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In which the white man kills the native population without even trying. But they save one or two as well
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It’s quite likely that the first black man killed by the First Fleeters was actually one they brought with them. George Nelson, the cook on the convict ship Prince of Wales was “a negro”, as described by First Fleet diarist Arthur Bowes Smyth (who doesn’t even think enough of Nelson to bother mentioning him by name).
Things went very awry for Nelson on February 15, 1788, as he was getting off the Prince of Wales via a rope. “...two of the boys of that ship playing tricks with him”, Bowes Smyth wrote, “shook him off the rope, and the poor fellow sunk down and was drowned, not being able to swim. Many sailors jumped overboard to save him, but he sunk and did not come up again.”
Unlike Nelson’s fate, early relations between the natives and the newcomers were relatively cordial, perhaps because the Aboriginal tribes figured this arrangement was temporary. The other times these weird-looking white guys turned up they hung around just long enough to get some food and water and then left.
So the natives apparently decided to treat them like less-than-welcome house guests – maybe if we give them what they want and humour them for a bit, they’ll go away. But, after a while, it became clear to them that these interlopers weren’t going away any time soon. Kind of like unwelcome house guests who start to pull out your sofa bed and ask if you have any bed sheets they could use.
That’s when things started to get a bit testy on both sides. The locals start to have issues with the newbies taking all the fish, chopping down the trees and generally wrecking the joint and so some of them began poking various whities full of holes.
In turn the whities didn’t like seeing their friends turned into human sieves and so decided to return serve. On March 6, 1789, sick of the natives’ incursions into their camp, a posse of convicts downed tools and headed back along the track to Botany Bay to mete out some revenge.
According to Marine Watkin Tench’s report, the Aboriginal tribe saw them coming a mile away and attacked.
“Our heroes (one wonders if Tench was taking the piss by calling them that) were immediately routed, and separately endeavoured to effect their escape by any means which were left. In their flight one was killed, and seven were wounded, for the most part very severely: those who had the good fortune to outstrip their comrades and arrive in camp, first gave the alarm; and a detachment of marines, under an officer, was ordered to march to their relief.”
But they were too late to repel the attackers; though they did bring back the body of the dead convict. Phillip was incensed by the attack, as the convicts had fibbed to him and said they had been innocently picking sweet tea when they were suddenly set upon by the dastardly natives.
But his mood changed when some of the convicts finally told the truth; the next day the ringleaders all received 150 lashes. Phillip had Arabanoo – an Aboriginal man kidnapped in December 1788 in an odd effort by Phillip to improve relations – watch the convicts get whipped. Phillip felt it would be taken as a sign of his fairness in dealing with those who harmed Aboriginal tribes. But, according to Tench, Arabanoo figured these white guys were sick in the head – “he displayed on the occasion symptoms of disgust and terror only”.
Around the same time the colonists managed to kill off a number of Aboriginal people without even trying. In March and April, the settlers would routinely find bodies of native men, women and children in the inlets and coves of the harbour. The pustules all over their bodies were a clear indication they had died of smallpox.
“From the great number of dead natives found in every part of the harbour,” wrote William Bradley, lieutenant on the Sirius, in early 1789, “it appears that the smallpox had made dreadful havock (sic) among them. We did not see a canoe or a native the whole way coming up the harbour and were told that scarce any had been seen lately, except laying dead in and about their miserable habitations, whence it appears that they are deserted by their companions as soon as the disorder comes out on them.”
Smallpox was a disease well-known to the white settlers of Sydney Cove, as the scars some wore on their faces did attest.
But it was an entirely new – and extremely unwelcome – development for the Aboriginal people whose immune systems weren’t really up to warding it off. And so they began dying. A number of suggestions for where the disease came from were floated. In a list of possibilities, Watkin Tench started off by blaming the French. Yep, it must have been those shifty cheese-eating surrender monkeys who had spent time in Botany Bay the previous year that had brought it with them.
He also made the faintly ridiculous suggestion that William Dampier introduced it when he landed in what is now Western Australia and it travelled all the way across the country to infect Aboriginal tribes on the east coast.
Bizarrely Tench places “hey maybe we brought it here 12 months ago” in last place on his list. Call me crazy, but if you set up camp in a location and, a year later, the native population starts karking it of a disease you’re quite familiar with, then odds are pretty high that it’s your fault.
In April, Phillip visited one of the beaches where bodies had been reported. There he found a boy aged nine or 10 pouring water on the head of an old man lying on the sand. Nearby was the body of a female child and her mother.
The old man and the boy were lifted into the boat and taken back to Sydney Cove, though not before Arabanoo – who was on the boat, buried the female child.
The two survivors were taken to surgeon John White’s hospital at Sydney Cove and put in quarantine. The boy’s name was, apparently, Nanbaree – the word the old man called him. The man did not survive, but Nanbaree did. The surgeon White would adopt him, giving him a mouthful of a name in Andrew Sneap Hammond Douglass White.
Nanbaree would spend the rest of his life split between his native world and that of the newcomers. He would live in the settlement for a time and became a sailor. But when back in Sydney he would go bush and take part in a number of ritual battles. One such battle – his final one – would see him cross paths with James Squire.