Читать книгу Dancing With Strangers - Inga Clendinnen - Страница 18

JANUARY 1788–SPRING 1790

SETTLING IN

The two French ships which had followed the First Fleet into Botany Bay remained at anchor there for the best part of six weeks, which allowed for a number of polite exchanges with the British now ensconced at Port Jackson. Philip Gidley King, fluent in French, especially enjoyed the French officers’ company, their conversation and the delicacy of their manners. Without King’s journal we would know very little about this small, beautifully equipped expedition and its courteous officers: the two ships sailed out of Botany Bay into oblivion, lost somewhere in the Pacific. In the event, King had sailed even earlier, being informed by Phillip on 31 January that he was to head a tiny settlement at Norfolk Island, another even more remote site identified by Cook as promising. On the morning of 15 February King and his little band of settlers—seven free men and fifteen convicts, six of them women—embarked on the Supply, to be dumped on a beach with their baggage and provisions piled around them with orders to make a new society. Naval obedience came at a high price.

Before he left King made the most of his time with the French. He reports the Comte de La Pérouse as notably less well disposed to the local people than was Phillip. His wariness was natural enough: at a landfall only a handful of weeks before, the expedition had lost two longboats and more than a dozen men, among them the captain of the Astrolabe and eight other officers, in a surprise attack by natives. (Up to that time they had not lost a single man.) Their assailants were islanders, probably Samoans, ‘a very strong & handsome race of men scarce one among them less than 6 Feet high, & well-sett’, who over several days had seemed perfectly friendly, and then, after what seemed to the French a trivial incident, had swung their clubs with killing effect. The French estimated that about thirty islanders fell to their guns.

Retrospectively La Pérouse read the episode as a textbook example of ‘savagery’: of unpredictable fluctuations in mood, unpredictable eruptions of murderous violence. At Botany Bay he built a stockade around his tents, mounted two small guns, and kept his guns at the ready.

Phillip built no stockades and he set no guards, or not against the Australians. He intended to persuade the local people that the newcomers were their friends. But his first task was to settle his own people, and once the flurry of disembarkation was over, with its inescapable disorder—the orgiastic scenes on the night of the disembarkation of the convict women have become legendary—officers, soldiers and convicts set about making themselves at home.

First, the alien landscape had to be mapped and its strangeness tamed by naming. Spectacular landmarks were given the names of distant patrons—Pittwater, Norfolk Island—but with their duty done to the grandees, the new arrivals could celebrate themselves and their adventures—Tench’s Hill, Bradley’s Head, Collins Cove, Dawes Point. The names, used daily and inscribed in letters to kin and friends, must in time have come to seem ‘natural’. Both Phillip’s sturdy mind and conciliatory ambitions are suggested by his decision in mid-1791 to reject the wistful romanticism of Rose-Hill for the new up-river settlement in favour of the local name, Parramatta, which meant something like Where Eels Meet—that is, a place of feasting and fecundity.

Outposts of empire are lonely places. But calendars count time at the same rate everywhere, so the settlers celebrated their first King’s Birthday on 4 June with all the pomp and alcohol they could muster. No news came from the real world: they could not know whether they were at war with France on any particular day, and these ardent patriots were to hear the King was well again before they had known he was ill. Remote though they were from the centres of action, distance brought none of the liberties remoteness can bring. The bounds of settlement were crushingly narrow. Officers could look forward to occasional ‘expeditions’ on land or on the water, but convicts were penned within settlement boundaries, unless they were given specific duties outside it. They were always being admonished for ‘straggling’—wandering in the bush without permission—which they continued to do whatever the consequences in floggings or spear wounds.

Officers settled to a range of genteel diversions. As we have seen, some made music, some collected specimens, some drew or painted. Some kept journals, giving form to otherwise featureless days: ‘this happened, then that happened’. A few, like Major Ross, squabbled. Irritability helps pass the time. And, as we know, everyone, or everyone literate, wrote letters home. They wrote in the hope that, barring shipwrecks, the words they were writing would be read months or years later by a known loved someone in some known loved place. George Worgan bursts into what reads like a post-modernist riff on time, sound and distance as he considers that, however long the chain of words he is hurling towards his brother, ‘the First Word will not have reached one quarter over the Seas that divides Us, at the time the last is tumbling out of my Mouth’, and decides he will let fly each one ‘with such an impulsive Velocity...as to make their Way against the Resistance of Rocks, Seas and contrary Winds and arrive at your Street-Door with a D—l of a Suscitation...’ A ‘suscitation’ indeed, with the force of love, gales and several seas behind it. Worgan was missing his brother badly. Two transports were about to sail. He planned to put a letter to Dick on each, and reflected on the melancholy possibility that neither would arrive. Then Dick, in lieu of his living, loving words, would have to make do with the narratives being prepared by Collins or Tench for news of his young brother. The two ships were sailing in the morning. Worgan confided he had thirty-one letters, five of them almost as long as this forty-page monster, ‘to Close, Seal, Enclose and direct’ and get on board before the ships raised anchor. Then comes a forlorn postscript: ‘I have sent you 2 letters beside this.’ For all its compulsive chirpiness, Worgan’s huge letter breathes loneliness.

