Master Mariner

THE LIFE AND VOYAGES OF

AMASA DELANO

Captain Amasa Delano, 1763-1823



BY
JAMES B. CONNOLLY

1943

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CHAPTER VI

Pleasant Moorings in Timor

FROM NEW GUINEA the expedition proceeded to the Dutch island of Timor: a long-drawn, tedious passage before and against the lightest of winds. Not once did the lookouts sight a likely and safe island for the replenishment of their water casks and woodpiles. Officers and men groused about the foreign substance in their ration of drinking water, and the cooks moaned of the shortage of fuel for their galley stoves; and so until the two ships arrived off the port of Copang in Timor.

Timor: An island about 120 miles long, and near forty broad. The south extreme lies in latitude 10° 23' south, and longitude 123° 40' east. The town of Copang lies on the north west side of a cove at the south end of the island, and is in some measure sheltered by the islands which are westward of it, though they are at a great distance. The fort, which is designed to protect it, could not hold out long against two or three frigates.

The commodore saluted the port, the guns being meant for the resident governor, name of Van Este, who was down on the commodore's itinerary as the representative of the Dutch Empire in Timor.

It happened that the resident governor had died since the commodore's last advices, but the governor's widow was at home when they called at the palace; and she considered it incumbent on her to honor as the governor would have honored, if alive, the important visit of this British commodore's expedition.

A river of clean, clear water flowed through Copang to the sea; and a short distance from the mouth of the river was the bathing resort of the well-to-do residents of Copang. The families of the government officials of account and of the merchants in profitable business composed pretty much all the well-to-do people of the port. On fine days, and most days in tropic Timor were fine, they went in for bathing en masse. The bathing scene was a delight to Amasa:

"The bank of the river where they bathed was shaded with rows of fragrant trees, and under the trees were small dressing cabins. The Dutch, men and women both, donned a Malay garment for the bath, a sort of petticoat, which was tied high up on the breast, but so tied as to leave the arms free. Some of these bathing garments were of extremely fine texture, and with beautiful designs woven into them."

Amasa and his brother officers were furnished with the same sort of bathing robes of extremely fine texture and beautiful design. "Men and women bathed together, picking out a spot with their backs to the current, and allowed the swift running water to rush over their heads, or flow around them." Amasa was always among those present at the bathing hour. His choice of place was between two rocks; and there, with a stone against which to brace his feet, he sat in secure enjoyment of the current, without incurring danger in an absent-minded moment of being swept down-river and put to the labor of swimming back against the current. He liked to swim, and these days in Timor were for relaxation after the wearying passage from New Guinea.

While the favored people bathed, Malay slaves were setting the tables and laying the lunch in the shade of the wide-spreading, handsome trees on the bank of the river. It was the life for a sailor ashore-that is, when the sailor was an officer.

"There was the river foaming over the rocks below gently in some places, sublimely in others; and the river was on the opposite shore spreading itself out like a transparent lake with lovely scenery reflected in its calm surface."

Amasa and his bathing brother officers would work up grand appetites while observing the tables being loaded deep with the wide variety of savory dishes. There were also oceans of fine wines. Amasa had not yet had the experience of sitting in at a party when English officials took on the job of entertaining Dutch rivals in trade; but certainly the Dutch in Amboyna and here in Timor were setting a warm pace against the day when it came the turn of the English to do the entertaining. For the prestige of that Royal Navy to which his officer shipmates belonged, he hoped said officers would rise to the occasion when it came their turn to play host. They would have to log the good knots to do so. The Dutch in Amboyna had done them well; the Dutch governor's widow in Timor and her official aides were doing them even better:

"The Dutch in Timor gave us altogether too good a time. It may have been the too frequent bathing, and staying too long at it that brought on intermittent fevers, from which several of our officers died. These deaths from the bathing in Timor were not the first of their kind, which I have known from personal observation."

It probably wasn't the bathing at Timor that brought on the deaths of Commodore McCluer's officers. In putting it so, Amasa was being the good shipmate. Expeditionary, and lesser, ships of those old South Sea days were not always healthful abodes for officers or men. The grub, even for officers, let be the crew at large, wasn't of the best. It was salt beef, salt beef for weeks on end, in the way of fresh meat. There would be a chicken killed now and then from the coops on deck; and while in port there might be fresh beef and vegetables in some ports. Also in port there would be tropic fruits aplenty--luscious tropic fruit; but there was no refrigeration, no ice chests, then, for keeping meats or vegetables or fruits fresh at sea. Expeditionary ships carried liberal stocks of wines and hard liquors for officers, and frequently wardroom officers of that day drank copiously of hard liquors; and hard liquor and the tropic climate were never meant for steady shipmates. Men before the mast had their daily tot of rum, but they also got their regular exercise in the way of hauling on sheets and halyards and braces at sea and manning capstan bars in port; but the officers were rarely getting enough exercise to work up a sweat.

Besides this amusement of bathing, there were parties for dancing; and that Amboyna custom of smoking a pipe also prevailed at Timor.

