The Fleet That Shouldn’t Have Been There

 

Look, I’m going to tell you a story that’ll make you rethink everything you thought you knew about empty places. Because there’s no such thing as an empty place, not really. There are only places where we haven’t been paying attention.

February 1803. Matthew Flinders—and you’ve got to picture this guy, all salt-stained and sunburned, thinking he’s the first white man to see this particular stretch of nowhere—is sailing around Australia like it’s some kind of real estate he’s got first dibs on. Then he sees them.

Ships. A whole goddamn fleet of them, rising out of the storm like something from a fever dream.

His heart must have damn near stopped. Chinese pirates, he thinks. Has to be. Out here in the middle of what London’s calling terra nullius—empty land, nobody’s land—which is the kind of lie empires tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

“Ready the cannons!” he shouts, and you can bet every man on that deck is thinking about dying, about drowning, about what it means to meet your end in waters so far from home that your bones will never make it back to English soil.

But then something happens that nobody expects. Communication. It turns out Flinders’ cook speaks market Malay, and isn’t that just perfect? The guy who makes the stew knows how to prevent a massacre. Sometimes God has a sense of humor dark enough to match Stephen King’s, if you believe in that sort of thing.

The fleet’s leader—Pobassoo, Flinders writes down, probably mangling the pronunciation like white men always do—comes aboard or Flinders goes to him, the accounts vary, but here’s what matters: Pobassoo is calm. Cool as a cucumber, which is funny because what they’re actually hunting is sea cucumbers, though they call them trepang.

“Six captains,” Pobassoo says, or something like it. “Sixty boats. A thousand men. We’ve been coming here for longer than your grandfather’s grandfather was alive.”

And just like that, Flinders realizes what every colonizer eventually learns if they live long enough: they’re never the first. They’re never even close.

The Yolngu people knew. Christ, of course they knew. They’d been trading with these sailors for so long that Macassan words had become their words. Rupiya for money. Lipalipa for boat. Balanda for white person—and they learned that one before they’d even laid eyes on a European, which ought to tell you something about how connected the world really was, even then.

The trepang boom hit its peak between 1750 and 1780—Campbell Macknight laid it all out in his book in 1976, The Voyage to Marege’, and if you’ve got any sense you’ll read it—but the radiocarbon dating tells a different story. Those Southeast Asian boats were showing up in Arnhem Land as early as the 1500s, maybe earlier. The Bayini, the Yolngu called them. Light-skinned visitors who came before the Macassans, bringing families, weaving cloth on their boats, arriving with the monsoon winds and leaving when the weather turned.

Every December, when the west monsoon blew just right, hundreds of padewakang praus would set sail from Makassar. Picture it: traditional wooden boats loaded with rice, coconuts, tools, cloth, tobacco—everything you’d need for a working season in foreign waters. When they reached Marege’—that’s what they called the Arnhem Land and Gulf of Carpentaria coast—the quiet bays transformed into something else entirely. Industrial hubs. Bustling camps where trepang got processed, cleaned, boiled in those stone hearths that archaeologists are still finding today.

The Macassans taught the Yolngu the whole operation, soup to nuts. How to harvest the damn things, how to cook them right so they’d keep, how to turn something that looked like a piece of animated snot into Chinese gold. And make no mistake, that’s what trepang was to the Chinese market. By the mid-1800s, these fleets were supplying 900 tons annually—a third of China’s total demand. Northern Australia wasn’t famous for wheat or wool yet. It was famous for sea slugs, and the money was good.

But it wasn’t just trepang. Nothing’s ever just one thing, is it? They harvested turtles, pearls, mother-of-pearl shells from the waters off the Kimberley. They traded sandalwood and hardwoods, the latter being essential because those long voyages from Sulawesi beat the hell out of their boats. They’d log with Yolngu permission—and that matters, that word permission—trading cloth, tobacco, and iron in return.

Iron. Now that’s the game-changer. The Yolngu had been making do with stone, bone, and wood for millennia. Then metal tools arrived, and everything changed. A man’s status started being measured by whether he owned iron tools. Technology has a way of doing that, doesn’t it? Rewriting the rules of society whether anyone planned it that way or not.

