Life

by Tim Flannery

  John Nicol had ‘seen more of the world than most persons in Edinburgh, perhaps in Britain’ according to Howell, yet throughout his life he seems to have remained almost unworldly. This may stem from the fact that, like many seamen, he led a largely sheltered life. While at sea, his domestic and financial arrangements were made for him. Decisions were made by others, and there was little time for romance with all its complications. In these ways, going to sea was akin to joining a religious order.

  Nicol was not a sailor of the rum, sodomy and the lash school. When he first went to sea he read his Bible daily and it troubled his conscience that he lost the habit. He was shy, did not drink heavily and was appalled by foul language. At times one wonders how this good and simple man mixed it with the recurrent brutality of life at sea.

  Nicol’s naivety shows through nowhere more clearly than in his first romance. After meeting a young woman on a coach journey he feels ‘something uncommon arise in [his] breast’. After a number of efforts, he ‘summonsed the resolution to take her hand in mine; I pressed it gently, she drew faintly back’. With little more encouragement than that, Nicol decides upon marriage and, were it not for a recalcitrant prospective father-in-law, may have succeeded in his designs. He was equally ‘at sea’ with the most important female in his life, a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam who became his great love. Yet time has shown that his assessment of Sarah Whitlam was hardly an accurate one.

  Given the editorial role Howell played, one wonders how much of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner represents his input, for the beauty of the language sometimes makes the reader doubt whether it could be the work of an unlettered cooper. Laing speculates that Howell’s influence on the book’s style and content was minor. He notes that the two works published by Howell alone (An Essay upon the War Galleys of the Ancients and The Life and Adventures of Alexander Alexander) ‘lack the passages of terse grandeur that lifts Nicol’s story, from time to time, to the level of great English prose’.5 Howell was also a great respecter of facts, and is unlikely to have tampered with the subjects of Nicol’s work. Nicol himself says that he will make his story as interesting as is in his power, ‘consistent with truth’; its detail is in itself a guide to its authenticity. He remembers, for instance, how Chinese washer women kept a pig in ‘a cage-like box fixed to the stern of their sampan.’ On the Falkland Islands the geese he saw were ‘very pretty, spreckled like a partridge’.

  There is something very special about Nicol’s prose, with its attention to minute detail, recalled decades after the events occurred. Perhaps this derives from Nicol’s style, which is clearly in the great oral storytelling tradition of the sea, owing more to the long tradition of the storytelling bards than to the written prose of his contemporaries. The natural rhythm and pattern of such language is a powerful aid to memory. The stories, told over and over, become ever more refined and compelling. Nicol even draws a picture of himself as raconteur, late in his life, when he takes a boat to London to attempt to gain his pension: ‘I was at sea again…I had always a crowd round me listening to my accounts of the former voyages that I had made…I was very happy.’ From such stories has come this vivid and romantic tale of travel to the hidden corners of the world.

  A large part of the fascination of Nicol’s book lies in his service as steward aboard the Lady Juliana transport which, as part of the Second Fleet, brought over two hundred female convicts to Australia in 1790. The logbook of the Lady Juliana is long lost, so Nicol’s account is the main source of information for the voyage.6 His time aboard the Lady Juliana (which he recollects as the Lady Julian) was formative, for Nicol fell in love with a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam. She was his first real love, and Nicol ‘courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman on board’. She was, he said, ‘as kind and true a creature as ever lived’. Before the voyage was out she bore him a son, John.

  On the evening of 3 June 1790 the Lady Juliana entered Port Jackson after almost a year at sea. Nicol records how the landing was ‘almost to our sorrow’. He knew his time with Sarah was running out. But it was a special moment, for that evening John Nicol and Watkin Tench—the great chronicler of the birth of European Australia, who had rowed out to meet the ship amid squalls and cloudbursts—stood together under the one set of sails. For Tench the arrival of the Lady Juliana was a moment of exquisite joy. ‘News burst upon us like meridian splendour on a blind man,’ he records as he learned for the first time of the French Revolution, the madness of George III and the loss of the Guardian supply ship. Nicol, characteristically, gives us a glimpse of an intensely human story inside this great historic moment. He doesn’t care about revolutions, kings or shipwrecks. His thoughts are all about his imminent separation from his new family.

