The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (9 page)

Flinders didn’t yet know that reef-making corals need light to survive and can grow only in relatively shallow waters, so he did not confront the mystery of how the animalcules managed to build their “monuments” within oceanic depths. Nevertheless he offered up a series of remarkably shrewd observations about the environmental character and achievements of these tiny creatures. He inferred, for example, that they had to be “constantly covered with water” to survive, “for they do not work, except in holes upon the reef, beyond low-water mark; but the coral sand and other broken remnants thrown up by the sea, adhere to the rock, and form a solid mass with it, as high as the common tides reach.”

Once these solid boulders were tossed clear of seawater, he noticed, they seemed to “lose their adhesive property” and to lie in loose jumbles that gradually developed into a “key” (cay) as sand gathered on the reef. Before long, in a series of stages, these cays gradually came to life: salt plants grew, soil formed, and birds carried over seeds of pandanus, coconut, and other shrubs and trees. Every gale piled up fresh mounds of sand, wood, broken trees, insects, and small creatures, until “last of all comes man to take possession.”
38

Flinders deduced, too, that the little cay in the Torres Strait that he’d called Halfway Island was well advanced in this “progressive” evolution. The lower part of the island—clear of the wash of even the highest spring tides—was still covered with half-evolved rock that displayed organic origins, such as “sand, coral, and shells … in a more or less perfect state of cohesion; small pieces of wood, pumice stone, and other extraneous bodies which chance had mixed with the calcerous substances when the cohesion began, were inclosed in the rock; and in some cases were still separable from it without much force.”

The upper part of the cay, by contrast, was already covered in casuarinas and other shrubs and trees, which were in turn providing food for parrots, pigeons, and other birds, “to whose ancestors it is probable, the island was originally indebted for this vegetation.”
39

*   *   *

Not until thirty-two years later, when another young explorer visited the Cocos (Keeling) atolls in the Indian Ocean in search of answers to similar speculations about the origins and character of coral reefs and islands, would Matthew Flinders’s luminous analysis be bettered. Significantly, that young man, Charles Darwin, had been reading Flinders’s
Terra Australis
before he arrived, and he borrowed from it the arresting metaphor of coral reefs as vast “monuments” to the tiny animalcules that built them.

Neither was it a coincidence that both these young coral theorists, who shared Enlightenment and romantic sensibilities, were reading Milton’s great romantic poem
Paradise Lost
at the time they made their reef observations. Flinders and Darwin also shared a belief that coral reefs and islands kindled mankind’s deepest poetic and scientific faculties, for, as Darwin said, “such formations surely rank high among the wonderful objects of this world.”
40

But if any of Flinders’s readers were inclined to see the Reef in a similarly romantic way, that inclination was soon to be dispelled by the harrowing testimonies of one Mrs. Eliza Fraser.

3

CAGE

Eliza Fraser’s Hack Writer

T
HE STORY OF ELIZA FRASER’S ORDEAL
at the hands of an Aboriginal clan at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef resounds through white Australian history. Before this incident, most readers in Britain and Australia knew little or nothing about the Reef region, other than Hawkesworth’s colorful account of Cook’s battle with the Labyrinth. Over the years, Eliza Fraser’s story has congealed into a core cultural myth, one of the few to be taken up by artists in other countries, and arguably as alive today as at the time of its inception. No one could possibly have foreseen its ramifications, which surely included the inclination on the part of many settlers to see Aboriginal peoples as violent, animalistic, and sexually predatory.

On September 27, 1837, John Curtis, court reporter for
The Times
of London, opened up a rival newspaper, the
Morning Advertiser
, to read in it a startling private letter. The letter had been sent several months earlier from the Liverpool Commissioner of Police, M. M. G. Dowling, to the current Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Kelly, and it had warned the mayor of the suspected fraudulent conduct of “a person calling herself Mrs. Fraser.”

Curtis already knew Mrs. Eliza Fraser, who was on the way to becoming a London celebrity. She was the widow of James Fraser, captain of a trader called the
Stirling Castle
, shipwrecked a year earlier on a coral reef two hundred miles off the coast of northeast Australia. Toward the end of 1836, newspapers in both Britain and the Australian colonies had carried reports that Captain and Mrs. Fraser and a small party of sailors had, after their shipwreck, landed a longboat on Great Sandy Isle (which was renamed Fraser Island after Eliza) at the southernmost point of the Great Barrier Reef, only to be captured by tribes of fierce natives. These we now know to be several bands or subgroups within the Kabi Kabi language group—the Ngulungbara in the north, the Badtjala in the center, and the Dulingbara in the south.

Mrs Fraser
in John Curtis’s
Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle
(London: Virtue, 1838) (Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library)

After six weeks of living with the Badtjala, during which time Mrs. Fraser’s husband and several other sailors died from maltreatment, she was rescued by a convict and returned to the Moreton Bay settlement, near present-day Brisbane. After recuperating for a while in Sydney, she embarked for England in early 1837 on a merchant ship owned by Captain Alexander Greene.

