Morgan’s Run (63 page)
“Then come with me to the proving butt,” said the Major, taking the walnut case from Richard. “Once the muskets are something like workable, there will be practice every Saturday at the butt, and ye will supervise. This place should be fortified, but since His Excellency deems battlements and gun emplacements frivolous, the best I can do is have my men prepared for emergencies. What happens if the French arrive? There is not a ship moored in a defensive position nor a cannon could be fired in under three hours.”
The proving butt was a log house with no front wall and sand piled inside it; a post bearing a chunk of blackened wood was the target. The Major fired at it while Richard loaded his second gun, fired that, and grunted in satisfaction. “Better than when I first bought them. Ye can start on the muskets tomorrow. And I have found ye an apprentice.”
That, thought Richard, is the trouble with dictators. I just hope my Ross-appointed apprentice has the right temperament for this painstaking work. Dealing with pretty pistols—he is an honest man, this one, and offered up his own possessions for sacrifice in case I was ham-fisted—dealing with pretty pistols is all very well, but I have to break down, clean and reassemble about two hundred Brown Besses, if not more. A good helper will be a godsend, an unsuitable one a handicap.
Private Daniel Stanfield was a godsend. A slight, fair young man with no pretensions to good looks, he spoke a grammatical, fairly regionless English and had, he said in answer to Richard’s question, been carefully tutored by his mother before going to a charity school. His taste inclined more to reading than to rum, and while he was extremely eager to learn, he had sufficient good sense not to make a nuisance of himself. He listened and remembered, put things back where they belonged, and was deft with his hands.
“This is a peculiar situation,” he remarked as he watched Richard break down a musket.
“How so?” asked Richard, driving the pins out along the barrel stock. “I am preparing to separate the piece into its component parts, so do not take your eyes off me. There is always a correct direction to punch out the pins, it is not mere brute strength. They taper, so if you strike them with your punch on the wrong side ye’ll ruin the pins—and possibly the gun.”
“This is a peculiar situation,” Stanfield repeated, “because officially I am your master, yet in this tent ye’re my master. I am not comfortable to have you address me as ‘mister’ while I call ye ‘Morgan.’ An it pleases ye, I would have ye call me Daniel while I call ye Mister Morgan. Inside this tent.”
Blinking in surprise, Richard smiled. “ ’Tis up to you, but I would be glad to call ye Daniel. Ye’re almost young enough to be my son.” An indiscreet thing to say: Richard felt his heart twist. Go back to sleep, William Henry, go back to sleep in the bottom of my mind.
“Ye’re well known as one of the quiet convicts,” said Daniel some days later, able to break down a musket himself. “I know not what ye did nor why, but we marines all know who is who, if not what and why. Ye’re also the head man of a number of quiet groups, which means ye’re respected in the marine camp. Less work.”
Richard did not look up to grin, he grinned to a Brown Bess between his knees.
When Major Ross had summoned him, Daniel Stanfield had gone secure in the knowledge that he had committed no crimes, even in the matter of women. His attentions were devoted to Mrs. Alice Harmsworth, who had lost her baby son a month after landing and her marine husband two months after that. Now a widow with two surviving children, she existed as best she could. Stanfield’s protection, which as yet displayed no amorous side, made the world of difference to her and her children.
“I need to train one of my own men as a gunsmith, Stanfield,” said Major Ross, “and my eye has lighted upon ye because ye’re the best shot here and ye’re also good with your hands. I have found a convict who is a master gunsmith—Morgan, late Alexander. His Excellency the Governor is leaning more and more toward making a larger settlement at Norfolk Island, and that means we will need a saw sharpener and a gunsmith for both settlements. Therefore I am sending ye to Morgan to learn at least the rudiments of gunsmithing. Whichever one of ye goes to Norfolk Island will have to be skilled enough to attend to the muskets there. If ’tis ye who goes to Norfolk Island, I would have to send a saw sharpener as well, which means I lean to sending Morgan there. But only if ye can maintain Port Jackson’s pieces. So start learning, Stanfield—and learn fast.”
