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

Robert sits down with Jack O'Brien to tell the story about Eliza Fraser, who survived being shipwrecked thanks to the indigenous people of an island her lies helped destroy. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I have increasingly gotten bad at opening. You would think normally when you do something thousands of times, you get better at it. But sometimes you just get worse at it because how do you keep opening the podcast? You know, I've already done the what's cracking my peppers. We've already reached the highest highs that a man can reach, not just in podcasting, but in life in general. So there's, there's nowhere to go, but just gibberish.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Wanna try, wanna try? Hello and welcome to Behind the Bastards. I'm your host, Robert Evans.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  I don't think any podcast is ever open that way. Is that, is that why we don't get awards?

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I prefer habba da ba ba ba da ba da.

• 0:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  That was pretty good.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I was like Adam Sandler status.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there you go. And he got to be in Uncut Gems, you know? Maybe I'll get to be in Uncut Gems. I could be, I could have a gambling problem, Sophie. I believe in me.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  I do believe that you could have a gambling problem, but we don't let you touch the money.

• 1:07Robert Evans?

  No. Ah, man, I can put it all on black, Sophie. 21 black. I think that's a roulette term. Anyway, speaking of roulette, every time we pick a new guest, it's roulette, except today, because today we have Jack O'Brien back on the pod. Jack the guarantee.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Swish.

• 1:29Robert Evans?

  Jack the pro Brian.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Ring a ding ding. That's called a jackpot.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I thought you were saying.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  And that is my catchphrase now.

• 1:37Robert Evans?

  That's nice.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I thought you were saying, and back from the dead.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  From the dead, you all forgot about him. Yeah, of all the popular casino names that you could have associated with my name, roulette is definitely the closest, especially after you had just said 21. There's a game called blackjack. I know they don't let you gamble, but.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's not allowed to touch the money.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  You got blackjack. It's a jackpot. My name really slots in nicely with a lot of casino lingo.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Why have you not made a crypto? Oh, because it's evil.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Oh, right, right. I will tell you, that is not why. It's a pure laziness and not willing to learn all the bullshit that goes along with it.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  I do feel like your co-host Miles Gray could really sell a meme coin.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Oh, hell, yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Zeitcoin?

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Come on. Oh, there it is. It's there. You did it.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  We've, we did try and soft launch Zeitcoin and everybody thought it was a joke.

• 2:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  I tried to launch Bastard Coin. Just wound up making the president a lot of money.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Basically what we all do every day.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, that that is kind of the point of everyone else in the country now. Speaking of making a lot of money doing evil things.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 2:57Robert Evans?

  Australia. That's the subject this week. It's an Australian bastard. Our Aussie listeners have been begging for years.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Years, literally.

• 3:07Robert Evans?

  Why don't you ever talk about 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.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And kangaroos.

• 3:24Robert Evans?

  And kangaroos replacing whatever armadillos? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think anything replaces kangaroos. Anyway, we're talking about a lady named Eliza Fraser this week. That's our bastard. And so Eliza is a lady who gets shipwrecked and then tells a bunch of lies about how the Aboriginal people on the island that she is shipwrecked on treat her. And those lies wind up cascading and playing a role in a lot of genocidal bullshit. So she's the bastard this week and also the colonial 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.

• 4:08Robert Evans?

  So we're gonna have a good time, Jack. You were gonna hear about some genocide.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  We're the worst, mate. No, that was not good. By the end, I will get one good syllable of an Australian accent.

• 4:19Robert Evans?

  Well, it's okay, because Eliza comes from this era. She's British. Right? Like she's, she's a major figure in Australian history, but like the Aussies hadn't really figured out that accent yet, right? They were still just British people on a different place, right?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  There's some workshopping it.

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  And Scottish people.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. I like the idea that they were just like intentionally in a room somewhere. That is kind of what happened with the received pronunciation, right? The British accent like.

• 4:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. A bunch of rich guys sat around in a room.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. In Shakespearean time, the British accent sounded like the Baltimore accent. Like it was just kind of like.

• 4:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Everyone sounded like a character in The Wire.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Can you, can you do that again, please?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 5:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yo, Yin's going down to see Shakespeare at the Globe.

• 5:08Robert Evans?

  That's exactly how Shakespeare sounded. Yes.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  That's how much of you're right. To be or not to be.

• 5:14Robert Evans?

  Yes. Thankfully Denzel's version of Macbeth really, really delivered on that.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  But then they were like, we should sound fancy and that's where we got received pronunciation. I don't think this is like exactly what happened. I don't think they had like a meeting where they were like, should we fancy it up? But they were just like, it kind of sounds cool when we talk like this.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Jack, I've missed you, buddy.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  My accent works so good. You've missed me and my accent work.

• 5:42Robert Evans?

  That's also part of the thing is like, we could be shitty to everyone who doesn't talk right. Cause they didn't go to Eaton or wherever.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:49Robert Evans?

  Which is why you have like received pronunciation. If you, if you know British people, they can always tell you, oh yeah, that guy's rich just by like hearing him.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  I know. Very posh, isn't he?

• 5:57Robert Evans?

  Whereas in America, everyone just sounds like a Californian now.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 6:02Robert Evans?

  We did it, Joe.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  All up speak.

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• 6:11Robert Evans?

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• 8:13Robert Evans?

  Let's talk about Eliza Frazier and this series of genocides. It's great stuff. Um, now, this is also kind of a story about, uh, how conflicting versions of events can sort of spread through popular media. Uh, cause 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. Um, and so there's just a whole, it like literally like a, like, it's almost like it's own cinematic universe of lying about this lady being shipwrecked that starts up in the mid 1800s.

• 8:58Robert Evans?

  It's very fun. Um, but every version of events starts the same way, which is that Eliza Fraser sets sail on a boat called the Sterling Castle in 1836. Uh, her husband is the captain and according to most versions of the story, although not all of them, she is Pregers, uh, which I don't think I've ever said on the show.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  I hated it. I really didn't.

• 9:20Robert Evans?

  Love it. I'm getting mixed reactions.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  The goosebumps that I have on my arms right now are, uh, because it felt so good and natural.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  I think.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Pregers.

• 9:31Robert Evans?

  So.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Pregers McGregor's.

