by Tony Horwitz
Glancing back, it was easy to see how Cook had failed to appreciate Port Jackson. Just beyond the golden sandstone headlands flanking its mouth, the harbor doglegged, obscuring what lay beyond: a drowned river valley that wended its way inland for miles. Even today, Sydney’s majesty—the scalloped Opera House, the soaring arch of the Harbour Bridge, the city’s lush foreshore of fig trees and fruit bats—doesn’t unfold until you’ve sailed well inside the headlands.
The harbor entrance slipped out of view and we glided parallel to the coast, with the rolling Pacific to port and the crowded beach suburb of Bondi to starboard. “Just think,” Roger said, gazing at the beach, “the Endeavour sailed past this same exact landscape. White sand, red tile roofs, string bikinis.”
I sensed the crew-women were rolling their eyes, though it was hard to tell. Their faces were obscured by sunglasses and visored caps. The few bits of tanned cheek or chin I could glimpse were streaked white with sunblock, like the clay-painted faces of Aborigines. I turned to a woman I guessed was Susie and asked what had drawn her to sail racing.
“I started after my husband died,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago. He was sailing a boat to Adelaide and a freak wave washed him overboard. His body was never found.” She paused. “I hadn’t done any sailing to that point, but ever since I’ve been keen as mustard.”
She ducked below to get a beer, leaving me to ponder her story. Roger whispered: “They’d been married ten years, so it may have been expedient and a blessing. Any earlier and you’d have to regard it as a tragedy.”
When Susie returned, I changed the subject and asked how Roger compared to other captains.
“He’s fine so long as the wind blows to buggery, like today,” she said. “Roger’s much worse when the wind’s light. Then he gets bored and hits the turps.”
“I drink to keep my hand steady,” Roger insisted. “Steering’s the most important job.”
“All captains say that,” Spider chimed in. “It keeps their egos up.”
“Among other things,” Karen added.
Roger groaned. “Cook didn’t have to endure this. No women on board. No democracy. And no limits on his grog.”
At the mention of Cook, I repeated the question I’d posed to Pugsy. What did the captain mean to Australians?
“Mean?” Susie said. “He doesn’t mean a bloody thing.”
“He’s boring,” Karen added. “Australians can’t stand boring.”
I looked at Spider. She shrugged. “Captain Cook, Captain Hook, I can never keep them straight.”
I cracked a VB and vowed never to ask the question again. After living in Sydney—and being married to a native for fifteen years—I should have known better. Australians mock almost everything, authority in particular and British authority most of all. They have no national heroes in the American sense, only lawbreaking folk heroes, like the horse thief and bank robber Ned Kelly, an Irish convict’s son who donned homemade body armor before battling police. Or the drunken gold prospectors who erected a stockade called Eureka rather than pay mining taxes. The nation’s best-known song, “Waltzing Matilda,” eulogized a sheep rustler.
Kelly eventually hanged, the Eureka Stockade fell after a fifteen-minute battle, and the “jolly swagman” drowned himself. But Australians love losers, so long as they lose with panache against overwhelming odds, or as martyrs to British authority (the Poms, Aussies derisively call Brits). The true national holiday wasn’t Australia Day; it was Anzac Day, commemorating the doomed, British-ordered assault by Australian troops at Gallipoli in 1915. James Cook—a winner, a faithful servant of His Majesty, a wigged Pom without much flair or humor—had little hope of entering Australia’s pantheon of antiheroes.
I was mulling all this somewhere between Bondi and Botany Bay when I realized I felt sick. “Sea’s getting lumpy out here, isn’t it?” Roger said. Lofty seemed more like it. Alpine, even. Huge swells formed behind us, pushing Aquadisiac to watery summits and plunging it into cavernous troughs. The beer sloshed in my stomach, mingling with the bacon-and-egg rolls, which hadn’t produced their intended effect.
Spider glanced at me with concern or curiosity, I couldn’t tell which. “Are you about to spew?” she asked.
“Chunder from Down Under?” Susie added.
“Hurl?” Karen offered. “Heave-ho?”