The evidence is everywhere if you know how to look. At Anuru Bay—Malara in Macassan oral history—archaeologists mapped the remains of processing camps. Stone hearths. Scattered pottery sherds from South Sulawesi, carried thousands of miles. Broken glass bottles. Rusted iron nails. Old Dutch coins, for Christ’s sake. Port Essington on the Cobourg Peninsula has layers of Macassan history stacked up against British colonial ruins like some kind of archaeological palimpsest, one story written over another.

And the tamarind trees. God, the tamarind trees. Still standing in Darwin gardens, planted by sailors who maybe didn’t find enough trepang that season, or who just wanted to leave something living behind. The tree isn’t native to Australia. The Macassans brought it for cooking spice and vitamin C, and now it’s as permanent a fixture as anything else in that red dirt country.

The Yolngu language absorbed hundreds of loanwords. Bunker for ship’s hold. Bandirra for flag. Jelang for a type of boat. Jama for paid work. Speaking Makassarese became a mark of status, a secret language for the elite. In the 1930s, anthropologist Donald Thomson watched clan leader Wonggu Mununggurr slip Macassan phrases into conversation like a code, testing listeners, joking with those who understood.

Some rituals still mirror Islamic prayer: the prostration, the bowing, the raised hands. Burial practices orient toward the west—toward Mecca, yes, but also toward the sunset route home to Makassar. John Bradley said if you go to northeast Arnhem Land, you’ll find traces of Islam woven into songs, paintings, dances, funeral rites. Not conversion, exactly. Something more complicated. Something that happens when cultures meet as equals and share what they have.

The most remarkable thing? Some Yolngu sailed back with the fleets when the monsoon reversed. They lived in Makassar for months, or permanently. Those who returned brought stories that must have seemed like science fiction: multi-story stone houses, wealthy kings, markets teeming with people from everywhere. These accounts survive in inherited Manikay songs, describing Makassar harbors and silver coins and the beautiful chaos of commerce.

There are photographs in archives—Aboriginal people in 19th-century Makassar, shattering the colonial myth that Indigenous Australians feared the sea. Of course they didn’t. They never had.

Then came the ending, and if you know anything about colonial history, you know this part already. You know how this story has to end, because it always ends the same goddamn way.

By the late 19th century, the South Australian colonial government—which ran the Northern Territory like a private fiefdom—decided the Macassan fleets were a threat. Violations of British sovereignty, they said. Smuggling routes for opium and booze. Competition for a local trepang industry they wanted to monopolize. And underneath it all, the rising tide of racism that would eventually harden into the White Australia policy, that poisonous dream of a pure white continent in a brown sea.

They imposed crushing import duties. Fishing licenses. In the 1880s they even taxed provisions—rice, arrack, tobacco. The Dutch consul in Adelaide protested, pointing out the obvious: these sailors had been trading there long before any Australian colony existed. Making it illegal now was like charging someone rent for a house they’d been living in for centuries before you showed up claiming to own the deed.

Nobody listened. Of course nobody listened.

1906: the government banned Macassan boats from landing or operating in Australian waters.

1907: the last fleet arrived in Arnhem Land. Then they were gone.

Just like that, centuries of connection—economic, cultural, spiritual—severed by bureaucratic decree. A major income source vanished. Old friends never reappeared on the horizon with the west winds. The Yolngu waited for boats that would never come again.

And that’s the real horror story, isn’t it? Not monsters or ghosts or things that go bump in the night. It’s the casual cruelty of empires. The way they can look at centuries of peaceful trade and cooperation and human connection and say: this ends now. We own this place. We always owned this place.

Terra nullius. Empty land.

The biggest lie ever told, and some people are still telling it.

But the tamarind trees remember. The songs remember. The loanwords embedded in language remember. The stone hearths at Anuru Bay remember.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all we’ve got: the stubborn persistence of evidence against the official story, like bones pushing up through shallow graves, refusing to stay buried.

Some things, once they’ve happened, can never completely disappear.

Even when someone really, really wants them to.