The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Beginning Of The Sea Story Of Australia, by
Louis Becke

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Title: The Beginning Of The Sea Story Of Australia
       1901

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: April 5, 2008 [EBook #24997]
Last Updated: January 8, 2013

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEA STORY OF AUSTRALIA ***




Produced by David Widger





 




THE BEGINNING OF THE SEA STORY 
OF AUSTRALIA  

From "The Tapu Of Banderah and Other Stories"  

By Louis Becke  

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd. 

1901  










To many people in England the mention of Australia conjures pictures of  tented gold-fields and tall, black-bearded, red-shirted bushrangers; of  mounted police recruited from "flaxen-haired younger sons of good old  English families, well-groomed and typically Anglo-Saxon"; of squatters  and sheep runs; of buckjumpers ridden by the most daring riders in the  world; and of much more to the same purpose; but never is presented a  picture of the sea or sailor folk.  

Yet the first half-century of Australian history is all to do with the  ocean. The British sailor laid the foundation of the Australian nation,  and, in the beginning, more than any other class, the sailorman did the  colonisingand did it well. This, however, is the story of most  British possessions, and generally it is gratefully remembered and the  sailor duly credited and kindly thought of for his work. But in these days  the dry west wind from the back blocks seems to have blown the taste of  brine and the sound of the seethe of the curling "white horse" out of the  mind of the native-born Australian; and the sailing day of a mail boat is  the only thing that the average colonial knows or cares to know about salt  water.  

To write on such a subject as this, one has to leave out so much, that it  is necessary to begin almost in the middle in order to reach an ending.  Sea exploration and coast surveying opened the ways; whalingit may  surprise the reader, but it is nevertheless truewas once the main  support of Australia and New Zealand; and runaway sailors formed a very  considerable part of the back country population, such men making handier  and better farm labourers, stockmen, and, later on, miners, by reason of  their adaptability to strange surroundings, than ticket-of-leave men or  the average free emigrant.  

The first four successive Governors of Australiain the beginning,  be it remembered, the continent was one colonywere captains in the  Navy. Governing in those rough days was not a mere  master-of-the-ceremonies appointment, and Phillip, Hunter, King, and  Bligh, if they made mistakes, considering their previous training, the  populations they governed and the times in which they lived, amply justify  Palmerston's words that if he wanted a thing done well in a distant part  of the world; when he wanted a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of  pluck, and plenty of common sensehe would always send for a captain  of the Navy.  

Phillip, the first of these Governors, was sent out to founda penal  settlement at Botany Bay, on the coast of New Holland,and did the work  in such fashion, in spite of every discouragement from the forces of  nature, the Home Government, and his own officers, as to well entitle him  to a place among the builders of Greater Britain. What was known of  Australia, or rather New Hollandthe name of Australia was still in  futurityin 1788, when Phillip first landed on its shores?  

Let us say nothing of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch voyages; of wrecks  and piracies; of maroonings, and massacres by blacks; of the discoveries  of Dampier and of Cook, but sum the whole up thus: the east coast of  Australia, from its northernmost extremity to its southernmost, was  practically unknown to the world, and was absolutely unknown to Englishmen  until Cook's first voyage. Cook, in the Endeavour, ran along the  whole east coast, entering a few bays, naming many points, and  particularly describing Botany Bay where he stayed some little time; then  he sailed through Torres Straits, and thence, via Batavia, home to  England, where he arrived in June, 1771. The English Government took no  advantage of his discoveries until 1786, when Botany Bay was fixed upon as  the site of a new penal settlement; and this choice was determined, more  than anything else, by the advice of Sir Joseph Banks, who, from the time  of his voyage with Cook in the Endeavour till his death, took the  keenest interest in the continent; and colonists are more indebted to the  famous naturalist for his friendly services than to any other civilian  Englishman of the time.  

