Morgan’s Run (56 page)

“Volunteering?” asked Furzer, recognizing their faces.

“One of us is,” said Richard, putting an arm around Whiting. “Here is a good man ye can trust, never been in any trouble since I met him in Gloucester Gaol in eighty-five.”

“That’s right, ye were the larboard head man on Alexander, and none of your men gave trouble. Morgan.”

“Aye, Lieutenant Furzer, Morgan. Can ye use Whiting here?”

“I can if he has brain enough to read and write.”

“He does both.”

They walked back to their camp bearing some loaves of hard bread, all the commissariat was able to issue. It had been baked in Cape Town and was very weevily, but it was food.

“We now have a man in the commissariat,” Richard announced, doling out the bread. “Furzer is going to use Bill to help deal with the salt meat. Which we cannot have until the kettles and pots are unloaded because from now on we cook for ourselves.”

Bill Whiting was looking a little better already; he would be working inside a shaded place, no matter how stifling, and doing something easier than clearing, sawing or gardening, which seemed to be what everybody was going to do eventually. “Once Lieutenant Furzer gets himself settled, we are to be issued with a week’s rations at a time,” Bill contributed, grateful for Richard’s perceptiveness. “There is supposed to be a storeship coming on from Cape Town soon, so we have enough provisions to last.”

At nightfall they put bags of clothing down as pillows and used their Alexander mats and blankets as ground cover, their old and tattered great-coats over them. Though it had been such a hot day, the moment the sun went down it grew cold. Their weariness was so great that they slept despite the unmentionable things which crawled everywhere.

Morning brought a sultry, steamy end to darkness’s chill. They went back to building their hut, hampered because they had nothing whatsoever to keep the palm fronds in place except long, strappy palm leaves they tried to turn into twine. The shelter itself seemed strong enough, though it worried Richard and Will, the best engineers, that they had no better foundation than six inches of sandy soil. They piled that soil up around their support posts and began to cut more saplings to lie flat on the ground as anchors, notching their supports and sliding the new poles into the notches.

Others were building around them with varying degrees of success. No one had any real enthusiasm for the task, but it was easy to see by the middle of that second day ashore which groups were either well led or had a mind for construction, and those owning neither. Tommy Crowder’s lot had started to wall their hut with a palisade of very thin saplings, an idea Richard resolved to imitate. Education and broader experience definitely showed; the Londoner Crowder had had a very checkered career and was besides a clever man.

There were a few marines around and about now, checking progress and counting heads; some convicts had absconded into the forest, including a woman named Ann Smith. Probably headed for Botany Bay and the French ships, which gossip said were staying a few days.

“Christ, what a place for ants and spiders!” said Jimmy Price, sucking at the edge of his hand. “That bugger of an ant bit me, and it hurts. Look at the size of the things! They are half an inch long and ye can
see
their nippers.” He cast a splendid, white-skinned tree a glance of loathing. “And what is it that deafens us with its—its croaking? My ears are ringing.”

His complaints about the croaking were as justified as about the ants; it was a good year for cicadas.

Billy Earl came through the trees white-faced and shaking. “I just saw a snake!” he gasped. “Christ, the thing was taller than Ike Rogers in his boots! Thick around as my arm! And there are huge fierce alligators on the other side of the cove, so Tommy Crowder told me. Oh, I
hate
this place!”

“We will get used to the creatures,” Richard soothed. “I’ve not heard that anybody has been bitten or eaten by anything bigger than an ant, even if the ant is the size of a beetle. The alligators are giant lizards, I saw one run up a tree.”

The house was finished by mid afternoon of that humid, torrid day full of surprises and terrors. The sun went in and the clouds began to pile up in the skies to the south of them. Black and dark blue, with faint flickers of lightning. They had built the hut in the lee of a large sandstone rock that had a little pocket in its under side, as if scooped out by a spoon.

“I think,” said Richard, looking at the approaching storm, “that we ought to put our belongings under our rock just in case. These palm fronds will not keep rain out.”

The tempest arrived an hour later with greater ferocity than that one at sea off Cape Dromedary, and more terrifying by far; every one of its colossal, brilliant bolts came straight to earth amid the trees. No wonder so many of them were split and blackened! Lightning. Not thirty feet in front of where they huddled, a huge tree with a satiny vermilion skin exploded in a cataclysm of blinding blue fire, sparks and thunder; it literally disintegrated, then burned fiercely. But not for long. The rain came in a cold, howling wind to put it out and wreck their palm-frond thatching within a single minute. The ground turned to a sea and the thick, hurtful rods pelted down, soaked them to the point of drowning. That night they slept amid the frame of their hut with chattering teeth, their only consolation the fact that their belongings were safe and dry under the rock ledge.

“We have to have better tools and something to hold our house together,” said Will Connelly in the morning, close to tears.

Time, thought Richard, to seek a higher authority than Furzer, who could not organize himself to save himself. I do not care if convicts are forbidden to approach those in authority—I am going to do just that.

He walked off in the cool air, pleased to see that the ground was so sandy it was incapable of turning to mud. When he reached the stream at the place where the marines had put three stones across it as a ford, he caught a glimpse of naked black bodies farther up the brook, smelled a strong odor of rotting fish. Not his imagination, then; he had been told that the Indians stank of a fish oil quite the equal of Bristol mud. When they came no closer he skipped across the stepping stones and turned to walk into the bigger settlement on the western side of the cove, where most of the male convicts were already encamped and all the female convicts would be located (the women were still being landed, a few at a time). There also stood the hospital tent, the marines’ tents, the marquees of the marine officers, and Major Ross’s marquee. On this side of the cove, he noted, the convicts lived in tents. Which simply meant that not enough tents had been put on the ships. Thus he and the rest of the last 100 male convicts had been relegated to the eastern side under whatever kind of shelter they could manufacture, out of sight and out of mind.

“May I see Major Ross?” he asked the marine sentry on duty outside the big round marquee.

The marine, a stranger to Richard, looked him up and down in contempt. “No,” he said.

“It is a matter of some urgency,” Richard persisted.

“The Lieutenant-Governor is too busy to see the likes of you.”

“Then may I wait until he has a free moment?”

“No. Now piss off—what’s your name?”

“Richard Morgan, number two-ought-three, Alexander.”

“Send him in,” said a voice from inside.

Richard entered a space fairly well lighted by open flaps on all sides, and having a wooden plank floor. An interior curtain divided it into an office and what were probably the Major’s living quarters. He was there at a folding table which served him as a desk and, typically, alone. Ross despised his subordinate officers quite as much as he did his enlisted men, yet defended the rights, entitlements and dignity of the Marine Corps against all Royal Navy comers. He considered Governor Arthur Phillip an impractical fool and deplored lenience.

“What is it, Morgan?”

“I am on the east side, sir, and would discuss that with ye.”

“A complaint, is it?”

“Nay, sir, merely a few requests,” said Richard, looking him straight in the eye and conscious that he must be one of the very few persons at Port Jackson who rather liked the picturesque Major.

“What requests?”

“We have nothing to build our shelters with, sir, apart from a few hatchets. Most of us have managed to get up some sort of frame, but we cannot thatch with palm fronds unless we have twine to tie them down. We would happily dispense with nails, but we have no instruments to bore holes, or saw, or hammer. The work would go faster if we had at least some tools.”

The Major rose to his feet. “I need a walk. Come with me,” he said curtly. “Ye have,” he went on as he preceded Richard out of the marquee, “a level head, I noted it in the matter of Alexander’s pumps and bilges. Ye’re a no-nonsense man and ye don’t pity yourself one wee bit. If we had more like ye and less like the scum of every Newgate in England, this settlement might have worked.”

From which Richard gathered, walking at the Major’s rapid pace, that the Lieutenant-Governor had no faith in this experiment. They passed the bachelor marine encampment and approached the four round marquees in which the marine officers dwelled. Lieutenant Shairp was sitting in the shade of an awning outside Captain James Meredith’s dwelling in the company of the Captain, drinking tea out of a fine china cup. On sight of the Major they rose to their feet, but in a manner which suggested that they actively disliked their outspoken, salty commandant. Well, everybody knew that, including the felons; fueled by rum and port, the divisions in the ranks of the officers led to quarrels, courts martial and, always, opposition to Ross. Who had his supporters in some circumstances, however.

“Are the sawpits under construction?” asked the Major frostily.

Meredith waved in a direction behind him. “Yes, sir.”

“When did ye last inspect, Captain-Lieutenant?”

“I am about to.
After
I have finished my breakfast.”

“Of rum rather than tea, I note. Ye drink too much, Captain-Lieutenant, and ye’re quarrelsome. Do not quarrel with me.”

Shairp had saluted and disappeared, returning a moment later with MacGregor in one hand. “Here, Morgan, take him. ’Twas one of your men won him, so I am told.” He giggled. “Cannot quite seem to remember, myself.”

Wanting to sink into the ground, Richard took the joyous scrap from Shairp and followed Major Ross down to the ford.

“D’ye mean to carry that thing to the commissary?”

“Not if I can find one of my men, sir. Our camp is on the way,” said Richard with a tranquillity he did not feel; he always seemed to be there when the Major had hard words to say to people.

“Well, ’tis time I visited the surplus. Lead the way, Morgan.”

Richard led the way, hanging on to the struggling MacGregor.

“He will survive by ratting,” said Major Ross as they arrived at the dozen or so shelters dispersed among the trees. “The place has as many rats as London.”

“Give this to Joey Long,” said Richard, thrusting MacGregor at a startled Johnny Cross. “As ye see, sir, we managed to get up a fair sort of frame, but I think convict Crowder has the best idea for walls. The trouble is that without tools and materials the work proceeds at a snail’s pace.”

“I did not know that there was so much ingeniousness among the English” was Ross’s comment, touring thoroughly. “Once ye’re done here, ye can start building another camp between where ye are and the Governor’s farm, which is being cleared and laid out already. If we get no fresh vegetables the scurvy will kill us all. There are too many women all together over on the western side. I will divide them, send some over here. Which does not mean congress, Morgan, understand?”

“I understand, sir.”

They proceeded to the commissariat, where confusion still reigned. The horses, cattle and other livestock had come off and were confined inside hastily erected barricades of piled branches, looking as miserable as everybody else.

“Furzer,” said the Lieutenant-Governor, erupting into the big marquee, “ye’re a typical fucken Irishman. Have ye
never
heard of method? What d’ye think ye’re going to do with those animals unless ye get them into grazing? Eat them? There is no corn left and very little hay. Ye’re not a quartermaster’s arsehole! Since there is nothing for the carpenters to do until they have some timber, get them onto building pens for the animals
right now!
Find someone who knows good grazing when he sees it and build the pens there. The cattle will have to be shepherded and the horses hobbled—and God help ye if they get away! Now where are your lists of what was on what ship, if it has come off, and where it is now?”