A Commonwealth of Thieves (9 page)

When the
Friendship
anchored at last, a boat crew from the
Supply
brought aboard some mown grass, and that seemed to have resonated with Clark as an event as astounding as the sight of land. For “I cannot say from the appearance of the shore that I will like it,” he noted.

Major Robbie Ross, commander of the marines, was now on the
Scarborough
with its big population of male convicts, and came ashore in time to take part in an expedition. Frustrated by shoals on the north side of Botany Bay and a brackish, boggy stream to the west, Ross and the others were sustained by sturdiness of soul, lack of imagination, and uneroded belief in Cook's hopeful reports of the place from eighteen years before, and went into an inlet on the south-west side of the bay and “ate salt beef and in a glass of porter drank the healths of our friends in England.”

There was a great shift of meaning commencing during those first hours of European permanency on the coast of New South Wales. At the end of a journey as long as a human gestation, the occupants of the ship were beginning to suspect that Botany Bay was a poor place, even though it had long since captured the imagination of the rest of the world. The animals Cook and Sir Joseph Banks found here or further north were nonpareils of the strange and exotic. On his journey through the Scottish Highlands in 1773, Dr. Samuel Johnson had a party trick— “imitating the newly discovered kangaroo: he stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat, so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.” Hereafter, in the wider world, Botany Bay, renowned until now for the exotic, the furthest reach of human investigation and endeavour, famous for both botanic and zoologic conundra, would slowly become a name of scorn. As Robert Southey, sending up both the place and the proposed penal settlement at one hit, would write as doggerel during a pleasant evening with William Wordsworth,

Therefore, old George, by George we pray
Of thee forthwith to extend thy sway
Over the great botanic bay.

For the Gweagal and Bediagal clans of the Eora, a similar shift was in progress. It is as well to say here that the term Eora may have been merely a sample phrase from their language, and not necessarily what the region's natives called the language or themselves. Lieutenant King would mention that the people called themselves “Eora—Men or People,” and Eora or Eorah would be listed as a word for “people” in a vocabulary put together by Phillip and Collins. Collins defined the word Eo-ra as the name common to the natives of the area the fleet would settle. It may, however, have been the local language's word for “here” or “the people about here.” In any case, for the indigenous people, the ghosts were abounding. One day: one ship, one floating island, one population of ghosts with mysterious outer skins. The next morning: four islands and four populations of strangers. They had not multiplied in this manner in their earlier visitation, eighteen years past. And on the morning of 20 January, when Captain Hunter on the
Sirius
led his second group of transports around Cape Solander, there were eleven of these floating phenomena with their huge and inhuman wings, their spider-web rigging, and infestations of questionable souls aboard. Some Gweagal and Bediagal, related by marriage, assembled on the southern point of the bay and yelled,
“Werre! Werre!”
across the water. They were speaking a language which the British did not understand, but this was their first, undeniable message to the men of the fleet, and it meant “Get out! Begone! Clear away.”

But the officers did not imagine themselves trespassers, and the private marines and especially the convicts would have found such a description whimsical.

A more poetic European vision had entered Botany Bay on the just-arrived transport
Charlotte,
in the person of the young captain of marines Watkin Tench. Captain Tench was in his late twenties, son of a successful and well-connected Chester boarding school proprietor. During the American War he had been made a prisoner in Maryland for three months when his ship,
Mermaid,
went aground. Like Collins and other officers, he had volunteered for service on the fleet to get off half-pay. In his striving, often elegant, and curious-minded journal, Tench dared write rich prose for the arrival of this second division of ships. “ ‘Heavily in clouds came on the day,’ ” wrote Tench, quoting the English poet Joseph Addison, “which ushered in our arrival. To us it was ‘a great, an important day.’ Though I hope the foundation, not the fall, of an empire will be dated from it.” This sanguine young Englishman rejoiced, not with absolute numeric accuracy, that ‘of two hundred and twelve marines we lost only one; and of seven hundred and seventy-five convicts put aboard in England, but twenty-four perished en route.???” He celebrated the fact that even though portable soup (blocks of compacted dried meat and vegetables), wheat, and pickled vegetables had not been supplied to the fleet, and though a small supply of essence of malt had been the only anti-scurvy remedy put on board, such an extraordinary number of people had survived the voyage of what had been, for the second division of ships, exactly thirty-six weeks from Portsmouth, very nearly to the hour. Watkin Tench thought that the low casualty rate amongst the fleet was the work of a beneficent government, but he knew too that a great deal of the success had depended on Phillip's demands for equipment and clothing, his organisational flexibility, his refusal to sail until they were properly supplied.