Phillip's commission ordered him to proceed to Botany Bay, but authorised  him to choose another site for the settlement if he considered a better  could be found. He arrived with his fleet of transports in 1788, after a  voyage of many months' duration, so managed that, though the fleet was the  first to make the passage and was made up of more ships and more prisoners  than any succeeding fleet, there was less sickness and fewer deaths than  on any of the convoys which followed it Phillip made a careful examination  of Botany Bay, and finding it unsuitable for planting, the settlement was  removed to Port Jackson. After landing the exiles, the transports returned  to Europe via China and the East Indies, and their route was along  the north-east coast of Australia. The voyages of these returning  transports, under the navy agent, Lieutenant Short-land, were fruitful in  discoveries and adventures. Meanwhile Phillip and his officers were  working hard, building their homes and taking their recreation in  exploring the country and the coast for many miles around them. And with  such poor means as an indifferent Home Government provided, this work of  exploration went on continually under each naval governor, the pressing  want of food spurring the pioneers ever on in the search for good land;  but that very need, with the lack of vessels, of men who could be trusted,  of all that was necessary for exploration, kept them chained in a measure  to their base at Sydney Cove.  

Phillip, white-faced, cold and reserved, but with a heart full of pity,  was responsible for the lives of a thousand people in a desolate country  twelve thousand miles from Englandso desolate that his discontented  officers without exception agreed that the new colony wasthe most  God-forsaken land in the world.The convict settlers were so ill-chosen,  and the Government so neglected to supply them with even the barest  necessities from Home, that for several years after their landing they  were in constant distress from famine; and disease and death from this  cause alone was an evil regularly to be encountered by the silent,  hard-working Phillip. The only means of relief open to the starving  settlement was by importing food from Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope,  and to procure such supplies Phillip had but two ships at his disposalthe  worn-out old frigate Sirius (which was lost at Norfolk Island soon  after the founding of the settlement) and a small brig of war, the Supplywhich  for many weary months were the only means of communication with  civilisation.  

The Home Government, when they did despatch a second fleet, instead of  sending supplies for the starving people under Phillip's care, sent more  prisoners, and very little to eat was sent with them. The authorities seem  to have had an idea that a few hundred shovels, some decayed garden seeds,  and a thousand or two of Old Bailey men and women criminals, were all the  means needed to found a prosperous and self-supporting colony. How Phillip  and his successors surmounted these difficulties is another story; but in  the sea history of Australia the work of the naval governors occupies no  small space in it. Remember, too, that the Torres Straits route and the  Great Barrier Reef, now as well charted as the Solent, were only then  being slowly discovered by clumsy old sailing craft, whose masters learnt  to dread and avoid the dangers of the unknown coast as children grow  cautious of fire, by actually touching it.  

Hunter, the second Governor of New South Wales, and King, the third  Governor, both did remarkable surveying work on the coast while serving  under Phillip, and both made still more remarkable voyages to England.  Hunter was the senior naval officer under Phillip, and was in command of  the Sirius when she was lost on Norfolk Island.  

This is how the dauntless Hunter got home with the crew of the Sirius,  after waiting six months on Norfolk Island for the chance of a passage.  The Waaksamheyd, a Dutch snow{*} of 300-tons burden, which had  brought supplies to Sydney from Batavia, was engaged to take Hunter and  his shipwrecked crew to England. She was thirteen months on the  voyage, and here are some extracts from Hunter's letter to the Admiralty,  written from Portsmouth on the 23rd of April, 1792:  

I sailed from Port Jackson on the 27th of March, 1791, victualled for six  months and with sixty tons of water. We were one hundred and twenty-three  people on board all told(remember this vessel was of three hundred tons  burden). "The master was directed to call at Norfolk Island to receive  despatches, but contrary winds prevented us carrying out these orders. We  steered to the northward and made New Caledonia, passing to the westward  of it, as the master (a Dutchman) did not feel himself qualified to  navigate a vessel in these unknown seas. He had, upon leaving Port  Jackson, requested my assistance, which I gave him. In sailing to the  northward we fell in with several islands and shoals, the situations of  which we determined, and it is my intention, if the Navy Board will permit  me, to lay a short account of this northern passage before the Board, when  the discoveries will be particularly mentioned. No ship that I have heard  of having sailed between New Britain and New Ireland since that passage  was discovered by Captain Carteret in Her Majesty's sloop Swallow,  I was the more desirous to take that route.... We passed through the  Straits of Macassar and arrived at Batavia after a tedious and distressing  passage of twenty-six weeks."  
     * A snow differed somewhat slightly from a brig. It had two
     masts similar to the fore and mainmasts of a brig or ship,
     and, close abaft the mainmast, a topsail mast.

