their slaves with ‘great humanity and kindness’. And if the Dutch ladies were not quite as fetching as the dark-eyed Brazilians, they were of a ‘peculiar gay turn’, cheerfully allowing liberties unthinkable in England. No tender sighings here: in Capetown he found he had to adopt more robust ways to be ‘the favourite with the fair’. The local style, he found, was to ‘grapple the lady’ (his italics), ‘and paw her in a manner that does not partake in the least of gentleness’. A gallant was also expected to ‘ravish kisses even in the presence of her parents’, as White gallantly did. Other countries, other customs.
White was also a fine surgeon, and proud of it. In Rio he displayed his professional skills before a sceptical local audience by amputating a man’s leg by a new method, and silenced the scoffers when the stump healed in as many days as the weeks it usually took. And for all his playboy style in port, throughout the voyage he maintained an active concern for the health of the people in his charge, convict and free. When he joined the fleet assembling for the voyage to Botany Bay at Portsmouth he was told by ‘a medical gentleman from Portsmouth’ that a ‘malignant disease’ was loose among the convicts on the Alexander which would demand their immediate re-landing, a daunting undertaking. When White hurried below to test the truth of the story, he found several men suffering from ‘slight inflammatory complaints’ but badly frightened by gloomy prognostications, others physically and mentally debilitated by long imprisonment, and others again keeping to their beds ‘to avoid the inconvenience of the cold, which was at this time very piercing’. With a David Collins these diagnoses would have led to scoldings and angry rousings-out, but White thought the malingerers’ strategy perfectly sensible, given that their ‘wretched clothing’ gave them no protection from the cold. He briskly reassured the invalids that the prognostications were false and that they would surely recover, and on the spot promised the rest of his eager listeners that warm clothes would be found for those who needed them, and that the salt rations they had been living on for the last four months while moored in a British port would be immediately replaced by fresh beef and vegetables. He also arranged with the ship’s master for the convicts to be brought up on deck daily, ‘one half at a time...in order that they might breathe a purer air’. Then, with matters sorted out below, he hurried back to the quarterdeck to demolish the interfering ‘medical gentleman’, who was unwise enough to repeat his destructive nonsense.
This energetic common sense made White an excellent surgeon for a convict fleet. He had been able to act so decisively because Phillip, who knew him from earlier voyages (remember how small a world this was), had given him authority to order what was necessary for the health and well-being of ‘the people’. We have an account from the lower deck of White’s precautions from the marine private Jonathan Easty, who records the time he spent scrubbing and whitewashing in the first days of the voyage. White continued alert to threats to his charges’ health, and was inventive in removing them: when the women convicts showed so pertinacious a desire to get into the men’s quarters that the hatches had to be kept closed, White prevailed on Phillip to have gratings made, which kept the sexes apart but at least let them breathe.
When White unloaded his convict cargo at Sydney Cove in late January 1788, there had been a mortality rate of only one in seventeen for the whole voyage, despite its miserable beginnings. This was a remarkable feat, especially when contrasted with the human catastrophe wrought among the convicts of the Second and Third fleets by greed and neglect. (The death rate for the Second Fleet is said to have been one in four, and for the Third Fleet one in eleven.) An officer of the New South Wales Corps travelling with the Second Fleet judged that ‘the slave trade is merciful to what I have seen in this fleet’. Twenty-one months after first landing, with the health of the settlement in White’s charge, Phillip could report that there had been only seventy-two deaths, including some by execution and misadventure, and with twenty-six due to long-standing causes. Even after the mayhem of the 1790 convict fleets, and despite increasingly desperate shortages of food, blankets and supplies, White somehow kept most of the people in his charge alive and sufficiently healthy.
Some time during 1790, with life in the colony harsh and getting harsher, White found solace with a young convict woman, Rachel Turner, first his housekeeper, later his mistress. Rachel bore him a son in September 1793. He was proud of his boy, and when he returned to England on the Daedalus in December 1794 he took his fifteen-month-old child with him, and found him a loving carer in the sister of his old friend Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse, which indicates how close-knit the friendships wrought in the course of colonial tours of duty were. Meanwhile White’s convict mistress, presumably aided by his good offices, had landed on her feet: in 1797 she was granted a special dispensation from the governor succeeding Phillip to marry a free settler, and together they went on to become one of the most prosperous couples in the colony. White himself did not marry until 1799, and then he brought his natural son into his growing household. Andrew Douglas White continued a source of pride to his father, joining the Royal Engineers and fighting at Waterloo. Then early in 1823, a year after his father’s death, the young man travelled back to Sydney to be reunited with his mother, now a respectable colonial matron. Clearly the meeting was a success: Andrew Douglas later willed his mother his cherished Waterloo medal.
White’s enthusiasm for the fauna of the new continent was evident from first contact, but how did this brusque, warm-tempered man respond to its human inhabitants? He was, as we might expect, charmed by the women. Out on an expedition with the governor late in August 1788, the British fell in with a large party of Australians at Manly Cove, and the women, who seemed to stand ‘in very great dread’ of their menfolk, were coaxed into accepting gifts: ‘Every gentleman,’ White tells us, ‘singled out a female and presented her with some trinkets...’ Commenting appreciatively that ‘many of the women were strait, well-formed, and lively’, White decked his chosen girl with strips of cloth torn from his pocket and neck handkerchiefs. Then, ‘having nothing left except the buttons of my coat, on her admiring them, I cut them away, and with a piece of string tied them round her waist’. Chivalrous indeed, with the weather chill and not the least prospect of any more buttons. ‘Thus ornamented,’ White continues happily, ‘and thus delighted with her new acquirements, she turned from me with a look of inexpressible archness.’ He was more than content with the exchange.
For all his stay, White would display a good eye for details of Australian behaviour and an easy tolerance in matters of race. In the autumn of 1789, when the Australians were ravaged by a smallpox epidemic, White did his best to save some of the afflicted, and took a survivor, a six-year-old boy called Nanbaree, into his household. He was content to keep Nanbaree on a very light rein, leaving him free to visit his kin at will, to sustain his duties to them and to fulfil his ritual obligations as required. Throughout his life, Nanbaree was to move between the two worlds with more confidence and at less personal cost than any of his Australian contemporaries.
From his first days in the colony White deeply enjoyed tramping through the bush taking pot-shots at novel animals and birds. He made what he insisted was an ‘excellent soup’ out of a white cockatoo and a couple of crows, and he was delighted to discover that the ‘New Holland Cassowary’, the bird we call the emu, tasted ‘not unlike tender young beef’. He had begun collecting specimens on behalf of a friend, but the favour flowered into a passion, and he quickly became a dedicated naturalist himself. His journal covered only the first ten months of his time at Sydney, with the first edition being published in 1791, only a year after Tench’s engaging narrative and the weightier compilation from Phillip’s dispatches titled The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay. The White volume was angled towards a particular market: the growing band of amateur natural scientists. Its title declared its ambition: Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales with Sixty-five Plates of Non Descript Animals, Birds, Lizards, Serpents, curious Cones of trees and other natural Productions by John White Esq., Surgeon General to the Settlement. Those sixty-five plates must have taken some organisation. Despite his powers of exact observation (for evidence see any one of his bird descriptions), White lacked the coordination of hand and eye of a draughtsman, and had to corral any available talent to secure his illustrations.
However—there is a strange absence
