A Commonwealth of Thieves (8 page)

When the fleet departed after a fortnight, the Viceroy saluted Phillip with twenty-one guns, and could be forgiven for wondering whether such a varied and implausible expedition would be heard from again.

O
N THE LONG STRETCH
between Rio and Dutch-controlled Cape Town, rancour, ill temper, cabin fever, and paranoia overtook many of the officers, while similar grievances and discomfort filled the prison decks. In late September, on the deck occupied by marines and female convicts, a sea broke and washed all parties out of their bunks. It must have been harder still for the male convicts on a lower deck. But the trip was relatively brisk. On one day
Friendship
logged 188 nautical miles, and Cape Town, the Dutch headquarters in Africa, was reached on 11 November.

Here, a convict tambour maker or embroiderer named Eve Langley, sailing on the
Lady Penrhyn
with her small son, Phillip, gave birth to a daughter on a bed of clean straw in one of the shacks on deck. Phillip Scriven, a foremast hand, was listed as the father. There were no baby supplies or clothing aboard the fleet, and so as Surgeon Bowes Smyth of the
Lady Penrhyn
recorded, the women were reduced to “plundering the sailors … of their necessary cloths and cutting them up for some purpose of their own,” a comment that casts interesting light on the subtleties of power between the men and women aboard the
Lady Penrhyn.
The two leaders in this plunder were Anne Colpitts, a Durham woman whose own child, John, died on the voyage, and Sara Burdo, a young dressmaker guilty of having stolen from a Londoner who rejected her sexual advances. Both convict women would later be midwives in the colony, having helped the births of the
Lady Penrhyn
's young. According to good midwifery methods, the mother's belly after birth was made moderately firm by the application of a table napkin, folded like a compress, and secured by pinning the broad bands of the skirt or petticoat over it. And though the midwives would have collaborated with the surgeon, the reality was that most convict women trusted their midwives more than any male. Because of their “less exquisite feelings,” wrote Bowes Smyth, “the lower class of women have more easy and favourable births than those who live in affluence.”

The midwives must have been competent, for the
Lady Penrhyn
was the healthiest ship in the fleet. It also possessed more medical staff than any other—Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth and two assistants. Nonetheless, the elderly woman named Elizabeth Beckwith, long afflicted with dropsy, would perish aboard. Hugh Sandlyn, a convict woman's son born in Newgate, had died early in the voyage, aged eighteen months. Jane Parkinson, a milliner and thief, was already sickening for her death at sea, when she would leave a young son, Edward, for the other
Lady Penrhyn
women to look after.

Above decks was a babble of complaint from animals. In the fleet, said another surgeon, George Worgan, “each ship is like another Noah's Ark.” Pet dogs roamed the decks. There were Captain Phillip's greyhounds and horses on
Sirius,
Reverend Johnson's kittens on the store ship
Golden
Grove,
as well as a number of newly purchased sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and pigeons penned in various structures on every deck. At the Cape of Good Hope, the women and some men aboard
Friendship
were transferred to other ships to make room for an additional intake of thirty-five sheep.

After leaving Cape Town, and sniffing the westerlies below Africa, Phillip divided the flotilla into two divisions, the first division to be led by the little
Supply,
to which Phillip now transferred. Its leading group was made up of the
Alexander,
the
Friendship,
and the
Scarborough,
now able to travel as fast as they liked. Visiting the
Prince of Wales
and
Friendship
by longboat, White found signs of scurvy amongst the women, particularly those who also suffered from dysentery. The symptoms were swelling and bleeding of the gums, a terrible breath which could make people wince even a considerable length away, pains in the joints leading ultimately to an inability to stand up, the appearance of large bruises on the flesh from the most glancing contact, an awful listlessness and a deadly depression, and finally the rupture of internal organs, internal bleeding, and death. He ordered the women dosed with essence of malt and good wine.

On the convict decks it must have been miserable, with the subAntarctic cold and the heaving seas of the roaring forties. Hail and snow came down, and officers like Clark were forced to wear a flannel waist-coat, two pairs of stockings, and keep their greatcoats on continuously. But the convicts generally had only their light clothing and their one blanket, and welcomed what crowded warmth they could generate. Ahead, amidst the squalls, lay the south end of Van Diemen's Land, and its perilous coasts.

