There is something very special about Nicol’s prose, with its attention to minute detail, recalled decades after the events occurred. Perhaps this derives from Nicol’s style, which is clearly in the great oral storytelling tradition of the sea, owing more to the long tradition of the storytelling bards than to the written prose of his contemporaries. The natural rhythm and pattern of such language is a powerful aid to memory. The stories, told over and over, become ever more refined and compelling. Nicol even draws a picture of himself as raconteur, late in his life, when he takes a boat to London to attempt to gain his pension: ‘I was at sea again … I had always a crowd round me listening to my accounts of the former voyages that I had made … I was very happy.’ From such stories has come this vivid and romantic tale of travel to the hidden corners of the world.
A large part of the fascination of Nicol’s book lies in his service as steward aboard the Lady Juliana transport which, as part of the second fleet, brought over two hundred female convicts to Australia in 1790. The logbook of the Lady Juliana is long lost, so Nicol’s account is the main source of information for the voyage.6 His time aboard the Lady Juliana (which he recollects as the Lady Julian) was formative, for Nicol fell in love with a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam. She was his first real love, and Nicol ‘courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman on board’. She was, he said, ‘as kind and true a creature as ever lived’. Before the voyage was out she bore him a son, John.
On the evening of 3 June 1790 the Lady Juliana entered Port Jackson after almost a year at sea. Nicol records how the landing was ‘almost to our sorrow’. He knew his time with Sarah was running out. But it was a special moment, for that evening John Nicol and Watkin Tench—the great chronicler of the birth of European Australia, who had rowed out to meet the ship amid squalls and cloudbursts—stood together under the one set of sails. For Tench the arrival of the Lady Juliana was a moment of exquisite joy. ‘News burst upon us like meridian splendour on a blind man,’ he records as he learned for the first time of the French Revolution, the madness of George III and the loss of the Guardian supply ship. Nicol, characteristically, gives us a glimpse of an intensely human story inside this great historic moment. He doesn’t care about revolutions, kings or shipwrecks. His thoughts are all about his imminent separation from his new family.
Nicol spent six weeks in Port Jackson with his beloved Sarah and their infant son. They were, perhaps, the happiest days of his life. Although his recollections of Port Jackson were thirty years old by the time they were written down, they are remarkably accurate. He records, for instance that there were only two ‘natives’ in the town at that time. They were Abaroo and Nanbaree, survivors of the smallpox epidemic who were then living with Surgeon White (Nanbaree) and the Reverend and Mrs Johnson (Abaroo). He also records some curious attributes of the ‘sweet tea’ which was drunk with such avidity by the first fleeters. Nicol wrote that ‘it is infused and drank like the China tea. I liked it much. It requires no sugar and is both a bitter and a sweet’. He also regarded its medicinal qualities highly:
There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had borne in the colony. Everyone went to see her, and I among the rest. It was a strange sight. Her hair was quite white. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea.
Tench and others tell us of this woman, but none do so with the descriptive vividness of Nicol. And none ascribe her fecundity to the tea!
As the hour of his departure approached, Nicol became desperate to stay with his wife and child. He was, however, contracted to return to England and the ship was short of hands. He relates that:
It was not without the aid of the military we were brought on board. I offered to lose my wages but we were short of hands … The captain could not spare a man and requested the aid of the governor. I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true.
Nicol spent the next few years trying to return to Port Jackson, but without success. While thus engaged, he heard from a runaway convict that Sarah had left the colony for Bombay. Nicol did not know what to make of this information, and nor do I. Sarah did not sail for Bombay until 1796, yet Nicol claims to have heard of it in 1791–92.7 Was Sarah sending out misinformation, or had Nicol misremembered? Given his subsequent sailing schedule, the latter seems unlikely, for after 1794 Nicol was fighting in the French Revolutionary wars. Nicol visited Sarah’s parents in Lincoln, but they could tell him nothing. Hoping for the best yet fearing betrayal, he tried to get a passage to Bombay, but could not find a berth, even as a paying passenger. In all his subsequent journeying, the possibility of being reunited with Sarah is continually on his mind. ‘She was,’ he says, ‘still the idol of all my affections.’
In 1801 Nicol returned to his native Edinburgh, being ‘too old to undertake any more love pilgrimages after an individual, as I knew not in what quarter of the globe she was, or whether she were dead or alive’. But what of Sarah and her son? The children of convicts were often removed from their parents, and little John’s fate is not recorded. Sarah, in contrast, first appears in the records of the colony the day after Nicol’s tearful departure, but the telling of that story must await its proper place.
Nicol’s Australian interlude occupied a fraction of his twenty-five years at sea. Much of what he records elsewhere is of great interest to the contemporary reader, for he recalls events and cultures which were glossed over by his better educated and better connected contemporaries. The importance of Nicol’s work is magnified by the fact that he was far above the ordinary in his humanity, memory and wit. He also loved a song, and nowhere does this shine through more clearly than during his visit to Jamaica, where he lived for some time among slaves. He says of these poor people, ‘I esteemed them in my heart’ and they clearly reciprocated.
Nicol records that during his stay, he and the other crew were fed on a ‘cut and come again’ basis, and he always ensured that he took a little something extra to give to the plantation slaves. They in return invited him to a dance. Nicol was touched to find that these poorest of the poor had purchased some ‘three bit maubi’ as they called rum. They did not drink this luxury themselves, but bought it on his account, having heard that sailors prefer it. The vibrancy of the songs he heard that night shone on undimmed in Nicol’s memory for over three decades:
I lost my shoe in an old canoe
Johnio, come Winum so;
I lost my boot in a pilot boat,
Johnio, come Winum so
and
My Massa a bad man,
My Missis cry honey,
Is this the damn nigger
You buy wi my money?
Ting a ring ting, ting a ring ting, tarro
The cruel treatment of the slaves clearly appalled Nicol. He records the beating of a pregnant woman and the part he and a colleague played in terminating it. He talks of a one-legged runaway blacksmith chained to his bench, and a slave forced to wear a barbarous collar of spikes. His anger at these outrages remained, like the songs, unblunted by the years.
Nicol’s next voyage was more carefree. His journey