A Commonwealth of Thieves (17 page)

On 30 December, Phillip sent two boats down the harbour under the command of Lieutenant Ball of the
Supply
and Lieutenant George Johnston of the marines with orders to seize some of the natives. At Manly Cove “several Indians” were seen standing on the beach, “who were enticed by courteous behaviour and a few presents to enter into conversation.” Two men who waded out to the boats were seized in the shallows, and the rest fled, but the yells of the two who had been taken quickly brought them back with many others, some of whom were armed with their long spears. One of the captured natives dragged the sailor who had hold of him into deeper water so the sailor had to let him go, and the native got away. The other captive, a slighter young native, was tumbled into one of the boats.

There was an immediate counterattack on the boats—the natives “threw spears, stones, firebrands, and whatever else presented itself, at the boats, nor did they retreat, agreeable to their former custom, until many muskets were fired over them.” The male native they had fastened by ropes to the thwarts of the boat “set up the most piercing and lamentable cries of distress.” He seemed to believe that he would be immediately murdered.

His arrival at Sydney Cove was a sensation, women and children and off-duty marines milling about him. Most people in the Cove had not seen a native at close quarters for a year. Like everyone else, Tench rushed down from his hut to assess the hostage. He appeared to be about thirty years old, not tall but robustly made, “and of a countenance which, under happier circumstances, I thought would display manliness and sensibility.” He was very agitated and the crowds who pressed round him did not calm him. Every attempt was made to reassure him as he was escorted to the governor's brick house, now finished adequately enough for Arthur Phillip to live there. Someone touched the small bell which hung over the vice-regal door and the man started with horror. In a soft, musical voice, the native wondered at all he saw, not least at people hanging out the first-floor window, which he attributed to some men walking on others' shoulders. That lunchtime, calmer now, intensely observed by Arthur Phillip and fed by Mrs. Deborah Brooks, wife of
Sirius
's bosun, he dined at a side table at the governor's, “and ate heartily of fish and ducks, which he first cooled.” He drank nothing but water, and on being shown that he should not wipe his hands on the chair he sat on, he used a towel “with great cleanliness and decency.” It was observed that his front incisor tooth was missing, and it was later learned by the governor that it had been removed at initiation.

Phillip watched the Aborigine with less flippancy than the crowd who had accompanied him to the governor's house. As part of the potential peace-making between Phillip and the young man, his hair was close cut and combed and his beard shaved—though he did not submit to any of this until he saw the same work done on a sailor or convict. He seemed to be delighted with his shorn hair, full of vermin as it was, which he proceeded to eat, and only the “disgusted abhorrence of the Europeans made him leave off.” He was now immersed in a tub of water and soap and Watkin Tench had the honour to perform part of the scrub.

Despite the young man's accommodating nature, he resisted telling people his name, and the governor therefore called him Manly, after the cove he came from. He seemed to belong to the Manly people named the Gayimai, but like all Eora speakers was known by other clans and shared various reciprocal hunting, fishing, and ceremonial rights with them. To prevent his escape, a handcuff with a rope attached to it was fastened round his left wrist, and at first it seemed to delight him, since he called it
ben-gad-ee
(ornament). In the Government House yard, he cooked his supper of fish himself that night, throwing it undressed onto the fire, then rubbing off the scales after cooking, peeling the outside with his teeth, and eating it, and only later gutting it and laying the entrails on the fire to cook. An unnamed convict was selected to sleep in the same hut with him and to be his companion, or as Tench inevitably wrote, “his keeper.”

The next morning, as a cure for his depression, he was led across the stream and past the parade ground through the men's and women's camps to the observatory and introduced to Dawes, the young astronomer, who like Collins had a scholarly interest in the natives and would soon start putting together a dictionary of Eora now that contact had been reinitiated. The purpose of this excursion was to amuse and instruct the native, not to parade him for mockery. But the camp housed men and women to whom all of life was a mock, and so there must have been hoots and catcalls.

