Three Sheets to the Wind

By Adam Courtenay

How a motley crew of merchant seamen walked 600 miles to save 7000 gallons of rum

By the bestselling author of The Ship That Never Was

When, in 1796, Calcutta-based Scottish merchants Campbell & Clark dispatched an Indian ship hurriedly renamed the Sydney Cove to the colony of New South Wales, they were hoping to make their fortune. The ship's speculative cargo was comprised of all kinds of goods to entice the new colony's inhabitants, including 7000 gallons of rum. The merchants were planning to sell the liquor to the Rum Corp, which ruled the fledgling colony with an iron grip, despite the recent arrival of Governor John Hunter.

But when the Sydney Cove went down north of Van Diemen's Land, cargo master William Clark and sixteen other crew members were compelled to walk 600 miles to Sydney Town to get help to save the rest of the crew and the precious goods. Assisted by at least six Indigenous clans on his journey, Clark saw far more of the country than Joseph Banks ever did, and his eventual report to Governor Hunter led to far-reaching consequences for the fledgling colony. And the rum? Some of it was saved.

By the bestselling author of The Ship That Never Was and The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter, Three Sheets to the Wind is a rollicking account of a little-known event that changed the course of Australian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781460713884

Adam Courtenay

Adam Courtenay is a Sydney-based writer and financial journalist. He has had a long career in the UK and Australia, writing for papers such as the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, the SMH/Age and for magazines including Forbes and Company Director. Adam has a love of Australian history and biography and has written six books, including The Ship That Never Was, The Ghost and the Bounty Hunter and Three Sheets to the Wind. He is the son of Australia's best-loved storyteller, Bryce Courtenay. He lives in Sydney with his wife Gina and dog Polly.

Book preview

Prologue

THERE ON ONE of the continent’s longest stretches of beach, seventeen disoriented and exhausted men, their bodies encrusted in salt and sand, fell asleep under an autumn sun. When most had regained consciousness later in the day, the turmoil of the morning had been replaced by a stillness of water and wind and the return of bird noise. Mutton birds and seagulls now patrolled the waters which had nearly killed them all a few hours earlier.

Still dazed, the crew looked around to see a thin but infinite strip of sand curving gracefully from east to west. At the back of the beach, green-topped sand dunes stood like natural ramparts, built up over time to rebuff concerted attacks from the ocean. What was left of the longboat littered the foreshore, its contents thrown along the sandy strip.

It was such an enormous expanse of beach that none could quite take it all in. This was not the muddy and craggy Scottish shores of Arran that William Clark would have known. The Indian sailors, too, had never seen any coast so vast and yet so remote and lonely. There were no cultural or geographic touchstones on Ninety Mile Beach in 1797. To their eyes it was the beach at nowhere that led to nowhere.

It was their first experience of mainland Australia and already they had marked it, as so many coming after them would, with their refuse. They spent the first three days searching for anything that could keep them alive and, in this, they were considerably lucky. At the high tide mark, among the stubs of vegetation and tangled scrolls of kelp, they found many of the bags of rice that would have fed them on the sea voyage. It could still be dried and eaten. Now it would have to sustain them for a very long trek.

Most of the water casks were also found intact, with fresh water still in them. Survival, at least for the short to medium term, looked possible, but in other ways, their plight was desperate. The longboat which had brought them across Bass Strait was irretrievably broken. The carpenter lacked special tools to fix the sprung planks and shattered timber frame. Of all the things that had been retained, Hugh Thompson’s compass was among the most valuable. He had kept it close to his person and dry. It was a survival tool in itself. It was meant for the ocean, but would make some sense of a featureless landscape. And yet what it now told him made no sense.

The beach was running in an east-north-east direction, and appeared to be arcing more easterly in the direction they needed to take. The sun rose at one end of the beach, and set at the other. This was not what the official maps illustrated. If these had been correct, this beach should be running from south to north. The maps had to be wrong.

They had recovered two pistols, a musket and swords from the wreck, albeit the guns would probably be useless as the gunpowder could not have survived the wreck of the longboat. They also redeemed axes, knives and cooking pots from the wreck as well as the water containers and bolts of calico cloth. William Clark thought these might be useful, but he wasn’t sure how. Perhaps they could be used for barter? They had found useable tinder and flint. Indeed, they took anything they could salvage from the beach.

