But was this a sufficiently harrowing picture to persuade Curtis’s readers that Mrs. Fraser was innocent of subsequent exaggeration and financial fraud? On further reflection he decided that his case needed strengthening, so he introduced a whole new chapter in which to defend Eliza. In doing so he compared himself to a navigator faced with an unexpected reef, “which called into requisition all our nautical experience, and forced into active service all the skill in seamanship which we possessed.” Moreover, colonial newspapers were now also joining in the clamor. They accused Eliza of “inexcusable ingratitude” in concealing the generous financial help given by the Australian public. One Sydney newspaper pointed to a marked disparity between her original and recent London testimonies, stating that the new version of her suffering was “greatly overcharged.”22
Experience as a court reporter had evidently taught Curtis a thing or two about how to undermine a prosecution case. He decided on a threefold strategy. First he reminded his readers of the “gallant” Lieutenant Otter’s proof that Mrs. Fraser’s ordeal had “been of a very extraordinary kind.” In fact, Curtis hinted that delicacy had forced him to understate it: “we have in our possession facts connected with the brutal treatment of this helpless woman, (and could produce a living witness who would verify them on oath,) which, if we dared to publish, would excite an involuntary shudder of horror and disgust in every well-regulated mind.”23
Next he endorsed a shrewd tactical move just made by Kelly. His lordship had remembered that Mrs. Fraser’s London subscription had all along been intended for her three grieving and indigent children in the Orkneys, who were being looked after by a local clergyman. In one stroke this transformed Kelly’s act of self-interested credulity into a “meritorious and praiseworthy” piece of public philanthropy intended to benefit “destitute orphans.” It also justified Eliza’s desire to raise more money in London, since she’d wanted it only to alleviate “the destitute condition of her three poor children, the legitimate offspring of a brave and unfortunate man.” To underline the point, Curtis added a poignant letter, supposedly written by Eliza’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Jane, explaining how her “dear mother” had gone to London to obtain money on behalf of her and her two brothers.24
The third element of Curtis’s strategy entailed some delicate maneuvering, because he had to justify Eliza’s failure to disclose her marriage to Captain Greene in Sydney, by which she’d ceased to be a destitute widow. He wisely decided to gloss over the issue of her financial assets and instead treat the matter as a minor breach of social convention. It was the case, he conceded, that she’d married Captain Greene relatively soon after the death of her husband, but who among his readers could predict or wish to control the ways of true love? “Here she was in Sydney, in a state bordering upon utter destitution. She became acquainted with Capt. Greene, a gentleman well-known and highly respected there … Perhaps he first viewed her, as did hundreds of others, as an object of commiseration; and at length pity gave way to a platonic affection, which ripened into a more tender sensibility.”
Both the Captain and his wife regretted the “indiscretion” of failing to admit their married state when they reached England. They had kept silent on this subject purely for technical legal reasons: there’d never been any intention to deceive. Curtis beseeched his “readers to forget her error, which at most is a venial one … She is fully aware that she has sinned against strict etiquette, and been guilty of an indiscreet secrecy; and we are ready to admit these facts; but without her knowledge, we have attempted an apology.”25
Though well satisfied, as he wrote, with “the manner” of his reply to Mrs. Fraser’s critics, Curtis still had a further reef to navigate. Late in the lord mayor’s inquiry, a surprise witness had appeared in the form of “Big Bob” Darge, one of three sailor castaways from the Stirling Castle on the island who’d been attached to a different group of natives from Eliza Fraser (probably the Ngulungbara in the north of the island). These three—Robert Darge, Joseph Corralis, and Henry Youlden—had walked to the mainland to relay the news of Eliza’s situation to Lieutenant Otter.26
Darge was proving to be an uncooperative witness. He was a tough sailor with no particular liking for his Aboriginal hosts, but his testimony contradicted the bleak picture presented by Eliza Fraser and John Baxter. Darge complained mainly about the rigors of the coastal environment, the scarcity of food, and the hard work needed to survive. But he didn’t pretend to have been worse off than the Kabi Kabi themselves: “it was the winter of that part of the world when we were with the natives, and they had a great deal to do very often to manage to live.” Furthermore, he openly admired the natives’ skill in fishing and hunting and declared their main food staple, the bungwa root, to be “delicious.”
