To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  For their part, the Eora were skeptical of the newly arrived strangers, and they certainly had cause to be so. Within weeks of the arrival of the First Fleet, Bennelong and his people were well aware of the dangers posed by the invaders. As had become standard practice for British explorers and settlers, Arthur Phillip had been charged with opening a dialogue with the local inhabitants—invaluable sources of information about the terrain, its peoples, and its flora and fauna. George III had instructed Phillip to “endeavor by every means possible to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections.” Governor Phillip would come to take the royal command to use every means quite literally.

  At first Phillip attempted to obey the crown’s mandate to “conciliate” the “affections” of the locals. According to Nagle, who as one of Governor Phillip’s boat crew usually accompanied him on his explorations:

  Whatever excursions we went on with the Governor, he endeavored to naturalize them, and giving them clothing and trinkets, and would not purmit them to be mislisted by any means, though he may run many risks of his life by them. When we would be shooting . . . and came across a school of fish, and the natives see us, they would come down with spear in hand and take what fish they thought fit until we could get them into the boat and push off. The Governor would not allow us arms to defend ourselves, for fear we would kill them in our own defence.25

  Phillip’s attempt to prevent the various misunderstandings likely to occur between two such alien cultures from turning deadly seems like sound policy, especially in the light of the many tragedies that plagued relations between British colonists and Native Americans in the early years of North American settlement. Unfortunately for the indigenous peoples of Australia, Phillip did not learn all of the lessons from the North American precedent. After a year of trying to establish firm connections with little to show for it, Phillip became frustrated at the paucity of sustained contact and dialogue with the Eora. He knew that if the fledgling settlement were to survive in such a foreign land, learning from the native inhabitants would be vital. So, Phillip employed a tried and tested strategy for securing indigenous informants: he simply kidnapped them. British explorers and settlers had been capturing native peoples for information since the early days of North American settlement. The pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in what would become Massachusetts were helped in the early years by Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, an English-speaking Patuxet man who had learned the language after being kidnapped by an English adventurer years earlier in 1614. With such well-known precedents firmly in mind, and with little willing cooperation among the Eora, on December 31, 1788, Phillip ordered Lieutenant Ball to take two boats and with Lieutenant George Johnston and a party of his marines “to seize and carry off some of the natives.”26

  The lieutenants and their men proceeded to Manly Cove, north-east of the British settlement, where they spotted a group of Eora standing on the beach. The cove had been named for “the manly undaunted behaviour of a party of natives seen there,” so the British used their best subterfuge to lure in the unsuspecting locals, enticing them into conversation “with our courteous behavior and a few presents.” Once the Eora’s guard was down, the trap was sprung. “A proper opportunity being presented,” an eyewitness later recounted, “our people rushed in among them, and seized two men: the rest fled.” The Eora had been surprised by the British gambit, but they were not cowed. As the two men struggled with their British captors, the rest of the Eora regrouped and attacked the British in a desperate attempt to free their kinsmen. In the pitched battle that ensued, one of the captives managed to escape, but the second, a man named Arabanoo, was thrown into one of the boats and tied fast. The British were used to the local peoples retreating in the face of British guns, but now the Eora renewed their attack, driven on by “the most piercing and lamentable cries of distress” emanating from the distraught Arabanoo. The British quickly cast off amidst a cascade of projectiles. “The boats put off without delay; and an attack from the shore instantly commenced: they threw spears, stones, firebrands, and whatever else presented itself, at the boats; nor did they retreat, agreeable to their former custom, until many musquets were fired over them.”27

  Arabanoo was taken back to Port Jackson and placed in fetters. A convict was assigned to sleep with him and shadow his movements, and although he was well fed, his spirits remained low. One British observer noted that “sullenness and dejection strongly marked his countenance on the following morning; to amuse him, he was taken around the camp, and to the observatory: casting his eyes to the opposite shore from the point where he stood, and seeing the smoke of fire lighted by his countrymen, he looked earnestly at it, and sighing deeply two or three times, uttered the word ‘gweeun’ (fire).”

  The British did their best to cheer their captive, playing him music and showing him pictures of birds, including some he recognized, and people, including the Duchess of Cumberland. They also made efforts to placate the Eora in the days and weeks after his capture, though the methods were heart-rendingly cruel. “To convince his countrymen that he had received no injury from us, the governor took him in a boat down the harbour, that they might see and converse with him: when the boat arrived, and lay at a little distance from the beach, several Indians who had retired at her approach” returned after seeing Arabanoo. The Eora captive “was greatly affected, and shed tears. At length they began to converse. Our ignorance of the language prevented us from knowing much of what passed; it was, however, easily understood that his friends asked him why he did not jump overboard, and rejoin them. He only sighed, and pointed to the fetter on his leg, by which he was bound.” On another occasion, while sailing aboard the Supply with Governor Phillip, Arabanoo dove from the ship to make his escape. He was a strong swimmer but unused to swimming in European clothes and was quickly recaptured.28