  Nicol spent six weeks in Port Jackson with his beloved Sarah and their infant son. They were, perhaps, the happiest days of his life. Although his recollections of Port Jackson were thirty years old by the time they were written down, they are remarkably accurate. He records, for instance, that there were only two ‘natives’ in the town at that time. They were Abaroo and Nanbaree, survivors of the smallpox epidemic, who were then living with Surgeon White (Nanbaree) and the Reverend and Mrs Johnson (Abaroo). He also records some curious attributes of the ‘sweet tea’ that was drunk with such avidity by the First Fleeters. Nicol wrote that ‘it is infused and drank like the China tea. I liked it much. It requires no sugar and is both a bitter and a sweet’. He also regarded its medicinal qualities highly:

  There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had borne in the colony. Everyone went to see her, and I among the rest. It was a strange sight. Her hair was quite white. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea.

  Tench and others tell us of this woman, but none do so with the descriptive vividness of Nicol. And none ascribe her fecundity to the tea!

  As the hour of his departure approached, Nicol became desperate to stay with his wife and child. He was, however, contracted to return to England and the ship was short of hands. He relates that:

  It was not without the aid of the military we were brought on board. I offered to lose my wages but we were short of hands…The captain could not spare a man and requested the aid of the governor. I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true.

  Nicol spent the next few years trying to return to Port Jackson, but without success. While thus engaged, he heard from a runaway convict that Sarah had left the colony for Bombay. Nicol did not know what to make of this information, and nor do I. Sarah did not sail for Bombay until 1796, yet Nicol claims to have heard of it in 1791–92.7 Was Sarah sending out misinformation, or had Nicol misremembered? Given his subsequent sailing schedule, the latter seems unlikely, for after 1794 Nicol was fighting in the French Revolutionary Wars. Nicol visited Sarah’s parents in Lincoln, but they could tell him nothing. Hoping for the best yet fearing betrayal, he tried to get a passage to Bombay, but could not find a berth, even as a paying passenger. In all his subsequent journeying, the possibility of being reunited with Sarah is continually on his mind. ‘She was,’ he says, ‘still the idol of all my affections.’

  In 1801 Nicol returned to his native Edinburgh, being ‘too old to undertake any more love pilgrimages after an individual, as I knew not in what quarter of the globe she was, or whether she were dead or alive’. But what of Sarah and her son? The children of convicts were often removed from their parents, and little John’s fate is not recorded. Sarah, in contrast, first appears in the records of the colony the day after Nicol’s tearful departure, but the telling of that story must await its proper place.

  Nicol’s Australian interlude occupied a fraction of his twenty-five years at sea. Much of what he records elsewhere is of great interest to the contemporary reader, for he recalls events and cultures that were glossed over by his better educated and better connected contempo
raries. The importance of Nicol’s work is magnified by the fact that he was far above the ordinary in his humanity, memory and wit. He also loved a song, and nowhere does this shine through more clearly than during his visit to Jamaica, where he lived for some time among slaves. He says of these poor people, ‘I esteemed them in my heart’ and they clearly reciprocated.

  Nicol records that during his stay, he and the other crew were fed on a ‘cut and come again’ basis, and he always ensured that he took a little something extra to give to the plantation slaves. They in return invited him to a dance. Nicol was touched to find that these poorest of the poor had purchased some ‘three bit maubi’ as they called rum. They did not drink this luxury themselves, but bought it on his account, having heard that sailors prefer it. The vibrancy of the songs he heard that night shone on undimmed in Nicol’s memory for over three decades:

  I lost my shoe in an old canoe

  Johnio, come Winum so;

  I lost my boot in a pilot boat,

  Johnio, come Winum so

  and

  My Massa a bad man,

  My Missis cry honey,

  Is this the damn nigger

  You buy wi my money?

