Читать книгу The Gifts of Frank Cobbold - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 8

1.

During the period the Ann Duthie was in the London docks discharging her cargo, being re-fitted, and taking in cargo for her second voyage to Sydney, Francis Cobbold spent an enjoyable holiday at his family home. His travels had partly drawn aside the curtain shutting off the far Southern World from the Old World, and what had been revealed to him provided food for reflection.

Though still only 15 years old, the decision resulting from this reflection demonstrates that Francis Cobbold had inherited sound foresight as well as an ability to assimilate and profit by hard facts. The ambition with which he had first sailed in the Ann Duthie was based on what he had seen and learned when visiting his grandfather's ships. That fleet of ships belonged to one owner, when other owners possessed single ships. It had been young Cobbold's ambition to sail his own ship in trading ventures among the alluring islands of the South Sea at a time when it was only just becoming clear that opportunities for trade in that part of the world might be as great as they were in both India and China.

At a much later date, private shopkeepers were to feel the keen competition of trading corporations and chain stores. In the same way, in 1868 private ship owners were feeling the competition of shipping lines owned by recently-formed joint stock companies. The lad saw this trend in ocean traffic and recognised its potential growth. Ships were becoming even larger, and already his grandfather's biggest ships were small in comparison with the newest ships launched from British slipways.

The prospects of becoming an independent trader were rapidly dwindling, and there was nothing ahead of a ship's apprentice but the prospect of slowly rising to the position of a ship's captain - subservient to the will of an owner or a combination of owners. Beyond that a sea career went no further.

Slow promotion and wretched pay lay ahead of the Ann Duthie's apprentice, who at that time would most certainly not have been able to envisage his advancement to the bridge of an Atlantic liner driven by steam turbines and owned by a joint stock company capitalised with millions of pounds. Steam at this time was regarded as an auxiliary to sail, and the most up-to- date mail and passenger liner running to Australia was the steamship Great Britain, an auxiliary vessel still relying mainly on sails for driving power.

So when Francis Cobbold sailed again for Sydney, he was determined to leave his ship in Australia, though he refrained from telling his parents of this decision.

2.

On reaching Sydney, Francis Cobbold packed his kit and walked off the ship. There was nothing to hinder him. The owners of the Ann Duthie had, of course received the £60 for his apprenticeship and they could not hope to get anything further. If the lad chose not to complete the sea education they had contracted to give him, it was no concern of the ship owners, to whom further sums of sixty pounds were being offered by parents wishing to apprentice their sons. Also, at that time Australia was comparatively a free country, access to which was open to everyone. There was then no White Australia Policy, no immigration restrictions whatsoever, and ships' captains were not held responsible for their crews and faced with a heavy fine should a member of a crew elect to stay in the country. So many sailors left their ships to take part in the gold rushes, or take up more remunerative work ashore, that often homeward bound ships found difficulty in obtaining crew.

From Sydney, the lad took passage to Melbourne in the Dandenong, a steam ship of about 500 tons. The cost of the passage was about thirty shillings, and the trip occupied six days or so.

3.

When he arrived in Melbourne, Francis Cobbold visited his sister, who had just recently come to Australia. She was the wife of Mr William Dickson, the founder of Dickson Brothers and Company, Importers of Flinders Lane. Cobbold accepted a position offered by his brother-in-law in the wholesale importing house - to enter commerce proved to be another decision which was to benefit him throughout his life thereafter.

His sister was Sarah Jane Cobbold, born 24th March 1841, who came to Australia from South America and has married William Hill Dickson (c 1825-1876) in Colchester on 8th July 1869. The business was located at 23 Little Flinders Street, which was also known as Flinders Lane. Sarah married a second time in April 1877. Her husband was the Hon William Cain (1831-1914).