After burying an officer and two seamen at Batavia, Hunter left that place  on October 20th, reached the Cape on the 17th of December, and was driven  to sea again after the loss of two anchors, till the 30th. So weak and ill  were his men from the effects of their stay in the unhealthy climate of  Batavia, that he had to remain at the Cape till the 18th of January, when  he again put to sea and sailed for England.  

Hunter's brief and precise official account of his voyage discloses little  of the great distress of that thirteen months' passage; but it shows how  the spirit of discovery was in the man; how, in spite of the care of one  hundred and twenty-three people in a 300-ton vessel, and half rations, he  had time and energy enough to think of surveying. One result of his voyage  was his strongly expressed opinion that the proper route home from  Australia was via Cape Hornnow the recognised homeward route  for sailing vessels.  

The name of King ought never to be forgotten, for the services of father  and son in Australian waters were very great. King, the elder, came out  with Phillip as second lieutenant of the crazy old Sirius. He had  previously served under Phillip in the East Indies, and soon after the  arrival of the first fleet in "Botany Bay," as New South Wales was then  called, he was sent with a detachment of Marines and a number of convicts  to colonise Norfolk Island. His task was a hard one, but he accomplished  it in the face of almost heartbreaking difficulties.  

Phillip, finding that his despatches failed to awaken the Home Government  to a sense of the deplorable situation of the colony he had founded at  Port Jackson, determined to send home a man who would represent the true  state of affairs. He chose King for the service. Every other officerboth  naval and militarywas ready to go, and would have eloquently  described the miseries of the colonists, and harped on the necessity for  an instant abandonment of the settlementthey were writing letters  to this effect by every chance they could get to forward thembut  this was not what Phillip wanted. He, and he alone, recognised the future  possibilities of New South Wales, writing even at the time of his deepest  distress:This will be the greatest acquisition Great Britain has ever  made.All he asked was for reasonable help in the way of food and decent  settlers who could work. All he got in answer to his requests was the  further shipment of the scum of the gaols and the hulksand some  more spades and seeds. King believed in his chief and cordially worked  with himand King was the silent Phillip's one friend.  

So King went home, his voyage thither being one of the most singular ever  made by naval officer. He left Sydney Cove in April, 1790, and after a  tedious passage reached Batavia. Here he engaged a small Dutch vessel to  take him to the Cape of Good Hope, sailing for that port in August Before  the ship had been a week at sea, save four men, the whole crew, including  the master, were stricken with the hideous "putrid fever"a common  disease in "country" ships at that time. King, a quick and masterful man,  took command, and with his four well men lived on deck in a tent to escape  contagion. The rest of the ship's company, which included a surgeon, lay  below delirious, and one after another of them dyingseventeen of  them died in a fortnight.  

King tells how, when handling the bodies to throw them overboard, he and  his men covered their mouths with sponges soaked in vinegar to prevent  contagion. In this short-handed condition he navigated the vessel to the  Mauritius, where, "having heard of the misunderstanding with the French"  the gallant officer refused to take passage in a French frigate; but  procuring a new crew worked his way to the Cape, where he arrived in  September, reaching England in December, after a passage which altogether  occupied eight monthsa letter from England to Australia and a reply  to it now occupies about ten weeks.  

In England King was well received, being confirmed in his appointment as  Commandant of Norfolk Island, and he succeeded in getting some help for  his fellow-colonists. Upon his return to his island command the little  colony proved a great worry. The military guard mutinied, and King armed  the convict settlers to suppress the mutiny! This act of his gave great  offence in some quarters. Phillip had resigned the command at Sydney, and  the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, who was in charge, was the  commanding officer of the New South Wales Regimentmore celebrated  in the records for its mutinies than its servicesand the  degradation of the Norfolk Island detachment by King was never forgiven by  the soldiers, but the Home Government quite approved his conduct.  

But King made one very serious mistake. He had sent a vessel to New  Zealand, and from thence had imported certain Maori chiefs to instruct the  settlers on Norfolk Island in flax cultivation.  