Kelly fired a succession of leading questions at the burly sailor in an effort to corroborate Eliza’s indictment of the “savages,” but Darge refused to oblige. He denied that the native males were brutal toward their females, denied that they lacked affection for their children, and denied that the men had taken pleasure in tormenting him. He even denied that they’d had any intention to kill him. And his admission that some of the natives hated white men because of the violence inflicted on them by local white soldiers hardly helped Mrs. Fraser’s case. Above all, Darge flatly refuted “that any of the tribes I was among ate human flesh.”
Exasperated, the lord mayor asked: “You don’t seem to think these natives such desperate savages as Mrs. Fraser and [Mr.] Baxter considered them to be?”
“I was certainly treated with great roughness,” Darge replied, “but I don’t think they would kill intentionally.” In fact, he said, it was only thanks to the bush skills of voluntary Aboriginal guides that he and the other two sailors had reached the Moreton Bay settlement.27
Curtis couldn’t exclude Darge’s testimony because it was already circulating in British and colonial newspapers, but he decided to prevent readers of his book seeing a verbatim version of the interrogation. Instead he provided a shrewdly edited interpretation of the sailor’s evidence. Like a skilled defense lawyer, he used Darge’s responses as a way to cast doubt on his objectivity, depicting him as a man of mutinous disposition, and he also, wherever possible, twisted Darge’s words so as to endorse Eliza’s claims.28
Curtis attributed the natives’ relatively humane treatment of Darge and his companions to sheer chance; he contended that the three castaways were lucky enough to fall into the hands of a more benign “tribe” than had Mrs. Fraser, whose cannibal captors represented “the zero of civilization.” Darge, “being naturally an abler-bodied man,” was “evidently considered” “more valuable than some of the less muscular portion of the captives.” Furthermore, Curtis suggested, the tribe chose to mitigate their natural cruelty because Corralis, one of the three sailors, also happened to be black. He concluded his case with the news that Big Bob Darge was about to undertake a fresh voyage to “a remote quarter of the earth,” even though “it was quite apparent that the health of the poor fellow had been greatly impaired.”29
This rather lame last sentence marked the surprising termination of the book—or at least, as Curtis explained in a footnote, “of what in strictness may be denominated the ‘Narrative’ of the Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle.” It seemed an oddly feeble conclusion to his long and impassioned defense, but in fact he wasn’t finished yet; he’d thought of an ingenious new way to advance his case. In an adjacent footnote he suddenly introduced his readers “to … another catastrophe, which in many respects is more appalling in its details than that which has preceded it.”
When Eliza Fraser had originally arrived in Sydney after her ordeal, he explained, she’d found the citizens there already in a state of outrage at the behavior of the Barrier Reef savages, “owing to several other wrecks which had recently taken place in the vicinity of Torres Straits, particularly that of the Charles Eaton, whose captain and crew, as well as every person on board, were murdered, save a lad of the n
ame of Ireland, and a child named D’Oyley, the son of a [military] captain, whose life was doubtless spared in consequence of the sagacity of the youth who was his companion and protector.”30
Curtis therefore felt bound, he said, to provide his English readers with additional insights into the cannibal problem offered by the Charles Eaton story. “After giving a narrative of this dreadful calamity, it will become our duty to give extracts from documents connected with both histories, historical quotations, and other interesting communications, together with such original remarks and reflections as upon review may be deemed necessary.”
To further link the two stories, he then inserted another hymn by his friend the Reverend “Boatswain” Smith, celebrating the “providential escape” of the survivors from both shipwrecks—a signal that Curtis would henceforth treat them in tandem. The title of this second part of the book also echoed its predecessor: Narrative of the Melancholy Wreck of the CHARLES EATON, on One of the Barrier Reefs in the Torres Straits: with an Account of THE MASSACRE of the Captain, Passengers, and Crew; and of the Providential Rescue of John Ireland, aged 16, and WM. D’Oyley, aged 3, from the Savages.