Commodore McCluer had rented a house for himself and his officers while his vessels lay in Amboyna. He planned to do the same in Timor, and detailed Amasa to find a suitable house. Amasa took note of a new, big house in Copang, not yet occupied. He made inquiries, learned from the governor's widow that it was a house for the new governor when he arrived. After so informing Amasa, she turned the big house over to him for the quartering of the commodore's officers while in Copang.

A spacious lot of land surrounded the house, and high trees were set in a square around the land. Every morning the Malay band of the governor's widow took station under the high trees and played the commodore's officers awake.

Amasa thought it a great advance over a bosun's shrill piping for breaking men out of sound sleep aboardship, "the Malay music being sweet as could be, and their handsome liveries showing pretty indeed under the green foliage."

The natives of Timor were Malays and paid allegiance to a rajah, who had a place seven or eight miles inland from Copang. The Dutch of Copang paid him small regard, but Amasa and some of his fellow officers thought he rated a visit. They brought along a number of presents. The rajah received them graciously, returned their visit, and as a gift for Commodore McCluer he brought along a young buffalo bull, one that was still wild and called for a detail of eight Malays pulling and hauling on ropes from before and behind to hold him in control.

The eight-man rope detail hauled and pulled and eventually maneuvered the young bull to where they could manage to tie him to the trunk of a tree in the yard of the governor's residence. The English officers then made a bowline in the bight of a rope and lassoed one of his legs, meaning to hold him so; but he was too strong to be so held: again and again he kicked himself loose, fifty or more times he broke clear of the bowline trap that was meant to bind him.

The young bull was meant for the Panther's cabin mess, but when the knife men approached to cut his throat he charged so fiercely that only after twenty attempts did a man get near enough to him to give him the death stroke. Amasa went overboard always for stoutheartedness in man or beast. So now, for this untamed young buffalo:

"He had the most vigorous, untamable spirit, and made the most obstinate resistance of any animal that I ever saw. Indeed I confess that his native courage, his wild proud spirit, his scorn of his numerous foes and their arts; his persevering reliance upon his own strength, and the fear he inspired even when he was subdued, surrounded him with such associations of magnanimity and fortitude under unjust sufferings, that I found myself more interested in him than in any of the human forms of the circle, and instinctively gave him for the moment a higher rank. Our pride, on such an occasion, receives but a poor homage from art, which is offered at the expense of natural strength and courage, when so many men are required to vanquish a single champion from the forest."

Not long before the McCluer visit to Timor, Lieutenant Bligh of the Bounty mutiny episode had arrived there. Timor was still lauding the seamanship and fortitude of Bligh and the men who had survived that long passage in that open boat, and Amasa thought the laudations well deserved. But shortly after Bligh's departure from Timor another boat's crew arrived there from a more perilous and far longer voyage than Bligh's; and they made the passage with only a chart and a compass for their navigation. While McCluer's officers were still at Timor that boat's crew of the more perilous passage were being held in ignominy in Copang.

Timor lies off the northwest coast of New Holland (Australia), and this second boat's crew had set sail from the very opposite part; that is, from the southeast coast of that continent. They were convicts who had escaped from Botany Bay, and to make Timor meant that they would have had to sail three thousand miles of open water in an open boat through dangerous waters. There were eight men in the party, led by a man named Bryant, who had picked up his wife and two children and taken them along. The sympathetic master of a Dutch snow furnished Bryant with the chart and compass. When they landed at Timor, Bryant told the authorities there that their ship had been cast away on a reef southeast of Timor, and that all the ship's crew had perished except those in the boat. Bryant gave his name as Martin and represented himself as the captain of the lost ship.

The Dutch credited the story of the wreck and advanced money to the boat's crew, taking bills drawn on the English government for their payment. Then came the end to their happy landing. In an impatient moment the masterful Bryant angered one of his party; and that one, having a few drinks of rum aboard, told a man in authority who they really were and of the manner of escape from the penal colony in New Holland. The Dutch officials rushed all hands of them to jail, including Bryant's wife and children, and, on the arrival of the next English ship in Timor, turned them over to her captain with orders to carry them to England in chains.

Amasa learned later that some of the convicts had been returned to Botany Bay and some hanged in England. Mrs. Bryant, who had only six months of her exile to serve from the time of her escape, was allowed to serve that six months in an English jail.

Amasa, always strong for law and order, deplored the escape of the convicts from Botany Bay; but as a navigator he felt compelled to go on record outright for the skillful, resourceful, and stouthearted convict, name of Bryant, who had sailed that open boat through three thousand miles of dangerous waters with only a compass and a small-scale chart. A natural navigator there, yes sir. A pity, yes sir, that such a one had to hang.

To mutiny against a Royal Navy officer was held as a form of sacrilege. While the McCluer expedition was at Timor ships of the Royal Navy were detailed to hunt for the landing place of the Bounty mutineers. They did not locate the mutineers. That was left for a South Sea sealer and a friend of Amasa's, Captain Matthew Folger of Boston. By and by, when the Royal Navy was for dropping talk of reprisals, Captain Folger passed the word of where the mutineers were to be found.