Life and Adventures 1776-1801 Read online

  Text Classics

  JOHN NICOL was born in Scotland in 1755, and first went to sea in 1776. He served in the American War of Independence, and later sailed to Greenland, the West Indies, the South Pacific, China and the colony of New South Wales.d.

  He lived with the convict Sarah Whitlam in Port Jackson in 1790 after their son was born on the voyage to Australia. Later he served in the French Revolutionary Wars in Egypt and the Mediterranean, until he settled in Scotland in 1801.

  He died in 1825.

  TIM FLANNERY is a bestselling writer, scientist and explorer. He has published over a dozen books, most recently Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific. In 2011 he was appointed chief commissioner of the Australian Climate Commission.

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  Copyright in the Introduction and this edition © Tim Flannery 1997

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 1822

  First published by The Text Publishing Company 1997

  This edition published 2012

  Designed by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079398

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921961694

  Author: Nicol, John.

  Title: Life and adventures : 1776-1801 / John Nicol ; Tim Flannery, editor.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Nicol, John—Travel. Voyages and travels.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Flannery, Tim F. (Tim Fridtjof), 1956-

  Dewey Number: 910.45

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the author

  About the introducer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  John Nicol

  Introduction

  A Most Interesting Character

  Preface

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Service of John Nicol

  Notes

  Text Classics

  Map of the world as Nicol would have known it, showing some of his journeys.

  JOHN NICOL

  MARINER, AGE 67

  Introduction

  by Tim Flannery

  JOHN NICOL TWICE circled the globe, in the process visiting all six habitable continents. He fought American revolutionaries and Napoleon’s navy, was in Hawaii when Cook’s murderers were still young, in Port Jackson when Sydney consisted of about a thousand souls, and in the West Indies when African slaves were beginning to experiment with the music which would become blues and jazz. In short, as he roamed the world in the late eighteenth century, he saw the modern age in its infancy.

  The world John Nicol records is not one of admirals, governors and high officials, for he was by his own admission a simple ‘bungs’—an ‘unlettered’ cooper. He describes a world seen from below decks; a world peopled by slaves, convicts and Chinese barbers, many of whom Nicol counted among his friends. As such, his story is an extreme rarity. People like Nicol usually lacked the means to have their adventures recorded, and publishers were largely uninterested in such autobiographies. Indeed, a significant fraction of Nicol’s compatriots would not even have lived to tell their stories. When he sailed, mortality rates of 15 per cent per annum were not looked upon as especially bad, yet Nicol survived twenty-five years at sea.1

  The story of how this book came into existence is almost as remarkable as the one Nicol himself tells. Picture yourself in a street in Edinburgh with the freezing winter of 1822 just beginning to relax its grip. An old derelict totters feebly along, picking tiny fragments of coal from between the icy cobbles. These he places in the pocket of an old apron tied round his waist. They will be used to light a small fire, over which he will crouch, trying to fight off the chill. As he searches for his coals, the old man is approached by a ‘very strange person’ and so begins the encounter which, after a long and happenstance history, places this book in your hands today.2

  The ‘very strange person’ was John Howell, who was to record and edit Nicol’s work. Even in nineteenth-century Scotland Howell was an anomaly. He described himself as a ‘polyartist’. Although a bookbinder by trade, he was an inveterate inventor and tinkerer by nature. The most enduring of his contrivances is the ‘plough’, a device used by bookbinders well into the present century. Alexander Laing, who gave some biographical notes on Howell, remarked of this invention that ‘many a careless binder has ruined good books by too exuberant cropping [with it].’3

  Howell’s other inventions included ‘a reliable salve for the ringworm’ and a method for the fabrication of false teeth. Transport also intrigued him. He invented a flying machine (the testing of which, from the roof of an old tannery, cost him a broken leg), and a sort of prototype submarine. This latter nearly led to fratricide, for John encouraged an unwilling brother to enter the ‘large model of a fish’ for its test run on the River Leith. The brother refused, however, and John took his place. A contemporary account reports that:

  Scarcely had the fish entered the water when it capsized: the keel turning upwards, and poor John was submerged. Sounds of an alarming kind were heard to issue from the belly of the fish, and no time was lost in dragging it to the bank, when the inventor was liberated from his perilous position; but it took nearly half an hour before ‘suspended animation’ was fully restored.4

  Howell’s other great interest lay in the exploits of military men and adventurers. He published five books, three of which concerned such people. The first, Journal of a Soldier of the 71st, or Glasgow Regiment was followed by The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner and, finally, The Life of Alexander Alexander Written by Himself. Howell’s method seems to have consisted of befriending old soldiers and sailors, then spending months writing down or editing their life stories. One wonders whether they moved into his house for the duration. Whatever the case, Howell’s motives were noble ones, for he signed over royalties to his adoptees, and endeavoured to use their stories to obtain for them their well deserved pensions.