  Ting a ring ting, ting a ring ting, taro

  The cruel treatment of the slaves clearly appalled Nicol. He records the beating of a pregnant woman and the part he and a colleague played in terminating it. He talks of a one-legged runaway blacksmith chained to his bench, and a slave forced to wear a barbarous collar of spikes. His anger at these outrages remained, like the songs, unblunted by the years.

  Nicol’s next voyage was more carefree. His journey in search of discovery and trade aboard the King George was to take him to Hawaii just after the murder of James Cook. Indeed, the King George was the first ship to arrive in the islands after Cook’s discovery of them. Nicol records that:

  Almost every man on board took a native woman for a wife while the vessel remained…The fattest woman I ever saw in my life our gunner chose for a wife. We were forced to hoist her on board. Her thighs were as thick as my waist. No hammock in the ship would hold her. Many jokes were cracked upon the pair.

  He also records the wonderful facility of the Hawaiians to parody the Europeans:

  We had a merry facetious fellow on board called Dickson. He sung pretty well. He squinted and the natives mimicked him. Abenoue, King of Atooi, could cock his eye like Dickson better than any of his subjects. Abenoue called him Billicany, from his often singing ‘Rule Britannia’…Abenoue loved him better than any man in the ship, and always embraced him every time they met on shore or in the ship, and began to sing, ‘Tule Billicany, Billicany tule,’ etc.

  Then comes Nootka Sound, the Marianas, and finally back to Nicol’s beloved Wampoa in China, which he visited three times. How can we believe that Nicol was befriended there by a Chinaman named Tommy Linn, a barber-surgeon who contracted to shave the entire crew of Nicol’s ship during the duration of their stay? Nicol was really at home among the Chinese, and he was accepted into their bosom when he saved a child from drowning.

  The current was strong and the boy was carried down with rapidity. I leapt into the river and saved him with great difficulty…and soon had the pleasure of delivering him to his father who stood on the beach wringing his hands. I wished to go on board, but the Chinese would have me to his house where I was most kindly received and got my dinner in great style. I like their manner of setting out the table at dinner. All that is to be eaten is placed upon the table at once, and all the liquors at the same time. You have all before you and you may make your choice.

  He also records, in a delightful manner, some examples of the lingua franca used between Chinese and European traders. Here were the antecedents of the diverse modern pidgins of Oceania, some of which are now the national languages of Pacific nations:

  Tommy Linn the barber…was a walking newspaper. His first word every morning was, ‘Hey, yaw, what fashion?’ and we used the same phrase to him. One morning he came, and the first thing he said was, ‘Hey, yaw, what fashion? Soldier man’s ship come to Lingcome bar.’ We, after a few hours, heard that a man-of-war frigate had arrived…

  They are much alarmed at the appearance of a man-of-war ship, and they often say, ‘Englishman too much cruel, too much fight.’ There were some English seamen flogged for mutiny while we lay in the river. The Chinese wept like children for the men, saying, ‘Hey, yaw, Englishman too much cruel, too much flog, too much flog.’

  Nicol’s final service was aboard a series of ships fighting in the French Revolutionary Wars. Nicol’s ship the Goliah participated in the Battle of the Nile, one of Nelson’s three great victories, and one of the most celebrated naval victories of all time. What is surprising is the presence of women and the role they played in the battle. Nicol writes:

  The women behaved as well as the men, and got a present for their bravery from the grand signior…I was much indebted to the gunner’s wife who gave her husband and me a drink of wine every now and then which lessened our fatigue much. There were some of the women wounded, and one woman belonging to Leith died of her wounds and was buried on a small island in the bay. One woman bore a son in the heat of the action. What a birth that must have been!

  After the guns ceased their booming, Nicol records what ‘an awful sight it was. The whole bay was covered with dead bodies, mangled, wounded and scorched.’ This carnage had been caused when the French warship L’Orient blew up close to Nicol’s Goliath. Such an event was rare in the naval warfare of the day.

