In January and February 1688 two small English buccaneer ships were anchored in a rocky inlet on the desert northwest coast of Australia. There they waited out a dangerous season of storms and contrary winds in the tropical seas to the north. While they cleaned the ships’ bottoms and repaired their sails, an officer of one of the ships, William Dampier, had plenty of time to observe the Aborigines. When the English first arrived, the Aborigines threatened them with their wooden weapons. “At last the captain ordered the drum to be beaten, which was done of a sudden with much vigor, purposely to scare the poor creatures. They hearing the noise, ran away as fast as they could drive, and when they ran away in haste, they would cry ‘Gurry, gurry,’ speaking deep in the throat.”
After the Aborigines had become more accustomed to them, the English tried to induce some of them to help carry barrels of water to the ships, by giving them some old clothes.
We put them on them, thinking that this finery would have brought them to work heartily for us . . . but all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for they stood like statues, without motion, but grinned like so many monkeys, staring one upon another; for these poor creatures seem not accustomed to carry burdens, and I believe that one of our ship boys of ten years old would carry as much as one of them. So we were forced to carry our water ourselves, and they very fairly put off the clothes again, and laid them down, as if clothes were only to work in. I did not perceive that they had any great liking to them at first, neither did they seem to admire any thing that we had.
The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods [Hottentots] of Monomatapa, though a nasty people, yet for wealth are gentlemen to these; who have no houses, and skin garments, sheep, poultry, and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs, etc., as the Hottentots have; and setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes. They are tall, straight-bodied, and thin, with small long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads, and great brows. Their eyelids are always half closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes; they being so troublesome here, that no fanning will keep them from coming to one’s face; and without the assistance of both hands to keep them off, they will creep into one’s nostrils, and mouth too, if the lips are not shut very close; so that from their infancy being thus annoyed with these insects, they do never open their eyes as other people; and therefore they cannot see far, unless they hold up their heads, as if they were looking at somewhat over them.
They have great bottle-noses, pretty full lips, and wide mouths. The two fore-teeth of their upper jaw are wanting in all of them, men and women, old and young; whether they draw them out, I know not. Neither have they any beards. They are long-visaged, and of a very unpleasing aspect, having no one graceful feature in their faces. Their hair is black, short and curled, like that of the Negroes, and not long and lank, like the common Indians. The color of their skins, both of their faces and the rest of their body, is coal-black, like that of the Negroes of Guinea.
They have no sort of clothes, but a piece of the rind of a tree tied like a girdle about their waists, and a handful of long grass, or three or four small green boughs full of leaves, thrust under their girdle, to cover their nakedness.
They have no houses, but lie in the open air without any covering, the earth being their bed, and the heaven their canopy. Whether they cohabit one man to one woman or promiscuously I know not; but they do live in companies, 20 or 30 men, women, and children together. Their only food is a small sort of fish, which they get by making weirs of stone across little coves or branches of the sea; every tide bringing in the small fish and there leaving them for a prey to these people, who constantly attend there to search for them at low water. This small fry I take to be the top of their fishery. They have no instruments to catch any great fish, should they come; and such seldom stay to be left behind at low water; nor could we catch any fish with our hooks and lines all the while we lay there. In other places at low water they seek for cockles, mussels, and periwinkles. Of these shellfish there are fewer still, so that their chiefest dependence is upon what the sea leaves in their weirs, which be it much or little they gather up and march to the place of their abode. There the old people that are not able to stir abroad by reason of their age and the tender infants wait their return, and what Providence has bestowed on them they presently broil on the coals and eat it in common. Sometimes they get as many fish as makes them a plentiful banquet, and at other times they scarce get every one a taste, but be it little or much that they get, every one has his part, as well the young and tender, the old and feeble, who are not able to go abroad, as the strong and lusty. When they have eaten they lie down till the next low water, and then all that are able march out, be it night or day, rain or shine, ‘tis all one; they must attend the weirs, or else they must fast, for the earth affords them no food at all. There is neither herb, root, pulse, nor any sort of grain for them to eat, that we saw; nor any sort of bird or beast that they can catch, having no instruments wherewithal to do so.
I did not perceive that they did worship any thing. These poor creatures have a sort of weapon to defend their weir, or fight with their enemies, if they have any that will interfere with their poor fishery. They did at first endeavor with their weapons to frighten us, who lying ashore deterred them from one of their fishing places. Some of them had wooden swords, others had a sort of lances. The sword is a long straight pole sharp at one end, and hardened afterwards by heat. I saw no iron, nor any other sort of metal. . . .
At last we went over to the islands, and there we found a great many of the natives; I do believe there were 40 on one island, men, women, and children.
They found more Aborigines on another nearby island; some of the women and children fled as the strangers approached their camp, while others “lay still by a fire, making a doleful noise, as if we had been coming to devour them; but when they saw we did not intend to harm them, they were pretty quiet, and the rest that fled from us at our first coming returned again.”
The Aborigines seemed to have no boats of any kind; once the English spotted some swimming from one island to another, brought four of them aboard, and gave them some rice and boiled meat. “They did greedily devour what we gave them, but took no notice of the ship, or any thing in it, and when they were set on land again they ran away again as fast as they could.”