• 9:33Robert Evans?

  McGregor's. Oh, if only her last name had been McGregor, that would really have worked.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  I'm sure one of the people on the, on the ship was named McGregor.

• 9:41Robert Evans?

  It's got, anytime there's a British ship at sea, there's a McGregor somewhere on that motherfucker.

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  So in May of 1836, uh, several months after setting sail, the Sterling Castle runs aground, not all that far from an island that, at that point Europeans called it the Great Sandy Island. It's going to be called Frazier Island. Uh, and.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 10:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. They name it after this lady who lies about it. Um, it is to this day, the world's largest sand island. So it's, it's a pretty sizable island. Uh, it's about 186 miles north of Brisbane. Um, and today. It's called Gari. Um, it is spelled K apostrophe G A R I. And if you go to like Wikipedia, it'll say it's pronounced Guri or Guri. 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 Gari. So that's how I'm gonna try to say it because I'm pretty sure they're righter than Wikipedia.

• 10:49Robert Evans?

  It's also possible that maybe there's some like dialect differences and and people. Yeah, anyway, I I'm gonna try to call it Gari because that's what it sounded like in the video that I saw.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Is it sandy island like just?

• 11:02Robert Evans?

  All sand is.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  All sand. Is that uncommon? I guess is my question. Like I've been to islands that have sand on them, but like I I did not realize that they were.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  It's common, but not for them to be this big, right? Like there's a bunch of sandy islands, but the great sandy island is the biggest. One thing you gotta give the first name Europeans give it is that it's at least accurate where they're like, wow, this is a fucking huge sandy island. Son of a bitch is big.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Jack imagine an island, but like more sand.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, like even sandier.

• 11:32Robert Evans?

  Even an even sandier island. The sand, you could call it the sandiest island.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Sandiest of islands.

• 11:39Robert Evans?

  Anakin Skywalker would hate this fucking island. As a colonizer, I guess makes sense.

• 11:46Robert Evans?

  So back, people have been living on Gari for a very, very long time. And at least some of what I've read, although I always take like European anthropology about Aboriginal people, a lot of which is written in like the 60s and 70s with a grain of salt here. But a lot of that kind of 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 they were like, a lot of the peoples who lived on Gari, lived on Gari 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 and what season, not uncommon around the world. Most peoples who were.

• 12:31Robert Evans?

  Like quote unquote hunter gathers or whatnot were more like semi nomadic, right? Where they would have places that they would like settle down and 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 air. Anyway, um, 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? Cause there's a genocide, right? But we do have quite a lot of, of information from these people.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  That's called foreshadowing, by the way.

• 13:15Robert Evans?

  Like a sizable amount of their records, like we have their records of their very first European contract, contact, which has been, um, passed down for a hundred, like several hundred years through songs. Human beings have lived on what is today Gari for more than 50,000 years. There's no real way to get much more precise than that. And human civilization on the island, in fact, predates it being an island because until about 6,000 years ago, it was still directly connected to the Australian mainland. Rising sea levels put an end to that and the fertile climate and bounty of aquatic protein enabled it to support a meaningful, permanent population of like several thousand people.

• 13:56Robert Evans?

  Most casual histories of Gari 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 Butchala, which is usually spelled B U T C H A L L A, but there's like three different spellings that are all correct because it's like an Anglicization, right?

• 14:25Robert Evans?

  So the Butchala 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 diff, like the, the mainland and the island. And then there's the Dulingbara, uh, who occupied much of the south and the. Uh, 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 Pachola right. Uh, to some extent, Gari, like occupation of Gari varied with the season. Mollet fishing was the major source of food and during the height of the harvest, there might be as many as 3,000 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 RVs, but otherwise that's more or less accurate.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  In many ways, eastern, like east coast retirees are living the most similar lives to indigenous peoples of long ago.

• 15:20Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Traveling to Florida and that.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  True, yeah, going, going between the Jersey Shore and Florida. I do.

• 15:27Robert Evans?

  I mean, there are some ways in which that's right, right?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  The, the idea that people would just live one place all the time is new.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  It is, and it's also like not, uh, that, that book, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengro, like they talk about how

• 15:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  one of the key freedoms that they used to have that we don't really have as much anymore and don't really value is just the ability to be like, well, this sucked and like leave town. Like that was always the thing that people were just able to do. And then like entire communities would just like move if things got shitty.

• 16:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, seems like it sucks here. Let's go. Uh, this guy's calling himself king. Time to bounce.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:08Robert Evans?

  Oh, if only we could still do that. Buy an RV, become free, everyone. That's the message of, of this podcast. Live on the road, you know? Um, there's no downsides. Everyone I know who lives in an RV is happy.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  That's right. It always goes well.

• 16:22Robert Evans?

  It never goes badly. RVs are well-made. They don't break immediately. Okay.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  I can't tell you the amount of times Robert has suggested we get in a podcast RV.

• 16:32Robert Evans?

  I think, I think we should get a fleet of RVs.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  I don't hate that idea. We should probably talk about that.

• 16:37Robert Evans?

  I could be a podcast Commodore. Thank you, Jack. Yes.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Just like a moving podcast studio. You just need like a small podcast studio to justify it. And then everything else is just, sorry, Sophie's so mad at me for entertaining this.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  So mad at you.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  For being like, oh, I love this idea.

• 16:52Robert Evans?

  We can cook lizards over open fires like Mad Max. I think it's a good idea. Okay.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  It's just a thing that I can't get my wife to agree to. And so I'm like, oh, we should expense it.

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  I mean, people, a lot of people are really hesitant to let their children live in a roaming RV.

• 17:08Robert Evans?

  Oh, they don't get to come. Okay, excellent. No, they're very good. So, uh, most of the sources I have found identify the island's Garry's first contact with Europeans as coming with the arrival of the notorious Captain James Cook. Uh, that said, there's evidence of several centuries of irregular contact with Europeans prior to James Cook showing up. Uh, this would have begun with Portuguese sailors around 1500. 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 1500. It's a little hard to say. There's also like clay pipes that were made by the Dutch that would have come from around the 1600s. But we don't really know, does that mean that those people like Europeans were landing

• 17:52Robert Evans?

  on the island and trading directly? Or that people who lived on the island, who we know went back to the mainland periodically throughout the year, were trading with other different like groups of Aboriginal peoples who were themselves trading with these other Europeans, right? We don't really know that. Um, as one of my sources, an article by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes, this could simply be, yeah, evidence of trade between Garry and people with other parts of Australia. Uh, over the generations, 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. Um, and this is again, something that I found in sort of anthropological studies. I don't think this is something that is like known to AT.

