Part One: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide

Australians So many of us are terrible. It's always been my understanding that Australia is sort of like Texas, the country in a lot of ways, but just with fucking desert racing replacing guns and kangaroos replacing whateverdillos.

state of Australia is a bastard. But it's a fascinating story about a place that I knew nothing about before I started reading about this. So we're gonna have a good time, Jack, you did to hear about some genocide.

this series of genocides. It's great stuff. Now, this is also kind of a story about conflicting versions of events can sort of spread through popular media because one of the things that's happens here is this lady gets rescued from being shipwrecked and starts telling a story that she changes several times, and a whole industry arises around telling that story because there's just a lot of money in lying about this, because it gets white people titillated, and

so there's just a whole it like literally like a like it's almost like its own cinematic universe of lying about this lady being shipwrecked that starts out in the mid eighteen hundreds. It's very fun. But every version of events starts the same way, which is that Eliza Fraser sets sail on a boat called the Sterling Castle in

eighteen thirty six. Her husband is the captain, and according to most versions of the story, although not all of them, she is Preger's, which I don't think i've ever set on the show.

world's largest sand island. So it's it's a pretty sizable island. It's about one hundred and eighty six miles north of Brisbane and today it's called Gharri. It is spelled k apostrophe j r I and if you go to like Wikipedia, it'll say it's pronounced gury or gury like g U r r i E. But I pulled up a video of like people who come from like the tribes that are indigenous to the island saying it, and they say it more like ghuri.

stuff that I've read said that in antiquity, at least the people who lived on this island did not conceive of a world outside of this island and this little chunk of the mainland that they kind of moved between, because they were like a lot of the people who lived on Ghari lived on Gary like part time and then would be on the mainland near the coast part time, would kind of move between the two right based on like the what kind of food was available in what season.

Not uncommon around the world, most people who were like quote unquote hunter gathers or whatnot, were more like semi nomadic right where they would have places that they would like settle down in places where they kind of would grow food, but they would also move around based on you know, what the climate's doing and what kind of

you know, food is available different chunks of the year. Anyway, I should start with some deep history of this island, which is again very imperfect, but it's it's better than

not doing it at all. The peoples who lived on this island tended to pass on knowledge orally through song, So we don't have a complete understanding of their history because not all of the people who knew all of the songs survived to pass them down, right, because there's a genocide, right, But we do have quite a lot of information from these people in that restitution shadow by the way.

directly connected to the Australian mainland. Rising sea levels put an end to that in the fertile climate and bounty of aquatic protein enable it to support a meaningful permanent population of like several thousand people. Most casual histories of Ghuri tend to emphasize the isolation that the people there had from other groups of people. This does not seem

to be entirely accurate. By the time Europeans arrived there, there were three broad tribal groups on the island, one of them the Bochola, which is usually spelled butcha La, but there's like three different spellings that are all correct because it's like an anglicization, right. So the Bachola lived on the mainland across from the Great Sandy Strait and in the central part of the island, right, so they would kind of go between different like the mainland and

the island. And then there's the Dulungbara who occupied much of the south, and the Nulungbara in the north. And I was not able to find pronunciations for those latter two, so I'm doing my best on those. I'm pretty sure I've got Bachola right to some extent. Ghuri like occupation

of Ghuri varied with the season. Mullet fishing was the major source of food, and during the height of the harvest there might be as many as three thousand people on the island, right, and then it's kind of like a snowbird situation, where like your full timers are a smaller chunk of the population. I don't think they had our vs. But otherwise that's more.