I sprawled flat with my face against the deck. This seemed to help, so long as I hugged the mast and kept my eyes firmly shut. Eventually I felt not so much sick as listless and profoundly apathetic, like a polar explorer who announces, “I’ll just lie down in the snow for a while.” Or like the pitiable few in Bligh’s longboat who, after being set adrift from the Bounty, became so thirsty and despairing that they drank seawater and died. It was depressing to realize that I was the type who wouldn’t have made it.
Roger stuck a foot in my ribs as we approached Botany Bay. “Get up, you pathetic worm, and pay your respects to the cradle of white Australia.” I opened one eye and saw a rock shelf with waves crashing against it, beautiful and forbidding. As we tacked into the bay, I forced myself upright for a full frontal view. The mile-wide entrance opened on to the “safe and commodious” harbor that Cook had described. Except that an oil refinery and mushroom-shaped fuel tank now loomed on one bank. Sydney’s airport crowded the other shore with a runway extending over the water. And dead ahead lay a vast shipping container terminal, piled with metal boxes.
There wasn’t time to take in more. We were too busy maneuvering toward a red channel buoy, the midpoint of the race. As we tacked around it, Roger steering close to shave seconds off our time, I noticed a metal plate affixed to the float. It was the “Captain Cook Buoy,” marking the site where the Endeavour dropped anchor 230 years ago.
“Look at that!” I shouted. “We’re at the exact spot Cook was!”
Roger barely glanced away from the luffing sails. “Bugger Cook. We’re still caning the rabble!”
On the return leg to Sydney, the sky and sea turned threatening, with squalls and whitecaps and wildly shifting winds. Susie and Roger began bickering about his beer intake. Spider became tangled in a line while Karen lost control of the spinnaker. I resumed my former posture: prone, with my eyes closed, absorbing little except Roger’s despairing reports. “We’ve fallen in a hole, we’re getting headed to buggery…. This is awful, it’s ugly to watch…. The whole thing has gone to pieces.”
We crossed the finish line at sunset, so late we’d been disqualified. “A dismayed crew, a disgusted captain,” Roger said. “We did our best and it wasn’t great.”
The water was calm now, and I opened my eyes. The Opera House lay just ahead, ringed by a motley fleet of tall ships, ferries festooned with flags, and party boats pulsating with strobe lights and disco music. Fireworks exploded overhead. It was Sydney at its hedonistic best. “Oh, Australia Day,” Susie said, yawning. “I forgot.”
Roger smiled wearily. “Makes you proud,” he said.
As soon as Cook anchored in Botany Bay, on April 29, 1770, his attention turned to “the natives and a few hutts” he’d glimpsed on shore. “I went in the boats in hopes of speaking with them,” he wrote. Having earlier sailed for two months from the Society Isles to New Zealand, Cook had found people whose language closely resembled Tahitian. So he had reason to hope that, with Tupaia’s assistance, he’d also be able to communicate with the New Hollanders, separated from New Zealand by just a few weeks’ sail.
Cook had no way of knowing that the Endeavour’s pinnace and yawl were about to pierce a community that had remained cocooned from the rest of humanity for millennia. “Aborigine” is Latin for “from the beginning”—an apt name for a people whose culture is probably the oldest surviving on earth. Most scholars believe that the first Australians island-hopped from Southeast Asia in small craft before 40,000 B.C., roughly the time that Cro-Magnons supplanted Neanderthals in Europe. As the Australian pioneers spread acros
s the continent, rising sea levels cut them off from their neighbors. Apart from a few tribes along Australia’s northern rim, who had intermittent contact with Asian fishermen, Aborigines, scattered in clans across an island the size of the continental United States, were completely isolated from every other people on the planet. Those living around Botany Bay in 1770 are believed to have dwelled there, undisturbed, for eight thousand years.