• 18:35Robert Evans?

  There's some debate on this, but there's some evidence that here, as well as in all, you know, other places, uh, 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 like 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, right? It's this like white colored substance between your skin and muscles. And as a result, white skin became associated with the dead, right? So this is like part of a ritual for, you know, burying your loved ones.

• 19:19Robert Evans?

  Um, and this kind of like whiteness, and when they see white people later, they will be associated with the dead, right? And with death. Not entirely wrong. Not entirely inaccurate. Kind of a helpful coincidence there. In some ways, yeah. Yeah. As a paper from the Anthropological Museum of Queensland edited by Dr. Peter Lauer describes, after this ritual was finished, quote, "Certain sacred portions of the deceased had been ceremoniously consumed by relatives. Carefully executed funeral rites would ensure that the spirit, like a cold wind, left the body before it was interred." According to Aboriginal informant Gairbaw, the B'challa believed that on the following day, the spirit returned, then the relatives would accompany it to a certain rock at Bari

• 20:03Robert Evans?

  Iba, which bore the impress of the foot of Beryl, 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 believed 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.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  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 Gari, 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 like this is not an accurate characterization of their ancestors. And usually what the Europeans are accusing them of doing is like hunting and eating white people, right? Right. Like as like a predatory act.

• 21:16Robert Evans?

  And this is like, basically, all of these accounts are lies, and we'll talk a little bit about how a lot of these lies 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 engage 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 and used as soil to grow things, right? There are services people use that for today and there's, there's something kind of powerful

• 22:01Robert Evans?

  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 15,000 years ago and evidence of similar practices has been found in Ireland, in Germany, in the UK, in 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 enough.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  And it kind of seems like a somewhat sophisticated idea, the idea of like you are turned into energy, like it's not necessarily like dust to dust as the whites like to say, you actually could be turned into energy and you know, you become something that 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, spiritual sacramental cannibalism is not, not uncommon in the Western world. Like they live for people who don't know Catholicism, like they believe that they're, you know, that they're doing the sacrament up on the altar, they ring a little bell

• 23:11Speaker 02

  and at that point, the bread and wine literally turns into Jesus's like body and blood. Like that's what they think is happening. I've tasted it, it's not actually, I mean, I don't want to spoil anything for anybody, but it's, 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 everybody's, they're so weird.

• 23:47Robert Evans?

  Right. The way they do it's bad though.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Is it just like a small piece of like a loved one?

• 23:52Robert Evans?

  That's what it sounds like, based on the reading that I've done. And I mean, it varies from place to place, right? Again, this is something that we found evidence of on every continent, right? So like, you know, different, different groups of people probably had different attitudes. It's like which parts and how you do it. But it's a thing that occurs basically everywhere, right? And so this real practice is going to be part of like, what gets spun out into these lurid stories of like predatory cannibalistic behavior that are one of like the pretexts for the genocide that's going to come, right? Which is why talking about this at all, there's a lot of like, aspects of this that are really problematic. And there's some other real practices that get misinterpreted and exaggerated. For one thing, infanticide, right?

• 24:35Robert Evans?

  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? Like, we are talking about people who are living 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 to, that they're doing this for some sort of magic purpose. This is survival, right? There's simply not enough food, right? Everyone who has ever lived has relatives, if you go far back enough, who had to make choices like this. Because it's, it's hard to live as a fucking, like, yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And almost like a mercy killing in some cases, right? Like, like they're going to starve to death.

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  I don't know if we're going to live. This baby certainly can't, right? And so you, you know, but what you have is you have these people who are calling themselves anthropologists, these Europeans traveling, you know, through the continent and who find evidence of this. And they're not really anthropologists, they're usually just like people with, who are kind of rich, and so decide to 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?

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:57Robert Evans?

  And so this thing that's Like, well, yeah, sometimes people who are starving have to make hard choices gets turned into something else.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:04Robert Evans?

  Right. I found an article on Aboriginal cannibalism in Queensland on the University of Queensland's website, written by E.G. Heap in 1967. 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." Bleakle, who's another scientist, also referred to rare cases of the killing and eating of a young girl

• 26:49Robert Evans?

  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? Like, we don't actually know why he said this.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  So good in our movies.

• 27:04Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:05Robert Evans?

  We gotta put this in some art, some newspaper articles, right?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's the same thing with like these claims about the killing and eating of white settlers by, by these people, right? Like where a lot of these claims, there's simply like not any evidence of. There's evidence of like, sometimes like people will be killed and their bodies will be left out and animals will get to them and but people will be like, oh, well, they must have been eaten after they were murdered, right? Like, 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.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Those animals are so fucked up. I can't believe they did that.

• 27:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  That's like, that's the explanation behind the dial atav pass, whatever that one is.

• 27:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, dial of pass, right. They're like, oh, some monster must have eaten them.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Their tongues were missing.

• 28:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Eyes were missing. It's like, yeah, those are the soft parts that the animals eat when you're just left out.

• 28:07Robert Evans?

  Because it's snowy.

• 28:09Robert Evans?

  And I, when I looked into this paper more, cause like, I found a bunch of cases where it's like, okay, here's a lurid story and he says, and there's, there's no evidence. So I decided to look at more into some of the sources for this paper who were making claims about cannibalism. And the major source in this paper is a woman named Daisy Mae Bates. Bates was an Irish woman, and again, a self-taught anthropologist who expressed- The best kind. The best kind. And she's kind of wandering around in like, the 1800s, or sorry, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 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

• 28:52Robert Evans?

  primary source during this period of claims about cannibalism. And- Sounds reliable. Sounds reliable. It's one of those things, and this is awful, what's frustrating. You can't 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, there's some stuff she has to say about like, languages and stuff, that's useful, but the second she brings up cannibalism, turn your brain off. She's full of shit. Which kind of makes me

• 29:37Robert Evans?

  question the other stuff, but I'm not an anthropologist like her. So Bates, this, this lady, this cannibalism obsessed lady, is a monarchist and an anti-union activist as well. So I'm, I'm not primed to like her. She seems to have grown up obsessed, like, she's one of these people, maybe I'll do an, 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.

