The Sea Inside

their lusty blows. They would soon be silenced. By the 1840s, as a result of thirty-five whaling stations around the bay, there were only a few animals left for them to kill. Hobart’s hunters turned to deeper waters, and the sperm whales which swam in them.
    Yet no one had come here for the whales; at least, not at first. Two hundred years before, in 1642, Anthony van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company, sent Abel Janszoon Tasman to map a place hitherto named simply Beach. In a remarkable omission, Tasman missed Australia altogether, and only brushed against its largest island, where he attempted to land at what would become known as Adventure Bay, but was driven back by storms. Having succeeded in planting the Dutch flag on North Bay, he sailed on to New Zealand.
    It took more than a century for another European to arrive. In March 1773 Tobias Furneaux’s ship,
Adventure
, separated from its sister ship, James Cook’s
Endeavour
, sheltered in the bay to be named after it. At that point, no one knew that Van Diemen’s Land was an island, nor did Cook himself land there until his third and final voyage, when he carved his name on a tree:
Cook, 26 jan 1777
.
    Adventure Bay lies on Bruny Island, which hangs off the coast, into the Tasman Sea, due south of Hobart. Turquoise waves break on its beach, having crossed the Pacific to get there. On an outcrop of rock stand two huge blue-grey eucalypts; they were here when Cook pulled ashore. Despite its apparent civilisation, this coast is largely untouched: those journeys of discovery might still be in progress today, sailing up and down the coast.
    At the end of the bay, I walk through an out-of-season holiday park of cabins. One large hut, containing the ‘facilities’, is bedecked with whale ribs and vertebrae. The path takes me through a closely-packed stand of eucalypts, swaying over my head. A deciduous tree’s leaves are angled to make the most of the light; a eucalypt’s hang vertically, as if they’d had enough. Out of the shadows and onto the beach, a white wallaby appears, staring at me with albino eyes. Along the shore, a desultory pile of rocks testifies to a former whaling station. At the tip of the beach is a turf-topped rock, Penguin Island. Here Cook took his leave of the land, his last step on Australian soil.
    It was for such wonders and desolations that men chose to sail around the world. When Cook engaged Joseph Banks – or, more accurately, agreed to his joining the expedition as its underwriter – the influential and wealthy young botanist declared: ‘Every blockhead does the Grand Tour. My tour shall be one around the globe.’ These voyages too were extensions of Georgian culture and taste: for Cook’s second voyage, Banks proposed that they should be accompanied by the portrait painter Johann Zoffany, as if it were a society outing. And although Zoffany – famous for his staged ‘conversation pieces’ – did not make it to the Pacific, he nonetheless produced a heroic, neo-classical image of the story’s finale, depicting the slaughter of Cook on a Hawaiian beach in the style of a Grecian frieze. Soon after, a Parisian manufacturer produced ‘Captain Cook Wallpaper’, ready to paste on one’s drawing-room wall.
    More than a thousand years before, St Augustine had queried the practicality of travelling to the other side of the world – ‘it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean’ – or that men could even live in a place in which the word of God had not been heard. Now the Age of Enlightenment had been alerted to the reality of an upside-down world. To Cook and Banks, the strange new species that they encountered there presented a challenge of identification and order. To those who followed, they were ready for the taking.

    The Tasman Peninsula is a great mass of Jurassic rock, the highest sea cliffs in the Southern Hemisphere, a spectacular wall of black dolerite. Somewhere behind them lies Port Arthur and its prison ruins. Tim, our twenty-two-year-old skipper, clad in board shorts and boots, brings the nine-hundred-horsepower rib to an abrupt halt and hands the controls to his first mate Ben, who is even younger than his captain.

    ‘This is awesome,’ Tim enthuses, as we look up at the ancient strata and crevices. Everything is open and sharp here, as if the world were still being built. Fur seals loll on every ledge, slipping into the water to