12

in the teeth of the reef

The Coral Sea, June 1768

None of them knew what lay ahead as they sailed due west along the 15th parallel south of the equator into increasingly uncharted waters, least of all Jeanne. Did her revelation as a woman change the way she looked and behaved? Did it change the way others looked at her, behaved towards her? Perhaps she was the same person she had been all along. Perhaps she had never been in disguise at all. Maybe she had always been true to herself, dressing as she wished, behaving as she wished, getting on with the work and life she wanted to have. Who is to say any of it was a pretence, so much as a revelation of truth. Maybe it was being forced into dresses, confined to the kitchen and the bedroom, treated as property for trade, purchase or exploitation, that had been the falsehood. Perhaps it was Ahutoru who had guessed at her true nature most accurately – one who fell between the strict binary definitions of her times.

How her compatriots changed in their attitude is less certain, for all Bougainville had ordered that she was not to ‘suffer any unpleasantness’. How strong would his protections have been once the memories of Tahiti had faded?

Vivez claimed that now that her true identity was known, Jeanne was finally able to reduce the amount of linen or rags she used to bind her breasts, making life more comfortable for her. I suspect he was giving more thought to her breasts than she was. I can see no reason why she would have felt more comfortable revealing her figure now than she would have before. She had no women’s clothes to change into and there was nowhere to obtain any. For the moment she remained as she was, dressed as a man and behaving like one of the men. There was no reason nor opportunity to change until they returned to some form of civilisation.

The land that lay ahead offered no recognisable prospect of that. They all knew that this land was a ship’s graveyard. The stories of the Eendracht and the Batavia on the west coast were etched into their collective consciousness. No-one wanted to be the first to mark the east coast with their skeletons.

Near midnight on 4 June, bright moonlight highlighted breakers ahead. The topman spotted a low sandbank. The Boudeuse, always in the lead, changed tack and signalled danger to the Étoile. By 8 am it was light enough for the two ships to approach more closely, within a league and a half. The low sandy island barely rose above the water, invisible except from the very top of the mast. It was covered from one end to the other with birds. They rose in a great cloud – tropic- and man-o-war birds as well as gannets, boobies and petrels.

Bougainville named the island Diane Bank. Its sudden appearance in an empty sea was ominous and put everyone on edge.

By afternoon, someone thought they had sighted land and breakers to the west. But they found nothing as they continued, laying to overnight before resuming under full sail the next day. It was a full 24 hours before telltale pieces of wood and fruit drifted past. The swell had fallen significantly and the wind had changed direction to a fresh south-easterly – all unmistakable signs that land was near. By the afternoon of 6 June, another sandbank appeared and the Boudeuse signalled a change of course from due west to a more cautious stepwise progress, north then west, north then west. This advance did not last long. The lookouts saw breakers not more than a league and a half away. The pounding foam stretched north to south, on a slight easterly slant, as far as the eye could see. Plumes of spray flew violently into the air, and here and there the jagged teeth of rocks or coral appeared beneath the bared lips of the waves. A distant thunder drifted on the wind towards them, even at this great distance. No-one wished to go any nearer to the seething Charybdis.

It was a sign from God, someone said. They could proceed no further on their westerly course at this latitude. Beyond the great lathering shoals lay ‘New Holland’, of that there was no doubt.

I draw a line around a globe on the 15th parallel from Peru across the Pacific Ocean. There is no land until you reach the islands and atolls of French Polynesia, Samoa and the islands of Vanuatu, and then nothing until you reach the Queensland coast, just south of Lizard Island. Keep going across the Australian continent and you slice through the Gulf of Carpentaria then across to Western Australia in the Kimberleys. From here across the Indian Ocean there is no land until you reach Madagascar and then Africa. And in the Atlantic there is only the island of Saint Helena, sliding past, slightly to the south. It reminds me of just how small the chances were of finding any land in crossing these oceans.

If Bougainville’s ships had kept approaching the coast, and had found a way through the reefs that lay between them, they would have arrived just south of modern-day Cooktown. At its most southern extremity the outer reef is 250 kilometres offshore, providing a wide clear passage of calm waters, beloved of sailors and tourists across generations. But as you go north, the Great Barrier Reef grows progressively closer inshore. Off Cooktown, the outer reef is only 40 kilometres from the beach. The inshore passage, from the Daintree northward, is a treacherous labyrinth of coral. It was no place for a sailing ship.

