The Fatal Shore
Page 14
After lunch, Sirius got the fleet under way. There was a light south-southeast breeze, which made it as hard for the ships to get out of port as it had been for La Pérouse to get in. The departing English now gave the French a spectacular show of fumbling. Friendship rammed Prince of Wales, losing her jib boom. Charlotte nearly ran on the rocks, clawed off and cannoned into Friendship. Lady Penrhyn just avoided ramming her amidships. The blue Pacific air darkened with nautical oaths. However, by 3 p.m. the transports had cleared Botany Bay and were working north; four hours later, while the pinkish-gray glow of evening began to fume delicately upward from the long flat inland horizon, they rounded South Head and stood in for Port Jackson or, as it would presently be called, Sydney Harbor.
ii
“WE … HAD the satisfaction of finding the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride with the most perfect security.”7 Phillip’s jubilant words to Lord Sydney suggest that he was already looking beyond the convict colony to the day when this harbor would become a strategic outpost for England, filled with the white-sailed emblems of a dominated Pacific. The chosen anchorage had a small stream of fresh water flowing into a sheltered bay, where ships could ride close to the shore in deep water. To honor the man who had sent them there, Phillip called it Sydney Cove.
Pink eucalypts grew thickly along its rock shores, and Phillip marvelled at how stoutly they flourished in mere cracks of the rock, drawing nourishment from the thinnest soil. The work gangs stumbled and cursed among the ferns as the ground heaved beneath their legs, and “the confusion,” David Collins noted, “will not be wondered at when it is considered that each man stepped from the boat literally into a wood.”8 Over the next few days, some military order began to emerge. “Business now sat on every brow,” Watkin Tench reported,
and the scene, to an indifferent spectator, at leisure to contemplate it, would have been highly picturesque and amusing. In one place, a party cutting down the woods; a second, setting up a blacksmith’s forge; a third, dragging along a load of stones or provisions; here an officer pitching his marquee, with a detachment of troops parading on one side of him, and a cook’s fire blazing up on the other.9
The marines had to watch for runaways. Within a few days some of the prisoners had escaped and struggled through the bush as far as Botany Bay, where La Pérouse’s ships still lay at anchor. They gave the French commander “trouble and embarrassment”10 by begging him to take them on board, but he dismissed them with threats and sent them back to Sydney Cove, where they were flogged. In fact, they had been lucky not to be taken on board. On March 10, 1788, after a six-week sojourn at Botany Bay, La Pérouse sailed off into the Pacific and was never heard from again. It took the French thirty years to establish that his ships were wrecked with the loss of all hands on Vanikoro in the New Hebrides.
The presence of the French boats warned Phillip that he must quickly colonize Norfolk Island. It would be a disaster to lose its pines and flax to France; and La Pérouse told him that he had already been there, although the surf prevented him landing.11 So Phillip dispatched Supply to Norfolk Island, with twenty-two people on board under the command of Sirius’s second lieutenant, Philip Gidley King. They had six months’ rations and were told to start sowing crops and retting flax immediately. Norfolk Island would be more fertile than the sandy dirt of Sydney Cove, at which the convicts were now scratching.
