This depressing state of affairs, along with the debilitating effects of his rheumatism and injured knee, precipitated Morrill’s early death, on October 30, 1865 at the age of forty-one, only two years and nine months after his reentry into the white world. The Bowen townsfolk staged a grand procession for his funeral, but the local newspaper makes no mention of their having “let in” any of his former kinsfolk to join the mourning.41
* * *
Narcisse Pelletier’s return to “civilization,” while different from Morrill’s, was no less ambivalent. Pelletier had come to welcome the idea of going home to his French family but he also retained a pride in his former clan identity and values. He’d been deeply missed by his mother, and was joyfully received by the villagers at a celebratory bonfire outside the Pelletiers’ house, but after a while his family seems to have found his “savage” appearance and pagan beliefs confrontational, if not repulsive. A decision to have him exorcised by the local Catholic priest suggests something of their unease. Local rumor had it that Pelletier came to feel a reciprocal alienation.42
His greatest initial challenge was to cope with public and academic curiosity about the nature of “savagery” at a time when new currents of “scientific” racial theorizing were coming into fashion. Sensitive responses like that of amateur anthropologist Louis de Kerjean in 1876 were rare. “Instead of cannibals,” de Kerjean wrote, “the young sailor had found an adoptive father, whose memory will always remain dear to him, and a second homeland, which nonetheless had not made him forget either his family or the country of his birth.”43
More typical were the writings by members of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, which had been established by the physician and anatomist Paul Broca at the beginning of the decade. They saw themselves as radical, secular, objective practitioners of a new science of physical anthropology, which used comparative craniological and anatomical measurement to assess what Broca called “the respective position [of races] in the human series.” Suspicious of the humanistic values of sympathy and imagination associated with ethnography, most members espoused a “polygenic” theory of multiple human racial origins—as against “monogenists,” who believed in a single origin. Société thinkers generally categorized Australian Aborigines as the most inferior racial type on the ladder of the human species, barely separated from animals.
Whether the French Consul George Simon, Pelletier’s early questioner and patron, held such hard-line ideas is uncertain, but he was said to have been briefed about Aboriginal peoples by an eminent Société theorist, Paul Topinard. Topinard placed Anco’s clan, the coastal Wanthaala, even lower on the scale of savagery than their inland counterparts.44
Constant Merland, the Nantes scholar who interviewed Pelletier in 1875 to produce the biography Dix-sept ans chez les sauvages, seems to have been a more sympathetic figure. Although he organized Pelletier’s story into a scientific-style treatise, he saw himself as an ethnographer rather than a physical anthropologist. Most importantly he acknowledged that some of the Wanthaala’s values were strongly indicative of the “tribe’s” humanity. Maademan, he said, was a devoted adoptive father, and the boy Sassy “a true and faithful friend.” Wanthaala women likewise showed intense and enduring maternal feelings toward their children. All members of the tribe were selfless in their sharing of property and impressive in their respect for the dead. Furthermore, Pelletier’s linguistic evidence “proved that the vocabulary of these tribes is truly rich,” even including words to express such complex concepts as a species and a genus.45
Reading between the lines, though, one senses that Pelletier engaged in a covert resistance to Merland’s more insensitive questions and implications, including some that mirrored prevailing assumptions of Société anthropologists. As an initiated warrior, Pelletier had sworn never to disclose major realms of men’s knowledge and sacral mythology, hence his silence about male initiation rituals. He also avoided mentioning his personal relationships with Aboriginal women, as did Morrill, albeit for different reasons. Later evidence suggested that both men might have left behind several children.46
The two former castaways were also evasive about the explosive subject of cannibalism, though Pelletier once muttered, “ce n’est pas jolie,” and Morrill admitted that it was practiced occasionally on slain enemies. One of Pelletier’s most sympathetic early questioners noted his evasiveness: “I am inclined to think, he had definitely made up his mind to give us no more information about the tribe and the language.”47
Merland couldn’t help testing Pelletier’s responses against two poles: “civilized” Frenchmen on the one hand, and the “bestial” Wanthaala, who were “living a completely animal existence,” on the other. The latter, Merland claimed, were moved by coarse material and instinctual appetites: “their thought never soars toward higher realms, it never embraces intellectual questions, it never debates accepted beliefs.” Almost uniquely among all “savage” peoples on earth, he speculated, they lacked a belief in immortality or a higher spiritual order. Expressions of sentiment and feeling were unknown: the men were brutal to their wives and endemically warlike toward their neighbors. All in all, he thought the Wanthaala were fixed in a stasis that blocked any will to improve. Narcisse Pelletier, Merland concluded, had been forced to live for seventeen years as a white savage with his soul in a state of suspended slumber.48
Appointed by the government to a lonely position as lighthouse keeper, and having quarreled with his family, Pelletier was rumored to have grown morose and solitary, staring wistfully out to sea and flying into rages when villagers taunted him with the nickname “le sauvage.” Around 1883 he married Louise Mabileau, a young local seamstress, but the couple had no children and few friends. Narcisse Pelletier died of unknown causes on September 28, 1894, at the age of fifty. Villagers speculated that he’d succumbed either to the long-term effects of Aboriginal sorcery or to a primitive nostalgia for his clan and country. Both explanations suggest that he was viewed as a failed Frenchman, unable to escape the legacies of “Endeavour Land” savagery.