Bougainville was 140 kilometres out to sea off Cooktown. In three years’ time, Cook would come to grief here in the Endeavour, on the inside of this same tangled maze. Bougainville was locked out, Cook was trapped within. Cook finally escaped, squeezing out through a narrow passage between ‘Half Mile Opening’ and ‘One Mile Opening’. It is the last point before the reef closes in towards the Howick Island group close inshore. Even today, in shallow-drafted boats with motors, the passage north is tricky and dangerous, requiring careful navigation and constant vigilance.

The Endeavour, the Boudeuse and the Étoile are ghost ships passing in time, following each other’s faded wakes across distant seas, each seeking to correct, refute or supersede the discoveries of those who came before, or forestall the claims of those who come after them.

The French ships were already further west than Quirós and on the same latitude as Dampier was when he abandoned his exploration of the west coast for lack of fresh water. They had no reason to think they would find any more hospitable land approaching from the east. Dampier himself had suggested that Australia (or New Holland, as he knew it) was no grand continent at all, but rather a cluster of islands, and this hostile sea full of shoals and sandbanks gave them no reason to think any different. There was likely nothing to be gained by making the coast, and great peril in doing so.

The Boudeuse signalled a change of course to the north-north-east, heading to Java.

I had always thought that Bougainville came within sight of the Australian mainland, that he had described it as lush and verdant. I am certain that I read that somewhere, have perhaps even repeated it, but I can’t remember where and it was clearly a mistake. The coast is indeed lush and verdant here but they were too far offshore to see it. The Australian coast is low and flat. The Great Dividing Range peters out in the northern reaches at 1611 metres, on Mount Bartle Frere south of Cairns. I lived here for a few years, in Innisfail, in the shadow of this mountain, when we stopped for me to finish my last two years of high school at the local school. We bought an old Queenslander on the river and moored Caliph in the muddy mangroves against the bank. I went to school, wore a uniform, chafed at the regulations and wasted time, made friends and took up rowing. From our wide verandah we could sit and watch the lightning crack across burning canefields as we waited for the rains to break. Mount Bartle Frere was visible in the distance, at least on a clear day and, though distinctive, it is not particularly imposing. I don’t recall, on any of our trips to the outer reef, that it could be seen very far off the coast.

It is easy to mistake the ship’s location in Bougainville’s narrative, with unclear bearings and no demarcation of coasts or landmasses. Maps of sufficient size and scale to reveal the precise details of location are expensive and unwieldy, needing to be folded in vast sheets and tucked into special pockets in the back of hardback books. They are the first luxury that publishers dispense with, leaving us to rely entirely on the imperfect imagination of a written description. I am delighted when I open the pages of French historian Étienne Taillemite’s maps reproducing Bougainville’s voyage. The sheets stretch across my wall, his route precisely marked in purple dashes and dates.

A map cannot be replaced by words. French philosopher Bruno Latour has argued that it is not the map itself that is important – you can, after all, keep a map in your head, redraw it at will. It is the mobility of the map, the capacity to take it elsewhere and have someone know the shape and geography of a country they have never seen, to answer questions and ‘determine who was right and wrong’. Not just over space, but also over time.

Bougainville did not fill in the gaps on his maps with imaginary lines. He left the spaces blank, with tiny sections of coast along his path, dotted through an otherwise empty Coral Sea. He could sense the east coast, the presence of a significant landmass, through the difference in the swell and the winds, the changes in wildlife, the passing of debris – wood, wrack and banana leaves – but he did not map it and did not pretend to do so. He laid no claim to this coast.

I have sailed the route that Bougainville took north across the Coral Sea. I had been away at university but came home to help my dad sail Caliph to Papua New Guinea, where he’d been chartered to carry cargo between the smaller islands. We started further south, taking the Grafton Passage out of Cairns and a direct path, almost due north, towards Samarai on the easternmost tip of New Guinea. Our route took us directly past Bougainville Reef. Our invisible paths intersected, 221 years apart, at about the place Bougainville decided to head north.

Our preparation for the journey had not been ideal. We had spent what felt like a small fortune at the supermarket, stocking up on giant tins of beans and soup, dried milk powder and jam, fishing hooks and sweets for trading. We had a refrigerated cool box mounted on the back deck, the first time the boat had ever had refrigeration instead of only an icebox. Feeling decadent we stocked up on fresh milk and cheese, eggs and meat – enough for the first week of the journey at least. Seduced by the overcast conditions, I forgot to protect my pasty southern skin and burnt my back and shoulders raw and blistered. A day or two before we left, an electrical circuit in the engine room overheated, burning out all the wiring to the batteries and filling the hull with the choking bitter smoke of charred plastic.

