by Tim Flannery
A rich picture of Tench’s personality emerges from his writings. From the moment he steps aboard the Charlotte he is extraordinarily bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, curious about everything, and filled with boundless energy. As the fleet’s journey progresses, Tench gives us snapshots of the diverse peoples and places that would mark the journey to the Great Southern Land for years to come. We follow him through the streets and byways of the Cape Verde Islands, Rio De Janeiro and Cape Town. But it’s upon reaching Australia that Tench’s wide-ranging interests truly come into their own. Here, in the vast new land where everything seems surprising and worth reporting, Tench proves capable as something more than an amateur naturalist, ethnographer, lawyer, soldier, agronomist and social commentator.
As the First Fleet was leaving England, Tench records the reactions of the convicts on leaving their homeland, in all probability, forever:
I strolled down among the convicts to observe their sentiments at this juncture. A very few excepted, their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land could not be wholly suppressed. In general, marks of distress were more perceptible among the men than the women, for I recollect to have seen but one of those affected on the occasion.
Tench’s deep humanity is particularly apparent in his dealings with the convicts. When he was told that he was at liberty to release them from their fetters, he records that he ‘had great pleasure in being able to extend this humane order to the whole of those under my charge, without a single exception’. The evident dismay with which he watched their punishment, particularly those who showed some penitence, is poignant. His transcription of the pathetic last letter of a condemned youth to his mother speaks eloquently of the inhumanity of the system under which he served. And Tench clearly had a soft spot for children. He tells us that he took a seven-year-old boy for a walk on the beach at Botany Bay at a time when the majority of the party was still confined aboard ship. We do not know who this boy was—whether the child of a convict or a marine—but he was doubtless weary of shipboard life, and must have appreciated the adventure.
Although Tench’s writings in natural history are not as voluminous as those of the surgeon John White, they are detailed and apposite. His account of the anatomy of the emu, with its description of the bird’s unusual double-shafted feathers, is worthy of a professional naturalist such as Charles Darwin. In his description of the kangaroo Tench compares the actual animal with an illustration drawn in 1770 during Cook’s voyage, noting the merits and inaccuracies of the earlier work. His comment that ‘the testicles of the male are placed contrary to the usual order of nature’ doubtless refers to the fact that the testicles of marsupials are found in front of the penis, a condition that must have seemed remarkable indeed at the time, but which had gone unremarked by earlier observers, including Joseph Banks.
While at Port Jackson Tench kept a daily journal that he often quotes in his published work, giving his words an immediacy that suggests that he has just arrived, breathless at his writing table, to narrate some extraordinary event. Unfortunately, this invaluable diary appears to have been lost, and we are much the poorer for it, for Tench deliberately omits some key events in his published work. He makes no mention, for example, of his arrest in March 1788, by his superior, Captain Ross, for failing to reconsider the ruling of a military court case he’d presided over. This arrest order was not lifted for the entire time that Tench was in New South Wales, and we know from other sources that the injustice of Ross’s action long angered him.3 While Tench decided not to include his arrest in his published writings, it might account for his minute detailing of the nature of courts in the colony. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspects of Tench’s writings (at least to the twenty-first-century reader) concern the Aborigines, or ‘Indians’ as he knew them. More than anyone else, except possibly his close friend Lieutenant Dawes, Tench was a friend and confidante of the Aborigines held in the settlement and those who regularly visited. He learned their language, and they, apparently, trusted and liked him. It is through Tench that some of the language of the Sydney Aborigines lives on in our own Australian idiom: dingo for native dog, gin (or dyin as he rendered it) for woman, and cooee for the call to locate someone in the bush.
Despite his many accomplishments Tench remained first and foremost a soldier, and it was perhaps his love of valour that inclined him to admire the Aboriginal men of Port Jackson. He was astonished at their bravery when facing an enemy more powerful than themselves, and awed by their disregard for death, both in their own combats and when facing Europeans armed with guns. Such bravery was not limited to the Aboriginal people of Port Jackson; it was commented upon by many Australian explorers. Yet few writers valued it as highly in a naked black man as they did in a fellow soldier.
As a military officer expected to defend the settlement, Tench was not in the best of positions to open friendly relations with the potentially hostile Aborigines. Indeed, he bears the unfortunate distinction of being the first European ordered to carry out an officially sanctioned massacre of Aborigines. In recording these events, his work takes on a tragic aspect, for the conflict between Tench’s private beliefs and the obligation of duty are conveyed with deep feeling, and his outward restraint is almost painful to witness. His horror at receiving the order to kill Aborigines remains implicit in his text, for as a soldier he could not be seen to betray his duty, but it is clearly there. We see Tench summoned to Governor Phillip’s residence to be told of the hatchets and bags with which he is to cut off and carry away the heads of ten Aboriginal men. We hear Phillip give the gruesome order in his own words.
