by David Hill
Smallpox was a greatly feared disease and an outbreak could spread quickly and kill many people. The first recorded epidemic was in ancient Egypt and seems to have reached Europe around the fifth or sixth century AD. By the eighteenth century it was a regular occurrence in Europe and in the colonies of north America.
The process of eradicating smallpox among Europeans had begun with the realisation that survivors could never contract the disease a second time. This led to the process of ‘variolation’, whereby a healthy person would be deliberately infected with material from someone with the disease in the hope of inducing a mild case of infection and thereby bringing about an immunity. The practice resulted in the death of between two and three per cent of those who were inoculated but saw a dramatic reduction in the number of epidemics.
The Aboriginal people had no exposure or resistance to the disease that was to devastate their population. Arthur Phillip noted that some who were infected had left their camp, saying that the disease ‘must have been spread to a considerable distance as well as inland and along the coast’.35
The settlers provided some medical help, and Arabanoo went to the aid of as many of his people as possible. The fetter was removed from his leg so he could move around the area but he too was struck down and died six days later. By this stage Arabanoo had become popular among the settlers. He was buried in the governor’s garden, and Phillip and all the officers of the settlement attended the funeral.36
The white settlers could not account for the outbreak, although it must have been brought into the area by the First Fleet. If it had been carried by one of the new settlers, why hadn’t it appeared before now, almost fifteen months after their arrival? And why wasn’t it evident among any other of the Europeans?
Arthur Phillip speculated as to how the disease could have arrived in the colony:
Whether the small pox, which has proved fatal to great numbers of the natives, is a disorder to which they were subject before any Europeans visited this country, or whether it was brought by the French ships, we have not yet attained sufficient knowledge of the language to determine. It never appeared on board any of the ships in our passage, nor in the settlement, until some time after numbers of the natives had been dead with the disorder.37
Another possibility is that the disease was released from one of the vials that the surgeons had brought as a source of variolation, but the surgeons denied it.
After the death of Arabanoo the settlers sought a replacement and conscripted two Aboriginal men, Bennelong (also known as Beneelon) and Colbee, into their service. The two men joined two Aboriginal children, Abaroo and Nanbaree, who were taken into the settlement when their parents died during the smallpox epidemic.
Bennelong was to adjust to the white man’s environment better than his colleagues. For most of the time he seemed happy to live among the English. He wore their clothes and was an effective liaison between his people and Governor Phillip. As Tench noted, he also enjoyed a drink:
He became at once fond of our viands [food] and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight. He was the only native we knew who immediately showed a fondness for spirits.38
Bennelong went to live in a little house built by the settlers for him in Sydney Cove. The area later became known as Bennelong Point and provided the site for the Sydney Opera House around a hundred and fifty years later. He was highly regarded by the English, as Tench wrote:
His powers of mind were certainly far above mediocrity. He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language, faster than his predecessors had done. He willingly communicated information, sang, danced and capered, told us all the customs of his country, and all the details of his family economy. Love and war seemed his favourite pursuits; in both of which he had suffered severely. His head was disfigured with several scars; a spear had passed through his arm, and another through his leg. Half of one of his thumbs was carried away; and the mark of a wound appeared on the back of his hand.
The cause and attendant circumstances of all these disasters, except one, he recounted to us. ‘But the wound on the back of your hand, Beenalon. How did you get that’. He laughed and owned that it was received in carrying off a lady of another tribe by force. ‘I was dragging her away. She cried aloud and stuck her teeth into me.’39
Despite being held in regard by the settlers, and initially being happy in the white man’s world, Bennelong fled back to his own people early in 1790. Some months later Phillip was told that Bennelong had been seen, and he took a boat with armed marines to recapture him across to Manly Cove on the northern side of Port Jackson where the Aboriginal people were feasting on a beached whale.
With the rowers sitting in the boat, Phillip went ashore with his fellow officers carrying gifts for the locals. As a gesture of friendship Phillip withdrew a knife from his belt and threw it on the ground, but it frightened one of the natives, who quickly lifted his spear with his foot and threw it at Phillip. The four-metre lance went through Phillip below the shoulder blade and the barb came out of his back.
Phillip and his colleagues hurriedly stumbled down the beach towards the boat. One of the marines, Lieutenant Waterhouse, tried to pull the spear out but, realising it would cause more damage, broke off the shaft instead. As they pulled Phillip onto the boat, the crew fired off a round from their muskets to aid their escape.
It took two hours to row back up the harbour. Phillip lay on the floor of the boat, conscious but bleeding, and his colleagues expected him to die. When they reached Sydney Cove, the surgeon William Balmain thought at first that his subclavian artery had been severed, but after treating the wound he saw that the injury was not as serious as he had feared. Bennelong, who had not been involved in the wounding of Phillip, expressed concern at the incident and began calling at Sydney Cove asking after the welfare of the governor. Eventually contact was reestablished and Bennelong moved back to Sydney Cove.
