Read Online Leviathan by John Birmingham - Free Book Online

instance, the convicts were in the habit of stealing the Aborigines’ canoes and spears, making it necessary for Phillip to publish decrees, enforceable under pain of death, to stop his people from interfering with the locals. He explicitly banned any revenge raids on Iora camps and, recognising their prior claims over the land’s resources, ordered that fishermen encountering any Aborigines on the harbour should hand over a portion of their catch.
    However, when his gamekeeper McEntire was killed, Phillip finally authorised a large posse to track down those responsible. McEntire had trekked over to Botany Bay with two other convicts and a sergeant of the marines, hunting kangaroos to restock the colony’s depleted larder. They bashed out through the scrub along the northern arm of the bay, making camp at a small hut recently erected on the peninsula for just this purpose. A rustling noise in the bushes awoke the sergeant with a start around one in the morning. Assuming some kangaroos had wandered up close, he called to the others, who quickly roused themselves. Peering into the obsidian blackness of the Australian night, they were alarmed to spy five natives advancing on them with spears at the ready. McEntire, who was more familiar with the bush and its indigenes than his companions said, ‘Don’t be afraid, I know them’. He laid down his rifle, stepped forward and spoke in their language. They began to withdraw, McEntire following and chatting as he went. Then, without warning, one of the ‘Indians’, as the colonists then called them, leapt onto a fallen tree and loosed his spear at the advancing white man. It pierced his chest with a sick wet crunch, the barbed wooden head driving hard between two ribs and puncturing the left lung. Prematurely but presciently McEntire cried out, ‘I am a dead man!’
    He staggered back to the hut, where someone broke off the protruding shaft while the others chased his attackers. The Indians, however, were too swift, too agile and too much at home in their own world and their pursuers soon gave up the trail. McEntire, awash with his life’s blood, begged them not to let him die in the woods. A large, muscular type, he dragged himself back to Sydney where the surgeons could only tell him that yes, he was a dead man. Watkin Tench, who would soon be appointed to lead a revenge party, described the change which came over the once fearsome gamekeeper as he received the news.
    The poor wretch now began to utter the most dreadful exclamations and to accuse himself of the commission of crimes of the deepest dye, accompanied with such expressions of his despair of God’s mercy as are too terrible to repeat.
    As he lingered on the tables of the rugged camp hospital for the next three days a number of Aborigines made their way in to see him. They seemed to know what had happened and when surgeons made signs of extracting the spearhead, still lodged tightly in the swollen, supperating wound, they gestured violently. Death would quickly follow any attempt at removal. The medical staff demurred, and on 12 December they removed the spear’s head. Out came a large wooden barb with several smaller stone spikes fastened on with yellow gum. However most of the spikes tore free with the force of extraction and remained embedded in the gamekeeper’s flesh. This primitive surgery did not really help. McEntire had already seen his last Christmas and on 20 December he died.
    Governor Phillip ordered a patrol of fifty marines to kit up and search out the tribe from which the murderer hailed. At the same time he expressly forbade any unauthorised attacks on the Aborigines. He called in Tench and tasked him with a three-day march ‘to bring in six of those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay; or, if that should be found impracticable, to put that number to death’. Tench had wrangled the body count down. Originally the young captain was to