Clark was the man in charge of the 7000 gallons of rum they were bringing to Port Jackson. He had wanted to be at the trading vanguard, first to strike a profitable, ongoing relationship between Calcutta and Sydney. That was the great hope. Fifty-five men had sailed on the Sydney Cove on a simple bet: that a colony made up of soldiers and felons would kill for a taste of the best Bengali rum.

The problem, of course, was that nobody in Sydney knew they were coming. The voyage to the colony was speculative and their hundred-foot, three-masted ship had never sailed further than the main ports around Asia and the Persian Gulf. It had never crossed the Indian Ocean. Very few in India had made this voyage. They were sailing on a hunch, equipped with a faulty map and little knowledge of the conditions ahead of them.

Their Indian sailors, who had laughed and sung in the face of tropical storms, had recoiled at the freezing winds and waters of the southern Australian coastline and yet it was they who had saved their lives and the cargo. The very fact that there were seventeen men alive and breathing on this beach had been a miracle grounded on the sweat – and blood – of Indian mariners.

Clark looked at the state of the men he was now about to take through the wilderness. Many of the men appeared shaken, pale and sick. They had survived two shipwrecks in succession. He wanted to move them out the next day and get to Port Jackson before the winter set in, but moving was clearly not even being contemplated. The party was unusually quiet and nobody strayed far from their makeshift camp.

It dawned on him that it wasn’t their bodies that couldn’t move but their minds. Seamen were more anxious about land than they were about the sea. Clark had been a virtual spectator at sea, almost incredulous at the speed and agility of the Indians, virtual acrobats aloft, whose combined actions could change the ship’s bearing in a matter of moments.

Where had all that gone now? The sea was the danger they did know, the land – especially this particularly silent and unrelenting land – held unknown terrors. Cannibals? Tigers? Crocodiles? Head hunters? The five Europeans and the twelve Indians had one thing in common – they were all similarly ignorant. It was still the age of discovery, the literature and rumour of the day fed by nightmares and superstitions.

They were, in fact, in the middle of Gunaikurnai land; the country of the Gunaikurnai people spanned hundreds of miles to the north, west and east of them. It stretched as far as the Snowy River in the east and as far north as the Great Divide. Clark and his men did not know it, but already they were being watched.

Just how seventeen men expected to be adequately fed for a period of weeks, if not months, was beyond Clark’s calculations. They had 500 miles of unknown territory ahead of them, and rationed rice for seventeen could only go so far.

It was all very simple in Clark’s mind: he had no idea where he was but he knew what they must strive to do. Terra nullius was a notion they could not entertain. This was their unspoken dilemma: the very people they feared most were their only avenue of salvation.

Chapter 1

The Ripeness of Wealth

WHEN WILLIAM CLARK stepped ashore in Calcutta one late afternoon in the summer of 1796, he could scarcely take in the scenes playing before him. He had disembarked at the Course, after a slow and precarious route up the Hooghly River. Together with men and women in their most extravagant finery, he walked the dusty boulevard, animals and birds walking freely among them.

There was a stork nicknamed ‘the adjutant’ strutting on the parade with as much regimental self-pride as any of the army officers present. Then there were the jackals that ranged freely in packs, scampering among the feet of the gentry who paid them no heed. He thought he heard the sound of screaming children, but it was only the jackals finding – and ripping apart – some discarded delicacy.

The 27-year-old Highlander, who had sailed from his home in Campbeltown on Scotland’s western coast, walked for the next few days in a half daze, finding his bearings in a bewildering city drenched in humidity. To someone hailing from the cold, clammy climes of Scotland’s Atlantic coast, Calcutta was an assault on the senses. Nothing could have prepared William Clark for the smells this city exuded. It was a confluence of squalor and spice which often appalled and sometimes appealed. There was nothing antiseptic, tidy or clean about Calcutta.

The city and its environs were fecund, coloured many shades of green, dotted with pools, ponds, lakes, canals and rivers. The city’s wealth seemed to walk hand in hand with rude nature. Around the city were marshes, tidal creeks and mangrove swamps. In the midst of its low-lying vegetation, great estates sat close to hovels. It was the City of Palaces, or so said its locals – akin to St Petersburg, he had been told, but to Clark it seemed the city of iniquity.

A view of the bazaar on the Chitpore Road, Calcutta, circa 1819. Watercolour by James Baille Fraser.