They had no ploughs or draft animals; it was all hack-and-peck hoe cultivation, and they sowed the first corn on a patch half a mile east of the stream, where the Botanical Gardens of Sydney now stand. Some of the trees they felled were giants, red gums more than twenty-five feet around the trunk, whose root systems had to be dug out and grubbed from the stony earth—an exhausting labor for men whose muscles had gone to suet after months at sea. Some officers had to sleep ashore. “I never slept worse, my dear wife, than I did last night,” the homesick Lieutenant Clark wrote in his journal, “what with the hard cold ground, spiders, ants and every vermin you can think of was crawling over me.”12
A fortnight passed before enough tents and huts were ready for the female convicts. On February 6 their disembarkation began, and all through the day the longboats plied between the transports and the cove, carrying their freight of women. Those who had decent clothes had put on all their finery: “Some few among them,” noted Bowes Smyth, heartily glad to have them off his ship, “might be said to be well dressed.” The last of them landed by six in the evening. It was a squally day, and thunderheads were piled up in livid cliffs above the Pacific; as dusk fell, the weather burst. Tents blew away; within minutes the whole encampment was a rain-lashed bog. The women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them. One lightning bolt split a tree in the middle of the camp and killed several sheep and a pig beneath it. Meanwhile, most of the sailors on Lady Penrhyn applied to her master, Captain William Sever, for an extra ration of rum “to make merry with upon the women quitting the ship.” Out came the pannikins, down went the rum, and before long the drunken tars went off to join the convicts in pursuit of the women, so that, Bowes remarked, “it is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.” It was the first bush party in Australia, with “some swearing, others quarrelling, others singing—not in the least regarding the tempest, tho’ so violent that the thunder shook the ship exceeding anything I ever before had a conception of.” And as the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aguardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun.13
Its political history began the next day. Late in the morning, as the sun stood up above the treetops and the drenched ground steamed, the marine band summoned all the colonists on shore to hear the Governor’s Commission read. Phillip stood at a folding table, with his senior colonial officers—Robert Ross the lieutenant-governor, David Collins the judge-advocate, Reverend Richard Johnson the clergyman and John White the surgeon—ranked next to him. Two leather cases on the table held George III’s seal and the documents commissioning the colony. With a rattle of drums and a small needling of fifes, the convicts were herded together in a circle around the gentlemen and officers; the soldiers formed a ring outside them. The convicts were ordered to squat. The soldiers remained standing with loaded muskets. This simple choreography summed up the main transactions of power.
Collins read the Royal Instructions giving Phillip, as Governor, the power to administer oaths, appoint officers, convene criminal and civil court and emancipate prisoners—the customary imperial boilerplate. He could raise armies, execute martial law and build “such and so many forts and platforms castles cities boroughs towns and fortifications as you shall judge necessary,” a clause that must have deepened the hungover prisoners’ gloom as Collins recited it.14
Phillip now harangued the convicts. He would stand no repetition of the last night’s orgy, and any prisoners who tried to get into the women’s tents would be shot. Cattle-duffers and chicken thieves would be hanged, without exceptions. Breeding stock was infinitely precious to the colony. Having watched the felons at work, “he was persuaded nothing but severity would have any effect upon them, to induce them to behave properly in future.” If they did not work, they would not eat. Up to now only one man in three had been working; discipline would fix that, and discipline they would have. Their task, apart from clearing and hoeing the soil, would be building houses: first for the officers, then for the marines and lastly for themselves. God Save the King! The marines fired three volleys and marched the convicts off. Phillip and his officers sat down to a lunch of cold mutton, chatting sociably amid the stuttering whir of the cicadas. Alas, the meat proved to be crawling with maggots, although the sheep had only been butchered the night before. “Nothing will keep 24 hours in this country, I find,” Lieutenant Clark morosely noted.