One wonders if it was something he saw in the expression on his lieutenant’s face that prompted Phillip to ask whether Tench could suggest any alteration to the order. Tench’s proposal that six Aborigines be captured (some to be executed, others to be released, as the Governor saw fit), rather than ten decapitated, was perhaps the best he felt he could negotiate. If so, he appears to have judged well, for his suggestion was accepted by Phillip. Remarkably, Tench’s inability to carry out even this diminished order is not related with shame. Rather, he writes of the termination of the terrible episode with evident relief, and an almost comic sense of his hapless endeavour.
Tench’s evolving view of the Aborigines is of enduring interest. In the beginning his views are typical of the way humans usually react to new and different cultures. At first fearful, perhaps even contemptuous of these ‘fickle, jealous, wavering’ people, Tench gradually came to know many individually, and to respect them. By the time he left Sydney in 1791, he’d forged firm friendships with several Aborigines.
The ignorance of Tench’s initial assessment of the Aborigines is perhaps understandable when it is remembered that encounters were few during the first six months of the settlement (the period with which the Expedition to Botany Bay is concerned). Of the encounters that did take place over this period, a number were marked by violence. Indeed, in all, the Aborigines killed or severely wounded seventeen Europeans (including Governor Arthur Phillip himself ) with no loss to themselves, before a reprisal was ordered.
The nature of contact between European and Aborigine changed dramatically following the kidnapping of Arabanoo. Phillip had decided to take a native into custody because every other means of opening communication had failed, and he felt strongly that the survival of the colony depended upon the development of good relations with the Aborigines. Tench was well aware that this was a desperate measure that would either make or break forever the chance for friendly contact between the two cultures. In Arabanoo, Tench came to know an Aborigine personally for the first time, and his attitudes underwent a profound change. From this point on in Tench’s writing one slowly loses sight of Arabanoo, Colbee and Bennelong as naked, black ‘savages’, and begins to see them as complex individuals. By the end of his time at Port Jackson, Tench could write: ‘untaught, unaccommodated man is the same in Pa
ll Mall as in the wilderness of New South Wales’.
Arabanoo was a serious, somewhat ponderous man, with a gentle demeanour and a kindness to children that endeared him to everyone. Bennelong (who appears in Tench’s narrative as Baneelon) is, in contrast, mercurial. Passionate, fearless and never slow to grasp an opportunity, he is the natural intermediary between his people and the colonists—and he plays the Europeans for all they are worth. Tench is patently fascinated by him:
Baneelon we judged to be about twenty-six years old, of good stature and stoutly made, with a bold intrepid countenance which bespoke defiance and revenge…He quickly threw off all reserve, and pretended, nay, at particular moments, perhaps felt satisfaction in his new state…His powers of mind were certainly far above mediocrity. He acquired knowledge, both of our manners and language, faster than his predecessor 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.
Tench did not demur at reporting events that show the Europeans in a poor light. During an expedition to the Hawkesbury, he reports how Boladeree refused to swim for a duck that the Europeans had shot. For days the party had been shooting birds, reserving the tastier ducks for themselves and giving crows and hawks to the Aborigines. The incident places in sharp focus just how distasteful the Aborigines found the English class system, a structure in which even fully initiated Aboriginal men were inevitably relegated to the bottom of the social ladder. They would simply not tolerate being treated so. Instead, they laughed at and mocked the Europeans for their clumsiness and stupidity in the bush. When the exhausted Europeans (who were in any case carrying the supplies of the Aborigines) showed ill-humour at this, the Aborigines called them gonin-patta—shit-eaters.
Tench’s account of Arabanoo’s meals with Governor Phillip stand in contrast with the events of the Hawkesbury expedition. Although his acquaintance with his European abductors was but a few hours old, Arabanoo acquitted himself well at dinner, watching the others carefully in order to learn how to handle his food and napkin. His single mistake, not repeated, was to wipe his hands on his chair. Only at the end of his second meal did his performance become unstuck, for then he moved to throw his plate (one of the few in the colony) out the window, as one would a leaf or piece of bark. Rarely has the gulf between the two cultures been so strikingly revealed.
One wonders, given the innate difficulties of their situation, how individuals such as Phillip and Arabanoo, or Tench and Bennelong, could have struck up friendships. Part of the equation, no doubt, was that the Europeans and Aborigines had yet to compete more than marginally for resources. The Europeans were fed largely out of their own stores, while the Aborigines still had their land. Because of this, neither group was dependent upon the other, and each retained its dignity. It was only when graziers and agriculturalists began to take the resources of the land wholesale from the Aborigines that the degradation of dispossession and dependency began.
Tench had hardly returned to Britain when he married Anna Maria Sargent, in October 1792. Apparently unable to have children of their own, the couple adopted four of Anna’s sister’s children (who had been orphaned) and brought them up as their own. He was soon fighting in the Napoleonic Wars, and on 6 November 1793, while serving under Captain Richard Rodney Bligh on the Alexander, was captured after a particularly bloody encounter. He was freed as an exchanged prisoner in May 1795.
Tench’s service afloat ended in 1802; thereafter he took land posts and retired as lieutenant-general in 1827. Described as a ‘gentleman’ by the time of his death, Watkin Tench passed away at Devonport on 7 May 1833, aged 74.