The wealthiest parts of the ‘White Town’ looked like neoclassical revivalism gone mad, lacking the subtlety and intricacy of the real thing. The airy statelies, well-formed and capacious, were always interrupted. Beautiful tree-lined streets ended abruptly in jungle. Great white structures gave way too easily and too soon to thatch and bamboo huts. There was the White Town and the Black Town and the people and their experiences were equally divided.

Depending on where William was, it was a day replete with cloying beggars or a day of wasteful banquets. When the two halves of the city met, they never stopped to look at each other. There were children begging and dogs defecating while all about them white men and women rushed through the city upon soft, shady palanquins, raised high above the squalid crowd. It was chaos and luxury in synchronicity, all performed amid a withering barrage of heat. For William Clark, this was all going to take time.

If Clark felt an instant antipathy towards his surroundings, he was here for the duration – however long that might be. There was never any other possibility for him other than to work for his family’s trading firm, Campbell & Clark, in White Town’s Theatre Street. It was in the best part of town, just behind the towering Fort William, which straddled the banks of the Hooghly River. He was expected to follow the footsteps of his brother John, who had left for India eight years earlier and formed a partnership in Calcutta with the Campbells.

John, a joint senior partner with John Campbell, was said to be doing good business. The firm was headed by those two, with a junior partner, John Campbell’s brother Robert. The Campbells were from Greenock, a major shipbuilding centre on the Scottish west coast – they had been trading on the subcontinent since 1790.

In Scotland, William and John’s long-deceased father, William senior, had been a local Campbeltown merchant, mostly dealing in the primary local commodities of fish and coal and the region’s highly prized single malt whisky. He had died in his thirties in 1778. Their mother, Margaret, had remarried and died ten years later, still only in her forties. There were now precious few Clarks left. Through both marriages his mother had given birth to thirteen children, but both William and John had watched in dismay as his siblings and half siblings were progressively culled by disease.

Smallpox still raged throughout the British Isles, and diphtheria was known to take several members of a family at a time. Tuberculosis was another scourge that did not discriminate between rich and poor and it was estimated that one fifth of the deaths in eighteenth-century Scotland were due to this infection – mostly afflicting those in their teens and twenties. By 1796, the family of thirteen children was down to just five, including William, John and three remaining sisters.

Other than the heat and dust – and the incessant seasonal rain – nobody had bothered explaining to William Clark what cultural or social signposts he might have to deal with in India. His journey had become standard fare among Scots of his age and class, who had been coming to Calcutta and experiencing the same culture shock since the union with England in the early part of the century.

One thing had never been explained, because somehow you were simply meant to know. For non-natives, this was the most lethal country on Earth. Clark had stepped out of the Scottish frying pan and into the Calcutta fire. Gone were the problems of diphtheria, smallpox and tuberculosis; he was now in the realm of amoebic dysentery, malaria, cholera and typhus. During the monsoon season, between June and September, India was considered among the most dangerous places in the world for Europeans to live.

That, of course, was the unspoken risk, but never enough to deter Clark’s milieu from trying its hand in the wealthiest city in Asia. Every young, up and coming Scot should have a stint here. It had become a normative rite of passage. Calcutta hardened the sinews and taught a man to think on his feet. You’re lucky to be here they all seemed to be saying and, what’s more, your peers will be there to enjoy it with you. As one young man wrote home to his family in the 1770s: ‘There are now so many of my Countrymen here that now and then I am meeting with an old acquaintance.’

Some of William’s contemporaries, like the young impoverished nobleman Lachlan Macquarie, had taken the military path to India, a different job but with the same high expectations. Macquarie hoped to work his way up to quick wealth, using patronage and connections in Bombay. For most soldiers from a privileged background, individual merit or courage on the battlefield was not the point. Valour in battle did not pay. As one commentator of the day once put it: ‘The colonial conquest of India was as much bought as fought.’

Scots filled all kinds of niches in India and their English counterparts – most of whom were connected to the giant East India Company – showed nothing like the same zeal for enterprise. It was clearly the Scots who were making their mark in the subcontinental business world, setting themselves up as agents, forming trading cartels with locals throughout the regions and immersing themselves in the colony as expatriate merchants, bankers, shippers and insurers. The Scottish names were also appearing in the courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, where deals and transactions, as well as legal matters concerning trade, were handled.

