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In which Governor Phillip decides kidnapping is a great way to improve race relations
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As white guys go, Arthur Phillip was a fair man when it came to dealing with the native population. Other white guys may have set about eradicating them just to get the blighters out of the way. Because, after all, all dark-skinned people were savages unlikely to ever evolve to the level of white people, am I right? Yes, of course I’m being sarcastic.
But not Phillip. He could have ordered the military to knock them off, but he didn’t. Not even when they chose to kill some white guys. Well, not for a whole two years, anyway.
However, the governor did have some curious ideas about dealing with the natives. One of which was his belief that kidnapping Aboriginal men was a great idea that would bring the two races closer. His thinking was that the kidnapped men would serve as an intermediary/hostage between the interlopers and the natives. Phillip outlined his plan in a letter to Lord Sydney back home in England.
“It was absolutely necessary that we should attain their language, or teach them ours, that the means of redress might be pointed out to them, if they are injured, and to reconcile them by showing the many advantages they would enjoy by mixing with us.”
Advantages like being kidnapped and held against your will, perhaps. Phillip was so enamored of this idea of kidnapping that he did it twice.
On December 30, 1788, Phillip ordered two boats to head down the harbour with orders to seize some natives. They arrived at Manly Cove and found several native men standing on the water’s edge. The English coaxed them to their boats and, when the natives got close enough, the visitors pounced. They grabbed two of the men and looked to shove them in the boat.
One managed to escape by dragging the sailor holding onto him into deeper water until he let go while the other was thrown in the boat, a manacle quickly placed around his ankle and he was put under the eye of a trusty convict.
With that, the kidnappers made their getaway “and an attack from the shore instantly commenced,” wrote Watkin Tench, “they threw spears, stones, firebrands and whatever else presented itself at the boats”. But to no avail – their companion had been snatched away.
After some understandable crying and wailing, the captive “sullenly submitted to his destiny”. In the early days of his captivity he was introduced to the weird ways of the west – including multi-storey buildings (apparently he thought the people he saw hanging out of the first floor of buildings were standing on someone else’s shoulders). But he refused to tell them his name – so they called him Manly, after the cove from which he was swiped.
In time he was twice taken back to Manly Cove to show the rest of his tribe that he was alright and perhaps tell them how tops the English were. On the second visit, no one showed up on the beach – likely because they feared it was a trap and the white ghosts would snap them up too. After this visit, when it must have seemed to him that his tribe had cast him aside, he revealed his real name was Arabanoo.
He never did learn English well enough to act as a conduit between the British and the Aboriginal population which, you’ll remember, was the whole point of the kidnapping. After five months in the colony, Arabanoo would fall victim to the smallpox that was ravaging the Aboriginal population in the vicinity of Sydney Cove. He passed away on May 18, 1789, and Phillip had him buried in his garden. And then waited a whole six months before he decided to kidnap some more natives.
On November 25, 11 days after Squire was sentenced to 300 lashes, Lieutenant William Bradley was ordered to head back to that happy hunting ground of Manly Cove to nab some more locals. Using some fish, they lured several men away from a larger group and, when Bradley gave the signal, the men in the ship grabbed two of them and took them away.
To his credit Bradley found this whole kidnapping thing quite ugly – “it was by far the most unpleasant service I was ever ordered to execute,” he wrote in his journal, after describing the disturbing scene at Manly Cove.
“The noise of the men, crying and screaming, of the women and children together with the situation of the two miserable wretches in our possession was really a most distressing scene; they were much terrified, one of them particularly so. The other frequently called out to those onshore apparently very much enraged with them.”
Once back at Sydney Cove, there was no need for the pair to hide their names; Nanbaree, the young boy found suffering from smallpox on the beach earlier that year, instantly recognised the pair as Colbee and Bennelong.
The pair were washed, shorn and each had an iron shackle attached to their ankles with a convict told to watch them lest they try and escape. Which was exactly what Colbee had in mind. Showing he was, as Captain Hunter wrote, “very far from being destitute of observation and cunning”, Colbee lulled his captors into thinking he was comfortable within the colony.
One night he was sitting just outside the door of their house, with his convict overseer inside eating dinner while holding the rope that was attached to Colbee’s shackle. Colbee pulled the rope from the shackle and then jumped the backyard fence and walked away. According to Lieutenant Bradley, Bennelong was also close to freeing the rope from his shackle and following Colbee when the latter’s escape was detected.
So Bennelong missed his chance and would bide his time in the colony, becoming friends with the governor and learning about the English before his shackle was removed in April 1790. Early on the morning of May 3, he pretended to be sick and was taken downstairs to the backyard to take care of business. In this case “business” being jumping over the back fence and walking off. Years later he, like Nanbaree, would walk into James Squire’s life.