  Howell’s 1822 edition of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner is a modest little book, measuring just sixteen centimetres by ten. Its only illustration is a simple drawing of Nicol himself—in all probability placed there to evoke the reader’s pity. It shows the weatherbeaten and wistful countenance of one who has seen much of life. The book’s rarity now suggests that the print run was small. Its only republication occurred in 1937 when Cassell issued an edition ‘embellished with numerous original designs’ by Gordon Grant, and with a foreword and afterword by Laing, who claims that Life and Adventures is the earliest reminiscence by an ordinary sailor that ‘has any claim to permanence as literature’. The book, he says, ‘acquainted me…with a distinct personality I should have felt far the poorer for not having known, and from time to time I have sought him out again, in his book, with the same pleasure I should take in looking up an old friend.’

  John Nicol had ‘seen more of the world than most persons in Edinburgh, perhaps in Brita
in’ according to Howell, yet throughout his life he seems to have remained almost unworldly. This may stem from the fact that, like many seamen, he led a largely sheltered life. While at sea, his domestic and financial arrangements were made for him. Decisions were made by others, and there was little time for romance with all its complications. In these ways, going to sea was akin to joining a religious order.

  Nicol was not a sailor of the rum, sodomy and the lash school. When he first went to sea he read his Bible daily and it troubled his conscience that he lost the habit. He was shy, did not drink heavily and was appalled by foul language. At times one wonders how this good and simple man mixed it with the recurrent brutality of life at sea.

  Nicol’s naivety shows through nowhere more clearly than in his first romance. After meeting a young woman on a coach journey he feels ‘something uncommon arise in [his] breast’. After a number of efforts, he ‘summonsed the resolution to take her hand in mine; I pressed it gently, she drew faintly back’. With little more encouragement than that, Nicol decides upon marriage and, were it not for a recalcitrant prospective father-in-law, may have succeeded in his designs. He was equally ‘at sea’ with the most important female in his life, a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam who became his great love. Yet time has shown that his assessment of Sarah Whitlam was hardly an accurate one.

  Given the editorial role Howell played, one wonders how much of The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner represents his input, for the beauty of the language sometimes makes the reader doubt whether it could be the work of an unlettered cooper. Laing speculates that Howell’s influence on the book’s style and content was minor. He notes that the two works published by Howell alone (An Essay upon the War Galleys of the Ancients and The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk) ‘lack the passages of terse grandeur which lifts Nicol’s story, from time to time, to the level of great English prose’.5 Howell was also a great respecter of facts, and is unlikely to have tampered with the subjects of Nicol’s work. Nicol himself says that he will make his story as interesting as is in his power, ‘consistent with truth’; its detail is in itself a guide to its authenticity. He remembers, for instance, how Chinese washer women kept a pig in ‘a cage-like box fixed to the stern of their sampan.’ On the Falkland Islands the geese he saw were ‘very pretty, spreckled like a partridge.’

  There is something very special about Nicol’s prose, with its attention to minute detail, recalled decades after the events occurred. Perhaps this derives from Nicol’s style, which is clearly in the great oral storytelling tradition of the sea, owing more to the long tradition of the storytelling bards than to the written prose of his contemporaries. The natural rhythm and pattern of such language is a powerful aid to memory. The stories, told over and over, become ever more refined and compelling. Nicol even draws a picture of himself as raconteur, late in his life, when he takes a boat to London to attempt to gain his pension: ‘I was at sea again…I had always a crowd round me listening to my accounts of the former voyages that I had made…I was very happy.’ From such stories has come this vivid and romantic tale of travel to the hidden corners of the world.

  A large part of the fascination of Nicol’s book lies in his service as steward aboard the Lady Juliana transport which, as part of the second fleet, brought over two hundred female convicts to Australia in 1790. The logbook of the Lady Juliana is long lost, so Nicol’s account is the main source of information for the voyage.6 His time aboard the Lady Juliana (which he recollects as the Lady Julian) was formative, for Nicol fell in love with a convict girl named Sarah Whitlam. She was his first real love, and Nicol ‘courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman on board’. She was, he said, ‘as kind and true a creature as ever lived’. Before the voyage was out she bore him a son, John.

  On the evening of 3 June 1790 the Lady Juliana entered Port Jackson after almost a year at sea. Nicol records how the landing was ‘almost to our sorrow’. He knew his time with Sarah was running out. But it was a special moment, for that evening John Nicol and Watkin Tench—the great chronicler of the birth of European Australia, who had rowed out to meet the ship amid squalls and cloudbursts—stood together under the one set of sails. For Tench the arrival of the Lady Juliana was a moment of exquisite joy. ‘News burst upon us like meridian splendour on a blind man,’ he records as he learned for the first time of the French Revolution, the madness of George III and the loss of the Guardian supply ship. Nicol, characteristically, gives us a glimpse of an intensely human story inside this great historic moment. He doesn’t care about revolutions, kings or shipwrecks. His thoughts are all about his imminent separation from his new family.