Europeans prior to James Cook showing up. This would have begun with Portuguese sailors around fifteen hundred, and there's evidence of some trade or other exchange of materials in Spanish lead that was found on the island, also dating from around fifteen hundred. It's a little hard to say. There's also like clay pipes that were made by the Dutch that would have come from the sixteen hundreds, but we

don't really know. Does that mean that those people like Europeans were landing on the island and training directly, or that people who lived on the island who we know went back to the mainland periodically throughout the year. We're trading with other different groups of Aboriginal people who were themselves trading with these other Europeans, right, we don't really

know that. As one of my sources, an article by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes this could simply be yet evidence of trade between Gari and people with other parts of Australia. Over the generation, some of the peoples of this island developed a spiritual cosmology and a set of rituals around death that would later get them slandered as cannibals. And this is again something that I found

in sort of anthropological studies. I don't think this is something that is known to at there's some debate on this, but there's some evidence that here, as well as in other places, when people's loved ones died, there was a

degree of funerary cannibalism practiced, right. And another thing that was done that we know that was done was that like when people's loved ones died, they would be skinned by their family members before being buried, leaving what was called the true skin behind, which is like, as best as I can tell, like the fascia underneath your skin, which is kind of a shade of white.

some ways. Yeah, As a paper from the Anthropological Museum of Queensland, edited by doctor Peter Lower describes, after this ritual was finished, quote, certain sacred portions of the deceased had been ceremoniously consumed by relatives. Carefully executed funeral rights would ensure that the spirit, like a cold wind, left

the body before it was interred. According to Aboriginal informant Geyerbau, the Butchalla believe that on the following day the spirit returned, then the relatives would accompany it to a certain rock at bari Eba, which bore the impress of the foot of Bahraal, their ancestral being left behind when he had leapt out over the sea on his way to the sky, and from which place the spirits of their dead also

followed him to the sky country. Two men, specially posted one at either side of the rock, would watch for the spirits release. If they witnessed the spirits jumping off, they would light a fire to make smoke in order to prevent the spirit from coming back to frighten the people. They believe that everyone went to the same place, and that apart from their homeland and the lands of other tribes,

they knew there was no other place. So again, this is like you know, some older anthropology, but it corresponds with a lot of other stuff in history right now.

And there's some controversy here because allegations of cannibalism, not just for the people of Ghari, but for like all of the different Aboriginal peoples in Australia will be used by Europeans as justifications for some pretty hideous acts of genocide, which has led to understandable pushback by modern day descendants of these people to assert that this is not an

or accurate characterization of their ancestors. And usually what the Europeans are accusing them of doing is like hunting and eating white people right like a as like a predatory act. And this is like basically, all of these accounts are our lives, and we'll talk a little bit about how a lot of these lives come up that said funerary cannibalism was engaged in by many peoples of this area and all over the world. It is in fact nearly a universal human practice if you go back far enough

anywhere on Earth. This is not the act of consuming people for food or even eating defeated enemies, both of which you can find different civilizations engaged in throughout history. Funerary cannibalism is something very different, and you might best compare it to something that many people in the West, including some people that I know, do today, which is

having their body composted. It used to soil to grow things. Right, there are services people use that for today, and there's there's something kind of powerful here, both in a refusal to totally let go of a dead loved one and a desire to keep a piece of them alive with you in some way. Funerary cannibalism was a common practice in England about fifteen thousand years ago, and evidence of similar practices has been found in Ireland and Germany, in

the UK and Russia, Belgium, Portugal, basically everywhere. Right, you can find evidence of this in almost every like human civilization on Earth if you go back far.

a plant grows out of that gets eaten. And you know, I will say also as somebody who grew up in a strict Catholic household, cannibalism is not uncommon in the Western world, like they live for people who don't know Catholicism, Like they believe that they're you know, they're they're doing the sacrament up on the altar. Uh, they ring a little bell and at that point, the bread and wine literally turns into Jesus' like body and blood. Yeah, like

that's what they think is happening. Yeah, I've tasted it. It's not Actually I don't want to anything for anybody, but it's uh yeah yeah, So I don't know, like like having fantasies of cannibalism that are supposed to be literal cannibalism at the center of your spiritual beliefs. But then every.

going to come, right, Which is why talking about this at all. There's a lot of aspects of this that are really problematic, and there's some other real practices that get misinterpreted and exaggerated. For one thing, infanticide, right, there were like during times of starvation, and again this is not just something that Aboriginal people did in Australia. This is something all throughout human civilization. When everyone is starving to death, sometimes you kill a newborn baby because it's

not going to be able to survive. Right, Yeah, Like we are talking about people who are living and with wildly different margins than we can conceive of, and the purpose here is not cruelty or some dark ritual which is again what it often got spun out that they're doing this for some sort of magic purpose. This is survival, right, there's simply not enough food.

