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execute ten and bring more back as prisoners. They ‘were to cut off and bring in the heads of the slain; for which purpose hatchets and bags would be furnished’. But no signs of friendship or invitation were to be used to lure the victims into a trap. Phillip thought such conduct treacherous, giving the natives reason to distrust the English in the future. So it was to be an honest, straightforward killing, a thoroughly British massacre. Phillip explained to Tench his reasons for ordering the strike; seventeen colonists had been killed or wounded by the natives; he thought the Bideegal tribe to be the principal aggressors and he was determined to strike a decisive blow, to convince them of English superiority ‘and to infuse an universal terror, which might operate to prevent further mischief’. His observations of the natives had led him to conclude that although they did not fear death individually, a tribe found its strength and security in its numbers; hence the necessity of decimating the whole rather than just punishing the individual. Phillip told his subordinate he had long held off violent measures, believing that in every former instance of hostility the Aborigines had acted out of misunderstanding or in retaliation.
    â€˜To the latter of these causes,’ said Phillip, ‘I attribute my own wound, but in this business of McEntire, I am fully persuaded that they were unprovoked, and the barbarity of their conduct admits of no extenuation.’
    Tench, on being asked whether he saw any way around the impending action inquired whether, instead of destroying ten people, the capture of six might suffice, ‘as out of this number, a part might be set aside for retaliation’ and the rest released some time later to spread the word. Phillip agreed, adding that if six couldn’t be taken, Tench should ensure that number were shot.
    Thus at four in the morning on 14 December, Watkin Tench strode to the head of a column consisting of another captain, two lieutenants, two surgeons, three sergeants, three corporals and forty enlisted men. Loaded down with heavy packs, canteens, bayonets and firearms clanking in the dawn and clouds of dust billowing up around their boots, they clomped south; a ‘terrific procession’ Tench called it, neatly anticipating the clumsy, impotent lunge of another technologically advanced but hopelessly misplaced army in the jungles of Vietnam a hundred and seventy years later. Reading Tench’s caustic, self-aware narrative of the hunt for McEntire’s killers, it is hard to shake a sense of strange familiarity, some exotic kin to deja vu as the lost patrol drags itself through an unpleasant alien landscape suddenly devoid of all sign of the enemy, in fact of all sign of life. The soil was shallow and sandy, ‘and its productions meagre and wretched’. When forced to quit the sand, they had to drag themselves through deep crevices and ‘clamber over rocks unrefreshed by streams and unmarked by diversity’. Tench wrote that by nine o’clock they had reached the peninsula at the head of Botany Bay, ‘but after having walked in various directions until four o’clock in the afternoon, without seeing a native’, they halted for the night, exhausted.
    Come daylight the British stretched stiff, aching limbs, noisily emptied their bladders, hauled their packs up from the ground and started out again, marching into the morning sun, hoping to make the south-west arm of the bay, about five kilometres from its mouth. Tench was going to rake over the area then sweep around to the northern arm to complete the search. Unfortunately the guides were off and at half past seven they suddenly came upon the shore at the head of the peninsula, between the two arms. Five Indians were gathered about the shore and the troopers moved quickly to surround them. In vain, however, as
    â€¦ they penetrated our design, and before we could get near