  At the termination of his service Nicol returned to Edinburgh, where he married his cousin Margaret. It was probably a match based more on affection and convenience than love. He had saved a relatively large sum (which was apparently kept sewn in his clothes) from his decades at sea, and this enabled him to set up a prosperous cooperage business. He also purchased a small cottage and for a time enjoyed married life. But then war (the Napoleonic Wars) broke out again, and the press gangs began their ghastly rounds. These gangs were sanctioned to kidnap and sell into forced labour any sailor they could find. It is hard for us, in our egalitarian age, to understand just what a threat the press gangs represented to someone such as Nicol. The most vivid description of their rapacity comes from Admiral Anson’s Voyage Around the World.8 Although it was written sixty years earlier, little had changed by Nicol’s time. The various efforts made to obtain marines for Anson all failed until:

  five hundred invalids [were] to be collected from the out pensioners of Chelsea college…who, from their age, wounds, or other infirmities, are incapable of service in marching regiments…But instead of five hundred, there came on board no more than two hundred and fifty nine; for all those who had limbs and strength to walk out of Portsmouth, deserted, leaving behind them only such as were literally invalids, most of them being sixty years of age, and some of them upwards of seventy.

  This ‘aged and diseased detachment’ was destined to undertake a five-year-long voyage around the world, which was almost unequalled in its arduousness. They dropped like flies. The wounds some had received over fifty years before broke open afresh due to the scurvy. Few survived to see action, much less their homeland.

  And so we find John Nicol, newly married at the age of forty-six, unable to sleep in his own bed for fear of being pressed. For eleven years he was forced to live the life of a fugitive in rural Scotland. Yet he remained loyal to king and country, and upon hearing the news of the victory at Trafalgar recalled:

  None but an old tar can feel the joy I felt. I wrought none the next day but walked about enjoying the feeling of triumph. Every now and then I felt the greatest desire to hurra aloud, and many an hurra my heart gave that my mouth uttered not.

  To ‘hurra’ of course, would have alerted the press gangs to his being ‘an old tar’.

  Finally, at the age of fifty-eight, Nicol felt that it was safe to return home. His homecoming was a joyous one. Perhaps the excitement was too much for Margaret, his wife, for she
did not long outlive it. Her death brought on another trial, for Nicol discovered that for years there had been ‘more money going out than I by my industry could bring in… and a number of debits…had been contracted unknown to me’.

  Nicol travelled to London in search of the pension he desperately needed and richly deserved. His fate in this endeavour would be familiar to anyone who has been shunted from one part of the bureaucracy to another. First he learned that his old friend Captain Portlock, who could have provided a testimonial of his service, had died six weeks earlier. He then went to Somerset House to gain a certificate of service. A clerk there sent him to Admiralty House where another clerk told him he had waited too long before applying. As a last ditch effort to gain the all-important certificate he went to see the governor of Greenwich Hospital, but he was on holiday in Scotland. Broke, Nicol returned to Edinburgh.

  And so, in the early spring of 1822, at the age of sixty-seven, this fine old sailor was forced to walk the streets of his city, seeking fragments of coal to prevent himself from dying of cold. Had he not met John Howell he would have died in anonymity.

  It is heartwarming to know that Howell’s charity really did make a difference to Nicol, for unlike so many of his fellows, he ‘died like an admiral, in bed, having evenly rounded out his threescore years and ten’.9 His funds were not exhausted even then, for a sum of thirty pounds was left to his relatives.

  As great as Howell’s gift was to Nicol, he left the world a far greater one, for Nicol’s recollections offer a unique glimpse of an extraordinary world as it was seen through the eyes of a simple yet most acute watcher upon life. Nicol’s tale still has the power to inspire us to adventure, and surely his prayers still go with those who love travel:

  Old as I am, my heart is still unchanged; and were I young and stout as I have been, again would I sail upon discovery—but, weak and stiff, I can only send my prayers with the tight ship and her merry hearts.