  Kidnapping and captivity were not the only wrongs perpetrated by the new arrivals. While the British command was content with their new informant, others among the settlers were restive. In March of 1789, a group of sixteen convicts hatched a plan to raid a nearby Eora settlement, hoping to seize their fishing equipment. One day while working at the brick kiln, the felons crept out of the British camp armed with clubs and tools and made their way to Botany Bay. If the convicts hoped to surprise their intended prey they were gravely mistaken, and as they arrived near the bay:

  A body of Indians, who had probably seen them set out, and had penetrated their intention from experience, suddenly fell upon them. Our heroes were immediately routed, and separately endeavoured to effect their escape by any means which were left. In their flight one was killed, and seven were wounded, for the most part very severely: those who had the good fortune to outstrip their comrades and arrive in camp, first gave the alarm; and a detachment of marines, under an officer, was ordered to march to their relief. The officer arrived too late to repel the Indians; but he brought in the body of the man that was killed, and put an end to the pursuit.

  Governor Phillip was incensed. The convicts had left the kiln without permission, and their actions threatened to upend the fragile peace with the Eora. The felons claimed to have been attacked by the Eora without cause, but the truth eventually emerged and the guilty men were “severely flogged.” Arabanoo was present at the flogging, perhaps to witness that the rigors of British justice applied to those who attacked his people. If the flogging was an attempt to win the approval of a representative of the Eora, however, it did not have its desired effect. As one onlooker recorded, “Arabanoo was present at the infliction of the punishment; and was made to comprehend the cause and the necessity of it; but he displayed on the occasion symptoms of disgust and terror only.” For Arabanoo and the Eora, the British brought to Australian shores not justice or civilization but only violence and death.29

  Arabanoo’s assessment of the British interlopers had its merits, and it must have seemed that they were often as violent and cruel to each other as they were to the Eora. In the s
econd year of settlement, a group of eight soldiers, perhaps tiring of a hard life so far from home and seeking to drown their miseries in a bottle, hatched a plan to steal a large quantity of liquor from the settlement’s storehouse. They had a duplicate key made by a convict blacksmith, and when one of the conspirators took his turn as sentry, robbed the storehouse of booze and other provisions. The key, however, broke off in the storehouse door, alerting the storekeeper to the theft. Fearing discovery, one of the soldiers turned king’s evidence and informed the governor of the entire affair. In addition to the theft, he admitted that the conspirators, drunk on stolen spirits, had beaten to death one of their mates who had threatened to turn them in. Rather than feeling remorse, the soldiers had proceeded to their fallen comrade’s grave with a keg of stolen liquor, “sat in the grave, and stuck a bayonet in to the grave, and renewed their oath not to discover.” The soldiers were duly tried, condemned, and hanged, despite pleas of mercy from other soldiers, who asked the governor to spare some of the conspirators. Governor Phillip replied that “if he saved one he must forgive all, and that was out of his power, to do justice to his country.”

  The soldiers were not the only colonists to feel the full weight of eighteenth-century justice. In November 1789, as the American sailor Jacob Nagle looked on in disgust, Ann Davis, a female convict, was hanged for stealing some laundry. She was led to the gallows by two women, because “she was so much intoxicated in liquor that she could not stand without holding her up.” For Nagle, “it was a dreadful to see going to eternity out of this world in such a senseless, shocking manner.” The convicts had been shown mercy, it was thought, in being spared the gallows in Britain in exchange for transportation to Australia. As such, any further criminal behavior would not be tolerated.30

  Keeping control of the large convict population was a constant concern for the leaders of the colony, and the rough justice meted out to those who transgressed was intended to provide a edifying example for the rest of the convicts. The difficulties of discipline were exacerbated by the ever-present lure of the frontier. Sentries were placed throughout the camp and fences erected, but these posed little hindrance for the convict determined to take his chances in the bush. Subsistence outside of the confines of the camp might be difficult, but a number of convicts were willing to stake their lives for the freedom provided by the vast Australian interior.

  One of the most difficult convict runaways in the first years of settlement was John Caesar, a man of African descent, and given the classical bent of his name, likely one of the handful of former slaves transported with the First Fleet. His troubles began in April 1789 when he was charged with theft. Caesar was a very large, powerful man and widely considered to be the most formidable laborer in the entire settlement. With rations purposely meager so as to make them stretch until the colony could be resupplied, the hard-working Caesar stole food to support his outsized frame and exhausting labor. In early May, Caesar escaped from confinement and fled to the bush, taking with him a pilfered musket and ammunition. Even with a firearm, surviving in the wilds beyond the settlement was clearly arduous, and at the end of May he was spotted stealing supplies from a party of convict brick-makers. After a month of tenuous freedom, the fugitive was recaptured in June. With multiple thefts and an escape marring his ledger, Caesar realized he was likely to hang, but he seemed little affected by the possibility. Captain David Collins described him as “so indifferent about meeting death that he declared while in confinement, that if he should be hanged, he would create a laugh before he was turned off, by playing off some trick upon the executioner.” Caesar was prevented from such a ghoulish performance, however, as questions about his mental capacity and his indifference to death led Governor Phillip to conclude that his execution would not produce the wished for didactic example for the other prisoners. As Collins relayed, “Holding up” John Caesar “as an example was not expected to have the proper or intended effect.” As a result, Caesar’s sentence was commuted and he was instead sent to Garden Island.31

