The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change (10 page)

Curtis’s introduction also offered other enticements to the reader. These included harrowing accounts of head-hunting and cannibalism—practices familiar from South Seas castaway memoirs like that of Alexander Selkirk, Defoe’s real-life model for Robinson Crusoe—as well as elements from Native American “captivity” tales. Curtis further promised all the attractions of romantic travelogues—dramatic engravings, sentimental poems, intimate personal letters, and spiritual homilies—and these would be seasoned with self-improving doses of scientific, topographic, navigational, and ethnographic information. “Useful knowledge” of this sort provided both the pleasures of entertainment and the certainties of factual authority; Curtis’s observations would reveal “the manners and customs of the barbarians, among whom the sufferers were cast.” All this “unquestionable corroborative testimony” would dispel any doubts “that human nature … could have borne up under tortures so numerous and enduring, and insults so diabolical.”
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Curtis assured readers that his narrative was based primarily on the court testimonies of Mrs. Fraser and her supportive witness, John Baxter—the nephew of her late husband and second officer of the
Stirling Castle
. Even before this, however, the journalist had managed to obtain some rich copy directly from Captain Greene and Eliza themselves, whom he’d befriended as soon as they arrived in London. The earlier versions Mrs. Fraser had given to the commandant of the Moreton Bay settlement and then to Sydney newspapers were rather too reticent.

True, even at that early point she’d complained of having experienced physical and mental hardships while living for six weeks with small bands of Aborigines on Great Sandy Isle: they’d stolen her clothes, forced her into backbreaking labor, and cruelly hastened the deaths of her husband and of First Officer Charles Brown. However, she’d said nothing to the Moreton Bay commandant about murder, torture, or acts of cannibalism. She’d talked only of the harsh treatment meted out by the Aborigines on whom she’d relied for survival. Her ravaged condition appeared to have come about from foraging for scarce food for those six weeks without protection from the searing heat and torrential rain.
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But Curtis’s book told a very different story. His fictive talents were everywhere to be seen. He provided fervid descriptions of Eliza’s anguish, revelations of her maternal and Christian virtue, hints of diabolical sexual violations too disgusting to specify, and lingering details of bestial native cruelties and cannibal practices. A true literary craftsman, he also inserted a series of tactical digressions designed to ramp up the tension or to gloss over inconsistencies in Eliza’s story. Wherever possible, he omitted any statements by court witnesses that might have the undesirable effect of humanizing her captors.

In short, Eliza Fraser was presented as the epitome of early Victorian womanhood, a lady who had exhibited inspirational qualities from the opening moment of the tragedy, on May 21, 1836, when the
Stirling Castle
hit one of the Swain reefs in deep water at the southeastern entrance to the Great Barrier Reef.

