Dancing with Strangers

by Inga Clendinnen

  In the event, the ‘terrific procession’ of fifty-two men which came stumbling back to the colony after three days’ hard slogging through December heat brought not a single captive with them. They had sighted some, they had chatted with Colbee, and that was the total of their success. What did Phillip do next? He sent out a smaller but still formidable expedition of thirty-nine men on the same mission. This time they were ordered to march at night, as Tench says with a carefully straight face, ‘both for the sake of secrecy and to avoid the heat of the day’; this time they saw not a single Australian. As we have seen, the main excitement was when several men, including Tench, came perilously close to drowning as they floundered in an unexpected patch of quicksand. When I first read that passage I kept expecting Colbee and a few grinning companions to step from behind the trees to rescue them. The British might have seen no Australians, but the Australians had surely seen them.

  Throughout, Tench’s attitude to these excursions was one of irony. He knew that a mob of British soldiers crashing through the bush had minimal chance of sighting, much less seizing, Australian men on their home ground. Phillip must have known that too. He also knew he would have to endure some local ridicule, especially after the second weary, muddy expedition came straggling in. So what was he up to?

  I suggest Phillip’s primary concern was to stage a histrionic performance of the terror of British law, in accordance with the fine late-eighteenth-century theatrical tradition of formal floggings, elaborate death rites and breathless last-minute reprieves and repentances. I think the performance was designed to impress both the increasingly restive convicts and soldiers within the settlement, and the Australians inside and around it. Certainly Collins, writing soon after the events and never one to mince his words, declared there had been no expectation of taking any prisoners or shedding any blood on Tench’s two expeditions: that they were, simply, theatrical statements about the new order—or, as we might say, performative acts, the governor being ‘well-convinced that nothing but a severe example, and the fear of having all the tribes who resided near the settlement destroyed…[would] put a stop to the natives throwing spears’.

  In sum: my view is that Phillip sent out the troops and then sent them out again to remind the British that violence towards Australians was the monopoly of the soldiery and the prerogative of the state, while the tribes were given the opportunity to reflect on Phillip’s capacity for military action—if he were tried too far. He threatened them with collective punishment, in defiance of British protocols, not because he had a taste for racist terror but because he had a good anthropological eye. What the tribes cared about was their fighting strength, individual injuries being simply shrugged off. Phillip knew that if he could not teach the tribesmen to refrain from all violence against whites, he would not be able to protect them, and the wolves would be loosed upon them. Racist terror would come soon enough. But not in Phillip’s time.

  ON DISCIPLINE

  Arthur Phillip, being committed to strenuous reasonableness, was an intrepid thinker, especially in matters of discipline. Preparing for his governorship of a convict colony—pondering how hard men could be terrified into docility—he had hit on the interesting notion of marooning condemned murderers and sodomites (both offences carried mandatory capital sentences) on the coast of New Zealand, where the resident cannibals could be relied on to finish them off at their leisure: an economical if doubtfully Christian way to maximise dread. He also considered, briefly, more tender uses for Polynesians, proposing that Polynesian women ‘may be brought from the Friendly and other islands to a proper place [in the settlement] prepared to receive them, and where they will be supported for a time, and lots of land assigned to such as marry with the soldiers of the garrison’—a brisk route to an instant yeomanry. (Convicts, excluded from this government-funded largesse, would have to content themselves with convict women.) A daring thinker indeed, but also a pragmatist: recognising potential difficulties, he dropped the plans.

