Morgan’s Run (65 page)

“And off to the Cape of Good Hope around Cape Horn,” Donovan said, nodding. “The trouble is that we are not needed as badly aboard Sirius as we are at Norfolk Island. His Excellency is very short of free men to act as supervisors of convicts because Major Ross has let it be known very loudly that the Marine Corps is not about to extend guard duty to supervisory duties. So the Crown has deputed me to act as supervisor of convicts at Norfolk Island.” He dropped his voice, wriggling his brows expressively. “I suspect Captain Hunter decided he would like a nice long cruise alone with Johnny, and personally nominated me to the Governor. But, alas, Johnny elected to go to Norfolk Island too. Captain Hunter has retired cursing, but no doubt will live to seek a return bout.”

“What will you do at Norfolk Island, Mr. Livingstone?” asked Richard, resigning himself to being identified by his fellow convicts as friendly with two free men who were a little—free.

Mr. Livingstone made no attempt to answer for himself; he was, as Richard discovered, extremely shy and self-conscious.

“Johnny has a great talent for the woodworking lathe, one of which—it is probably the only one, knowing London—is aboard for use at Norfolk Island. The wood at Port Jackson cannot be worked on a lathe, whereas the pine can be. That His Excellency was eager to accommodate Johnny in the matter of his desire to leave Sirius lies in the new Government House’s balusters—he will turn them at the source of the timber. Also many other useful wooden objects His Excellency lacks.”

“Surely a job better done at Port Jackson?”

“There is not room for the raw timber aboard ships plying back and forth between the two settlements—every ship will be loaded to the gunwales with sawn timber to get the bachelor marines and convicts into better houses.”

“Of course. I should have thought of that.”

“And here,” Donovan announced blithely, “are the ladies.”

There were eleven women in the longboat. Richard knew most of them by sight thanks to Lizzie, though none by acquaintance. Mary Gamble, who had told Captain Sever to kiss her cunt and had cut a swathe through those men who prided their masculinity by demeaning it in any way her barbed tongue could; her back would scarcely have time to heal before she was lashed again. Ann Dutton, who loved rum and marines, and would go after the latter to obtain the former. Rachel Early, a slattern who would pick a fight with an iron post. Elizabeth Cole, who had married a fellow convict shortly after reaching Port Jackson and been so shockingly beaten by him that Major Ross had stepped in and put her in the women’s camp as a laundress. If the other seven were like these, then His Excellency was ridding himself of nuisances, though obviously Elizabeth Cole was being sent 1,100 miles from her husband as an act of pure compassion.

“What a jolly voyage this is going to be,” Richard sighed, watching the women being herded to the forward hatch.

Golden Grove
sailed at dawn on the 2nd of October, 1788, in company with Sirius until the two ships shook free of the Heads; then Golden Grove tacked to find a wind to bear her northeast while Sirius took advantage of the south-flowing coastal current and headed away to find her eastings for Cape Horn, 4,000 miles to the east.

By the time that the ship drew close to Lord Howe Island five days later, Richard had solved his equation. As he suspected, the Governor was ridding himself of nuisances. Not necessarily because they were disciplinary problems like Mary Gamble and Will Francis. No, the majority were less fortunate than that: they had been adjudged mildly mad. Only four of the men could pass muster as what the ship’s manifest purported them to be—young, strong, unattached and sea crazy. They were to man the fishing coble at Norfolk Island. For himself, he was not sure quite why he had been chosen—a sawyer he was not, yet that was what he was listed as. Did Major Ross somehow sense that Morgan was tired of Port Jackson? And if he had, what was so different about that? Everybody was tired of Port Jackson, even the Governor. At the core of him he had a feeling that Major Ross was banking him like money—tucking him away for future use. Well, maybe. . . .

Men like poor, timid John Allen and Sam Hussey were distinctly peculiar, twitched or muttered or stayed too long in one position. The real villains were outstanding ones—Will Francis, Josh Peck, Len Dyer and Sam Pickett. Some were married and had been allowed to bring their wives, in every case because one or the other or both were odd—John Anderson and Liz Bruce; the fanatical Catholics John Bryant and Ann Coombes; John Price and Rachel Early; James Davis and Martha Burkitt.

Sergeant Thomas Smyth, Corporal John Gowen and four privates of marines made up the guard detachment, though guard on Golden Grove was so relaxed a business that Private Sammy King was able to commence a touching and passionate affair with Mary Rolt, one of the peculiarities (she conducted whole conversations with herself). A temporary aberration, it seemed, for after she and the Private became lovers her imaginary dialogues stopped completely. A sea voyage, Richard mused, could indeed be highly beneficial.

For him it had commenced badly; Len Dyer and Tom Jones lay in wait for him below to teach him how they felt about convicts who not only hobnobbed with free men but with Miss Molly free men into the bargain.

“Oh, grow up!” he said wearily, not backing down. “I can take both of ye with one hand tied behind me.”

“How about six of us?” asked Dyer, beckoning.

Suddenly there was MacGregor, snapping and snarling; Dyer aimed a foot at him, caught him on the hind leg just as Golden Grove heeled hard over. The rest of it happened very quickly as Joey Long hurled himself into the fray and three of the six attackers lost interest in anything but their rising gorges. Richard put a shod toe into Dyer’s backside right behind his testicles, Joey climbed on Jones’s back and started biting and scratching, and MacGregor, uninjured, sank his teeth into Josh Peck’s heel tendon. Francis, Pickett and Richardson were busy vomiting, which came in very handy; Richard finished the fight by rubbing Dyer’s face in spattered deck and putting all his weight into kicking Jones and Peck in the groin.

