From the Edge
Page 7
A ‘soak’, close to Hamilton’s campsite, Preservation Island, 2013
Fearing that Hamilton and some of the survivors he had left on Preservation Island in February might not be alive when the Francis arrived, Clark had suggested to Hunter that he send six men (possibly former convicts) who would remain on the island to protect the cargo that could not be loaded onto the rescue vessels. But Hamilton took one look at this motley band of recruits and rejected the idea, finding them ‘very improper to be left in charge of spirits’. He then turned to Bennet and five of his fittest Lascars and asked them to remain on the island until he could return in another vessel from Sydney and retrieve them with the last of the cargo. Bennet and the Lascars did not need to be ordered; they ‘volunteered’. Bennet had only had a few weeks to recuperate in Sydney before he sailed back to the island on the Francis. Now he found himself marooned there a second time, issued with an official certificate by Hamilton that placed him ‘in charge of the Cargo saved from the Wreck of the Ship Sydney Cove on and for Account of the Underwriters on the said Ship’. That Hamilton went so far as to formally declare Bennet’s role on paper said much about the necessity and power of the written word in the late eighteenth century. Even on this remote island in the southern seas, two weeks’ sail from the nearest settlement, Hamilton’s proclamation carried authority. They had sailed from Calcutta to sell Campbell and Clark’s cargo at Port Jackson, and this objective was always uppermost in Hamilton’s mind. Despite all they had been through, he remained determined to save ‘as much of the cargo as possible’.34
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On 23 June, nearly six months after they were shipwrecked, Hamilton and the remaining Lascars finally left Preservation on board the schooner Francis and the ‘sloop’ Eliza. Sailing through ‘dreadful weather’, the two ships were separated in ‘a violent storm’. The Francis arrived safely in Sydney on 3 July and Hamilton ‘immediately landed the Goods … and deposited them in his Majesty’s Store’ and waited for the Eliza to arrive. The following morning he met Judge Advocate Richard Atkins, and ‘gave notice’ that he would lodge a legal ‘protest’ which would explain how he had lost the Sydney Cove in violent ‘winds and weather’. Days and weeks passed and there was still no sign of the Eliza. On 17 July, Sydney was struck by gale-force southeasterly winds, which tore down ‘trees’ and ‘chimneys’ and ‘two of the vanes of the windmill’, while the torrential rain was so heavy that some of the ships in Sydney Cove ‘brought their anchors home’. As David Collins feared, the violence of the storm seemed ominous. It ‘increased the apprehensions of everyone for the safety of the longboat’. Captain Armstrong and the Eliza’s small crew, including the ‘seven or eight lascars’ they had rescued from Preservation Island, never arrived in Sydney. Hunter lamented that ‘three infant orphan children’ survived Armstrong, the man who had kindly offered his assistance when he had needed another vessel to accompany the Francis to Preservation Island, while the Lascars, after surviving one shipwreck and months of privation, lost their lives on the very vessel that rescued them. Of the fifty or so people who had left Calcutta in November 1796 on board the Sydney Cove, less than half were still alive.35
Reunited in Sydney, Hamilton and Clark finally had time to tell one another their stories. Each man had his tale of perseverance and woe, lightened now by the divine taste of the food and wine they shared at Hunter’s table and elsewhere in town. While Hamilton knew that his ‘duty’ was to ‘remain [there] for some time’ in order to secure another vessel, retrieve the last of the cargo and, as ‘agent for the underwriters’, oversee its sale, he was also eager for Clark to return to Calcutta and inform Robert Campbell of his ship’s fate. Due to the shortage of available vessels in Sydney, Hamilton would have to wait until December before departing for Preservation Island. Meanwhile, Clark looked for passage on the first available ship leaving Sydney. By late July he had fully recovered, although the scars on his palms would remain with him for life. If he wrote home to Scotland from Sydney, as he almost certainly did, his first words would probably have expressed the difficulty of holding a pen or of grasping any object in his hands.