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  So she's like continuing to work as an elderly woman, getting increasingly crazy and obsessed with cannibalism.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  She could literally be the president right now. Monarchist racist, like fucking making things up about her background. Like, was she a time traveler?

• 30:40Robert Evans?

  No, no, she's just a very modern figure. She could have been in the administration.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  From dementia, Jesus.

• 30:46Robert Evans?

  He would have made her the fucking ambassador to Australia.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Believes that she's qualified to do a job that she is in no way qualified to do.

• 30:55Robert Evans?

  Honestly, iconic.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Ahead of her time.

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  I talked to you a little bit earlier about how some like some of these peoples during times of starvation would practice infanticide. Right. Which is again, a thing you see all over the world. Bates is the person who spins that into claiming that they're doing infant cannibalism. Right. And she is the primary source in this period is like claiming that that is a thing that's happening. She writes dozens of articles in newspapers about this practice. And in 1920, came claimed to have received the bones of a baby that had been cooked and eaten by its pregnant Aboriginal mother. Right. Uh, the bones were, you want to guess what, what the bones came from?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Ooh, dog?

• 31:34Robert Evans?

  Cat. Ah, you were close. You were close, Jack. Fucking cat bones. She's lying about a cat bones being a cannibalized baby. Speaking of eating cats.

• 31:46Robert Evans?

  Don't do that. Listen to these ads.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  I thought, I thought the advertiser was.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Hello fresh as a new product line.

• 32:01Robert Evans?

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• 33:00Robert Evans?

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• 34:00Speaker 09

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• 34:10Robert Evans?

  We're back and our lawyers have sent us an email.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  We're never getting a HelloFresh sponsorship.

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  I am not allowed to accuse HelloFresh of serving cat meat. You know, until the court case finishes one way or the other, we can't prove that they ate cat meat, certainly can't prove it. And, you know, are there allegations that they serve cat meat? There certainly are now, Robert. Absolutely, now there are, for sure.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Your cats.

• 34:37Robert Evans?

  But we can't prove it.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Your cats just sent me a text message and they're uncomfortable with this conversation.

• 34:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, they do look delicious.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Oh my god, leave Saddam Hussein's best friend alone.

• 34:50Robert Evans?

  Well, they've gotten fat lately, you know, they have a good diet, I'm just saying, you know. Salivating.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I think they look great and you're mean.

• 34:59Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's, I am. And when Sophie says they look great, she means they look like big cartoon ham legs.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Not what I said.

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  That's what they look to me, I didn't have breakfast today, so I'm just, I'm just looking at everything that way.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  So. By the way, it's 3:00 in the afternoon, everybody, just so you know what kind of hours Robert keeps.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  The audience knows.

• 35:21Robert Evans?

  They're aware by this point. Yeah. For an example of the kind of shit Bates was writing in newspapers at this period of time, here's a direct quote from her. "I used the word cannibal advisedly. Every one of these natives was a cannibal. Cannibalism had its local name from Kimberley to Euclid and through all the unoccupied country east of it, and there were many grisly rites attached there too. Human meat had always been their favorite food, and there were killing vendettas from time immemorial. In order that the killing should be safe, murderer's 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 in running shoes, their feet leaving no track." So.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  What does that have to do with, like, she's just describing things that they have, like, tools that they have and being like.

• 36:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm sure they have like shoes that allow them to move quiet because that's useful when you're hunting or in war. But she's just like.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  That must be because they are trying to eat people.

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  And like, again, you can find like actual debate between, you know, the actual anthropologists about the different kinds of cannibalism that may or may not have been practiced here. No one agrees everyone was a cannibal. It was not the norm. It was not wildly common. It was not, certainly not like a thing that was normal, right? Like, uh, whether it 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 is very racist.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  They like cannibalism so much, they like try and marry it. They want to marry cannibalism. It's their best friend.

• 36:54Robert Evans?

  She, she would have married cannibalism. Yes. Yes. Um, she's, she's a cannibalism influencer.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like what Joe Rogan is to fucking ayahuasca, this Bates lady is to cannibalism, allegations of cannibalism.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  So frustrating that he is the psychedelics person.

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. I know. I know. I've done way more fucking DMT than him.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  You're so much better at psychedelics than him. You need to take it back. This is, this is our psychedelics guy, not fucking Joe Rogan. Jesus Christ. Did you see his special?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Forget being the Joe Rogan of the left. Robert's the psychedelics of the left.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  The psychedelics guy.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's you.

• 37:35Robert Evans?

  I could take steroids. I believe in me. Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Did you see his stand up special? Or better yet, did you see the elephant graveyard analysis of his stand up special?

• 37:46Robert Evans?

  No.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  I have, I will send that link to you.

• 37:49Robert Evans?

  I assume it's a literal elephant graveyard you're talking about. I'm not going to look into that more.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  I think that's the name of the channel, but they just like go through, they're like, we're really excited about Joe Rogan's stand up special. And then just like go joke for joke. And they're like, oh no, Joe, what is, what is happening?

• 38:06Robert Evans?

  Things have gone downhill since, what was he? He wasn't on the man show, was he? Fear Factor.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  He might. No, Fear Factor.

• 38:13Robert Evans?

  That was Adam Carolla. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was on a, he was on that show with Andy Dick.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Frankly, too much time on Joe Rogan. Continue with the script, please.

• 38:22Robert Evans?

  Anyway, speaking of Andy Dick, the Andy Dick of old timey European colonizers was Captain James Cook, who was the first Englishman to enter the recorded history of the people of Gari. In 1770, he first sighted the island and reported spotting several people on the shore. He regarded them all as Indians and he gave the island the name Indian Head. So this is, it's name after the great Sandy Island. So we go from, well, that's at least accurate to, okay, we're just being racist now. Great. Uh, he and 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

• 39:06Robert Evans?

  they were a new race of humans. Uh, he was kind of tripped up by their hair, which he was surprised to see was quote, "very much like ours."

