Leviathan Read online

  Come daylight the British stretched stiff, aching limbs, noisily emptied their bladders, hauled their packs up from the ground and started out again, marching into the morning sun, hoping to make the south-west arm of the bay, about five kilometres from its mouth. Tench was going to rake over the area then sweep around to the northern arm to complete the search. Unfortunately the guides were off and at half past seven they suddenly came upon the shore at the head of the peninsula, between the two arms. Five Indians were gathered about the shore and the troopers moved quickly to surround them. In vain, however, as

  … they penetrated our design, and before we could get near enough … ran off. We pursued; but a contest between heavy-armed Europeans fettered by ligatures, and naked unencumbered Indians, was too unequal to last long. They darted into the wood and disappeared.

  The alarm being given, they moved rapidly to a little village of five huts which stood nearby. Before they could reach it, however, three canoes filled with Aborigines were seen paddling with great haste to the opposite shore. Exhausted and sweating, the avengers could only search the huts for ‘weapons of war’. They found none. Knowing the chances of surprising anybody were gone, at least for that day, Tench ordered the men to return to their baggage. After a rest they marched for two hours in the afternoon, finally camping at a swamp. Wasted by fatigue and heat they settled down for the night but found no real respite as black clouds of mosquitoes and sandflies fell on them. They hauled themselves back into Sydney the following day.

  Phillip ordered them out again, this time at night. Hoping to fool the natives, they pretended to prepare a raid on Broken Bay to capture the man who had thrown a spear at the Governor a little earlier. They marched out under a full moon three days before Christmas, proceeding to the river they had waded through on the return leg of the last mission. The tide forced a halt to any advance until quarter past two in the morning. Dropping all their equipment except firearms and ammo boxes – which they tied fast on top of their heads – they waded across. Six short men and one sergeant, ‘who from their low stature and other causes were most likely to impede our march’, were left to guard the equipment train.

  Tench ordered the guides to move out as quickly as possible, without regard for terrain. They hurried alongside the river for three quarters of an hour, suddenly stopping by a creek about fifty metres wide ‘which extended to our right and appeared dry from the tide being out’. Tench consulted the guides, asking whether the bed could be crossed safely, or whether it might be better to walk around the head of the water course, a few hundred metres away. The guides indicated it would be a dangerous crossing but feasible. And so Tench’s second expedition teetered on the edge of disaster. Pressed for time, he ordered his men over. Within a few minutes they began to sink into the creek bed.

  We were immersed nearly to the waist in mud so thick and tenacious that it was not without the most vigorous exertion of every muscle of the body that the legs could be disengaged. When we had reached the middle, our distress became not only more pressing but serious, and each succeeding step buried us deeper. At length a sergeant of grenadiers stuck fast, and declared himself incapable of moving either forward or backward; and just after, Ensign Prentice and I felt ourselves in a similar predicament, close together.

  Men cried out in distress all around. Tench did not know what to do. With every moment the danger increased. Luckily, those at the rear of the column, warned by the soldier’s shouts, moved towards the head of the creek and passed over safely.

  Our distress would have terminated fatally had not a soldier cried out to those on shore to cut boughs of trees and throw them to us – a lucky thought which certainly saved many of us from perishing miserably; and even with this assistance, had we been burdened by our knapsacks, we could not have emerged; for it employed us near half an hour to disentangle some of our number. The sergeant of grenadiers, in particular, was sunk to his breastbone, and so firmly fixed in that the efforts of many men were required to extricate him, which was effected in the moment after I had ordered one of the ropes, destined to bind the captive Indians, to be fastened under his arms.

  Congratulating each other on a close escape, the soldiers cleaned their rifles of mud, formed up and pushed on. They found themselves a few hundred metres from the village half an hour before sunrise. Tench split the command into three squads and ordered them to charge the settlement in perfect silence. Despite the long, tiring march through the dark and the terrifying episode at the creek bed, the marines executed his design perfectly, converging on the village from three different directions at exactly the same moment. ‘To our astonishment, however,’ wrote Tench, ‘we found not a single native at the huts; nor was a canoe to be seen on any part of the bay.’

  At first he thought they had arrived perhaps thirty minutes too late. But the camp fires were cold and no fresh food could be found. The natives, Tench concluded, had decamped a number of days earlier and had not returned. Another abject failure. Tench considered letting his disappointed men refresh themselves with a swim, but the tide was turning and if they did not leave immediately, they would be cut off from their baggage and with it food and water. Alternately running and walking, they made the creek in time, but it was hard on the men, several of whom simply collapsed and refused to go on, a telling indication of their weariness, considering the savage discipline of the British army in those days. Tench, no martinet, was mindful of their plight. He was sorry that all he could do ‘for these poor fellows was to order their comrades to carry their muskets, and to leave with them a small party of those men who were least exhausted, to assist them and hurry them on’.

