There Were Three Ships

THERE WERE THREE SHIPS

124 people sailed for a land of promise in Western Australia in the 1860s. They found hell.

CHRISTOPHER RICHARDS

First published by University of Western Australia Press

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ISBN 0 64637 561 X (print edition)

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About 2pm we reached the extremity of the sandstone ridges, and a magnificent view burst upon us. From the summit of the hills on which we stood, an almost precipitous descent led into a fertile plain below; and from this part, away to the southward, for thirty to forty miles, stretched a low luxuriant country … since I have visited this spot, I have traversed large portions of Australia, but have seen no land, no scenery to equal it.

- Sir George Grey

The view was magnificent; high lands and islands at one time blended together, but as we approached opening distinct from each other, masses of red brown rock at their base and running far into the sea, clothed to the summit with grass or herbage of the most vivid green … an extensive sheet of water, almost surrounded by land of a particularly fertile description.

- Robert John Sholl

We arrived at the entrance of the harbour on Christmas Day … There were sands with mangroves all around … the harbour was surrounded with mangroves. At first sight, we thought it was such a grand place.

- Mary Field

God only knows how many of us will be spared or how many more will be left behind to take our final rest on Sheep Island.

- Trevarton Sholl

‘Gigantic ants nest & gouty-stem tree’ sketched by George Grey near the Prince Regent River 1837-38. (Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery, 1841; State Library of South Australia)

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Lyons Street

Chapter 2: Christmas Treat

Chapter 3: Beginnings: Figures in the Rocks

Chapter 4: On the Track

Chapter 5: Surgeon Governor

Chapter 6: Gentlemen on Tour

Chapter 7: Wildman’s Chase

Chapter 8: The Businessman

Chapter 9: The Planning

Chapter 10: I, Antonio …

Chapter 11: Arrival: the First Doubts

Chapter 12: Baked Earth

Chapter 13: Victim of the Tides

Chapter 14: Hand of Authority

Chapter 15: Reverend Adventurer

Chapter 16: A Shower of Ants

Chapter 17: Sails in the Harbour

Chapter 18: Island Graves

Chapter 19: My Noble Boy

Chapter 20: Under Way

Chapter 21: Fresh Fields

Acknowledgements

Appendix 1: Emigration to Camden Harbour

Appendix 2: Passenger list of the Stag

Appendix 3: Passenger list of the Calliance

Engraving of the Camden Harbour government camp from a photograph by Arthur Hamilton and Charles Hake. (Robert Bruce, Illustrated Melbourne Post, February 1867; Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria)

LYONS STREET

The bluestone house still has a tall palm tree at the front. Fifty years ago the palm drily rattled its fronds in the sea breeze on summer days as my cousin and I cycled past to the beach. To me it was simply an old two-storey building, although I had a hazy recollection of visiting relatives there when younger. My cousin lived just down from the house and was much more informed. A great-aunt lived there, he told me. Once there had been grandfather Henry Hick, my mother’s grandfather, but he died long before I was born. With him, I learned later, he took the last living memories of the family’s great adventure.

Some say that Henry left a journal. But after the death of the great-aunt, who was his daughter, other relatives had a bonfire in the shell-lined garden at the back of the bluestone house. No one really knew what went on the fire and blew in ashes across the bay towards the city buildings of Melbourne. But no journal ever came to light. My cousin’s mother salvaged a charred document that gave the specifications Henry prepared before he built a police station in a country town up by the Murray River. It was very detailed and seemed an odd thing for him to keep. Stranger still then if the bonfire had not also included evidence of the biggest adventure in Henry’s life – and in the lives of more than 120 other Australians of the mid-1860s.

There are no known family mementoes of this event; no small, gleaming nuggets wrapped in soft cloth at the back of a drawer, or tarnished war medals. Its details were passed on by spoken word, with only those interested enough able to relay a few details from the kaleidoscope of childhood memories. My mother got it from her father, Henry’s son, and told me: something about a great harbour far to the north and plans to found a perfect land, a Utopia. There was a clue of a sort elsewhere in the family, on the handles of a set of old woodworking tools: the carved letters D.H.

These could only have belonged to Henry’s father, Daniel, a Cornish carpenter with a disturbing gaze. He had incurable wanderlust and was a key to mother’s family’s great adventure. I listened off-handedly and decided to travel overseas.

But the seed grew over the years. A visit to a damp Cornish churchyard revealed a memorial, the stonemason’s work as sharp as yesterday, put up by a forgotten relative in Daniel’s memory. This led me to the Public Record Office at Kew in London, where fragile pages unfolded part of the story of a humble carpenter and evidence of something solid behind the family myth. Henry, short, blue-eyed and with a temper to match his height, did not speak much about it before his death in 1926. He rose from mine carpenter and gold scrip dealer to builder – and mayor of the dockland town where he finally settled. Achievements enough for a boy born in the slums of 1850s’ London. But as an old man, when he sat and gazed at the trees around his house in Lyons Street, Williamstown, in southern Australia, I wonder if he sometimes imagined them dissolving into the tops of gum trees waving in a breeze long past and far away.