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 39:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Made out of the same stuff.

• 39:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Wow. The same kind of hair as we.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Same dang hair. Do you remember this article that we did at Cracked about like the great explorers and all the just insane lies that they told?

• 39:31Robert Evans?

  Well, because you, you have to be out of your mind. And if you're not out of your mind, when you start becoming an explorer, the months you spend dying at sea are going to make you lose your mind.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. They would be like the, I saw the person, like one of them was, I think they said they had like eyes where their shoulders were and like mouths in the middle of their, like between their nipples.

• 39:55Robert Evans?

  Yes. Those, the anthropophagi, I think are the, is the name of those, that, that like cryptic race.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. I still think they're real somewhere, but they just live, I saw one down the street from me in rural Oklahoma as a kid. Yeah. Yeah. They just live here.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was, these were just like the world's best liars. Like, I mean, not even good lies.

• 40:18Robert Evans?

  Oh, the lies I would have told.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Successful.

• 40:21Robert Evans?

  Imagine, because you like, you wind up in like the center of like a European capital, effectively in the center of their entire media ecosystem. And you're like, so have any of you guys been to China? All right. I'm going to just say some shit.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 40:33Robert Evans?

  I can, I can make you guys believe anything.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Good news for me. They worshiped me as a god.

• 40:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Robert Evans?

  So the B'chula are the tribe that Cook most likely saw first because they saw him as well. And we have, this is one of the things I find so interesting about how kind of how much fidelity there is with their oral tradition, how good it actually is at getting down history. We have their record of seeing him, right? So he's writing, he's got people on his boat writing about seeing these people. And we have them singing about seeing his ship. Per an article by Fiona Foley, a B'chula artist and scholar, writing for the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. "The B'chula 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 20th of that year. The song takes place on

• 41:24Robert Evans?

  a volcanic headland of Gari, known in B'chula as Takiwuru. 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 Takiwuru 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 case, which is fairly rare when you're talking about story, like, like, things like this, like, first contact between, you know, in a indigenous group and Europeans, that you have like, both sides of like, the very first conversation about seeing each other, which I find really interesting.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  And frequently, they're like, and why do these guys smell like shit?

• 42:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, wow, they smell, like, that boat, you can smell it from here.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Fucking terrible. Why? Like, all the European settlers just smelled, I mean, first of all, they're like, rolling in off a boat.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  Like, they're shitting over the side of this thing, right?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Just, yeah. At first, they're shitting over the side of it, Robert. By the end, they're just like, I really am so hungry, I can't even get up to the edge.

• 42:30Robert Evans?

  Every one of those sailors is like, 80% Giardia by body weight. Like, they're just, just stomachs full of worms.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  And like, swollen gums. That's what 90% of their body weight comes from.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's, like, even, um... You know, I remember the, that article that I was talking about, like Marco Polo is one of them. His like whole claim to fame was going to China and like becoming a great ruler in China and like helping them fight a war. And you can go like they were a way more advanced civilization, the most advanced civilization on the planet. They had, they had a printing press at this point, like well, well ahead of your, and so you can like go back and look at their written record and like, it's just crickets as far as Marco Polo goes, but we, you know, we just trust whatever the random guy who, uh, you know, sailed around the bend and then just like came back five years later and was like, uh, China? Ever heard of it? Great.

• 43:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Nope. Okay. I'm just gonna say shit. No, this is why I'm an Ibn Battuta stan and not a Marco Polo stan.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 43:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Cool. You always have been.

• 43:36Robert Evans?

  Look him up, kids. He's cool. So, uh, he probably also did some fucked up shit, man. I'm not gonna lie. Um, so Fiona here, who's this, uh, Bachelorette scholar and artist, uh, 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," um, and cites Jodi Byrd's book, The Transit of 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 land, resources, and sovereignty from indigenous people," right? And I think that, that it doesn't start with the actual colonization or with even the legal code. It starts with this guy on a boat trying

• 44:20Robert Evans?

  to racially categorize this people and taking the name of their island away from them and making it kind of a racist column, right? But that's the start of the process of racialization that ends that, well, it, it leads to genocide. It doesn't end there, but that's a part of it, right? Um, so this was just the beginning of a long process of colonial violence, uh, and a major chapter in that history brings us back to the person who is the subject of these episodes, Eliza Fraser, right? And to set up the rest of this so that we could talk about old Eliza. She was possibly born Elizabeth Slack in Worksworth, Derbyshire, uh, and- And baptized on the first of June in seventeen ninety-eight, although that is debated. One writer in the nineteen thirties described her as coming from the Orkney Islands.

• 45:05Robert Evans?

  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.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Anyone famous, you know, we don't care why. Let's just get someone famous.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  We're scraping the bottom of the barrel in Derbyshire. Derbyshire?

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Let's go to the genocide insiders. Let's, uh, we don't have anybody.

• 45:46Robert Evans?

  Oh, that the article really gives her like a pass on some things that I would not.

• 45:53Robert Evans?

  But anyway, we don't know for sure. Although it does look like Derbyshire is one of the likelier ones. We do have evidence that she came from at least modest means and enjoyed a good education for her time, by which I mean, as a woman, she learned to read and write in childhood, which, you know, you're not super poor generally, if that's happening in in England at this period of time.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Most men thought that that was scientifically and physically impossible.

• 46:17Robert Evans?

  It's starting to change by the time she, but seventeen ninety-eight is still pretty dark days for that. She may have had a husband and at least one child with someone else before she married Captain James Fraser, maybe not. Again, kind of some conflicting reports there. But she marries this, the sea captain, whose boat, the Sterling Castle, depending on, again, who you read, was either a crumbling death trap or a relatively state of the art ship for its time. The captain himself, her husband, is described as either a pompous, fat, old bore, much in demand by ship owners who had managed to over insure their vessels. In other words, this guy's so incompetent, you, you hire him to be to run your ship.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  To drunk drive your car.

• 46:59Robert Evans?