Despite these setbacks, we departed on time, and carefully picked our way out of the reefs with the aid of detailed charts and clear, well-placed navigational beacons. By nightfall, we were in open waters, settling into the regularity of two hours on, six hours off between our four crew, darkness and a sea breeze offering some welcome respite from tropical heat.

The breeze, however, was not enough for sail alone, so the engine thundered constantly below deck, maintaining a suffocating heat amid the diesel fumes. During the day, the sun seemed to hang high overhead for far longer than its designated midday hours, shearing any shade from the sails. The momentary cool of the ocean evaporated in seconds, leaving a crust of sticky salt across burnt flesh. I slathered my back and shoulders with aloe vera, soaking the peeling layers of skin into a putrid mess that smelt like the flesh was rotting from within.

On the third day, the refrigerator died. We gorged ourselves on consumables and stored what we could under the floorboards in the bilge where the temperature sat in the mid-twenties. A huge block of cheese, wrapped in a tea towel, lasted the longest, progressively getting softer, gooier and smellier as it matured. I reminded myself of my French ancestry, blocked my nose and ate it anyway, treading the fine line between gourmet and gross.

No-one wanted to spend much time below deck preparing food, so meals reduced down the minimal efforts. A New Guinean favourite, from a country not renowned for its cuisine, became a staple: rice fried with flaked corn beef and a little curry powder. Thirty years later I still crave this irreproducible dish, but at the time I found myself dreaming, like Rose de Freycinet, of elaborate dishes I could not have.

Glittering days passed with gritted teeth and squinting eyes – broken only by a crab swimming on the surface of the open sea, or a loggerhead turtle raising its head as we passed. A sea snake swam past in the opposite direction, writhing black and yellow stripes, apparently oblivious to our presence. They are highly venomous for all they lack the hypodermic syringe action of the more familiar terrestrial Elapidae snakes. In Australian terms they are only moderately worrying. Another swam past, then another and another. I counted 147 before they petered out. I have no idea where they were going or why.

I sat on the chains under the bowsprit, my feet skimming the water. I hoped for bottlenose dolphins to join us, as they often do in southern waters, but these northern species seemed less sociable and we saw them only in the distance, skittering small and dark across the surface. I spotted something white floating on the water in the distance and signalled the helmsman to bring us closer. It could have been rubbish, a broken piece of polystyrene, a worn and sunbleached buoy from a fishing net or mooring. But there had been very little rubbish here, in this cul-de-sac between Australia and New Guinea, away from the great oceanic gyres that pool islands of garbage into their hearts.

As we came closer, I climbed down into the chains of the dolphin striker and scooped the object out of the water as it bobbed past the hull. Remarkably, it was a chambered nautilus, empty of the squid-like animal that once regulated its buoyancy within the water column. Rare and hard to come by, nautilus are mysterious creatures of the mid-ocean, usually found below 100 metres. Nowadays you can call up video footage of them online and watch them clunking awkwardly against one another while they scavenge on decomposing flesh. Their unblinking eyes stare out from an exquisitely patterned mantle, their tentacles neat and tidy as a trimmed beard.

This nautilus was one of the last survivors of the great dynasties of nautiloids, ammonoids and coleoids, nearly all of which were wiped out by the Cretaceous mass extinction along with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Now all we have of these once dominant species are their shells, layered in abundant fossil beds across ocean floors, shaped in coils, spirals, cones, hooks and even paperclips. A friend gave me a fossil ammonite from Nepal, its imprint trapped in a smooth black shale that unlocked to reveal its two-sided treasure, connecting me across 100 million years to this pristine undamaged specimen floating in the ocean. The friend had told me at the time that they were also found opalised in the Australian desert, which once formed a shallow inland sea, a notion so intriguing and puzzling that it would one day lead me to write a book about it. Not for the first time, I wonder how many of my books are driven by the questions I could not answer in my childhood.

In the distance, the mountains rise above the horizon, steadily growing as the hours tick past. We comment on their amazing height, wondering how long it will be before we can see their feet dipping in the ocean. The newly minted highlands of New Guinea, a fold in the Australian continental plate thrust over 3 kilometres skyward by the continent’s relentless slide north over the Pacific plate, are mountains on an entirely different scale to Australian eyes.

‘Wait, look, up there,’ one of the crew says, pointing. ‘Above the clouds.’

We look up above the thick layer of clouds encasing the mountains and realise their peaks emerge sharp and dark, impossibly, improbably lofty, from above the clouds themselves. Higher than the Alps, only here they seem to rise directly from the sea itself. I could not even have dreamt, could not have imagined, that such mountains were even possible.