After accompanying Bass down the coast to retrieve the coal in early August, he quickly secured a berth on board the Britannia bound for England via Canton. As the ship sailed through The Heads with Clark, his servant and several of the Lascars who had accompanied Hamilton from Preservation Island on board, it carried various accounts of their epic journey: Hunter’s dispatches to the Colonial Office and his letter to Sir Joseph Banks, Thomas Palmer’s letter which spoke enticingly of ‘the finest country [he] ever saw’, the correspondence Hamilton and Clark sent to their families in Scotland, and the battered, bloodstained journal that Clark had kept on his walk. Also on board the Britannia were the specimens of coal that Clark and Bass had broken from the face of the cliffs at ‘Coalcliff’ several days earlier. Hunter had placed them in a box especially for Joseph Banks’s perusal: ‘In short, Sir Joseph, it appears that this part of the country abounds with coal & probably other useful matter’. Leaving Sydney, Clark knew like few others the vastness and magnificence of the country that lay beyond the colony. He had met Aboriginal people as few others had met them—as a temporary visitor to their lands—before the rapid loss of so much of the cultural knowledge they had accumulated over millennia. Yet his experience would be largely remembered in the future for his ‘discovery’ of coal. As Hunter told Banks, he wanted to go and see this ‘coal country’ for himself. Usefulness of country was what mattered.36
With Clark bound for Calcutta via China, Hamilton settled in to a more comfortable life in Sydney and discussed the sale of the spirits with Hunter. Long convinced of the ‘ruinous’ effects of the ‘excess in the use of spirits’ on the convict colony, and reluctant to fuel an alcohol trade with British India that he would otherwise have discouraged, Hunter ultimately had little choice but to purchase the alcohol in order to control its sale and distribution. While he bemoaned the large numbers of convicts who had been ‘launched into eternity’ after their enthusiastic participation in numerous bacchanalian festivals, the news that hundreds of barrels of rum were languishing south of Sydney spread like wildfire around the town. In September, Hunter had the spur he required to purchase the spirits, when rum fever led fourteen convicts to hatch a harebrained scheme to escape, sail to the wreck of the Sydney Cove and attempt to claim the rum for themselves. After thieving a boat on Parramatta River they sailed down the coast with the intention of floating the ship, or at the very least raiding it of all its cargo and selling the proceeds overseas. Miraculously, this ill-prepared band of Irish marauders managed to reach as far as Wilson’s Promontory. There, on a small offshore island, seven of the convicts stole out to sea one evening while their fellow escapees were asleep, effectively leaving the others for dead. The betrayers reached the Hawkesbury before eventually turning themselves in. Two were later put to death for escaping from Sydney. For the seven convicts who woke to find themselves stranded, they remained for weeks on the island before George Bass spotted them while he was exploring the coast in early January 1798.37
At first, when Bass saw the smoke from their fire he thought that they were Aboriginal. But when he went ashore to speak with them he realised that they were white ‘and had some clothing on’. Two convicts swam off as soon as they saw him, more fearful of capture and execution than of losing their lives slowly from starvation. Bass, who was eager to prove the existence of the strait between the mainland and Van Diemen’s Land, gave them some provisions and told them he would return to help them on his way back to Sydney. But it was precisely lack of provisions that forced Bass at Westernport to turn back for Sydney without crossing the strait. When he reached the convicts again in early February, he could only manage to fit two of the most ill on his small boat. He then took the other five across to the mainland, gave them his pocket compass, a musket and ammunition, some fishing gear and the few clothes he could spare, before telling them the news
they did not want to hear: they would have to walk to Sydney. As Bass later told Hunter, this moment of separation was wrenching both for him and the convicts—‘when they parted … some tears were shed on both sides’. All of the men knew that fourteen of Clark’s party had lost their lives attempting the same journey twelve months earlier. They began their walk far less equipped to survive their ordeal, while the Aboriginal people who again saw a line of weary walkers making their way north along the beaches of their Country surely wondered if this procession of ghosts would continue indefinitely. All seven convicts failed to reach Sydney and no trace of them was ever found. How far did they walk? As far as Moruya, where they could possibly have met a few of the Lascars who had been taken in by local Aboriginal people in 1797, or as far as Jervis Bay? In March 1801, while exploring the coast south of Sydney, Lieutenant James Grant