“A SET OF PIRATES”

Evening Star, Issue 22687, 29 June 1937, Page 11

“A SET OF PIRATES”

BASS STRAIT SEALERS FIGHTERS AND WRECKERS SOME EARLY HISTORY Though interest in the early sealers, that “complete set of pirates” who inhabited Kangaroo Island, has been revived by the Adelaide Centenary celebrations, no prominence has been given to the fact that this ruffianly gang went there from Wilson’s Promontory and the rugged islands of Bass Strait—the first sealing grounds in Australia or New Zealand (says a writer in the Melbourne ‘Age’). These sealers, possibly the finest seamen that ever belted open boats through the tide-whipped seas that lash Victoria’s shores, were in the main the most lawless of men, and some of them frequented Bass Strait before Flinders. There are authentic records of sealing in Bass Strait as early as 1798. In October of that year the captain of the 60-ton brig Nautilus, from Port Jackson, formed a sealing depot at Kent Bay, Cape Barren Island—the first settlement south of Sydney—but another venturesome skipper, William Reid, of the schooner Martha, it is said, brought tierces of seal oil and bales of sealskins from the Strait even earlier. This is not unlikely, as Governor King reported that the island called by his name was seen by Reid early in 1798. The success of these shipmasters, however, induced leading merchants in Sydney to despatch gangs to seal on many islands in Bass Strait. There the men lived in crude huts and remained for months killing and clubbing seals. At long intervals a schooner would arrive with supplies and to shift them to new grounds, FIRST IN PORT PHILLIP. There is also reason to believe that sealers were the first men to enter Port Phillip, for two huts, obviously built by Europeans, were found on the shore between Rye' and Rosebud by Surveyor Grimes on his expedition to the Bay in 1803, previous to Collins’s arrival at Sorrento. This belief is borne out by the fact that the aboriginal “wife” of Jimmy Munro, the notorious uncrowned king of Cape Barren Island, is said to have come from Port Phillip around 1800. By the year 1802 the number of sealers in the Strait was estimated to bo 200, and catches were heavy. The gang landed from the brig Harrington on the shores of King Island alone killed 4,300 seals and 600 sea elephants in one month. In consequence of the ruthless and extravagant slaughter of females, the sea elephants—so called because of their huge size and their long snouts—were exterminated, and the seals and pups took refuge on the less-accessible islets and rocks. Independent sealers, mainly runaway convicts, also began to engage with the regular men, so in 1803 we find the Sydney schooners shifting their field of operations to New Zealand. Bass Strait was left to adventurers who fought for their own hand, and who looked to Port Dalrymple, the re-cently-formed settlement on the Tamar, for supplies. Kent Bay, Cape Barren Island, as the headquarters of these freebooters, then entered on a lurid era. Their number was reinformed by runaways from n sealing vessel from Mauritius and deserters from American whale ships. BOATS FROM A WRECK. From the timbers of the wreck of the East India Company’s ship Sydney Cove, these men fashioned, with few tools beyond tomahawks, large doubleended boats, in which they sailed from island to island, and along the Victorian coast. Some of them landed to seal on rockv islets fashed by tide

