LITMIR.BIZ

      DANCING WITH STRANGERS

      On a December evening in 1832 the Beagle entered a bay in Tierra del Fuego and gave young Charles Darwin his first view of the famously savage Fuegians. Through the gloom he could distinguish some remarkably tall men, naked except for long skin cloaks slung from their shoulders, perched on the edge of a wild promontory, shouting and waving their cloaks. He watched as they followed the ship along the coast to its overnight anchorage.

      Darwin was an eager member of the party which went ashore the next morning to meet the wild men. There were four of them, and Darwin was fascinated: ‘I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man; it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal...their very attitudes were abject, and the expression of their countenances distrustful, surprised, and startled.’ That vast gulf shrank slightly over the next minutes. The wild men accepted the Englishmen’s gifts of scarlet cloth, which they tied around their necks, and in return they gave their own welcome. An old man paired himself with Darwin, clucked like a chicken, patted the Englishman on the breast, gave him three hearty, simultaneous slaps on the back and chest, and then bared his bosom for Darwin to return the compliment.

      What to do next? Clearly words were useless: Darwin thought the men’s language was no language at all, being as savage as they were, a ‘barely articulate’ matter of raspings and hawkings with a few gutturals mixed in. So parallel gabbling gave way to a more elastic mode of expression: competitive face-pulling. The British began it (‘Some of our party began to squint and look awry’); the savages eagerly reciprocated, winning the contest when one young Fuegian with black-painted face and a white band across the eyes ‘succeeded in making far more hideous grimaces’. Then they mouthed words at each other, and again the Fuegians won: ‘They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time’; and Darwin paused to wonder why savages should have a natural bent for mimicry.

      Then the British reclaimed the initiative. They began to sing and to dance, and this time they struck gold: ‘When a song was struck up by our party I thought the Fuegians would have fallen down with astonishment. With equal surprise they viewed our dancing.’ But they recovered quickly, and ‘one of the young men, when asked, had no objections to a little waltzing’. Later in the day there was more dancing, and by the evening, Darwin tells us, ‘we parted very good friends; which I think was fortunate, for the dancing and “sky-larking” had occasionally bordered on a trial of strength’. The wild men had truly descended from their ‘wild promontory’ to mingle and dance on the beach. We leave Darwin and his company peacefully waltzing with savages in the Land of Fire.

      We don’t readily think of dancing as a phase of the imperial process, but rather more than forty years before, when a fleet of British ships berthed on the east coast of Australia, first at the place they named Botany Bay and then at ‘Sydney Cove’, a surprising amount of interracial dancing went on. On 29 January 1788, three days after landfall, Lieutenant William Bradley, second in command of HMS Sirius, was dutifully charting the harbour when he had his first meeting with the Australians. It was a remarkably friendly encounter, the British party being welcomed ashore by unarmed men who pointed out a good landing place ‘in the most cheerful manner, shouting and dancing’. (At this point we have to suppose ‘dancing’ meant no more than ‘caperings’: ‘the giving of direct physical expression to sensations of pleasure and excitement’, as my dictionary dourly puts it.) From the strips of cloth tied around their bodies Bradley knew that at least some of these friendly fellows must have met with Governor Arthur Phillip the previous day, with the bright rags the spoils of their meeting.

      Then, Bradley tells us, ‘these people mixed with ours and all hands danced together’. The next day at Spring Cove there was another impromptu dance party when about a dozen of the local men came paddling in soon after the British landed, left their spears in their canoes as a sign of friendship, and all proceeded to more ‘dancing and otherwise amusing themselves’. Then they embarked on an even more intimate interaction: the combing of never-before-combed hair. I would have thought this exercise painful for the people who suffered it and distasteful to the Europeans who performed it—the hair, Bradley tells us, was ‘clotted with dirt and vermin’—but excitement and curiosity overcame fastidiousness, and it seems all parties enjoyed themselves.

      We can imagine the hair clipping, but what can this mysterious ‘dancing together’ have looked like? Rollicking British hornpipes followed by elegant Australian knee-lifts? Wild hoppings and leapings from some cultural no-man’s land? Bradley, having thickened the mystery with words, clarifies it with paint in a charming watercolour, signed ‘WB’ and titled View in Broken Bay, New South Wales, March 1788: that is, two months after landfall. (The picture is reproduced on the cover of this book, and on the third page of the plate section.) The dancing is presented as a decorative foreground to the ‘view’, so Bradley probably constructed this particular representation from several incidents, but as he was a serious young naval lieutenant who set great store by accuracy, I think we can rely on him. What he shows us is the British and the Australians dancing hand in hand like children at a picnic: that is, dancing in the British style. (Darwin’s ‘waltzing’—bodies facing and lightly embraced—had not yet become respectable in Britain. That had to wait on the loosening effect of Napoleon and Waterloo.) Furthermore, the pairs are scattered over the whole foreground, with none of the local preference for formation dancing, which reinforces my suspicion that it was the British who took the initiative.

      The First Fleeters also invoked the power of song. When Surgeon-General John White fell in with a large body of Australians at Botany Bay soon after landing, he was anxious to make them realise the fatal power of the short metal sticks the British redcoats carried, both to preserve the peace and to save local lives. He therefore concocted a vivid visual demonstration: he borrowed a warrior’s shield, propped it as a target, and fired his pistol at it. Alarm erupted, both at the noise and because the ball passed clean through the shield. White does not bother to tell us what happened next (his journal is a rather shorthand affair) but Watkin Tench of the marines, with his eye for the speaking detail, does. White began to whistle ‘Marlbrooke has gone to the wars’, the tune we know as ‘We won’t get home until morning’; the locals took up the fetching little air; the panic subsided; and ‘Marlbrooke’ became a favourite item in the Australians’ expanding repertoire of borrowed songs. Six months later, with relations souring and some British blood spilt, White still trusted in the pacifying power of song when some canoes ventured to fish behind the point on which the hospital was built. After some friendly exchanges with one couple, White persuaded one of the British gentlemen with him to sing. The women in the canoes responded: they ‘either sung one of their own songs, or imitated him, in which they succeeded beyond conception’. The impromptu songfest had gone on for some time when an Englishman happened to appear with a gun and the panicked Australians paddled away. White ordered the gun set aside, his people kept right on singing, and the canoes came back to their fishing and their friendly conversation-through-song.

      Some encounters were raunchier. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King of the Sirius gives an amiably binocular account of what the locals might have been seeing during his own first contact with a band of Australians. As the first man was being coaxed to approach by the offer of the usual trinkets King noted that he ‘seemed quite astonished at ye figure we cut in being cloathed’. And then, reflectively and not altogether in bad faith, ‘I think it very easy to conceive ye ridiculous figure we must appear to these poor creatures, who were perfectly naked.’ It was King who later

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