A History of the World in 100 Objects (76 page)

… a man who attempted to oppose our Landing came down to the Beach with a shield … made of the bark of a tree; this he left behind when he ran away, and we found upon taking it up that it plainly had been pierced through with a single pointed lance near the centre.

This must be that very shield. It has the hole near the centre mentioned by Banks, and traces of white colouring, as recorded by the expedition’s illustrators. It’s rough-hewn, a rich reddish brown, about a metre (40 inches) high and 30 centimetres (12 inches) wide – quite narrow for protecting a man – and gently curved. You can sense the trunk from which it was cut. It is made of red mangrove wood, one of the woods chosen for making Australian shields, because it is tough enough to absorb the impact of a spear or deflect a club or boomerang and is extremely resistant to insects and rot, even when submerged in sea-water. At the back is a handle made out of flexible green mangrove wood that has dried to a firm shape for a good grip. The person who made this shield knew precisely what materials were fittest for purpose.

This shield was owned by a man living in a land that his ancestors had occupied for some 60,000 years. Phil Gordon, Aboriginal heritage officer at the Australian Museum in Sydney, describes the way of life in the area:

One of the great myths about Aboriginal Australia, of course, is that it was a hand-to-mouth existence, for want of a better word. The living around Sydney and in the Sydney region and a vast majority of the coastal part of Australia was very good; the fish levels in the harbours were high … Sydney harbour would have been a great place to live. The climate was good; the economic existence was good. That allowed people then to involve themselves in the spiritual side of their existence and the other parts of their culture.

Cook and Banks would later remark on how happy and contented the people seemed, although we know that there were conflicts between tribal groups. As well as the shield, the men had spears, and indeed the hole here in the centre of the shield was made by a wooden spear or lance, presumably in combat. This piercing, as well as marks and scrapes on the surface, make it clear that the shield had seen action before it came up against Cook’s musket shot. The shield also seems to have indicated individual identity or tribal allegiance: the traces of white paint have been found to be white kaolin clay, and it is likely there was a painted white mark or symbol at the centre of the shield. Phil Gordon elaborates:

There was warfare in Aboriginal Australia, of course; there were blood feuds, group against group, all those sorts of things. But they’re also a marker of your cultural grip, so the shape of your shield would be different from other areas, and the design on the shield would be different, which would equate to your status within the group and your standing among the groups all around you, too. So shields were distinctively different from coastal New South Wales to the Kimberley coasts region in Western Australia.

Cook, of course, knew nothing about indigenous customs – no European could – and the potential for misunderstanding in this First Encounter was limitless. In retrospect, neither side seemed to have wanted to kill or maim the other. The indigenous men threw stones and spears, but they missed everyone. Given that they were hunter-gatherers who lived by the accurate use of a spear, it seems highly likely that these were warning shots – telling this group of white strangers to go away and leave them alone. Cook, on his side, claims he thought the spears might have poison tips, so justifying the musket shot that he aimed at the legs of the men. When they ran off, Cook and his crew disembarked and went into the nearby woods:

We found here a few small huts made of the bark of trees in one of which were four or five small children with whom we left some strings of beads, etc. …

Cook had found in the Pacific islands that trading and bartering were quick ways of striking up peaceful relationships and of getting some sense of how the local society functioned. But here there was no interest in his offerings. When he came back the next day,

the strings of beads etc. we had left with the children last night were found laying in the hut this morning; probably the natives were afraid to take them away.

Perhaps they were less afraid than uninterested – or perhaps, more accurately, unwilling to engage, because to do so would have involved them in an obligation they did not want. It’s not the case that these people did not trade – they traded and exchanged goods over great distances, as the shield itself can tell us. The red mangrove wood the shield is made of comes from trees that grow about 200 miles north of Sydney, so to source the wood the people at Botany Bay must have been trading with other indigenous Australians.

With no direct encounters or exchange of gifts, Cook gave up. After a week collecting botanical specimens he sailed on up the coast. When he reached the northern tip of Australia, Cook formally declared the whole east coast a British possession.

I now once more hoisted English Colours and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast by the name New South Wales … after which we fired three Volleys of small Arms which were Answerd by the like number from the Ship.

This was not Cook’s usual procedure where land was already inhabited. His normal practice was to acknowledge the rights of existing populations to the land they occupied, as for example in Hawaii. Perhaps he failed to grasp how intimately the indigenous Australians occupied and controlled their continent. We do not know what lay behind this momentous first step in expropriation. Not long after the expedition returned to England, Banks and others recommended Botany Bay as a Penal Colony to the British Parliament, so beginning the long and tragic story that for some indigenous Australians spelt the end of their communities.

