Captain Cook's Apprentice

by Anthony Hill

  Thus, in this first extended meeting between the Aborigines of New Holland and the Endeavour, relations seemed to be amicable. Until they suddenly went wrong . . .

  In the third week of July Mr Molineux went out in the pinnace once more to look for a passage through the reefs. Isaac wanted to go, but the Master told him to stay behind and help load stores.

  ‘We’ll be sailing soon, and every hand is wanted about the ship. Besides, ye’ve already been out in the yawl hunting turtle again.’

  This was true. A dozen fat turtles were now swimming in tubs on deck, just ready for eating. So, while Molineux put to sea and the Captain walked overland to spy out the coast from a high hill to the north, Isaac helped lug the water casks, biscuit, and gunpowder barrels aboard.

  Several Aborigines came to the camp that afternoon, and for the first time ventured onto the ship. The bama were certainly amazed at what they saw. What interested them most were the twelve captured turtles: ngawia!

  They left, talking rapidly among themselves. A larger party of ten or eleven bama returned next morning, and coming up the gangway they went straight to a tub, lifted out one of the turtles and tried to carry it ashore.

  A couple of seamen stopped them.

  ‘Oi! Put that back. That ain’t be your’n!’

  Oh yes it is. The turtle here are all ours!

  But the bama’s words had no currency. In such conflicts between cultures, meanings are often lost and only actions signify. More seamen gathered. Tempers rose. And by press of numbers the Aborigines had to return the turtle. They picked up another, however, and were making for the side when they were stopped again.

  ‘Them damned thieves be stealing our dinner!’

  We’re happy for you to eat our turtle, but you have taken more than you need.

  ‘We caught ’em ourselves!’

  By our law you should share them, and so we will take one.

  ‘Oh no you don’t!’ As the bama were once more compelled to replace the turtle in the tub.

  Tensions turned into anger. Not only had these Wangarr taken turtles from Guugu Yimithirr waters without permission, they were defying the laws of hospitality and the sharing code. Very well! Bama could do the same. They seized any loose deck gear – rope coils, casks – and only with difficulty were stopped from throwing them overboard.

  Into this scene of jostling confusion, the Captain stepped. Cook was as much bound by his native traditions as were the Guugu Yimithirr. He had no more idea of needing permission to fish the sea, than the Aborigines did of private property ownership. Still, it was clear that the dispute was about food. While he had no intention of giving away his turtles, and dinner was not yet ready, Cook went ashore with Mr Banks hoping to pacify matters by saying the natives could eat as much ship’s biscuit as they liked.

  The bama didn’t want any of it! They’d seemed such inoffensive people. Now, they strode off: proud and seething and empty-handed. But not for long. They plucked fistfuls of dry grass – and lighting them at the coals burning under a pot of caulking pitch, ran upwind of the camp and set fire to the surrounding vegetation.

  The tinder brown grassland, high as a man’s chest, caught at once. Sickly smoke plumed into the sky. And fanned by strong winds blowing from the sea, scarlet flames leapt and crackled and swept down upon the encampment.

  ‘Make haste!’ cried the Captain, as men tumbled off the ship. ‘Beat it out with anything you can lay hands to.’ The crew grabbed blankets, and sailcloth, and even the shirts from their backs.

  ‘Blimey! How fast it moves. I’d no idea . . .’

  ‘Thank God we brought the gunpowder aboard yesterday.’

  ‘Look to the armourer’s forge!’

  ‘My tent!’ shouted Mr Banks. ‘It will burn. Save it!’

  Isaac rushed forward with Nick and Taiata to help dismantle the botanists’ tent. A few minutes more and it would be ablaze. Smoke stung their eyes and fouled their breath, and the dirty sun burned fiercely down.

  ‘Quickly! It is nearly upon us!’

  But then, through the noise and shouting, Isaac heard a squealing. ‘The pigs! Hurry! They’ll burn to death!’

  Leaving the gentlemen to haul away the tent, the boys ran to the pens. The sheep and goat had already been led to safety, but the sow and her piglets had been forgotten. They were running terrified around their enclosure as the air grew dark with ash, and the livid flames raced closer.