Neither of the publications about the two castaways attained a wide circulation, even in their home countries. The pamphlet on Morrill was considered unsatisfyingly brief, and the expensive volume on Pelletier, not widely read in France, wasn’t translated into English until 2009.
By contrast, Louis de Rougemont’s fantastic plagiarism of their stories managed to reach popular audiences in half a dozen countries. His crude, if sometimes romanticized, inventions of Australian Aboriginal life and values for Wide World Magazine achieved a record circulation in Britain. The subsequent book is said to have sold more than fifty thousand copies, and was published in American and foreign-language editions. Even Australia’s first acknowledged literary genius, Henry Lawson, who might have known better, was entranced by the preposterous memoir. He thought de Rougemont’s style and sentiments “delightful,” and claimed that the con man had made “a bigger splash in three months than any other Australian writer has begun to make in a hundred years.”49
It was ever thus.
7
REFUGE
William Kent Escapes His Past
BORN ONE YEAR AFTER Narcisse Pelletier, in 1845, Australia’s first professional Reef scientist experienced a childhood more bizarre than even the wildest inventions of a de Rougemont. William Kent’s tortured path to the Great Barrier Reef can be said to have begun with an early-morning event in July 1856, at the age of eleven. That was the morning William and his sister Constance, twelve, ran away from their home in the small rural village of Road on the Wiltshire and Somerset borders in southwest England.
They’d planned their escape with care. The instigator, Constance, having retrieved some of her brother’s old clothes that she’d secreted in a hedge, led the way to an unused garden privy screened by shrubbery. Here William helped cut off her long hair and toss it down the privy’s drop. Now dressed as two little brothers, and armed with eighteen pence and a small stick,
they set off for the distant port of Bristol. From there they intended to sail as cabin boys to the West Indies, and to somehow find their eldest brother, Edward, a junior officer on an inter-island steamship.
By evening they’d reached Bath, ten miles away. There the publican of the Greyhound Hotel, suspecting they were runaways, alerted the police. Under questioning, William broke down in tears and was returned to the hotel for the night. Constance, pugnacious and defiant, remained under lock and key at the station to prevent further escape. The following morning they were collected by a servant and returned home.
A Bath newspaper reported the event coyly as “A Little Romance,” delighting in the brave behavior of the girl and the childish fancy of the escapade. As keen readers of exploration and adventure stories, the two children had often been caught playing daring games of make-believe on the roof of their substantial home. But the reporter missed the underlying desperation in their attempt to run away. Brother and sister returned to a harsh interrogation from their father, Samuel, and their hated stepmother, Mary Drewe Kent, née Pratt. William sobbed for forgiveness, but Constance remained unmoved, explaining simply: “I wished to be independent.”1
Had the two children been able to articulate what really drove them, they would have told a pitiable story. Charles Dickens, with his nose for sentimental melodrama, adapted the incident in his last and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). Here he has the William figure, Neville Landless, explain his motivations for running away: “I have had … from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and bitter hatred. This has made me secret and revengeful. I have been always tyrannically held down by the strong hand. This has driven me, in my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean. I have been stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions of youth. This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don’t know what emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts…”2
It was a plausible reconstruction of William’s burning anger, but if anything, Dickens understated the misery of his two real-life models. Throughout their childhood their father, a sub-inspector of factories, had been gripped by the twin obsessions of social aspiration and sexual conquest, impulses that led to frequent moves and fractured, insecure lives for his large brood of children. William and Constance were shunted back and forth between a succession of unaffordable houses and austere boarding schools.
Samuel Kent’s bullying personality and rampant libido had also broken the health, mind, and spirit of his cultured first wife, Mary Ann Kent. She was subjected to a stream of annual pregnancies, a syphilis infection that left both William and Constance with permanent legacies, and a regime of crushing isolation and humiliation as her husband conducted a flagrant affair with their live-in governess, Mary Drewe Pratt.3
Young William, timid and artistic, had clung to the company of his mother and his two elder sisters, while Constance, as tough and willful as her father, turned to furious rebellion as she neared her teens. By the time of their attempted flight to Bristol, the children’s mother had died. Mary Pratt, now their triumphant stepmother, was already pregnant with the second of many half brothers and sisters. William was ridiculed by his stepmother as a girlish mommy’s boy and made to use the backstairs of the house, like a servant. He was also forced to wheel his baby half sister through the streets of the village in a baby carriage, running the gauntlet of jeering local kids who loathed the dandies at Road House.