The historian Maria Nugent looks at how Cook has been viewed since this first encounter:

In Australian history Cook has mainly been seen as a precursor to colonization … So he’s seen as a founding father. Which in a way cancels out the fact that there had been other European nations who had already ‘discovered’ or charted parts of Australia. But since he’s British he gets a prominent place because we became a British colony. And he held that position for quite some time; probably until the politics of the 1960s and 1970s, in which Aboriginal people vocally and prominently criticize Cook as a founding figure. And they see him as a symbol of colonization, of death and destruction … I think we’re going through a new phase now, and there’s a kind of renovation of Cook’s reputation, and he’s being seen more perhaps as a figure through which we can understand an Australian history which is about interactions between Aboriginal people and outsiders. And some people refer to this as a kind of history of encounter. But Cook is still, I think, a provocative figure in Australia, particularly for indigenous Australians.

The bark shield stands at the head of centuries of misunderstanding, deprivation and genocide. One of the big questions in Australia today remains how or indeed whether any meaningful reparation can be made. It is a process in which objects like this bark shield, held in European and Australian museums, have a small but significant part to play. Programmes of research, carried out together with the indigenous communities, are exploring surviving artefacts, recording myth and legend, skills and practice, to recover what can still be recovered of a history largely lost. This bark shield, present at the beginning of the encounter, might now play its part in a dialogue that failed to materialize 250 years ago.

The last four chapters have been about the European Enlightenment project of discovering, mapping and seeking to understand new lands. This object is from China at a time when it was having its own Enlightenment, under the rule of the Qing Dynasty that had displaced the Ming in 1644 and which would rule China right up to the early twentieth century. The Qing ruler of the time, the Qianlong emperor, roughly contemporary with George III, devoted considerable attention to exploring the world beyond China. In 1756, for example, he decided to map the territories he had annexed in Asia, so he sent out a multicultural taskforce, two Jesuit priests trained in map-making, a Chinese astronomer and two Tibetan lamas, which produced such useful geographic data that the knowledge spread across the world, along with the emperor’s reputation.

The object here, a jade ring called a
bi
(pronounced ‘bee’), is another product of the emperor’s intellectual curiosity, this time about the Chinese past. This
bi
– a fine, plain disc with a hole in the centre, of a type often found in ancient Chinese tombs – was already more than 3,000 years old when the emperor decided to study it. The emperor took the ancient, unadorned
bi
and had his own words inscribed all over it. In doing so, he transformed the ancient
bi
into an object of the eighteenth-century Chinese Enlightenment.

For Enlightenment Europe, China was a model state, wisely governed by learned emperors. The author and philosopher Voltaire wrote in 1764, ‘One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese to recognize … that their empire is the best that the world has ever seen.’ Rulers everywhere wanted a piece of China at their court. In Berlin, Frederick the Great designed and built a Chinese pavilion in his palace at Sanssouci. In England, George III erected a ten-storey Chinese pagoda in Kew Gardens.

The Qianlong emperor in his study

In the fifty-nine years of the Qianlong emperor’s reign, from 1736 to 1795, China’s population doubled, its economy boomed and the empire grew to its greatest size for five centuries, more or less to its modern extent – covering more than four and a half million square miles. The Qianlong emperor was a tough leader, happy to proclaim the superiority of his own territorial conquests over those of his predecessors and to assert for his Qing Dynasty the backing of the heavenly powers – in other words, to claim for himself the Mandate of Heaven:

The military strength of the majestic Great Qing is at its height… How can the Han, Tang, Song or Ming dynasties, which exhausted the wealth of China without getting an additional inch of ground for it, compare to us? … No fortification has failed to submit, no people have failed to surrender … In this, truly we look up gratefully to the blessings of the blue sky above to proclaim our great achievement.

This emperor was also a shrewd intellectual, an adroit propagandist and a man of culture – a renowned calligrapher and poet, a passionate collector of paintings, ceramics and antiquities. The prodigious Chinese collections in the Palace Museums today hold many of his precious objects.

It is not hard to understand why this
bi
thoroughly engaged the emperor’s attention, for it is a strange and intriguing thing, a pale beige thin disc of jade, about the size of a small dinner plate but with a hole in the middle and a raised edge round it. Nowadays we know from similar objects found in tombs that this
bi
was made probably around 1200
BC
. We don’t know what it was for, but we can see clearly enough that it is very beautifully crafted.