One lot of gums weaves sunlit patterns on crossroads around the small, faded town of Clunes, north-west of Melbourne, Henry’s first home in Australia. A detailed map still lists the names of these intersections: Ullina, Moorookyle, Glengower. Today the names refer only to the grey-green eucalyptus trees, pale yellow wattle flowers, chalky mountains of mining rubble and the end of dreams.

But once mining villages surrounded these crossroads, and in turn circled the former leading centre of gold production in Victoria. Clunes and its green valley, settled by a young farmer from Inverness-shire, Scotland, was the scene of the first major gold strike in the state.

Under fluttering eucalypts on quartz-littered ground just north of the town is its cemetery. Leading citizens from the early days lie beneath ornate masonry. Towards the back of the graveyard, a watchmaker with a knack for mending guns shares a grey monument with his sister and her husband. His inscription reads: In loving memory of John Pascoe, died 17th August 1900, aged 75 years.

Six thousand kilometres away by the closest sea route – or 3,750 miles in the imperial measures of the adventurers’ story – diagonally opposite Clunes in the tropical far north-west of Australia, beside the brilliant blue, wide waters of a huge harbour, grass grows as high as a man in the tropical wet season and low trees stand thick on surrounding hills. On a promontory rough-hewn stones form a right angle – the remains of the foundations of a small building. Shards of pottery can be found at the foot of the tall grass and if fire clears the area in the dry season, small white stones mark out a pathway. On an island not far from shore a gravestone is hidden in the grass. Fire will leave grey ashes feather-like on the mound of red soil and then the letters can be made out after more than 150 years: In memory of Mary Jane Pascoe, died June 4th 1865, aged 30 years.

As the tide ebbs around the island and the mainland, less than a kilometre away, a change comes over the harbour’s beauty. The water falls back by many metres to uncover thick, blue-grey mud, the dark green bushes reveal themselves as twisted mangroves. A crocodile slides quickly down into a creek before the waterway empties with the receding sea.

The harbour is Camden Harbour in the West Kimberley region. Closer by 2,000 kilometres to Koepang in Timor than it is to the Western Australian capital of Perth, it is still in the 21st century inaccessible to all but the most determined adventurers. At the height of its 12-metre tides it is, to an inexperienced eye, a superb shelter for shipping. Yet it has defied settlement by whites.

From the Dreamtime, Aborigines roamed its shores and drew wondrous, glowing paintings in caves not far inland from its mangroves. They fished, they lit fires to encourage new growth in the native grasses which in turn encouraged animal and bird life for them to hunt. When the creeks dried under a burning sun, they knew where rock pools and springs hid reserves of cool water. The first white explorers stayed long enough to see the awesome drop of a few tides. It did not dismay them; those who came after the monsoons were more impressed by the rolling green ranges that lay beyond the top of the sandstone cliffs that lined part of the harbour. It seemed a gateway to fine pastoral country. They saw their hopes confirmed by expeditions inland and reported back to their governments and backers that here was fine land for the taking.

But 2,800 kilometres from Perth by sailing ship proved a formidable barrier. It took three men to overcome it and open Camden Harbour to European settlement. One was a determined state governor, keen for a land-booming success to shift attention from his harsh regime in a convict settlement. The others were an amateur explorer with more enthusiasm than good judgement, and a sharp land agent. Their drive swung a usually cautious British administration in Westminster into supporting the public opening of the north-western territory.

Three ships carrying 124 men, women and children from the colony of Victoria beat their way up the Western Australian coast in late 1864. They sailed in response to a publicity campaign by the Western Australian government, backed by a publicity campaign by the land agent in Melbourne. The cooperative pastoral adventure attracted a few sons of the colonial landed gentry, the acreage-occupying squatters. These young men hoped to make good on the soil in their own right. But the bulk of the voyagers were shopkeepers and traders or other hard-working small-town people with a little capital won from the goldfields. They also believed they could establish themselves as pastoralists in an unopened territory before the men of wealth arrived.

Some pioneers in the party sold up in Victoria to travel west, while others left wives and children behind as they went alone. For the most dedicated, those who held out to the end, the adventure took at least a year out of their lives. Some lives it claimed.

My mother began tracing the trail of her Camden Harbour adventurers, the Hicks, many years ago. I decided to follow, but became waylaid in tributaries looking at their fellow passengers. Few left a record of their epic journey. After the fanfares that launched it, they crept home when it failed, embarrassment ensuring the silence of most.

But the story is there to be found in official records, in a handful of journals that relatives thought to preserve, in newspapers and in letters.

First what I see with my own eyes. It is a fading photograph of a woman in black. She has a determined jawline, her hair is grey and she has a brooch at her neck. Her name is Mary McManus and she died in western Victoria in 1928. A brief memoir she put down when she was old tells of a time when she was a girl called Mary Field and her father sent her off on a sailing ship.

CHRISTMAS TREAT

The memory of her 13th Christmas Day never left Mary Field. It fell on a Sunday in 1864 and the 12-year-old was awake earlier than in any other year. At 30 minutes past midnight, the rattle of an anchor chain broke into her sleep and a tropical breeze carried the low voices of seamen into the saloon-class cabin. If it had not been for those noises the girl might have slept on, the passage of the Calliance was so smooth.

