David Prior

David Prior

David Prior (B.A. M.A., L.L.B.) has always been interested in history. He studied ancient history at school before matriculating to study arts and law at Sydney University. His thesis, completed in 2011, was Pirates Slave Traders Savages or simply misunderstood? Colonial Imagination of the Sealers and the Frustration of Authority. Since then, David’s research has led to the publication of Stone Carver: The Life and Times of Franco Vallario, as well as Mariners on the Margins. David is now working on a third manuscript, Beyond Dystopia: The Enduring legacy of the Chief and Missionary. David has reviewed three books on maritime subjects, published in The Great Circle, a journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History. He was recently granted a residency at the Lighthouse Arts Centre at Nobbys in Newcastle. Apart from his interest in Australian colonial history, David is an avid photographer, gardener and plays field hockey at a reasonably high level. He practices part-time as a business family and commercial lawyer.

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from Chapter 1: Navigating the World of the Mariners on the Margins

The English ship’s captain was excited. Staring out from the primitive docks of the nascent colony of Port Jackson in October 1798, he had previously encountered two respectable colonial explorers and the survivors of a shipwreck who had given him what was called ‘intelligence’. They convinced the captain that he could make his fortune by voyaging to the extreme south of New Holland in pursuit of the abundant seal rookeries they had previously observed there. At that time the fledgling colony of New South Wales was in poor economic circumstances, having gained little success in feeding its small population from any enterprise that may have been attempted. Galvanised by what he had been told, the captain left Sydney Town on 7 October 1798 in a 110-ton brig crewed by a gang of men, called for all time ‘sealers’. He was accompanied by another vessel carrying the two explorers and a small crew. In doing so, he was the first of many captains to plunder the mammals in the southern Antipodes. Several months later the brig anchored back in the settlement. It was fully laden with a cargo of seal skins.

In a few short years after this initial foray into the sealing trade, entrepreneurs known as the ‘Sydney Traders’ engaged captains to sail brigs, schooners, snows, cutters and merchantmen into the icy waters of the southern Antipodes in search of fur and elephant seals. They employed a polyglot of mariners to man their ships to engage in a frenzy of activity in slaughtering these mammals. After a time, many of these employed mariners became tired of their lot. Often left on empty promises in very harsh and difficult remote littoral places, they chose lives of independence from mainstream colonial society and set up their own hybrid and collective communities. In these new “societies”, they partnered voluntarily or often by force with First Nations peoples, primarily women, to eke out a living. This is a history of Australia’s first real industry and the marginal characters who plied their trade in it.

The English captain’s hunt for seals was nothing new to human endeavour. Well before the time Lieutenant Governor Arthur Phillip arrived with the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour in 1788, First Nations peoples throughout the world had been involved in slaughtering seals for food or trade. Since about the twelfth century, First Nation’s peoples in the Arctic Circle had understood that the seal was a multi-functional resource. They made use of the oil for providing light, and the skins and fur for clothing and shelters. In the maritime environments of the Great Southern Continent, the Aboriginal nations had been seeking seals for generations. In more modern times, Europeans had begun procuring these mammals as a resource by the sixteenth century. The Spaniard Juan De Solfo sailed to South America in 1515, and his crew returned to Seville with a vessel filled to the brim with a plethora of seal skins. This was despite the death of their captain following a skirmish with the American local First Nations people.

The well-known adventurer, privateer and maritime knight, Francis Drake, and his 164 ‘gentlemen and sailors’, feasted on what they described as ‘sea wolves’ to supplement their diet when sailing around the Cape of Joy near Brazil in 1577. On his second global voyage in 1580, Drake, embarked, officially, on a journey of exploration. But, like many an explorer, he had other intentions: to exploit the natural and man-made resources he encountered. His ships entered a harbour with ‘a wonderful great store of seals’ which were ‘of a wonderful great bigness, huge and monstrous of shape.’ The crews killed several and hungrily devoured the flensed meat. A short time later Dutch mariners were hunting African seals for their skins and oil as early as 1610. In the late 17^th century, another English privateer and explorer, Willian Dampier, anchored off Juan Fernandez Island near Chile and observed that:

‘Seals swam around… there is not a bay nor rock… but it is full of them. For wherever there be plenty of fysh, there be seals’.

However, despite observations made by many maritime explorers and navigators of the vast colonies of pinnipeds located around the globe, it was not until the 18^th century that the first known commercial sealing operation took place. By then, Russian mariners were the first to trade seals of the Aleutian type with the Chinese. While the Russians conducted occasional exchanges with the Oriental merchants, it was English and American mariners who were the first to conduct sealing as a large-scale trading enterprise. This occurred when these maritime men systematically procured seals in South Georgia, the Magellan Straits and the Falklands in the 1770s. After some mariners discovered the vast seal rookeries in the waters of South America and, below that, Antarctica, multitudes of vessels voyaged there to take advantage of the pinnipeds. They set out on a feeding frenzy to procure as many seals as would fill a boat. By 1788, ships were carrying cargoes of as many as 40,000 seal skins from the Falkland Islands to London. That same year, men who became known as sealers, sailed to South Georgia and quickly established a thriving industry. This meant that, by 1800, a New York sealer was able to procure 57,000 seal skins in one expedition. On board that vessel, the skins were given priority in the brig over the crew.