The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  so predominant was the warmth of their constitutions, or the depravity of their hearts, that the hatches … could not be suffered to lay off, during the night, without a promiscuous intercourse immediately taking place between them and the seamen and marines … [T]he desire of the women to be with the men was so uncontrollable that neither shame (but indeed of this they had long lost sight) nor the fear of punishment could deter them from making their way through the bulkheads to the apartments assigned to the seamen.50

  It sounds like bedlam, and probably it was. The marines on the four female transports—Charlotte, Lady Penrhyn, Prince of Wales and Friendship—could buy a woman with a pannikin of rum from their daily rations, and from then on the drunkenness of some female convicts would become another problem for Captain Phillip.

  When the women got unruly, they were ironed and sometimes flogged. One prisoner on Friendship, Elizabeth Dudgeon (7 years for stealing £9 19s. 6d. in London), was especially troublesome. She spent the first nine days of the Tenerife-Rio run in irons for fighting, and on release she was found carousing in the seamen’s quarters. Back into irons she went, but a few days later she rashly gave a guard officer, Captain James Meredith, a tongue-lashing. He had her triced up to a grating and flogged, to the pleasure of Lieutenant Ralph Clark: “The corporal did not play with her, but laid it home, which I was very glad to see … she has long been fishing for it, which she has at last got to her heart’s content.”51

  Once the fleet reached the doldrums, Phillip rationed water to three pints a day. But by mid-July the ships picked up the southeast trades, the sails cracked and bellied, and down to Rio they rolled, Lady Penrhyn lagging and wallowing, nimble little Supply herding up the slow transports until, on August 5, the whole fleet was snugged down in Rio harbor.

  It stayed there a month. There was much to be done: watering and cleaning ship, buying stores and making repairs. Sixteen people had died since England—ten on one boat, the mephitic Alexander—and there were eighty-one on the sicklist. By eighteenth-century standards, things could have been much worse. Phillip busied himself with stores. He could not get the small-arms supplies he needed in Rio—Portuguese armorers’ tools did not fit English guns—but he obtained 10,000 musket-balls from the local arsenal. The clothing of the women convicts was already disintegrating, and to replace it Phillip parsimoniously bought 100 sacks of tapioca (which would substitute, in a pinch, for flour), the sacks of which “being of strong Russia [burlap] will be used hereafter in cloathing the convicts, many of whom are nearly naked.”52 He bought seeds and laid in supplies of the local beef, which was excellent, and of the local firewater or aguardiente, which was not. “That [Brazilians] have not learnt the art of making palatable rum,” Watkin Tench morosely noted many hangovers later, “the English troops in New South Wales can bear testimony.”

  The Viceroy, who had known Phillip in the days of his mercenary service for Portugal, entertained him and his men generously and gave them carte blanche to go wherever they pleased, unescorted. They promenaded contentedly about, admiring the macaws and toucans, gorging themselves on limes, lemons and oranges, and ogling the “lusty” girls of Rio whose long hair, once unbraided, trailed two inches on the floor when they walked barefoot. They envied the Portuguese their police, but their English souls were affronted by Rio’s tropical Catholicism.

  The convicts, of course, saw none of this. They were kept below deck. But some of them had been up to their old tricks on the long Atlantic run. John White found that a convict named Thomas Barrett had “with great ingenuity” started a forgers’ ring, making quarter-dollars out of old buckles and pewter spoons:

  The impression, milling, character … was so inimitably executed that had their metal been a little better, the fraud, I am convinced, would have passed undetected … How they could effect it at all, is a matter of the most inexpressible surprise to me; as they were never suffered to come near a fire; and a centinel was constantly placed over their hatchway, which … rendered it impossible for either fire or fused metal to be conveyed to their apartments. Besides, hardly ten minutes ever elapsed, without an officer going down among them. The adroitness, therefore, with which they must have managed, in order to complete a business that required so complicated a process, gave me a high opinion of their ingenuity, cunning, caution and address.53

  Barrett was lightly punished, but James Baker, a marine who had tried to pass off one of the forged coins on shore, got 200 lashes. As a rule, the floggings inflicted on the marines were far worse than anything the convicts got. The inequality of punishment would turn out to be a great source of friction between marines and convicts later.

