Captain Cook's Apprentice

by Anthony Hill

  They had known terror from the warlike Maori, but at least it had become a familiar fear. Now before them lay the empty sea once more, another void in the map, and whatever dangers the unseen coast of New Holland might bring . . .

  9

  NEW HOLLAND

  To Cape Tribulation, April to June 1770

  For eighteen days the ocean lured Endeavour westward. Days of brisk winds astern that tore her spritsail into rags fit only for patches, even as they drove the ship forward to the mysterious shores of New Holland. Days of calm and humid heat, when tropic birds were seen and Isaac fancied himself nearing Matavai Bay again – and Heimata.

  He’d take her pearl from the bag and caress it in his palm: cool and soothing, and not just a distraction from his struggles with lunars and longitude. For as they sailed further into unmapped seas, everyone’s apprehensions rose again. Unspoken, for the most part, but there. Like all of them, Isaac turned to the familiar and the loved for resolution to face uncertainty. Thus Heimata, transfigured in the pearl, became not only remembered joy but present strength as well.

  When clouds tower like mountains, storms threaten.

  And so they did. As Endeavour beat under close-reefed topsails, nobody knew when a hazardous coast might suddenly rise out of the wild, expectant deep and dash them asunder. One evening, when the ship was beating against the tempest, Isaac sought to hearten himself by whistling as he tottered with a chamber pot below.

  ‘Stop that!’

  A sudden silence descended on the mess deck. Every man ceased what he was doing and tried to touch a piece of cold metal – a nail, a tin plate, a knife – and then turned to stare at Isaac, confused and reddening by the companionway.

  ‘Why? What have I done?’

  ‘Don’t you know what dreadful fings can ’appen when you whistle in a storm?’ said old Jack Ravenhill at last. ‘You be tauntin’ the winds, boy, makin’ ’em even angrier.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Boatswain Gathrey, ‘crew couldn’t hear me pipe orders with your whistle.’

  ‘Go up on deck and turn around three times,’ Ravenhill added. ‘Don’t cut your fingernails for a month. And never do it ag’in. Whistling! Wiv a unknown coast nigh upon us.’

  As indeed it was. Petrels and gannets were sheeting the wind, and a small land bird got caught in the rigging. Captain Cook ordered the leadsmen to take soundings every few hours. No bottom at one hundred and thirty fathoms. He was approaching the longitude where Tasman had left the south-east corner of New Holland in 1642; and even allowing for errors in judging the log-line, sea currents, and old-fashioned methods of ‘dead reckoning’ sailing distance, he couldn’t be far out!

  Nor was he. At six o’clock in the dawn of 19 April, Zachary Hicks had charge of the morning watch when, through his telescope, the Second Lieutenant saw a faint smudge on the horizon. Grey on grey, like a thumbprint smeared on glass.

  ‘Land! Land ahoy!’

  ‘Where away, Mr Hicks?’

  ‘Three points off the starboard bow.’

  ‘Helmsman, set your course!’

  ‘Aye, aye sir!’

  Putting on all sail, Endeavour steered towards it, running before the blustering wind on a swollen sea. The landfall turned to smoky blue by daylight; and as it assumed form and substance to the watching crew, their hearts responded. Any dire consequences of Isaac’s whistling seemed averted. For here was a coastline – something tangible – with which practical seamen could deal and navigators trace on paper. Their phantom fears began to evaporate like a sea mist, though the constant need to watch for hidden dangers remained real enough.

  The land trended from nor’-east to sou’-west, the furthest point of which the Captain named after Lieutenant Hicks. Beyond that was still a gap on the chart. Cook had hoped to fall in with that part of the coast where Tasman had left it; but the southerly gales forced him further north, and he had to follow that course from Point Hicks. What happened between that and Van Diemen’s Land, could be left for future navigators to determine: and it was not until 1798 that Bass and Flinders proved that Tasmania, as it’s now called, is separated from the mainland by a strait.