Mary McManus (formerly Mary Field)

Mary had been born in Adelaide, South Australia, and brought east by her father when he joined in the excitement of the Victorian gold rush. James Field was always on the move, and his next surprise was to say he was taking her away from Pleasant Creek and sending her on a voyage.

His daughter preferred solid, honest earth beneath her feet. She had found the beginning of the journey west from Port Phillip terrifying. Vessels on the run to Australia generally took advantage of the prevailing winds blowing from the Cape of Good Hope. But this English sailing ship was going the other way, first pressing into the wind on its way to the south-west tip of Western Australia. The rolling seas sent the short, thin girl to her cabin where she stayed for days, feeling sick enough to die. As she told it later, the captain, George Turnbull Brown, helped her find her sea-legs with a bluff and hearty remedy.

The captain used to call me Polly as he said he had a daughter of that name and he told me to sit at the table near him … I was so sick so long and did not come on deck for so long that the steward came into the cabin and said the captain said if I did not come on deck today he would come and carry me up as I was. So in about half an hour he came and wrapped a shawl around me and carried me up on deck. So after that I did not want to stay down and soon got well.

After her first fortnight of misery, Mary fell into the routine of each day at sea and became a favourite of the crew. At Cape Leeuwin, they turned north along the Western Australian coast and she and her brother, John, three years older and sleeping in the men’s quarters in steerage on the 820-ton vessel, filled in much of the time listening to the adults talk, gazing at the endless horizon and the wheeling gulls, and watching the seamen at work aloft or on deck sounding for treacherous shoals. As they pressed north, Captain Brown kept his ship well out from the coast, away from the scattering of islands of the Buccaneer Archipelago.

At noon on the Friday before Christmas, 10 miles west of Adele Island and 1,600 miles north of Perth, the crew checked for a safe passage and failed to touch the sea bed at 40 fathoms, or 73 metres. Yet at 2.30pm the lookout reported shoal water on both bows. Brown was quickly on the bridge and steered the Calliance through the breaking sea. But a clear way out seemed impossible to find and 30 minutes later the ship struck in about five metres of water on an uncharted shoal.

Worried passengers and crew peered over the side as they waited for the next high water. It came, the Calliance surged – and struck even more heavily with a horrific grinding of timber. Seamen and male passengers were ordered to begin unloading ballast: 130 tons of stone went over the side into the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, followed by 120 bales of hay, floating off in the direction of the coast, 56 miles to the east. Brown also pumped out 1,500 gallons of fresh water, to the consternation of those who had chartered his vessel. He told them: If we don’t get off, you will have to land. They looked towards the barren, low dunes of the isolated island, now seven miles away, and realised the wisdom of making the ship light enough to float free.

Sailors had got boats ready for all to abandon ship when, at 6pm, the Calliance, after striking sickeningly on rocks for some time, floated off. The adults, speaking as they went to join the queue for the galleys to prepare evening meals, were relieved that the ocean had stayed calm or, they said, the ship would have been knocked to pieces. Mary, still staring down at the sea, fancied the water looked so shallow that she could walk on the rocks. The water was very clear and we could see the coral and seaweed and shells, she told Jane Patterson when she was called away from the side.

That was all three days ago. Now it was Christmas Day and they had reached their destination. Mary was expecting no gifts this December. Her only wish was to see her father again after weeks of separation. There was also his promise: to begin a new life in this new territory and make their fortune. Dreaming such thoughts, the girl dozed off in the pre-dawn darkness.

Map: Western Australian pastoral exploration moves north in the mid-1860s.

She was awake again by six and the warmth of the early sun coming through from the deck held a power she had not felt before. Many of the other passengers were already about by the time she had finished dressing, put on a pinafore and laced her boots. She went out on deck, into a brilliant white light, to hear Captain Brown give the order to weigh anchor and see the Calliance tack into a magnificent harbour. The captain’s charts showed it as roughly V-shaped, one arm running north-east to south-west and the other, some nine miles long, west to east. This was the direction from which they now entered by one of three channels between reefs and islands. An early breeze chopped across the wide sheet of clear blue water surrounded by vividly green hills and headlands. More islands brought the same bright green into the centre of the harbour.

There were gasps from those standing on the starboard side as the ship slid past a towering pinnacle of rust-red rock against a headland at the entrance to the channel. From some distance back, Brown had privately admitted its resemblance, in the eyes of those more fanciful than he, to a figure of a huge native. Beyond the pinnacle his passengers saw that the luxurious vegetation was a topping for masses of red-brown rock that plunged into the sea in dramatic cliffs and headlands. This was Brecknock Harbour and further on, beyond the islands, their target and landing place.

Camden Harbour, 15 degrees 30 minutes south latitude, 124 degrees 36 minutes west longitude, eight degrees above the Tropic of Capricorn, in the top left-hand corner of Australia, and formed where the huge land mass of Augustus Island sits above the indentations of a rugged mainland coast. They were 560 miles from the new northern settlement sponsored by the South Australian Government at Port Essington, 400 miles from Koepang, the nearest settlement on the Malay archipelago, and