In his sweeping survey of human history, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond posits two keys to the development of agriculture and technology: exposure to the ideas and tools of other societies, and easy access to resources such as timber, iron, fertile soil, and large animals to domesticate. Aborigines, sequestered on a predominantly arid and intractable continent, lacked all these advantages. The most isolated tribes, in Tasmania, subsisted without nets, bone tools, wheels, or the ability to make fire. As a result, Diamond writes, their material culture at the time of Western contact was “simpler than that prevalent in parts of Upper Paleolithic Europe tens of thousands of years earlier.”
Aboriginal belief was as intricate as the material culture was simple, weaving together ancestors, animals, and the land in a rich body of lore and law that today is called the Dreaming or Dreamtime. Wreathed in secrecy and taboo, and profoundly non-Western in character, traditional Aboriginal culture remains baffling to modern-day outsiders. For Cook and his men, there was almost no hope of comprehending the natives they met at Botany Bay.
Even before Cook’s boats landed, it became clear to the English that the shore dwellers were very different from those they’d previously encountered. Banks observed that a fishing party “scarce lifted their eyes from their employment,” while an old woman on shore “lookd at the ship but expressed neither surprise nor concern.” Others began preparing fish to eat, “to all appearance totally unmoved at us.” This indifference startled the English. Where was the well-organized belligerence of the New Zealanders, or the urgent curiosity of the Tahitians?
The “Indians,” as the English called them, also looked different from Polynesians, who were generally tall, tawny, and powerfully built. “The Natives of this Country are of a middle Stature straight bodied and slender limbd,” Cook wrote, “their skins the Colour of Wood soot or of a dark Chocolate.” The men had thick black hair and bushy beards and went naked except for “White paist or Pigment,” which they daubed on their foreheads and in broad bands around their legs and shoulders. Banks, as ever, studied the women, who “did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf.”
Most of the natives fled as the English boats came close to land. But two men stood their ground. “They calld to us very loud in a harsh sounding Language of which neither us or Tupaia understood a word,” Banks wrote. Parkinson recorded their words as Warra warra wai. Cook, meanwhile, attempted his usual peacemaking, throwing “nails beeds &c a shore.” The two Aborigines responded by throwing stones and pronged fishing gigs, one of which landed between Parkinson’s feet. Cook fired small shot, striking one man in the legs. The warrior hoisted a bark shield with two eyeholes cut into it, and hurled a “dart.” Only after three rounds of musket fire did the natives finally retreat, though with a defiant lack of haste.
Exploring the shore, Cook found a few bark canoes, which he judged “the worst I think I ever saw.” For shelter the natives had only “mean small hovels not much bigger than an oven.” On the floor of one, the English scattered nails, beads, ribbons &c. When they returned the next day, the trinkets remained, untouched. A landing on the other side of the bay followed the same pattern, with hostile gestures and then retreat, the natives leaving the sailors and their gifts alone on the beach.
“Neither words nor actions [could] prevail upon them to come near us,” Cook wrote. At one point, “alone and unarm’d,” he went so far as to follow ten armed men “some distance along the shore.” Even this bold and pacific gesture aroused nothing but stony indifference. “All they seem’d to want,” Cook concluded, “was for us to be gone.”
Englishmen aboard the First Fleet would later learn that the phrase Parkinson had recorded, warra warra wai, meant “Go away.”
A month after my sail with Roger, I returned to Botany Bay, this time by land. The drive south from Sydney took me along a bitumen scar of discount centers and car-repair lots with names like Jap World Spares. Then I crossed the Captain Cook Bridge and rode along the looping southern shore of Botany Bay, known as the Kurnell Peninsula. As the kookaburra flies, Kurnell lies just fifteen miles from downtown Sydney. But it felt like another country, an exurban netherworld of scrub, sand, and high-voltage electricity pylons. I passed a turnoff named Joseph Banks Drive and a sign saying “Road Tanker Entrance,” leading into a landscape the botanist would not have recognized: a vast oil refinery burning off gas in plumes of flame from its forest of smokestacks.
Just beyond the refinery lay the community of Kurnell, comprising a dozen residential streets, most of them named for Cook’s crew. I spotted a mob of scabby-kneed boys in gray shorts and girls in maroon tunics, all wearing broad-brimmed hats bearing the motto “We Endeavour.” These were eight- and nine-year-olds from Kurnell’s primary school. I’d arranged with their teacher, Leanne Noon, to tag along when her Year Three students made their annual trip to the national park enclosing Cook’s landing site.
“For most of the term we’ve been talking about the Dreamtime and the culture that was here for thousands of years before Europeans arrived,” Leanne said when I fell in beside her. A dark-haired woman in her thirties, with striking hazel eyes, Leanne had grown up just across the bay. “When I was a kid, we learned that Australia began with Cook, but that’s all changed. We only spend a day or two on him now.”
The school group was met at the park entrance by John Atkins, a trim ranger in olive pants and a shirt adorned with a logo of a banksia, a gnarly, nectar-sweet plant named for the Endeavour’s botanist. “We’re going to concentrate today on Cook,” he told the schoolchildren, who sat cross-legged before him. “But there were people living here when he arrived. Do you know who they were?”
Twenty hands shot in the air. “Aborigines!”
“That’s right. But they didn’t call themselves that. The ones who lived here were the Gwyeagal or Gwygal people. Do you know why we pronounce it both ways?”
“Because it’s hard to say?”
“Because they spelled it different ways?”
John shook his head. “No. I say both ‘Gwyeagal’ and ‘Gwygal’ because we don’t know how they said their name. They aren’t here to tell us anymore.” Kurnell, I later learned, was an English corruption of the name of the last full-blooded Aboriginal elder born on the peninsula, Cundlemong, who died in 1846. By then, disease, displacement, and attacks by settlers had killed or driven off virtually all the Gwyeagal.
John led us to the park’s small museum and paused next to a model of the Endeavour. “How many of you would want to ride in this across the world?” he asked. Almost every hand shot up. “But you’d be away three years,” he said. “You’d be in Year Six by the time you came back.”
“Cool!”
“Or you might not come back at all,” John added. “Do you know why?”
“Pirates?”
“Sharks?”
“How about health?” John asked. “Sailors couldn’t just pull fruit and veggies from the fridge. So sometimes they got sick with a terrible disease called scurvy.”
“That’s not as bad as what I have,” a boy called out.
“What’s that?”
“A.D.D.”
John swiftly moved on to another exhibit, “The Owners and the Invaders.” “Owners,” or “traditional owners,” was the term that polite Australians now used when referring to the country’s indigenous population. The exhibit quoted Lord Morton’s words to Cook about acquiring the consent of the natives before taking possession of any land. “Cook disregarded these orders or at best misinterpreted them,” the exhibit said, noting that Cook raised the flag at Botany Ba
y without native consent.
John took the class outside to a sloping lawn leading down to the bay. He pointed to a reconstructed building and said this was the site of the first white homestead in Kurnell, an 1817 land grant called Alpha Farm. A semiliterate clerk rendered this classical name as “Half-a-Farm,” and the puzzling designation remained on maps and in official documents. A nearby stream, referred to in the Endeavour journals as the “watering place,” was now a brackish, weed-choked trickle.
John continued on toward the site of the first English landing, a puckered rock shelf with a small plaque to Cook that was unreachable at high tide. A refinery wharf loomed in the background and jets roared overhead. John reached into a prop bag and said, “Okay, now we’re going to act out Cook’s landing. You two there, you’re Aborigines,” he said, handing spears to a boy and girl. Then he gave a red jacket to a “marine,” a wig to “Banks,” and a tricorn and blue jacket to “Cook,” a little girl with pigtails.
“Aborigines,” John said, “these blokes are rowing towards you. Do you like the look of them or not?”
They shook their heads. “They’re white,” the girl said. “They have silly clothes and funny hats.” She brandished her spear and shouted, “Go away!”
During the lunch break, I chatted with John as he microwaved spaghetti in the rangers’ office. A former history teacher, he’d been guiding school groups through the park for several decades. “I try to walk a line between admiring Cook and recognizing the damage done in his wake,” he said. “But I’m dealing with nine-year-olds. I may go on all day about Cook, and what impresses them most is a lizard running across the road.”