When Phillip returned to England in 1792, he took Bennelong and another Aboriginal man, named Yemmerrawanne, with him. Yemmerrawanne was reportedly unhappy in London and became ill and died, but Bennelong seemed to enjoy himself, initially at least. He wore laced shirts and embroidered waistcoats and was a novel figure in British society. In May 1793 he was taken to meet King George III. In London he learned to box, skate and smoke and adopted some of the English manners, including the use of knife and fork, bowing and drinking toasts.
After more than two years Bennelong longed to go home, and he returned to Sydney in September 1795. By now he was drinking heavily and constantly fighting, which resulted in his losing the respect of many of his own people. He died a sad figure aged about 50 in 1813.
The failure of the Aboriginal people and the Europeans in Australia to understand each other was exacerbated by fundamental differences in their respective societies. The Aboriginal people accepted that different groups had rights to different territory. The Europeans, by contrast, treated all of the land as entirely their own; by their law it now belonged to King George III and to his heirs and successors.
Survival in the harsh Australian environment required a sensitive relationship between the people and the land and the sea, yet the First Fleeters took everything they could, depleting the natural food supply and chasing away many of the other animals. The Aboriginal people shared what they had, but the English, committed to the idea of individual property, saw them as scavengers when they asked for food.
Over the next two centuries these fundamental differences would disrupt and destroy a civilisation and culture that had survived for thousands of years.
14
CRISIS
Famine … was approaching with gigantic strides, and the gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections … Still we were on the tip toe of expectations … every morning from daylight until the sun sank did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail … all our labour and attention
were turned to one object – the procuring of food.
The First Fleet settlers had struggled in the early days to establish a new home, but over the next two years a growing food shortage was to create a crisis that would threaten the survival of the entire settlement.
From the start food was rationed, although it was envisaged that the restrictions would gradually be eased as the colony developed its own food supply. The fleet had sailed with only two years’ worth of supplies, and having spent the best part of a year on the voyage out from England it was important that sufficient crops were sown immediately on arrival.
But within two months of arriving an assessment of available food stocks resulted in what was to be the first of a series of cuts to the food ration. Over the next two years the standard issue would be progressively reduced to starvation levels.
The shortage of food in the settlement was made worse by theft from the public stores. Phillip, who had initially demonstrated a tolerance that raised the eyebrows of even his most loyal officers, now agreed to the most severe treatment of those caught taking food. The governor ‘signified … his resolution that the condemnation of anyone for robbing huts or stores should be immediately followed by execution’.1
It had been hoped that they might have been able to at least partially offset the lack of fresh food with turtle meat. In February of 1788, when Lieutenant Henry Ball had ferried Philip Gidley King and his small party of settlers to Norfolk Island on the Supply, he had brought back from Lord Howe Island sixteen large turtles each weighing more than a hundred and fifty pounds. More of the turtles would have given the settlement a good source of fresh meat.
In May Lieutenant Ball was sent back to Lord Howe Island to collect as many as he could load onto the Supply, only to find that the turtles they had seen there earlier had already migrated further north for the winter. According to Surgeon White the return of the Supply to Sydney without any turtles was ‘a dreadful disappointment to those who were languishing under the scurvy, many of whom are since dead, and there is great reason to fear that several others will soon share the same fate’.2
Fishing proved to be erratically successful, and there was the occasional hunted emu or ‘stray kangaroo which fortune now and then threw in our way’, but by the middle of the first year the settlers became ‘utter strangers to the taste of fresh food’.3
By July White was to complain that illness was aggravated by the lack of vital food. At the time he reported that a total of one hundred and fifty-four marines and convicts were too sick to work:
The distress among the troops, their wives and children, as well as among the convicts, who have been ill for want of necessaries to aid the operation of medicines has been most materially and sensibly felt … The articles [include] sugar, sago, barley, rice, oatmeal, currents, spices, vinegar, portable soup and tamarinds … Constantly living on salt provisions without possibility of change make them more necessary.4
In the same month Phillip sent the first clear signal to England that the settlement was heading for crisis.5 In a long letter he told Lord Sydney that the original plan that required the settlers to bring out with them only two years’ provisions, after which they would be self-sufficient, had failed. Phillip wrote that he had hoped to ‘provide a more pleasing account of our present situation’ but that the colony ‘must for some years depend on supplies from England’. In his opinion, ‘A regular supply of provisions from England will be absolutely necessary for four or five years, as the crops for two years to come cannot be depended on for more than what will be necessary for seeds.’6
In September Phillip wrote again to say that the first harvest had failed and yielded only enough food to support the colony for a ‘few days’. Consequently none of the grain was fed to the settlers but was instead saved as seed for the following year’s sowing:
