Part 8 (1/2)
”such blushes as adorn The ruddy welkin or the purple morn.”
Indeed, they appeared to be quite unaware that there was anything remarkable about their deficiency of clothing. ”A naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords” might have shocked them, but not merely because he was naked. They were greatly interested when, as a sign of friendliness, one of the Frenchmen, the doctor of Le Naturaliste, began to sing a song. The women squatted around, in att.i.tudes ”bizarres et pittoresques,” applauding with loud cries. They were not, however, a group of ladies for whom the Frenchmen had any admiration to spare. Their black skins smeared with fish oil, their short, coa.r.s.e, black hair, and their general form and features, were repulsive. Two or three young girls of fifteen or sixteen years of age the naturalist excepted from his generally ungallant expressions of disgust. They were agreeably formed, and their expression struck him as being more engaging, soft, and affectionate, ”as if the better qualities of the soul should be, even amidst hordes of savages, the peculiar appanage of youth, grace, and beauty.” Peron remarked that nearly all the older women were marked with wounds, ”sad results of bad treatment by their ferocious spouses,” for the black was wont to temper affection with discipline, and to emphasise his arguments with a club.
If the black gins gave no satisfaction to the aesthetic sense of the naturalist, his white skin appeared to be no less displeasing to them; and one of them made a kindly effort to colour him to her fancy. She was one of the younger women, and had been regarding him with perhaps the thought that he was not beyond the scope of art, though Nature had offended in making his tint so pale. Rouge, says Mr. Meredith, is ”a form of practical adoration of the genuine.” Charcoal was this lady's subst.i.tute for rouge. A face, to please her, should be black; and, with a compa.s.sionate desire to improve on one of Nature's bad jobs, she set to work. She approached Peron, took up some charred sticks, rubbed them in her hand, and then made advances to apply the black powder to his face.
He gravely submitted--in the sacred cause of science, it may be supposed--and one of his colleagues was favoured with similar treatment.
”Haply, for I am black,” he might have exclaimed with Oth.e.l.lo after the treatment; and the makers of charcoal complexions were charmed with their handiwork. ”We appeared then to be a great subject of admiration for these women; they seemed to regard us with a tender satisfaction,” wrote Peron; and the reflection occurred to him ”that the white European skin of which our race is so proud is really a defect, a sort of deformity, which must in these distant climates give place to the hue of charcoal, dull red ochre, or clay.” Bonaparte would not have concurred; for he, as Thibaudeau tells us, emphatically told his Council of State, ”I am for the white race because I am a white man myself; that is an argument quite good enough for me.” It was hardly an argument at all; but it sufficed.
The expedition encountered extremely bad weather along the eastern coast of Tasmania; where, also, Captain Baudin was too ill to superintend the navigation in person. He shut himself up in his cabin, and left the s.h.i.+p to his lieutenant, Henri de Freycinet. Le Naturaliste was separated from her consort during a furious gale which raged on March 7 and 8, and the two vessels did not meet again till both reached Port Jackson. While making for Ba.s.s Strait, Le Geographe fell in with a small vessel engaged in catching seals, with whose captain the French had some converse. He told them that the British Government had sent out special instructions to Port Jackson that, should the French exploring s.h.i.+ps put in there, they were to be received ”with all the regard due to the nature of their mission, and to the dignity of the nation to which they belonged”* (*
Peron, 1824 edition 2 175.)--surely a n.o.ble piece of courtesy from the Government of a people with whom the French were then at war. It was this intimation, there can be no doubt, that a month later determined Baudin to go to Sydney, for Captain Hamelin of Le Naturaliste was not aware of his intention to do so, as will appear from the following chapter. Ba.s.s Strait was entered on March 27, and the s.h.i.+p followed the southern coast of Australia until the meeting with Flinders in Encounter Bay, as described in the earlier part of this book.