Now
the hard work began, and it soon became clear that the colonists were wretchedly equipped for it. Not only was there a dearth of skilled labor, but tools were short and, Phillip complained, “the worst that ever was seen.”15 The only good building timber came from the cabbage-tree palms that grew in profusion around the stream at Sydney Cove. They were straight, easy to work and had little natural taper. All were cut down within a year. The huts they became might have been drawn by a child—boxes about 9 by 12 feet, with a hipped roof and two windows like eyes on either side of a doorway, the archetypal cottage-as-face. Their construction was equally simple. Walls were framed with 6-inch-square timber posts, set directly in the ground; vertical studs went between these, three feet apart. Between the roughly rabbeted studs, the carpenters inserted horizontal lengths of sapling whose ends were tapered to fit grooves. The walls, at this stage, looked like crude washboards. Then they were daubed (roughly sealed) on both sides with mud. This method of construction was used in every peasant community in England and Ireland; it was called “wattle-and-daub.” Because, in Sydney, the horizontal wall slats were cut from mimosa saplings, that golden tree of the Australian summer has been known as a “wattle” ever since.16
The usual roof was reed thatch, gathered from the tidal marshes of Rushcutters’ Bay. It harbored colonies of bugs and spiders, and it leaked. Presently it would be replaced by shingles. But when the winter rains came, the mud washed out of the walls. What the colony needed was brick, and before long some suitable clay was found. One convict, James Bloodworth, had been a brickmaker in England and took charge of manufacture. Convicts ground clay with water in natural depressions in the sandstone, using a log for a pestle; then, in barelegged teams, they squelched and trod it into a homogeneous pug. The bricks were molded, racked, dried and fired. They shrank unequally, and nobody could build level courses with them. For mortar, the only source of lime was burned oyster shells, laboriously gathered by convict women. That supplied just enough for a permanent Government House, a two-storied brick building with a tiled roof, stone quoins and real glass windowpanes—the first true piece of Georgian architecture in Australia, “composed of the common and Attic orders, with a pediment in front,” wrote Thomas Watling, “simple, and without any other embellishment whatever.” All other buildings had to be constructed without mortar and instead were made with a mixture of sheeps’ hair and mud. The rain soon washed it out. No ruins of the earliest convict buildings, therefore, have survived at Sydney Cove.17
There was even, one may guess, a psychological reason for the poverty of building. Architecture signifies permanence; it announces the desire to stay. No other officers shared Phillip’s dream of a colony of free immigrant settlers. To the convicts, all talk of a national future, or indeed a nation, was a joke. If your one dream was to escape from this Georgian shantytown, why build for the future? “Every person,” wrote Lieutenant-Governor Ross, “who came out with a design of remaining in this country were [sic] now most earnestly wishing to get away from it.”18 This was the motif of life over the next decade in Sydney, until the Rum Corps gentry—grasping, ruthless and nepotistic, but resolved to make a life for themselves in New South Wales—perceived what there was to be gained and how the gains could be consolidated through the use of slave labor.
Since the First Fleet officers did not expect to stay, their diaries emphasized the exotic, the unique: animals, plants and Aborigines. They wrote very little about the convicts themselves, who had been sent there to be forgotten. Their work, infractions and punishments were all duly logged; but of the convicts as people, the records say little. What did the first man hanged in Sydney, a seventeen-year-old lad of “most vile character” named Thomas Barrett, really mean to say when, stammering and trembling and seeming “very much shocked,” he announced at the foot of the ladder that “he had led a very wicked life”? How much “wickedness” could a boy compress into that small span from his birth to the fatal act of stealing some butter, dried peas and salt pork at Sydney Cove?19
The Australian blacks interested the First Fleet officers much more, and no account of the new thief-colony in the antipodes could be complete without a chapter or two on its “Indians.” Spartan in bearing, they had a general appeal to men whose education reposed on neoclassical foundations. They were not as attractive as the Tahitians, and they seemed less like that fiction of the liberal European mind, the Noble Savage. They exemplified “hard” as against “soft” primitivism. But certainly the colonists did not wish to exterminate or enslave them, and they seemed at first to pose no threat.
