submerged to get a clear view, spears at the ready, while a companion did his best to keep the craft balanced for the thrust. Thinking of Sydney Harbour we think of sharks, but the Australians kept themselves out of the water unless there was no help for it—and what use would a heavier canoe be against a white pointer with murder in its heart? (Tench: ‘Sharks of an enormous size are found here. One of these was caught by the people on board the Sirius, which measured at the shoulders six feet and a half [two metres] in circumference.’)
Tench recognised the élan of these men, paddling kilometres into the open sea in mere twists of bark. But (typically) he looked beyond male flamboyance to the women, and they impressed him even more. A woman would go out in her skiff, ‘a piece of bark tied at both ends with vines, and the edge of it just above the water’, with a nursling child precariously perched on her shoulders and gripping her hair. The baby would be swung down to the breast when its grizzling grew too loud, and then swung up again so the mother could get on with her hook-and-line fishing in woman’s style. Hunger being a close companion, both men and women nurtured small fires on clay pads in the bottom of their canoes, cooking and eating the first fish as they were taken, and taking the rest of the catch back to shore to be shared.
Captain Hunter of the Sirius also recognised seamanship when he saw it, even in women, and again we see his endearing concern for the well-being of infants. A mother, he said, might take out two or even three tiny children with her, all of them packed into ‘a miserable boat, the highest part of which was not six inches above the surface of the water, washing almost in the edge of a surf, which would frighten even an old seaman to come near in a good craft’, but with the smallest baby tucked between her breast and her raised knees, ‘where it lay secure and safe as in a crib’.
Where Tench excels is in the reporting of encounters, moods, and above all conversations. He conversed with everyone—or, more exactly, with everyone who interested him: fellow-officers, settlers and (long before he had any of the language, and intensely) with the Australians, who, with his American experience behind him, he nonchalantly called ‘Indians’.
Consider his first meeting with the local people.
Late in January 1788, after three days at anchor in Botany Bay, Tench was walking for the first time on an Australian beach. He had the company of a few friends, and he was hand-in-hand with a little boy of about seven who had also been cooped up too long. (There were seventeen children belonging to the officers and men on the First Fleet, and sixteen children of convicts. On the Charlotte, Tench’s ship, there were only three: two children belonging to convicts, and one ‘free’ child. Was this Tench’s small friend?)
Tench tells us that as the British party strolled along ‘we were met by a dozen Indians, naked as at the moment of their birth’, also out for a stroll. The two groups, one clothed, one naked, both armed, and presumably neither ready to give the advantage to the other, advanced warily. Tench had seen ‘Indians’ during his American sojourn; he had read Cook and the others on the blessed inhabitants of Polynesia, but he was not prepared for what he saw that day: naked black men, with wild hair and scrubby beards, hair, faces and bodies shining with fish oil, and every one of them hefting a businesslike spear. This was Encountering the Other with a vengeance.
Tench seems not to have turned a hair. Noting that the sight of the little boy roused particular interest, Tench, with the confident intuition and the quick invention which were to characterise his contacts with the Australians, opened the lad’s shirt so the strangers could appreciate the dazzling whiteness of his skin, and continued to walk steadily towards them. One ‘hideously ugly’ old man was especially charmed by the child: drawing close, ‘with great gentleness [he] laid his hand on the child’s hat and afterwards felt his clothes, muttering to himself all the while’. When the boy grew restless under the handling, Tench contrived to send him back to the rest of his party ‘without giving offence to the old gentleman’, who he was confident would understand his protectiveness because ‘some youths of their own, though considerably older than the one with us, were kept back by the group’.
This is probably about as good as it gets in encounters between strangers. The recognition that ‘natural’ impulses—curiosity, tenderness towards the young, a nervous good will—were probably shared by both naked Australians and swaddled Europeans is a denial of the dangers of otherness not often met with. Tench—alert, intelligent, curious, compassionate—demonstrates here his genius both for the ‘natural’ human response, and for the quick recognition of unfamiliar styles of dignity, treating the old man with a sensitive courtesy which assumed not only a common humanity, but a shared delicacy of feeling. He was in no doubt as to the political relationship between the two peoples—he had just recorded Governor Phillip landing on the north shore of the bay ‘to take possession of his new land and bring about an intercourse between its old and new masters’—but for Tench the assumption of political domination did not preclude mutual understanding and respect.
Over the next months his view was to harden. By the completion of his first report, ‘A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay’ to which a postscript was added in October 1788, with the first cheerful encounters a fading memory and contact shrunk to occasional tussles between fishing parties, his hopes of friendly exchanges had dimmed. He claimed to have come to share the bleak evaluation of Australians made by Cook eighteen years before: these were an ugly, dirty people, miserably under-equipped for life. He declared himself shocked by their lean-tos, their nakedness, the crudeness of their few tools. Nonetheless, he continued sensitive to details of their behaviour, noting, for example, the contrast between the men’s domination over their women and their egalitarianism between themselves: ‘Excepting a little tributary respect which the younger part appear to pay those more advanced in years, I never could observe any degree of subordination among them.’ The absence of visible marks of deference must have been startling for a young captain-lieutenant, whose every action was modulated by the niceties of rank.
Then once again Tench displays his distinctive flair. The early encounters had taken place around the coves of the harbour: that is, on the Australians’ home ground, which the British, of course, assumed to be neutral, or more correctly empty, given there were no obvious permanent habitations. Only once did two old men venture into the settlement, and we wonder if staying away from guests’ camps was an Australian courtesy. Tench decided their hesitancy might have a different origin: that in the face of ‘our repeated endeavours to induce them to come among us...they either fear or despise us too much to dare be anxious for a closer connection’. ‘Fear’ was the conventional and comfortable British interpretation of native caution. But ‘despise’? Could these naked savages dare ‘despise’ officers of the British Crown? That Tench thought they might marks him as a man of unusual imaginative flexibility.
As for himself, he took every chance he could to ‘converse’ with these interesting people. During the brief period of good will immediately after the move to Port Jackson when Australians were still frequenting the fringes of the settlement, he began collecting all the words and phrases in the local language he could. He made some surprising discoveries: for example, that it was Cook and the British who had introduced the word ‘kangaroo’ to the local people, whose word for that surprising creature was patagorang. They seemed to have started applying ‘kangaroo’ as the British word for any and all the large animals the newcomers had brought with them, excepting the familiar dog, or, as they called it, ‘dingo’. Tench deduced all this when he came upon a group of men ‘busily employed in looking at some sheep in an enclosure, and repeatedly crying out “kangaroo, kangaroo”!’ Always ready to augment innocent amusement, he was trying to point out some horses and cows at a little distance when the men’s attention was deflected by the appearance of some convict women, upon which they ‘stood at a distance of several paces, expressing very significantly the way in which they were attracted’, but ‘without offering them any insult’. This is a pleasant and, in its way, a remarkable scene. I cannot see a Spanish captain standing by while ‘savages’ openly assessed the charms of Spanish women.
(Some