reported the discovery of human bones near an Aboriginal campsite. One of his crew ‘picked up part of a human skull … with the cavities of the eyes and part of the bones of the nose still attached to it … he also found a piece of the upper jaw … [and] the vertebrae of the back with evident marks of fire on it’. Yeranabie, the Aboriginal man who accompanied Grant on his voyage, allegedly ‘interpreted’ that the bones were the remains of ‘a white man [who] … had come from some ship which … had broke down—been lost to the southward’—and that the Aborigines had eaten him. Grant took the bones on board and later sent them to the surgeon and anatomist WL Thomas in London asking him to examine them in order to prove the ‘colour of the person’. Not surprisingly, Thomas was unable to enlighten him. By the early 1800s, some of the first settler oral histories of cross-cultural encounters outside Sydney were laced with these bizarre tales of ‘native savagery’ and cannibalism, stories of lost white men wandering half-starved through Aboriginal coastal lands seeking redemption.38
By the time Bass was making his way back to Sydney in February 1798, Hamilton had already sailed down to Preservation Island and returned with Bennet, four Lascars (one having died) and nearly all the remaining cargo, including his mare. The wreck of the Sydney Cove was now ‘entirely washed away’. Hamilton listened to Bennet’s distressingly familiar tales of their six long months on the island, battling gales and storms and living on smoked mutton-birds and the kangaroos they had killed on nearby islands. After more than one year spent either marooned on the island or walking the coast, Bennet had finally been liberated but his subsequent fate remains a mystery. Most likely he returned to Calcutta or England, another refugee from the wilds of New South Wales.
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A few weeks before Hamilton and Bennet returned to Sydney, Clark arrived back in Calcutta where he and Robert Campbell were immediately ‘admitted partners in … the firm of Campbell and Clark’, which included Clark’s brother, John. They were not deterred in the slightest by their experience with the Sydney Cove. Instead, Clark’s news of the colony’s dearth of supplies only increased their determination to fill another ship with saleable Indian goods and sail as quickly as possible for Sydney, this time with Robert Campbell aboard as ‘agent and underwriter’. Days after his arrival in Calcutta, Clark, perhaps with Campbell’s and his brother’s encouragement, had also made contact with a journalist and discussed the publication of excerpts from his journal. He was well aware that his story could make his name, especially back in Britain, where firsthand accounts of similar adventures with the ‘natives’ in the far-flung corners of the Empire were eagerly consumed by the reading public. He had carried his pencilled journal with him ever since the morning he had left in the longboat from Preservation Island. In late December 1797 and early January 1798, a 6000-word ‘abstract’ from his journal appeared in Calcutta’s Asiatic Mirror and was immediately syndicated to a number of other newspapers, including many in England and Scotland. It was written up with the assistance of the journalist who he entrusted with the story. As a result, its introductory passages are replete with the standard tropes of European contempt for Indigenous cultures. Clark is forced to cross ‘unfrequented deserts’ inhabited by ‘barbarous hordes’. Whoever assisted him certainly felt free to inject his own words into the narrative, yet strangely, Clark’s true voice—more descriptive and restrained, and less given to melodrama and hyperbole—is always apparent. How much material he left unpublished is difficult to estimate because the original journal has never been found. But the British journalist certainly gave his abstract the full romantic treatment, converting Clark’s experience into the predestined triumph of brave British men who overcame the ‘natives’ and unimaginable horrors on the ‘inhospitable shores’ of New South Wales’. Eventually, the story Clark published in Calcutta found its way back to Sydney and later appeared in Historical Records of New South Wales, thus slipping into history.39
In February 1798, as Robert Campbell prepared to sail for Sydney aboard the Hunter (an ingenious example of flattery, which was designed to win the Governor over to the agency’s future trading plans), Hamilton was making his second and final voyage back to Preservation Island on the Francis with Matthew Flinders, who had happily agreed to Hunter’s request to survey as much of the area as possible. During their 4-day stay on the island, Hamilton watched over the loading of the last of the Sydney Cove’s cargo. Broken up by the westerly winds, the ship’s beams and timbers were now scattered along the shorelines of the neighbouring islands, the flotsam of speculative commerce. Flinders busied himself charting the islands and acquainting himself with the local wildlife. ‘I levelled my gun at [a large seal], which was sitting on top of a rock with his nose extended