The second division of ships suffered the same turbulent weather. On 19 December 1787, Surgeon Bowes Smyth recorded that “we spoke the
Golden Grove,
Captain Sharp, who informed us that Mrs. Johnson, the parson's wife, was very ill, and also that the parson's clerk, Mr. Barnes, was very ill.” On 10 January in the New Year, a great wave shook all the ships of the second division and split the foresail and mizzen-topsail on
Golden
Grove
and entered the Johnsons' cabin windows, tearing them away and washing Mr. and Mrs. Johnson out of their bunks. “God of Oceans,” went one of Richard Johnson's prayers, “when will you bring us to a safe harbour?”

The first division sighted the south-west of Van Diemen's Land and its South Cape on 5 January. It was summer in the southern hemisphere, but it did not feel like it there, and patches of snow could be seen on high ground. Surprisingly, it was less than two days after the first division worked its way around South Cape that
Sirius,
with the help of its signal guns to attract the attention of other masters, and a large blackboard with the course chalked on it and hung over its stern, led the second division round and headed north. John White on
Sirius,
soon to be, aground, the surgeon with the most geographically extensive medical practice in the universe, saw “no hazard that attends making this land by day … as nature has been very particular in pointing out where it lies, by rocks which jut out into the sea, like so many beacons.” And he would see in a day or so that the New South Wales coast, though not without some shoals and perils, had a similarly frank coastline.

The fleet was now on the last leg towards fabled Botany Bay, using the charts made by Cook as their guarantee of safe arrival.

six

T
HEY WERE CLOSE NOW
, on 16 January in the New Year.
Supply,
Scarborough, Friendship, Alexander,
the good sailers, were reaching northwards on the New South Wales coast. The seas and handsome terrain they looked out on had been viewed by a mere handful of Europeans. The many beaches and bays were marked by bold headlands and backed by blue mountain ranges. If the wind had favoured them and swung to the south, the first division might have made it into the longed-for port that very day.

On the cluttered 70-foot deck of
Supply,
with “a great sea running and cloudy dirty weather,” Phillip witnessed the third squally dawn in a row, with heavy rain and lightning to the north. Yet the unprecedented nature of where they were did not seem to worry him or his officers, or the weather present them with an omen. These were all practical men, and when it was found that the chronometer in the main cabin of
Supply,
the almighty time-keeper by which longitude was calculated, had stopped here on the coast of the Antipodes, after working for the whole eight months of the voyage, they merely started it again and factored in the time during which they guessed it had not been working.

On the ships trailing
Supply
that day, and further south on ships around the
Sirius,
the convict mess orderlies, frowsy from sleep, so accustomed to the seas that memory of the solid earth and stone gaols had been washed out of them, were at the cook-shacks to collect the morning meal. Forward, on each vessel, from the heads by the bowsprit, two hunched sailors crapped into the sea. All was normal and vaguely hopeful, yet tinged with the edginess of near arrival.

F
OR THE FIRST DIVISION
of the fleet, it was the morning of 18 January, when the wind shifted to the south-west and a hot breeze blew from an interior utterly unknown to any European, that they reached the neighbourhood of their landfall, Botany Bay. Lieutenant King did not let any high emotion to do with historic beginnings enter his account of what happened on the afternoon of that day. He noticed the high chalk cliffs recede towards Red Point, named like many other topographic features by Captain Cook. Cook, who had come this way only once, had made such names both bywords for great distance and also a form of taming; he had reduced the coast to size with British tags. The officers took professional joy in seeing these comfortable reference points come up. “An eminence on the land … bore at this time W1/2 S 4 leagues which we take for a mountain resembling a hat which Captain Cook takes notice of.” Red Point was nine miles north of this, and then the southern point of Cook's Botany Bay, Cape Solander, named in honour of Sir Joseph Banks's Swedish assistant, was sighted. “It is impossible to miss this place with Captain Cook's description before one.”

The
Supply
hauled in for the harbour at a quarter past two in the afternoon of the next day. Lieutenant Ball, who commanded
Supply
under the overall direction of Phillip, anchored in the northern arm of the bay, so that the three closest convict transports following,
Alexander, Scarborough,
and
Friendship,
and then all the ships of the second division, would be able to see them from the entrance and be guided in.