  Nicol spent six weeks in Port Jackson with his beloved Sarah and their infant son. They were, perhaps, the happiest days of his life. Although his recollections of Port Jackson were thirty years old by the time they were written down, they are remarkably accurate. He records, for instance that there were only two ‘natives’ in the town at that time. They were Abaroo and Nanbaree, survivors of the smallpox epidemic who were then living with Surgeon White (Nanbaree) and the Reverend and Mrs Johnson (Abaroo). He also records some curious attributes of the ‘sweet tea’ which was drunk with such avidity by the first fleeters. Nicol wrote that ‘it is infused and drank like the China tea. I liked it much. It requires no sugar and is both a bitter and a sweet’. He also regarded its medicinal qualities highly:

  There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had borne in the colony. Everyone went to see her, and I among the rest. It was a strange sight. Her hair was quite white. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea.

  Tench and others tell us of this woman, but none do so with the descriptive vividness of Nicol. And none ascribe her fecundity to the tea!

  As the hour of his departure approached, Nicol became desperate to stay with his wife and child. He was, however, contracted to return to England and the ship was short of hands. He relates that:

  It was not without the aid of the military we were brought on board. I offered to lose my wages but we were short of hands…The captain could not spare a man and requested the aid of the governor. I thus was forced to leave Sarah, but we exchanged faith. She promised to remain true.

  Nicol spent the next few years trying to return to Port Jackson, but without success. While thus engaged, he heard from a runaway convict that Sarah had left the colony for Bombay. Nicol did not know what to make of this information, and nor do I. Sarah did not sail for Bombay until 1796, yet Nicol claims to have heard of it in 1791-92.7 Was Sarah sending out misinformation, or had Nicol misremembered? Given his subsequent sailing schedule, the latter seems unlikely, for after 1794 Nicol was fighting in the French Revolutionary wars. Nicol visited Sarah’s parents in Lincoln, but they could tell him nothing. Hoping for the best yet fearing betrayal, he tried to get a passage to Bombay, but could not find a berth, even as a paying passenger. In all his subsequent journeying, the possibility of being reunited with Sarah is continually on his mind. ‘She was,’ he says, ‘still the idol of all my affections.’

  In 1801 Nicol returned to his native Edinburgh, being ‘too old to undertake any more love pilgrimages after an individual, as I knew not in what quarter of the globe she was, or whether she were dead or alive’. But what of Sarah and her son? The children of convicts were often removed from their parents, and little John’s fate is not recorded. Sarah, in contrast, first appears in the records of the colony the day after Nicol’s tearful departure, but the telling of that story must await its proper place.

  Nicol’s Australian interlude occupied a fraction of his twenty-five years at sea. Much of what he records elsewhere is of great interest to the contemporary reader, for he recalls events and cultures which were glossed over by his better educated and better connected contemporaries. The importance of Nicol’s work is magnified by the fact that he was far above the ordinary in his huma
nity, memory and wit. He also loved a song, and nowhere does this shine through more clearly than during his visit to Jamaica, where he lived for some time among slaves. He says of these poor people, ‘I esteemed them in my heart’ and they clearly reciprocated.

  Nicol records that during his stay, he and the other crew were fed on a ‘cut and come again’ basis, and he always ensured that he took a little something extra to give to the plantation slaves. They in return invited him to a dance. Nicol was touched to find that these poorest of the poor had purchased some ‘three bit maubi’ as they called rum. They did not drink this luxury themselves, but bought it on his account, having heard that sailors prefer it. The vibrancy of the songs he heard that night shone on undimmed in Nicol’s memory for over three decades:

  I lost my shoe in an old canoe

  Johnio, come Winum so;

  I lost my boot in a pilot boat,

  Johnio, come Winum so

  and

  My Massa a bad man,

  My Missis cry honey,

  Is this the damn nigger

  You buy wi my money?

  Ting a ring ting, ting a ring ting, tarro

  The cruel treatment of the slaves clearly appalled Nicol. He records the beating of a pregnant woman and the part he and a colleague played in terminating it. He talks of a one-legged runaway blacksmith chained to his bench, and a slave forced to wear a barbarous collar of spikes. His anger at these outrages remained, like the songs, unblunted by the years.

  Nicol’s next voyage was more carefree. His journey in search of discovery and trade aboard the King George was to take him to Hawaii just after the murder of James Cook. Indeed, the King George was the first ship to arrive in the islands after Cook’s discovery of them. Nicol records that: