nearly three years in Port Jackson before they realised that the native word they used as meaning ‘good’ in fact signified ‘no’, or at least demurral. The consequences are too daunting even to contemplate.)
Tench had deeply enjoyed these fleeting encounters with Australians before the general alienation. Then on the second-last day of 1788 an Australian man was taken captive on Phillip’s orders, and Tench’s talent for personal relationships could at last come into play.
JANUARY 1788–SPRING 1790
SETTLING IN
The two French ships which had followed the First Fleet into Botany Bay remained at anchor there for the best part of six weeks, which allowed for a number of polite exchanges with the British now ensconced at Port Jackson. Philip Gidley King, fluent in French, especially enjoyed the French officers’ company, their conversation and the delicacy of their manners. Without King’s journal we would know very little about this small, beautifully equipped expedition and its courteous officers: the two ships sailed out of Botany Bay into oblivion, lost somewhere in the Pacific. In the event, King had sailed even earlier, being informed by Phillip on 31 January that he was to head a tiny settlement at Norfolk Island, another even more remote site identified by Cook as promising. On the morning of 15 February King and his little band of settlers—seven free men and fifteen convicts, six of them women—embarked on the Supply, to be dumped on a beach with their baggage and provisions piled around them with orders to make a new society. Naval obedience came at a high price.
Before he left King made the most of his time with the French. He reports the Comte de La Pérouse as notably less well disposed to the local people than was Phillip. His wariness was natural enough: at a landfall only a handful of weeks before, the expedition had lost two longboats and more than a dozen men, among them the captain of the Astrolabe and eight other officers, in a surprise attack by natives. (Up to that time they had not lost a single man.) Their assailants were islanders, probably Samoans, ‘a very strong & handsome race of men scarce one among them less than 6 Feet high, & well-sett’, who over several days had seemed perfectly friendly, and then, after what seemed to the French a trivial incident, had swung their clubs with killing effect. The French estimated that about thirty islanders fell to their guns.
Retrospectively La Pérouse read the episode as a textbook example of ‘savagery’: of unpredictable fluctuations in mood, unpredictable eruptions of murderous violence. At Botany Bay he built a stockade around his tents, mounted two small guns, and kept his guns at the ready.
Phillip built no stockades and he set no guards, or not against the Australians. He intended to persuade the local people that the newcomers were their friends. But his first task was to settle his own people, and once the flurry of disembarkation was over, with its inescapable disorder—the orgiastic scenes on the night of the disembarkation of the convict women have become legendary—officers, soldiers and convicts set about making themselves at home.
First, the alien landscape had to be mapped and its strangeness tamed by naming. Spectacular landmarks were given the names of distant patrons—Pittwater, Norfolk Island—but with their duty done to the grandees, the new arrivals could celebrate themselves and their adventures—Tench’s Hill, Bradley’s Head, Collins Cove, Dawes Point. The names, used daily and inscribed in letters to kin and friends, must in time have come to seem ‘natural’. Both Phillip’s sturdy mind and conciliatory ambitions are suggested by his decision in mid-1791 to reject the wistful romanticism of Rose-Hill for the new up-river settlement in favour of the local name, Parramatta, which meant something like Where Eels Meet—that is, a place of feasting and fecundity.
Outposts of empire are lonely places. But calendars count time at the same rate everywhere, so the settlers celebrated their first King’s Birthday on 4 June with all the pomp and alcohol they could muster. No news came from the real world: they could not know whether they were at war with France on any particular day, and these ardent patriots were to hear the King was well again before they had known he was ill. Remote though they were from the centres of action, distance brought none of the liberties remoteness can bring. The bounds of settlement were crushingly narrow. Officers could look forward to occasional ‘expeditions’ on land or on the water, but convicts were penned within settlement boundaries, unless they were given specific duties outside it. They were always being admonished for ‘straggling’—wandering in the bush without permission—which they continued to do whatever the consequences in floggings or spear wounds.
Officers settled to a range of genteel diversions. As we have seen, some made music, some collected specimens, some drew or painted. Some kept journals, giving form to otherwise featureless days: ‘this happened, then that happened’. A few, like Major Ross, squabbled. Irritability helps pass the time. And, as we know, everyone, or everyone literate, wrote letters home. They wrote in the hope that, barring shipwrecks, the words they were writing would be read months or years later by a known loved someone in some known loved place. George Worgan bursts into what reads like a post-modernist riff on time, sound and distance as he considers that, however long the chain of words he is hurling towards his brother, ‘the First Word will not have reached one quarter over the Seas that divides Us, at the time the last is tumbling out of my Mouth’, and decides he will let fly each one ‘with such an impulsive Velocity...as to make their Way against the Resistance of Rocks, Seas and contrary Winds and arrive at your Street-Door with a D—l of a Suscitation...’ A ‘suscitation’ indeed, with the force of love, gales and several seas behind it. Worgan was missing his brother badly. Two transports were about to sail. He planned to put a letter to Dick on each, and reflected on the melancholy possibility that neither would arrive. Then Dick, in lieu of his living, loving words, would have to make do with the narratives being prepared by Collins or Tench for news of his young brother. The two ships were sailing in the morning. Worgan confided he had thirty-one letters, five of them almost as long as this forty-page monster, ‘to Close, Seal, Enclose and direct’ and get on board before the ships raised anchor. Then comes a forlorn postscript: ‘I have sent you 2 letters beside this.’ For all its compulsive chirpiness, Worgan’s huge letter breathes loneliness.
There were the immediate pleasures of local conviviality. From their first days in the colony gentlemen were deploring the convict passion for rum and the wickednesses they would commit to get it, but not only the lower orders were addicted to alcohol. Surgeon White gives a genial description of the toasts drunk during that first extravagant King’s Birthday. The lower orders had been catered for: the governor had issued every soldier a pint of porter in addition to his usual allowance of rum-and-water grog, and to every convict a half pint of rum ‘that they might all drink his Majesty’s health’. Then the gentlemen settled to their pleasures. After the midday gun salutes the officers attended the governor in his house, and sat down to dinner to the pleasant accompaniment of the band playing ‘God Save the King’ followed by ‘several marches’. Worgan gives us the menu: they ate ‘mutton, pork, ducks, fowls, fish, kanguroo, sallads, pies and preserved fruits’: foods handsomely outside the usual salted or dried rations. Then the cloth was removed, and they had the toasts. White lists them: ‘His Majesty’s health was drank with three cheers. The prince of Wales, the Queen and royal family, the Cumberland family, and his Royal Highness Prince Henry William...his Majesty’s ministers were next given.’ Then, the obligatory public toasts drunk, they began on the private and the particular, with the governor opening the new round with a toast to their own ‘Cumberland County’, the first British-style county in the new world, existing as yet only in the mind, but, as Phillip proudly declared, ‘the largest in the world’. Its name, he said, would be ‘Albion’.
So the toasts continued. Worgan (these surgeons seem to have been devoted drinkers) recorded the officers drank ‘PORT, LISBON, MADEIRA, TENERIFFE and good Old English PORTER’ (his capitals), which ‘went merrily round in bumpers’ through a long afternoon. Then, after joining in the democratic jubilation around a great bonfire, the officers went back to the governor’s house for supper and a night-cap
