Morgan’s Run (37 page)

After the
introductions had been performed, the fourteen convicts (William Stanley from Seend and Mikey Dennison had to be included) settled to hear what Mr. James Thistlethwaite could tell them about what might happen to them.

“Originally,” said the purveyor of reading delights for most of Britain’s literate women, “those on board Ceres were destined for a place called Lemaine, which, as I understand, is an island in the midst of a great African river about the size of the island of Manhattan in New York. Where undoubtedly all of ye would have died of some pestilence within a year. ’Tis Edmund Burke ye have to thank for striking Lemaine and all Africa from the list of places thought possible transportation destinations.

“Aided and abetted by Lord Beauchamp, last March and April Burke launched an attack on Mr. Pitt’s schemes to rid England of its felons. Better, cried Burke, to hang the lot of ye than ship ye off to some place where death would be a great deal slower and a sight more painful. After the inevitable parliamentary committee of enquiry, Mr. Pitt was forced to abandon Africa, probably forever. Hence attention turned to the suggestion of Mr. James Matra—that Botany Bay in New South Wales might be a good place. Lord Beauchamp had made a huge fuss over the fact that Lemaine Island was outside the limits of English territory in an area the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese all frequent for slaving. This Botany Bay, on the other hand, though it certainly lies outside the limits of English territory, is also not anybody else’s territory. So why not kill two birds with the same stone? The raven—a far bigger, nastier feathered specimen—is the likes of you, costing England vast sums with little or no return. The quail—a demure and most toothsome little sweeting—is the possibility that, after a few years of outlay, Botany Bay will turn a fat profit for England.”

Richard got out a book and tried to show the group whereabouts Botany Bay was on one of Captain Cook’s maps, but the only faces to display any kind of comprehension belonged to the literate men.

Mr. Thistlethwaite tried. “How far is it from London to, say, Oxford?” he asked.

“A long way,” offered Willy Wilton.

“Fifty miles or thereabouts,” said Ike Rogers.

“Then Botany Bay is two hundred times farther from London than Oxford is. If it takes a week for a wagon to journey from London to Oxford, then it would take two hundred weeks for the same wagon to make the journey from Oxford to Botany Bay.”

“But wagons cannot travel on water,” Billy Earl objected.

“No,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite patiently, “but ships can, and much faster than wagons. Four times as fast at least. That means a ship will take a year to go from London to Botany Bay.”

“That is excessive,” said Richard, frowning. “Ye should know that from Bristol days, Jem. In a good wind a ship can sail near two hundred miles in a single day. Allowing for time spent in ports of call as well as periods of standing and tacking, the time might be as few as six months.”

“Ye’re splitting hairs, Richard. Be it a mere sixmonth or a whole twelve-month, Botany Bay is not only on the far side of the globe, but on its underside as well. And I have had enough. I am off.” Suddenly sapped, Mr. Thistlethwaite rose to his feet.

As well that they are the infinitely patient Richard’s burden! Were they mine, he thought, banging loudly on the door to be let out, I would side with Edmund Burke and hang the lot of them. I can see neither rhyme nor reason in this Botany Bay experiment. It smacks of utter desperation.

“Adieu, adieu!” he cried as the gigger dubber on duty dubbed the gigger for his benefit. “We shall meet anon!”

“Mr. Thistlethwaite is a great swell,” said Bill Whiting as he usurped the departed visitor’s place alongside Richard. “Is he your London informant, Richard my love?”

The old nickname jarred. “Do not call me that, Bill,” he said a little sadly. “It reminds me of Gloucester Gaol’s women.”

“Aye, it does. I am sorry.” He was not the old, cheeky Bill these days; Ceres tended to reject jokers. He thought of something else. “At first I thought that Stanley from Seend would become one of us, but he is only with us for what he can get.”

“What could ye expect, Bill? You and Taffy made off with live animals. Stanley from Seend was caught skinning a dead one. He will always fleece what cannot fight back.”

