What made Tench incomparable among good observers is that he treated each encounter with the strangers as a detective story: ‘This is what they did. What might they have meant by doing that?’ This glinting curiosity is uniquely his. (Compare him with John Hunter, who also watches keenly, but at a condescending distance: the squire watching his beagles.) Tench always saw the Australians as fellow humans, and their conduct as therefore potentially intelligible. This focus on action is essential in ethnohistory, which is what we call history when the people we are curious about have left no easily decipherable records of their own, and when their intentions and understandings have to be constructed out of descriptions given by literate outsiders who often do not know what they are looking at (a wedding?...a war party?). At best we can hope for the documentary equivalent of a silent film shot by a fixed camera—a camera which cannot know precisely where the focus of action is. It is that alert, steady gaze that Tench grants us.
Tench was a marine, but his journals do not follow the naval model. It is true that on the voyage out he gives triumphantly precise measurements of latitude and new-fangled longitude, that marvellous fruit of the new science, and like any young man involved in grand affairs he brims with advice: potential settlers may buy their poultry, wines and tobacco in Tenerife, the Madeiras, the Cape of Good Hope, anywhere—but they must buy their sheep and hogs in England, and bring all their clothing, furniture and tools with them. But that was on the voyage. Once arrived in Australia he left such matters to others, nor did he bother with visual illustrations beyond a single map. While he was astonished by the weirder fauna and delighted by some of the flora, his natural tendency was towards philosophising rather than science, and his descriptions of the land’s human inhabitants come sequined with reflections and anecdotes. An example: while he, like his competitors, provided the conventional description of the physical attributes of the Australian—long-muscled, skin char-black, hair wavy, beards scant—only Tench thought to tell us that the Australians’ ‘large black eyes are universally shaded by the long thick sweepy eyelash’. He finished with a dancing-school flourish which does not quite come off—‘[the sweepy eyelash is] so much prized in appreciating beauty, that perhaps hardly any face is so homely that this aid can to some degree render interesting; and hardly any so lovely which, without it, bears not some trace of insipidity’—which leaves us slightly dizzy. But we will not forget those eyelashes.
Tench also had a sharp eye for what the anthropologists call ‘material culture’. He was especially intrigued by the Australians’ canoes, as James Cook had been in his time. In New Zealand Cook had been impressed by the ‘great ingenuity and good workmanship in the building and framing of [Maori] Boats or Canoes’, which he described as ‘long and narrow and shaped very much like a New England Whale boat’, that universal model of fine small-boat design. They were also splendidly large, the largest being capable of carrying up to one hundred men along with their arms. By contrast, he was outraged by the sheer effrontery of Australian canoes: ‘The worst I think I ever saw, they were about twelve or fourteen feet long made of one piece of the bark of a tree drawn or tied up at each end and the middle kept open by means of pieces of sticks by way of thwarts.’
Bradley of the Sirius recorded his contempt for the flimsy craft, so unlike the sleek double-hullers he knew from Tahiti—no more than a narrow strip of bark, he said, inelegant, unstable, and propelled by ludicrous paddles ‘in shape like a pudding stirrer’ held one in each hand. Nonetheless, Bradley had to allow that in these apologies for canoes the local men went astonishingly fast: sitting back on their heels with knees spread to hold out the sides, with bodies erect and paddling furiously with their pudding-stirrers, they could slice through a heavy surf (and we know how big the surf around Sydney can be) ‘without oversetting or taking in more water than in smooth seas’.
In these same horribly unstable craft men would leap to their feet and proceed to spear fish with four-metre-long spears, or alternatively lie athwart the canoe, heads fully 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