How could the place not fail to disappoint the travellers' long-sustained expectation? No one on the
Supply
made exuberant statements about it. It lay in its afternoon, sultry light, not much elevation to it, despite all the great sandstone cliffs and headlands they had passed further south. It was in part a landscape of some shallow hills, eucalypt trees, and cabbage tree palms spread as in a park, with the grass soon to be called “kangaroo grass” growing between the trees. Otherwise, it was a country of low, indiscriminate earth, open ground in many places, with rank grass: the sort of country that promised there would be lagoons and swamps just behind the shore. Its sand beaches shone in the afternoon sun, but with an ambiguous welcome which hurt the eye.

As the
Supply
watched the earth, the inheritors of the earth watched the
Supply.
The Gweagal clan of the Eora language group occupied the south shore of the bay and wondered why, after many years, the sky had ruptured again and the risky phenomenon of a craft as large as an island had returned. The Bediagal on the north-west side of Botany Bay were galvanised by the same question. Old men and women began to sing songs of expulsion, and the young repaired spears, not taking for granted the animal gut and yellow gum which held the points of stone or bone in place, and tested throwing sticks for solidity. A young Bediagal
carradhy,
a man of high degree and preternatural physical courage, Pemulwuy, if not actually present, was sent a message that the manifestation was back again. Mothers and aunts counselled children to be wary. The last time one of these phantasms had appeared, it had been an uneasy business, but they had been able to expel the alien presences in the long run.

Though Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Sydney had authorised Phillip to look at this target coast as a vacancy, the people who had lived here since the last ice age had created their known earth, and whose ancestors had been in the hinterland for millennia longer still, had seen the scatter of ships and were sending reports ahead overland, clan to clan, of the astounding phenomenon they represented.

Modern dating methods show that the people who became the first natives of the Australian continent had crossed from the prehistoric south-east Asian district named Wallacea between 60,000 and 18,000 years ago, when the Arafura Sea was an extensive plain, when sea levels were 30 metres below where they are now, and there was a solid land bridge 1,600 kilometres wide between Australia and New Guinea. There was in that period a continent made up of Australia and New Guinea, their continental shelves and connecting lowlands, known to scholars as Sahul. Sahul's north-western coast received small numbers of individuals from Wallacea, possibly as few as fifty to a hundred people over a decade.

Eighteen thousand years ago, when the east coast of Sahul still ran from New Guinea to the southern tip of Tasmania and beyond, the coast Phillip was now approaching was a region of cold steppes and sub-alpine woodland. When the original settlers first explored the southern part of the continent, they may have encountered the 5-metre-long giant anaconda and the marsupial lion, the latter resembling a traditional cat, yet whose features also showed an obvious relationship to the kangaroo. The furs of marsupials were essential to the Aborigines of New South Wales at that stage. But now, for the uneasy observers ashore on this January day of 1788, ice existed only in tribal memory. The native coastline had stabilised in its present from about 7,000 years before, when the glaciers melted. As elsewhere on earth, innumerable camping places, stone quarries, burial grounds, and sacred sites were flooded by the sea. In compensation, the coast matured and developed, providing sandstone plateaus, mangrove swamps and wetlands, rock platforms, and beaches.

Now, as the fleet was delayed by northerlies off the coast, bushland and forest covered most of the eastern half of New South Wales. This was regularly set fire to by the lightning of the vigorous electric storms of the area, or by Aborigines using fire-stick farming—that is, using fire to flush animals out of the bush, but as a means of renewal as well. The ancestral beings, who had made the visible earth and its resources, expected the cleaning up and fertilisation wrought by the fire-stick. A number of Australian species of trees welcomed fire—the banksia, the melaleuca, the casuarina, the eucalyptus; and fire fertilised various food plants—bracken, cycads, daisy yams, and grasses. The fire-stick, in itself and as a hunting device, may have speeded the extinction of the giant marsupial kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the giant sloth, and other species now vanished from the coast the flotilla was following.

