The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  ON AUGUST 25, 1768, the Endeavour—a converted Whitby collier, small and brawny, 106 feet long—set sail from Plymouth. Along with her crew, marines and officers, she had on board a number of civilians. The most important of them, from Greenwich’s point of view, was the astronomer Charles Green. The rest made up a private scientific party: a brilliant, mercurial young amateur named Joseph Banks and the servants and specialists he had hired to accompany him. At twenty-five, Banks was well-educated (Eton, Oxford), well-connected, well-off (a rural fortune) and in the proper sense a dilettante: one who took an eclectic, educated pleasure in the world about him. His passion was botany, and his hero (whom he had not met) was the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. On hearing of the expedition to Tahiti, Banks realized that this was his chance. To be the first botanist into the South Seas would make his reputation, for he would have the flora of a new world to himself. “Any blockhead can go to Italy,” he is said to have told a friend who wondered when he would take his Grand Tour. “Mine shall be around the world.” He would go with Cook. Friends in the Admiralty and the Royal Society arranged it. Banks went on board the Endeavour with a retinue consisting of two artists (one of them a young genius of botanical illustration, Sydney Parkinson), several servants, a secretary, two hounds, and another naturalist, the most affable, enthusiastic and learned of travelling companions, a favorite pupil of Linnaeus himself: Dr. Daniel Solander.

  The Endeavour took almost eight months to reach Tahiti via Rio de Janeiro and Tierra del Fuego, dropping anchor in Matavai Bay in mid-April 1769. The doings of Cook, Banks and the crew in this barely touched Eden must no more concern us here than the details of Cook’s coastal exploration of New Zealand, as the Crown never considered either Tahiti or New Zealand as penal settlements.7

  The transit of Venus was duly, though imperfectly, observed. Banks’s crates and bottles were filling up with specimens, his artists’ folios with sketches. Early in August they left Tahiti, taking with them a young Tahitian of exalted birth named Tupaia, whom Banks intended to bring back to London as the ultimate exotic pet, a live Noble Savage. Their search for the Southern Continent now began.

  For months, beating west through the toppling green hills of the Pacific, they were misled by what Banks called “Our old enemy Cape fly away”—cloudbanks on the horizon. Then, on the afternoon of October 6, 1769, land lay before them. “All hands seem to agree,” wrote Banks, viewing the low solid line to the west, “that this is certainly the continent we are in search of.”8

  It was not, and their track across the southern Pacific had nearly eliminated that continent. They had reached Poverty Bay on the east coast of the north island of New Zealand, and for the next four months Cook sailed the Endeavour around the coasts of both the north and the south islands, mapping every reef, cliff and indentation and, with caution, observing the habits of the brave and bellicose Maori: The Tahitians made love, but these men with faces rigidly tattooed like purple fingerprints made war. “I suppose,” Banks jotted, “they live intirely on fish, dogs, and enemies.”

  At the end of March 1770 Cook was ready for the homeward voyage. The Southern Continent had proved “imaginary”; however, more than 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coastline were charted. He had fulfilled the Admiralty’s brief and could shape his course for England.

  He could return eastward around the Horn or westward via the Cape of Good Hope. The western route was unlikely to bring forth new discoveries. But March is the end of the Pacific summer and Cook did not want to commit his ship—battered and wormy as she was from two years’ voyage—to the eastern route and the winter storms of Cape Horn. Cook had Tasman’s charts, and he decided to try another way. Somewhere to the west, there must lie the east coast of New Holland. They would follow Tasman’s track, in reverse, from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land. Then they would find whether Van Diemen’s Land was part of New Holland, or a separate island. If it was separate, they would find the coast of New Holland and sail north along it.

  On March 31 they left New Zealand. Southerly gales rose and drove the Endeavour to latitude 38°, too far north to make Van Diemen’s Land. But on April 19 a new coast announced itself. Flat and sandy, most unlike the magnificent scenery of New Zealand, it lay dry on the gray horizon. Their landfall was at Cape Everard, in Victoria.

