to have lost that same tooth himself in some long-ago accident. He did not know how much that would matter, and he did not take the Dampier lesson regarding Australian recalcitrance at all. How could he, given the strength of his convictions regarding ‘savage teachability’?
Consider his account of an early trans-racial meeting at Port Jackson. His strategy of mimed trust and the offer of gifts seemed to be working as well there as it had in Botany Bay, so confirming, as he thought, the excellence of his diplomatic technique. (Oddly, it rarely occurred to the British that the Australians might be in communication with each other, with information about the white men running before them. Like imperialists earlier and later, they tended to take each meeting as de novo and ‘the natives’ as perennially innocent.) At the Port Jackson meeting Phillip was particularly delighted to find a man fascinated by his first sight of an iron pot full of boiling water. Phillip reports:
He...went on with me to examine what was boiling in the pot, and exprest his admiration in a manner that made me believe he intended to profit from what he saw, and which I made him understand he might very easily do by the help of some oyster shells...by these hints, added to his own observation, he would be able to introduce the art of boiling among his countrymen.
The art of boiling introduced to Australia by Phillip’s solemn dumb-show. I suppose teachers everywhere tend to overestimate the effectiveness of their teaching, if only to avoid despair.
But it was the moral challenge which most enthralled him. Given that these Australians were intelligent beings, capable of reciprocating trust and assessing consequences, they were also capable of being ‘civilised’ in the fullest (British) sense. Being fully confident that British superiority must have been obvious to all parties, he was able to interpret what were probably displays of Australian insouciance or tolerant courtesies extended to uncouth strangers as admiring recognitions of superiority. Experience kept confirming his reading, as experience will. One example: at the cove he had named Manly to mark his high estimation of the impressive men he met there, a noisy group of Australians who had been ‘very troublesome when we were preparing our dinner’ quietly subsided when he drew a circle in the sand and gestured that they should stay outside it, so that he and his officers could eat in peace. They sat in silence outside the circle; the British ate. Phillip took this as ‘another proof of how tractable these people are, when no injury or insult is offered, and when proper means are used to influence the simplicity of their minds’. That they might have been shocked into silence by the ignorance of these extraordinary guests, who sat down without invitation, and who then gobbled their food with no hint of sharing even between each other, much less with their hosts, did not occur to him. How could it? Phillip knew nothing of nomad protocols of food-sharing.
More damningly, and, as time was to show, most damagingly, he believed these people to be bereft of formal rules to live by, and so confidently assumed that his greatest gift to them would not be British manners or cooking techniques, desirable as they were, but the gift of British justice mediated by British law. In time he would learn, slowly, painfully, that Australians were rather less teachable than he had thought. It would be on deep disagreements regarding the moral foundation of law that his dreams of enduring reconciliation would founder.
CAPTAIN JOHN HUNTER,
COMMANDER OF HMS SIRIUS
Jane Austen exclaimed that her naval-officer brothers ‘write so even, so clear, both in style and penmanship, so much to the point, and give so much intelligence, that it is enough to kill one’. In her novels she allowed herself to become positively girlish in her effusions of admiration for naval men like Fanny’s brother William or Anne Elliot’s Captain Wentworth, and quite lost her characteristic irony when she considered the nobility of their profession.
I confess that as I read John Hunter’s journal I felt something of the same flutter. I liked what he said, and I liked his silences, too. He was silent as he watched his big, beautiful Sirius pounded to pieces on a reef at Norfolk Island in February 1790, knowing he would have to face a court-martial for its loss; knowing its loss to be unavoidable; knowing that he and his men would be marooned on the island for unknown months to come (eleven, as it turned out), being treated as so many extra mouths to feed and ignominiously subordinate to a mere marine. He was silent regarding his loathing of that marine, Major Ross, new governor of the island: officers do not denigrate their fellow-officers. But he was unhesitatingly brisk in his criticism of unseamanlike behaviour, as when a ship’s captain en route to China decided not to waste valuable time calling in on the forlorn little sub-colony of Norfolk, leaving the islanders bereft of provisions, news, and the hope that they had not been forgotten. Here was the very model of an eighteenth-century British sea captain.
I especially liked watching how his few mannerisms fell away when he wrote on matters nautical. Reading the accounts of those naval officers today, we recognise a shared view of what mattered and how what mattered should be ordered. New territories like Port Jackson were described in accordance with a formula: geographic form, terrain, bays, rivers and creeks; human inhabitants considered under the headings of economic organisation, social organisation, political organisation (if discernible), religious thought (if decipherable); local fauna, local flora. Their laconic recording of events in stern chronological order derived from their habituation to the grid-form of ships’ logs, with their topics typically following the model of the journals of the great Cook. They also acquired a daunting array of skills. They were responsible for their own charts, maps and ‘views’ (exaggerated profiles of coastlines for easy visual identification), and their written sailing directions would be crucial guides for all later mariners entering those waters. That training in naval draughtsmanship meant that once landed they could supply land maps, sketches, landscapes, and even carefully precise drawings of previously ‘non descript’ creatures and plants. There were three especially skilled draughtsmen on board the Sirius: Captain Hunter himself, his first mate Lieutenant Bradley, and young George Raper, appointed midshipman on the voyage out, possibly the most gifted of the three, who would never see England again. He would die of fever off Batavia when he was twenty-four.
These men were sons of the English scientific enlightenment, and proud of it. But they were seamen first of all. On all professional matters—the location of reefs, shoals and currents, the seasons and habits of treacherous winds—Hunter’s easy exactitude reminds us of something we landlubbers forget. For men like Hunter, as for Phillip, the ‘trackless oceans’ were well-signed thoroughfares linking familiar ports and provisioning centres, and thick with memories, familiar to them in ways the land spaces of the colonies could never be.
Hunter’s unusual insouciance regarding land-based catastrophes presumably derived from his conviction that worse things happen at sea. On land he used his fine measuring eye to assess, for example, the accuracy and the killing power of native spears, crucial information to the intruders and also, as we will see, to us, as we struggle to retrieve Australian intentions from British accounts of their aggression. (Preliminary example: did spears which fell short or wide miss deliberately, or through lack of skill or power?) Hunter could recognise the strategic deployment of Australian warriors in situations which to less experienced eyes would look like savage chaos.
He was also, by his own confession, rather too quick to resolve ambiguous situations by force. During an apparently friendly encounter with some of the local people, but after several British stragglers had been speared by unknown assailants, a warrior suddenly flung a spear. It whistled a good six feet over the startled Britishers’ boat, so the gesture was probably theatrical, but Hunter snatched up his gun, intending to discharge it into the midst of the clustered Australians. The gun misfired, the men fled, and no permanent damage was done, but Hunter knew he had been hasty: ‘It was perhaps fortunate that my gun did not go off; as I was so displeased by their treachery, that it is highly probable I might have shot one of them,’ which would have been directly contrary to Phillip’s requirement of restraint. Hunter was normally obedient to his superiors, but he was not of a temperament