  Other tensions were felt not long after the fleet left Rio on September 3 for its drop south and its long run before the westerlies to Cape Town. In the confined space of a ship, irritations grow and all raw spots chafe. Some of the officers took to drink, traded insults in the mess and cursed their hangovers. One could find relief from the bickering on deck, watching the frigate birds and pintadoes, trolling a line for fish and admiring the hungry grace of albacore tearing into the schools of flying fish as they burst, like scattering chainshot, from the heaving indigo rollers. Luckily the fleet had a quick crossing. By mid-October they were at Cape Town, the tip of Africa, the extreme point of European penetration into the southern hemisphere.

  The fleet spent a month in Cape Town. The main task was to stock up on plants, seeds and livestock for the colony in New South Wales. This Phillip did, with much hard bargaining against phlegmatic Dutch tightwads. He also tried to build up the convicts’ strength for the last, most difficult leg of the voyage, by giving them fresh beef and mutton, soft bread and as many vegetables as they could eat, every day.54 His officers hated Cape Town—the Dutch, the Kaffirs, the heat, the dust. Nevertheless it was the last civilized place, the last repository of recognizable European values, that the men and women of the First Fleet would see for years; and the thought must have lain heavily on them when at last the tars stood to the capstans and the anchor-cables rose dripping through their hawser-holes. This was the end of Europe. Before them stretched the awesome, lonely void of the Indian and Southern Oceans, and beyond that lay nothing they could imagine.

  The modern traveller, gazing down on the wrinkles of the earth’s waters from an armchair six miles up, has no conception of the forbidding grandeur of the sea into which the First Fleet now moved. Its waves are the largest of any of the world’s oceans, and from the deck of a boat they are overwhelming: tottering hills of indigo and malachite glass, veined in their transparencies with braids of opaque white water, their spumy crests running level with the ship’s cross-trees. The inexorable rhythm of their passage numbs the brain, first with fear and then with repetition.

  The fleet transports labored now, clawing up the swells and staggering down into the troughs. They were loaded down with new supplies, including some five hundred animals mooing, clucking and bleating frantically in their improvised pens. The convict quarters were more crowded than ever, because room had to be made for the future colony’s livestock (and its bales of food)—two Africander bulls, three cows, three horses, forty-four sheep, thirty-two hogs, poultry of all sorts, and such animals as the officers had managed to cram on board for their private stock. All the women convicts had been moved off Friendship and redistributed among the other three female transports; their place was taken by sheep which, Ralph Clark opined, would be “much more agreeable shipmates.” Arthur Bowes Smythe, the surgeon on the women’s transport Lady Penrhyn, felt the same way. “I believe few Marines or Soldiers going out on a foreign Service under Government were ever better, if so well provided for as these Convicts are,” he remarked, but

  I wish I cd. with truth add that the behaviour of the Convicts merited such extream indulgence—but I believe I may venture to say there was never a more abandon’d set of wretches collected in one place at any period than are now to be met with in this Ship.… The greater part of them are so totally abandon’
d and callous’d to all sense of shame & even common decency that it frequently becomes indispensably necessary to inflict Corporal punishment upon them.… [E]very day furnishes proofs of their being more harden’d in their Wickedness—nor do I conceive it possible in their present situation to adopt any plan to induce them to behave like rational or even human Beings.… Nor can their matchless Hippocracy be equalled except by their base Ingratitude.55

