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In which a marine tries to swap his hat for an Aboriginal child
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By February 1790 Squire was a servant for marine lieutenant and president of the I Hate Female Convicts club Ralph Clark. That month he found himself accompanying Clark on several exploratory trips to Lane Cove, with a view to interacting with the locals. And, like Arthur Phillip, trying to get his hands on one.
On February 14, Clark met two natives and gave them a hatchet in exchange for two spears. The following day Clark, Squire and his other convict servant (who we only seem to know by his surname of Davis) headed back up river looking for those two native men. Nearing the spot where they met the previous day, Clark could see no one on the beach. He called out for them and they responded and so he made to get out of his boat, much to the concern of the fearful Davis, who Clark described in his journal as “one of the greatest cowards living”.
In a move that suggests Clark placed a good deal of trust in Squire (perhaps because of his time in the military back in 1774) the marine gave him a gun. “Before I left the boat I desired Ellis [another servant on the trip] and Squires ... that should [they] attempt to throw any of their spears at me or them, to fire without waiting for my orders,” Clark wrote in his journal.
But the Aboriginal men were unarmed and so no bullets were fired. Clark then made his servants join him onshore – “Davis trembled the whole time” – and as he could hear crying children, asked to see them. He handed the children small pieces of coloured cloth and then put forward a rather one-sided deal.
“I asked them if they would give me the children for my hat which they seemed to wish most for, but they would not on any account part with their children, which I liked them for.”
Clark makes no mention of what the native men thought of him for trying to buy their children with a frigging hat. In his diary he brags about how he could have easily kidnapped the men but chose not to because it would be “very ungenerous” of him after they had placed such trust in him. But trying to buy someone’s kids with a hat was perfectly fine.
The next morning, a Sunday, Clark dragged Squire and Davis out to Lane Cove again. He found no sign of the pair whose children he tried to buy the day before but he did spot another Aboriginal man armed with two spears, who took off as soon as he realised Clark was coming ashore.
Apparently decided that chasing after someone while armed with a gun is not at all a threatening gesture, Clark armed himself, told Squire and Davis to do likewise, and then hared off into the bush to look for the man (and perhaps ask if he had any children he wanted to sell). They found no sign of the man but, on the way back to their boat, did find something else – a human skeleton.
It still had some hair and skin attached to the skull, which Clark saw was light brown in colour and therefore could not be an Aboriginal skeleton. So Clark concluded that it “must belong to some unfortunate person that was killed by the natives or, what is much more dreadful than being killed by the natives, that of losing one self and perishing with hunger.”
Clark took the skull back to the settlement, believing the skeleton to be that of sailor Francis Hill who had gone missing in November 1789 when walking in the bush towards Sydney Cove. After surgeons examined it they concluded it was instead the skull of a convict who had gone missing a year ago. Several days later, Clark returned to Lane Cove with the skull and buried it along with the rest of the skeleton.
These Lane Cove exploits are interesting for what they hint at about Squire. It is hard to imagine a marine lieutenant giving a weapon to any old convict and expecting him to act as a bodyguard of sorts. Especially not when, as it appears from Clark’s description of events, he would have had his back to Squire at least some of the time. He surely had to have faith in Squire’s character, that he would not aim up and simply shoot him in the back.
It shows that, in the government’s eye, Squire may have been in the upper ranks of the convicts. It also lends a small amount of plausibility to a particularly questionable claim regarding the life of James Squire – that he was a bodyguard to Governor Phillip. Both online and in print there is a quote suggesting he protected Phillip, who “felt safer with Squire than with the marines”. There is never a source given for this quote, which in and of itself makes its veracity a little suss if you ask me. Also, I couldn’t find this quote in any document of the time – nor could I find a single mention of Squire being a bodyguard of the governor. The governor himself certainly never mentioned him in his own journal – a curious omission if he did hold Squire in such high regard.
The “bodyguard” theory has it that Squire was present in that capacity on Manly Cove on a Tuesday afternoon in early September 1790 when Phillip visited the escaped native Bennelong and got speared through the shoulder. If Squire was there, then he was a bit crap as a bodyguard because he let his boss get skewered.
But here’s the thing. There are a number of written accounts of that day, where an associate of Bennelong speared the governor in his presence (in what now seems a clear case of payback for his kidnapping) but not a single one of then mentions Squire. Marine Captain David Collins, Marine Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse and Phillip himself were all on the beach that day and all of them left behind a written account of the spearing. None of them mention Squire; in fact it’s only Collins and Waterhouse – both armed with muskets – who accompanied Phillip along the beach to his rendezvous with a spear. And the governor asked for both of them to come with him onto the sand.
Now, you have to ask yourself, if Phillip saw Squire as such a trusted bodyguard, more trusted than the marines even, then why is it them and not Squire the governor turned to for protection on the afternoon of September 7?
To me, the most likely answer is because Squire wasn’t there and he wasn’t Phillip’s bodyguard either.