The native could see across the water to the north side, where on a sandstone cliff-face a great rock-pecking depiction of a sperm whale had been made by people ritually and tribally connected to him. Spotting also the smoke of a fire lit by his fellows in the northern distance, “he looked earnestly at it, and sighing deeply two or three times, uttered the word
Gw-eè-un
[fire].” Although depressed and despairing, he consumed eight fish for breakfast, each weighing about a pound. Then he turned his back to the fire and thought hard, but lying so close that at last the fabric of the shirt he had been given caught flame, and he had to be saved.

This young man of subtle and soulful features fascinated Phillip. On New Year's Day, Manly, as he was still called, dined heartily on fish and roast pork while sitting on a chest near a window, out of which, when he was finished eating, “he would have thrown his plate, had he not been prevented.” A band was playing in the next room, and after the cloth was removed one of the company sang in a soft and superior style. Stretching out on his chest, and putting his hat over his head, the native hostage fell asleep.

Phillip ordered now that he be taken back to Manly Cove for a visit, so that his people could see he had not been hurt. A longboat carrying armed marines conveyed him close to shore so that he could speak to natives on the beach, or those who edgily waded close. He chatted to his people with a good humour which even survived the return to Sydney. Some of his kinsmen urged him to escape, but he pointed to an iron fetter on his leg. He told them he was kept at
Warrane,
Sydney Cove.

He was taken back to Manly again two days later, but no natives came near the beach this time, so that he and his keeper were let ashore to enable him to place a present of three birds, shot on the way down-harbour by members of the boat crew, into a bark basket left on the beach. He returned to the longboat without having heard a word of acceptance or rejection. Either his clan considered him vitiated by his contact with the Europeans, or else they were frightened that he was placed on the shore as a bait to attract them, and that they would end up in his position.

Perhaps he realised he would never be an intimate of his people again, and he released his real name, or at least one of his names, to his captors. It was Arabanoo. The fleet's children, still impressed by his novelty, would flock around him, and he treated them with great sensitivity— “if he was eating, [he] offered them the choicest morsels.” He does not seem to have had a volatile disposition and to have been wistful and gentle by nature.

Since everyone, including Phillip, was enchanted by him, his continued presence at Government House almost became its own point. The fact was he did not learn English quickly, at least not to the point where he could make Phillip any wiser on the grievances of the natives.

Though he was an honoured courtier and ambassador during the day, every night Arabanoo was locked in with his convict. As he became aware that his rations would be regularly supplied, he ate less voraciously than he had on his first return from Manly, when he had eaten a supper of two kangaroo rats, “each the size of a moderate rabbit, and in addition not less than three pounds of fish.”

These dietary details were recorded by Watkin Tench, whose fascination with Arabanoo seemed to be based on his instinctive belief that the native was somehow Watkin on the far side of a dark mirror. It was as if, once he could read the native, and the native read him, the humanity of both of them would be enlarged. Arabanoo's appetites and actions were therefore of crucial interest. Tench recorded, for example, a small excursion the native had on the
Supply
when it left for Norfolk Island in February 1789. Arabanoo and the governor and other gentlemen were aboard
Supply
simply for the journey down the harbour, but the native was in an agitated state as the vessel was lifted by the great swell of the Pacific through Port Jackson's heads. By now he had been freed from his shackle and was as attached in friendship to Phillip and Tench and others as they were to him, yet he seemed to fear they were taking him out of the known world, and every attempt to reassure him failed. Near North Head, he lunged overboard and struck out for Manly, attempting to dive, “at which he was known to be very expert.” But his new clothes kept him up and he was unable to get more than his head underwater. Picked up, he struggled, and on board sat aside, melancholy and dispirited. His experience of having clothed himself in alien fabric that took away his power in the water served him as great proof of the inadvisability of his situation. But when the governor and his other friends descended into a boat to return to Sydney Cove and he heard them calling him to join them, “his cheerfulness and alacrity of temper immediately returned and lasted during the remainder of the day. The dread of being carried away, on an element of whose boundary he could form no conception, joined to the uncertainty of our intention towards him, unquestionably caused him to act as he did,” wrote Tench.