  Right, right. If your insurance is good, yeah, he's gonna drunk drive your boat into oblivion. Yeah, that, so that's one claim about him. I've also. Heard him described as urbane in his manners and in attitudes and features what is deemed a handsome man. So either he was a drunk old bore who will crash your 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.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Love how mean the conflicting thing like the people are like this big fat idiot who

• 47:30Robert Evans?

  dumb shit. Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Sucks shit at his job. And then like, there's obviously the self-edited Wikipedia entry where it's like, urbane in his manner.

• 47:39Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. He was like, I was handsome as shit.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Picking up subtle things about like how attractive he is.

• 47:46Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yeah. His dick game. Like, yeah, there's a whole Wikipedia subset there. Yeah. Uh, he was, speaking of dick game, he was 54 and Eliza was 37, uh, when they left London on October 22nd, 1835. So there's a bit of an age gap here.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Slight, small.

• 48:05Robert Evans?

  As, as is the norm for European parents, they have no interest in parenting their children and leave them behind in Orkney to be watched over by a local 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 now.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Hang out with a priest.

• 48:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this, this guy's got to be in charge.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Good call.

• 48:31Robert Evans?

  Uh, parenting in the 1800s. Most accounts will say that Eliza was pregnant when the vessel departed, uh, although again, there's some dispute on the matter. Uh, the sterling made it to Sydney the following May, uh, so it sets out in October and it makes it to Sydney by May and offloads supplies it had brought from England, which, you know, this is Australia. Uh, so the supplies are rum, wine, beer, pickles, mustard, uh, you know, the necessities, right? All the things Australians need to survive, um, starting with rum, wine and beer. Uh, it picks up other goods and charts a course to Singapore, uh, and the route to Singapore with these goods that it picks up in Sydney is going to take it past, uh, Moreton Bay. Unfortunately for everyone aboard, this takes

• 49:17Robert Evans?

  them near the Swain reefs, which is a treacherous piece of sea for competent helmsmen to navigate. And some of the evidence suggests Captain Fraser and his men may not have been the very best seamen England ever produced. Which you could also say, nope, I'm not going to make that joke. So the ship ran a ground on the reef and the crew of 19 got into two lifeboats. Captain Fraser, his wife, his 13 year old nephew and several other sailors, including a guy named Robert Darj, who we'll talk about later, got into one leaking longboat and everyone else got into a pinnace, which is a slightly nicer boat. Both boats traveled together for a time.

• 49:58Robert Evans?

  And they split their supplies between them, which included brandy and beer, but no water. So again, they've got liquor and beer. No, you don't want water. You don't want water in this boat.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  You just want some brandy and beer and some pickles with mustard. If you, ah shit, we dropped that stuff with the Aussies. Fuck.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  So they're just like drunk in the heat in the tropics, which is going to slowly be killing them. So everyone is slowly dying on these rescue boats. They don't really know where they are. They do have guns though, so they're drunk and disoriented, but heavily armed. The nearest settlement to them was about 370 miles south of where the Fraser ran aground. But navigation was difficult under these conditions. And again, no one here.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  The drunkenness particularly.

• 50:42Robert Evans?

  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.

• 50:51Robert Evans?

  Now, in their defense, this is also difficult because Captain Fraser's longboat is constantly taking on water. So they're bailing it out 24/7 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 is probably, I don't have trouble believing that if she was pregnant, because babies don't do well in these conditions.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Being born underwater during a shipwreck?

• 51:31Robert Evans?

  Yes, bad way to have a baby.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  To people who have only consumed alcohol for the rest of like three months.

• 51:37Robert Evans?

  Only source of calories are beer and brandy. Yes.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know what happened. How did the baby not make it?

• 51:44Robert Evans?

  If she did give birth and have the baby die, it's kind of amazing she lived, right? Like this is, it does point to her being physically pretty resilient.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 51:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, this is not part of the story, or part of why people doubt whether or not she really was pregnant, is that when she first gets rescued, she does not talk about having a baby. Uh, she doesn't talk about this in the first or second version of events that she dictated. Later, writers would only say that she avoided this, uh, until her story had gone 1800s viral, quote, "probably 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 debate, did she just make this up to kind of get sympathy? Cause she definitely does some of that, right? We really don't know. Um, "Two days later, processing this and several other traumas, Captain Fraser

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  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 wringing 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, it's a 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 maybe.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  They didn't have dresses on, though.

• 53:08Robert Evans?

  Right. They didn't have dresses. Um, at any rate, they fill up their water, they finally have water, and they continue their journey until they run out of water again. Uh, 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.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:27Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  That's a superpower. That's like her being like, "And then I just flew to the island."

• 53:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I levitated above the, the leaky boat.

• 53:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you cannot survive on seawater. It's generally 3% to 4% sodium. Obviously, drinking some, like if you've ever gone swimming, is fine. But your kidneys need fresh water to process out all of the sodium. And if you do not have fresh water, you will get sick. Don't try to live off of seawater. They're sort of traveling around the islands off that coast, 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 Gari. 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

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  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.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  They're so annoying.

• 54:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. There is some evidence of that.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  History changed based on like, how annoying someone is.

• 54:49Robert Evans?

  Other survivors were like, yeah, she sucked.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  We're doing for a different podcast. We're looking into the day Lincoln was assassinated. And like, the only reason that Ulysses S. Grant wasn't there was because Ulysses S. Grant's wife found Mary Todd Lincoln annoying.

• 55:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  It's like, completely changed the course of history, you know?

• 55:10Robert Evans?

  Folks, you have to follow your instincts. If you think someone's annoying, you're definitely gonna die if you go out to a party with them.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Never underestimate having that one annoying friend that you keep around just to avoid assassinations.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 55:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the whole reason the guy who created Family Guy survived 9/11, if I'm remembering correctly. Had bad vibes about a flight. Turned out to be a bad flight to be on. I don't remember if that's exactly what happened, but he definitely was supposed to be on one of those flights.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  They're like, keep doing the Quagmire voice.

• 55:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you're not allowed on this one.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Stop saying giggity giggity, man. Just get the fuck out of here.

• 55:47Robert Evans?

  No, they would let anybody on flights back then. As evidenced by 9/11 happening, right?

• 55:54Speaker 02

  What a time.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 55:58Robert Evans?

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• 58:07Robert Evans?