Many aspects of Watkin Tench’s personality seem to sit more comfortably in our century than in the eighteenth. Yet it would be a mistake to judge him by our own sensibilities. That his regard for the Aborigines and his push to reform the cruel penal practices of the eighteenth century accords with contemporary views is to be applauded. But it would be far too easy, and decidedly wrong, to condemn him for failing to espouse many other causes that have gained currency today.
So often we rewrite history to suit our own ends. For nations whose beginnings are shrouded in the mists of time, this is perhaps understandable. But in Australia we have the writings of Phillip, White, Tench and many others to inform us. We have no reason not to read them. It is merely our neglect of our own past that has led to the absurd idea that ‘Australia has no history’. In truth no history is so extraordinary, nor so well documented, as that of Australia. I hope that Tench’s seminal works be ever more widely read so that we can better understand how things really were in the beginning.
John Nicol, Mariner
1997
JOHN NICOL TWICE circled the globe, in the process visiting all six habitable continents. He fought American revolutionaries and Napoleon’s navy, was in Hawaii when Cook’s murderers were still young, in Port Jackson when Sydney consisted of about a thousand souls, and in the West Indies when African slaves were beginning to experiment with the music that would become blues and jazz. In short, as he roamed the world in the late eighteenth century, he saw the modern age in its infancy.
The world John Nicol records is not one of admirals, governors and high officials, for he was by his own admission a simple ‘bungs’—an ‘unlettered’ cooper. He describes a world seen from below decks; a world peopled by slaves, convicts and Chinese barbers, many of whom Nicol counted among his friends. As such, his story is an extreme rarity. People like Nicol usually lacked the means to have their adventures recorded, and publishers were largely uninterested in such autobiographies. Indeed, a significant fraction of Nicol’s compatriots would not even have lived to tell their stories. When he sailed, mortality rates of fifteen per cent per annum were not looked upon as especially bad, yet Nicol survived twenty-five years at sea.1
The story of how this book came into existence is almost as remarkable as the one Nicol himself tells. Picture yourself in a street in Edinburgh with the freezing winter of 1822 just beginning to relax its grip. An old derelict totters feebly along, picking tiny fragments of coal from between the icy cobbles. These he places in the pocket of an old apron tied round his waist. They will be used to light a small fire, over which he will crouch, trying to fight off the chill. As he searches for his coals, the old man is approached by a ‘very strange person’ and so begins the encounter which, after a long and happenstance history, places this book in your hands today.2
The ‘very strange person’ was John Howell, who was to record and edit Nicol’s work. Even in nineteenth-century Scotland Howell was an anomaly. He described himself as a ‘polyartist’. Although a bookbinder by trade, he was an inveterate inventor and tinkerer by nature. The most enduring of his contrivances is the ‘plough’, a device used by bookbinders well into the present century. Alexander Laing, who gave some biographical notes on Howell, remarked of this invention that ‘many a careless binder has ruined good books by too exuberant cropping [with it].’3
Howell’s other inventions included ‘a reliable salve for the ringworm’ and a method for the fabrication of false teeth. Transport also intrigued him. He invented a flying machine (the testing of which, from the roof of an old tannery, cost him a broken leg), and a sort of prototype submarine. This latter nearly led to fratricide, for John encouraged an unwilling brother to enter the ‘large model of a fish’ for its test run on the River Leith. The brother refused, however, and John took his place. A contemporary account reports that:
Scarcely had the fish entered the water when it capsized: the keel turning upwards, and poor John was submerged. Sounds of an alarming kind were heard to issue from the belly of the fish, and no time was lost in dragging it to the bank, when the inventor was liberated from his perilous position; but it took nearly half an hour before ‘suspended animation’ was fully restored.4
Howell’s other great interest
lay in the exploits of military men and adventurers. He published five books, three of which concerned such people. The first, Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, or Glasgow Regiment was followed by The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner and, finally, The Life of Alexander Alexander Written by Himself. Howell’s method seems to have consisted of befriending old soldiers and sailors, then spending months writing down or editing their life stories. One wonders whether they moved into his house for the duration. Whatever the case, Howell’s motives were noble ones, for he signed over royalties to his adoptees, and endeavoured to use their stories to obtain for them their well-deserved pensions.
Howell’s 1822 edition of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner is a modest little book, measuring just sixteen centimetres by ten. Its only illustration is a simple drawing of Nicol himself—in all probability placed there to evoke the reader’s pity. It shows the weatherbeaten and wistful countenance of one who has seen much of life. The book’s rarity now suggests that the print run was small. Its only republication occurred in 1937 when Cassell issued an edition ‘embellished with numerous original designs’ by Gordon Grant, and with a foreword and afterword by Laing, who claims that Life and Adventures is the earliest reminiscence by an ordinary sailor that ‘has any claim to permanence as literature’. The book, he says, ‘acquainted me…with a distinct personality I should have felt far the poorer for not having known, and from time to time I have sought him out again, in his book, with the same pleasure I should take in looking up an old friend.’