  As the vessels slipped further down the map, below the fortieth south parallel, under the southern coast of Australia and toward Van Diemen’s Land, the gales stayed favorable and the weather “dark, wet and gloomy.” Gannets and terns circled the ships. Whales were sighted, and often the wandering albatross, Diomedea exsulans, would materialize out of the spindrift, white from white, and wheel silently about the plunging masts on its fourteen-foot wings before vanishing into a rainsquall. Waves broke green over the decks, dumping tons of freezing water down the companionways and sluicing the marines and the shivering, half-clothed convicts out of their bunks. Coming north around Van Diemen’s Land on January 10, 1788, they ran into a violent thundersquall that split the Golden Grove’s topsails and carried away Prince of Wales’s main yard; the women on Lady Penrhyn “were so terrified that most of them were down on their knees at prayers, and in less than one hour after it had abated they were uttering the most horrid oaths and imprecations that could proceed out of the mouths of such abandoned prostitutes as they are.”56

  Surgeon John White on Charlotte had a revelation of how far from the company of European man they had all come. Flocks of “large oceanous birds” flew about the ship, and the marines amused themselves by shooting at them; but the seabirds showed no alarm “either at the report, or at the balls … [for] they had never been harassed with firearms before.”57

  On the evening of January 19, Sirius and the transports sighted the coast of mainland Australia. By ten the next morning they were all anchored in Botany Bay. “To see all the ships safe in their destined port,” White wrote with commendable restraint, “without ever having, by any accident, been one hour separated; and all the people in as good health as could be expected or hoped for, after so long a voyage, was a sight truly pleasing, and at which every heart must rejoice.”58

  It had been one of the great sea voyages in English history. Captain Arthur Phillip, the middle-aged nonentity, had brought them across more than fifteen thousand miles of ocean without losing a ship. The entire run had taken 252 days. A total of forty-eight people had died—forty convicts, five convicts’ children, one marine’s wife, one marine’s child and a marine. Given the rigors of the voyage and the primitive medical knowledge of the day, the crammed ships and the lack of anti-scorbutics, the poor planning and the bad equipment, it was a tiny death rate—a little over 3 per cent. The sea had spared them; now, they must survive on the unknown land.

  * “Austrialia” was a reference to his King’s Hapsburg blood (“Austria”) and a pun on tierra austral, “the south land.”

  4

  The Starvation Years

  i

  PHILLIP AND HIS OFFICERS soon realized that there could be no settlement at Botany Bay.

  Everything they had been told about it, even the testimony of Cook’s log, was wrong. They had expected grassland with deep black soil and well-spaced trees, where crops could be planted without clearing; an ample source of building-stone; a protected anchorage.1

  But what Captain Phillip saw from the deck as his ship rounded Point Solander and hauled into Botany Bay on Friday, January 18, 1788, was a flat heath of paperbark scrub and gray-green eucalypts, stretching featurelessly away under the grinding white light of that Australian summer. The dry buzzing monotony of the landscape did not match Cook’s account. The bay was open and unprotected, and the Pacific rollers gave it a violent, persistent swell; the water was shallow, the holding-ground poor.

  Supply anchored in the north of the bay, so that she could plainly be seen by ships in the offing. Phillip and some officers, including Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, hoisted out the boats in the afternoon and went looking for water. They made tentative contact with the Aborigines, giving them beads and mirrors. These “trembling” savages, King thought, “seemed quite astonished at the figure we cut in being cloathed. I think it is very easy to conceive the ridiculous figure we must appear to these poor creatures, who were perfectly naked.”2

  Over the next two days all the rest of the fleet arrived in Botany Bay. The Aborigines began to assemble in greater numbers on the rock-strewn spits and white beaches. As Sirius sailed past Point Solander, Captain John Hunter watched them flourish their spears at her and cry “Warra, warra!” These words, the first recorded ones spoken by a black to a white in Australia, meant “Go away!”

  But the intruders did not go away. Issuing from the ships, they tramped about in their scarlet tunics, looking for water, entangling themselves in scrub and branches. Formal threats were exchanged. With guttural yells of warra, warra! one tribesman “threw his spear wide of us to shew how far they could do execution”; it flew forty yards and stuck quivering in the earth. Another black flung his spear straight at them. A marine answered with a blank cartridge, “when they all ran off with great precipitation.”