  So anyway, they get abandoned off the coast of Gari. And, you know, they spend about a week kind of sailing around the coast because again, they're scared of the cannibals. And they manage to like live off of limpets that they tear off of rocks before eventually getting desperate enough that like, fuck it, let's try our luck. We're going to die either way.

• 58:29Robert Evans?

  It's kind of, I said earlier, they think they found the mainland. We don't 100% 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 Bachelot 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, live off of limpets. You're clearly dying. I don't know why you didn't come for help earlier. Here's some food, right?

• 59:12Robert Evans?

  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 Bachelot 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 sea, 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.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  They approached them with fruit that had brown spots on it.

• 59:58Robert Evans?

  It's like, what the fuck? And like, they give them food and they're like, hey, can I try on your clothes? I haven't seen anything like that. It's weird, right? It's a pretty normal thing to do. You're meeting someone from a new culture. Can I try that hat? I've never worn a hat. What is that? Yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  To this day, athletes exchange jerseys after, you know? It's a thing that's done and it's not a sign of war. It's a sign of like, hey, this is silly.

• 1:00:22Robert Evans?

  When I met you, you gave me some rancid kangaroo meat, although for a different reason that we don't need to get into.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  And then we exchanged shirts.

• 1:00:29Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. We did exchange shirts. Yes.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  That was more to, yeah, it was a weird hallucinogen, but the rancid kangaroo meat.

• 1:00:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. If you get make it into high meat, you trip off of it. Yeah, that's right. Look it up, folks. So not long after this, eight of the remaining men who had gotten like landed with Captain Fraser and Eliza either tried to leave or like walk off to try to find a town to get rescued for everyone else, or they just desert. 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 allege 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?

• 1:01:24Robert Evans?

  He also, Yolden also called Eliza a she captain, which was him insulting both her and her husband.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, he sounds like the worst.

• 1:01:32Robert Evans?

  It's possible for everyone to suck here.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Stirring shit in the middle of a life and death thing, just like shit stirring on a new level, being like, oh, well, I guess we should listen to our captain.

• 1:01:43Robert Evans?

  Our she captain. Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  At the same time, I do think that you should now address me as she captain.

• 1:01:49Robert Evans?

  As she captain? Sure, of course.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Cause it's kind of grown on me in the last 30 seconds.

• 1:01:53Robert Evans?

  I don't feel like you need to gender captain. Like it's not an inherently masculine or feminine word.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  I don't know. There's, there's kind of a flow to it. She captain.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  It's like calling someone a she person. You don't really need to do that. That just kind of sounds fucked up. Yeah. Um, so Eliza alleged that Yolden at one point threatened to throw the captain overboard while they were still on the boat. I don't know. Uh, and also depending on how competent Captain Frazier was, this may have been an understandable move. I can see a version of the story where throwing him overboard might have been the best thing for everyone. At any rate, after they are rescued by the bachola, the group splits up and Darje, Yolden and four other men head for where they think is Morroton Bay, but Morroton Bay is on the mainland. So again, they don't really know where they are. Eliza, her husband-

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  They're good navigators. They're great at this. We're gonna head over to Sydney real quick.

• 1:02:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like east and I think east is left. So yeah, we'll just try that.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  They've been at sea, like offshore sailing around the island for the past like few weeks. And now they're like, I think-

• 1:02:56Robert Evans?

  I say they're bad at this. I'm sure it's hard.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:02:59Robert Evans?

  I haven't, I haven't tried to navigate this way without access to a backup plan. Um, Eliza, her husband and four other men go south with the bachola, right? Uh, now most of them have guns, uh, but they become separated at some point. Um, or several of them become separated at some point. It's a little bit unclear exactly what happens. All of these stories are kind of different, but Eliza and her husband wind up living with the bachola for several months. And the first thing that she reports the bachola 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, they are attempting to do a humanitarian things, right?

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Those monsters.

• 1:03:45Robert Evans?

  They're 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.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Patiently teaching them how to not die. And she's like, oh my God, they're trying to kill me.

• 1:03:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now Eliza admits that they did this, but she also claims they demanded clothing from the men and beat one of them when he refused. And here's how John Wright, the author of that Derbyshire Life article, describes what happened next. "Their dwindling numbers made the Aborigines," again, that's not Aboriginal people is the preferred term, but this is how he writes it, "bolder and the exchange of clothing continued until they were naked. 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

• 1:04:42Robert Evans?

  Fraser 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 Bachelot used charcoal to treat wounds, rubbing it into like an injury as a salve or unguent, 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, that the Bachelot 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 filled, covered in cuts because she'd been shipwrecked and at

• 1:05:26Robert Evans?

  sea for months, and they were trying to treat her injuries." Blackface was actually their idea. It's not something that we do on our, yeah, they actually came up with the idea because they thought it was cool. Yeah, it, it looks to me like they were, again, trying to teach her how to have clean water and deal with her injuries so she doesn't die. And also, the story about being forced to nurse is not in either of Eliza's original accounts, and she, in fact, does not bring this up at all until she gets back to London, which is like the third version of the story she gives, which is also when she adds the part of the 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

• 1:06:09Robert Evans?

  she just knew that, like, "Oh, adding in that they made me breastfeed one of their babies, that's gonna really, like, be freaky to all of these, like, white British people that, like, 'I was made to do this, so 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 a thing you need, you're gonna 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 bestial treatment. From the B'chola, 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.

• 1:06:53Robert Evans?

  Now, it's important that we take a second here to look at how the B'chola 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 in corporeal form, right? These are the ghosts of our dead who have come back to us, right? That's at least, you know, an anthropological account that I found. 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

• 1:07:35Robert Evans?

  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? 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 B'chola and other tribes. And again, the same kind of justification is used when someone arrives. A 1977 paper in the Journal of Occupational Papers in Anthropology noted, quote, "The

• 1:08:16Robert Evans?

  convict most likely to have reached the island first was James Davis, who ran in March 1829 and subsequently joined the B'chola on the Mary River. Although initially known to coastal aborigines as Duninbot, meaning small one, among the B'chola he became Tharimbi, the reincarnated son of a tribal elder, killed in battle some years before. Again, details of Davis's exploits are sparse, for he was a particularly taciturn individual who remained tight-jawed about much of his 14 years' experiences as a wild white man." David Bracewell's verbocey earned him the name Want or Talker, but it was not until his fourth abstention from Moreton Bay after July 1839 that he actually mentions having passed over to Fraser's Island, called Gari. By the natives, right? He spells it Karina. I don't understand why, but it's pronounced Kari.