Nevertheless, they were destroyed. Cholera and influenza germs from the ships began the work. By 1789 black corpses were a common sight, huddled in the salt grasses and decomposing in the creamy uterine hollows of the sandstone. These epidemics were not meant to happen; the days of arsenic and the infected trading-blanket were still far off. Governor Phillip’s instructions as to blacks were quite clear: He must “conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them,” and punish anyone who harmed them. Common sense dictated that: why add tribal warfare to the problems of the colony?20
If at first the officers of the fleet saw the Aborigines through a scrim of Arcadian stereotypes and Rousseauist fancies, this pleasant delusion did not last long. The proper denizens of Arcadia were nymphs, but those of Port Jackson were unlike the welcoming girls of Tahiti. Young aboriginal women provoked mild longings in George Worgan, the surgeon on Sirius. “I can assure you,” he wrote,
there is in some of them a Proportion, a Softness, a roundness and Plumpness in their limbs and bodies … that would excite tender & amorous Sensations, even in the frigid Breast of a Philosopher,
Would stop a Druid in his Pious Course,
Nor could Philosophy resist their Force.21
Their virtue, or at least their relative immunity to rape, was nonetheless secured by their dirtiness, repellent even by the norms of Georgian hygiene. “What with the stinking Fish-Oil,” Worgan complained,
with which they seem to besmear their Bodies, & this mixed with the Soot which is collected on their Skins from continually setting over the Fires, and then in addition to those sweet Odours, the constant appearance of the Excrementitious Matter of the Nose which is collected on the upper pouting Lip, in rich Clusters of dry Bubbles, and is kept up by fresh Drippings; I say, from all these personal Graces & Embellishments, every Inclination for an Affair of Gallantry, as well as every idea of fond endearing Intercourse, which the nakedness of these Damssels might excite one to, is banished.22
In the same way Lieutenant Daniel Southwell, mate on Sirius, dreamed of Palladian villas on the shores and islands of “this extraordinary harbour”—“charm’g seats, superb buildings, the grand ruins of stately edifices … ’Tis greatly to be wished these appearances were not as delusive as in reality they are.”23
This was a common complaint. The land was not what it seemed. It looked fertile and lovely, but it proved arid, reluctant, incomprehensible. “Here, a romantic rocky craggy Precipice, over which a little purling Stream makes a Cascade. There, a soft, vivid-green, shady Lawn attracts your eye. Such are the prepossessing Appearances which the country that forms PORT JACKSON presents.… [H]appy were it for the Colony, if these appearances were not so delusive.”24 The most vivid complaint about the scenic treachery of Sydney Harbor came from a Scots convict, young Thomas Watling of Dumfries, transported for forging guinea notes on the Bank of Scotland, who arrived on the Royal Admiral in 1792 at the age of thirty. He was a landscape painter, and as the first European artist to live in Australia he soon found how hard it was to depict the sights of Sydney Cove within the conventions of the journeyman picturesque that had formed his training. To be sure, Australia presented itself to the artist or naturalist as “a country of enchantments,” with “numberless beauties” and “Elysian scenery.”25 But Arcadia is underwritten only by leisure and surplus, and the infant colony had neither. Soon Watling found the place of
fered no respite. The earth was sandy, swampy or full of rocks; fertile topsoil only existed in pockets, and every yard of ground was impenetrably tangled with brush. There were no streams of any size, or lakes or even ponds, and rain simply ran off the meager soil into bogs. Away from the harbor, the bush crushed the eye with its monotony. “The landscape painter,” wrote poor blistered Watling, “may in vain seek here for that beauty which arises from happy-opposed off-scapes” (meaning the beauty of romantic contrast, à la Salvator Rosa). Close up, the country matched the harshness of the penal regime, and Watling lamented
the sterility and miserable state of N. S. Wales. It will be long before ever it can even support itself.—Still that country so famed for charity and liberality of sentiment will I doubt no persevere to continue it.—When I have seen so much wanton cruelty practised on board the English hulks, on poor wretches, without the least colour of justice, what may I not reasonably infer?—French Bastille, nor Spanish Inquisition, could not centre more of horrors.26
Most of all, the young Scot resented being treated worse than the Aborigine, a “barbarian New-Hollander”:
Many of these savages are allowed what is termed a freeman’s ratio of provisions for their idleness. They are bedecked at times with dress which they make away with [at] the first opportunity, preferring the originality of naked nature; and they are treated with the most singular tenderness. This you will suppose is not more than laudable; but is there one spark of humanity exhibited to poor wretches, who are at least denominated Christians? No, they are frequently denied the common necessaries of life!—wrought to death under the oppressive heat of a burning sun; or barbarously afflicted with often little-merited secondary punishment—this may be philosophy, according to the calculation of our rigid dictators; but I think it is the falsest species of it I have ever known or heard of.27