King had pledged his word to these noble savages to return them to their  native country, and in order to do so, and make sure of their getting  there, he himself embarked in a vessel, leaving his command for a few days  to the charge of his subordinate, while he sailed the thirteen hundred  miles to New Zealand and back. For this he was censured, but was  notwithstanding afterwards appointed the third Governor of New South  Wales, succeeding Hunter.  

King's son, who was born at Norfolk Island in 1791, entered the Navy in  1807, and saw any amount of fighting in the French war; then went to  Australia in 1817, and surveyed its eastern coast in such a manner that,  when he returned to England in 1823 there was little but detail work left  for those who followed him. Then he was appointed to the Adventure,  which, in conjunction with the Beagle, surveyed the South American  coast. In 1830 he retired and settled in Australia, dying there in 1856.  His son in turn entered the service, but early followed his father's  example, and turned farmer in Australia. He still lives, and is a member  of the Legislative Council or Upper House of the New South Wales  Parliament.  

Here is a family record! Three generations, all naval officers, and all  men who have taken an active share in the founding and growth of Greater  Britain; and yet not one man in a thousand in Australia, much less in  England, has probably the remotest idea of the services rendered to the  Empire by this family.  

The fourth and last naval Governor, Bligh, is more often remembered in  connection with the Bounty mutiny than for his governorship of New  South Wales. He was deposed by the military in 1808, for his action in  endeavouring to suppress the improper traffic in rum which was being  carried on by the officers of the New South Wales Regiment. This second  mutiny, of which he was the victim, certainly cannot be blamed against the  honesty of his administration; and the assertion, so often repeated, that  he hid himself under his bed when the mutinous soldierswho had been  well primed with rum by their officersmarched to Government House,  can best be answered by the statement that Nelson publicly thanked him for  his skill and gallantry at Copenhagen, and by the heroism which he showed  in the most remarkable boat voyage in history. He may have been the most  tyrannical and overbearing naval officer that ever entered the service,  but he was not the man to hide himself under a bed.  

There were other naval officers of the early Australian days whose  services were no less valuable to the infant colony. Think of the men  associated with this time, and of the names famous in history, which are  in some way linked with Australia. Dampier, Cook, La Pérouse, Bligh,  Edwards and the Pandora, Vancouver, Flinders, Bassall these  are familiar to the world, and there are others in plenty; for example,  Grant, who in his vessel, the brig Lady Nelson, did such work in  Australian waters as, if performed nowadays say in Africa, would have been  recorded in hundreds of newspaper interviews, many process-work pictures  and a 21s. book with cheap editions!  

What a story is that of Bass and Flinders! Such noble, disinterested  courage! Such splendid service to English colonisation, and such a sad  ending to it all.  

Bass and Flinders, in their tiny open boat, the Tom Thumb, and in  the sloop Norfolk, dotting the blank map of Australia with the  names of their discoveriesit is not necessary surely to remind the  reader that Bass began, and together the two men completed, the discovery  and passage of the straits between Van Dieman's Land and the main  continent. Bass surveyed something like six hundred miles of the  Australian coast in a whaleboat with a crew of six men! And one cannot  summarise Flinders' work in the Norfolk and in the Investigator  before the old ship was condemned and converted into a hulk to rot in  Sydney Harbour.  

How were these men rewarded for their services, and what has posterity  done to keep their names in remembrance? In 1803 Flinders started for  England, was wrecked, and making his way to the Mauritius was there, to  the everlasting disgrace of Napoleon's Island governor, detained a  prisoner for more than six years. Of course the English Government  ultimately procured his release, but it took them all that time to do it;  and when he did get back they promoted his juniors over his head. When he  died in 1814, a broken heart was as much as anything else the cause of his  death.  

Bass, after leaving Australia, went to England and sailed in an armed  merchantman bound to South America. At Valparaiso the Governor of the town  refused to allow the vessel to trade. Bass, who was then in command of the  ship, threatened to bombard the town, and the refusal was withdrawn; but,  watching their opportunity the authorities seized him when he was off his  guard, and it was supposed he was sent to the interior. As the years  passed by there were one or two reports that he was seen working in the  mines, but it seems to have been no one's business to inquire into his  fate. It is more than probable that the brave Bass died a slave.  