William Dampier was a gifted observer and stylist. Although he had little formal education, later in his life he was quite welcome in literary London and among the scientific correspondents of the Royal Society. His great passion had been to see distant corners of the earth. In the 1680s the days of the great first reconnaissances of the maritime world (Columbus, Magellan, Barents, Hudson) were long past, and the age of systematic scientific exploration (Bougainville, Cook, and on to our own times) was still far in the future. The most frequent European voyagers in uncharted waters in the 1680s were buccaneers. Dampier was not happy about the company he kept, but in his writings he neither concealed the pillaging of his companions nor apologized for it. Frequently we find him observing plants, animals, and natives, keeping up his notes day by day, recording the many times when his good advice was rejected, amid the brawls, the splittings up of squadrons, the constant craziness of people who seem to have been more like a motorcycle gang than a Mafia.
In 1688 Dampier, thirty-six years old, was nearing the end of his first voyage around the world, a series of improvisations and misadventures that took him twelve years. After finding little worth pillaging on the Pacific coast of South and Central America and waiting in vain for the rich prize of the annual galleon from Manila to Acapulco, he and his captain, both eager to quit buccaneering and take up honest trade, had persuaded their crew to set out across the Pacific. They were lucky to make it to Guam before their food supplies were exhausted; later the crew told them that if the food had run out, they had resolved to eat first the captain, then Dampier and others who had promoted the venture. Europeans confronting unknown and warlike peoples often feared that they would be eaten, as did the Africans who were loaded on the slave ships. In Dampier’s experience it was not the shy and weak Bardi who were the potential cannibals but his fellow Englishmen.
After an effort to trade at Mindanao in the southern Philippines and the stop on the Australian coast, Dampier and a few others jumped ship and made a risky voyage in a small native boat to Aceh on the north end of Sumatra. After more wanderings in Asian waters, including a voyage to what is now northern Vietnam and a spell as chief gunner of the dismal little English outpost at Bengkulu on the west coast of Sumatra, Dampier finally made his way home in 1691. He was made much of in London as a source of excellent, clear information about previously unknown parts of the world and as a teller of wonderful stories. In 1693, in what may have been the finest meeting of diary stylists in the history of the English language, he dined with John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. They convened at Evelyn’s house, which was soon to be let to—and trashed by—Tsar Peter the Great and his suite. Dampier’s book about his voyage, published in 1697, was a great success. Some think his description of the Australian Aborigines influenced Swift’s picture of the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels. In 1699 Dampier was off again, this time as captain of a royal ship on a formal and legal voyage of exploration. He did some important exploring around Australia and even returned to the same barren stretch of coast he had seen in 1688. But there were many difficulties with his ships and crews, and he ended his homebound voyage ignominiously when his rotten ship sank at Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and his crew had to wait to be picked off the island by a passing ship. He made more voyages and published more books about them but never had another voyage as carefree and as full of delight in new sights as his first.
Dampier’s habit of careful observation of non-European peoples had begun early in his travels, when he encountered the Miskito Indians of the Central American coast, excellent fishermen often hired by the buccaneers for that skill. He was not interested in languages or kinship, key problems for the modern anthropologist, but he always noted food and ways of getting it, boatbuilding skills, and a bit about any festivals he saw. It is not surprising that this fine observer could not see much more than material deprivation in the Aboriginal peoples of Australia; Modern anthropologists have needed all their resources of hard work and imaginative sympathy to begin to understand these remote people. Well into the twentieth century, anthropologists found the Bardi people still clinging to their ancient way of life on the Dampier Peninsula, still fishing in their coastal weirs. They have a beautiful language with twenty-two different affixes to modify the use and meaning of a verb. People lived in small exogamous bands, with complex rules about who was and was not marriageable in nearby bands. Elaborate rituals took place, especially for the initiation of young men into adulthood, at special grounds not to be approached for ordinary purposes. Tiny childlike spirits, born as spirit guides of particular children, were said to live in special places, accompany men on journeys, warn them of danger. They made themselves known in dreams. Everything important came to a man in a dream. Poor in objects, building nothing more elaborate than their fish weirs, the Bardi found their riches in the elaboration of human basics—language, story, ritual, kinship, dreams. Today they live in houses in a nearby settlement, their old ways increasingly in disarray.
Dampier’s account of his sojourn on that remote coast, with its distinctive ironic voice, had been shaped by repeated tellings and by some forgetting. He was a wary pilot and a meticulous observer of the tides; his expertise may have been responsible for the decision to repair the ships in an outer bay, where they would not have to risk the strong tidal currents of some of the channels. He noted that the native people were aware of the tides and came down at low tide to check their weirs. He recorded seeing some of them swimming from island to island. But there is no trace of amazement at the level of understanding of the tides that such swimming must have required; a swimmer could have survived only if he or she had known how to wait for slack water at low or high tide or exactly how to swim with a current.
It is highly probable that the ships on which Dampier arrived were the first the Bardi had ever seen. They built no structures, saw no different people, wore almost no clothes. How could they even begin to describe the wooden sides of the ship, its masts and flapping sails, its pale-skinned humans wearing clothes? Dampier says they ran away, shouting, “Gurry, gurry.” Probably, says a modern student of the Bardi language, they were calling the strangers ngaarri, the most feared, most tricky and malevolent of all the kinds of spirits.