Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  Dear Sir/Madam,

  I am trying to locate information regarding the piratical seizure of the colonial vessel (brig) Venus at Port Dalrymple on the 17th of June, 1806, on her way from Port Jackson (via sealing grounds at Two-Fold Bay) with supplies for the settlements in Van Diemen’s Land. Any information relative to this episode would be of interest, especially any mention of it in the ship’s logs of the Britannia, Brothers, or Elizabeth in the years 1806-08.

  I am also looking for information concerning a female convict named Charlotte Badger (possibly Edgar), known to have been aboard the Venus when it was captured. She is described as very corpulent with a full face, thick lips, and light hair, and is said to have had an infant child with her. I am particularly interested in knowing where she came from, what ship she arrived on, what she was transported for, what her movements were in Australia before June 1806, and whether there is any further record of her after 1808.

  Many thanks for your assistance in this matter.

  Sincerely yours.

  About three weeks later I received a large envelope containing photocopies of the assignment list from the colonial secretary’s correspondence and the convict indent for the ship Earl Cornwallis, both showing Charlotte Badger’s name. Also, from the Mitchell Library, copies of two cards from the manuscript index catalog, one of which was intriguingly marked, “VENUS, ship, seized by mutineers … blame attached to captain for event.” From these and other sources I pieced together the following story.

  Charlotte Badger was most likely born in Worcestershire, England, in 1778. Little is known of her before the age of eighteen, when she was convicted of the crime of housebreaking, an offense punishable by death. She was tried at the Worcester Summer Assizes in July 1796 and was sentenced to be transported to Australia for the term of seven years. She arrived in Port Jackson (Sydney) on June 12, 1801, on the ship Earl Cornwallis. There were 287 other prisoners aboard, 94 of whom were women, most transported for varieties of theft.

  In 1806, with two years of her sentence left to serve, Charlotte gave birth to a child at the old Parramatta Female Factory. Shortly afterward she was assigned, along with another convict named Catherine Hagerty, to the service of a Tasmanian settler. The ship that was to take them south was the forty-five-ton brig Venus, a colonial vessel used to supply sealing gangs and run provisions up and down the Australian coast. On this occasion, it was loaded with grain, flour, salt pork, and other stores for the settlements at Port Dalrymple (Launceston) and Hobart Town.

  It was not a happy voyage. They stopped en route at Two-Fold Bay, where the master, Samuel Chace, discovered that the crew, a mixed lot of seamen and convicts, had been stealing the ship’s stores. He accused the first mate, Benjamin Kelly, but Kelly denied the charge. Chace later told an official inquiry that he had every reason to believe, from Kelly’s conduct, that the ship was “in danger of being run away with” and that, with the crew robbing and plundering her, he did not think his life safe.

  Nevertheless, they arrived safely in Tasmania, where they anchored in the river at Port Dalrymple on the morning of June 16. Chace promptly left the ship and did not return until the following morning, when, to his consternation, he found the Venus underway. The sudden appearance of five members of the Venus’s crew confirmed his worst suspicions. Kelly, they reported, along with the pilot and a soldier of the New South Wales Corps, had knocked down and confined the second mate and taken command of the vessel and was now in the process of taking her out to sea.

  For six months the Venus disappeared from view. Then, in early 1807, she was sighted in the Bay of Islands, where two women and a child had reportedly been put ashore, along with Kelly and a convict named John Lancashire. It is unclear whether they had been marooned or had left the ship voluntarily but the Venus, in any case, sailed on under the command of a black man who, it was said, was incapable of piloting her. The last we hear of her, she was “supposed to be still wandering about the coast … and no possible prospect can present itself to those that remain in her, but to perish by the hands of the natives or to fall into the hands of justice”—which is more or less what came to pass. Within a matter of months, Catherine Hagerty was dead, Kelly had been taken prisoner and was en route to England, and Lancashire, also in irons, was on his way back to New South Wales. The ultimate fate of the ship remains a mystery, though it is presumed that she was finally wrecked and plundered by Maoris somewhere on the New Zealand coast.

  And what of Charlotte Badger? She alone remained at Rangihoua, alive and presumably well, for when Captain Bunker of the Elizabeth volunteered to take her aboard a year later, she declined the offer. She would, no doubt, have been concerned about returning to either England or New South Wales, as she was listed among those who had “by force of arms violently and piratically” taken a colonial vessel filled with stores belonging to His Majesty King George. But it is interesting to note that Bunker did not arrest her. And, according to at least one contemporary historian, when she was offered a second chance to leave a year later, she responded by saying that “she would prefer to die among the Maori.”

  What could it possibly have been like for her, alone in the Bay of Islands in 1806? There were no other Europeans to speak of; aside from the occasional runaway sailor, it was, for all intents and purposes, an entirely Maori world. She could not possibly have spoken the language; she would not have been accustomed to the food. She would probably have had to surrender every stitch of her clothing and anything else that she possessed. It cannot have been physically comfortable; it must have been terrifying at times.

