1788
Text Classics
WATKIN TENCH was born in Chester, England, in 1758. His father was a dance teacher and the master of a boarding school.
In 1776 Tench entered the marine corps. He served in the American War of Independence, during which he was taken hostage for three months. He was soon promoted to captain lieutenant. In 1786 Tench volunteered for a three-year tour of duty to the convict colony of Botany Bay.
Prior to his departure, Tench was commissioned by the publisher John Debrett of Piccadilly to write a book about his adventures. In fact he wrote two. A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay was published in 1789, and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in 1793. Both were successful, and were translated into a number of languages. ‘Not to have read Watkin Tench,’ wrote Robert Hughes, ‘is not to know early Australia.’
Tench was back in England by 1792. In October of that year he married Anna Maria Sargent. He served in the war against France but was captured. Imprisoned for six months, he wrote an account of French politics and society. After his release he continued to serve until he retired as a major-general in 1816.
Watkin and Anna Maria had no children of their own but adopted four of Anna’s sister’s children who had been orphaned. Tench died in England in 1833.
TIM FLANNERY is a bestselling writer, scientist and explorer. He has published over a dozen books, most recently Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific. In 2011 he was appointed chief commissioner of the Australian Climate Commission.
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First published 1789 and 1793
First published by The Text Publishing Company 1996
This edition published 2012
Cover and page design by WH Chong
Typeset by Lynne Hamilton
Primary print ISBN: 9781921922312
Ebook ISBN: 9781921921919
Table of Contents
Cover Page
About the Author
About the Introducer / Also by
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Conversion Table
Introduction by Tim Flannery
Book One: A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay
Book Two: A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson
A List of the Civil and Military Establishments in New South Wales
Text Classics
Notes
CONVERSION TABLE FOR WEIGHTS AND MEASURES USED BY WATKIN TENCH
Length
1 inch = 25.4 mm
1 foot = 30.5 cm
1 yard = 0.914 m
1 mile = 1.61 km
Mass
1 ounce = 28.3 g
1 pound = 454 g
Area
1 acre = 0.405 ha
Volume
1 gallon = 4.55 litres
Temperature
°C = 5/9 (°F - 32)
The Extraordinary Watkin Tench
by Tim Flannery
The European settlement of Australia occurred so swiftly, and altered the land and indigenous cultures so profoundly, that it can be difficult to imagine what the country was like before the first white settler walked ashore. If we wanted to picture that different land, and think about how it has been transformed, there’s no better guide than Watkin Tench’s extraordinary accounts of Australia’s first European settlement. Bestsellers in their day, they vividly describe the land and the Aboriginal people as they were at first encounter, and comprehensively report how they were affected by the new settlers. Despite their early popularity, Tench’s books have remained virtually unknown to Australian readers for most of the past 200 years and are only now claiming their rightful place in our national literary canon, and inspiring new works of national importance, such as Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers and Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant.
Watkin Tench was a lieutenant in the marine corps on board Australia’s First Fleet. Around 1000 people, 700 of whom were convicts, sailed on the eleven ships. Britain’s jails were overflowing at the time, and with the American colonies gaining independence and thus no longer willing to accept convict labourers, a new solution had to be found. West Africa was briefly considered as the site for a penal colony. Joseph Banks, who accompanied James Cook when he mapped Australia’s east coast, vigorously championed Botany Bay as a site. An influential voice in Britain, his arguments carried the day. Unfortunately, Botany Bay did not live up to expectations as a site, and upon arriving Governor Phillip quickly made the decision to relocate the settlement to Port Jackson.
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Watkin Tench was born in Chester on 6 November 1758. Very little is known of his childhood. His father, Fisher Tench, was a dancing master who ran a dance academy and boarding school in Chester with his wife Margaritta.1 The building that housed this establishment, probably the birthplace of Watkin Tench, still stands. Today a pizza shop occupies the street frontage and there’s no sign that one of Australia’s finest chroniclers was born there. It was presumably a happy home, one in which the young Watkin was well educated, as his fondness for quoting from Milton and Shakespeare attests. Indeed such were his educational achievements that he would be widely considered the most cultured mind in the colony at Port Jackson.
Tench entered the marine corps at the age of sixteen. At the time the marines were considered to be a distinctly junior (and therefore inferior) service, deficient both in pay and prestige relative to the army and the navy. Perhaps Tench joined the marine corps because in those days you had to buy your position in the military, and the cost of a commission with the marines was within his family’s reach. Whatever the case, Tench saw active service almost immediately, for by 1776 the American War of Independence was in full swing. Just two years later, in 1778, Tench was captured by American forces; he spent three months as a prisoner of war before rejoining the fray. The end of the war, in 1783, must have brought bittersweet feelings to the young marine. The adventure and the chance to distinguish himself had passed, and he faced the boredom of non-active service. He was placed on half pay in 1786—it must have been all but intolerable for a talented and ambitious young man to linger idly on a substantially reduced income.
We can only imagine Tench’s feelings when, just a few months later, the opportunity arose to volunteer for a three-year tour of service (which ended up being nearly five) with the First Fleet. The unusual nature of the commission—it involved having some of the responsibilities of a jailer—must have deterred many officers who perhaps saw such service as beneath their dignity. But in it Tench may have seen the chance to develop a second career—that of a writer.
In early 1787, when the publishing house John Debrett of Picadilly commissioned him to write an account of the voyage to New Holland and the settlement of the new land, Tench had no literary credentials. But such was public interest in the ven
ture that would dispatch around 1000 Britons into the unknown that all the leading figures of the expedition had been signed up to write accounts. They included the governor and lieutenant governor, the judge advocate and the surgeon. Debrett commissioned surgeon John White, perhaps hoping that his medical training might incline him to document the natural history of the new land, and White did not disappoint, producing a fine account of the flora and fauna of what is now the Sydney region.
It is not known what Debrett expected of Tench, but perhaps the laying out of a few pounds to secure a work from the young lieutenant—who was by far the most junior person commissioned to write—seemed like a reasonable risk. Whatever Debrett’s thinking his investment was amply repaid when a ship returning from New South Wales carried Tench’s manuscript detailing the voyage out and the first months of settlement. Tench’s A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay was rushed to press, appearing on 24 April 1789 as the very first genuine account of the settlement. Published as a pocket-sized pamphlet, Expedition to Botany Bay is by far the most modest of the five ‘foundation books’ of Australia’s colonial history, but it is also the most elegant, perceptive and engaging2. Even from a distance of more than 200 years Tench’s personality draws us in as he tells us about the very first days of our national story. Tench spent just four years at Port Jackson, and upon his return in 1793 his second book, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, was published by J. Nichol of Pall Mall. Altogether a more handsome publication it is testimony to both the success of Tench’s first work and the enduring public fascination with the colony at Port Jackson.
A rich picture of Tench’s personality emerges from his writings. From the moment he steps aboard the Charlotte he is extraordinarily bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, curious about everything, and filled with boundless energy. As the fleet’s journey progresses Tench gives us snapshots of the diverse peoples and places that would mark the journey to the Great Southern Land for years to come. We follow him through the streets and byways of the Cape Verde Islands, Rio De Janeiro and Cape Town. But it’s upon reaching Australia that Tench’s wide-ranging interests truly come into their own. Here, in the vast new land where everything seems surprising and worth reporting, Tench proves capable as something more than an amateur naturalist, ethnographer, lawyer, soldier, agronomist and social commentator.
As the first fleet was leaving England, Tench records the reactions of the convicts on leaving their homeland, in all probability, forever:
I strolled down among the convicts to observe their sentiments at this juncture. A very few excepted, their countenances indicated a high degree of satisfaction, though in some the pang of being severed, perhaps forever, from their native land could not be wholly suppressed. In general, marks of distress were more perceptible among the men than the women, for I recollect to have seen but one of those affected on the occasion.
Tench’s deep humanity is particularly apparent in his dealings with the convicts. When he was told that he was at liberty to release them from their fetters, he records that he ‘had great pleasure in being able to extend this humane order to the whole of those under my charge, without a single exception’. The evident dismay with which he watched their punishment, particularly those who showed some penitence, is poignant. His transcription of the pathetic last letter of a condemned youth to his mother speaks eloquently of the inhumanity of the system under which he served. And Tench clearly had a soft spot for children. He tells us that he took a seven-year-old boy for a walk on the beach at Botany Bay at a time when the majority of the party was still confined aboard ship. We do not know who this boy was—whether the child of a convict or a marine—but he was doubtless weary of shipboard life, and must have appreciated the adventure.
Although Tench’s writings in natural history are not as voluminous as those of the surgeon John White, they are detailed and apposite. His account of the anatomy of the emu, with its description of the bird’s unusual double-shafted feathers, is worthy of a professional naturalist such as Charles Darwin. In his description of the kangaroo Tench compares the actual animal with an illustration drawn in 1770 during Cook’s voyage, noting the merits and inaccuracies of the earlier work. His comment that ‘the testicles of the male are placed contrary to the usual order of nature’ doubtless refers to the fact that the testicles of marsupials are found in front of the penis, a condition which must have seemed remarkable indeed at the time, but which had gone unremarked by earlier observers, including Joseph Banks.
While at Port Jackson Tench kept a daily journal which he often quotes in his published work, giving his words an immediacy which suggests that he has just arrived, breathless at his writingtable, to narrate some extraordinary event. Unfortunately, this invaluable diary appears to have been lost, and we are much the poorer for it, for Tench deliberately omits some key events in his published work. He makes no mention, for example, of his arrest in March 1788, by his superior, Captain Ross, for failing to reconsider the ruling of a military court case he’d presided over. This arrest order was not lifted for the entire time that Tench was in New South Wales, and we know from other sources that the injustice of Ross’s action long angered him.3 While Tench decided not to include his arrest in his published writings, it might account for his minute detailing of the nature of courts in the colony.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspects of Tench’s writings (at least to the twenty-first-century reader) concern the Aborigines, or ‘Indians’ as he knew them. More than anyone else, except possibly his close friend Lieutenant Dawes, Tench was a friend and confidante of the Aborigines held in the settlement and those who regularly visited. He learned their language, and they, apparently, trusted and liked him. It is through Tench that some of the language of the Sydney Aborigines lives on in our own Australian idiom: dingo for native dog, gin (or dyin as he rendered it) for woman, and cooee for the call to locate someone in the bush.
Despite his many accomplishments Tench remained first and foremost a soldier, and it was perhaps his love of valour that inclined him to admire the Aboriginal men of Port Jackson. He was astonished at their bravery when facing an enemy more powerful than themselves, and awed by their disregard for death, both in their own combats and when facing Europeans armed with guns. Such bravery was not limited to the Aboriginal people of Port Jackson; it was commented upon by many Australian explorers. Yet few writers valued it as highly in a naked black man as they did in a fellow soldier.
As a military officer expected to defend the settlement, Tench was not in the best of positions to open friendly relations with the potentially hostile Aborigines. Indeed, he bears the unfortunate distinction of being the first European ordered to carry out an officially sanctioned massacre of Aborigines. In recording these events, his work takes on a tragic aspect, for the conflict between Tench’s private beliefs and the obligation of duty are conveyed with deep feeling, and his outward restraint is almost painful to witness. His horror at receiving the order to kill Aborigines remains implicit in his text, for as a soldier he could not be seen to betray his duty, but it is clearly there. We see Tench summoned to Governor Phillip’s residence to be told of the hatchets and bags with which he is to cut off and carry away the heads of ten Aboriginal men. We hear Phillip give the gruesome order in his own words.
One wonders if it was something he saw in the expression on his lieutenant’s face that prompted Phillip to ask whether Tench could suggest any alteration to the order. Tench’s proposal that six Aborigines be captured (some to be executed, others to be released, as the Governor saw fit), rather than ten decapitated, was perhaps the best he felt he could negotiate. If so, he appears to have judged well, for his suggestion was accepted by Phillip. Remarkably, Tench’s inability to carry out even this diminished order is not related with shame. Rather, he writes of the termination of the terrible episode with evident relief, and an almost comic sense of his hapless endeavour.
Tench’s evolving view of the Aborigines is of enduring intere
st. In the beginning his views are typical of the way humans usually react to new and different cultures. At first fearful, perhaps even contemptuous of these ‘fickle, jealous, wavering’ people, Tench gradually came to know many individually, and to respect them. By the time he left Sydney in 1791, he’d forged firm friendships with several Aborigines.
The ignorance of Tench’s initial assessment of the Aborigines is perhaps understandable when it is remembered that encounters were few during the first six months of the settlement (the period with which the Expedition to Botany Bay is concerned). Of the encounters that did take place over this period, a number were marked by violence. Indeed, in all, the Aborigines killed or severely wounded seventeen Europeans (including Governor Arthur Phillip himself) with no loss to themselves, before a reprisal was ordered.
The nature of contact between European and Aborigine changed dramatically following the kidnapping of Arabanoo. Phillip had decided to take a native into custody because every other means of opening communication had failed, and he felt strongly that the survival of the colony depended upon the development of good relations with the Aborigines. Tench was well aware that this was a desperate measure which would either make or break forever the chance for friendly contact between the two cultures. In Arabanoo, Tench came to know an Aborigine personally for the first time, and his attitudes underwent a profound change. From this point on in Tench’s writing one slowly loses sight of Arabanoo, Colbee and Bennelong as naked, black ‘savages’, and begins to see them as complex individuals. By the end of his time at Port Jackson, Tench could write: ‘untaught, unaccommodated man is the same in Pall Mall as in the wilderness of New South Wales.’