arrival at Botany Bay of two ships, the Boussole and the Astrolabe, comprising an official French expedition under the command of Comte Jean de La Pérouse.) The British ships only got out of the bay with the ‘utmost difficulty & danger wt many hairsbreadth escapes’ and quite a lot of bumping into each other, ‘with everyone blaming the rashness of the Governor in insisting upon the fleets working out in such weather, & all agreed it was next to a Miracle that some of the Ships were not lost’.
Bowes Smyth was also a touch sardonic regarding Phillip’s onshore performance. He gave a full account of the governor’s formal reading of his commission, embellished with bands and marching and the processing of colours, and then the gentlemen gathered at the centre, with the convicts around them sitting on the ground and the soldiery forming an outer circle. Listening to the commission, Bowes Smyth judged it to be ‘a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any Governor under the British Crown’, Phillip being accorded ‘full power and authority’ to do whatever he needed to, with no requirement to take any counsel of anyone.
Bowes Smyth reports that the governor proceeded to outline his regimen. Phillip was admirably direct. He warned the convicts that he had reason to think most of them incorrigible, and that his discipline would be accordingly stern: that anyone attempting to get into the women’s tents at night would be fired on; that if they did not work they would be let starve; that given their situation any stealing of ‘the most trifling Article of Stock or Provisions’ would be punished by death. Then came a gentler conclusion: they would not be cruelly worked, and ‘every individual shd. contribute his Share to render himself and Community at large happy and comfortable as soon as the nature of the settlement would permit it’. It was, given the circumstances, as encouraging a harangue as could be expected. But Bowes Smyth swiftly realised the governor’s court would be exclusively an officers’ club, noting crossly that only officers were invited to the governor’s tent for supper while he and the other free men come from England were left to fend for themselves.
Nor was he impressed by Phillip’s on-shore discipline. Within a month of disembarkation he thought the convicts out of control and already carving out their own territory, the men being ‘ready to seize on any Sailors on shore who are walking near the Women’s Camp, beat them most unmercifully, & desire them to go on board’. (Sailors had used their opportunity to establish alliances with some of the convict women on the long voyage out.) He also thought the ‘justice’ dealt out in the governor’s courts was no justice at all. A marine who got in among the convict women and bashed a girl who had been his lover (‘a most infamous hussy’, splutters Bowes Smyth) was given a hundred lashes with a hundred more to come, while a convict who had struck a sentry received a mere one hundred and fifty. His comment: ‘The severity shewn to the Marines and Lenity to the Convicts has already excited great murmurings & discontent among the Corps & where it will end, unless some other plan is adopted, time will discover.’ He was even more outraged when Phillip ordered a naval steward who had bought ‘an animal of the squirrel kind’ from a convict and paid him in rum to suffer one hundred lashes, reduced to fifty when ‘several gentlemen’ urged greater leniency. (The steward had bought the ‘squirrel’, presumably a possum, on an officer’s behalf; trade with convicts was forbidden.) He had no complaint about the death sentence imposed on three convicts found guilty of stealing bread, pork and other provisions, or the three hundred lashes awarded a fourth man who had been their accomplice. In the event only one of the three died, being hanged before the assembled convicts on 26 February. The two others were twice granted a stay of execution for twenty-four hours, and finally reprieved once more, which might seem to us a purely sadistic display of power, but which was intended to impress its victims with the mercy lurking within the terrible justice of the Crown. The two men were condemned to be ‘transported’ yet again when somewhere could be found to send them, and another convict who had stolen food and wine in the interim was granted his life only if he would take on the hideous role of public executioner.
All this and more, within a month of landing. Bowes Smyth’s agitated cluckings give us some sense of the challenges Phillip faced in bringing each level of this unruly new society to hear and to heed his words. Phillip’s own correspondence is notably smoother, largely having to do with the anxious business of housekeeping and the balancing of eroding provisions against reducing rations.
Phillip was also the patriarch of an expanding community: managing his officers, sustaining the morale of the soldiery in a hardship post, struggling to restore the health of diseased and ailing convicts and then to get useful work out of them, and then, when he was able, finding new land, establishing new settlements. Given the urgency and the consequence of all these concerns, the energy Phillip expended on his relationship with the Australians is to my mind remarkable. I have come to think him close to visionary in his obstinate dream of integrating these newly discovered people into the British polity.
Phillip had arrived burdened with an armful of instructions on how to handle natives. As early as 1768, when Cook’s Endeavour was about to embark on its voyage, the Earl of Morton, President of the Royal Society, presented Cook with a list of ‘hints’ for dealings with native peoples met along the way. The hints have the whiff of the candle about them; of pleasurable hours spent in desk-bound explorations. Beautifully clear principles were enunciated. The shedding of native blood was prohibited as ‘a crime of the highest nature’, these people being equal in the eyes of their Maker to ‘the most Polished European’. Nor could they be deprived of their land without consent. Moreover, they could justly resist invaders whom ‘they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether the apprehension be well or ill founded’.
Morton realised that this last principle might be difficult to maintain, given that the British would have to get water and fresh food where they could. How to communicate the innocence of their intentions? So he set himself to devising a basic-needs alphabet in sign language. We watch his imagination take fire as he wrestles with this delightful problem:
Amicable signs may be made which they could not possibly mistake—Such as holding up a jug, turning it bottom upwards, to shew them it was empty, then applying it to the lips in the attitude of drinking, [or] opening the mouth wide, putting the fingers towards it, and then making the motion of chewing, would sufficiently demonstrate a want of food.
A question arises. Will the chewing always be understood to mean, ‘We want to eat?’ Might it not, under certain circumstances and in certain company, mean, ‘We want to eat you’? But Morton does not falter, and proceeds smoothly to the next phase. Music, but only music of a soothing kind, should be employed. The natives should not be alarmed ‘with the report of Guns, Drums, or even a trumpet’, but rather ‘be entertained near the Shore with a soft Air’. Thus, with savage breasts calmed, a landing could be effected and a few trinkets (‘particularly looking Glasses’) laid upon the shore. The newcomers would then tactfully withdraw to a small distance to observe the locals’ response before a second landing was attempted. Furthermore, ‘Should they in a hostile manner oppose a landing, and kill some men in the attempt, even this would hardly justify firing among them.’
Then, at last, comes the crucial qualifier: ‘till every other gentle method had been tried’. In the last resort, the landing must be effected whether the natives resisted or not. Why? Because the expeditions’ aims were scientific, and therefore virtuous. The British could land, even in the face of resistance. They could trade. All they could not do was to occupy the land without consent.
There is something disarming about these solemn lessons in mannerly imperialism, but as we would expect the ‘hints’ proved somewhat wanting as guides to action. Cook’s first landing in New Zealand ended with his men withdrawing to their ship leaving their gifts of nails and beads on the corpse of a chief pierced through the heart by a musket shot. Cook already knew something the noble deskman did not: a lot of ‘savages’ enjoyed fighting. His New Zealand experiences were only some among many initially peaceable encounters which had swirled into violence: as he coolly observed of the chief-killing episode, ‘Had I thought