The solemnity and terrors of that awful night, were heightened in a great degree by peals of thunder and flashes of vivid lightning, such as have never been heard or beheld in our latitude; the elements above seem to have confederated together with those beneath, to strike alarm and dismay into the minds of the benighted and shipwrecked captain and his desponding and exhausted crew; and were imagination to be expended to its utmost bounds, it could form no adequate idea what must have been the sensations of one person on board the wreck,—a woman, a doating and affectionate wife, one, who being influenced by conjugal fidelity, and anxiety for the health and welfare of her husband, had left her country, children and friends, to console him in the hour of sickness and exhaustion, from a consciousness, that while performing the duties which the law of connubiality enjoins, she had no reason to dread the terrors of the mighty sea.
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Eliza’s husband also needed some sanitizing. Captain Fraser’s record of a previous Barrier Reef shipwreck, a chronic inability to retain crewmen, and a paranoid terror of cannibals was not helpful. Rather than portray him as already ill and half crazed with fear on first meeting Aborigines on the Great Sandy Isle beach, Curtis declared that he had from the outset “been a marked man, [who] underwent more suffering and experienced more contumely” from the savages than any other of the castaways. Reckless of the consequences, however, the captain had chivalrously “interfered in behalf of his wife, when he beheld her subjected to diabolical insults.”
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Fraser’s refusal to do the “bidding” of the savages, claimed Curtis, caused them to contrive “ingenious and horrid modes of torture” that culminated in a cowardly murder. A spear, hurled from behind, “struck him near the shoulder blade, and passing through his body, came out at his breast.” His brave wife “darted from her hiding place and exclaimed, ‘O Jesus of Nazareth! can I stand this?’” whereupon her husband, expiring in a welter of blood, whispered, “‘O Eliza! I am gone!’” “These were,” said Curtis, “the last words uttered by the unfortunate victim of barbarian vengeance.” An accompanying illustration of the fleeing captain being impaled through the back completed one of the book’s great set pieces. To ensure that the scene achieved its intended effect, though, Curtis also needed to suppress Eliza’s surprising admission to Mayor Kelly’s court: “I don’t think it was their intention to kill my husband; I believe the man who cast the spear merely intended to wound him.” She implied that Captain Fraser’s already wasted body had succumbed to the shock of the spearing.
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Similar omissions were needed for Curtis to make a convincing case that two other castaway crewmen had been murdered. He presented the death of First Officer Charles Brown as a stock Native American–style atrocity: “Mr Brown was inhumanly tied to a stake, and a
slow fire
being placed under him, his body, after the most excruciating sufferings, was reduced to ashes.” The slowness of the fire was to ensure “that their [the savages’] joy might be enhanced at the writhing of their victims.” John Baxter and Eliza Fraser admitted in court that neither had been present at the man’s demise, but this didn’t stop Curtis from citing them as firsthand witnesses.
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The murder of Captain Fraser as depicted in John Curtis’s
Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle
(London: Virtue, 1838) (Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library)

He also included a claim that Baxter had found fragments of bone on the beach that he identified by scraps of clothing as coming from a young sailor named James Major. Although Major appears to have died a natural death and rolled into his own campfire, Baxter’s evidence inspired Curtis to write that “the natives had placed [Major’s] head on a fire, which consumed the thorax, and descended obliquely to a part of the left side of the abdomen, when it appeared to have satiated its vengeance, or perhaps its flame was extinguished by the gushing of the heart’s blood of the victim.” Curtis’s earlier
Times
report had been equally imaginative: “the savages,” he wrote, “set to work and by means of sharpened shells severed the head from the body with frightful lacerations. They then ate parts of the body, and preserved the head with gums of extraordinary efficacy and affixed it as a figure bust to one of their canoes.”
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Curtis regretfully had to leave these flesh-eating details out of the book, because Baxter suddenly forgot them when testifying to the mayoral court. It was a pity: confirmed instances of cannibalism would have proved that these natives were crueler than “wild beasts.” But details of the inquiry, which was held at the same time that Curtis was writing his book, were being published in many newspapers, forcing him to curb his fictional impulses. He had to content himself instead with a few rather unsatisfactory generalizations, such as his definition of a “corrobery” as a savage dance “round a miserable captive, whose flesh they would presently greedily devour.” He also dug up some unsupported accusations of cannibalism made by a naval surgeon during the 1820s, which were directed at Aboriginal clans living one thousand miles from Great Sandy Isle. Mrs. Fraser’s savage captors, Curtis implied, had shared those Aborigines’ love of eating human flesh “in a manner the most revolting.” They would consume enemies slain in war, as well as any Europeans they could capture, and—when especially hungry—even eat their own children.
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Curtis felt himself on stronger ground when bringing to light new instances of hardships endured by Eliza Fraser and her associates. The most startling of his scoops was the revelation that she’d been forced to give birth to a premature baby in the ankle-deep bilge water of the longboat. The baby had died, “after gasping a few times,” and the body was tossed overboard wrapped in a piece of shirt. Curtis quoted a hymn by his clergyman friend, Reverend G. C. “Boatswain” Smith, which compared the dead babe to one even more famous: “In ‘swaddling clothes’ wrapt midst infernal commotion, / To sink and to die on life’s accurst ocean.”
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Curtis also disclosed fresh details of suffering during Eliza’s “worse than satanic bondage” ashore, especially after she was assigned to the care of a band of native women. They had evidently howled “with derision and mirth” at her naked, sunburned body and then, as if she were an animal in a cage, pelted her with wet sand that caused “excoriation of the skin … excruciating almost beyond endurance.” This entertainment triggered a succession of worsening tortures that included starving her of food, forcing her to carry heavy logs, making her nurse a lice-infested infant, beating her with clubs, stabbing her with spears, and burning her legs with lighted brands. Eliza’s ordeals, Curtis speculated, must have been motivated by the native women’s jealousy, which was aroused “because attentions of a diabolical nature were paid her by the men.” As for the men themselves, their “sport” supposedly consisted of throwing lighted resinous bark on the sleeping castaways, or tossing them overboard from canoes at sea, “for the purpose of exulting in their struggles to save themselves from drowning.”
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After relating this litany of horror, Curtis suddenly thought it prudent to reassure readers that Mrs. Fraser and Mr. Baxter had in no way “over-coloured their statements in respect of the suffering which they endured.” Pages later, a more urgent footnote on the same subject temporarily displaced the text, spilling over into several additional pages of tiny print.

