Fiction

As per the parlance of the day, the sealer – or any mariner, really – came in one of two varieties: Brines or Clods. The Brines were the native seamen, usually marrying themselves to the trade with unquestioned, life-long fidelity, like a tree to dirt. The Clods, on the other hand, were the uprooted, those who shirked society in search of a liberation that three years of being ship-bound somehow provided. The term Clod also doubled as an insult, a reference to one’s greenness in all things seafaring. But, it must be said, after a sufficient apprenticeship of two or so years – in which time a Clod could absorb the skills, jargon and conduct of his mates – differentiating between a Brine and a Clod became nearly impossible.

For the Brines, their paths to becoming seamen were as undeviating as the anchor’s to sea bottom. Most were, like Charles, continuations of their forebears, inheritors of whatever was left of their fathers’ spirit and possessions. Even words, as though a finite resource, would seemingly deplete with each generation, so that each Brine was quieter, blanker and deader in all facets than his father. 

The Brines of Nancy were a semi-conscious, illiterate group, whose bent for hard labour was in itself a means of muzzling thought. They were ignorant of all matters life on land but buoyed by the convenient belief that there was so little worth knowing. Thus on the confines of the ship they were placid creatures, comforted by the certainty that conversation would rarely drift into the uncharted. But when Nancy berthed this calmness was ruffled as though by a squall. In seaside establishments some Brines clammed up, thrusting pipes between their lips to ensure not a word spilled out; while others adopted an air of superiority over their land-dwelling hosts, going to great lengths to exhibit both a disinterest and disapproval in all things terrestrial. Of course, liquor could lower these defences, but just as often it unleashed a torrent of complaints, most of which asserted an unvarying thesis: things aren’t what they used to be.

Excluding Charles there were eleven Brines in all, each of whom maintained their position from Nancy’s previous owner—what they call a ‘Barnacle’ in the fisheries. These men would speak of their whaling days as the preacher spoke of Eden, regularly reminding the uninvolved that they now lived in a fallen age—despite the fact that under Charles’ leadership the voyages were far safer and more lucrative than ever. 

They were the oldest on the boat and their minds were generally sealed shut against the fresh ideas of newcomers. Maybe more so than any other Frenchman, the Brine was deaf to all domestic affairs. In most cases the bloody wedding, reign, and death of Marie Antoinette had all transpired without their notice. Suffice to say, it is from the Brine that the mute, pipe-puffing caricature of the seaman was born.

Then, most famously, there was Aime, for whom the ceilings and corridors below deck were too low and narrow, and the people too many, resigning him to eat, sleep and seek his solitude in the open sea air on deck. It was he who introduced the tradition of tattooing the names of past lovers onto his body, a list which on Aime coiled its way around both legs and enveloped most of his torso, like a boa constricting its prey. And yet, even with these markings, it was widely accepted that Aime was the most handsome man who ever lived.

He was immense in stature and as strong as an archway. His skin had been so thoroughly sunbaked that even in winter’s depths it never lost its brownness or warmth, while the inky hair of his youth had been lightened by years of salt and sun. On him all clothes looked borrowed from a boy, so that when summer found him spartanly dressed in nothing but fraying breeches he was let alone on account of the confusion he caused in his fellow salts.

His days of hunting women had long passed as by then his legend was so strong that they would travel for days to intercept him at Nancy’s regular ports. On land Aime was businesslike in his tallying of lovers, recording their names on paper before they undressed and rarely taking any fewer than seven at a time. These women, upon meeting Aime and having to reconcile the man with the myth, were never disappointed, for no description could’ve prepared their imaginations for such potent beauty. Both his physique and character had been rendered so elemental by decades of sun, salt, sea, rain and wind, that the women likened the experience of fucking him to being lifted heavenward in a hurricane.

And yet, what was most striking about Aime was that he had such little bravado about him. His melancholic eyes, usually fixed on the horizon, seemed out of place in the candlelit rooms of his orgies. Given his prowess as a harpoonsman, and the power of his legend in coastal towns, comparisons to Poseidon were naturally drawn. But a shrewder mind might’ve likened him to the Minotaur, for not only was there something frightening in his beauty, something beastly in his appetite, but a part of him seemed to long for that final, fatal encounter with love. Moreover, in the case of Aime, love was the labyrinth to which he was condemned from birth: for it was said that his inventory of names was merely a means to cover the invisible scars left by the mother whom he could not have—or at least, so the story went.

Charles, like most people, had heard of Aime long before seeing him. During a homeport landing rumours began to circulate in the seaside taverns where the women were growing scarce. The distress this caused was only surpassed by the curiosity surrounding tales of a gargantuan man who could be found squatting in an old quarantine station on the headland, and who, allegedly, took women in nines. Civil unrest grew when females of every rung started disappearing into the night to visit him, only to return days later, bereft of desire or the capacity to walk without a hobble. 