  John Dann, the distinguished editor of Joseph Nagle’s journal, tells us that Phillip ‘came from a very humble background, was educated at the charity school at Greenwich hospital, and was one of the relatively rare individuals to achieve the rank of captain in spite of having begun his life at sea at the very bottom, as cabin boy and seaman, before becoming a midshipman’. That rough apprenticeship served Phillip well when it came to handling seamen. He began his rule on the Sirius by dividing the watches into three instead of the usual two as being ‘much more comfortable for the seaman’, as sailor Nagle reports approvingly. Nagle also reveals Phillip’s quick resolution of a shipboard incident which could have generated long-term disaffection. About halfway to Tenerife on the voyage out, Third Lieutenant Maxwell, already on his way to insanity, called the men of both watches onto the deck, and had the boatswain’s mate ‘thrash them all around, one by one, and told them he would soon have them south of the line’ (that is, beyond civilisation and at his mercy) ‘and he would then work their hides up’. Captain Hunter, alerted by the racket, came up on deck, gave Maxwell ‘a severe setting down’, and went below to report to Phillip. Who ‘ordred every officer on board the ship to appear in the cabin, even to a boatswain’s mate, and told them all that if he new any officer to strike a man on board, he would brake him amediately’, Nagle reports smugly. Then Nagle—writing from memory late in life, having lost his Australian diary in the course of his colourful career—provides Phillip with a marvellously vehement speech to his officers, further enlivened by Nagle’s adventurous spelling, which reads like a seaman’s manifesto:

  He said, ‘Those men are all we have to depend on, and if we abuse those men that we have to trust to, the convicts will rise and massecree us all. Those men are our support. We have a long and severe station to go through in settleing this collona, at least we cannot expect to return in less than five years. This ship and her crew is to protect and support the country, and if they are ill-treated by their own officers, what support can you expect of them? They will be all dead, before the voige is half out, and who is to bring us back again?’

  The expression and spelling might be Nagle’s, but the sentiments were Phillip’s, as attested by his later interventions in several shipboard brushes. On land, as governor of a convict colony, he was to be altogether harsher.

  First, with soldiers, whom we might have thought equally important to the ‘collona’ as guardians against anarchy. In March 1789 (while Arabanoo was still a captive) six marines were discovered to have been looting the provision shed by the elegant expedient of having three keys forged to three essential doors, and then plundering at will whenever one of their number happened to be on guard duty. All six were hanged before their weeping comrades. In his account of the hanging Tench gulps, dubs them, implausibly, ‘the flower of our battalion’, and leaves it at that. David Collins characteristically points to a larger moral: ‘From the peculiarity of our situation, there was a sort of sacredness about our store, and its preservation pure and undefiled was deemed as necessary as the chastity of Caesar’s wife.’

  Jonathan Easty, a private marine who somehow continued to keep a neat, careful journal throughout all his time in the settlement, took a different view of this public act of justice: ‘thare was hardley a marine Present but what Shed tears offacers and men…’ Even Collins acknowledged that while some of these men were rogues, ‘some of these unhappy men were held in high estimation by their officers’. Six useful lives forfeit to Phillip’s reading of priorities within a highly precarious colony when the sailors were elsewhere, the Sirius off securing supplementary rations, and the Supply investigating a reef.

  These men hanged for robbing the provision shed. We can see the hard reason for that. But there was also a seventh man, the confessed ringleader. He escaped punishment because he turned king’s evidence, and we wonder how he could continue to live among his fellows. This is not a society we will easily understand.

  Above all, there is the issue of flogging,
huge to us, apparently commonplace to those who practised it. Some of the six marines had previously been punished for drunkenness and brawling, probably inspired by that stolen rum. Collins mentions in passing that the seventh man, Joseph Hunt, he who turned king’s evidence, had received 700 lashes in two allotments, separated by three weeks for healing, for being absent from his post. Not many days before the public hangings, a party of sixteen convicts set off, armed with staves, to take vengeance for the killing of a fellow convict by the people of Botany Bay. They were worsted, leaving several wounded and a man and a boy dead. Phillip, intolerant of all unofficial vendettas, ‘directed that those who were not wounded should receive each one hundred and fifty lashes and wear a fetter for a twelvemonth’. The same punishment was to be inflicted upon those in the hospital as soon as their wounds healed. ‘In pursuance of [this] order,’ Collins tells us, ‘seven of them were tied up in front of the provision store, and punished (for example’s sake) in the presence of all the convicts.’ These were the floggings which horrified Arabanoo.

