In retrospect this seems an insanely risky act, like a scorched moth returning to circle a flame. Cook later justified himself on the grounds that he was afraid to miss the passage that could confirm whether New Holland and New Guinea were separate continents rather than a single landmass. The chance to make this discovery, which would eclipse the achievements of the mighty Portuguese explorer Fernandes de Queirós, had been on his mind ever since they first sighted New Holland, and he could not bring himself to let it go.31
The fruits of this folly were soon upon them. Cook woke at 4:00 a.m. on August 16 to the sound of the surf “foaming to a vast height.” With no wind to give them motion and no ground for the anchor, the ship was carried toward the Reef by the powerful current. Banks recognized this as a unique moment of peril.
All the dangers we had escaped were little in comparison of being thrown upon this Reef where the Ship must be dashed to peices in a Moment. A Reef such as is here spoke of is scarcely known in Europe, it is a wall of Coral Rock rising all most perpendicular out of the unfathomable Ocean, always overflown at high-water generally 7 or 8 feet and dry in places at low-water; the large waves of the vast Ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance make a most terrible surf breaking mountains high …32
Two hours later, despite strenuous efforts to tow the ship clear with the longboat and yawl, “we were,” Cook observed, “in the very jaws of distruction.” Banks was certain their last moment had come: “a speedy death was all we had to hope for.”33
Just then a few intermittent puffs of wind gave them enough leeway to kick the ship one hundred yards from the breakers, bringing into view a channel through the Reef about a boat-length wide. Cook’s immediate attempt to thread this needle was, however, rebuffed by the strong ebb tide, which pushed the ship a quarter of a mile back out to sea. Anxiously they waited for the tide to turn, while the master in the pinnace looked for and eventually located another narrow channel, a quarter of a mile in breadth. Once again hopes rose. “The fear of Death is Bitter: the prospect we now had before us of saving our lives tho at the expence of every thing we had made my heart set much lighter on its throne,” wrote Banks. When the flood tide eventually rushed in, “we soon enter’d the opening and was hurried through in a short time by a rappid tide like a Mill race which kept us from driving againest either side.” The portly Endeavour shot through like a nimble canoe. Once they were back within the inner reef lagoon, they dropped anchor in nineteen fathoms on a “Corally and Shelly bottom.”34
Delighting in the calm, Banks and a few sailors took a small boat to the Reef to hunt for shellfish and turtle. The coral, no longer an emblem of terror, seemed for the first time to be a source of scientific curiosity and aesthetic pleasure. After first collecting three hundred pounds of great cockles for the pot, Banks found himself entranced by “Corals of many species, all alive, among which was the Tubipora musica. I have often lamented that we had not time to make proper observations upon this curious tribe of animals but we were so intirely taken up with the more conspicuous links of the chain of creation as fish, Plants, Birds &c &c. that it was impossible.”35
* * *
Though relieved at having orchestrated yet another hair’s-breadth escape, Cook’s mood was now altogether darker. The inconsistency of his actions in first leaving and then reentering the Labyrinth was obvious to all. “How little do men know what is for their real advantage,” Banks reflected, “two days [ago] our utmost wishes were crownd by getting without the reef and today we were made happy by getting within it.” This philosophical reflection on the foibles of man appeared to carry no judgment against his captain, but Cook knew he could not presume the same tolerance from his employers in the Admiralty or the gentlemen of the press. The despair and anger that washed over him at this thought led to an unusual spurt of self-vindication.