His job at the warehouse was to enter into a journal the lines called out by the entry men. His fellow clerk at the same desk was the invoice clerk concerned with despatching invoices with outgoing goods. Their work was inter-dependent, and young Cobbold learned how to write quickly and legibly and accurately run up the pounds, shillings and pence columns simultaneously. Should there occur a discrepancy at the end of the day, they had to work back until it was discovered - naturally in the beginning there were many, for the entry man was constantly calling for more speed which meant higher proficiency or employment elsewhere. Cobbold came to owe a debt to a fellow clerk named Wingate, for Wingate gave him a good deal of assistance and encouragement.

But it was not the type of work that appealed to him. Life on the Ann Duthie had roused the wanderlust in his soul, and very soon he was seeking an avenue of escape from the desk in the warehouse.

Australia was in closer proximity to the islands of the South Sea than England was; it was then the jumping-off place for all those glamorous tropical countries just being opened up to unrestricted trade. The tales of fortunes won and to be won were rife and seemed more realistic than they had seemed at the other side of the world.

The American Civil War had recently dragged to its conclusion. The price of cotton had risen to two shillings per pound, and through the commercial houses in Melbourne and Sydney went the tale that the Islands of Fiji were the coming place for anyone possessing spirit and enterprise to grow cotton.

The Islands! The South Sea Islands were painted with the bright colours of romance, adventure and wealth far more then than today. Had not Tasman sailed those seas in search of islands of solid gold? Certainly neither Tasman nor any one of those ocean explorers who followed him had ever found those islands of gold but - there is never smoke without fire. The heart of Francis Cobbold was stirred, and his distaste of the indoor, sedentary life of a commercial man became intensified.

11. Australia and the Melanesian Islands

His fellow invoice clerk was a young fellow built on his own lines and he, too, was spiritually restless - dissatisfied with a clerk's life and yearning for something more rewarding. Often these two discussed the price of cotton and the prospect of the cotton market for a long way ahead, and eventually they decided to leave Dickson's and migrate to the Fijis in search of fortune. They resigned on the same day and shortly afterwards arranged passages - it was during this period of waiting that Francis Cobbold met with an aggravating misfortune, breaking his arm while trying to jump a horse over a three-rail fence.

It was two months before he was able to use the injured arm again. Still determined to try his fortune in Fiji, he sailed for Levuka via Sydney and New Zealand on the City of Auckland - a smart steamer having a cutaway yacht's bow.

The voyage was pleasant, and he made two good friendships on board ship. One was with an Italian surveyor named Martinelli and the other was with a Mr Wingate, whose brother had been so helpful to Francis Cobbold at Messrs Dickson's. They, too, were going to Fiji, their object being to survey eight thousand acres of land on the Island of Viti Levu for a Melbourne syndicate.

4.

Together with other groups of islands in the immense Pacific Ocean, the Fijian Archipelago is unique in formation and colourful in its history. According to geologists, back in a tremendously far distant age a great part of what is now the Pacific Ocean was an extended land mass, while the Continent of Australia was still submerged except for the Great Dividing Range running down its east coast, the Mt Lofty and Flinders Ranges in South Australia, and the south-western portion of Western Australia. A cataclysmic upheaval caused the Pacific 'continent' to sink beneath the sea and the sea to drain off the land about the Australian 'islands', thus raising one continent while lowering another.

Certainly the study of any modern chart of the Islands of the Pacific gives the impression that a continental mass has subsided, leaving only its most elevated portions above sea level in the shape of islands. In the Fijian Archipelago, there are over two hundred and fifty islands, and they vary enormously in size from Viti Levu, with its mountains and rivers lying in an area of 4,053 square miles, to a mere rock. In many cases, not even a rock or sand cave is left above water to indicate the position of former islands. However, around the sites of these original islands the coral insects have built reef walls that enclose still lagoons from between two or three feet to fifty fathoms in depth, generally with a precipitous edge to the deep water.

In calm weather, when no breaking surf marks the submerged reefs, they are extremely difficult to locate. During his epic voyage of some 3,600 miles in an open boat into which he and eighteen companions had been forced by the Bounty mutineers, Captain Bligh sailed across an unsuspected reef above which was just four feet of water - a reef capable of wrecking any ship.