After two weeks, a mixed mob of cuckolded and curious locals stormed his camp with intention to cause harm—or, at the very least, dismember. But upon seeing Aime they adjusted their demands, issuing an eviction notice with a tentative grace period of one month. Simple though he may have been, Aime knew when he was not wanted in a place and so set about leaving the city that very night.
Charles was among the mob - belonging to the curious half - and couldn’t help but notice what everyone else was too awestruck to see. For one, Aime was living in total squalor, with nothing but a few precarious threads on his back and the bones of some poor farm animal scattered beside him. (Soon it’d be shepherds after him too.) Beyond his startling appearance, it was also plain in his eyes that the fugitive life was wearisome business. Of course, when Charles offered Aime bed and board on Nancy, it wasn’t complete charity. He knew just by looking at him that Aime could probably skewer a Blimp at a league’s distance. In any case, Aime accepted the position in the hope that sealing could relieve whatever vice he was fighting.

More famous, however, was Flinders’ chance meeting with Le Geographe, upon whose decks roamed the wistful Captain Nicolas Baudin. Their encounter – at what would later be dubbed Encounter Bay – served as another testament to the mariner’s ability to transcend national feuds, even when sailing under the King’s shilling or the Consul’s franc. (Neither Flinders nor Baudin could’ve been aware of the Amiens Treaty signed a month prior to their meeting.)

Any misgivings one had for the other were played out as a mere formality, and could not be affected for long given the mutual languor that had descended upon both captains after a year at sea—a fatigue which had seen buttons on jackets and holes in pant legs go unmended for months. Without reservation Baudin and Flinders shared details of their respective discoveries, doing so over the type of rum whose occasion for opening at sea generally never arrived, but which, on this day, assisted in the lubrication of both sensitive findings and easy seafarer’s gossip.

Chief among Baudin’s scientific endeavours was his plan to bring Australian plants and animals back to France, where they’d be condemned to shivery afterlives on Napoleon’s Parisian estate, Château Malmaison. To achieve this Baudin relegated Le Georgaphe’s high-ranking officers to common quarters so as to accommodate the seventy-two native animals he had rounded up like disobliging cattle. Almost every creature took to the high seas with great distress, despite Baudin’s eagerness to give each the ultimate French reception, furnishing them not only with the cosiest accommodations but with French names and diets generally reserved for members of civilised society.

Many refused their meals, either in protest of their captivity or because the choppy seas robbed them of their appetites. But Baudin was unyielding, going as far as to hand-feed rissoles into the beaks, mouths and muzzles of the sick, often at the cost of the crew’s diminishing stores. On finer days, when the sea was calm and the deck warm from sun, Baudin would lead a wombat or wallaby on a rope, allowing it to ruminate among familiar vegetation on deck.

Of the seventy-two animals taken from Australia only sixteen survived the journey to France. Most were destined ignoble burials: thrown overboard, left to perplex fish. Baudin himself would meet a similar end, dying kinless and confused on Mauritius. The cause of death, while undiagnosed, was believed to be the same that claimed some of his passengers—that which saw Eugene, the tiger snake, ingest its own tail and the floating primroses dive to their collective death. However, Baudin’s demise did not take the form of self-ingestion or a voluntary plank-walk, but rather an unwillingness to eat, drink or fight in any way against the degeneration of his body, so much so that in he refused to be transported to a more comfortable location than his foreshore hammock, where he contently decomposed in his final weeks among the living. 

Three months later, when Flinders arrived in Mauritius, he visited Baudin’s grave—a plot of earth marked only by an assortment of flowers begging to be replaced. It moved him deeply. 

However, paying his respects to a peer was not the reason he had docked in Port Louis. On his way home to Britain, Flinders’ vessel had encountered seething seas on the Indian, resulting in severe damage to the hull. Out of desperation he pulled into Port Louis for repairs. It was dumb, rotten luck for Flinders and crew that hostilities between Britain and France had resumed in the meantime and that he and his men were thus detained by French authorities for six years.

By the time Cook landed on mainland Australia, Tasmania’s bounties were some of the worst-kept secrets on the sea. For decades small-fry fishermen – lured by the songs of the humpback – had been ploughing its waters with great rewards. But ultimately it was the blaring honks of the seal that compelled these men off their boats and onto her wild shores.

In the early days, fleets of sealers would row ashore at dawn and return to the mother ship by the end of the day, bearing a haul of dead seals to be skinned and rendered on deck. But with years of refinement this process came to resemble in efficiency the mills of mechanised Europe. For entire summers gangs were left ashore to harvest seals by means of club or pike. There, pelt shelters were erected to preserve the skins, while try-pots were installed to boil blubber on site. 

As it happened, these sealing settlements brought about the earliest contact between Europeans and the Aborigines of Tasmania, the Palawa. To the latter, how lost the shivering sealer must have seemed, how inexplicable his mission. It stood to reason that he came from a world where seal pelts were more vital to life—how cold his distant lands must have been! Either that or the unindustrialised Palawa saw the white man’s need to build pelt shelters and set up try-pots as a forewarning to his inclination for excess. Either way, a cautious distance was kept.