They're usually just like people with who are kind of rich and so decide they do that as a hobby and they wind up having their own biases or their own bigotry, and they just kind of like weave this story into ongoing narratives about how dangerous these people are, right, And so this thing that's like, well, yeah, sometimes people who are starving have to make hard choices gets turned

into something else. I found an article on aboriginal Cannibalism in Queensland on the University of Queensland's website, written by E. G. Heap in nineteen sixty seven, so this would have been published at close to the peak of days of racist anthropology on this matter. And even in this article the author repeatedly points out how incredibly thin the actual evidence is for many of the cannibalistic practices that were claimed

to be universal. Quote Thomas, who's one of the anthropologists in this period, recorded a case on the Gascoyne River in Western Australia where an Aboriginal girl was eaten and killed and eaten by a native who decoyed her away. She was very plump. The object of killing her was to acquire this desirable quality. Bleekel, who's another scientist, also referred to rare cases of the killing and eating of a young girl on a special ritual occasion. But his

information is not documented. And that's the thing that you find over and over again is like, here's this lurid claim of someone being like eaten for this like ritual purpose. There's no evidence that this happened, right, Look.

stuff like that happens a lot too. I presume there are some cases of like people eating parts of defeated enemies, and because that happens in various parts of the world, so maybe that's the case. But again, over and over again reading this paper, it's just here's this like lurid story and there's no evidence.

best kind. And she's kind of wandering around in like the eighteen hundreds, oh sorry, in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and she's this mix of this kind of like paternalistic sympathy towards aboriginal people, right, but also a lot of bigotry. And she becomes maybe the primary source during this period of claims about cannibalism. And it sounds reliable, sounds reliable. It's one of those things,

and this is awful. What's frustrating. Discard everything she says, because she is one of the only sources of like ethnographic research we have on some some of these groups of people from this period of time. But we also know that she lies a lot. And in fact, I found historian Bob Reese is like, she does good work

in some things quote with the notable exception of cannibalism. Basically, you can't listen to anything she says when she brings up cannibalism, right, like the stuff she has to say about, like languages and stuff that's useful with the second she brings up cannibalism, turn your brain off. She's full of shit, which kind of makes me question the other stuff. But

I'm not an anthropologist like her, so baits this. This lady, this cannibalism obsessed lady is a monarchist and an anti union activist as well, so I'm not primed to like her. She seems to have grown up obsession, act like she's one of these people. Maybe I'll do another I might want to do an episode on her at some point. She's got a long history of like lying about her background, like pretending to have come from a different place than she did and be a different person that she is.

And she's got like she's obsessed with cannibalism. Kind of later in life it becomes One historian describes it as a fixation, which gets worse as she ages and she starts to suffer from dementia. So she's like continuing to work as an elderly woman getting increasingly crazy and obsessed with cannibalism.

like claiming that that is a thing that's happening. She writes dozens of articles in newspapers about this practice, and in nineteen twenty came claimed to have received the bones of a baby that had been cooked and eaten by its pregnant Aboriginal mother. Right the bones were you want to guess what the bones came from?

In order that the killing should be safe murderers, slippers or pads were made Emu feathers twisted and twined together, bound to the foot with human hair, on which the natives walk and run as easily as a white man, and running shoes their feet leaving no track.

was practiced in some groups or not. Again, there's there's argument there, but it was like what she is saying is a complete lie that she's made up because she's gone crazy, and it's very racist.

at least accurate too. Okay, we're just being racist now great, He in a colleague debated whether or not because again there's like notes taken on board the ship, and the notes are that James Cook is debating with like a colleague, whether or not the skin color of these people meant they were a new race of humans. He was kind of tripped up by their hair, which he was surprised

to see was quote very much like ours. Wh yeah, out of the same stuff, yeah yeah, wow, the same kind of hair as same dang hair.

have them singing about seeing his ship. Per an article by Fiona Foley, Ala artist and scholar right for the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. The Boschula people were unique because not many people in the world would be aware. They created a song recounting what was happening when the ship passed by our country on May twentieth of that year. The song takes place on a volcanic headland of Ghari to the known in Bochula as Takiwaru. What I love about this song are the layers of

metaphors contained within one verse. The ship rose out of the sea like a cloud and kept near land for three or four days. One day it came in very close to Takiwaru, and they saw many men walking around on it. They asked each other who are these strangers?