By this time, as has been related, scurvy was wreaking frightful havoc among the crew. Before the Encounter Bay incident occurred, the French sailors had expressed so much disgust with their putrid meat, weevilly biscuit, and stinking water, that some of them threw their rations overboard, even in the presence of the captain, preferring to endure the pangs of hunger rather than eat such revolting food. After Baudin had made those investigations which his means permitted in the region of the two large gulfs, the winter season was again approaching, when high winds and tempestuous seas might be antic.i.p.ated. It was therefore hoped by all on board that when the commandant decided to steer for the shelter and succour of Port Jackson, he would, as it was only sensible that he should, take the short route through Ba.s.s Strait. In view of the distressed state of his company, it was positively cruel to think of doing otherwise. But there was, it seems, a peculiar vein of perversity in Baudin's character, which made him p.r.o.ne to do that which everybody wished him not to do. We may disregard many of the disparaging sentences in which Peron refers to ”notre commandant”--never by name--because Peron so evidently detested Baudin that he is a doubtful witness in matters of conduct and character. We must also give due weight to the fact that we have no statement of Baudin's point of view on any matter for which he was blamed by colleagues who were at enmity with him. But even so, we have his unquestionable actions upon which to form a judgment; and it is difficult to characterise by any milder term than stupidity his determination to sail to Port Jackson from Kangaroo Island round by the south of Tasmania, a route at least six hundred miles out of his straight path. That he came to this decision after having himself sailed through Ba.s.s Strait from east to west, and thus learnt that the navigation was free from difficulty; when he had in his possession the charts of Ba.s.s and Flinders showing a clear course; during a period of storms when he would be quite certain to encounter worse weather by sailing farther south; when his crew were positively rotting with the s...o...b..tic pestilence that made life all but intolerable to them, and attendance upon them almost too loathsome for endurance by the s.h.i.+p's surgeon; and when his supplies were at starvation limit in point of quant.i.ty and vermin-riddled in respect of quality that he resolved to take the long, stormy, southern route in face of these considerations, seems hardly to admit of explanation or excuse. ”A resolution so singular spread consternation on board,” wrote Peron; and it is not wonderful that it did. The consequence was that the voyage to Port Jackson made a story of privations pitiful to read. The bare fact that it took Baudin from May 8 to June 20, forty-three days, to sail from Kangaroo Island to Sydney, whilst Flinders in the Investigator, despite contrary winds, covered the distance by the Ba.s.s Strait route in thirty days (April 9 to May 9), including several days spent at King Island and Port Phillip, is sufficient to show how much Baudin's obtuse temper contributed to aggravate the distress of his people.
Peron described the weather during the voyage southward as ”frightful.”
”And now the storm blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'er-taking wings, And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The s.h.i.+p drove fast, loud roar'd the blast, And southward aye we fled.”
Torrents of very cold rain fell, furious squalls lashed the sea to a boil, thick fogs obscured the atmosphere; and the s.h.i.+p had to be worked by men ”covered with sores and putrid ulcers, each day seeing the number of the sick augmented.” There was a short rest in Adventure Bay, Bruni Island, for the purpose of procuring fresh water on May 20, and when the order to sail again was given, the crew were so much enfeebled by disease that it took them four hours to weigh the anchor. On the east coast more storms came to hara.s.s the unfortunate men. A paragraph in Peron's own terms will convey a sufficient sense of the agony endured on the stricken s.h.i.+p.
”On June 2 and 3 the weather became very bad. Showers of rain succeeded each other incessantly, and squalls blew with a violence that we had never experienced before. On the 4th, during the whole day, the weather was so frightful that, accustomed as we had become to the fury of tempests, this last made us forget all that had preceded. Never before had the squalls followed each other with such rapidity; never had the billows been so tumultuous. Our s.h.i.+p, smitten by them, at every instant seemed about to break asunder under the shock of the impact. In the twinkling of an eye our foremast snapped and fell overboard, and all the barricading that we had erected to break the force of the wind was smashed. Even our anchors were lifted from the catheads despite the strength of the ropes which held them. It was necessary to make them more secure, and the ten men, who were all that were left us to work the s.h.i.+p, were engaged in this work during a great part of the day. During the night the tempest was prolonged by furious gales. The rain fell in torrents; the sea rose even higher; and enormous waves swept over our decks. The black darkness did not permit the simplest work to be done without extreme difficulty, and the whole of the interior of the vessel was flooded by sea-water. Four men were compelled to enter the hospital, leaving only six in a condition to carry out the orders of the officer on the bridge, and these unfortunates themselves dropped from sheer exhaustion and fatigue. Between decks, the sick men lay about, and the air was filled with their groans. A picture more harrowing never presented itself to the imagination. The general consternation added to the horror of it. We had nearly reached the point of being unable to control the movements of the s.h.i.+p amidst the fury of the waves; parts of the rigging were broken with every manoeuvre; and despite all our efforts we could scarcely s.h.i.+ft our sails. For a long time our commandant had had no rest. It was absolutely necessary to get out of these stormy seas at the extremity of the southern continent, and hasten on our course for Port Jackson. 'At this time,' says the commandant in his journal, and the fact was only too true, 'I had not more than four men in a fit condition to remain on duty, including the officer in charge.' The ravages of the scurvy can be estimated from these words. Not a soul among us was exempt from the disease; even the animals we had on board were afflicted by it; some, including two rabbits and a monkey, had died from it.”