  ‘For example’s sake.’ Phillip believed in examples. Discreet by temperament and training, he exercised his remarkable authority with minimal consultation, in part to avoid disruptive jealousies, more because he recognised the ultimate responsibility to be his. Much of the law’s ferocity in the convict colony was a distillation and intensification of British practices in the British homeland. The work of E. P. Thompson and his associates on late-eighteenth-century Britain has become famous for its analysis of the class motivations behind the savagery of the law’s penalties, and also its dramatic last-minute pardons, the arbitrariness of mercy serving to dramatise the awful terror of the law. We would expect colonial law to mimic that harshness. But Sydney law had its peculiarities. Phillip was, profoundly, a naval man. We need to investigate the influence navy protocols and practice had over him.

  Historians have taken different views of British shipboard discipline. For example, Marcus Rediker characterises the imposition of order on merchant ships as ‘a system of authority best described as violent, personal and arbitrary’, and provides hair-raising examples to prove it, while N. A. M. Rodgers reconstructs a more human and consensual bundle of formal and informal law from evidence of punishments on board ships of the Royal Navy in his The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy. He emphasises the negotiability of the seaman’s lot—for example, a sailor could always make a run for it when his ship made port, and find another master ready to take him on. That liberty was not available to the men who manned the ships to Sydney. They had some protection: naval officers, unlike merchant shipmasters, were vulnerable to legal challenge if they exceeded their proper authority, with the upper limit for immediate punishment being officially set at a dozen lashes. More serious crimes required the time-consuming business of a court-martial—but also carried the risk of more formidable punishment at the end of it. Rodgers concludes that both men and officers accepted de facto escalations of informal floggings as the best solution in a situation in which other forms of punishment—prolonged imprisonment, deprivation of rations—were simply not viable.

  Drunkenness, a common offence, was treated indulgently. ‘What will we do with the drunken sailor?’ had it about right with its ‘Put him in a longboat ’til he’s sober’. But theft from one’s mates was a major crime in the enclosed territory of a ship, with no secure hiding places for treasured possessions. Charges of theft would usually go to court-martial, and risked sentences of up to five hundred lashes. On occasion the culprit’s shipmates’ anger was utilised directly in the ceremony of ‘running (in fact, and more cruelly, slow-marching) the gauntlet’ between the men, who struck the offender at will. Should he fall, would he be allowed to get back on his feet? His shipmates would decide.

  Knowing this, we can make more sense of the stunningly tough sentences Phillip handed down for the theft of food and personal property at Sydney Cove. With years of naval discipline behind him and the little colony his present command, Phillip knew that for a man to take more than his rightful ration was both to imperil his comrades and to threaten an order at once artificial, fragile and essential.

  Which leaves the largest issue: the emotional and political sediment left by those floggings. We hear from Rediker about the pride some men took in their scarred backs, and in their silence under the lash. Greg Dening, who has counted the lashes officially recorded on all fifteen British naval vessels sailing in the central Pacific between the years 1767 and 1795, tells us that 21 per cent of sailors received a flogging. How were they regarded? As heroes? Villains? Fools? How did they regard themselves? Jonathan Easty was stiff-lipped about his occasional ten or fifteen lashes. Was that the silence of pride, or shame, or anger? Did convicts respond differently from seamen? We know that some convicts stood silent, or their cries went unrecorded, while others screamed; that some remained unreconciled to every aspect of their servitude, and wore their ravined backs as badges of defiance. These were nonetheless extreme principles to be so vigorously asserted within a tiny, mutually dependent society, where daily intimacy was inescapable. What were the psychological consequences, for officers, for marines, for convicts, of such visible, dreadful harshness?

