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 to give second chances.
As an artist Hunter drew with stern devotion to accuracy. Although we might feel that his representations of, for example, the platypus or the wombat fall far short of capturing the creatures’ distinctive forms of life, we have to remember he was often drawing from a corpse or even from an emptied skin—although we have to remember too that the great George Stubbs, also working from a skin, could re-create a marvellously vivid kangaroo back in England. But Hunter’s birds are unfailingly marvellous and his written account is alive with images no one else thought to mention. Painted dancers at a little distance ‘appeared accoutred with cross belts’; others, with ‘narrow white streaks around the body, with a broad line down the middle of the back and belly, and a single stripe down each arm, thigh and leg’, gave the wearers ‘a most shocking appearance; for upon the black skin the white marks were so very conspicuous, that they were exactly like so many moving skeletons’.
Despite his artist’s eye we might judge Hunter to be unpleasantly haughty in his accounts of the Australians, rather like a squire observing the doings of a beagle pack. He was eager to control situations, and rather too fond of taking calculated liberties. One example: when on one occasion he suspected that the local women were being deliberately kept at a distance, he exerted himself to lure them closer, and was triumphant when he succeeded—or was permitted to succeed. He took little interest in Phillip’s civilising mission; he thought the Australians physically repellent because they were ‘abominably filthy’, and he describes their filthiness with his usual visual exactitude:
they never clean their skin, but it is generally smeared with the fat of such animals as they kill, and afterwards covered by every sort of dirt; sand from the sea beach, and the ashes from their fires, all adhere their greasy skin, which is never washed, except when accident, or the want of food, obliges them to go into the water.
And he gives no hint that he thought the Australians even potentially educable: when ‘passion’ overcame them, he said, ‘they act as all savages do, as madmen’.
Were this all we knew of him, we would not like him. But there was good humour in him, and male competitiveness, too. To return to dancing: Hunter was one of the white guests invited to the corroboree staged by Baneelon and Colbee early in 1791, just after the ‘coming in’. He was particularly impressed by a remarkable feat performed by the male dancers, achieved by ‘placing their feet very wide apart, and, by an extraordinary exertion of the muscles and thighs, moving the knees in a trembling and very surprising manner’. Then he adds, casually, ‘which none of us could imitate’, and suddenly we know that at some stage of the evening Hunter and other Englishmen were on their feet and in the ring, furiously wobbling their knees. I have a subliminal vision of tourists visiting indigenous territories nowadays being pulled to their feet and made to stumble through a parody of an Australian dance, to the covert giggles and overt shouts of encouragement of the locals.
Hunter also chose to report an apparently trivial episode in detail. In June 1789 ‘the Governor, Captain Collins (the judge-advocate), Captain Johnston of the Marines, Mr White, principal surgeon of the settlement, Mr Worgan, Mr Fowell and myself, from the Sirius’ plus ‘two men, all armed with muskets’, set off for Broken Bay to explore the Hawkesbury River. Notice that these imperialists had to do without the glamour and ease of horse-borne exploration, the one stallion and three mares belonging to the colony being far too precious to risk in such adventures. They had to walk, and to carry their own supplies, in this case ‘several