Slowly, painfully, as though the s.h.i.+p herself were diseased, like the miserable company on board, the coast was traversed, until at last, on June 20, Le Geographe stood off Port Jackson heads. Even then, with the harbour of refuge in sight, the crew were so paralysed by their affliction that they were positively unable to work her into port.* (* An astonis.h.i.+ng statement indeed, but here are Peron's words: ”Depuis plusieurs jours, nous nous trouvions par le travers du port Jackson sans pouvoir, a cause de la faiblesse de nos matelots, executer les manoeuvres necessaires pour y entrer.”) But the fact that a s.h.i.+p in distress was outside the heads was reported to Governor King, who was expecting Le Geographe to arrive, and who had doubtless learnt that there was scurvy aboard from Flinders, whose quick eye would not have failed to perceive some trace of the sad state of affairs when he boarded the vessel in Encounter Bay. Accordingly King sent out a boat's crew of robust blue-jackets from the Investigator; and Peron records with what trembling joy the afflicted Frenchmen saw the boat approaching on that June morning. Soon the British tars climbed aboard, sails were trimmed, the tiller was grasped by a strong hand, a brisk British officer took charge, and the s.h.i.+p was brought through the blue waters of Port Jackson, where, in Neutral Bay, her anchor was dropped.
It is not overstating the case to say that Le Geographe was s.n.a.t.c.hed from utter destruction by the prompt kindness of the British governor. A slight prolongation of the voyage would have rendered her as helpless as if peopled by a phantom crew; and she must have been blown before the wind until dashed to fragments on the rocks on some uninhabited part of the coast. The extremity of abject powerlessness had unquestionably been reached when the wide entrance to Port Jackson could not be negotiated.
Peron regarded the dreadful condition of the vessel as furnis.h.i.+ng a great and terrible lesson to navigators. ”These misfortunes,” he wrote, ”had no other cause than the neglect of our chief of the most indispensable precautions relative to the health of the men. He neglected the orders of the Government in that regard; he neglected the instructions which had been furnished to him in Europe; he imposed, at all stages of the voyage, the most horrible privations upon his crew and his sick people.” The naturalist concluded his doleful chapter of horrors by quoting the words of the British navigator, Vancouver, who was one of Cook's officers on his third voyage: ”It is to the inestimable progress of naval hygiene that the English owe, in great part, the high rank that they hold to-day among the nations.” He might also have quoted, had he been aware of it, an excellent saying of Nelson's: ”It is easier for an officer to keep men healthy than for a physician to cure them.”
CHAPTER 9. PORT JACKSON AND KING ISLAND.
Le Naturaliste at Sydney.
Boullanger's boat party.
Curious conduct of Baudin.
Le Naturaliste sails for Mauritius, but returns to Port Jackson.
Re-union of Baudin's s.h.i.+ps.
Hospitality of Governor King.
Peron's impressions of the British settlement.
Morand, the banknote forger.
Baudin shows his charts and instructions to King.
Departure of the French s.h.i.+ps.
Rumours as to their objects.
King's prompt action.
The c.u.mberland sent after them.
Acting Lieutenant Robbins at King Island.
The flag incident.
Baudin's letters to King.