There were the immediate pleasures of local conviviality. From their first days in the colony gentlemen were deploring the convict passion for rum and the wickednesses they would commit to get it, but not only the lower orders were addicted to alcohol. Surgeon White gives a genial description of the toasts drunk during that first extravagant King’s Birthday. The lower orders had been catered for: the governor had issued every soldier a pint of porter in addition to his usual allowance of rum-and-water grog, and to every convict a half pint of rum ‘that they might all drink his Majesty’s health’. Then the gentlemen settled to their pleasures. After the midday gun salutes the officers attended the governor in his house, and sat down to dinner to the pleasant accompaniment of the band playing ‘God Save the King’ followed by ‘several marches’. Worgan gives us the menu: they ate ‘mutton, pork, ducks, fowls, fish, kanguroo, sallads, pies and preserved fruits’: foods handsomely outside the usual salted or dried rations. Then the cloth was removed, and they had the toasts. White lists them: ‘His Majesty’s health was drank with three cheers. The prince of Wales, the Queen and royal family, the Cumberland family, and his Royal Highness Prince Henry William...his Majesty’s ministers were next given.’ Then, the obligatory public toasts drunk, they began on the private and the particular, with the governor opening the new round with a toast to their own ‘Cumberland County’, the first British-style county in the new world, existing as yet only in the mind, but, as Phillip proudly declared, ‘the largest in the world’. Its name, he said, would be ‘Albion’.

So the toasts continued. Worgan (these surgeons seem to have been devoted drinkers) recorded the officers drank ‘PORT, LISBON, MADEIRA, TENERIFFE and good Old English PORTER’ (his capitals), which ‘went merrily round in bumpers’ through a long afternoon. Then, after joining in the democratic jubilation around a great bonfire, the officers went back to the governor’s house for supper and a night-cap or three. We have to assume that by bedtime most of them were thoroughly drunk. Nonetheless, they were affronted the next morning to discover that during their loyal celebrations some of their tents had been looted: ‘We were astonished at the number of thefts which had been committed during the general festivity, by the villainous part of the convicts, on one another, and on some of the officers, whose servants did not keep a strict lookout after their marquees.’ White harrumphed: ‘Availing themselves thus of the particular circumstances of the day, is a strong instance of their unabated depravity and want of principle.’ A young convict would hang for the crimes he committed in the course of that festive night.

White provides the frankest account we have of officers’ drinking, and some of his own conduct implies a ready tolerance of inebriation. At another celebration in August 1788, the governor’s dinner to honour the birth of the Prince of Wales, White and William Balmain, one of his assistant surgeons, had a difference of opinion, rose from the table, went outside, and, without seconds (so avoiding the risk of bloodless reconciliation) fought a pistol duel. Ralph Clark claimed that each fired several shots at the other, but that the only injury sustained was a slight wound to Balmain’s thigh, which implies either remarkably bad marksmanship or incapacitating drunkenness. As White on a good day was capable of bringing small birds down from trees, we have to diagnose inebriation exacerbated by a warm temperament. By the end of the same year White was ready to settle another dispute with pistols, this time with an adjutant of marines, until friends managed to persuade him he was in the wrong. Phillip would need a cool head to keep such effervescent fellows in amity.

The second King’s Birthday celebrated in Sydney was marked by a play, George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, watched happily by governor and officers, but acted, directed and produced by convicts—which sheds an unexpected light on convict conditions and caste relations in the new colony. Tench:

I am not ashamed to confess that the proper distribution of three or four yards of stained paper, and a dozen farthing candles stuck around the mud walls of a convict hut, failed not to diffuse general complacency on the countenances of sixty persons of various descriptions who were assembled to applaud the representation.