These interventions marked the moment, in September 1837, when Commissioner Dowling’s letter hit the news. Curtis admitted in the footnote that he’d been suddenly confronted in the middle of writing with a flurry of newspaper accusations that Eliza Fraser was “an ingenious impostor,” a “base fabricator,” and a purveyor of lies “to gull the benevolent.” He felt bound, therefore, “to deviate from the track … originally marked out” in order to defend his heroine against such “cruel and un-English” abuse.
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Here Curtis abandoned all pretense of being a dispassionate court reporter and flung himself into the role of defending attorney. Most of his emergency footnote was given over to reproducing a letter just obtained by Lord Mayor Kelly from Lieutenant Charles Otter of the Moreton Bay settlement. A year earlier, Otter had masterminded Eliza Fraser’s rescue by conscripting an Irish convict familiar with the Kabi Kabi people to persuade the natives to hand her over. Otter described his first sight of the rescued lady: “You never saw such an object … Although only thirty-eight years of age, she looked like an old woman of seventy, perfectly black, and dreadfully crippled from the sufferings she had undergone.… She was a mere skeleton, the skin literally hanging up on her bones, while her legs were a mass of sores, where the savages had tortured her with firebrands.”
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But was this a sufficiently harrowing picture to persuade Curtis’s readers that Mrs. Fraser was innocent of subsequent exaggeration and financial fraud? On further reflection he decided that his case needed strengthening, so he introduced a whole new chapter in which to defend Eliza. In doing so he compared himself to a navigator faced with an unexpected reef, “which called into requisition all our nautical experience, and forced into active service all the skill in seamanship which we possessed.” Moreover, colonial newspapers were now also joining in the clamor. They accused Eliza of “inexcusable ingratitude” in concealing the generous financial help given by the Australian public. One Sydney newspaper pointed to a marked disparity between her original and recent London testimonies, stating that the new version of her suffering was “greatly overcharged.”
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Experience as a court reporter had evidently taught Curtis a thing or two about how to undermine a prosecution case. He decided on a threefold strategy. First he reminded his readers of the “gallant” Lieutenant Otter’s proof that Mrs. Fraser’s ordeal had “been of a very extraordinary kind.” In fact, Curtis hinted that delicacy had forced him to understate it: “we have in our possession facts connected with the brutal treatment of this helpless woman, (and could produce a living witness who would verify them on oath,) which, if we dared to publish, would excite an involuntary shudder of horror and disgust in every well-regulated mind.”
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