For other food sources, the Eora, the indigenous people of the language-grouping in the Botany Bay area, were able to trace the small, stingless native bees to their caches of honey in hollow trees. Fish and shellfish were plentiful, but sharks and stingrays were taboo and could not be eaten. “The Indians, probably from having felt the effects of their voracious fury testified the utmost horror on seeing these terrible fish,” said one officer. The shark and the stingray were clan totems of the coastal people; moreover, a subtle religious division into permitted and forbidden foods was apparent, and there were also prohibitions between individual men and women and their totem animals. One did not devour one's totem animal, whether bird, mammal, fish, or serpent.

As sweet as life might be on that coast for hunter-gatherers, the conditions for the development of a sedentary life did not exist. Perhaps only one of the grasses which were the basis for farming elsewhere grew here, and the only semi-domesticated animal was the native dog or dingo, which helped the people harry kangaroos, wallabies, and smaller game in return for meat at the evening fire. The Aboriginal population of the entire landmass and islands, in that last undisrupted week, stood at perhaps 750,000.

This New South Wales coast, which was as far as government or the Royal Navy would venture short of the ice of Antarctica, was the centre of all things for the people who saw the phantasms of the fleet pass by. They would have been astounded that there were, somewhere else, in remote, northern, unholy mists, members of their own species who considered their country a netherworld, a legislated form of hell. And until now, they had not had any reason to think their horizons were about to collapse in upon them.

A
RTHUR
P
HILLIP KNEW FROM
C
OOK'S
journals to be wary and conciliatory. Cook had not received an open welcome in Botany Bay eighteen years before. Phillip's task was harder—rather than being merely an investigator here, he was meant to make a penal town somewhere in this bay. Relationship with the “Indians” needed to be as good as they could be for as long as possible. The instructions on this matter had been attached to his commission from the Crown and read: “You are to endeavour by every means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them, and if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment.”

At three o'clock the boats were hoisted out from the
Supply.
Arthur Phillip, Lieutenant King, Lieutenant Johnston, and Lieutenant Dawes all landed on the north side of the bay, “and just looked at the face of the country, which is as Mr. Cook remarks very much like the moors in England, except that there's a great deal of very good grass and some small timber trees.” A reliable young Cornish convict, James Ruse, had been moved to the
Supply
and would always claim he was the first ashore, wading in with Lieutenant Johnston riding scarlet and glittering on his back.

They searched that afternoon for a stream of freshwater, but could not find one. This must have concerned Arthur Phillip, though he was not easily daunted. Returning to the boat sweaty, Phillip spotted a group of natives on another beach and ordered the boats ashore at a point where two canoes lay. The natives immediately rose to their feet and called to the newcomers “in a menacing tone and at the same time brandishing their spears or lances.” The usual testing rituals of arrival took place. Phillip showed them some beads, and ordered one of the seamen to tie them to the stern of a canoe, and made signs that they would be obliged if the natives could guide them to water. Arthur Phillip, as a founding act of good-will, was carried ashore by a convict, and walked towards them alone and unarmed, and a male native advanced and made signs that he should lay the gifts on the ground. The native, edgy and trembling, came forward and took them, and then he and others came near enough to be given looking glasses and other wonders. Soon, Phillip became aware that a missing front tooth of his own coincided with the tooth Aboriginal men lost in initiation, and this fact gave him a weight with the natives. The Eora directed the visitors round the sand spit where a good stream of freshwater came down to the bay from the hinterland. Perhaps if the intruders were given water, they would depart.

Phillip was already doubtful about this bay, its shallow anchorages and fluky winds, and about its capacity to support an illsupplied penal settlement. But he waited and kept his counsel. He was a man who would rather carry all of a burden than share it in easy conversation.

The next morning the other ships of the first division came round Cape Solander. They had made very good time. On
Friendship,
Lieutenant Ralph Clark rejoiced in the fair wind after a lot of overnight lightning, thunder, and downpour. He had his things ready for landing, having acquired from the carpenter a deal box to hold the butterflies he planned to collect “for you my dear woman.” All night in his little hutch he had been haunted by dreams of his Betsy Alicia—that he was walking with her and that she was wearing a riding habit. At six o'clock that morning, the man at the masthead had called that he saw land on the port bow. Clark was pleased, since the sheep aboard, some of which he owned, had been living off flour and water and were in bad condition. Now he had the excitement of seeing the nearby land, and a great many natives at Cape Solander.