up towards the sun, and struck him with three musket balls. He rolled over, and plunged over into the water; but in less than half an hour had taken his former station and attitude. On firing again, a stream of blood spouted forth from his breast to some yards distance, and he fell back, senseless. On examination, the six balls were found lodged in his breast; and one, which occasioned his death, had pierced his heart: his weight was equal to that of a common ox’. Mapping and shooting went hand in hand. Everything that moved had to be tasted: wombats (like ‘lean mutton’), echidnas (‘somewhat aromatic’) and penguins (‘strong and fishy’), their skin making excellent waterproof caps. Flinders’s crew killed ‘as many large [seals] as there was time to skin whilst taking the bearings’, as well as capturing a wombat, which he took back with him to Sydney where Hunter, after failing to keep the animal alive, ‘preserved it in spirits’ and shipped it to ‘the Literary & Philosophical Society … at Newcastle upon Tyne’ where it remains today in Newcastle’s Great North Museum, a stuffed specimen standing ridiculously on its back haunches like a gigantic squirrel.40
Flinders, who had been unable to accompany Hamilton on his first journey to Preservation Island six months earlier, left the question of the strait undecided as the Francis sailed quickly back to Sydney as soon as the cargo was loaded, although later that year he returned with George Bass and proved the existence of the strait that Hamilton had all but confirmed. Like Collins and Hunter, Flinders recorded Clark and Hamilton’s stories of the wreck, and the traces of his astonishment at their survival are visible in his brief but vivid account. When he arrived in Sydney with Hamilton, their bounty of sealskins created a frenzy of interest. Before the year was out, a ship had set up base on the south coast of Cape Barren Island. This enterprise would result in the successful sale of over nine thousand skins to a Canton merchant. In the years ahead, many other firms and speculators would follow them, including none other than Campbell & Co. Well before the first British settlement in Tasmania at Risdon Cove in September 1803, there were over two hundred sealers living on the islands of Bass Strait. Stories were later told of these men building ‘double ended boats’ from the ‘timbers’ of the Sydney Cove, as they went from island to island ‘clubbing seals’. In 1802, the crew of Nicolas Baudin’s Naturaliste noted the large numbers of seals on the islands and saw the remains of the Sydney Cove’s ‘sternpost’. Hamilton’s hut on Preservation Island quickly became a hal
fway house for bands of sealers and the Aboriginal women they ‘traded’ or stole from the mainland.41
With all the salvaged cargo now safely unloaded in Sydney, Hamilton immediately arranged for its sale on Campbell’s behalf. Although Hunter had already agreed that the government would purchase the spirits, no other collection of goods had been as much discussed in the colony’s short history. With little competition, the cargo fetched ‘enormous prices’. Collins looked on with dismay, complaining that the money that should have been spent on improving farms was ‘lavishly thrown away’. For Hamilton, the huge profits were at least some compensation for all he had endured. He had fulfilled his responsibilities beyond all expectations. Yet when he was finally relieved of his duty, he fell ill.
Few details are known about Hamilton’s life in Sydney between July 1797 and mid-1798. Robert Campbell was already on his way from Calcutta to Sydney when the cargo was sold in March. When he arrived in the Hunter on 10 June, Hamilton was gravely ill. He had little more than a week to live. Time enough though to tell Campbell his story and to inform him of the successful retrieval and sale of the cargo. It was eighteen months since they last spoke in Calcutta. Unfortunately, no report of their conversation exists, nor of Hamilton’s logbook from the Sydney Cove, which was most likely lost in the wreck. Hamilton died in the third week of June 1798 aged thirty-eight, almost as if he had waited until the moment he could personally account for the ship’s fate in the presence of its owner. Collins, who reported Hamilton’s death, indicated that his health had been poor since he was rescued from Preservation Island: ‘Captain Hamilton, the commander of the Sydney Cove, survived the arrival of the Hunter but a few days. He never recovered from the distresses and hardships which he suffered on the loss of his ship, and died exceedingly regretted by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance’. Hamilton’s funeral was held at St Phillip’s Church, the wattle and daub structure that would be burnt down only three months later by convicts angered at Hunter’s decree that attendance at church services was compulsory. He was buried in the cemetery in George St near the site of today’s Sydney Town Hall. Robert Campbell wrote the initial inscription on his gravestone: ‘Here lieth the body of Captain Gavin Hamilton, Commander of the ship Sydney Cove, who departed this life June 20 1798, Aged 38 years’.42