  They rested through the heat of the day, continuing their mission at four in the afternoon. They marched until sunset, seeing no natives, only miles of ‘high coarse rushes, growing in a rotten spongy bog, into which [they] plunged knee-deep at every step’. One final push, in the wee hours of the next day, ended like all the others in failure and despair. Come nine in the morning they turned north to Sydney. While McEntire’s killers were not caught, the tired bitter men of Tench’s patrol did come across a group of black potato thieves on the way back. A sergeant and some privates gave chase and Tench reported that their rage at the previous days’ frustrations ‘transported them so far that, instead of capturing the offenders, they fired in among them’. Some women were captured but the men escaped.

  One of the men, a native called Bangai, was hit, a mortal wound to the shoulder. Surgeon White, on hearing of this, took three Aborigines from Sydney with him to see if he might be able to save the man. But on reaching the spot where he was last reported they were told that he had died and the body was being tended to about a mile off. They found it near a fire, covered in green boughs. The face was hidden behind a thick screen of woven grass and ferns. A strip of bark hung around the neck and a stick had been stripped and bent into an arch over the body. None of the natives who had taken White to the spot would touch the corpse, or even approach it, saying the mawn would come; literally that ‘the spirit of the deceased would seize them’, an ancient belief with some real-world efficacy, although sadly for the first inhabitants of Sydney Harbour they did not understand how much.

  The white men who hunted the Aborigines carried a far deadlier weapon than their clumsy, single shot muskets. They stepped down from the weathered wooden decks of their ships with flintlocks and cannons but their blood and tissue were to prove much more efficient at destroying the local community. The British were crawling with viruses and bacteria against which the quarantined natives of the harbour had no defence. The men, women and children who made it across the oceans came bearing a cocktail of smallpox, syphilis, measles, whooping cough and influenza. Bred up through hundreds of years in the filthy, crowded cities of Europe, these invisible attackers fell ravenously upon their new, unprotected hosts.

  Smallpox was the mass killer. It was already burning at the edge of the Iora when Tench and his patrol set out for Botany Bay. The English bl
amed La Perouse and his crew for introducing the fearsome disease, but every European who penetrated the harbour was effectively bearing a death sentence with them. Smallpox was particularly well adapted to its new home. A stable virus which can live outside the body for months in dust or clothing, it has a long incubation period of up to two weeks, during which time the new host is infectious without showing it. A contaminated hunter could travel hundreds of kilometres, meeting others and passing on his gift. The virus cooked up and gathered strength within the warm, dark oven of the victim’s organs and, when it was ready, announced itself with a burst of unpleasant symptoms: fever, headache, muscle pain, nausea and vomiting.

  Taking to his bed, fussed over by the women of the tribe, the hunter would break into a rash two or three days later; a flat spot, or macule, changing into a blister – clear at first – but soon filling with a rich contagious pus. Another week or so and scabs would form and fall off; although at the extremities, the hands and feet by which a hunter lives, they were longer lasting because of the tougher skin. The scabs left ugly scars, or pockmarks, by which the disease is known. However, with no natural immunity to draw on, unable to hunt or gather because of the painful eruptions, and with the tribal structure collapsing around them, the Iora hunters had more to be concerned about than their good looks. They were in the first stage of being annihilated.

  By the 1850s a few hundred remained in bands scattered over the entire Sydney plain. A Russian naval officer, Pavel Mukhanov, describing a visit to Sydney in 1863, recounted a meeting with Ricketty Dick, the ‘last survivor of the aboriginal tribe who used to be masters of this district’. Mukhanov found him sitting by the road at the gate of a wealthy farm, grunting two or three English words, begging for alms. He was a small brown crippled man with long matted dreadlocks. The Russian thought his every line was imprinted ‘with stupidity and hopelessness’ and pondered whether nature was right, to condemn ‘this pitiful race’ to extinction. Echoing the fashionable theories of the time, he predicted that Dick’s brothers would soon simply vanish, without explicable cause, leaving in their place a ‘strong and vigorous British race’. Mukhanov threw the old beggar a shilling by way of recompense.

  We do not have to look so many years ahead of Phillip’s time to find evidence of the Aborigines’ decline. Their ancient civilization had been thoroughly debased and overcome by the convict state within a few years of the First Fleet’s arrival. It often took the unbiased eye of a foreigner such as Mukhanov to bear witness and take note. In April 1792 Judge-Advocate David Collins remarked favourably on the integration of black and white cultures or, more accurately, on the assimilation of the former by the latter. He noted that the natives had not recently launched any hostilities against the settlement and several of their younger people lived in the township, which was visited in turn by their relatives. In 1796 he thought the two races were getting along famously, the ‘friendly intercourse … so earnestly desired’ having been established, ‘these remote islanders have been shown living in considerable numbers among us without fear or restraint; acquiring our language; readily falling in with our manners and customs; enjoying the comforts of our clothing; and relishing the variety of our food …’. They had always been their own masters, wrote Collins, and ‘by slow degrees we began eventually to be pleased with and to understand each other’.

