Botany Bay, first contact

Some encounters in history are decided before either party has understood what is being decided. Two men stand on a beach. A third sits at the tiller of a boat twenty yards offshore. None of them know that the next quarter of an hour will be remembered for two and a half centuries, on two continents, in languages that have not yet met. The hinge of an empire turns on the small choices of men who believe themselves to be making only the choices of an afternoon.

THE SAILOR FROM MARTON

The man at the tiller is forty-one years old, the son of a Yorkshire farm labourer, raised in a two-room cottage at Marton in Cleveland and apprenticed at eighteen to a Whitby coal-shipper. He has come up to this command by soundings and chart-work in the cold seas off Newfoundland, by the patient drawing of coastlines, by the observation of a transit of Venus from Tahiti the previous June. He is Lieutenant James Cook RN, eleven years a commissioned officer, on his first independent command. He has read Dampier and Tasman; he has the Admiralty's secret instructions in a locked drawer in the great cabin, directing him, after the transit, to sail south in search of the supposed continent and, finding inhabited land, to take possession with the Consent of the Natives. The phrase is the Admiralty's; he has copied it into his journal. He believes himself a careful man.

THE APPROACH

On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1770 the Endeavour lies at single anchor in seven fathoms off the south shore of a wide bay he has, on the chart drawn that morning, called Sting-Ray Harbour for the rays of the shoals. The southerly has dropped. The sky is high and the light is the clean hard light of a New Holland autumn. He has the pinnace lowered. He goes down into it with Mr Banks the gentleman botanist in his good coat, Dr Solander, the sailmaster Molyneux at the sheet, six oarsmen, and the marine sergeant Edgcumbe at the bow with a Brown Bess loaded. The boat pulls in. At twenty yards from the surf line the oars are held water. Two men have stood up out of a low rise behind the beach and walked down to the water. They are stripped to the waist. They carry, by his journal entry made that night, long, dark wooden spears, four-pointed, perhaps eight or nine feet. They are not the first natives his people have seen on the coast. They are the first who have shown that they intend to oppose a landing.

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR OFF THE BEACH

He calls across the water. He tells them, in the King's English which they cannot possibly understand, that he is not their enemy, that he has cloth and beads, that he would be permitted to come ashore. He throws a few brass nails into the surf as a token of intention. The nails sink. The two men do not move toward them. The elder raises his spear. It is now that the quarter of an hour begins to dilate, because he sees, in the held water of the oars and the cocked musket at the bow and the raised spear on the sand, the whole arithmetic of the next century pressed into a single decision he must make alone. He has not come round the world to fire on men from a boat; he has been told to take possession with their consent; he has been raised in the chapel-going caution of a Yorkshire village and he has the Admiralty's phrase in his journal. He also has Edgcumbe with the musket, and Banks and Solander on the bottom-boards behind him, and the certainty that if the boat goes in among the spears one of his people is killed. He has read enough of Tasman to know what is taken from a commander who loses men on a beach. He weighs the spear and the musket and the phrase in the journal, and he settles on what he will afterwards call, in the entry made that night, a middle course. He has Edgcumbe fire over their heads. The shot is loud at thirty yards. The two men do not move. The elder, after a long second, throws his spear. It falls short of the boat by ten feet. He fires himself, the second barrel, small-shot, at the elder's leg. The elder yelps and lifts the leg. The younger throws a second spear that lands between Banks and Solander on the bottom-boards. Banks reaches down and picks it up. The two men turn and walk, not run, up the rise into the trees, and do not come back into sight.

THE LANDING

The boat goes in on the empty shallows. The marines step out into knee-deep water with their muskets held high. He walks up the soft sand to the rise behind the beach where eight or ten huts of bark stand among the trees, their cooking-fires still warm. The huts are empty. He takes nothing out of them. On a flat stone in the largest he sets down a string of glass beads, four iron nails, and a strip of red cloth. He goes back to the boat. He is aboard the Endeavour by sunset and he writes the entry that night by the stern-lantern, careful, exact, and uneasy. All they seem'd to want, he writes of the people of the bay, was for us to be gone.

THE TREES

The men in the trees are, by the oral tradition recorded in the twentieth century, two elders of the Gweagal clan of the Dharawal nation, defending the country at the only point of the visit at which it could be defended. They have watched the great vessel stand in across the heads since dawn. They have seen the lowering of a smaller boat and the coming-in of pale men with sticks. They do not know what kind of beings these are. They have decided, between themselves, that the country will be held. When the elder is struck on the leg by the small-shot and the boat puts in regardless, they retreat to the trees and remain there. For the eight days the Endeavour lies in the bay they will watch from the trees, every day, and not approach. The presents on the flat stone, by the last visit on the day before sailing, are gone. The British believe, on no evidence, that the people have taken them. The tradition holds that they were not touched.

THE QUARTERDECK AND THE CHART

Eight days in the bay. Mr Banks and Dr Solander take up, by their own count, three hundred and thirty-eight new plant specimens out of the tidal flats and the heath behind, the haul for which he scratches out Sting-Ray Harbour on the chart and writes in Botany Bay. On the sixth of May he weighs anchor and stands out through the heads and sails north up the coast. He does not return. On the twenty-second of August, on a small island in the Torres Strait that he names Possession Island, he steps ashore with a party, hoists the colours, and claims the eastern coast of the country he calls New South Wales for the Crown of Great Britain, with no native present to consent or refuse. The phrase from the Admiralty's instructions, with the Consent of the Natives, does not appear in the journal entry for that day.

THE LONG WATER

Eighteen years later the First Fleet stood in across the same heads with eleven ships and seven hundred and fifty-one convicts and found Botany Bay too open and the soil too poor and moved north to Port Jackson. The dispossession he had not intended became the dispossession he had begun. He himself did not live to see it; he was killed in the shallows at Kealakekua Bay in February 1779, on his third voyage, struck down at the water's edge by men whose country he had misread. The transcript of the Endeavour journal, in his careful clerk's hand, lies today in the National Library of Australia at Canberra. The first European description of an Australian Aboriginal weapon, the spear Banks took out of the bottom-boards, lies in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. The two men on the beach are not named in the journal. They are named, now, in the country whose coast they tried, for a quarter of an hour on a bright autumn afternoon, to hold.

THE BEACH

Some encounters in history are decided before either party has understood what is being decided, and what is decided in them outlives, by centuries, the men who decided it. The careful Yorkshire sailor at the tiller believed himself to be choosing a middle course; the elders on the sand believed themselves to be holding the country. Both were right within their own quarter of an hour. Beyond it, neither was. On the south shore of Kamay, the bay the British called Botany, the sand still runs down to the water at the place where the boat came in, and the casuarinas behind it still bend in the southerly off the heads, and there is, on a small headland above the landing-place, a low stone monument that names the lieutenant and does not name the two men he fired upon.