Despite the fact that the Charles Eaton had been shipwrecked two years before the Stirling Castle, news of the fate of its crew and passengers had leaked out only in dribs and drabs—in this sense it was still breaking news. Moreover, it offered an even more sensational set of horrors than Eliza’s captivity.
Among the victims of the Charles Eaton were Captain and Mrs. D’Oyley, the parents of one of the rescued boys. The D’Oyleys belonged to East Indian military and merchant dynasties with substantial political clout, and Curtis was a sharp enough journalist to know that political clout could usefully translate into publicity. Charlotte D’Oyley’s brother, a wealthy Stockton merchant named William Bayley, had lobbied relentlessly to find out what happened to the ship. Having formed “a kind of social compact,—a society of mourners weeping for their kindred,” Bayley had bombarded the Colonial Office and the Admiralty with requests for news and action. That Bayley was a close friend of Sir John Barrow, a renowned Admiralty Secretary and wire-puller, also helped the cause of the grieving group. On Barrow’s advice, Bayley sent letters to Mr. Stephens of the Admiralty Office, Sir George Gray of the India Office, John Cowan—who had recently replaced Thomas Kelly as lord mayor of London—and to the head of the Colonial Office, Lord Glenelg. All replied deferentially.31
Reports of sightings of the Charles Eaton’s wreckage had first trickled back to England in early 1835, two years before Eliza Fraser was rescued. Later in 1835 some survivors who’d escaped the shipwreck in a cutter reached Batavia. There they filed details of how, on August 15, 1834, the ship had been pounded to pieces on the “Detached Reef” near the entrance to the Torres Strait. Then, in February 1836, a Canton (Guangzhou) newspaper published a tantalizing letter written by a trading captain, William Carr. He claimed to have made fleeting contact on Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait with a youthful Charles Eaton survivor, who’d refused to be enticed aboard his vessel. Carr said he’d also glimpsed a small white child on the shore, as well as signs of further survivors, but he’d not dared to make a rescue attempt. Carr’s later testimony at another mayor’s court in November 1836, attended by William Bayley, helped precipitate the government’s commissioning of two rescue ships to investigate his report, the HMS Tigris from India and HMS Isabella from Sydney.
In that same month of November 1836, Captain M. Lewis of the Isabella returned to Sydney with the only two Charles Eaton survivors, John Ireland and William D’Oyley, who after their long sojourn in the Torres Strait were now aged nineteen and four respectively. Both were in good health, but scarcely able to speak English. Ireland nevertheless managed to stumble out a horrifying tale. After landing on Boydang Island in the Torres Strait with two rafts of shipwrecked survivors, both boys narrowly escaped a subsequent massacre. Seventeen passengers and crew were clubbed to death, decapitated, partially eaten, and had their skulls bound into a mask. Captain Lewis had found and brought this gruesome trophy back to Sydney, where it generated waves of outrage. Around the same time, John Ireland met and spoke to Eliza Fraser in Sydney, but was decisively upstaged by her in press interviews. Ireland eventually reached London from Sydney in August 1837 and immediately presented his tale to another mayoral inquiry. A print version of the story appeared the following year, under the title of The Shipwrecked Orphans.32
Curtis had originally intended to offer only a short sketch of the fate of the Charles Eaton. Anything more ambitious was impossible because he lacked access to the firsthand oral testimonies that Eliza Fraser had given him. Neither could he waste time researching the new story; he needed to publish Eliza’s saga before the public lost interest. It looked as if Curtis would have to rely on brief and irregular reports from colonial newspapers.