  But before long the Aborigines were accepting presents from Phillip. They swarmed around the boats, plucking at the whites’ clothes and shouting with amazement and pleasure whenever anyone lifted his hat. The general bonhomie was such that the blacks

  ran up to the man who had thrown the lance & made very significant signs of their displeasure at his conduct by pointing all their lances at him & looking at us, intimating that they only waited our orders to kill him. However, we made signs for them to desist & made the culprit a present of some beads & ca3

  Soon the Englishmen ran out of beads and ribbon, but the hesitant contacts went on through the afternoon as more tribesmen gathered on the beach. King gave two Aborigines a taste of wine, which they spat out. Names for things were exchanged. But the great enigma, for the Aborigines, was the sex of the whites. They poked at the marines’ breeches. Finally King ordered one of his men to satisfy their curiosity. The embarrassed marine fumbled at his fly, and the first white cock was flashed on an Australian beach. “They made a great shout of admiration,” King wrote,

  and pointing to the shore … we saw a great number of Women and Girls, with infant children on their shoulders, make their appearance on the beach—all in puris naturalibus, not so much as a fig-leaf. Those natives who were around the boats made signs for us to go to them & made us understand their persons were at our service. However, I declined.4

  Instead, he produced his handkerchief and tied it on one of the women “where Eve did the Fig Leaf; the natives then set up another very great shout.”

  Thus the acquaintance of black and white on the shores of Botany Bay grew. There was no violence; the convicts were still cooped up in the transports, and the officers and seamen were under strict orders from Governor Phillip (as the commodore now officially became, on landing in New South Wales) not to molest the natives in any way. Of course, they could not be ordered to like them. “Altogether a most stupid insensible set of beings,” concluded Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth, after dilating on their “miserable wigwams” and fishy stink.5 The blacks, in turn, were consumed with curiosity about the whites. One even scalded his fingers trying to swipe a fish from a cookpot on the beach, for, being totally ignorant of pottery (let alone iron), he had never seen water boiled in a container before. Surgeon White demonstrated his pistol to a group of Aborigines, shooting a hole in a bark shield at several paces. It produced consternation, and to calm them White whistled “the air of Malbrooke, which they appeared highly charmed With, and imitated him with equal pleasure and readiness.” It was the first sign of the astounding powers of mimicry that the Australian Aborigines would show the whites in years to come.6

  This was all very well, but it was not what the First Fleet had come for, and the colonists had a colon
y to make. “If we are obliged to settle here,” wrote Lieutenant Ralph Clark after five days in Botany Bay, “there will not a soul be alive in the course of a year.” In the meantime, Phillip had left with Hunter and some marines to explore Port Jackson, a few miles to the north. Its opening had been seen, named but not visited by Cook as he sailed by it in 1770. Phillip returned with the news that this place was a paradise compared to Botany Bay: a harbor with many branching arms in which ships could find shelter from any wind, with plenty of fresh water and fertile soil. He ordered the fleet to make ready for sea again.

  But the next morning they were thunderstruck to see, far out on the cloudy horizon, two large and obviously European ships trying to beat in to shore against a stiff breeze. If coincidence, this was incredible; if not, menacing. Were they Dutch men-o’-war, sent to attack the fleet? In the evening the strange ships vanished in the haze, still tacking impotently against the shore wind. Phillip left for Port Jackson the next morning. Whoever the intruders were, he must beat them to the new harbor; to lose that would mean losing the whole expedition.

  It was a prudent move, but he need not have worried. The ships were La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, commanded by the French explorer Jean-François de la Pérouse, two and a half years out of Brest on a voyage of Pacific discovery. La Pérouse had been as startled to see an English squadron as Phillip had been to see his, but, as he noted in his log, “All Europeans are countrymen at such a distance from home.” When he dropped his hook in Botany Bay on the morning of January 26, La Pérouse was fairly cordially received by Hunter, who was in a blinding hurry to get the rest of the fleet to Port Jackson. He politely told La Pérouse that he could give him any assistance he wanted—except, of course, for food, stores, sails, ammunition or anything else he needed.