races as spiteful as the Port Phillip rip,—feats to-day that would command newspaper headlines. In time these freebooters, to relieve their solitude 'and to lighten their labours, obtained gins, mostly from the tribes along the Tasmanian coast. Many of the men had several sable consorts, and these women, taught to handle oar and halyard, became as skilled as their masters in sailing a boat. These gins, too, did the greater part of the sealing, and such success crowned their efforts that a fresh, impetus was given to the industry. Captain James Kelly—the first Aus-tralian-born master mariner—on his famous exploratory voyage around Tasmania in 1816, watched two young women, naked and carefully greased in seal oil, creep up almost imperceptibly to some seals. With clubs in hand they lay down beside the animals on the spray-washed rocks. Some of the animals lifted up their heads to scent the newcomers, but the gins went through the same motions as the seals, holding up their elbows to imitate a flapper and scratching themselves with their hands. Thus they acted for some time until suddenly they jumped up and each struck two seals on the nose, killing them with the blow'. Then they began dancing with joy. FIGHTS OVER EXPERTS. The most expert sealing women were much prized from an economical standpoint, as their diet consisted merely of three or four pounds of half-cooked seal meat. To obtain them rival gangs engaged in sanguinary feuds, for at the opening of the nineteenth century in the Strait might was right. The men lived hard, their wants were few —mostly rum and a little flour, for which they bartered their pelts. Strange to relate, the sole demand for sovereigns among the men was to pierce holes in them to make earrings. Shades of the Spanish Main! And gold earrings were not inappropriate, for these men were veritable pirates. It is said they were in the habit of carrying lanterns up and down pads on cliffs to simulate the swaying, lights of another craft and so attract some vessel off her course to be piled up on the rocks. Rarely did any_ of the vessel’s crew reach the shore alive. These ruffians saw to that; and then the wreck was plundered. Should any liquor be salved the event would be celebrated by a carousal. They were real orgies, for these sealers drank deep. It is related that rum was ac-' tually poured into holes made in the clay floor of their huts so that they could continue drinking when they had fallen on the ground, too overcome to rise. One can imagine the wreck. The thunder of surf booming on the rooks, the flickering of the wind-blown flares as they dimly light the wreckage strewn along the beach. Two men. their jealousy inflamed by rum, fight with flensing knives, while a solitary gin, clad in skins, stands by watching intently. The others are too busy. CARRYING THE PLUNDER. Some men standing knee-deep in the surf wrestle with obstinate barrels in the undertow. Other men and gins carry the plunder away to be cached in the sand dunes close by. After one of these orgies at Prime Seal Island a once-cherished hunting ground, a sealer, jilted by his gin, tarred the rocks, and tho animals never returned. A relic of these wild days are six bottles of brandy, their corks nearly rotted with age, that were found some years ago in the sand at Preservation Island by Captain Harry Burgess, well known in the Bass Strait crayfishing trade.

In 1815 Captain Stewart, a ship master of Port Dalrymple, bitterly complained to the Van Diemen’s Land authorities of the piratical ways of these sealers. In an abnormally Jong

letter he writes: . . . “if some means are not taken to suppress it, any vessel or people’s lives are not safe that frequent these Bass Strait islands.” He reports on the mysterious disappearance of several men, and also the presence of six desperate ex-convict bushrangers from Van Diemen’s Land, who were lurking about the Kent group—those rugged islands to the south of the Promontory, whose bold red granite-faced clitfs rise sneer from the sea to a height of 900 ft. As one who knows the place well, I cannot help reflecting what an admirable haunt for pirates. In the year 1826, George Robinson —an Australian Robinson Crusoe—who had lived for many years on King Island, was forcibly driven thence by these pirates. The same year Dumont d’Urville, the French navigator, on a visit to Australia in the Astrolabe, entered Westemport, and there found a party of sealers living on Phillip Island. HUTS ON THE CLIFFS. They had built huts on the cliffs just north of the present Newhaven jetty, and had a standing crop of two acres of wheat. Eliminating the insignificant plot sown by Grant on Churchill Island, this was the first crop grown in Victoria. i Several sealers, too, had permanent dwellings in the coves on the east coast of Wilson’s Promontory. In the middle ’thirties, so harassed had been the seals that they deserted most places in Bass Strait. Some sealers in consequence had coasted to distant fields—to Kangaroo Island and oven on to Rottnest Island, off Fremantle. Imagine it, through the Bight in open boats! Those who had remained in the Strait settled down on islands, abandoning their old pursuits for kangarooing and mutton-birding. At present some 200 inoffensive halfcastes, the descendants of these lawless men, are living on Cape Barren and the adjacent islands, carrying on these occupations. Strange to relate these islanders refer, as did their ancestors, to the aboriginals of Australia as “New Hollanders.” To-day, with the exception of Seal Rocks, Westemport, there are still a few seals in Bass Strait, and these half-castes, and such names as Sealers’ Cove and Sea Elephant Bay, alone serve to remind us of the old hardliving sealers. One feels that the giant Tasmanian airliners that fly daily across the Bass Strait islands, must have long since frightened to more distant shores the last ghost of my bygone sealers which may have .ingered on in this scene of his misdeeds—this once famous sealing ground.