked Australians and swaddled Europeans is a denial of the dangers of otherness not often met with. Tench—alert, intelligent, curious, compassionate—demonstrates here his genius both for the ‘natural’ human response, and for the quick recognition of unfamiliar styles of dignity, treating the old man with a sensitive courtesy which assumed not only a common humanity, but a shared delicacy of feeling. He was in no doubt as to the political relationship between the two peoples—he had just recorded Governor Phillip landing on the north shore of the bay ‘to take possession of his new land and bring about an intercourse between its old and new masters’�
��but for Tench the assumption of political domination did not preclude mutual understanding and respect.

  Over the next months his view was to harden. By the completion of his first report, ‘A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay’ to which a postscript was added in October 1788, with the first cheerful encounters a fading memory and contact shrunk to occasional tussles between fishing parties, his hopes of friendly exchanges had dimmed. He claimed to have come to share the bleak evaluation of Australians made by Cook eighteen years before: these were an ugly, dirty people, miserably under-equipped for life. He declared himself shocked by their lean-tos, their nakedness, the crudeness of their few tools. Nonetheless, he continued sensitive to details of their behaviour, noting, for example, the contrast between the men’s domination over their women and their egalitarianism between themselves: ‘Excepting a little tributary respect which the younger part appear to pay those more advanced in years, I never could observe any degree of subordination among them.’ The absence of visible marks of deference must have been startling for a young captain-lieutenant, whose every action was modulated by the niceties of rank.

  Then once again Tench displays his distinctive flair. The early encounters had taken place around the coves of the harbour: that is, on the Australians’ home ground, which the British, of course, assumed to be neutral, or more correctly empty, given there were no obvious permanent habitations. Only once did two old men venture into the settlement, and we wonder if staying away from guests’ camps was an Australian courtesy. Tench decided their hesitancy might have a different origin: that in the face of ‘our repeated endeavours to induce them to come among us…they either fear or despise us too much to dare be anxious for a closer connection’. ‘Fear’ was the conventional and comfortable British interpretation of native caution. But ‘despise’? Could these naked savages dare ‘despise’ officers of the British Crown? That Tench thought they might marks him as a man of unusual imaginative flexibility.

  As for himself, he took every chance he could to ‘converse’ with these interesting people. During the brief period of good will immediately after the move to Port Jackson when Australians were still frequenting the fringes of the settlement, he began collecting all the words and phrases in the local language he could. He made some surprising discoveries: for example, that it was Cook and the British who had introduced the word ‘kangaroo’ to the local people, whose word for that surprising creature was patagorang. They seemed to have started applying ‘kangaroo’ as the British word for any and all the large animals the newcomers had brought with them, excepting the familiar dog, or, as they called it, ‘dingo’. Tench deduced all this when he came upon a group of men ‘busily employed in looking at some sheep in an enclosure, and repeatedly crying out “kangaroo, kangaroo”!’ Always ready to augment innocent amusement, he was trying to point out some horses and cows at a little distance when the men’s attention was deflected by the appearance of some convict women, upon which they ‘stood at a distance of several paces, expressing very significantly the way in which they were attracted’, but ‘without offering them any insult’. This is a pleasant and, in its way, a remarkable scene. I cannot see a Spanish captain standing by while ‘savages’ openly assessed the charms of Spanish women.

  (Some of these attempts at language learning can only have compounded confusion. Tench tells us that the British had been nearly three years in Port Jackson before they realised that the native word they used as meaning ‘good’ in fact signified ‘no’, or at least demurral. The consequences are too daunting even to contemplate.)

  Tench had deeply enjoyed these fleeting encounters with Australians before the general alienation. Then on the second-last day of 1788 an Australian man was taken captive on Phillip’s orders, and Tench’s talent for personal relationships could at last come into play.

  JANUARY 1788–SPRING 1790 SETTLING IN

  The two French ships which had followed the First Fleet into Botany Bay remained at anchor there for the best part of six weeks, which allowed for a number of polite exchanges with the British now ensconced at Port Jackson. Philip Gidley King, fluent in French, especially enjoyed the French officers’ company, their conversation and the delicacy of their manners. Without King’s journal we would know very little about this small, beautifully equipped expedition and its courteous officers: the two ships sailed out of Botany Bay into oblivion, lost somewhere in the Pacific. In the event, King had sailed even earlier, being informed by Phillip on 31 January that he was to head a tiny settlement at Norfolk Island, another even more remote site identified by Cook as promising. On the morning of 15 February King and his little band of settlers—seven free men and fifteen convicts, six of them women—embarked on the Supply, to be dumped on a beach with their baggage and provisions piled around them with orders to make a new society. Naval obedience came at a high price.