… such are the vicissitudes attending this kind of service and must always attend an unknown Navigation … The world will hardly admit of an excuse for a man leaving a Coast unexplored he has once discover’d, if dangers are his excuse he is than charged with Timorousness and want of Perseverance and at once pronounced the unfitest man in the world to be employ’d as a discoverer; if on the other hand he boldly incounters all the dangers and obstacles he meets and is unfortunate enough not to succeed he is than charged with Temerity and want of conduct (italics added).36
A recent Cook biographer has seen this cri de coeur as a clue to Cook’s “deep character” and a revelation of his tendency to self-pity, paranoia, and a “mortal fear of being … found wanting,” as well as of his overweening hunger for fame. Perhaps this was so, though a historian’s judgment is easy to make thousands of miles from the roar of the breakers. To me the moment seems significant more as the disclosure of a profound dilemma: navigating this maze was not only Cook’s greatest ever test of maritime skill and physical stamina, but it also confronted him with the explorer’s most insoluble moral and psychological nightmare—whether to endanger his men or fail his mission.37
From now on he determined to sail northward hugging the coast, “whatever the consequences might be.” On Tuesday, August 21, 1770, after a relatively smooth if laborious passage through the remainder of the Labyrinth, including the vortices of currents, shoals, and fringing reefs around the Torres Strait, he was now confident of being “about to quit the eastern coast of New Holland.” He therefore landed with a group of sailors and marines on a small stony island to perform a formal ceremony of acquisition: “I now once more hoisted English Coulers and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took posession of the whole Eastern Coast from the above Latitude [38] down to this place by the name of New South Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbors Rivers and Islands situate upon the said coast (italics added).” That he had not, as his Admiralty orders prescribed, consulted with and gained the prior agreement of the Indigenous peoples must have been an oversight.38
There remained some tricky navigation around the barren, guano-covered rock off the tip of Cape York that he named Booby Island, but his crew accomplished it without difficulty. They were by now perfectly drilled in combating the swirling currents and sudden shallows of this capricious sea country. A gentle wind and rolling swell from the southwest convinced the captain on August 23 that the Endeavour had passed the northern extremity of New Holland and entered the open sea that lay westward, “which gave me no small satisfaction, not only because the dangers and fatigues of the Voyage was drawing near to an end, but by being able to prove that New Holland and New-Guinea are 2 separate Lands or Islands.”39
Despite his relief, Cook still felt the need to pen a small apology to posterity. He hoped that a less hazardous passage through the Torres Strait would one day be discovered, never doubting that “among these Islands are as good if not better passages than the one we have come thro’.” But James Cook the navigator was exhausted by his battle with the Labyrinth and had “neither time nor inclination” to explore further, “having been already sufficiently harass’d with dangers without going to look for more.”40
He wanted, in fact, to get out of there as fast as the Endeavour could take them, having accomplished his key tasks. Along with assessing and claiming for England the land of New South Wales, which might or might not be a new continent, separate from the westerly land that the Dutch called New Holland, he’d achieved his own personal goal of determining whether or not New Guinea was detached from the northeast coast of New South Wales.
James Cook’s chart of the South Sea (National Library of Australia)
Cook did not know how important it would one day become for British trading ships to have a speedy, thoroughly charted passage through the Torres Strait: for the time being, his protracted route would do. As for the coral Labyrinth, he probably guessed, rightly, that it would interest his masters less as a scientific wonder than as an annoying obstacle for future navigators. But then neither he nor his readers ever realized the true vastness of this coral maze.
These
issues were unfinished business, and would one day become the lot of another British explorer-navigator, Matthew Flinders.
2
BARRIER
Matthew Flinders’s Dilemma
FLINDERS, WHO WAS NOT YET BORN when Cook turned the Endeavour for home, grew up longing to emulate, and then to exceed, his mighty predecessor. By 1802, at the age of twenty-eight, Flinders was commander of the bark HMS Investigator, and July 20 of that year found him in Port Jackson, New South Wales, pouring his heart out to his newlywed wife, Ann. He was replying to her twelve-month-old batch of letters from England, which had just reached him. After a grueling survey of a large portion of the southwest coast of New Holland, he was now in the process of refreshing his ship and men in preparation for what he expected to be the most testing leg of a vast journey of scientific discovery: to circumnavigate and survey the great body of southern land known as New South Wales and New Holland, to which he would one day give the name “Australia.”