That is: they enjoyed it. There were more mundane pleasures to be taken in tending exotic menageries of pets like parrots or dingos or possums or lizards. The Australians’ alert, handsome dingos especially caught the dog-loving British eye. In flagrant defiance of an ‘all dogs ashore’ order Phillip had given in Portsmouth, a number of officers had brought their dogs with them on the voyage. The dogs contributed unpleasantly to the horrible crowding of shipboard life, already burdened with a Noah’s Ark of ‘useful’, meaning edible, animals, and there are indications that sailors resented cleaning up after them, more than a few fetching up overboard. On Ralph Clark’s Friendship five dogs, including his own, had mysteriously vanished over the side before the voyage was much more than half over. Soon after they landed the dog-deprived British were searching the countryside or bartering with dog-rich Australians for dingo puppies.

What happened next could have served as an early warning of deeper incompatibilities. John Hunter, studying the dingos as carefully as he studied all the creatures of the new continent, discovered them to be fatally flawed. Despite their notable good looks, they had an ineradicable propensity to kill all and any small animals. Some packs could even drag down kangaroos. Hunter writes, regretfully:

Of those [native] dogs we have had many which were taken when young, but never could we cure them of their natural ferocity; although well fed, they would at all times, but particularly in the night, fly at young pigs, chickens, or any small animal which they might be able to conquer and immediately kill and generally eat them. I had one which was a little puppy when caught, but notwithstanding I took much pains to correct and cure it of its savageness, I found it took every opportunity, which it met with, to snap off the head of a fowl, or worry a pig, and would do it in defiance of correction. They are a very good-natured animal when domesticated, but I believe it to be impossible to cure that savageness, which all I have seen seem to possess.

Governor Phillip himself supplied an assessment of this interesting animal, based on his study of a living specimen he had sent as a present to Under-Secretary Nepean:

It is very eager after its prey, and is fond of rabbits or chickens, raw, but will not touch dressed meat. From its fierceness and agility it has greatly the advantage of other animals much superior in size: for a very fine French fox-dog being put to it, in a moment it seized him by the loins, and would have put an end to his existence, had not help been at hand. With the utmost ease it is able to leap over the back of an ass, and was very near worrying one to death, having fastened on it, so that the creature was not able to disengage himself without assistance; it has also been known to run down both deer and sheep.

An impressive animal, but an alarming one. David Collins put the dilemma with his usual pragmatic economy: ‘The dogs of this country...have an invincible predilection for poultry, which the severest beatings could never repress. Some of them are very handsome.’

If it’s meat and it moves, grab it. These nomads’ dogs knew nothing of the pastoralists’ distinction between ‘stock’ and ‘game’. Meanwhile the offspring of the dogs the British brought with them, especially little terriers and spaniels, were eagerly coveted by the Australians. They were dog lovers too: their dingos were allies in the hunt and companions around the campfire. But dingos, bred to stalk flighty marsupials, did not bark. British dogs did. Through their centuries of living in agricultural settlement they had developed a strong sense of property, so they barked at strangers, especially strangers who came softly in the night. Translated to Australian conditions, those British-bred spaniels and terriers could give warning of night attacks. One of the skills of the Australian warrior was to move stealthily through the night, and kill an enemy who had mortally offended him as he lay by his own campfire.

To each culture its own canine. The ‘mindless’ slaughter of stock and the consequent murderous reprisals which were to embitter British–Australian relations through later decades were implicit in this energetic early trade between dog lovers.

Isolation, with desolation lurking within it, remained the temporary settlers’ worst enemy. William Bradley has left us a watercolour of the settlement at Sydney Cove in early 1788 (plate 4a): a scatter of tents, a few huts, a handful of larger structures, a flagpole—and that is all. The land constructions are given substance and focus by the two ships riding at anchor in the clear water. For officers, sailors and marines those ships spelt security even in a storm, because they breathed of home. Mind and spirit were refreshed by the clustered signs of European, indeed of British, technological ingenuity. Later, when officers condescended to play host to parties of Australian sightseers, leading them around the assemblage of cunning arrangements which constitute a ship, they were offended to find the tourists thoroughly bored, coming alive only when weapons or animal skins stimulated their curiosity. But if for these men the sea was an open highway back to home and England, by February 1789 the big ships had all sailed away, and even the faithful Supply was gone on a mission to Norfolk Island. The settlers were left with only the poor fruits of their own labour: huts, tents, a canvas house for the governor, some scars in the earth, some trees felled. With the harbour empty, Sydney Cove must have seemed to cling to the edge of the world.