Sometime in late 1837, though, the journalist’s luck changed. He stumbled on an obscure pamphlet from that year called Narrative of the Melancholy Shipwreck of the Ship Charles Eaton. Written by the Reverend Thomas Wemyss, a clergyman from Stockton in the north of England, it contained a well-documented, up-to-date account of the shipwreck, the massacre on Boydang Island, the voyages of the rescue ships, and the recovery of the two surviving boys from Mer. This was almost too good to be true: Curtis didn’t know it, but the author was a personal friend of William Bayley, who had collaborated in producing the book. Wemyss had been given full access to Bayley’s correspondence, including documents from the Colonial Office and Admiralty, private letters between Charlotte D’Oyley and her two older boys, and poignant notes from a clergyman whose son had perished in the massacre.33
Wemyss supplemented his gripping account with information drawn from missionaries, newspaper interviews with John Ireland, and a recent Sydney pamphlet by William Brockett, one of the officers who’d sailed on the Isabella’s rescue mission to the Torres Strait.34
Best of all, as far as Curtis was concerned, the provincial obscurity of Wemyss’s pamphlet meant he could steal its contents with impunity. Pressmen of the day needed to be skilled in the art of plagiarism, operating as they did in a free-for-all print economy, and Curtis was among the best of them. His boldness was breathtaking. Few other Times journalists would have had the bravado or ability to plunder an entire book, including its full title, so near to the time and place of its original publication.
Curtis opened his plagiarized story with Wemyss’s moving reflection on the vicissitudes of a sailor’s life. The piece was set in quotation marks, but attributed only to “a modern author,” so that the source could not be traced. After this, he reproduced the entire pamphlet as his own, taking care at the same time to introduce some strategic alterations. At several points he simply rearranged the clergyman’s original structure. He changed occasional words and phrases, sometimes for concealment, sometimes for greater effect. He inserted a few chunks of his own supercharged prose here and there, especially at points where he felt Wemyss had been too restrained. And he excised, when necessary, passages wherein the clergyman appeared overly tolerant of the Torres Strait natives.
Another of Curtis’s tricks was to imply that information lifted from Wemyss’s documented sources was given to him in face-to-face interviews. He even had the effrontery to insert a passing note of thanks to “Mr. Wemyss, a gentleman to whom we beg to express our high obligations for the occasional assistance he has rendered us.”35
Not all of this word surgery was purely for disguise. Curtis wanted to weld this new piece to the story of Eliza Fraser so as to produce something like a super-text with a unified structure, style, and set of aims. To achieve this, he inserted strategic cross-references between the first and second stories, most of them referring to observations and claims made by Eliza and Baxter, and designed to cover weaknesses in her account by fortifying them with the meatier material of the Charles Eaton story.
With this twinning, Curtis was able to extend and transform the thrust of the overall
work. He could now suggest that the castaways of the Stirling Castle and the Charles Eaton were victims of a common system of terror that threatened British merchant ships along an entire region of land and sea. His book, which he’d begun as a specific defense of Eliza Fraser and the lord mayor, could be repositioned as a far-reaching exposé that demanded government action on the appalling dangers confronting Britons within the Great Barrier Reef. By lucky chance, Great Sandy Isle, the site of Eliza Fraser’s ordeal, and Boydang Island, where the massacre of the Charles Eaton castaways had occurred, marked the extreme southern and northern tips of the Great Barrier Reef. Scores of shipwrecked castaways generated within this vast minefield of coral, Curtis suggested, were being routinely captured, imprisoned, and subjected to fates worse than drowning. They became either the slaves or food of savage cannibals who shared proclivities to bestiality and violence. With his book, Curtis had produced a searing double indictment “of the coast, and the natives which inhabit it.”
He demanded that something drastic be done about the Torres Strait in particular.
The Straits of Torres … seem really as if they were destined to be the terror of navigators. This arises from the extreme difficulty of steering through that perilous passage, the irregular courses of the tides, the sudden manner in which storms and hurricanes arise, and the numerous shoals which are scattered in this vast expanse of water seem to bid defiance to nautical skill, and the steadiest caution. To detail the various wrecks which have happened there, that have come to our knowledge, would fill a large folio, and many a vessel has, doubtless, foundered, and been swallowed up in that insatiate gulf, of the particulars of which the world will ever remain ignorant. It is not unlikely that the sanguinary character of the natives, who massacre the survivors who fall into their hands, is the most plausible reason which can be assigned why the fates of many other hopeless vessels are never made known.36
The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change Page 8