  Day by day, Endeavour pitched her lonely way up the seaboard, as close inshore as she safely could to let New Holland begin to reveal its secrets. Isaac stood with his pencil among the young gentlemen sketching the features of a coast that, so far as they knew, no other European had seen. Stretches of white sand, and high cliffs; patches of green, like lawn; and tree-covered slopes rising to dusky hills . . .

  Mount Dromedary, humped like a camel . . . Pigeon House with its lofty square peak . . . Prosaic enough names the Captain gave them: but important as landmarks for future sailors, and as reference points for the officers who took their bearings from them using the principles of triangulation – and which, with his elegant brass station pointer, ivory scale of sines, and mahogany parallel rule, the Captain translated into the first spider lines on his chart.

  ‘You’ll be doing that thyself one day,’ said Molineux to his servant. ‘You’ve a nice enough hand at drawing, Mr Manley, but your trigonometry’s woeful yet.’

  Isaac was too well aware of it. But how could Euclid compete with the exciting prospect of this new country? Smoke rolled from the hinterland and out to sea, carrying the spice of distant dreamings. People were seen walking along a beach: skin dark and naked in the spyglass. But all attempts to land were thwarted by rocky shores and pummelling surf.

  It wasn’t until Sunday 29 April, that sunrise found Endeavour standing off the opening to a large bay into which Cook decided to sail for wood and water, and first meetings with the native inhabitants. The pinnace was lowered for the Master and Mates to sound the entrance and, as recompense for his chiding, Molineux let Isaac come too: for it was the seafarer’s tradition to pass knowledge by example from one generation to the next.

  ‘I know you want to be a seaman, not a mathematician,’ he said. ‘Though ye’re finding the one also needs the other.’

  ‘’Specially if he fancies himself officer material, look you,’ added Francis Wilkinson: a familiar joke, but it showed the boy’s measure of acceptance.

  A clear, southerly swell carried them through the headlands. The leadsman at the bow cast the heavy lead plummet on its line well ahead with an underarm throw. As the pinnace came abreast the lead found the bottom, with the fathom depths identified by different pieces of leather and coloured cloth tied to the line.

  ‘By the mark seventeen!’

  The lead was hauled in, wax on its underside showing if the bottom was sand or shale, and cast forward again.

  ‘Deep twelve!’ An estimate, where there was no mark on the line.

  It required skill and experience; and as the channel revealed itself, empty casks on lines and sinkers were hove as marker buoys to show Endeavour the way in.

  A group of Aborigines watched the boat from a hill, and as it rounded the point Isaac saw two bark canoes by the beach. The men were armed with spears and what seemed curved wooden scimitars, burnished bright as steel.

  He wondered how they’d respond to strangers? But the men neither paddled out to welcome them as at Tahiti, nor to attack as the Maori had done. They just looked on with curiosity. Some people fishing inshore from small canoes barely showed interest, but continued without seeming to notice the pinnace.

  Only when the boat approached a cove did two men come to a rock ledge for closer inspection. Both were black bushy bearded and bare as Adam, a thin bone through their noses, their thighs and chests painted with white ochre stripes, like garters or a soldier’s crossed belt. They beckoned – but whether with friendly or hostile intent Mr Molineux didn’t know, and he wisely returned to the ship.

  By noon, Endeavour was anchored offshore in a comfortable six fathoms. After dinner, the Captain and a good third of the ship’s company went ashore, but following the morning’s expedition Molineux told Isaac to stay aboard. ‘Give others a chance.’ Yet at the last, Isaac sneaked into th
e stern of the longboat. The opportunity to be among the first Europeans to land on this coast was not to be missed!

  A family group was watching from the cove: but as the boats approached, the women, children and all but two men disappeared among the trees. These warriors, armed with spears and throwing sticks – woomeras – came down to the sandstone ledge and shouted to the strangers, ‘Warra! Warra wai!’ Go away! Go far away!

  Neither Tupaia nor Taiata understood what these Gweagal men were saying, for their language was not of Polynesian stock. Nevertheless, the Captain told his men to lay on their oars awhile, as he tried to establish some dialogue and avoid the bloody mistakes of his first encounters with the Maori at Poverty Bay.