  As the hunger worsened and thefts multiplied, Phillip did not flinch. A convict found guilty of pilfering potatoes from a garden was sentenced to 300 lashes. The shredded wreck was then to be chained for six months—six months!—to two other felons serving out their sentences, and for the duration of his sentence to have his allowance of flour stopped. He would have to survive, if he survived at all, on two pounds of salt pork and two pounds of rice a week. Watkin Tench was a member of the court which arrived at this decision.

  It is worth imagining our way through this particular horror, the fruit of such principled thought, and the physical anguish and slow, shackled death by starvation it proposed. (In actuality the man’s flour ration was restored after a few days, but the dramatic point had been made.) We also remember that in Dening’s count of the ‘cliometrics of violence’ on those sailing ships in the central Pacific, the man who received the most stripes, a German armourer on Vancouver’s Discovery, ‘received a total of 252 lashes on nine different occasions’.

  Phillip had his reasons for the Boschian escalation of punishments over those desperate months. He knew that the crimes, overwhelmingly thefts of food and essential clothing, were the fruits of necessity, which was the inevitable result of the failure of the state to provide for its dependants. Later he was to say as much: in a letter to home secretary Dundas in October 1792, two months before he would quit the colony forever, he acknowledged that he could ‘recollect very few crimes during the last three years but what have been committed to procure the necessaries of life’. But he also believed that to respond sympathetically to that awareness would unloose anarchy, with every man at another’s throat and social bonds dissolved.

  So he did his duty, flogging and starving with exemplary ferocity. How did the Australians respond to that?

  We remember that when a man offended against Arabanoo Phillip took the opportunity to demonstrate the supra-racial majesty of British law by having him flogged before him, and that Arabanoo was horrified. Later, after the ‘coming in’, when a convict stole fishing gear from Colbee’s wife Daringa, Phillip rounded up his Australian friends and had the offender flogged before their eyes. This time the response was more active: Daringa wept, and Barangaroo, always one for direct action, leapt up, seized a stick, and made to wallop the flogger.

  There is an enduring fascination about such scenes of calculation miscalculated. Where Phillip saw right order made visible, with God and King behind whipping post and gibbet, the Australians saw disgusting, wanton cruelty. We know the intentions of one side; we see the responses; there can be no doubt as to their emotional import—but the ‘why’ eludes us. What precisely was it that the Australians found so intolerable about flogging? They could watch a man stand with no more than his shield to receive the spears o
f punishment; to bleed; to fall. They could not endure to see a man bound and helpless, while other men set about him with a whip. Because he was deprived of the choice to endure the pain, or to try to evade it? Was it the punishments’ remorselessness, giving the designated victim no room for amends or negotiation, no hope of the interventions of kin? It seems that the impersonality which Phillip saw as the glory of the law was to Australians profoundly anti-social, and therefore inhuman.

  There was also the nature of the wounds inflicted. Flogging meant the pulping and shredding of flesh and the laying bare of bone, producing a meaningless mat of scarring which could mark a man as shamed, or seasoned. A spear wound healed clean, and its scar carried a permanent message of transgression purged by challenge and pain courageously borne.

  We cannot read the exact meanings behind the Australians’ revulsion, but I am reminded of certain passages of a recent television documentary about the return of one-time inmates to the Benedictine orphanage at New Norcia in Western Australia. (Most of the children were not orphans, of course, but the issue of black–white unions.) The returnees were to my mind remarkably generous to their erstwhile guardians, forgiving them their childhood hunger and the misery of separation from siblings. Then one previously calm man began to weep on camera—to weep with a kind of horrified bewilderment—as he had wept as a child years before when a friend of his guilty of some trivial infringement had his hands tied to the head of the bed, and was flogged as he lay. After all the deprivations and cruelties of his childhood, it was this the adult man could not forget. ‘He wouldn’t cry,’ he said: ‘He wouldn’t cry.’ And cried himself.