“Oh, I do not know,” said Bill with a dreamy look at variance with his perky round countenance. “If you and Mr. Thistlethwaite are only half right, ’tis a long sail from here to Botany Bay. A spar might fall on Stanley’s pate. And would it not be a sight for sore eyes if Mr. Sykes met with an accident before we go?”

Richard took him by the shoulders and shook him. “Do not even think such things, Bill, let alone say them! There is only one way any of us can ever hope to see an end to misery, and that is to endure it without ever attracting attention to ourselves from those who have the power to increase our misery. Hate them,
but bear them.
All things end. Ceres will. And so, sooner or later, will Botany Bay. We are not young, but we are not old either. Do ye not understand? In surviving, we win! That alone must concern us.”

And so
time wore on, marked by the little circuits of the dredge bucket’s chain—in, out, around. Piles of stinking mud. The stinking orlop of Ceres. The stinking bodies hustled out once a week for burial in a piece of waste ground near Woolwich that Mr. Duncan Campbell had acquired for the purpose. New faces kept arriving; some of them went to the waste ground. Old faces went to it too, but none belonging to Richard or to Ike Rogers.

A certain camaraderie existed between everyone on the orlop, born out of tribulations in common, remotest between groups who could hardly communicate. By the end of the first seven months every face which lasted was known, nodded to, gossip and news exchanged, sometimes simple pleasantries. There were fights, some very serious; there were feuds, some very bitter; there were a certain number of snitches and toadies like William Stanley from Seend; and, rarely, someone died violently.

As in any other enforced congress of very different kinds of men, the grains of single individuals and the various layers of similar weight shook until they settled into stability. Though a monthly repetition of Handelian and Hippocratic invocations served to keep other groups too wary to encroach on their domain, both Richard’s and Ike’s groups achieved confraternity as well as an exclusivity. They were not bully boys or pranksters or predators, but nor were they the prey of those who were. Live and let live: it was a good rule to go by.

Mr. Zachariah Partridge found no reason to alter his opinion of his dredging crew; as the days lengthened and the hours of labor increased, he was paid his £5 bonus for a full load more frequently than he had dreamed possible. These fellows made a ritual out of keeping fit by working and eating well.

Like everybody else on that populous river from the bum boat denizens to the hulk gaolers, he was well aware that Botany Bay loomed. This disposed him to be generous with his crew because he knew that were they chosen to sail, his chances of getting another crew half as good were slender. The Ricketts tobacco had arrived, together with a small keg of wonderful rum. So when Richard and his men wanted the services of a bum boat vending sometimes peculiar wares, he indulged them provided that the dredge scooped in its stipulated amount of ballast. Fascinated, he watched them accumulate duck clothing, sea soap, shoes, scissors, good razors, strops, whetstones, fine-toothed combs, oil of tar, extract of malt, underdrawers, thick stockings, liniment, string, stout sacks, screws, tools.

“Ye’re touched in the noddle,” he observed. “D’ye expect to be Noahses?”

“Aye,” said Richard solemnly. “That is a fitting comparison. I doubt there are any bum boats at Botany Bay.”

News came from Jem Thistlethwaite whenever he had more of it. In late August he was able to tell them that Lord Sydney had written formally to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury and notified them that 750 convicts were to be ferried to a new colony in New South Wales likely to be situated at Botany Bay. They would be in the custody of His Majesty’s Royal Navy and under the direct control of three companies of marines, who were to sign on for three years’ duty dating from arrival in New South Wales.

“They will not simply throw ye ashore,” he said, “so much seems certain. The Home Office is awash in lists, from convicts to rum, and tenders for the contracts. Though,” he grinned, “it is to be an expedition of male convicts only. They plan to provide women from islands in the vicinity, no doubt in the same manner as Rome obtained women from the Sabines on the Quirinal. Which reminds me that I must give ye the existing volumes of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall.
”

“Christ!” Bill Whiting exclaimed. “Indian wives! But what
sort
of Indians? They come in all varieties from black through red to yellow, and fair as Venus or ugly as Medusa.”

But in October Mr. Thistlethwaite informed them that there were to be no Indian wives. “The Parliament was not amused at a reference to the rape of the Sabine women, for all could see that the Indian men would not offer their women as a gift, or maybe even sell them. The Do Gooders shrieked a treat. So women convicts will sail too—how many, I do not know. As forty of the marines are taking their wives and families, it has been agreed that husbands and wives in prison together will both go. There are some such, apparently.”

“We knew a pair in Gloucester,” said Richard. “Bess Parker and Ned Pugh. I have no idea what has become of them, but who can tell? Perhaps they have been chosen if both live. . . . Yet what a shame to send men like Ned Pugh and women like Lizzie Lock when by next year they will have served five of their seven years.”

“Do not hope for Lizzie Lock, Richard. I hear that the women to go will be drawn from the London Newgate.”

“Ugh!” was the general reaction to that.

A week later their fount of knowledge was back.

“A governor and a lieutenant-governor have been appointed for New South Wales. A Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy is to be the governor, and a Major Robert Ross of the Marine Corps is his lieutenant-governor. Ye’ll be in the hands of the Royal Navy, and that means ye’ll be introduced to the cat. No naval man, even a marine sort, can live with out the cat, and I do not mean a four-legged creature which says meow.” He shuddered, decided to change the awful subject. “Other appointments have been made. The colony is to exist under naval law—no elected government whatsoever. The judge-advocate is a marine, I believe. There will be a chief surgeon and several assistant surgeons, and of course—how could ye live without a good, stoutly English God—a chaplain. For the moment, however, it is all hush-hush. No public announcement has been made.”

“What is this Governor Phillip like?” asked Richard.

Mr. Thistlethwaite guffawed. “He is a nobody, Richard! A true naval nobody. Admiral Lord Howe was very disparaging when he heard, but I imagine he had some young nephew in mind for a thousand-pound-a-year commission. My source is a very old friend—Sir George Rose, Treasurer of the Royal Navy. He informs me that Lord Sydney chose this Phillip personally after a long conversation with Mr. Pitt, who is determined this experiment will work. An it don’t, his government will face defeat on something as piddling as the prison issue. All those felons with nowhere to go, and ever more of them into the bargain. The problem is that transportation is linked to slavery in zealous, reforming Do Gooder minds. So when a Do Gooder espouses the one, all too often he espouses the other.”

“There are similarities,” said Richard dryly. “Tell me more about this Governor Phillip, who will be the arbiter of our fates.”

Mr. Thistlethwaite licked his lips, wishing he had a glass of brandy. “A nobody, as I have already said. His father was a German and taught languages in London. His mother had been the widow of a naval captain, and was a remote connection of Lord Pembroke’s. The boy went to a naval version of Colston’s, so they were poor. After the Seven Years’ War he was put on half-pay and chose to serve in the Portuguese navy, which he did with distinction for several years. His biggest Royal Navy command was a fourth-rater, in which he saw no action. He has come out of a second retirement to take this present commission. Not a young man, nor yet a very old one.”

Will Connelly frowned. “It sounds distinctly odd to me, Jem.” He sighed. “In fact, it sounds very much as if we are to be dumped at Botany Bay. Otherwise the governor would be—oh, I do not know, a lord or an admiral at the very least.”

“Give me the name of one lord or admiral who would consent to go to the far ends of the earth for a mere thousand pounds a year, Will, and I shall offer ye England’s Crown and Scepter.” Mr. James Thistlethwaite grinned evilly, the lampoonist in him stirred. “A refreshing trip to the West Indies, perhaps. But this? It is very likely a death trap. No one really knows what lies at Botany Bay, though all are assuming it is milk and honey for no better reason than that to think thus is convenient. To be its governor is the sort of job only a nobody would accept.”