* * *
Winter was
proving itself the rainy season; at the beginning of August, well after the men of Richard’s hut had waved an ironic farewell to Alexander, it rained without let for fourteen days. The stream flooded and drove the married marines out of their camp conveniently close by, even this sandy soil tried to turn to muck, and every chinked log house was a death trap of whistling chilly winds after the mud plaster melted. The thatched roofs did not merely leak, they let waterfalls through, property stored in the open was irreparably damaged, and the Government Stores was beset with molds, damp, crawlies and deterioration.
As usual, the more enterprising suffered less. Having no garden to tend, Lizzie made use of the astonishing trees of this place, which may not have been lushly beautiful of foliage, but did own some spectacular trunks. Some had brown or grey-brown bark like English trees, but many had skins of different colors—white, grey, yellow, soft pink, deep pink, vermilion, cream, a grey almost blue, an occasional rich pink-brown. And these trunks varied in other ways: the basis might be covered in aimless corneille scribbles—striped with other colors—smooth as silk or stringier than unraveling rope—patched—spotted—scaled—tattered. No tree appeared to lose its leaves over winter, but many seemed to shed their bark.
The ones Lizzie was interested in were the ones the natives used to make their humpies; they yielded sheets of leathery, rust-colored bark. Having pestered Ned Pugh into making her a short ladder, she used the bark to cover the palm thatch on their ever-growing hut, then sewed it down and together with twine and a baling needle cadged from Stores on condition that the needle came back. So when the rains arrived they had no leaks could not be fixed by another bark appliqué; Lizzie kept a stock of bark in a room added on to store their belongings. At the painful rate the brick and stone buildings were going up, it would be years before any convict had a more substantial dwelling than palm log or sapling lattice. And sapling lattice like theirs, curtained as it was with woven palm leaflets, was proving itself more desirable in this cold rain than fruitlessly chinked logs.
In fact, they were quite cozy. All of them were able to keep working through the fortnight’s bad weather; Major Ross had given the saw sharpeners a tent the moment one came free. His own stone house became habitable just before the rain, his first stroke of luck in some time. As was true of other senior men, most of his more luxurious possessions had remained in England to come out on a storeship thought to be Guardian, expected in New South Wales at any time after the dawn of 1789. She would also be bringing more food, more cattle, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks. London had been hopelessly over-optimistic about how long things like flour sent with the fleet would last because London had counted on rapid crops of grain and lots of vegetables, melons and other quick-yielding fruit within the first year. That was not going to happen, everybody from highest to lowest knew it. The hard bread was all used up, they were now baking minute loaves from weevily flour, and the salt meat had been in the casks so long that a pound of it yielded four tiny bits after boiling. Yet on this plus pease and rice the convicts were expected to live; they did not get bread anymore save on Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays.
Rations were being doled out daily again; no one could keep a week’s rations on hand without their being stolen, even after a desperate Governor Phillip hanged a seventeen-year-old boy for stealing food. Sickly babies and children died; the miracle was that any survived at all, yet some did. Orphans became common, deprived of both convict parents; these the Reverend Mr. Johnson gathered in, cared for, fed, and rejoiced that their depraved parents were dead. Depraved beyond redemption they definitely were—why, otherwise, would God have visited Port Jackson with an earthquake and the reek of sulphur for a day afterward?
The natives were becoming steadily more aggressive and took to stealing goats. Apparently they did not fancy sheep, perhaps not sure what lay beneath all that wool. Goat hide resembled the hide of a kangaroo.
A goat, in fact, was the source of the only trouble Richard’s men got into. When one of the Stores workers, Anthony Rope, married Elizabeth Pulley, Johnny Cross stumbled upon a dead goat, which he appropriated with delight and presented to the newlyweds as the basis for a wedding feast. They made a sea-pye out of its meat, nesting it in a crust of bread for want of pastry. The whole group was arrested and tried for killing the goat rather than for eating it. Amazingly, the military court believed the convicts’ frantic oaths that the goat was already dead; all of them were acquitted, including Johnny Cross and Jimmy Price.