It was now found that very little of the English wheat had vegetated and a very considerable quantity of barley and many seeds had rotted in the ground, having been heated in the passage and some much injured by weevils. All the barley and wheat likewise, which had been put aboard the Supply at the Cape were destroyed by the weevil.7
Phillip also described the sorry state of the colony’s livestock:
The greatest part of the stock brought from the Cape is dead, and from the inattention of the men who had the care of the cattle, those belonging to the Government and two cows belonging to me are lost … All my sheep are dead and a few only remain of those purchased for Government. The loss of four cows and two bulls falls very heavy.8
Although the pigs and chickens ‘thrive and increase fast’, he admitted that:
I have now given up all hopes of recovering the two bulls and four cows that were lost, and one sheep only remains of upwards of more than seventy which I had purchased at the Cape on my own account and on Government’s account.9
In July Phillip had written that the failure of the new colony to grow any significant food meant that all of the settlers would be largely dependent for another year on the food that was still in two small storage sheds: ‘All the provisions we have to depend on until supplies arrive from England are in two wooden buildings, which are thatched. I am sensible to the risk but have no remedy.’10
Clothing was also wearing out and replacements running short. As the first winter came, many of the settlers, including the marines, had worn out their shoes and were forced to go about their business barefoot: ‘Clothing in this country is full as necessary as in England, the nights and mornings being very cold; and before any supplies can be sent out most of the people will be without shoes, the most necessary article.’11
Phillip would complain in September: ‘The clothes for the convicts are in general bad and there is no possibility of mending them for want of thread; it is the same with shoes, which do not last a month.’12
The settlement also needed ‘some kind of covering’ for the children, as children’s clothing had never been included in the original planning.13
The combination of disease and the shortage of food was taking its toll, and more people died in the first eight months after arriving than had died on the eight-month voyage from England: fifty-two had died in the colony by September, compared with forty-eight while sailing from England. Sadly, the dead on land included twenty-three women and children.14
The marine captain Watkin Tench admitted that before the end of the first year the settlers were increasingly desperate for supplies and living every day in the hope that ships from England would appear with fresh provisions: ‘We had long turned our eyes with impatience towards the sea, cheered by the hope of seeing supplies from England approach, but none arriving.’15
In August, while exploring the head waters of the river that ran from the mountains in the west into Port Jackson, Phillip had found fertile soil and decided to establish a settlement at what was to become known as Rose Hill, thinking that this area might be ideal for the colony’s food production.
The situation was so urgent in September, though, that with the food stocks declining and ‘the fear of not having grain to put into the ground next year’, Phillip decided to send Captain Hunter on the Sirius to Cape Town to fetch grain and flour. As Hunter was to record:
In the month of September, Governor Phillip signified to me, that it was his intention very soon to dispatch the Sirius to the Cape of Good Hope, in order to purchase such quantities and provisions as she might be capable of taking on board.16
Before it could leave, the Sirius had to be made shipshape, as its maintenance had ‘been much neglected’. For the next month Captain Hunter ‘employed an old man, the carpenter’s yeoman, and a convict caulker’17 to help prepare the ship for its voyage.
It had originally been planned that the Sirius would be sent to the Cape to collect more livestock, given the losses and death of so much that came with the fleet at the beginning of the year. However, the failure of the first year’s harvest in both Sydney and Norfolk Island left the colony with a more immediat
e need of food; and the Sirius was not large enough to carry both livestock and grain.18
A month after Hunter left on his quest to southern Africa, the food ration in the colony was reduced by a third.
To reach the Cape of Good Hope and return quickly Hunter decided to circumnavigate the globe by sailing east under New Zealand and then under Cape Horn at the bottom of South America before heading east again to reach Sydney:
At that season of the year the route to the eastward by Cape Horn promised fairest for an expeditious passage; I therefore steered for the South Cape of New Zealand which I passed on the 12th [November] and made the coast of Terra del Forego on the 26th November.19
The voyage was to prove difficult from the start. Within a day of leaving Sydney a major leak was discovered below the waterline that required the water to be pumped out of the Sirius all the way to Cape Town:
On the day I sailed from Port Jackson the ship sprang a leak, which admitted two feet four inches water in the four hours but as before my arrival here we had discovered it to be about two or three feet below the wale, starboard side, I hope to have it stopped before I sail on my return to the coast of New South Wales.20
It appears that the ship’s maintenance team of the old man, the carpenter’s mate and the convict caulker had not done a good job.
Even though it was now approaching the height of the southern-hemisphere summer the prevailing winds took the Sirius in latitudes towards the Antarctic, amid snow and icebergs: ‘The weather proved intolerably cold. Ice, in great quantity, was seen for many days; and in the middle of December … water froze in open casks upon the deck in the latitude of forty-four degrees south.’21