  Isaac held open the gate as Nick herded the litter out. The sow and most of her family fled towards the river and safety. But several piglets ran into the fire’s path. One of them was later found dead on the blackened stubble; yet perhaps the others escaped, for in this part of the world wild black pigs would come to be known as ‘Captain Cookers’.

  Mr Cook may have supposed the bama would be satisfied. They weren’t. He saw the Aborigines move up river, where some of the ship’s washing was spread out to dry, and again set fire to the grass.

  ‘Stop!’ he shouted, running towards them. ‘Cease!’

  But they didn’t. Once more the grass bloomed like an orange flower, fragrant with smoke. Cook’s men were close enough, however, to stamp the fire out; and raising his musket, the Captain fired a round of small shot at the bama. They ran to the mangroves – though not before one man had been hit, for a few drops of blood were seen on the linen, and several spears were collected nearby.

  Cook shot a musket ball wide to show they were not yet out of range, and the bama disappeared among the trees.

  Why, Isaac wondered as he had in New Zealand and at Botany Bay, why does it always have to end like this?

  The confrontation wasn’t over yet. Voices were heard. The Captain and a few men followed the sounds into the bush, where they saw a bama elder called Ngamu Yarrbarigo, coming towards them with his warriors.

  Both parties stopped, eyeing each other. Then, with great courage in the face of these Wangarr with their powerful spirit weapons, the old man approached Cook.

  You will come with us, he beckoned.

  They followed the Aborigines for over half a mile: past the mangrove flats, then up through the grass to a rise with a rocky outcrop. There Cook sat down, laying the spears beside him in a gesture of peace.

  The bama sat down a hundred yards away. Waiting.

  Cook called to them, and Ngamu Yarrbarigo rose and walked towards the Wangarr. He carried a spear without a point, and from time to time wiped the musk-smelling sweat from his armpit and licked it – for strength, and also protection if these were spirits of the ancestors.

  The Captain rose and handed him the spears.

  ‘We only wish to be your friends,’ he said.

  And we, too.

  The sense was understood. The elder called to his warriors, who laid their spears against a tree and came across. Gifts were given: beads and musket balls, the purpose of which the Wangarr explained by sign language. In return, the bama promised not to light the grass again. And as there were some who had not yet seen Endeavour, they all returned to the ship with her Captain – which, as he wrote in his journal that night, reconciled everything.

  Perhaps not everything, for Isaac and his companions saw little of the Aborigines after that, although the hills burned with their hunting fires for days. Not that the bama were hostile. One seaman got lost in the bush, and a family fed him kangaroo meat. They felt him all over, and even had him take off his clothes to show he really was a man. And they guided him back to the ship, as friends. It was just that, after the turtles and the shooting, the Guugu Yimithirr had almost nothing more to do with Endeavour, like the people of Botany Bay. Cook even found the shirts he’d given them in a heap by the beach. Nature provided, and they had no need of them.

  Endeavour was kept in port for two weeks longer than Cook expected. He was ready to sail and buoyed the channel, but the onshore winds that had fanned the grassfire still blew so strongly that the ship couldn’t get out to sea. And what course would it take? For Mr Molineux returned with new
s that he could find no safe passage through the shoals, and proposed they go back the way they’d come.

  ‘But we’ve already sailed a thousand miles without the leadsmen ever once being out of the chains,’ exclaimed Cook. ‘That’s unheard of! It would be an endless piece of work to go south again.’

  ‘We may have no choice.’ Molineux sounded worried.

  ‘We can’t be that far from the end of this coast and a strait that Torres claimed lies between here and New Guinea. It’s shown on Mr Dalrymple’s chart.’

  ‘Other maps show the land extending all the way down to these latitudes.’

  ‘Then we must seek to discover the truth for ourselves. We’ll try to find a way north once we’re at sea, Robert . . . even if the reefs force us back in the end.’

  The winds blew a gale for another fortnight, palm trees streaming ragged against the sky; and it wasn’t until early August that Endeavour was able to warp over the sandbar and out of the river that the Captain named after his ship. Even then, the weather sometimes forced her to anchor all day: and under sail she could only proceed slowly, the boats always ahead sounding, as they went like blind men feeling for the channels that wound among the maze of shoals and islets that stretched wherever they looked.