To achieve this he knew he would have to renavigate Cook’s Labyrinth, which he now understood a little better than its discoverer, thanks to later charts from two merchant captains, W. D. Campbell and William Swain. Each had, in 1797 and 1798 respectively, revealed the existence of stretches of coral reef far south of where Cook had first encountered them at Endeavour River. Making sense of how these reefs connected with those Cook had seen would be one more challenge in what Flinders privately intended to be a wholesale rectification and extension of his precursor’s famed navigation of the east coast of New South Wales.
Captain Matthew Flinders, RN, 1814 (National Library of Australia)
The young Lincolnshire-born sailor’s willingness to bare his soul to Ann came from a profound conviction that the best of modern men combined “the qualities first of the heart, and then of the head.” This belief made him heir to two of his century’s most influential cultural currents. The heart stood for the cult of “sensibility,” a pervasive fashion among middle-class English men and women that required the cultivation of intense and refined personal feelings. A man of sensibility was thought to possess a delicate and elastic nervous system capable of feeling and conveying sympathetic affinities with the emotions and sufferings of all sensate beings. Growing up in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, Flinders and Ann had absorbed the sensitivities of the bestsellers of the day, especially Laurence Sterne’s saga The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) and Ann Radcliffe’s gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Such works had helped shape young Matthew Flinders into a “man of feeling,” who, like his boyhood literary hero Robinson Crusoe, combined sensibility with a longing for romantic adventures and explorations.1
The head, on the other hand, stood for the rational values and technical attainments of the English Enlightenment that dominated Flinders’s chosen profession of naval surveyor. An ambition to excel in navigation and naval discovery had begun with boyhood readings of the great journals of James Cook, whose explorations had added half a hemisphere’s worth of new knowledge to geography, navigation, natural history, and ethnography. Trumping his European rivals, Cook had brought new lands and resources into the reach of the British Empire and quickened the march of reason throughout the Western world. In the process, he’d risen from plowman’s son to world celebrity.2
Gripped by a similar ambition, Matthew Flinders rejected his father’s modest occupation of rural surgeon-apothecary to join the British navy at the relatively late age of fifteen. The boy’s slight frame belied a fierce will. Advised to concentrate on the skills of navigation and hydrography, Flinders was by 1792 serving as a midshipman on William Bligh’s second voyage to the South Seas and the West Indies. Battle experience against the French two years after, followed by a naval posting in the colony of New South Wales, brought promotion and the chance to undertake explorations and surveys for Governor John Hunter.
By the time Flinders returned to England in September 1800, he’d gained enough self-belief to secure agreement from Sir Joseph Banks and the Admiralty for the circumnavigation and survey of New South Wales and New Holland. His orders were to focus in particular on a survey of the Torres Strait and other unknown parts, rather than areas already charted by Cook; to find out whether the east and west coasts belonged to a single continent or were separated by a body of water; and to explore “this, the only remaining considerable part of the globe.”3
* * *
Flinders was anguished to learn from Ann’s letters that she had endured a miscarriage, an eye operation, and a nervous collapse, and replying to her required all his considerable resources of sensibility and reason. “Oh my love, my love, how much do I sympathize in thy sufferings,” he wrote. So he should, for he was the source of most of her pain. Midway through the previous year, after bewildering Ann with letters that blew hot and cold in line with his career prospects, he’d suddenly rushed her into marriage. Having been promoted to commander, he hoped she’d be able to accompany him to New South Wales, but the Admiralty and Banks vetoed the idea. Rather than risk his new command, he immediately sent his bride of three months back to her parents and departed for New South Wales.