  He tossed some nails and beads onto the rock. The men picked them up and seemed not displeased with the gifts. They even appeared to beckon again. Cook ordered the boats closer in. At once the warriors took up threatening postures – and this time there could be no doubt they intended to oppose a landing.

  Cook raised his musket and fired between them, hoping to establish the power of his weapons without causing injury. Thus was the first shot heard on the tremulous air of Gamay: Botany Bay. It had no other effect than to make the Aborigines retire a little to pick up more spears.

  The elder of the two hurled a rock at the pinnace, where the Captain waited. Cook fired again, hitting the warrior on the legs with small shot. He was forty yards away, however, and suffered no great hurt. Indeed, the two calmly retreated briefly to some bark shelters – gunyas – in the treeline.

  The Captain took advantage of the lull to make his landing. The boats pulled to the sandstone outcrop, worn to a flat, pooled stage by the tides. Instead of being the first to step ashore, Cook gave that honour to his wife’s cousin, another Isaac – Isaac Smith, who at only eighteen was proving a valuable assistant at the map table. He’d just been promoted, in fact, from Able Seaman to Midshipman.

  ‘You shall go first, Isaac,’ the Captain said. And Cook followed after him.

  They had no time then to reflect further on the significance of the occasion. Endeavour’s men no sooner landed on the rock, than the warriors returned, the elder with a wooden shield, painted white, with two eyeholes.

  Warra! Warra wai!

  And he threw a spear at the strangers with his woomera.

  The younger threw a second spear, which landed harmlessly enough between the startled feet of Sydney Parkinson, for the Gweagal also knew how to demonstrate their weapons without intending to kill.

  Cook fired a third round of small shot – after which the Aborigines turned their backs and walked into the bush, calling on their families to make themselves scarce.

  Isaac Manley, watching from the stern sheets, could only admire the calm bravery of these men in confronting three boatloads of strangers who must have appeared utterly alien, and who outnumbered them at least fifteen to one.

  ‘They seem so casual we could capture one if we chose,’ said Cook.

  But Mr Banks urged caution.

  ‘There is some resinous substance on the spear tips which Dr Solander thinks might be a poison. We may be in danger should they attack us en masse.’

  So the Captain did not go in pursuit of the warriors. Instead he went to the gunyas – but found only four or five little children huddled there. And as the bush echoed with the cries of their unseen parents, Cook let them be, leaving a few strings of beads to show he meant no harm.

  His party did, however, take all the spears found at the camp – about fifty of them, many were pronged fishing harpoons tipped with stingray spines. The Captain saw their removal as a sensible precaution: but why the natives should interpret stealing their means of livelihood as a friendly act, Cook could not have explained.

  As it turned out, the spears were not poisonous – though Robert Molineux was with his young servant, when the boats returned to Endeavour. The Master was waiting amidships.

  ‘I told you to stay aboard,’ he roared as Isaac climbed the ladder, ‘and thou’s disobeyed me!’

  ‘I only wanted . . .’

  ‘A ship could be lost if every man followed his own wants. Orders are not to be flouted, young man, and you will learn discipline. Go aloft now – and stand in the rigging till I tell thee to come down.’

  ‘But I haven’t had supper.’

  ‘Be damned! You can stay up there all night. And be thankful I don’t get Mr Pickersgill to beat thy backside with his cane.’

  So Isaac was forced to climb the mainmast shrouds, clinging like a marmoset, exposed to the gaze and taunts of his shipmates . . .

  ‘Ahoy Issy! Be ye bird watchin’?’

  Evening fell, and Isaac’s hunger was assailed by cooking smells from below and the native fires ashore. The ship settled to silence, broken only by the half-hour bells and murmurs of the watch. Isaac himself dared not sleep, lest he slip and plunge to the sea.

  He fought to stay alert, listening to the harsh cries of night birds calling from the dark land. A heavy dew descended, wetting his clothes and freezing his hands. The boy grew colder and more miserable. His legs ached, and his mind was numb. He tried to cheer himself with thoughts of Heimata . . . but they made him even more aware of his predicament. And any whistling, of course, was forbidden.