When she arrived in Liverpool on July 16, Mrs. Fraser approached the police to beg for relief from distress, and to ask for money to travel to London so as to take her horrific story directly to Lord Mayor Kelly. “But,” Police Commissioner Dowling’s subsequent letter informed Kelly, “on the second interview I had with her, an evident exaggeration of her sufferings while in captivity, caused a suspicion, and her relief was suspended till inquiries were made, when it turned out that she had married in Sydney … the master of the vessel in which she arrived here … who is a man in good circumstances, and who it now appears accompanied her to London … no doubt solely for the purpose of raising money by imposing on your Lordship and the public. Her husband, whose name is Greene, is the person who so warm-heartedly confirmed her statement before your Lordship.”
1

By the time he received this warning letter from Dowling, Kelly had already committed himself publicly to Mrs. Fraser’s cause, so he delayed his reply in the hope of finding evidence to verify her claims. Annoyed at the snub, Dowling eventually leaked the letter to the
Morning Advertiser
, which embellished it with the headline: “MRS FRASER … whose extraordinary adventures among savages have lately excited sympathy, is now suspected of being an imposter.” The radical
Morning Post
grabbed the opportunity to attack Lord Mayor Kelly, jeering that he’d failed to respond to the police warning because he’d “interested himself very warmly in her behalf.”
2

This was true. Facing an impending election, Kelly—a successful publisher of cheap books for the masses—had decided that Mrs. Fraser’s shocking story of captivity and abuse by cannibals could be harnessed to his political cause. Taking up the plight of the brave widow would present him, Kelly reasoned, as a good-hearted philanthropist. When Mrs. Fraser and Captain Greene had approached him, Kelly did not question her account of how she’d been captured and tortured by savages, and left lame, half blinded, and destitute by the ordeal. Announcing that he’d “never heard anything so truly dreadful,” Kelly urged the charitable ladies of London to give generously to his appeal for this “unfortunate” lady.
3

Being also a chief magistrate, Kelly had decided to convene a Mayoral Court of Inquiry to give publicity to Mrs. Fraser’s story. Favorable coverage of the event wouldn’t, of course, come free. All early nineteenth-century British newspapers relied to some degree on income procured by small-scale bribery or blackmail—and
The Times
was no exception. Its editor and reporters always expected to be paid for “puffs” (positive mentions) or for “excisions” (the dropping of discreditable mentions). Money would need to change hands to ensure that John Curtis gave due prominence to Kelly’s sympathetic interviews with Mrs. Fraser.
4

And so it proved. Curtis’s court reports presented a sparkling, real-life newspaper melodrama of cannibalism, imprisonment, murder, torture, and sexual violation—a story so affecting that the lord mayor’s public subscription quickly topped the considerable sum of five hundred pounds. But now, to the great inconvenience of both Curtis and Kelly, the
Morning Advertiser’
s exposé of Mrs. Fraser threatened to turn their scoop into an embarrassing scandal.
5

*   *   *

John Curtis was in an especially awkward position because he was also well on the way to completing a book about Mrs. Fraser’s ordeal, for which he’d composed the juicy title
SHIPWRECK of the STIRLING CASTLE
,
… the Dreadful Sufferings of the Crew,… THE CRUEL MURDER OF CAPTAIN FRASER BY THE SAVAGES [and] … the Horrible Barbarity of the Cannibals Inflicted upon THE CAPTAIN’S WIDOW, Whose Unparalleled Sufferings Are Stated by Herself, and Corroborated by the Other Survivors
. News of Dowling’s letter threatened to wreck the potential bestseller-in-progress, which Curtis hoped would appeal to a well-established vein of popular fascination with the sexual perversity, violence, and cannibalism of South Seas natives. Eliza Fraser’s six-week “captivity”—the first entailing a woman castaway—needed only some amplification and reshaping to achieve a level of sensation suitable for a mass readership. Curtis’s name, as the press mouthpiece of this wronged and fascinating lady, was already known through his
Times
court reports, which had generated a spate of imitative ballads, chapbooks, playbills, and merchandise from the grubby hacks in the London district of St. Giles and Seven Dials. His prospective book had everything going for it.
6

But who was this John Curtis? The man remains a mystery. All we definitely know is that he worked as the court reporter of
The Times
. Given recent evidence of how interchangeable the names John and James were in Britain at that time, it is probable he was the same
Times
court reporter who wrote a decade earlier under the name of James Curtis. This James Curtis had also published a sizzling bestseller, based on his reports of the trial of William Corder, a well-to-do farmer’s son accused of the grisly murder of a young mole catcher’s daughter, Maria Marten. The public couldn’t get enough of the seamy story. Curtis’s
Authentic and Faithful History of the Mysterious Murder of Maria Marten
pioneered the genre of real-life courtroom drama, which some modern critics hail as the genesis of Truman Capote–style crime writing. Moreover,
Maria Marten
’s publisher was none other than Thomas Kelly, the same man who as lord mayor of London was now conducting the inquiry into Eliza Fraser’s story.
7

Possibly in order to avoid accusations of collusion, John Curtis had organized for his forthcoming book to be published not by Kelly himself, but by George Virtue, one of the mayor’s friends. Virtue was another successful cheap-tract publisher, who worked almost next door to Kelly on Paternoster Row, and who served with him for the same London shire on the Court of Common Council, an elected body of the Corporation of London.
8

Even if James and John Curtis were not the same man, the latter’s decision to use the former’s bestseller as a model for the Eliza Fraser book must have been irresistible.
Maria Marten
had been a spectacular financial and popular success. Eliza Fraser’s story—suitably embellished—contained similarly sensational ingredients of torture, sex, and violence. In the introduction to his book, John stressed that he’d adopted a true-life, courtroom-drama approach that presented testimonies “from the lips of such of the survivors as we could have access to.” This, he claimed, had enabled him to eclipse all existing accounts of the affair in newspapers and chapbooks, which offered “a mere
epitome
.” By contrast, “it will be our object to narrate and arrange [the testimonies] in the chain of melancholy recital.”
9

Unbeknownst to himself, Curtis was actually doing far more than this. He was writing the book that would become the primary source for all subsequent retellings of the Eliza Fraser story, up to our own times. It is for this reason that we need to explore the book’s origin, structure, and content in detail.