• 1:09:02Robert Evans?

  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 Fahey, called Gisburri, after a long trek from Armidale to the Mary River via the Bunyul festivals in the Blackall ranges, moved with the Aboriginal people of Wide Bay for almost 12 years, helping them to plan raids against early white settlers, before being retaken by Lieutenant Bligh and his native mounted police in December 1854. Fahey, 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 Musgarra scars and the epilith Bora marks on the white shoulder.

• 1:09:41Robert Evans?

  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 Fahey's case, his Black Kinsman fought bitterly with the native troopers to prevent his recapture. Upon his return to Sydney, however, officialdom casually awarded Fahey a year's imprisonment on the roads and chains and forgot him.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Geez.

• 1:10:02Robert Evans?

  There's this like fascinating story of like these people who have been tossed out by their own culture. And like you, 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 Fahey, 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. I wish we knew more about that guy. It's an amazing story.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. All of these interpretations where it's like, and they thought we were ghosts and were like, it's like, but then all of the stories when people, when they're living side by side, it's always, people love to like go join the tribe and like are accepted in.

• 1:10:54Robert Evans?

  And it, it seems to be a mix. Like some of these people do go back and forth. A couple of these guys go back several times. Will like try to make it in Europe and then head back to the tribe. 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.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:11:11Robert Evans?

  Exchange here. Um, but certainly like, like especially this case of Fahey, this guy who was like, oh, you know what? These people rip. I'm going to help him kill. Like these colonizers, right? Yeah. Sounds like, and then, yeah, dies abandoned in a chain gang by the British authorities. Yeah, of course. Real bummer, real bummer.

• 1:11:34Robert Evans?

  But yeah, 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? Yeah. 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? Yeah. Like, this isn't just like, this is the thing they believed.

• 1:12:16Robert Evans?

  It's like, no, this was like, a belief that existed at a period of time and changed after contact with the world, right? Right. On First Pass, they were like, they look different, there must be a reason for that. Oh, no, they're just assholes. Yeah, they're kind of like our dead people, maybe they're like, you know, this is something that happens, I don't know. Yeah, it's not like, when you think about like, the, what they had in access to information wise, it's not an illogical conclusion to come to initially. Right. So, and again, it's important here at this point, as we kind of close this episode out, that I make two acknowledgements. 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 welcomed them

• 1:12:57Robert Evans?

  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's 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 directly with these folks. And some of them are going to get angry at you, right? Yeah. 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? And you're like, another mouth to feed, you're like, that-

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Baby, they're like, God, can I please just fucking bash his head in with a rock?

• 1:13:35Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Could I like, it's, what are we doing here?

• 1:13:37Robert Evans?

  Right. And like, like many cultures, like there is like corporal punishment. If you're not pulling your weight, maybe you get smacked, right? You get yelled at or you get smacked, right? Because that's just like a thing that's not uncommon with people. And these folks are not, they're like children, right? Like you have to, they can't, they're not learning how to do anything fast enough. And they require a lot of food to keep alive.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  So many wacky misunderstandings.

• 1:14:04Robert Evans?

  Right. There's some misunderstandings. And also just these people, this is the starving time of the year. So you have to also keep in mind when members of the Bachelot are doing stuff like smacking them for not being good at gathering food, they're starving actively. Cause it's the starving season, right? You go hungry at points in the year regularly, because it's just kinda hard to live this way.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  They gave me a spanking on my little bottom, these savages.

• 1:14:30Robert Evans?

  Right. And we talk about like, yeah, maybe they'd get smacked, you know, smacked around or hit or something for not doing a job correctly. That is the same 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.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  He's like, but not me.

• 1:15:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Captain Fraser.

• 1:15:12Robert Evans?

  Sometimes people, you know, smack each other. It's not uncommon. This is not a Bachelot thing.

• 1:15:19Robert Evans?

  So the worst that we might say then about the Bachelot is they expected these guests or ghosts or whatever, however, they saw them to pull their own weight. And they weren't afraid to like, you know, chastise them if they put the group in danger. Much of Eliza and the European world's horror at her treatment is going to come from the fact that the Bachelot, 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.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 1:15:50Robert Evans?

  But that's all coming in part two, Jack.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  That sounds like it's gonna be a really fun part two without any horrifying information to learn.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's all good from here. They started Dance Troop.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Smooth sailing.

• 1:16:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  They dance it out.

• 1:16:05Robert Evans?

  They open a B and B together. Yeah, it's great. It's all gonna be good. All right. Jack, you got anything to plug?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  I do, Robert. Thank you so much for asking. I co-host a show called The Daily Zeitgeist with Miles Gray, also a guest on this show in the past. We're on there every, like, every weekday, I believe. That can't be right. That's too many, too many damn shows. Yeah, Monday through Friday, we drop at least an episode. So you can find me there. And I'm on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien and on Blue Sky at Jack Obie the number one, because I didn't get on Blue Sky fast enough.

• 1:16:50Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Well, either get on Blue Sky or you don't. Honestly, I think we've all had enough social media at this point. Maybe light your computer on fire.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  That's a good idea.

• 1:17:00Robert Evans?

  That's an interesting idea. Burn your own house down with all of your electronics in it, except whatever electronics you use to listen to this podcast. Don't stop listening to this podcast.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Never take advice from Robert.

• 1:17:11Robert Evans?

  Obviously. Except this, this advice, obviously.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  Burn down your neighborhood.

• 1:17:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Okay, let's end on that note.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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• 1:18:19Speaker 11

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.

• 1:18:49Speaker 12

  Right now, you're in New York, and it sounds like this. But hop a short flight to Daytona Beach, Florida, and soon it could sound like this instead. Because here, stress ceases to exist. What you'll find instead are seaside accommodations, 23 miles of sprawling beaches, and exciting activities for all ages. So don't be surprised if you hear some of this, too. Plan your trip at daytonabeach.com today. Daytona Beach, beach on.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.