“The wind was now fair,” Watkin wrote, “the sky serene, though a little hazy, and the temperature of the air delightfully pleasant: joy sparkled in every countenance and congratulations issued from every mouth. Ithaca itself was scarcely more longed for by Ulysses, than Botany Bay by the adventurers who had traversed so many thousand miles to take possession of it.”

The convict women and nearly all the men were still kept aboard their vessels, and while they exercised on deck in a pleasant evening, their boisterousness echoed through the cove. The some the country obviously seemed enormous enough to offer room for escape, and some who did not understand that wildernesses were to provide the walls here already planned decamping. Wild elation, dread, and depression competed for voice amongst these felons, some of them—despite Watkin Tench's sanguine view of their health—already pallid and doomed for the hospital tents Surgeons White and Balmain were erecting ashore. The wives of marines and their children also looked at the long dun foreshores of the bay with some surmise. They came from the same class as many of the convicts, and shared with them a capacity for stubborn acceptance.

Since the 190 or so convict women of New South Wales had been either in service or “single women of no trade,” they had few apparent skills to bring ashore. The one artificial flower maker lacked tools and materials; the book-binder was in a country without publishers. Esther Abrahams, a Cockney Jewess, asserted, as did a number of others, that she was a mantua-maker—a maker of fashionable veils—but there was no society here to whom to sell such a refinement. As for Rebecca Bolton of
Prince of
Wales,
she was what was then called an idiot, and had been in prison four years, which helped explain her mental desperation. She was in frail health, as was her little daughter of four or five. Both of them were chaff for the penal experiment. Tamasin Allen and Mary Allen, a prostitute and her accomplice in stealing a large haul of diamonds, jewellery, and cash from one of Mary's upper-crust clients, by contrast had robust intentions of survival but little to offer except a questionable record. Tamasin was described in her trial papers as “a lustyish woman with black hair … she seems to be a drunkard and unreliable.” She would be one of the women who would face the lash in the colony then in prospect, but had she known about that, she would have shrugged it off in defiance. Ann Fowles was another apparently incorrigible type. Officials had already recommended that her four-year-old daughter, who had come with her on the
Lady Penrhyn,
be taken from her as “she was a woman of abandoned character,” and sent to Norfolk Island as a “public child.” It seemed that these women at least had not been chosen for their suitability as colonists.

Hunter and King surveyed the southern side of Botany Bay that same day, and, climbing a hill, found the soil an exceeding fine black mould, with some excellent timber trees and rich grass. John Hunter, that characteristic Royal Navy officer, in effect the captain of Phillip's small navy, possessed the rigour and energy which often went with Presbyterianism. He had served as a master, that is, navigator, since 1767, and then in the American War. Like Phillip, he was the sort of sailor whose career was rendered uncertain by lack of family connections, but he had become a post-captain through the influence of Lord Howe of the Admiralty, with whom he had served. And now he was bringing his talents and the template of his European mind, imbued with his study of the classics and theology, up a hill in New South Wales, carrying with him too, as they all did, a word-for-word description of what had appeared in Cook's published journal, which influenced him to see the place in the best terms possible.

Encounters with the natives remained edgy. King and Dawes met natives who “halloo'd and made signs for us to return to our boats … and one of them threw a lance wide of us to show how far they could do execution. The distance it was thrown was as near as I could guess about 40 yards.” King was alarmed enough to ask one of his marines to fire with powder only.