And where are they going? So you actually get like a little bit of you know, like this record of like a conversation of both sides of it in this stase, which is fairly rare when you're talking about story like things like this, like first contact between you know, in a digitous group and Europeans that you have like both sides of like the very first conversation about seeing each other, which I find really interesting.

They had a they had a printing press at this point, like well well ahead of your and so you can like go go back and look at their written record and like it's just crickets as far as bar goes. But we, you know, we just trust whatever. The random guy who you know sailed around the Bend and then just like came back five years later and was like China ever heard of it? Great?

some fucked up shit. Man, I'm not gonna lie. So Fiona here, who's this Butchulla, scholar and artist who I just quoted from, describes Cook's attempts to classify the denizens of Gari in his decision to name the island Indian Head as quote the first evidence of British racialization in Australia, and cites Jody Byrd's book The Transitive Empire, which describes this as part of a process that allowed the Empire to quote facilitate, justify, and rationalize the state sponsored violence

that tear lane and resources and sovereignty from indigenous people. Right, And I think that it doesn't start with the actual colonization or with even the legal code. It starts with this guy on a boat trying to racially categorize this people and taking the name of their island away from them and making it kind of a racist copy. Right that that's the start of the process of racialization that ends that well, it leads to genocide. It doesn't end there,

but that's a part of it. Right. So this was just the beginning of a long process of colonial violence, and a major chapter in that history brings us back to the person who is the subject of these episodes, Eliza Fraser, right to set up the rest of this so that we could talk about old Eliza. She was possibly born Elizabeth Slack in Worksworth, Derbyshire, and baptized on the first of June and seventeen ninety eight, although that

is debated. One writer in the nineteen thirties described her as coming from the Orkney Islands, and there's a number of people who will claim she came from the Orkney Islands, but there's not evidence of that. A great grandson of hers in New Zealand disputed this, arguing that she was born in Ceylon in modern Sri Lanka, where her parents lived at the time. We do not know for certain.

The article I found claiming that she was born Elizabeth Shack in Derbyshire was like a Derbyshire website claiming her as like a native daughter of the town. So I don't know. Maybe they have a little bit of an agenda.

for its time. The captain himself, her husband, is described as either a pompous, fat old bore much of demand by shipowners who had managed to overensure their vessels. In other words, this guy's so incompetent you you hire him to be a run your ship, to drunk drive your car, right, if your insurance is good, He's going to drunk drive your boat into oblivion. So that's one Claime about him.

I've also heard him described as urbane in his manners and an attitude and features what is deemed a handsome man. So either he was a drunk old boy who will crash a ship, or he was like a handsome, you know, polite and competent sea captain. You'll hear both stories. He's been dead a long time. I simply don't know.

Presbyterian minister, which was the style at the times. Hey, kids, we're going on a boat for like a year. We may die or not. This minister's going to be your dad and mom.

So the supplies are rum wine, beer, pickles, mustard. You know the necessities, right, all the things Australians need to survive. Starting with rum wine and beer. It picks up other goods and charts a course to Singapore. And the route to Singapore with these goods that it picks up in

Sydney is going to take it past Moreton Bay. Unfortunately for everyone aboard, this takes them near the Swain Reefs, which is a treacherous piece of sea for competent helmsman to navigate, and some of the evidence suggests Captain Fraser and his men may not have been the very best seaman England ever produced, which you could also say, no, I'm not going to make that joke. So the ship ran aground on the reef and the crew of nineteen

got into two lifeboats. Captain Fraser, his wife, his thirteen year old nephew, and several other sailors, including a guy named Robert darsh who we'll talk about later, got into one leaking longboat, and everyone else got into a Pinnas, which is a slightly nicer boat. Both boats traveled together for a time and they split their supplies between them, which included brandy and beer.