The ultimate consequences of Samuel’s behavior proved too grim even for Dickens’s later co-option. On June 30, 1860, two villagers discovered the body of William and Constance’s three-year-old half brother, Francis Savill Kent, in the same outdoor privy where four years earlier Constance had changed into her runaway’s clothes. Francis had been abducted from the house while he slept, smothered to death, and stabbed in the chest with a razor. His head was almost severed from his neck. Circumstances pointed to more than one perpetrator, and to them being from inside the household.4
* * *
Some thirty years on, William and Constance Kent made a second attempt to flee the shores of England. William, then aged thirty-nine, arrived in Tasmania in July 1884 accompanied by his wife, Mary Ann, and his half sister Mary Amelia. Late the following year Constance Kent, forty-two, left England on the Carisbrook Castle, reaching Sydney on February 27, 1886.
The once inseparable brother and sister had traveled under starkly different circumstances. The former, now a scientist, sailed in comfort to Hobart on the steamship John Elder to take up a position as superintendent of Tasmanian Fisheries. Constance sailed in steerage under the alias of Ruth Kaye, alone and penniless. She’d just completed twenty-two years of grueling imprisonment for the murder of her baby half brother.
Whether William had invited Constance to follow him to Australia or was hoping to avoid her by leaving England just before her release remains unknown. He had, however, written to her in prison in 1883, likely disclosing his intention to move to Australia with their four remaining half siblings. With or without his encouragement, Constance, as soon as she was freed in 1885, set sail for the distant convict continent. It was, as Dickens had so often shown, an ideal place to escape past shame and to fashion a new identity.5
William, like it or not, could never forget the debt he’d incurred to his sister. He owed Constance everything: his freedom, his reputation, his career, his comfort. The shrewd Scotland Yard detective who had led the murder inquiry, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, had been unable to find enough evidence to make a charge against the boy stand, but he remained convinced that Constance had carried out the murder in collaboration with William. Their motive, Whicher believed, was to exact revenge on their stepmother for blighting both their own and their mother’s lives—an assessment backed by the most authoritative modern analysts of this famous Victorian crime.6
In the summer of 1865, five years after the death of Francis, Constance confirmed at least half of Inspector Whicher’s suspicions by confessing to the murder. A bout of intense religious indoctrination had aroused her conscience, and she seems to have been moved by a martyr’s determination “to absolve her family, especially William.” Yet her overinsistence on having done the deed alone rang false with many of her interviewers. Inconsistencies and evasions in her account suggested she was protecting someone in the family, and she compounded this impression by refusing to take her counsel’s advice to plead a family history of mental instability. To do so, she said, would damage her brother’s future career. And so she stuck to her confession, even though she risked execution as a result—a sentence she did in fact incur, but which was later commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment.7
Constance had always encouraged William’s ambition to be a scientist. Samuel Kent and other family members wanted the boy to go into business in his maternal grandfather’s coach-making company, but William’s heart lay elsewhere. He was talented at drawing and he loved nature rambles, the seaside, and stories of science, exploration, and adventure. In 1859 Constance introduced him to the most important scientific work of the century. She read, and probably brought home, a copy of Charles Darwin’s newly published On the Origin of Species, and then announced to her horrified parents that she was a convert to evolution. At the time of her sentencing in 1865, she knew, too, that William was shortly due to inherit money from his mother’s estate, which could fund his education. A taint of family insanity might cast this legacy into doubt. Constance had thus performed an act of martyrdom to protect her beloved younger brother.8
* * *
In opting for a scientific career, William had not chosen an easy path. Clergymen steeped in the creationist tenets of the Church of England still monopolized most paid scientific positions in England at that time. Luckily, though, William’s desire for a science education coincided with a social revolution that was beginning to pave the way for a new brand of professionalism in the field. Inspired by Charles D
arwin’s ideas and led by his pugnacious disciple Thomas Huxley, scores of young men from the insecure lower-middle class began to storm the traditional bastions of science and engineering, in the expectation of making a living. Huxley urged them to overthrow clerical and aristocratic privilege and bring about a “New Reformation,” by forging useful, secular, and morally uplifting scientific careers.9
With the help of his recent inheritance William Kent was well placed to join these aspirants, even though his earlier education had been spotty and erratic. After his stepmother died in 1866 and his father moved to rural Wales to escape the murder scandal, timid William began to reveal abilities and ambitions few had suspected. Enrolling in evening classes at King’s College, London, he attended Huxley’s inspirational lectures on marine biology and decided to follow in his footsteps. Probably at his teacher’s urging, he joined the Microscopical Society and began investigating minute marine organisms called infusoria. After this he worked for a period with Huxley’s great friend William Flower at the Royal College of Surgeons, cataloging coral collections and becoming “smitten” with these mysterious creatures.10
By 1870 William, aged twenty-five, was a published authority on corals and sponges, and was working as a junior assistant at the British Museum. But he shared his father’s restless ambition and chafed at the poor pay and lack of promotion opportunities. Three years on, the added financial burden of marriage to a London barrister’s daughter, Elizabeth Bennett, goaded him into taking a better paid position as resident biologist at a new commercial aquarium in Brighton. It was an inspired decision for someone with both artistic and technological talents. William used the profits from the entertainment attractions of the aquarium to subsidize his scientific work—culturing lobsters and oysters, studying marine behavior and reproduction, and designing artificial marine environments.11
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 16