Contrast this with Darwin’s dismissive diagnoses regarding the Tierra del Fuegian ‘savages’ a mere fifty years later. Phillip grants no gulf in nature. We are still in the dawn of the world, with friendship between unlike peoples a blossoming hope—given the universality of reason and local good will.
Phillip was further disarmed by his first meetings with Australians, when his calm, weaponless advance and the offering of gifts led to the consummation of hand meeting hand in The Handshake, to him a universal pledge of peace and friendship. (That same experiment could turn out differently. The historian Greg Dening tells a story of a British officer who was powerfully offended when another native on another beach grasped his extended hand, turned it over to see if it had anything in it—and then let it drop. The Britisher crossly concluded that these were an unpleasantly avaricious people.)
Phillip’s serene account of the Australians’ response to the British presence is obliquely confirmed by the gleeful descriptions George Worgan provided his brother in a letter written a month later. Worgan told of a string of meetings with locals whom he described as behaving like excited children at a Christmas party, holding out their hands for their presents, laughing heartily, jumping ‘extravagantly’, and whooping with pleasure as they examined the clothes, hats and hair of the newcomers. They also allowed themselves to be tricked out in ‘different coloured Papers, and Fools’-Caps which pleased them mightily’. Even allowing for Worgan’s determined jocularity these still look like astonishingly amiable meetings, incorporating startling hands-on intimacies. Worgan describes ‘a Fellow’ picking up a quill and ‘trying to poke it through my Nose and two or three other Gentlemen’s’, as he checked to see whether their nasal septums were pierced or not, and then giving up and ‘shewing Us that he could not wear it in his own, and shaking his head’.
Phillip, reading these scenes not with Worgan’s irony but for the trusting good will he thought he saw demonstrated, was confirmed in his chosen policy. That policy and his personal example would keep the British and the local men on sufficiently peaceful terms for as long as they were under his eye. But he could not control attitudes. Here is a paragraph from Worgan, again to his brother, on what he really thought about the new people, beginning with his estimation of the charms of their women.
‘It must be merely from the Curiosity, to see how they would behave...that one would be induced to touch one of Them, for they are Ugly to Disgust, in their countenances and stink of Fish-Oil and Smoke, most sweetly.’ They are shapely enough; he allows that if some of them were cleaned up they might excite lust ‘even in the frigid breast of a philosopher’, but in their natural state the fish-oil and soot would keep more than philosophers away. He concludes: ‘To sum up the Qualities Personal and mental...they appear to be an Active, Volatile, Unoffending, Happy, Merry, Funny, Laughing, Good-natured, Nasty Dirty, race of human Creatures as ever lived in a state of Savageness.’ (Worgan’s italics throughout.) He knew these people to be ‘savages’, and therefore creatures utterly unlike himself.
Pragmatic David Collins recognised the fish oil to be a sensible protection against both the ferocious local mosquitoes and the cold. Nonetheless he acknowledged that ‘the oil, together with the perspiration from their bodies, produces, in hot weather, a most horrible stench’ (the British had made landfall in late January, on the brink of the hottest month). He recorded he had seen some natives ‘with the entrails of fish frying in the burning sun upon their heads, until the oil ran down over their foreheads’. Later we will see that the first thing the British did with their kidnap victims was to dump them in a tub, crop their hair and give them a thorough scrubbing before stuffing them into shirts, trousers and jackets. We can’t know what the victims thought about any of this, only that they were terrified. It is also likely that the Australians found the stink of unwashed British flesh sweating in unwashed woollen clothing in Sydney heat at least as repellent, but in such encounters it is the literate who do all the complaining.
Less contemptuous and more curious observers than Worgan, and less complacent ones than Phillip, could be baffled as to Australian intentions. Surgeon John White had this to say about an unexpected and potentially dangerous encounter with ‘about three hundred natives’ at Botany Bay on 1 June:
This was the greatest number of the natives we had ever seen together since our coming among them. What could be the cause of their assembling in such great numbers gave rise to a variety of conjectures. Some thought they were going to war among themselves. Others conjectured that some of them had been concerned in the murder of our men, notwithstanding we did not meet with the smallest trace to countenance such an opinion, and that, fearing we should revenge it, they had formed this convention in order to defend themselves against us. Others imagined that the assemblage might be occasioned by a burial, a marriage, or some religious meeting.
‘A burial, a marriage, or some religious meeting’—or perhaps a preparation for war. It was certainly a deeply uncanny situation. It is against this background of casual contempt and intelligent anxiety that we have to locate Phillip’s determined optimism. From the beginning, and remarkably, he recognised the Australians’ wants and expressions to be as powerfully felt as his own, and as we will see he acknowledged some conflicts. But he also remained persuaded of something not at all evident: that in time the Australians would inevitably come to recognise the benefits of the British presence among them, not only in material matters, but in the unique, incomparable gift of British law.
First, for things material. Phillip:
It is undeniably certain that to teach the shivering savage how to clothe his body, and to shelter himself completely from the cold and wet, and to put into the hands of men, ready to perish one half of the year with hunger, the means of procuring constant and abundant provision, must confer upon them benefits of the highest value and importance.
Phillip did not regard this conviction as prior and ideological, but as the fruits of observation. He had watched these people suffer hunger when fish supplies dropped off in colder weather. He noted the meagreness of their vegetable resources, and how long and painfully the women laboured to collect and prepare them. He watched them in bad weather, and knew they suffered: ‘While they have not made any attempt towards clothing themselves, they are by no means insensible to the cold, and appear very much to dislike the rain. During a shower they have been observed to cover their heads with pieces of bark, and to shiver exceedingly.’ His response was typically direct. He decided that the moment he established good contact with these poor cold savages he would introduce them to the benefits of clothing. He therefore requested the immediate dispatch from England of ‘a supply of frocks and jackets to distribute among them’, urging that the garments be made long and loose ‘so they would be useful to both men and women’.
Phillip, unlike some of his compatriots, acknowledged that sensibilities might differ between the races. He noted, for example, one Australian’s disgust at the smell of salt pork lingering on his fingers after he had touched a piece. He thought such differences to be trivial and ephemeral, and that civilising savages would be easy because, as rational beings, they would readily recognise the superiority of British material and moral arrangements. Like most of us, Phillip believed his home culture to be universally advantageous and desirable. Furthermore, he believed it to be universally applicable and therefore transportable; that it could flourish in any clime. The irony of this vision, given the total British dependence on imported supplies and their near-starvation in a milieu where Australians had survived for millennia, quite escaped him. I doubt it escaped the Australians.
Every Britisher thought their superiority manifest in their possessions, especially their manufactured goods—clothing, guns, tools—but also what Tench calls ‘toys’: the baubles brought to charm and disarm the natives. All of the officers and some of the men had brought stocks of such objects to barter for native artefacts, which were enjoying a vogue at home since the voyages of the great, good, and martyred Captain Cook.
The model for pacification through trade had been established in Tahiti, that terrestrial Paradise. There Cook had seen an earth so spontaneously productive that ‘in the article of food those people may almost be said to be exempt from the curse of our