Bougainville described this country as one of the finest he had ever seen, with mountains so high they were lost in cloud. Did these darkly wooded slopes remind Jeanne of the smaller mountains of her home? Or did they seem implausibly alien in all their vast stature to her too?

I am increasingly frustrated by Commerson’s journals. I had expected accounts of the species he has found, of plants collected and sights seen. But even the naval officers make more comments on nature than Commerson does, even it was just ‘Saw lots of birds.’

I know that Commerson was saving his biological work for publication, that many naturalists kept their science separate from their travel narratives. I am not quite sure why. Natural history narratives were popular in the eighteenth century – Georges-Louis Buffon’s Natural History from 1749 is often said to have outsold Voltaire, making him one of the most widely read authors of the century. But travel narratives did not seem to include nature until the nineteenth century. I long for Alfred Wallace’s vivid descriptions of collecting under seemingly impossible conditions in the Malay Archipelago, battling with dogs and ants for his precious specimens. Or Darwin’s thoughtful considerations on the origins of life from the Beagle. Both of them mention their assistants and helpers regularly. But I can find so little material in Commerson’s writing that it’s hard to even remember he was a biologist, let alone one of the greatest naturalists of his age. And of course, there is almost no trace of Jeanne. You’d think he was working entirely alone.

Like Bougainville, we missed our mark as we approached the New Guinea coast. We should have reswung the compass before we left, adjusting for changes in the earth’s magnetic field. As it happened, we arrived very close to where the Étoile and Boudeuse had approached, although we were fortunate to have vastly better weather.

The coast stretched in each direction in a long low line of breakers against a rocky coast. Vast quantities of debris washed around us from the rivers that surged down the slopes of titanic mountains. We were not sure exactly where we were, or how far it was to Samarai. We could not go ashore to ask, as we had to clear customs first. Fortunately, others noticed our presence. Just as they have always done, canoes launched from the shore, now with blue tarpaulins for sails, and made their way out to us, laden with fish, fruit and vegetables for sale. We purchased corn cobs from an ancestral multicoloured breed of corn that I only knew existed from genetics practicals. We were told that we were in Amazon Bay, some distance west of where we needed to be. We were given directions and local advice, and headed east along the coast, careful to stay well offshore as night fell.

The Australian coast is studded with jewels of light, flashing their unique and characteristic signals out to sea. Count the unique beats of the lighthouses, one-two-pause-one-two-pause, and you know which lighthouse you are near. You can take a bearing, often triangulating between two lighthouses along a stretch of coast, and pinpoint exactly where you are. We scoured the horizon for the next lighthouse, staring at the dark line between sea and sky, hoping to see a tiny flash. Often it appears in the periphery of your vision, so small and so precise it cannot be seen if you look directly at it – obliterated by a tiny blind spot in the middle of your vision. So we looked to one side as if, like in quantum mechanics, the act of observing disrupted the phenomenon itself, and counted the flashes we could not see directly.

The New Guinea coastline was dark, unpunctuated by electric lights of any kind. Here and there we saw a fire glowing on a beach, but these too died down as night fell. The steady pounding of the engine pushed us forward through the clear waters irrespective of the light winds and drifting currents. The night was clear and we cooked fresh fish over coals on the back deck as we continued on our way, sailing by the board, trusting that our charts and course were correct.

The Étoile and Boudeuse wallowed on rising swells, drifting slowly north perilously close to the lines of breakers. As day broke on 10 June 1768, someone sighted land and those on the deck could smell the pungent damp earth that drifted from a large bay opening out to the south.

It seemed like a vision. No-one could recall ever having seen a finer aspect that this. Gentle plains and groves filled low ground to the seashore. Beyond rose an amphitheatre of mountains, their summits wreathed in clouds. This was no land of dry sandy soil, destitute of water like the west coast of Australia. This land was rich and fertile, well worth exploring, if only they could find a safe passage through the reef. But they did not have the supplies to make such an expedition. They could not guarantee that they would find food or water ashore. These waters were not safe for them to stay.

And yet the wind still forsook them. The swells swept them slowly sideways, closer and closer to the shore. By four o’clock in the afternoon the ships lay just off the coast of a small island, at five the commander ordered the ships to bring their heads up. Every inch of cotton was hoist aloft in an effort to catch the slightest breeze. The heavy main sails sagged, bereft of air, while the topsails puffed with intermittent enthusiasm but little effect.

By the next day, they were just four leagues off the coast. The island’s residents sailed along the coast watching the distant spectacle, while behind them great fires burnt along the coast. One of the crew caught a shark and, cutting it open, found a turtle inside.