  It was “a rainy, miserable night,” wrote the traveling artist Augustus Earle about two decades later. Earle, who spent nine months touring New Zealand, had been traveling crosscountry in the Hokianga—just across the northern peninsula from the Bay of Islands—and had arrived at dusk at a Maori village, whose inhabitants invited him to stay for the night. “We were a large party,” he wrote, “crowded into a small smoky hut, with a fire lighted in the middle.” Around the fire sat a dozen large, athletic men,

  their huge limbs exposed to the red glare of the fire; their faces rendered hideous by being tattooed all over, showing by the fire-light quite a bright blue; their eyes, which are remarkable for their fierce expression, all fixed upon us, but with a look of good temper, commingled with intense curiosity.

  The missionary Samuel Marsden describes a similar night spent inside a pa, or fortified village, on the coast near Whangarei in 1820. The pa sat on the summit of a high conical hill. At high tide it was almost completely surrounded by water and the only way in was by a path so steep and narrow that Marsden had to be helped up. “When I reached the top,” he wrote,

  I found a number of men, women, and children sitting round their fires roasting snappers, crawfish, and fern-root. It was now quite dark. The roaring of the sea at the foot of the [pa], as the waves rolled into the deep caverns beneath, the high precipice upon which we stood, whose top and sides were covered with huts, and the groups of natives conversing round their fires, all tended to excite new and strange ideas for reflection.

  Was this what it was like? The crackling fires with their sparks dancing up into the dark night sky; the stars blotted out by clouds; the wind from the sea rattling at the palings; the Maoris, huddled under their cloaks, talking quietly among themselves; a laugh somewhere; the thump of a log thrown onto the fire; the acrid smell of burning fish bones; the rustle of a child turning in someone’s lap. Was this the New Zealand that tempted Charlotte Badger? It is possible that she felt safer in New Zealand, despite the Maoris’ reputation for ferocity. Maybe she enjoyed a kind of freedom that among her own people she was almost sure to be denied. Maybe she just liked the Maoris, or is that too twentieth-century an idea? What was it that made her feel as though New Zealand were a place where she could reasonably stay?

  There is nothing in the historical record that will definitively answer such questions. What is clear, from other stories of lone Europea
ns living in places like New Zealand at this time, is that no European, male or female, could have survived without the personal protection of a chief, or rangatira. Someone had to feed and protect her; someone had to allow her to remain. Within that framework there were a number of possible roles open to Charlotte Badger. She might have been a wife or a concubine or possibly some kind of slave—a taurekareka, a menial slave, or maybe a mokai, which can be translated as something closer to “pet.” Or she might have begun as one thing, a slave, say, and earned her way to higher status as, perhaps, a wife.

  Maori society was hierarchical, but it was still comparatively fluid by European standards. Position, while inherited, could also be earned, and traditions existed both for adopting and enslaving people from outside the tribe. Slavery, too, meant something rather different from what we understand. Slaves were people of low status or those who’d had the misfortune to be captured in war. They were often killed or mistreated, but they could also, under certain circumstances, become integrated into the clan. Charlotte’s fate would thus have depended both on how much mana, or charisma, she was able to project and how useful she succeeded in making herself to her rangatira and her tribe.

  There were a number of Europeans in situations like this throughout the Pacific during this period, though, of course, almost all of them were men. Commonly known in the islands as “beachcombers,” they were called “Pakeha Maori” in New Zealand, that is, “strangers turned into Maori” in Trevor Bentley’s turn of phrase. Some were castaways and some were convicts and some were sailors who’d absconded from ships, and their fates were as varied as their characters. Those who survived and prospered learned to abide by the local rules—infringements of tapu, or sacred law, in New Zealand routinely resulted in death—and to treat their hosts with the proper degree of courtesy. It was, writes the historian O. H. K. Spate, “a necessary condition of [their] existence that they should be relatively free from feelings of racial superiority, should see Islanders not as savages noble or ignoble but as fallible human beings like themselves.”

  This seems obvious enough to us, but to Europeans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was not self-evident. “A man who chose to ‘live among natives,’ “writes I. C. Campbell,

  was not merely an emigrant; he was regarded in European society as a renegade. To have “gone native” was a mark of degeneration, an act of a man who turned his back on progress, enlightenment, civilization, order, law, and morality and preferred a life of savagery, immorality, paganism, and lawlessness. This was not only personal decadence; it was an affront and a challenge to the ethos of Western society, which assumed and asserted a moral and existential superiority over savagery or life in the “state of nature.”

  For a man to make such a choice was contemptible, but for a woman to do so begged understanding. White women did not “choose” to live with natives; they were “captured” by them, according to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century European thinking. Accounts of white women cast away among or captured by “Indians” (a term commonly used to refer to indigenous people all over the world) were a staple of frontier literature and were enormously popular in both Europe and the United States. The women were generally pitied, since they had been “ruined,” but there was also a prurient fascination with their fate and much interested speculation as to whether they could ever be redeemed. But the idea that a woman might voluntarily place herself in such a situation was inconceivable, and there was no narrative or explanation for a woman who did.