  Before he left King made the most of his time with the French. He reports the Comte de La Pérouse as notably less well disposed to the local people than was Phillip. His wariness was natural enough: at a landfall only a handful of weeks before, the expedition had lost two longboats and more than a dozen men, among them the captain of the Astrolabe and eight other officers, in a surprise attack by natives. (Up to that time they had not lost a single man.) Their assailants were islanders, probably Samoans, ‘a very strong & handsome race of men scarce one among them less than 6 Feet high, & well-sett’, who over several days had seemed perfectly friendly, and then, after what seemed to the French a trivial incident, had swung their clubs with killing effect. The French estimated that about thirty islanders fell to their guns.

  Retrospectively La Pérouse read the episode as a textbook example of ‘savagery’: of unpredictable fluctuations in mood, unpredictable eruptions of murderous violence. At Botany Bay he built a stockade around his tents, mounted two small guns, and kept his guns at the ready.

  Phillip built no stockades and he set no guards, or not against the Australians. He intended to persuade the local people that the newcomers were their friends. But his first task was to settle his own people, and once the flurry of disembarkation was over, with its inescapable disorder—the orgiastic scenes on the night of the disembarkation of the convict women have become legendary—officers, soldiers and convicts set about making themselves at home.

  First, the alien landscape had to be mapped and its strangeness tamed by naming. Spectacular landmarks were given the names of distant patrons—Pittwater, Norfolk Island—but with their duty done to the grandees, the new arrivals could celebrate themselves and their adventures—Tench’s Hill, Bradley’s Head, Collins Cove, Dawes Point. The names, used daily and inscribed in letters to kin and friends, must in time have come to seem ‘natural’. Both Phillip’s sturdy mind and conciliatory ambitions are suggested by his decision in mid-1791 to reject the wistful romanticism of Rose-Hill for the new up-river settlement in favour of the local name, Parramatta, which meant something like Where Eels Meet—that is, a place of feasting and fecundity.

  Outposts of empire are lonely places. But calendars count time at the same rate everywhere, so the settlers celebrated their first King’s Birthday on 4 June with all the pomp and alcohol they could muster. No news came from the real world: they could not know whether they were at war with France on any particular day, and these ardent patriots were to hear the King was well again before they had known he was ill. Remote though they were from the centres of action, distance brought none of the liberties remoteness can bring. The bounds of settlement were crushingly narrow. Officers could look forward to occasional ‘expeditions’ on land or on the water, but convicts were penned within settlement boundaries, unless they were given specific duties outside it. They were always being admonished for ‘straggling’—wandering in the bush without permission—which they continued to do whatever the consequences in floggings or spear wounds.

  Officers settled to a range of genteel diversions. As we have seen, some made music, some collected specimens, s
ome drew or painted. Some kept journals, giving form to otherwise featureless days: ‘this happened, then that happened’. A few, like Major Ross, squabbled. Irritability helps pass the time. And, as we know, everyone, or everyone literate, wrote letters home. They wrote in the hope that, barring shipwrecks, the words they were writing would be read months or years later by a known loved someone in some known loved place. George Worgan bursts into what reads like a postmodernist riff on time, sound and distance as he considers that, however long the chain of words he is hurling towards his brother, ‘the First Word will not have reached one quarter over the Seas that divides Us, at the time the last is tumbling out of my Mouth’, and decides he will let fly each one ‘with such an impulsive Velocity…as to make their Way against the Resistance of Rocks, Seas and contrary Winds and arrive at your Street-Door with a D—l of a Suscitation…’ A ‘suscitation’ indeed, with the force of love, gales and several seas behind it. Worgan was missing his brother badly. Two transports were about to sail. He planned to put a letter to Dick on each, and reflected on the melancholy possibility that neither would arrive. Then Dick, in lieu of his living, loving words, would have to make do with the narratives being prepared by Collins or Tench for news of his young brother. The two ships were sailing in the morning. Worgan confided he had thirty-one letters, five of them almost as long as this forty-page monster, ‘to Close, Seal, Enclose and direct’ and get on board before the ships raised anchor. Then comes a forlorn postscript: ‘I have sent you 2 letters beside this.’ For all its compulsive chirpiness, Worgan’s huge letter breathes loneliness.