  Only when the Master came on deck for the morning watch, did he let Isaac descend stiffly from the rigging, and snatch a few hours’ sleep in his hammock.

  ‘I hope you’ve had time to think upon the need to obey orders in future.’

  Even then, the boy was not allowed to land again for several days, and his curiosity had to be satisfied by listening to those who were.

  When the crew went back on shore, the beads had been left undisturbed in the gunya where Cook had put them. A group of Aborigines silently watched the men filling water casks at a small stream. At midday, with the crew aboard ship again for dinner, they approached the barrels on the beach, but did not touch them. Afterwards, when Mr Hicks tried to entice a few men with presents, they desired nothing he offered them.

  ‘They want us only to be gone,’ he said. And this set the pattern for the eight days Endeavour remained.

  Gifts of cloth, nails and trinkets were untouched. When a Midshipman offered a parrot he’d shot to a family he met in the bush, they refused it. The Captain several times tried to speak to the people, but they always moved away. When Lieutenant Gore walked with a companion from the head of the bay to the watering cove, they were followed at a distance by several warriors: but they did not try to attack.

  There was little overt hostility – although a native boy, hiding in a tree, once threw a spear at Dr Monkhouse, which missed. For the most part, the Aboriginal family groups moving around the bay just ignored the Europeans. They went on gathering oysters and mussels, or fishing from their simple bark canoes – the ends tied together, kept athwart by sticks – as if these white strangers were not even there.

  This reaction was quite different to anything the voyagers had met from other natives. Joseph Banks considered them timid and cowardly, but the first landing showed they didn’t lack courage. The Aborigines may have seen the intruders as pale clayed spirits of the dead, best left alone. Perhaps they were just being prudent. Whatever the motives, there could be no doubting their meaning: ‘They want us only to be gone.’

  Yet Endeavour could not go immediately. For one thing, the botanists were vastly excited collecting specimens of trees and shrubs unlike anything they’d seen before. Trees such as Tasman described, oozing thick gum and pungent eucalyptus: dull lozenge leaves rattling, and bark peeling like flayed skin. Bright bottlebrush flowers on spiky plants that were to bear Banks’s name. So many new species that Sydney Parkinson laboured through the daylight to capture their colours before they faded and the plants were dried.

  Footprints of strange animals were seen. Something like a dog . . . another that seemed to be as large as a grazing deer. None were actually found, although iris-hued parrots, lorikeets and cock-atoos winging
their way through the bush, were shot down to be painted, classified and stored below.

  The ship also had to be replenished: wood and water brought aboard, and fresh food. Fortunately the bay abounded in it. One drag of the seine on the northern shore netted three hundred pounds of fish. Mr Gore caught a stingray that weighed over two hundred and forty pounds – and next day another two that together weighed six hundred pounds. More than enough for everybody. In fact for months the Captain called the place Stingray Harbour on his chart – until he changed it to Botanist Harbour, and finally to Botany Bay, in honour of the plants collected there.

  It was fortunate, too, that almost everyone was in good health. Zachary Hicks still had trouble breathing the cold night air, and Tupaia complained of sore gums: an early sign of scurvy, which Banks treated with lemon concentrate.

  But Forby Sutherland was the only seaman really sick. He’d come down with a consumption at Cape Horn, and had been languishing for months. Now, at Stingray Harbour, he lay in his hammock, life ebbing away. The Orkney sailor, once so bonny as he bawled at Isaac that first day he came aboard, had shrunk gaunt and hollow in the canvas that enclosed him like a shroud already.

  Forby had encouraged the boy aloft at sea, had rescued him adrift on the streets of Rio. Now, Isaac held the basin as the man retched and spat blood. Brought water to soothe his gasping lungs, and spooned warm gruel into his mouth.

  ‘It will do you good, Forby.’

  ‘Nae, laddie. Nae good at all. I’m done for.’

  And Isaac grieved more than most when Forby was found dead on May Day morning, and helped stitch him into his hammock for a last sleep. Mr Molineux let the lad go ashore with the funeral party, for he knew the two were close, and understood the need sometimes to ease the reins of discipline.