News of Ann’s subsequent breakdown was painful enough; worse was her accusation that it had resulted from his “poor proof of … affection.” In response he begged her to remember that they could never have lived comfortable, independent lives on his English pay. All his actions had been honest and heartfelt: “Heaven knows,” he pleaded, “with what sincerity and warmth of affection I have loved thee.” Instead, he argued, she ought to stop treating him as the perpetrator of a “crime,” accept what fate had dished up, and restore her health with thoughts of their happy future. “See me engaged successfully thus far, in the cause of science and followed by the good wishes and approbation of the world,” he enjoined. It was a prospect that he, at least, found supremely consoling.4
There was more than a dash of rhetorical calculation in this, and in his successive letters to Ann. Flinders liked to present himself as a suffering romantic, forced by poverty to chase fame and fortune in a remote wilderness that had parted him from his heart’s desire. The vast Pacific separating them became a barrier that could be blamed for their pain. “In torture at thy great distance from me,” he wrote, “I lay musing upon thee, while sighs of fervent love, compassion for thy suffering health, and admiration of thy excellencies in turn get utterance.” Such oscillations between emotional hyperbole and masculine rationality were typical. Often his two creeds of sensibility and science pulled him in opposite directions, making his actions appear conflicted and cold, but they could also sometimes work together, generating a combination of sensitivity and energy.5
No leg of his impending voyage, however, would test the compatibility of these two philosophies more than “threading the needle” through Cook’s fearsome Labyrinth and the treacherous Torres Strait.
* * *
The isolation and mental strain experienced by British survey captains while extending the empire was known to produce a grim toll of suicides, breakdowns, and heart attacks. Flinders understood the loneliness he would face in upholding a necessarily removed and authoritarian role as the voyage’s commander, so, like Captain Robert Fitzroy after him, who chose gentlemanly Charles Darwin to keep him company, Flinders selected a sympathetic companion from outside the naval service to provide an outlet for personal feelings. Given that Cook’s 1770 voyage had set a precedent for using Indigenous guides, Governor King, Hunter’s successor, was not surprised when asked by Flinders in May 1802 if he could enlist two “natives of the country” as supernumeraries. Flinders explained: “I had before experienced much advantage from the presence of a native of Port Jackson, in bringing about a friendly intercourse with the inhabitants of other parts of the coast.”6
He was referring in particular to the assistance rendered by a young Aboriginal who’d accompanied Flinders on two local explorations in 1798 and 1799. Bungaree, a “worthy and brave fello
w,” had migrated to Sydney some years earlier from Broken Bay, near the mouth of the Hawkesbury River, and he helped Flinders calm several dangerous skirmishes, such that “[his] good disposition and open and manly conduct … attracted my esteem.” Flinders normally reserved such warm praise for personal friends like George Bass, the British explorer, but he’d come to regard his “native friend” Bungaree (whose name Flinders spelled “Bongaree”) in the same light.7
Flinders’s need to maintain the distance of command was all the more acute because his sulky younger brother Samuel, a junior officer on the Investigator, was inclined at every opportunity to take advantage of their fraternal relationship.
One outlet for the commander’s natural warmth was his famous fat black cat, Trim—named after the faithful manservant in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. That Trim was also besotted with Bungaree further cemented Flinders’s affection for his native companion: “If he [Trim] had occasion to drink, he mewed to Bongaree and leaped up to the water cask; if to eat, he called him down below and went straight to his kid [kit], where there was generally a remnant of black swan. In short, Bongaree was his great resource and his kindness was repaid with caresses.”8
Bungaree’s sensitivity was matched by his courage. On July 30, 1802, a week after departing Port Jackson, the Investigator and its supporting brig the Lady Nelson, captained by Lieutenant John Murray, arrived at Hervey Bay. This lay just off Great Sandy Isle (today’s Fraser Island), at the southernmost entrance of the Great Barrier Reef. The following day, Flinders and Bungaree strolled together along the beach toward Great Sandy Cape, while the remainder of the shore party—botanist Robert Brown, gardener Peter Good, mineralogist John Allen, and illustrators Ferdinand Bauer and William Westall—walked in the opposite direction to collect specimens. The captain and his companion were immediately confronted by a group of spear-carrying Aborigines, waving tree branches and gesturing angrily for the strangers to go back. Bungaree’s response set a pattern for the rest of the voyage. He stripped off his clothes, dropped his spear, and walked steadily toward the warriors, chanting words of peace in his own language.
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 4