was difficult under these conditions. And again, no one particularly right, yeah, right, right, No one's a master sailor here, right, We're not talking about people who are great at what they're doing now. In their defense, this is also difficult because Captain Fraser's longboat is constantly taking on water, so they're baling it out twenty four to seven while they're on it. Also adding to the difficulty is that his wife goes into labor on day three because it's pretty stressful having your

boat sink and then being on a longboat. So per the most common accounting of the story, she delivers the baby underwater because again the boat is constantly sinking and the baby dies almost immediately, which geez, it's probably I don't have trouble believing that if she was pregnant, because babies don't do well in these conditions.

through modesty. In other words, she didn't what it was kind of shameful to talk about, so she didn't initially, But she also does when she starts raising a bunch of money, So there's some bid. Did she just make this up to kind of get sympathy, because she definitely does some of that, right, we really don't know. Two days later processing this in several other traumas, Captain Fraser was finally forced to put his failing boat ashore to

find water. Eliza would later claim that she figured out how to get fresh water by lowering her skirt into a crack and ringing enough water out of it to fill their containers. She does lie about almost every part of this story, and I don't assume this is true, just because, like, well, this pretty obvious way to get water. And I'm going to guess other people on these boats had more experience foraging for water than her, So I don't know if she had to teach all of them this.

But they didn't have dresses on though, right, and they didn't have dresses at any rate. They fill up their water, they finally have water, and they continue their journey until they run out of water again. Eliza claims that she was able to survive on seawater, but all of the men got sick when they tried. And this is definitely a lie because you simply can't survive on seawater.

They're sort of traveling around the islands off that coast, you know, periodically stopping when they need more water, trying to find food, and eventually they wind up off the coast of what was then called Indian Head, right based on what Captain Cook had called it. The indigenous people are still calling it Ghari. But Captain Fraser doesn't want to get on the big island because number one, he

thinks it's a chunk of the Australian mainland. But number two, he's been told everyone here is a cannibal, so he's like scared of they can see people, and he doesn't want to get close to people because he thinks they'll eat him. One day, though, the pinnace, which is the second boat with them, goes out to find water, while the longboat kind of waits by the shore and it never comes back. The people on it do eventually find their way back to civilization. I don't know if they

just abandoned Eliza and her husband. Maybe because they found them annoying.

They think they found the mainland. We don't one hundred percent know if they know this is an island or not, but most accounts will say they thought this was somewhere on the mainland that was just isolated from European civilization. They are met very quickly by five locals with spears. Now, contrary to all these myths that Captain Fraser had believed that these people were cannibals, these folks, these Butchola people see strange white people come aground and they show up

with food. Right, They're like, you guys look like shit. You are obviously dying. We've watched you sailing, We've watched you like boating around the coast, trying to eat liftoff of limpets. You're clearly dying. I don't know why you didn't come for help earlier. Here's some food, right, This

is very obviously a humanitarian gesture. But even in modern casual accounts like this write up I found in Great British Life, which is the one that wants to take credit for her coming from Derbyshire, this humanitarian gesture is often described as like gross and savage. Quote the Machola people approached them with decomposing kangaroo meat. When a sailor ate some they took some of his clothing and like

what man number one? They don't have refrigerators right, like this is this happens in like the winter, so it's not a great seat. They don't have a lot of food, like this kind of going off like kangaroo meat is the best they can do, and it's better than you were able to do for yourselves, like this is a this is a nice thing.

or they just dessert. We don't really know. Crewman Harry Yolden is the source of the claim that like we deserted, and he blames Eliza for making them desert right quote, she was a terrible liar and the most profane, artful, wicked woman that ever lived, and this does comport with some of her later behavior. Although other crewmen alleged that Yolden was the problem and he stole a bunch of water that like, way more water than he was supposed to be drinking, both of these could be true. Maybe

they both sucked right. He Also, Yolden also called Eliza a she captain, which is him insulting both her and her husband.