  The Labyrinth, Cook called it, and he was not wrong.

  For a week after leaving Endeavour River the ship crept up the coast, until one morning they saw several small islands fifteen miles to seaward. They stood out for them. Anchored. And ordering Molineux to sound the lesser isles, the Captain and Mr Banks went in the pinnace to the largest one to see if any way out of the Labyrinth could be spied from its summit. Isaac came with the Mate, Dicky Pickersgill.

  It was a stony, rough-grassed island where many lizards lived – and Aborigines, too, from time to time, for fresh water was found, and the remains of shellfish, turtles, and simple shelters.

  They climbed the hill on a sultry, hazy afternoon; and to the east, through his spyglass all Cook saw at first was a foaming white ribbon, where the Pacific dashed itself against the outermost reef. No escape there! And yet . . .

  ‘Take a look, Mr Pickersgill. Do you see . . .?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Captain.’ But after a little . . . ‘There do seem to be an opening in the breakers. Not a large one, mind ye . . . and beyond it, the deep blue of the ocean . . .’

  ‘Quite so. Show the lad. At first light I’ll get thee to go in the pinnace and take a look at it. We’ll sleep ashore.’

  So, next day, Isaac found himself pushing the boat out into the dawn with Richard Pickersgill. It was an easy six-mile sail with the wind: the olivine sea broken and choppy, but a millpond compared to what happened as they neared the outer reef.

  Here, the coral rose as a great wall from the deep, like battlements against which the mighty Pacific rollers hurled themselves and broke. The tumult was incessant. The besieging waves roared as they burst upon the ramparts, and foam blew like tattered banners across the protected water behind.

  For the most part, the wall held the invaders back. Occasionally there was a gap, through which the ocean poured – and it was towards the largest of these that the pinnace steered. Big enough for Endeavour, Mr Pickersgill thought.

  ‘Aye, and deep enough too,’ he reported to the Captain, ‘though we didn’t sound it. We didn’t dare enter the channel, sir. The swell was so strong that, once through, I doubt we’d have got back again. We’d have been wrecked on reef.’

  Robert Molineux had nothing encouraging to say, when the officers met in the Great Cabin later that afternoon. The openings he’d explored were all perilous, and the shoals seemed to go on for ever up the seaboard.

  ‘I must say, gentlemen, that I’m inclined to quit this coast altogether,’ said Cook. ‘I’d be sorry not to prove that it ends at the strait Torres discovered – which I believe it does. But if we were to go aground again on these inshore reefs . . .’

  ‘We might be kept a year until we get more favourable winds,’ cried Lieutenant Hicks.

  ‘And we’ve provisions to last us only three months,’ reminded the Master.

  ‘There are always turtles and gangurru,’ argued Mr Gore, the sportsman.

  ‘We may not be so fortunate again,’ the Captain said.

  Thus they weighed next morning and headed for the opening Pickersgill had seen. The Master went ahead in the pinnace after dinner to sound: and by mid-afternoon, in the very mouth of the howling breach, he shouted to young Isaac. ‘Hoist the signal, lad, for the ship to follow us!’

  And they stood into it.

  The channel was about three-quarters of a mile wide. The water heaved and slumped as the little craft strove upon the warring sea. Ebb tide and wind were with them, and before long the pinnace, followed by Endeavour, was safely through the clashing breakers, and into the open ocean.

  Hearts took wing – and voices too when the leadsman cast his line again. No bottom at a hundred and fifty fathoms! It was nearly four months since they’d last heard that call.

  Captain Cook brought his ship to for the night and men thought, like Theseus, they’d escaped the Labyrinth. All next day, as they sailed north with no land in sight, they reckoned themselves safe.

  But the worst was yet to come.

  Just after dinner on the second day, the masthead lookout spied land again to the west. Afraid of missing the passage Torres apparently found in 1606, Cook veered a little towards the coast – but by mid-afternoon hostile waves were once more seen crashing on the barrier reef in a battleline that stretched as far as they could see.

  Quickly Endeavour tacked nor’-east until midnight, when they brought to again. No bottom at a hundred and forty fathoms and no need for a canvas sea anchor, for the Captain believed they were out of any immediate danger. He was wrong.