  Governor Phillip had not, as it transpired, heard the last of John Caesar. In December 1789 he escaped from his Garden Island exile, once more taking with him a gun and ammunition. Those tasked with his recapture were not at all sanguine, admitting that “it was dangerous to strive to retake him, being both ignorant and very powerful and strong.” If he hoped for a more permanent existence in the bush, he was once more disappointed, and finding scraping a long-term existence on his own increasingly onerous, he surrendered himself a month later in January. He was clapped in “double irons” to prevent yet another escape, and “tried for his life and condem’d.” The governor tried his best to persuade Caesar of the seriousness of his predicament and the likely consequences of his continued thefts and escapes. You can almost hear a sense of gentle pleading in Governor Phillip’s conversation with the condemned man, a vain attempt to convince John Caesar of the finality of death and the remorseless judgment of the world to come. He asked Caesar “what he thought would become of him when he had to die,” but the prisoner only laughed, “and seemed to rejoice, saying he would go to his own country and see his friends.” Perhaps Caesar’s perceived simplicity is belied by this heart-rending retort. For a man who likely spent much of his life as a slave, either stolen from his homeland or raised in the brutal world of Atlantic slavery, a man who gained a modicum of freedom in Britain, yet another foreign land, only to be arrested and sent around the world to a new colonial captivity, for such a man the distant call of home, of family and of friends, must have made the prospect of earthly death laughably quaint.32

  Governor Phillip once more commuted Caesar’s sentence, sending him this time to the more remote Norfolk Island, but such a determined runaway could not be contained for long. In 1793 he was returned to Port Jackson, but continued his pattern of flight and surrender until 1796, when a price of five gallons of liquor was finally put on his head. That year, after eight years of persistent resistance to his captivity, John Caesar was shot and killed in the bush by an Eora man seeking the reward. It was reported that Caesar escaped so often in part because he wished to establish himself “in the society of the natives, with a wish to adopt their customs and to live with them: but he was always repulsed by them; and compelled to return to us from hunger and wretchedness.” That an indigenous Australian would come to kill an escaped British convict of African descent for a prize set by colonial authorities is one of the many horribly surreal conjunctures of the expanding world in the late eighteenth century.33

  The Europeans brought other, more insidious, perils in their train as well. Tragically, as so often happened when formerly isolated groups of people met, contact was followed by epidemic. A mere year after the arrival of the British, smallpox, the scourge of Native Americans, broke out among the Eora. By April 1789 British foraging parties began to encounter the bodies of Eora floating in the coves and inlets of Sydney Harbor. It was clear that something was dreadfully wrong, and some of the surgeons and medical men of the colony acquired some of the corpses for examination. What they found was truly alarming: “On inspection, it appeared that all the parties had died a natural death: pustules, similar to those occasioned by the small pox, were thickly spread on the bodies; but how a disease, to which our former observations had led us to suppose them strangers, could at once have introduced itself, and have spread so widely, seemed inexplicable.” British observers found it hard to conceive how smallpox could have reached such distant shores. No European had shown symptoms or signs of the disease in the seventeen months since they left the Cape of Good Hope. Some theorized that smallpox had been spread by the French, or by Captain Cook, or even across the continent from western Australia via earlier contacts made by William Dampier. Whatever the original source of the virus, by May 1789 the Eora were dying.34

  When Arabanoo heard a family of his people living in a nearby cove had been struck with the new illness, he sped to the scene with Governor Phillip and one of the colony’s surgeons. The
y arrived to a devastating scene.

  Here they found an old man stretched before a few lighted sticks, and a boy of 9 or 10 years old pouring water on his head, from a shell which he held in his hand: near them lay a female child dead, and a little farther off, its unfortunate mother: the body of the woman shewed that famine, superadded to disease, had occasioned her death: eruptions covered the poor boy from head to foot; and the old man was so reduced, that he was with difficulty got into the boat.

  The old man and the boy were put in a boat to transport them back to the colony hospital, but Arabanoo refused to leave until he had seen to the burial of the dead. With his own hands he dug a grave in the sandy soil, lining it with grass. With gentle care he placed the body of the girl into the simple grave and covered the tiny corpse with more grass before burying her with sand until a mound rose over her.35