But the whalers, "South Seamen" and East Indiamen, did no less good  service than the King's ships in the early days, and yet even the old  books do them but scant justice. For the first fifty years of Australian  colonisation the merchantmen charted reefs, discovered harbours, and did  just those things for the desert waters of the Australasian Pacific as  were afterwards done by land explorers, in their camel and pack-horse  journey-ings into the waterless interior of the continent And the stories  that could be told! The whalers and sealers who were cast away on desert  islands, and lived Robinson Crusoe lives for years! The open boat voyages.  The massacres by blacks. The cuttings-off by the savage islanders of the  South Pacific. The mutinies and sea fights!  

Hobart in Tasmania, Twofold Bay in New South Wales, and many New Zealand  ports were the great whaling stations, and Sydney the commercial  headquarters. Fifty years ago there were something like twenty whalers in  the Hobart Fleet alone; now, one or two hulks lying in Whaler'sRotten  Rowis practically all that survives of the trade.  

The Americans took a leading part in the industry, and ships with New  BedfordorNantucket under their sterns traversed the Pacific  from one end to the other. Australian whaling was begun (Dampier reported  whales as early as 1699) in Governor Phillip's time, by some of the  convict transports coming out with whaling equipment in their holds, and  after disembarking their human freight, departing for the "Fisheries."  

Some of these ships often remained in the Pacific for years, making  cruises of twelve or eighteen months' duration, returning to Sydney when  full ships to discharge and refresh, their cargoes being sent to England  in some returning "favourite fast clipper," while the whalers went back to  their greasy and dangerous vocation, until they were lost, or cut off by  the savages, or worn out and converted into hulks.  

What numbers of them were lost! and what wonderful and  blood-curdling experiences their crews underwent when they were castaways,  or deserted, or were marooned on "the islands"! Here is a story of a  vessel lost in Torres Straits in 1836not a whaler, but an East  Indiaman. Some of her crew and passengers managed to land on the mainland  of North Australia and were there captured by blacks. Six months later a  few survivors were rescued and landed in Sydney; and this is what had  happened to the only woman of the party, Mrs. Fraser, wife of the captain:  She had seen her child die, her husband speared to death before her face,  the chief mate roasted alive, the second mate burned over a slow fire  until he was too crippled to walk, and otherwise horribly and  indescribably tortured, and she herself was made to climb trees for honey  for her captors by having lighted gum branches applied to her body.  

In another instance a vessel was wrecked on the North Australian coast in  1846, and nearly twenty years later the sole survivor turned up at a  cattle station near Port Denison, in North Queensland. He had been all  this time living among the blacks, unable to escape, and civilisation had  found its way, in the years that had elapsed, far enough into the back  country to reach him. The stockman who first saw the man took him for a  black and levelled his rifle at him, when he was stopped from shooting the  poor fellow by the words, "Don't fire, I am an Englishman."  

Here, told in a few words, is the story of the first landing in Victoria,  and the first discovery of coal in New South Wales: On the map of  Tasmania, in the north-east corner, is marked the Furneaux Group of  islands in Bass's Straits. Dotted about the cluster are such names as  Preservation Island, Clarke Island, and Armstrong Channel. These names all  commemorate the wreck of the Sydney Cove, Captain Hamilton, bound  from Calcutta to Sydney, and lost in February, 1797. She sprang a leak on  the 13th of December, 1796, and her crew, chiefly Lascars, managed to keep  her afloat till the 9th of the following February, when the skipper made  Preservation Island, and there beached her. All the people landed safely,  and got what stores they could ashore. Then it was decided to despatch the  long boat to Port Jackson for help.  

Thompson the mate, Clarke the supercargo, three European seamen, and a  dozen Lascars manned the boat and left the island on the 29th of February.  On the 1st of March the boat was driven ashore and battered to pieces  close to Cape Howe (near the present boundary line of Victoria and New  South Wales) three hundred miles from Sydney, in a country never before  trodden by the feet of white men. All hands were saved, and after a  fortnight's rest, feeding on such shellfish as they could obtain, the  party set out to walk to Sydney.  