The ships save for Fishburn and Golden Grove had sailed, but Richard wrote no letters. He had taken to copying excerpts out of books to keep his handwriting steady, but write letters home he would not. As if, did he not, the pain would stay buried.
At the end of August spring arrived with a cessation of the rains and typical equinoctial winds. Flowers bloomed everywhere. Undistinguished small trees and bushes suddenly produced brilliant, fluffy yellow balls, spiky crimson pendants that resembled bottle brushes, spidery-looking pink and fawn and orange tufts. Even the tallest trees nodded with masses of cream-lashed eyes and produced young foliage of an exquisite pink. The mode of flowering was mostly of this brushy, wispy kind than English or American petaled blossoms. For petals they had to look among the grasses, where little shrubs were laden with cyclamen flowers like miniature tulips. The clean, sweetly resinous air was filled with a thousand perfumes, some subtle, some suffocating.
And on the 5th of September came a night sky the like of which few had ever seen, and that never with such structure as this huge display of celestial fireworks. The vault glowed and shimmered with fabulously draped curtains and arches dripping luminous fringes in greenish-yellow, crimson and violet; great steely-indigo beams shot from all horizons to the zenith, moving as fast as lightning or eerily still and radiant. There had been an aurora in England in 1750, but no one remembered it as more than a cloudy, colorful glow. This was, the sailors assured people the next day, more wondrous by far than any Northern Lights.
Spirits picked up, even though there had been no real winter, nor any dramatic increase in warmth. But sheep were lambing, goats kidding, hens hatching eggs. None of which could be touched, yet at least augured well for some vague future. If anybody lived to see it; rations did not improve.
Lizzie applied for and received more seeds, and set to in the garden again with renewed enthusiasm. Oh, for a seed potato! Still, if the carrots and turnips came up they would eat something having substance, real belly-filling nourishment. Greens might be good for the scurvy, but they were not filling.
Governor Phillip
had decided to send Sirius to Cape Town for more provisions; storeship Guardian was just too distant a prospect to cherish hopes of survival without something to go on with. She was to sail east for Cape Horn on her way there; the decision as to whether she would return around Van Diemen’s Land or Cape Horn was left to Captain Hunter. And Golden Grove would leave Port Jackson with her because the liquor store was almost finished. She would sail first to Norfolk Island bearing the first consignment of convicts under Phillip’s scheme to add to the tiny settlement and subtract from the big and overburdened one.
When Major Ross sent for him on the last day of September, Richard knew what he was going to say. He had not long turned forty years old and every birthday since his thirty-sixth had been spent in a different place—Gloucester Gaol, Ceres hulk, Alexander and New South Wales. He would go somewhere else before he turned one-and-forty, though this was sooner than he had expected. In a few weeks he would be at Norfolk Island. Nothing surer.
“Ye’ve worked wonders with Private Stanfield, Morgan,” said the Lieutenant-Governor, “and ye’ve left us with two trained saw sharpeners as well. I had thought of sending Stanfield to Norfolk Island, but he is concerned for the welfare of Mistress Harmsworth and her children, and I am obliged to consider not only my marines, but also their wives, widows and dependents. Stanfield will stay here and continue with the muskets. Ye’ll go to Norfolk Island as a sawyer, saw sharpener and gunsmith. Lieutenant King has informed His Excellency that his only skilled sawyer has drowned. While ye’re not a skilled sawyer, Morgan, I have no doubt ye’ll soon pick up the art. Ye’re that sort of man. I have told Lieutenant King in my own despatches that ye’ll be an asset to Norfolk Island.” The thin lips stretched in a sour smile. “As well that
some
who go will be assets.”
“May I take my wife, sir?” Richard asked.
“I am afraid not. There are no vacant berths for women—His Excellency has given me a list of the women who will be going. I have Blackall from Alexander in mind as another sawyer because I suspect ye’ll have a lot of sharpening to do. Our building timber for Port Jackson is coming from Norfolk Island until we can find a proper source of limestone to use stone or brick. The local timber is impossible, whereas the beams and planks Supply has brought back with her are ideal. Supply had a very rough voyage and has to be laid up, which is why Golden Grove has been commissioned to drop ye off at Norfolk Island.”