at any rate. After they are rescued by the bachola, the group splits up and Darj Yolden and four other men head for where they think is Moreton Bay. But Moreton Bay is on the mainland, so again they don't really know where they are. Eliza her husband good navigators.

little bit unclear exactly what happens. All of these stories are kind of different, but Eliza and her husband wind up living with the batola for several months, and the first thing that she reports the Patrolla show them how to do is dig a hole in the sand so that it fills with water and then add leaves from a local shrub to improve the taste. Right, So again,

they're like trying to teach them how to survive. They are attempting to do a humanitarian things, right those monthster like, oh, you guys are always you're dipping your filthy clothing into water to like, no, this is how you get nice clean water.

The men were led away, leaving Eliza naked apart from some trailing sea grape plant she tied around her waist. Aboriginal women took her to their camp, prodded her and pulled her hair. They gave her a baby to breastfeed as its mother was sick, and painted her body with charcoal and lizard grease to make her skin darker. Now this is largely wrong. It's based on a mix of three different accounts left by Frasier and several subsequent books,

one of which is fiction based on her story. Some of these details are true, but are missing important details. For example, the story about them painting her with charcoal and grease is likely true, but they didn't do it to make her skin darker. There's substantial documentation that the Bochola used charcoal to treat wounds, rubbing it into like an injury as a sav or ungwin perhaps mixed with herbs, right,

and this can actually be effective. You don't have better methods right available, Like this is a thing that the Beachola and other people do. So this account and other accounts are like, oh, they did it because they wanted to make her skin darker like theirs. It's like, no, she was probably covered in cuts because she'd been shipwrecked and at sea for months and they were trying to treat her injuries.

story that she gave birth on a lifeboat. So again, maybe she was just embarrassed to talk about it earlier, or maybe she knew that this. She was raising money off of the story at this point, so maybe she just knew that like, oh, adding in that they made me breastfeed one of their babies. That's going to really like be freaky to all of these like white British people that like, I was made to do this. I'll

just throw that into the story too. She would also later claim to have been given the job of maggot picking right, otherwise picking like maggots out of injuries, and maybe she was that's the thing you need, you're going to have people do, and they have her work, not like in a mean way, but because you don't survive as a group of people living this way unless everyone

does stuff right. In general, she alleges beasteal treatment from the Butchola, who, by her accounts, forced her and the other survivors into hard labor and beat them when they failed to work at a sufficient pace. Now it's important that we take a second here to look at how the Bachola would have seen these white people at this point in time. They have had very little contact with Europeans, and their traditional concept of the world was a lot

smaller than it would become. Since part of their funerary ritual involved skinning the dead, which left them looking white. They interpreted the first white people they saw as something like ghosts returned to corporeal form. Right, these are the ghosts of our dead who have come back to us.

and it was common. Some of the evidence for this is that it was really common in this period for stranded whites who like wound up on the island to get adopted into different bands on Gari after one member of a tribe or another would be like, oh, I think this is the returned spirit of like my husband or my kid, right, And so that was kind of like the way that they rationalized what they were doing and sort of you know, what was going on under

the hood here. Another thing that's happening in this period is that, you know, you've got cities like Sydney, which are European cities and thus have European prisons, and sometimes convicts will escape these prisons on mainland settlements and they'll flee, and some of them will wind up on these islands and they will be taken in by the Bachula and other tribes. And again the same kind of justification is used when someone arrives a nineteen seventy seven paper in

the Journal of Occupational Papers in Anthropology noted quote. The most likely to have reached the island first was James Davis, who ran in March eighteen twenty nine and subsequently joined the Bachula on the Mary River. Although initially known to coastal Aborigines as Dunnbot, meaning small one, among the Bachula, he became Thorimbi, the reincarnated son of a tribal elder