Just as the English did, they liked to keep their associations close and their connections culturally pure. The captains of the ships which took Campbell & Clark’s goods were all Scots. The firm’s business in the vast interior of India was conducted either through Newton, Gordon & Murdoch or via Cullen, Willcock & Campbell. Even in London Campbell & Clark’s agents were Scots – they were Wilson & Birnie, who joined them in business ventures underwritten by Fairlie Fergusson & Co and Gilmore & Co of Calcutta.

On paper, William Clark was part of this brightest and most brilliant group, a diaspora with great expectations thrown into a barrage of heat, dirt, splendour and squalor. In reality, however, Clark was different. He was there for the family trade, and was outwardly keen but that did not mean that he had the right temperament for the job. He recognised early on that success in India demanded speed and agility, and William was more the dogged and hardworking type.

There was no time to be an ingénue in India; you hit the ground at pace and did not look back. Most of the young Scots had worked this out, but Clark inwardly eschewed it. He felt conflicted. He was a man who was told to follow the path that was set for him by family, rank and kin and yet he felt he did not fit. He wanted to do a good job for the firm, but could not quite grasp the methods which would lead it to success.

William Clark liked to look back. He liked to assess, digest and think through his actions. He was both sensitive and spiritual. He was a devout Presbyterian, but a Calvinist by nature, with its clear emphasis on hard work, thrift and education. He saw the contrast in conditions and wealth in the White and the Black towns and inwardly baulked. There was no moderation here. He soon realised that equality had no place in a universe where you could be struck down by airborne amoeba any day. Everybody, of course, knew this and so the quick deal ruled all. William believed in solid, steady graft, but all he could see about him was money being made and lost, partnerships formed and just as quickly dissolved. Relationships struck one day were discarded the next. Goods which were valuable on Monday had lost their lustre by the end of the week. It was just too fast and furious.

Practising the fluid trade required enterprise, a head for market variations and decisive action. It was little more than speculation, requiring canny decisions on the future value of products and their hoped-for viability in certain ports. He noted, too, that business success was tied to the machinations of the seasons; profits and livelihoods were on permanent tenterhooks. Ships could not get to China until the south-west monsoon came into effect from mid-August to April, while ships sending goods to Europe needed the north-eastern winds in the intervening months. Goods had to be bound, carted and shipped like clockwork. There were two great fears – a break in the supply chains and an unexpected change in the weather.

To Clark, the contrast between the business at home and the business in India could not have been more acute. William’s Campbeltown fare, which he had learned from his father (and possibly his father before him), had supplied the same markets for decades. Fish and coal knew their customers. So did Scotch whisky. Indian commerce, by contrast, was built on the next new thing. You were only as good as yesterday’s trade.

Calcutta was at the centre of a rapidly growing global trade of manufactured goods and premium commodities, the vast bulk of which were handled by the seemingly all-powerful East India Company (the Company). Nowhere in the world had William seen such a breadth and depth of goods jostling for price and weight. The Company traded in cotton, silk, salt, indigo dye, saltpetre and tea. Just about everything of value was being sent from or into Calcutta, goods and materiel perpetually in motion.

Tea was a commodity the British craved and the Company was by far the world leader in its trade. It was seen in England as a distinctively Asian delicacy, part of the growing fetishism for exotic art, porcelains and silk from the Orient known as ‘chinoiserie’. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the average English family quintupled its consumption of tea and profits for the Company skyrocketed. By Clark’s time, tea was by far the most important commodity of the Company, comprising its entire profit and contributing to one-tenth of England’s total economic output. So essential was tea to England – and to all of Britain – that by the 1780s the British government mandated that the Company retain a year’s stock in reserve.

By the 1790s the Company was cornering not just the tea the British craved, but also trade in another addictive substance. After addicting Europeans to Chinese tea, it was busy hooking the source of its greatest exports to opium. The Portuguese had started the trade years earlier, but, by Clark’s time, the Company had made sure it had cornered the markets. The Chinese tried to stop this illicit trade, but the Company found ways to smuggle opium into the port city of Canton (now known as Guangzhou). In 1786 it was calculated that the Company’s exports to China were more than 300 per cent greater than its imports, creating a ballooning trade deficit with its main trading partner. Opium did not produce anything like the profits that tea accrued for it across the world, but it proved to be an effective means to square the ledger.

The Company issued licences and advance payments to Bengali opium producers to cut out potential competitors. It had the power to control production and price and myriad means to distribute to a pliant Chinese population. Opium may have been sold to rebalance its deficit with China, but the Company cared far more for its monopoly on Chinese tea. Twenty years earlier it had tried to corner