  They coasted north, finding no harbor. But now and then they saw smoke rising from the scrubby headlands, so they knew that the place must be inhabited. To Banks, the landscape looked poor after Tahiti and New Zealand. “It resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out further than they ought accidental rubbs and knocks have intirely bar’d them of their share of covering.”9 On April 22, they saw some Australians on a beach. They looked black but it was hard to tell their real color. Exactly a week later, the first contact was made. Heading up from the south, Cook saw a wide bay and steered into it, sending the pinnace ahead to make soundings.

  They saw bark canoes and in them blacks were fishing. The ship floated past these frail coracles. It was the largest artifact ever seen on the east coast of Australia, an object so huge, complex and unfamiliar as to defy the natives’ understanding. The Tahitians had flocked out to meet her in their bird-winged outriggers, and the Maoris had greeted her with hakas and showers of stones; but the Australians took no notice. They displayed neither fear nor interest and went on fishing.

  Only when they anchored and Cook, Banks, Solander and Tupaia—who, all hoped, might act as interpreter—approached the south shore of the bay in a longboat did the natives react. The sight of men in a small boat was comprehensible to them; it meant invasion. Most of the Aborigines fled into the trees, but two naked warriors stood their ground, brandished their spears and shouted in a quick, guttural tongue, not a syllable of it familiar to Tupaia. Cook and Banks pitched some trading-truck ashore—nails and beads, the visiting cards of the South Pacific. The blacks moved to attack, and Cook fired a musket-shot between them. One warrior ran back and grabbed a bundle of spears, while the other began shying rocks at the boat. Cook fired again, wounding one of them with small-shot, but still the man did not retreat; he merely picked up a bark shield.

  It was time to land. A young midshipman named Isaac Smith was in the bow. Years later, after many promotions, Admiral Smith—the cousin of Cook’s wife—would proudly tell how the greatest navigator in history hesitated before quitting the longboat, touched him on the shoulder and said, “Isaac, you shall land first.” The lad sprang into the green, bottle-glass water as it prickled on the floury white sand, and waded ashore. Cook and the others followed, and the seal of distance and space that had protected the east coast of Australia since the Pleistocene epoch was broken. The colonization of the last continent had begun. The blacks threw their stone-tipped spears.

  Cook fired a third shot. With an insolent lack of haste, the tribesmen retreated into the bush. The whites found some bark shelters near the beach from which the adult natives had fled, although in one humpy there were “four or five children with whome we left some strings of beeds &ca.” What kind of people were these, who ran away and left their babies to the mercy of strangers? Nothing could win their confidence. “We could know but very little of their customs,” Cook complained on May 6, a week after at anchor, “as we were never able to form any connections with them, they had not so much as touch’d the things we had left in their hutts.” They seemed to have no curiosity, no sense of material possessions. “All they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.” Tupaia, in particular, had a low but prophetic opinion of these elusive men and women of Australia. He was heard to remark that “they were Taata Eno’s that is bad or poor people.” The Polynesian phrase taata ino denoted the very lowest caste of Tahitians, the titi, who were used as human sacrifices.

  Cook saw them differently, and in a famous passage in his journal he contradicted Dampier’s view of them. “They may appear to some to be the most wretch
ed people upon Earth,” he remarked,

  but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniencies so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition.10

  These few days of sparse contact on the coast of New South Wales sealed the doom of the Aborigine. There was no chance that the Crown would ever try to plant a penal colony in New Zealand, for the Maori were a subtle, determined and ferocious race. These Australians, however, would give no trouble. They were ill-armed, backward, and timid; most of them ran at the sight of a white face; and they had no goods or property to defend. Besides, there were so few of them. All this the British authorities would presently learn from Joseph Banks, without whose evidence there might have been no convict colony in Australia.

  The men of the Endeavour gave little thought to any of this as they explored that distant sheltered bay in the Pacific autumn of 1770. Banks and Solander were especially busy. The low, flat shores were full of plants and creatures unknown to European science. The animals were elusive—they found one kangaroo-turd, without seeing the ’roo—but there was a staggering quantity of “nondescript” (unclassified) plant life. Eventually, the young botanists were to bring back 30,000 specimens from their voyage, representing some 3,000 species of which 1,600 were wholly new to science. The harbor was full of fish, and on its shallow flats immense stingrays, Dasyatis brevicaudatus, were caught; Sydney Parkinson, Banks’s botanical artist, commented that their guts tasted “not unlike stewed turtle.” Cook decided to call the bay Stingray Harbor, but later he changed his mind. The place represented such a triumph for his young companions’ science that, thinking of all the accumulated specimens and drawings in the Endeavour’s stern cabin, he fixed on the name Botany Bay. Its northern and southern heads went on the chart as Cape Banks and Point Solander.

  They sailed and kept coasting north. They passed but did not enter a harbor fifteen miles north of Botany Bay, which Cook named Port Jackson, after the Secretary for the Admiralty. Their track up the immense eastern flank of Australia ran through twenty-eight degrees of latitude, more than two thousand miles from Botany Bay to the tip of Cape York. In the labyrinth of the Great Barrier Reef—Cook had unwittingly sailed into it like a fish into the funnel of a trap—the ship struck; a coral fang ripped through her sheathing and broke off, by the merest fluke stopping the hole until the ship could be kedged clear, beached and repaired. This brush with annihilation delayed them seven weeks at Endeavour Bay, giving Banks more time for botanizing. At last the mysterious kangaroo was seen, and two were shot; they tasted like tough venison. A seaman told Banks, to his amusement, about a ghastly monster he had spied, “about as large and much like a one gallon Kegg, as black as the Devil and had 2 horns on its head, it went but slowly but I dar’d not touch it.” It was a flying fox. More Aborigines appeared, behaving in the fickle uncertain manner of people startled by an alien intrusion. They seemed as timid as those of Botany Bay. Apparently, the variations of culture and nature were small along this immense coast.

  On August 21, 1770, the Endeavour rounded Cape York. From there, to the west, stretched a discovered sea crossed by Dutch ships. Cook, Banks, and Solander landed on a nubbin of rock now called Possession Island, hoisted a Union Jack and formally claimed the whole coast south of where they stood—down to 38° S., near their original landfall—as “New South Wales” in the name of George III. They fired three volleys, which were answered from the ship. The salute had to be given with small arms, for all the Endeavour’s cannon had been trundled overboard to lighten her when she lay holed on the Barrier Reef. In this modest way, by the slap of muskets echoing across a flat warm strait, Australia was added to the British Empire.

  iv

  AMID THE TUMULT of publicity that greeted the safe return of the ship and her crew to England in July 1771, it was clear that only one place ravished the public imagination: Tahiti, languid isle of the Golden Age, Cytherea of the Pacific. New Zealand was next in order of interest, while Australia ran a poor third. Naturally there was professional curiosity among scientists as to the plants and fauna of the new continent. But no kangaroo, even when painted by George Stubbs, could possibly compete with Tahitian princesses as an object of fantasy. There was something, if not exactly dull, at least ungraspable about that flat hot fringe of a blank continent, sown about with deadly reefs. Cultivated opinion on the matter was symbolized in a portrait of Banks done in 1773 by Benjamin West, the rising young prodigy of America paying his homage to the even younger virtuoso of a world still newer, the Pacific. Banks stands wrapped in a fine chief’s cloak, pointing out a detail of the weave; around him are trophies of his periplus—Tahitian ceremonial gear, a carved paddle, a Maori mere (jade war-club). But the only thing that might stand for New South Wales, and rather ambiguously at that, is an open folio with Parkinson’s drawing of a lily. The disappointing truth about Australia was that once the legend of the Southern Continent had been disproved and the facts about New Holland were known, there was not much reason to go there.

  In 1772 Cook boarded the Resolution and began his second voyage, that epic navigation of the Antarctic Ocean which took him further south than any human had ever been—to 71° S.—and which destroyed the last vestiges of that legend. There was no habitable latitude where such a continent could be, and “the greatest part of this Southern Continent (supposing there is one) must lay within the Polar Circle where the sea is so pestered with ice, that the land is thereby inaccessible.” Cook’s intuition of Antarctica was correct.

  Thus eighteen years passed before another ship called at Botany Bay, and for the first eight of those years the subject of Australia, as far as George III’s government was concerned, was forgotten. It was revived after 1783, when Pitt the Younger became prime minister. The idea that Australia might carry a British penal colony was raised by the revolt of the American colonies, and by a crisis in England’s hulks and jails. However, it is by now a common (though by no means general) opinion among students of Australian history that the “grand design” of Botany Bay was really strategic, hatched by Pitt’s desire to deny France power over India and the Far Eastern trade routes that were so vital to British interests in the late eighteenth century. This vision of the embryo colony as a “strategic outlier” of England, not just an opportunistically chosen dump for its criminals, has become popular with Australians as our national bicentenary approaches. It lends dignity to our origins. “The rag and bone shop of Australia’s beginning,” wrote the main spokesman for this view, Alan Frost, “was perhaps not so foul as we have long supposed.”11 We shall see.

  In 1779, the year Captain James Cook was killed by the Hawaiians at Karakakoa Bay, a House of Commons committee was set up to determine where convicts, if sentenced to transportation, could be sent now that America was closed to them. The place should be very distant but not a mere desert, for it was essential that a colony there be able to support itself. What about New Holland? The committee invited Joseph Banks, now a celebrity and soon to be knighted, to deliver his views. Nobody in England knew more about Australia. The great man, now thirty-four years old, spoke of Botany Bay and its naked cowardly savages. The climate was good, the soil was arable; he described the abundance of fish, pasture, fresh water and wood and set forth the opinion that a colony of felons could support itself within a year. Perhaps he actually believed this farrago of optimistic distortions; but though the committee was impressed, it made no decision. It heard other witnesses, who suggested transportation to Gibraltar or the west coast of Africa.

  There was reason to be skeptical about such projects. The American transportation system had relied on free settlers who would buy indentured labor. The convicts were sold by middlemen and from the moment they stepped on American soil they ceased to cost England a penny; they were not a charge on the State.

  Yet in Australia, these c
onditions would not apply. Thousands of men and women would be packed off, in ships that would bring back no cargo, to a place expected to produce no surplus. There were no free settlers to buy the indentured labor of the felons, and every item of their upkeep would be a dead charge on the government. Even granted the pervasive sense of a crisis in the criminal system and the widespread desire to solve it by expelling the “criminal classes” of England to some place “beyond the seas,” the notion of setting a convict colony in a place as remote and ill-known as Australia was certainly bizarre. The argument for strategic colonization of Australia seems, at least on the face of it, to make the exercise more rational.

  When William Pitt the Younger became its prime minister in 1783, England was half-bankrupted from war with France. Pitt believed it was essential to keep the French from gaining any influence over India and the trade routes of the Far East. The East’s economic importance to Britain was growing. It had not approached the volume of Britain’s Atlantic trade,12 but its direction was clear: In the future, a great part of Britain’s economic destiny would lie in the “East Indies,” a vast swath of territory that ran from the Cape of Good Hope through India and Malaya to the coast of China and on into the Pacific.

  The main instrument of British interests there had been the sprawling, corrupt East India Company, which had the closest relationships to government of any English business. For ten years, starting with Lord North’s Regulating Act (1773), the government strove to curb and reform “John Company.” With the passage of Pitt’s India Act (1784), which partly nationalized control of the East India Company, the matter of India was at the front of all political argument, the responsibility not of the Company men but of the Crown and its ministers. Trade had brought territory, territory war, war an Empire. With this had come immense problems of security as well as trade. Not only did India have to be run, but the East as a whole—not excluding the Western Pacific—had to be kept open to British shipping, especially along the vital trade route from India to Canton. Eastern trade represented Britain’s best hope of economic recovery from the setbacks of the early 1780s: her loss of North America, her costly war against the French, and her alienation from once friendly European states—notably, Holland.