  To throw a less rosy tint on the state of the Iora we have to look to the journals of other Europeans travellers. Men such as the Spanish naval captain Alessandro Malaspina di Mulazzo who berthed in Sydney Cove between March and April 1793. His mission included preparing secret strategic reports on the state of Russian and English settlements in the Pacific. Malaspina saw Sydney primarily as a military threat. Spain, with her South American holdings, still saw the Pacific as her own private lake, and Malaspina thought that by setting up a penal colony the English were gathering a formidable collection of desperadoes who would menace the entire world with their depredations. Some might find that wryly amusing, perhaps even a little cool, but the Spaniard cut much closer to the bone when dissecting the Aborigines’ future.

  Tranquil inhabitants of its immense shores … how can you imagine at this moment that the present of a few ribbons and Trinkets, the useless gift of a few domestic animals, and astronomical observations a thousand times repeated, will very soon have brought you to a scene of blood and destruction? You will see your fields laid waste, your huts overrun, your women violated, your very lives snatched away in the flower of their youth and joys, solely to feed new Buccaneers …

  Malaspina had his own blind spot of course – the appalling record of the Spanish in the Americas – but he was right in seeing through Collins’ idyll. The peace between the old and new civilizations was a matter of brute power, not cultural refinement. ‘They keep generally good harmony with the Europeans,’ he wrote, because

  … punishment has made them cautious in this regard; there are very few tribes which do not maintain a strict subordination to the English, and the inequality in arms has extinguished or removed the discontented. The mere sight of a musket, the appearance of the uniform of a soldier, would scatter an army of natives, who with signs of peace and submission take pains to capture their goodwill …

  By 1819, when Frenchman Jacques Arago visited Sydney, he was surprised to find a fully grown city ‘of admirable design’. It seemed to Arago to have been growing for centuries rather than three short decades. He may have spent a little too much time at sea. His enthusiam for the new city led him to imagine that the ‘best architects had deserted Europe and come to New Holland to reproduce their most elegant mansions’. However, the bright march of European architecture stood in contrast to the absence of enlightened human virtue.

  Visiting an influential merchant and his family for dinner, Arago was horrified to find the family’s young ladies watching a group of Aborigines, all naked and ‘presenting all the outward signs of the most revolting misery’, drawn up to amuse the colony’s new elite with a gladiatorial contest. In Roman style it was to be a fight to the death. Covered with old scars, and armed with spears and clubs, the blacks had already been rewarded for their preliminary ‘capers and grimaces’ with some glasses of wine and brandy and a few pieces of bread which they still held under their arms. Arago watched with dawning horror as the alcohol took effect on the warriors.

  Their gestures soon became more violent and their speech more raucous, all talked at once and all shook their murderous weapons fiercely. Attracted by the uproar the master and the mistress of the house and their guests hurried to the scene and invited me to await the issue of this commotion. I agreed readily, convinced that license could go no further and almost certain that the ladies and girls would leave us alone to enjoy this sight. I was mistaken in my expectation, and on the contrary their light voices stimulated the courage or rather the ferocity of the actors. But when these poor wretches had ended the prelude to their bacchanals, their clubs, swung with greater force and skill, began to fall on nearby fences as though practice were needed to make their aim sure: and these hapless people whose gaeity at first had been so peaceful, at length belaboured each other soundly; two fell dangerously wounded and a third was killed outright. The gins, who until then had taken no part in the action beyond encouraging the combatants, now rose, quietly carried off the victims, perhaps their fathers or their brothers, and disappeared with their burdens.

  He marvelled that such a display could take place in the heart of a civilized city with respectable merchants and such elegant, accomplished young ladies as the spectators. But it was not the first such scene he had witnessed. A small inn had laid on similar entertainment for the Spaniards just a few days before. Arago noted that all quarrels seemed to end in such ways for the blacks, but he recognised that this brutality did not come naturally to them. Most often it was the whites who encouraged them with ‘bottles of strong drink’.

  Scarcely have the fumes mounted to their heads when they breathe battle and utter war crie
s. They are eager to slay, seeking out antagonists, provoking them by fierce war songs and asking for death in the hope of giving it. They find only too easily the opportunities they provoke, and their war whoops are answered by other whoops no less terrible. Then the combatants, drawn up in two lines about twenty paces apart, begin to threaten each other with their long pointed spears; they are soon throwing them with marvellous skill and force, and finally attack each other with formidable heavy clubs. Limbs are broken, bones crushed, heads split; no cry of pain escapes the breast of these savage beasts; the air only resounds with frightful vociferations …

  It was a long fall from the judicious rule of Arthur Phillip. His lighter hand was stayed by the idea of the noble savage, a notion which was still working its way through the Age of Reason when Cook sailed up the east coast and found a race neither civilised nor corrupted. They may have appeared to his crew ‘to be the most wretched people on Earth, but in reality,’ wrote Cook, ‘they are far more happier than we Europeans’. They lived a tranquil existence; everything needed for life was provided in abundance by the earth and the sea. The fine climate meant they had little need of clothing and ‘they seemed to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them’. After being threatened by a couple of natives on the shores of Botany Bay, Cook wrote, ‘All they seem’d to want for us was to be gone’. A wise response, thought the mariner, who challenged anyone to tell him ‘what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans’.