killed in battle some years before. Again to tales of Davis's exploits are sparse, for he was a particularly taciturn individual who remained tight jawed about much of his fourteen years. Experiences as a wild white man. David Bracewells for Bossi earned him the name want or Talker, but it was not until his fourth abstention from Warreton Bay after July eighteen thirty nine that he actually mentions having passed over to Fraser's Island, called Gari by the natives, right he

spells at Karina. I don't understand why, but it's pronounced Kai, where he remained for nearly a year. His impression was that its inhabitants were very numerous, he thinks thousands, and at their great fights he has seen them, covering the

beach for four miles in extent. Finally, John Failey, called Gizburi, after a long trek from Armadol to the Mary River via the Bunyel festivals in the Black All Ranges, moved with the Aboriginal people of White Bay for almost twelve years, helping them to plan raids against early White settlers, before being retaken by Lieutenant Bly and his Native mounted police

in December eighteen fifty four. Fayhee, it seems, became the most totally incorporated of all the fugitives into Aboriginal lifestyles, passing through the Bora ceremony and bearing upon his body the Musgara scars and the Eppelate Bora marks on the white shoulder. After enduring the brutal privations of convict life, each of these escapees testified to the comparatively kindly treatment

they received from the Aboriginal people. In John Fahy's case, his Black kinsmen fought bitterly with the Native troopers to prevent his recapture. Upon his return to Sydney, However, officialdom casually awarded Fayhee a year's imprisonment on the roads and

chains and forgot him. This is like fascinating story of like these people who have been tossed out by their own culture and like you have no value, but like being chained to a gang, working on the roads or locked in a cage, and they're adopted as members of the family by some of these groups. I find that particularly the case of Fah where he's like helping them raid at like white settlers, and they're like fighting, you know, tooth and nail to the death to stop him from

being recaptured. They like, you know, ritually scar his body. They take it's it's I wish we knew more about that guy. It's an amazing story.

Like some of them have like families that they will periodically leave and then come back to So it is like a it's like a complicated, for sure exchange here, but certainly like like especially the case of Fahy, this guy who is like, oh you know what these people rip, I'm going to help him kill like these colonizers, right, sounds like and then yeah, dies abandoned in a chain gang by the British authorities. Yeah. Real bummer, real bummer. But yeah, Like fascinating stuff and the fact that it's

one of those things. One of the things I find interesting that we'll talk about more in part two is this belief that like these people with white skin are like returning spirits, isn't going to last. Right, This is a belief that exists primarily when they have not had

a lot of contact with Europeans. They don't keep believing that forever, right, Like, it becomes very clear as they have more and more Oh no, no, no, these are these people are something else, and they're kind of a problem for us, right, Like, this is something that changes because this is not a static culture. Right, They're capable, like any culture, of adapting to times because they're people, right, Like, this isn't just like this is the thing they believed.

It's like, no, this was like a belief that existed at a period of time and changed after contact with the world.

The first is that even though the vast bulk of the evidence suggests that the people who took in Eliza and her husband and shipmates were trying to be kind and welcome them in essentially as members of the family, this still would have been disorienting and terrifying for Eliza and her shipmates, and not just because they're racist, because like, you don't know these people language, you don't understand entirely what they're trying to do. It is a scary situation,

even if you're not a bigot. It's like scary because you can't communicate direct with these folks, and some of them are going to get angry at you, right, like because you're not good at hunting and gathering, and you're kind of dragging the rest of the group down and taking away resources of them, right.

in the culture they came from. The most common phrase to describe how the British Navy is held together in this period is rum sodomy and the lash otherwise keeping them drunk, letting them fuck each other and whipping them until they're bloody when they don't perform at the expected level, right, Like Captain Fraser would have whipped people on his ship.

So the fact that they are also being subject to probably some corporal punishment when they fuck up is not like alien to them, right, Their own culture does this.

Much of Eliza and the European world's horror at her treatment is going to come from the fact that the Beatola they didn't It's not that they treated her as a slave or as a captive, but they treated her like an equal, and for the rest of her life, Eliza Fraser is never going to forgive them for this, and neither are the Europeans. Jesus, that's all coming in part two, Jack.