For a time in history
the sun never set on the British Empire and the penal colonies in Australia and
Tasmania were as far away from England as one could get. The English Passengers by Matthew Kneale begins in England in 1857. Captain Illiam
Quillian Kewley, a rum smuggler who is experiencing financial difficulties, is
forced to charter his ship to missionaries who want to go to Tasmania. Reverend
Geoffrey Wilson hopes to refute Darwinism by his proving his theory that the
Garden of Eden is located on Tasmania. His fellow traveler, Dr. Thomas Potter,
secretly plans to collect aboriginal skulls to prove his theory of the
superiority of the white race.
Alternating chapters
begin in 1820 and move forward in time. In these chapters the suffering of the
aborigine people is told by Peavay, a young mixed-race child whose tribe is eventually
decimated by the English, both those who mean well and those who don’t.
As the smugglers’
ship sails toward Tasmania, the aborigines’ story moves forward to 1857. Until
the ship docks in Tasmania, the reader is reading two separate and equally engrossing
books, one humorous, one tragic. Once the two stories merge, the characters,
humor and tragedy also merge. Reverend Wilson becomes suspicious of Dr.
Potter’s motives and fights to maintain control of his project. An
Eden-searching trek into the jungle drives Dr. Potter power-mad and Reverend
Wilson simply mad. Peavay, renamed Cromwell by missionary teachers, agrees to
guide the search. Using Potter’s and
Wilson’s own weaknesses, hubris and treachery, he manages to turn the two men
against each other and abandons them in the bush. Consumed by the hatred that
has been building in him for thirty-seven years, he plots his revenge.
The missionaries
eventually find their way back to the ship and when the ship departs Tasmania,
the party is in disarray. When Dr. Potter, consumed by a sense of power,
engineers a mutiny and takes control of the ship, he brings about both disaster
and one of the most satisfying story conclusions in modern literature.
Check out The English Passengers @ the library!