Clarke kept a rough diary of this journey, telling of encounters with  blacks, of death and madness by starvation and other privations; of how  they crossed wide and shark-infested rivers by building rafts of tree  branches cut down and fashioned with jack knives; of how the lives of men  were purchased from the blacks by strips of clothing; and of how they  counted the buttons on their ragged garments, and thus reckoned how many  lives could be bought from the savages with what remained.  

The terrible march lasted until the 15th of May; then three exhausted men,  horrible to look upon, and the only survivors of seventeen who had, sixty  days before, begun the journey, were picked up a few miles to the south of  Sydney by a fishing boat.  

The spot where they were seen walking along the beach was close to Port  Hacking, and Clarke, three days before his rescue, had lit a fire and  cooked some fish with coal he picked up. This was the first discovery of  the great southern coal-fields of New South Wales.  

There are other less gruesome stories than these; for example that of the  Sydney whaler Policy, which, sailing under a Letter of Marque for  the Moluccas, was set upon by a Dutch private ship of warthe Swiftat  one time a formidable and successful French privateer. Captain Foster of  the Policy, though his armament was very inferior and many of his  crew were prostrated with fever, engaged the Dutchman, fought him for some  hours, and brought his ship a prize into Sydney Harbour. Two Spanish  vessels were captured in the same way by armed Sydney whalers; so that  Australian waters have seen a little fighting.  

On board the convict ships of those early days there were often mutinies,  desperate and sometimes bloody, and some of these led to remarkable  results. In one instance the soldiersnot the prisonersrose  upon the crew and the ship's officers, turned them adrift in an open boat,  and carried off the ship. They were recaptured afterwards by a man-of-war  in the Indian Ocean and brought to justice. Convict mutinies often were  only suppressed after desperate hand-to-hand fighting; then a day or two  later the ringleaders would be hanged from the yardarm, and a dozen or  more convicts flogged at the gratings. And these things, be it remembered,  were going on only an old man's lifetime ago.  

New Zealand is fertile in adventure stories, and the well-known Boyd  massacre is paralleled by two or three other tragedies equally as  dreadful, if less often told. The whaling history of that colony would  make a booknot of the kind suitable for young ladies seminaries,  'tis true, but mighty strong in human interest, and presenting the race as  well as the sex problem for the study of the reader.  

Statistics are terribly dry reading, but by way of contrasting the  condition of Australian shipping then and now, it is worth while quoting a  few figures.  

In 1835, the heyday of the colonial whaling trade, when the smoky glare of  the whaleships' try-works lit up the darkness of the Pacific ocean night,  there were forty-one vessels, of a total tonnage of 9,257 tons, registered  in New South Wales, employed in the fishery. In the same year twenty-two  vessels arrived in Sydney from the various grounds, their cargoes of  whalebone, sealskins, and sperm and black oil valuing altogether about  £150,000. Now the whaling trade in Southern Seas is represented by two or  three small and poorly equipped ships from Hobart, though the whalessperm,  right, and humpbackare again as plentiful as they were in the first  years of the fishery. One of the present writers, less than four years  ago, counted over three hundred humpbacks passing to the northward in two  days on the coast of New South Wales, while there were ten times that  number of the swift and dangerous "fin-back" whales travelling with them.  

But, though the whale fishery is extinct, there is something to be shown  instead.  

It has been said that twenty-two whalers entered Sydney in 1835, which  means that during that year not twice that number of vessels of all  descriptions entered the portfor the whaling was then the  trade. But the steamer was beginning to count, and the beginning of the  Sydney steam trade is not without a peculiar interestfor Londoners  at any rate.  

The Sophia Jane was the first steamer in Australasian waters. She  arrived in Sydney from London, via the Cape of Good Hope, with  cargo and passengers, on the 14th of May. This vessel was built on the  Thames by a well-known shipbuilder of the time, William Evans, who was the  builder of many other notable early steamers. She was running for a summer  or two as a passenger steamer between Gravesend and London; then between  different ports in the south of England; and then, under a Lieutenant  Biddulph, of the Royal Navy, she was sent to Sydney. The little vessel was  126 feet long by 20 feet beam, drew 6 feet of water, was of 256 tons  burden, and had accommodation for fifty-four passengers; her engines were  of 50 horse-power, and her speed eight knots an hour. This was the first  steamer in the Southern Seasthe forerunner of a fleet of mighty  leviathans.  









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