Experiences on the voyage of the First Fleet

First European footprints

1688 ~ William Dampier

Sources:

A New Voyage Round the World (1697)

A Voyage to New Holland (1703)

Circumnavigator William Dampier is regarded as the first recorded Englishman to land on Australian soil, reaching the north-west coast on 4 January 1688 with his crew of buccaneers from the Cygnet. By the time of his arrival, he was on his first of three circumnavigations of the globe. His accumulated experience at sea, together with his growing reputation, ensured that his judgements carried considerable weight in the decades that followed.

Dampier was an extraordinary observer of winds, tides and natural history, and his published accounts - A New Voyage Round the World (1697) and A Voyage to New Holland (1703) - gave English readers their first vivid, sensory descriptions of the Australian coast. Unfortunately, he wrote with a sting in his quill. His infamous judgement of Aboriginal people—an unsettling mix of bafflement, ethnocentrism and contempt—shaped English attitudes toward the continent and its inhabitants for generations, becoming one of the earliest widely circulated expressions of racial prejudice in the Australian context.

William Dampier.

First encounter and resistance from inhabitants

In his account, Dampier wrote that upon approaching the mainland, a company of the inhabitants came against his ship and. standing on a high bank,

“…threatened us with their swords and lances, by shaking them at us. At last the captain ordered the drum to be beaten, which was done of a sudden with much vigour, purposely to scare the poor creatures.” A canoe was sent ashore to “get some acquaintance with them” and to gain provisions, “but the inhabitants seeing our boat coming ran away and hid themselves.”

After a few days, they crossed over to a nearby island (the Buccaneer Archipelago / King Sound area), where they encountered resistance from about 40 inhabitants. Dampier recalled

“At last we went over to the islands and there we found a great many of the natives… The men, at our first coming ashore, threatened us with their lances and swords; but they were frightened by firing one gun, which we fired purposely to scare them… they were much disordered at our landing, especially the women and children, for we went directly to their camp … but when they saw we did not intend to harm them they were pretty quiet, and the rest that fled from us at our first coming returned again.”

Damning testimony

From his encounters, Dampier wrote:

“The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world… setting aside their human shape, they differ but little from brutes.” He described them as “tall, straight-bodied and thin,” with “great heads, round foreheads and great brows,” adding that their eyelids were “always half-closed to keep the flies out of their eyes.” Their features, he declared, were “of a very unpleasing aspect,” their hair “short and curled,” and their skin “coal black, like that of the Negroes of Guinea...

“They have no sort of clothes,but a piece of the rind of a tree tied about their waists, with grass or small green boughs thrust under it to cover their nakedness.” They had “no houses, but lie in the open air,” living in groups of “twenty or thirty men, women and children together.”

Dampier said their food consisted almost entirely of small fish caught in stone weirs built across tidal inlets, adding that the land yielded them nothing:

“The earth affords them no food at all. There is neither herb, root, pulse nor any sort of grain for them to eat, that we saw; nor any sort of bird or beast they can catch, having no instruments wherewithal to do so.”

Their only weapons, he noted, were “short truncheons of very hard, heavy wood,” carried at all times. Though they showed no fear of the English, they were protective of their fish weirs, “gently pushing us away” whenever the visitors approached.

Dampier said that some of the men were provided with old clothes, “…to one an old pair of breeches, to another a ragged shirt, to the third a jacket that was scarce worth owning…” in hopes they would be “put to service”, carrying barrels of fresh water, but it was to no avail. “…they stood like statues, without motion, but grinned like so many monkies, staring one upon another… So we were forced to carry our water ourselves.”

He concluded: “This is the substance of what I observed among these poor people; and I am of opinion that they are the poorest nation of people that I ever saw in all my travels.”

On that first landfall Dampier found the country to be unpromising. The coast, he wrote, was “all low even land” fronted by sandy banks, the soil a dry sand that supported only thin, scattered woods. He recorded no animals, except for a single track “as big as a great mastiff dog,” and noted only a few small land-birds and very few seabirds. Even the surrounding sea, he complained, was poorly stocked with fish, apart from shy turtles and creatures he likened to manatees, but almost certainly referring to dugongs.

It was not until he returned a decade later, in 1699—commanding HMS Roebuck on a formal voyage of discovery for the English Admiralty—that Dampier made more comprehensive observations. Cruising around what is now Shark Bay and the Dampier Archipelago, he described low, scrubby country with grass, shrubs and small trees, noted mangroves fringing the inlets, and carefully recorded shells, fish, sharks and rays, as well as turtles and sea-snakes. He remarked on flocks of seabirds and the behaviour of cormorants, gulls and terns, and made some of the first European notes on Australian shorebirds. Although his overall verdict on the land remained cool, these journals contain some of the earliest reasonably detailed natural-history observations of coastal Western Australia.

Capture of Aboriginal

Dampier’s second description of the people was no kinder, describing them as “the same blinking creatures we saw before,” yet inadvertently recording signs of social and ceremonial life: “One of them, a chief, was painted with a circle of white paste or pigment above his eyes and a white streak down his nose from his forehead to the top of it; his breast and part of his arms were made white with the same paint.”

“… one of them who had lost his weapon, was by the skipper seized round the waist, while at the same time the quartermaster put a noose round his neck, by which he was dragged to the pinnace … I hope that with God’s help Your Worships will in time get information… from the black we have captured.”