  In Charlotte’s case, part of the story undoubtedly had to do with the class she came from and the sort of life she had already led. But part of it must also have had to do with her personally—the way she looked, the way she acted, the way she thought. There can be little doubt that she was a woman of some physical strength. She is described as “very corpulent” and may have been comparatively tall in an age when people of her class were often small and undernourished. The average height of the men aboard the Venus was five feet six inches, and her companion John Lancashire, a pockmarked, emaciated man of sallow complexion, was only five foot four. She was, in any case, clearly robust—consider, too, that she was nursing a baby—and this no doubt served her well among the Maoris, who, like most Polynesians, valued size and strength. There is even something vaguely Polynesian about her physical description, with her “full face [and] thick lips.” Disparaged, possibly, by Englishmen for these features, she may well have been considered unusually handsome (for a Pakeha) by the Maoris.

  Still, neither beauty nor physical stamina alone would have been enough; she must have had strength of character as well. Perhaps something of this can be deduced from the circumstances of her life: charged and convicted at the age of eighteen, confined for years to hulks and English prisons, she survived the crowded, disease-ridden voyage south and incarceration in the infamous penal colony of New South Wales. Captain Chace described the women on board the Venus as enthusiastic participants in the debauchery and drunkenness that plagued his ship, and convict women of the period were commonly, almost routinely, depicted as abandoned (meaning immoral), drunken, dissipated, impudent, vicious, violent, sullen, and deceitful.

  But shift the lens ever so slightly and it seems obvious that, simply to survive, they must also have been resourceful, hardy, vigorous, feisty, and resilient. Certainly some of the stories of the convict period suggest this—the historian L. L. Robson relates an incident in which a group of convict women, being addressed by an ecclesiast at the Hobart Town factory, “reacted by drawing up their gowns and, in unison, smacking their buttocks.” And sauciness, seen from a different angle, is also a kind of nerve. On the whole, life as a transported felon might almost be viewed as a sort of basic training, a brutal initiation period, beyond which almost anything else might seem comparatively nice. And any woman who was not crushed by it must have had something going for her.

  It was enormously tempting to me to romanticize the story of Charlotte Badger, to see her as a heroine, a bold and independent woman taking fate into her own hands, and to imagine her hosts as kind and generous people who opened up a space for her in their world—even to think of her rangatira as someone with whom she might have fallen in love. The academic in me strongly resisted this kind of thinking, but the traveler kept trying to project into this fragment of history a sense of what it had actually been like to stay, albeit briefly, among the very descendents of the people who had sheltered Charlotte Badger, not six miles from where she’d lived.

  Maybe if I’d never been there, I would have seen the story in a different light. But, as it was, I could so easily imagine their interest in her, their discreet curiosity, the way they might have benignly ignored her many missteps. I could imagine the patience with which one or two might have taken her aside and helped her, and her growing awareness of whom she could count on and whom she had better avoid. I could imagine the pleasure she might have taken in their gaiety, their generous laughter, not to mention the comparative freedom of movement that, even as a slave, she would have had, and the affection that both men and women would undoubtedly have shown toward her child. It might all have been so completely different from what the documentary record, with its nineteenth-century biases, its litany of dramatic and shocking events, its insistence on the waywardness of convicts and the ferocity of Maoris, its preoccupation with violence and terror, might lead one to conclude.

  But there was just no way to know. What I finally decided was that she was probably one of those people, a shape-shifter, a transculturite, a person who could slide from one world to another and back again with ease—like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who is famous for having invented the fieldwork method in 1914 by setting up a tent in a village in New Guinea and staying there for as long as it took get a handle on what was going on. Some people, it seems, just have this ethnographic impulse, a powerful curiosity about people who are very different from themselves and a willingness to surrender themselves to a
flow of experience they do not necessarily understand. Malinowski once half-jokingly suggested that his success might have had something to do with his being a Pole. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage” than that of the Western European. Maybe, I thought, it was Charlotte’s plasticity, maybe she—maybe I—was a little more naturally savage than others of our kind.

  7

  A Natural Gentleman

  Living in New Zealand was not in the cards for me, however, nor would it be again for Seven, not for many years. But Australia proved a surprisingly good place for us, and I’ve often wondered if we’d have been as happy living in New Zealand or the States. Australia was a neutral territory. We had friends but no family and there was no one who questioned our decisions or argued with us about what we ought to do. But there was also a sense in which Australia connected us to each other, triangulating our relationship in an interesting way. We were about equally distant from the local culture. I, though white, was not as English as people from Australia or New Zealand tend to be. I didn’t eat Vegemite or drive on the left and I couldn’t tell a cricket bat from a wicket, at least when I arrived. Seven was culturally much closer to the Australian mainstream, having grown up watching Coronation Street and spending Christmas at the beach. But being Maori—that is, black but not Aboriginal—set him apart in a different way.