Nowhere in the world are there more reefs and shoals in proportion to the size of the Archipelago than Fiji. Even today, when in command of a steam-driven ship and when supplied with accurate charts, a sea captain seldom deviates outside known channels of deep water - the hazards presented to ships dependent on the wind can be clearly appreciated.

12. The Fijian Archipelago

5.

During the 1840s common sea adventurers arrived in the Fiji Archipelago. They were a roaring, fighting, buccaneering crowd, and when Francis Cobbold reached Levuka, then the chief port and the largest native town on the islands, they had not quite passed on. Blackbirding was rampant and murder a common crime.

Blackbirding refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji. The practice occurred primarily between the 1860s and 1901. Those 'blackbirded' were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland.

Cobbold's age at this time demands comment. When modern boys are studying for their school leaving certificate, he was working in the rigging of a clipper; when the modern boy is venturing from the parental home to study at a high school or university, Cobbold was sailing to an archipelago not fully charted or even fully explored, little known to the outside world, and populated with proven savages. At the age of fifteen he had embarked on a venture undertaken only by grown men of the roughest and the wildest natures. It was not as though he were an orphan kicked out into the world to fend for himself or go under, or that his people were needy, or that circumstances drove him. Nor was he sufficiently affluent to travel for pleasure, or for the excitement to be gained from visiting out-of- the-way places. If further proof of a dauntless spirit is needed, it will be found in full measure in his subsequent history.

At Levuka he met a charming family - a Mr Whalley and his wife with their two sons of about his own age and their daughter, aged twelve years. Whalley had been a government servant at Geelong, Victoria, and apparently the lust for adventure had seized upon him. Tall and thin and sure of himself, he and his courageous wife accepted Francis Cobbold with firm friendship.

Walking one day on the beach at Levuka, he was presented to a quite famous personage - none other than King Cakobau, pronounced Thakombau, the true King of the Cannibal Islands. Of striking physique, His Majesty expressed his delight at the introduction, smiling broadly and revealing his nicely filed teeth. The eating of human flesh was not then fashionable at Levuka, but it was suspected that the First Citizen often indulged his craving.

At the Whalley's invitation, Cobbold accompanied them to their plantation - or what was alleged to be a plantation. He and the entire family left Levuka one evening in an open boat fitted with a lugsail and the usual complement of oars for the home on the Ra Coast of the Island of Viti Levu. For a one time civil servant, Whalley revealed marked ability as a navigator for, steering by the stars all night through, he beached the small boat quite close to his house, a native hut built with bamboo and thatched with grass.

Only a small portion of the plantation was cleared, while no planting had been done. They lived chiefly on yams, coconuts and fish. He had no money - or very little - but very little money was needed other than for development of the plantation.

The only labour performed during young Cobbold's visit seems to have been the construction of a bamboo pipeline for carrying water from the nearby hills for domestic purposes.

Several other settlers were neighbours of the Whalleys, among them being an old Scotch gentleman named Carstairs who possessed a wonderful baritone voice and a plantation in the maturing stage. Accompanied by Mrs Whalley on her piano - imagine the determination and the struggle to get it there from Geelong! - Carstairs often sang 'Jessie's Dream' in which she hears a Highland Regiment rushing to the relief of Lucknow, and out across the tropic beach and the slow-heaving sea would roll in rich Highland accent:

"I hear the pibrochs sounding!"

Francis Cobbold's visit to the Ra Coast was both pleasurable and memorable and not a little instructive. It formed a prologue, as it were, to the play of many acts that was to follow.

Ra is one of the fourteen provinces of Fiji, occupying the northern area of Viti Levu. Ba is a province covering the north-west sector of Viti Levu; the name Ba is also used for a province, a tikina (a native Fijian administrative region comprising several villages), a town and a river.