As for the sealers, the smoke that rose from the bush and carried scents of roasting kangaroo and shellfish were easy to resist at first. For weeks, fear confined them to the beaches and to their meagre diet of hardtack and rainwater. But gradually a kind of mania would set in. Day by day their spirit eroded, as card games, conversation and the drudgery of work did little to alleviate the boredom that came with land sealing. It wasn’t curiosity or even adventure that finally led them into the bush—but the overwhelming tedium that came from watching pelts dry.

Upon first meeting, both sides were naturally tentative. After all, these early encounters were not only the Palawa’s first sightings of white skin, but ships, firearms, mirrors, trousers and so on. For that reason the Palawa showed disproportionate curiosity towards the sealers, while the sealers chiefly focused on how they could benefit from the meeting—namely through food, sex and labour. Soon this imbalance afforded the Palawa a new thesis: there is nothing more dangerous than a bored white man.

It wasn’t until much later that the misadventures of sealing gangs made their way into the gazettes of European England, fuelling a budding literary genre of the coloniser in his fight against nature—and the very people who embodied that concept. The tales generally tell of a hungry sealer who heads inland to befriend a native, hoping to trade his tools for food. Depending on the author, these encounters then went one of two ways. One, a sealer is bemused by the natives’ traditions, charmed by their simple way of life and in awe of their skills as hunters. Alternatively, the white man’s trade proposals would result in sealer-Palawa violence, where the former would invariably prevail in all-out war.

Whether these tales had any fidelity to the truth mattered little to their audience, for no reader was willing to go to the trouble of verifying them. They served either to cast doubt on or justify the Crown’s claim to these faraway shores and the people who inhabited them. In reality, the nature of the sealer-native dynamic had evolved year on year, becoming more complex each season. Of course, sealers were less swashbuckling than the stories represented and the natives far less uniform in their responses to white settlement.

In Charles’ day, decades prior to the gazettes, land sealing was so established across Tasmania that, upon landing, a gang was often greeted with a dance from a Palawa tribe. A group of native men would then enlist themselves as envoys to the sealers, with the primary object of finding women from rival bands who could assist in sealing operations - chiefly skinning and preparing hides – as well as offering the sealers companionship during their stay.

Whether the arrival of the sealers and their want of women incited fresh rivalries between bands or aggravated old ones was never clear. But whatever Palawa life was like before land sealing, it couldn’t be recovered. Tribes would often retaliate against the sealers with rescue attempts which, in the long run, offered only ephemeral glory in an inexorable process of replacement at the hands of Europeans.

Soon the women became a commodity in the economy of the islands, valued for their knowledge of the environment as well as their amenability as lovers and labourers. In the summer months they assisted by not only skinning and preserving pelts but also hunting mutton birds, shellfish, gulls and their eggs. Often, gangs would ferry the Palawa women to neighbouring islands where they, like the sealers themselves, were abandoned for months at a time to hunt and process seals on their own.

If the women resisted these duties the consequences were, naturally, more brutal than the reality of their servitude. Sometimes they were beaten, sometimes shackled to a tree and deprived of food. Those who didn’t submit to their new reality were made examples of—either killed or abandoned to an island of their own. The latter punishment explains how the women Milou saw from Nancy reached their island.

In many cases the relationship between a sealer and a Palawa woman resembled the sealer families of Europe, so much so that sealers and their partners adopted the titles of husband and wife. Much like their European marriages, this was a union of estrangement where the man would spend but a few summer months with his wife, followed by a year or more of separation. Of course, it was rarely up to a gang sealer if he came back at all.

In her servitude, the sealer wife was not only tasked with various sealing operations but was also charged with reconstructing, as best as the elements permitted, a European home on sand. Of course, this was a concept she would have to be taught. But before long many sealer wives were cooking and cleaning, as well as learning to await or dread their husband’s return in his absence.
Another responsibility of hers was raising children, both those born from conjugal and non-conjugal relations. From their fathers, children might have picked up phrases in Dutch, French, English and so on. But generally the sealers didn’t interfere as Palawa mothers passed down their language, customs and their knowledge of the environment to their children.
One such tradition was crafting shell necklaces. Like sealing, this was performed in the summer when the tides were low and the choice shells were most accessible. After gleaning the shallows for pieces – often, as in the case of the maireener, no larger than a rice grain – the shells were rinsed and left in open air, much to the delight of the bugs that cleansed them of any remaining debris. After sorting through the shells, the best ones were perforated with sharp animal bone and then threaded with the sinews of a kangaroo tail or plant fibres dried, softened and twisted for the purpose. Once the shells were arranged in a pleasing order the necklace was worn by the maker or given to a loved one on a worthy occasion. The most special necklaces acquired the status of heirlooms and were passed down the generations.
Every  summer these mixed-race communities proliferated, and within a few decades, as gangs came and went, as Brits established their claim, the white man and mixed-blood Palawa would outnumber those of full Palawa ancestry, until eventually replacing them altogether.