This time the tents and poles and extra provisions could be ferried to the agreed beach rendezvous by boat, and by afternoon the walkers were setting up their base camp. Then someone stumbled upon a girl, still weak from the smallpox epidemic which had swept the area a month before, crouching in the wet grass close by the camp. The whole party trooped off to look at her, scaring her even further out of her wits. Hunter reports: ‘She was very much frightened on our approaching her, and shed many tears, with piteous lamentations.’
The gentlemen went into a flurry of action. A fire was made, grass dried, birds shot, skinned and laid on the fire to broil ‘along with some fish’, and water, of which she was in great need, given her. Then they stacked up fuel for her fire, put her to bed by covering her with warm dried grass, and retired contentedly to their tents.
The next morning the girl was rather less frightened, and when the British party returned from their day’s walking late that afternoon they found she had moved to a little bark hut on the beach. Now she had a little girl with her, whom she was trying to protect from falling rain by covering her with her body. The child was, in Hunter’s bachelor opinion, ‘as fine a little infant of that age as I ever saw’, but desperately afraid of the strangers: however much they coaxed ‘it could not be prevailed on to look up; it lay with its face upon the ground, and one hand covering its eyes.’ (Note again the visual detail.) Again they plied the mother with meat, fish and fuel, this time heaping dried grass over her hut to keep her warmer, and in the morning, when they visited again, the baby was ready to hold a British hand. I hope it was Hunter’s. He has just betrayed an unexpected tenderness towards small children. Then, leaving the mother with good supplies of fuel, food and water, they set off on their expedition upriver. When they returned after a few days’ (inconclusive) exploring, their friend and her child had gone.
I cite this episode because it tells us a great deal about Hunter we would not otherwise know. It also reminds us how precarious are the edifices we build from surviving fragments from the past. Hunter might have left out the incident as trivial; or his publisher might have struck it out as behaviour unbecoming to serious-minded Britons. Instead he chose to memorialise it on the title page of the first edition of Hunter’s Historical Journal. There is the naked woman cowering with her baby in a curved grass shelter; there are the tall Englishmen standing protectively around her like a wall. The image provides no model for the future: not very much later, Australian women, and Australian babies too, would die of British bullets. Nonetheless, we have been permitted to see these men bustling about arranging for the comfort of a frightened woman.
The accident of our knowledge of this particular incident also reminds us how many other Britishers, articulate in their own time, have been retrospectively struck as dumb as Lot’s reckless wife because no record of their actions happens to survive. The ‘historical record’, with its silences, absences and evasions, accidental and deliberate, is a most imperfect mirror of ‘what happened’.
SURGEON-GENERAL JOHN WHITE
By his own account Surgeon White enjoyed playing the gallant on the voyage out. Thirty years old and unmarried, he sought the company of women, whether Dutch or Brazilian, in the ports along the way and flirted zestfully with them. In Rio he was charmed to discover that the Portuguese, reputedly a jealous race, were so delighted by compliments paid their womenfolk that they were ready to grant a delightful degree of access to them, as he discovered when a gentleman asked him to help rebind the magnificent floor-length hair he had ordered his wife to loose so the charming English officer could properly admire its abundance. While other officers on shore leave no more than glimpsed feminine shadows behind latticed windows, White spent tender hours at convent grilles in halting conversation with the lovely novices within. He enjoyed every aspect of his stay in Rio except for the lack of coffee-houses, an odd absence to claim for Brazil, especially when we know that the masters of the different vessels ‘all adjourn’d to a Coffee house to Breakfast [where] they had Coffee in great plenty, sweatmeats [sic] & a great variety of rich cakes’ after they had done their marketing, a treat they enjoyed so much they described it in detail to Arthur Bowes Smyth, cooped up on the Lady Penrhyn.
Surprisingly, White enjoyed Capetown nearly as well as exotic Rio. During three years spent in the West Indies he had been sickened by the British style of slavery: ‘The bare retrospect of the cruelties I have seen...there excites a kind of horror that chills my blood.’ By contrast the Dutch, cruel as they were to delinquent compatriots (they were slowly broken on the wheel) treated 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