Still, Arabanoo's presence brought no quick solution to the relations between the Aborigines and newcomers. On 6 March 1789, sixteen convicts, feeling vengeful towards the natives, left their work at the brick kilns set up by James Bloodworth to the south-west of the settlement and, without permission, marched south on the track which snaked along a forested ridge above bushy coastal headlands and beaches on one side and lagoons to the west, then down to the north side of Botany Bay. They had been troubled by occasional Eora visits to their camp, and had none of His Excellency's lenient feelings towards native murderers of convicts. They meant to attack the Botany Bay natives and relieve them of their fishing tackle and spears. “A body of Indians, who had probably seen them set out, and had penetrated their intention from experience, suddenly fell upon them. Our heroes were immediately routed … in their flight one was killed, and seven were wounded, for the most part severely.” Those who ran back to Sydney gave the alarm, and a detachment of marines was ordered to march to the relief of the wounded, but the natives had disappeared and the detachment brought back the body of the man who was killed. At first the convicts claimed they had gone down to Botany Bay to pick sweet tea and had been assaulted without provocation by the natives, “with whom they had no wish to quarrel.” Gradually, their story developed holes.

Seven of the survivors of this expedition appeared before the criminal court and were each sentenced to receive 150 lashes and wear an iron on the leg for a year, to prevent them from straggling beyond the limits pre-scribed to them. Tied up in front of the provisions store, they were punished before the assembled convicts. For this flaying, the governor made a point that Arabanoo should accompany him down to the triangles in front of the stores, and the reason for the punishment was explained to the native, both “the cause and the necessity of it; but he displayed on the occasion symptoms of disgust and terror only.”

At this time, for lack of any replenishment, and until
Sirius
returned from Cape Town, the ration had been reduced to 4 pounds of flour, 21/2 pounds of pork and 11/2 pounds of rice. As in so many other areas, Watkin Tench gives us a frank and telling example of how people lived then. “The pork and rice were brought with us from England: the pork had been salted between three and four years, and every grain of rice was a moving body, from the inhabitants lodged in it. We soon left off boiling the pork, as it had become so old and dry that it shrank one-half in its dimensions when so dressed. Our usual method of cooking it was to cut off the daily morsel and toast it on a fork before the fire, catching the drops which fell on a slice of bread or in a saucer of rice.” Phillip also had needed to reduce the working hours: now the working day lasted from sunrise to one o'clock. The same regulations operated for the people up the river at the newly surveyed settlement at Rose Hill. People could receive 10 pounds of fish as the equivalent of their 21/2 pounds of pork, if fish were available, as it was intermittently. The shortage of pease, compacted pea porridge, deprived people of their chief source of vitamin B, and increased their vulnerability to infection, which showed up in a hollowed-out appearance and leg ulcers.

Arabanoo seemed exempt from these rations, and this surely became a cause for complaint on the part of some. But in case Arabanoo escaped back to his people, Phillip did not want the natives to know that the newcomers' hold on Sydney Cove was so tenuous, so threatened by hunger.

The Eora were threatened in a new way too. Sergeant Scott noted on 15 April 1789 that he went with a party to cut grass trees for thatching and, landing on a beach, found three natives lying under a rock, a man and two boys, but one of the latter dead from what looked like smallpox. Phillip took Arabanoo and a surgeon immediately by boat to the spot. It is interesting that the idea of smallpox amongst the natives aroused no great concern for their own safety amongst the whites. To a seaman like Arthur Phillip, scurvy, with its combination of wasting ailments, its lesions, and its strange hellishness of depression, was of far more concern than would be a smallpox outbreak.

Though it could be lethal, smallpox was a disease most of the residents of Sydney Cove were used to. Many British people of all classes carried the pitted faces of survivors of the illness. The comeliest of Sydney's transported women were marked by having suffered smallpox earlier in their lives. By the standards of the eighteenth century it was eminently survivable, and on top of that, it seems that from early in the century, many English men and women had already been inoculated against it. Indeed, that up-to-date surgeon John White had carried with him on Phillip's fleet a flask of “variolous material,”
variola
being the Latin name of smallpox, just in case he needed to inoculate the young against an outbreak in the penal colony. Phillip would soon check with White whether that tissue had somehow escaped its flask and thus spread itself to the natives.