Lieutenant Bradley, Hunter's second-in-command, said that on the one hand boat crews “amused themselves with dressing the natives with paper and other whimsical things to entertain them.” But the next day, after a landing party began clearing brush from a run of water on the south side of the bay, the natives became “displeased and wanted them to be gone.”

By 22 January, when a seine net cast by a fishing party was hauled in and the natives saw the quantity of fish the sailors were dragging onshore with it, they “were much astonished which they expressed by a loud and long shout.” They took some of the fish away, as a matter of right in their eyes, but as a form of primitive pilferage as far as the English were concerned. The sort of ownership the natives were asserting in raiding the net is clear when read now, but was invisible to the European eye then.

The next day the natives struck the fishers with spear shafts, took fish, “and ran off with them sensible that what they had done was wrong,” wrote Lieutenant Bradley. It was not just that it suited the convenience of Phillip or the British government to ignore native ownership. Indeed, in other colonies, including Sierra Leone and the American colonies, and some years later in New Zealand, treaties and land transfers were transacted. It was that the material possessions of the Botany Bay people seemed so slight, and their presence so flitting, that it was taken for granted that they had not yet left the state of childlike innocence beyond which issues of title to fish, fowl, animals, and land became important. Phillip found no grounds to take a different view. “What they wanted most,” he reported, “was the greatcoats and clothing, but hats was more particularised by them, their admiration of which they expressed in very loud shouts whenever one of us pulled our hats off.”

One day the Eora people indicated that they wanted to know the gender of the men in the boats, “which they explained by pointing where it was distinguishable.” It became obvious to King that they thought the men were women, since they had no beards. “I ordered one of the people to undeceive them in this particular, when they gave a great shout of admiration and pointing to the shore, which was but ten yards from us, we saw a great number of women and girls with infant children on their shoulders make their appearance on the beach, all in
puris naturalibus pas
mëme la feuille de figeur
[completely naked, without even a leaf to cover themselves].” The natives had brought forth their women, thinking that the arrival of these pale spirits might have had something to do with a need of sex. The native males made it clear by their urgings that the men in the longboats could make free with the women onshore. “I declined this mark of their hospitality,” said King. With a Low Church mixture of prudery and prurience, he urged a particular young woman to put her baby down and wade out to his boat, where she “suffered me to apply the handkerchief where Eve did the fig leaf.”

Elders and tribesmen would have found the appearance of a flaccid ghost penis fascinating, but they would have been confused when the British refused a perfectly good opportunity to exercise these organs, to sate themselves, and withdraw to sea at last. As for the Aboriginal women, these figures to whom they offered themselves were more virtual than real. Since the great sexual sins of Aboriginal society were to have sex within forbidden blood limits—though adultery did bring its own private and public scorn and punishment—these pale people with their strange outer skins did not fit into the Eora world scheme. A dalliance with such phantasms had no moral or tribal meaning. That King should then invite a young woman out to his boat and affix a broad white bandanna over her thighs must have seemed a mystifying denial. It must have struck the Gweagal and Bediagal that these were people whose desires took considerable subtlety to discern.

Watkin Tench would initiate his own adventures ashore by landing from the
Charlotte
with a seven-year-old boy, the first child to disembark. Edward Munday, son of Private John Munday, certainly enchanted the natives. Tench undid the child's shirt and exposed his chest to show the natives his white flesh, and an old man came up and touched the child on the head and took an acute interest in him, trying to learn something about the newcomers from his demeanour. But in the end, it was
“Wer-re”
or
“War-re”
again. On his next landing Tench saw a scene that was always enacted early in imperial encounters with natives: an officer fired at a shield, placed as a target, with a pistol. “The Indians, though terrified at the report, did not run away, but their astonishment exceeded their alarm on looking at the shield, which the ball had penetrated.” Such shots were usually a demonstration in good faith, but in practice often served as a prelude to worse things. To reassure them that he did not intend to put a hole in them, the officer walked away whistling the then popular tune named “Malbrook.”