  At four o’clock, as the dawn watch was going up, Isaac was woken by the sound of men talking. The word ‘breakers’ crept into his consciousness, and sleep vanished. Through the wooden wall of the ship, he could hear surf pounding.

  ‘Nick! Wake up!’ And pulling on britches, the boys hurried to the deck.

  ‘Mr Wilkinson, what’s happened? Where are we?’

  ‘The ship has drifted in the night, look you. The wind’s dropped, and the sea’s calm. Yet the current and the flood tide have carried us back to the reef.’

  The onslaught could be heard through the darkness, not far away at all.

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Well, you can say your prayers, boyo. But keep them to yourself. To the world you will stand as men, and follow orders. We’re not lost yet.’

  Cook was already on the quarterdeck and, however fearful he may have felt, as Captain he gave his commands as always with control, decision and example.

  The yawl and longboat were ready to lower away at first light to start towing the ship. The pinnace was under repair, but John Satterley and his carpenters were fixing a temporary board to get her afloat again.

  Men were heaving on the sweeps, like galley oars through the stern ports, trying to bring the ship’s head round and prevent her going broadside onto the swell. And Isaac waited with the lines-men on deck, ready to trim the sails should any wind blow to push them out.

  Oh, the wind! After so many weeks of gales, could the sea gods not spare one little puff? The air shook only with the thundering waves as they surged forward, dragging the ship with them, to rise and fall tremendously upon the reef.

  Daylight came – revealing their true peril. For Endeavour was not two hundred yards from the breakers. Every wave brought them nearer to the coral wall. And once within its tow there was no escape. The ship would inevitably be smashed on the rocks, and every life aboard her lost.

  Closer and closer. Isaac thought of Papa – of his brothers and sisters at home in Hatton Garden, not knowing what had become of him. He could picture Mother’s face in the silver locket wrapped in his sea chest. Then the image turned into Heimata, glowing iridescent through her pearl. But he dare not leave h
is post to get his most precious things and hold them close in his last hour . . .

  Stand firm my bully boys . . . keep steady, brave souls . . .

  Six o’clock, and the boats out towing. They were making no headway. For Isaac saw they were now less than a hundred yards from the reef . . . eighty yards . . . The very roller that lifted them up on one side, bore down and exploded upon the other.

  ‘Between us and destruction was only a dismal valley the breadth of one wave,’ wrote the Captain. Yea, the valley of the shadow of death . . .

  . . . I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me . . .

  Isaac groped for the words of the Psalm. Mamma . . . Heimata . . . Then all he remembered was the grinning stone skull on the gatepost of St Nicholas’s Church at Deptford. The seamen’s church, they called it. And now he knew why, when life ended like this . . .

  ‘The wind! There’s a breeze!’

  All hands to your lines!

  The shouts jerked Isaac from his imaginings. He felt a breath on his cheek – a mere billow they wouldn’t have noticed at any other time. It was enough to lift every sailor’s hope.

  On braces and bowlines . . . ease away . . . haul away . . .

  And enough, too, with the help of the boats, to take Endeavour two hundred yards from the reef.

  But then the wind dropped and all fell calm again. Once more the current pulled the ship towards the rocks faster than the boats could tow it away. Mr Banks was dropping paper over the side to see if they were making any progress. They weren’t. But as if to assert their disdain in the face of calamity, astronomer Green, Gunner Forwood and a Master’s Mate, Charles Clerke, were quite methodically taking the midday readings with their sextants from the quarterdeck.

  And Providence seemed to be with them. Their friendly breeze, as Cook called it, visited again, enough to take them a quarter mile off the reef. A little way ahead they saw an opening – not much, but perhaps sufficient to let Endeavour through and back into the placid and comparatively safer waters of the inner reef. Mr Pickersgill went to investigate, and the ship followed.

  The tide had turned, however, and the ebb was now flowing out strongly through the gap. The ship couldn’t make it – thankfully! For they saw rocks, like teeth in its maw. But the rip was enough, with skilful seamanship, to carry Endeavour out nearly two miles. There, men ate their dinner meat as if at a funeral wake: relieved they were not yet among the dead, but aware they soon might be when the afternoon tide bore them in again.