The weather grew worse. The wind picked up, blowing against them, rain fell and a fog descended so thick the ships had trouble keeping touch with each other. The sea rose in anger. The two ships had no choice but to drop their sails to avoid being driven ashore, and yet this made it even harder for them to tack and weave their way off the coast. The Boudeuse, with finer lines, had a better chance of beating to windward, but the Étoile’s bluff bows made it impossible to point into the wind. They tacked back and forth, barely even maintaining their position.

The shallow seas swept sand and weed onto the foredeck. Bougainville stopped taking soundings. He set their course as close to the wind as he could and the ship pounded ‘by the board’ out to sea – following a straight line on the map, oblivious to all dangers. They closed their eyes and prayed. There was no point seeing what lay ahead: death or salvation.

‘We are sailing here like blind men,’ said Caro. ‘We do not know where we are . . . I would be a fool if I ever have to go around the world a second time.’

My paper chart comes from my father. It is crisscrossed with other voyages. Charts are expensive to buy and these ones have been in heavy rotation, borrowed and returned by successive travellers seeking to sail up the Queensland coast. Most stop at Cairns, after which the waters become precarious. Supplies and facilities are hard to come by. Beyond Cooktown there are few places to stop for food and water, and such supplies as exist are horrendously expensive.

Bougainville had just the same concerns, although his supplies had to last much longer. They had bread for two months and the salt meat was rancid. They could not get close to the Étoile to resupply Boudeuse. What poor food they had was under constant attack from rats, weevils and cockroaches.

Fifty years later, the naturalist René Lesson on the Louis Isidore Duperrey expedition described a plague of cockroaches on the Coquille.

‘The latter disgusting insects had multiplied so much through the ship that they turned our narrow cabins into torture chambers,’ he said. ‘Spreading in their thousands, they fouled the food, soiled the water and disturbed our sleep. They attacked everything, not overlooking the inkwells, which they emptied without leaving a single drop, and even leather succumbed to their appetite . . . Mr. d’Urville and I gave up our cabins and for more than ten months, for as long as our voyage lasted, we slept on a native mat stretched out on the deck from which even the rain could not drive us away.’

We counted ourselves fortunate not to have cockroaches on Caliph, but in the tropics I occasionally slept on deck, even in the rain, when nights were so hot and still that the alternative was to drown in a pool of sweat below deck anyway.

I remember, too, the careful stock book on Caliph recording the supplies packed tightly into sealed containers stored beneath the floorboards. We crossed off each tin of beans or tuna and monitored the slow decline of rice and flour. A friend once told me of an ocean crossing with her parents that took longer than expected. She could see their stocks were getting low and with a child’s logic she thought it better to stop crossing off the items on the inventory than admit how little food was left. In the end, they survived the last two weeks on brown rice and tomato sauce.

The food situation on the Boudeuse and the Étoile was far worse. On the Boudeuse, they ate the goat that had been on board since the Falklands and had given them a little milk every day. A young dog that Nassau-Siegen had bought in the Magellan Straits was sacrificed. Someone even killed the ship’s cat but superstition prevented them eating it.

‘He was killed for food,’ said Saint-Germain. ‘Some sailors claimed that they had seen it fall from the top of the masts, so it was thrown overboard.’

I wonder if their deteriorating health made things better or worse for Jeanne. Whether starving men were more, or less, dangerous than well-fed ones.

They ate their last pig on 3 June and started eating the untanned leather the grain had been provided in. They even started eating the leather in the rigging until Bougainville banned the practice for fear the ship would fall apart. They soaked it and scrubbed it of its bristles but it still didn’t taste as good as the rats. Roasted ship’s rat turned out to be quite a delicacy.

‘We found it quite excellent,’ wrote Saint-Germain, ‘and we shall be happy if we can find some more before others acquire a taste for them.’ Later he ate three rats for dinner ‘with great gusto’.

The situation was not much better on the Étoile, even though they had more supplies.

‘We had to reduce [rations] to twelve ounces of bread, two ounces of vegetables and three quarts of water, as our sick were increasing considerably,’ wrote Vivez, ‘their number including twenty scurvy cases with nothing to give them but water and bad rice and even this in small quantities. The frightening uncertainty about our ability to leave this abominable place where we have no hope other than the tidal currents that seem to favour us.’

Vivez did not bother to describe the islands and reefs they were sailing through, north through the Solomons to New Ireland and New Britain. To his mind there was no point.

‘No-one would want to come here,’ he wrote.