“I fight dirty,” he said, panting, “so do not lie in wait for me again. Otherwise ye’ll never sire children.”

It was politic, however, he decided after making sure that Joey and MacGregor were all right, to shift themselves and their stuff up on deck. If it rained they would shelter under a boat.

“I hope,” he said to Stephen Donovan later, “that ye can handle yourself, Mr. Donovan. Tom Jones and Len Dyer do not care for Miss Mollies. Ye’ll be supervising them, not to mention Peck, Pickett and Francis. Though the last man is their leader, he let Dyer do the job. Therefore he is dangerous.”

“I thank ye for the warning, Richard.” Donovan studied him thoughtfully. “No black eyes or bruises that I can see.”

“I kicked them in the balls. Seasickness,” Richard grinned, “was a great help. My luck held, you see. Just as they rushed me Golden Grove found a wind and some of the stomachs revolted.”

“ ’Tis true, Richard, ye do have luck. It seems odd to say that of a man unlucky enough to have gone down for something he did not do, yet ye do have luck.”

“Morgan’s run,” said Richard, nodding. “Luck runs.”

“Ye have had your runs of bad luck too.”

“In Bristol, aye. As a convict I have had very good luck.”

Lord Howe
Island marked a kind of halfway point, and save for the day they spent in its vicinity the weather was glorious. That meant the ship’s company never saw this magical island of turtles, palm trees and soaring peaks, 500 miles east of the coast of New South Wales. They ploughed onward, another 600 miles to go.

This was Richard’s first venture into the mightiest of all seas, the Pacific, which he had thought to find no different from the King’s herring pond, or that unnamed monster of an ocean south of whatever lay between New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land. But the Pacific was different; it must, he decided, leaning for hour after hour over the rail looking into illimitable distances, be unfathomably deep. Seen close up as the tremendous yet tranquil swell cradled Golden Grove, its waves were a luminous ultramarine shot with pure purple. Of fish they caught none, though of denizens there were plenty—huge turtles skimmed along, porpoises leaped. Massive sharks cruised by scornfully ignoring the baited lines, their dorsal fins three feet clear of the water, their length terrifying. A sea of giant sharks rather than whales. Until the day when they were surrounded by leviathans, voyaging south to summer while Golden Grove, inexplicable marine creature, surged northeast. Strange. He had never really felt lonely on the way to New South Wales, but now he was perpetually conscious of his loneliness. The sense of belonging a year ago probably lay in the fact that there were always ten sets of sail in sight. Here no ship ventured except Golden Grove.

At some
time during the eleventh night he became aware that he was not lifting and falling gently; Golden Grove had backed her sails and was standing.
We are here.

The deck was absolutely quiet because the sailors had nothing to do and the helmsman, out in the open on the quarterdeck, had only to keep the tiller steady. The night was still, the sky cloudless save for that haunting wilderness of numberless stars, no moon to dim them as they wheeled in some incalculable cycle across the heavens. Anything so thinly and ethereally brilliant, he felt, ought to be audible: what privileged ear could hear the music of the spheres? His ear heard naught but the creaks and washes of a ship standing in an easy sea, and the shadow-sounds of night birds flitting like ghosts. Land is there, invisible. Yet another shape to my fate. I am going to a tiny isle in the midst of utter nowhere, so remote that even men have not dwelled in it until we English came. Counting us, there will be about sixty Englishmen and Englishwomen.

One thing is certain. This place can never be home. I come alone through a lonely sea, and I will leave alone through a lonely sea. Nothing so far away can have substance, for I have reached that point on the globe where I begin to swallow my own tail.

T
he women were ordered to ftay below, but at dawn all
the men had their belongings on deck and waited for morning to reveal Norfolk Island. Light came in the midst of a stunning sunrise, high billows and wisps of rainless cloud turning slowly from purple-shot plum through fiery scarlet to the glory of pure gold.

“Why does sunrise feel so strange?” Joey Long asked as he stood with Richard at the rail, MacGregor panting at his feet.

“I think because it is the reverse of sunset,” said Richard. “The colors go from dark to light until the clouds are white and the sky is blue.”

MacGregor barked to be picked up; Joey obliged. The dog was on a homemade leash his master had manufactured out of tiny scraps of leather even Lieutenant Furzer could not find a use for; more accustomed to freedom, MacGregor disliked the leash but wore it with resignation. The voyage had provided him with plenty of pickings, and Captain William Sharp had been delighted to let the little terrier have the run of the holds. The ship’s cat (MacGregor had no patience with cats) had retired to the forecastle in a huff and left the field to this impertinent intruder.

Having lain some miles off during the night, they were under sail again. Captain Sharp had never been to the island before, and was taking no chances. Getting in would be no trouble, as Harry Ball of Supply had lent him Supply’s sailing master, Lieutenant David Blackburn, who knew every kink in the reefs and every rock and shoal offshore.

Because the sun shone in the eyes until it climbed higher into the vault, all that could be seen of the island—three miles by five miles in extent, Donovan had informed Richard—was a dark, disappointingly low mass. No Teneriffe, this. Then, it seemed in a second, its bulk filled up with light. The green of it was blackish and the 300-foot-high cliffs were either dull orange or charcoal. Therefore the place should have looked ominous, brooding; that it did not lay in the sea, shading from purple-blue out where Golden Grove was trying to find a wind to a glowing aquamarine around its coast. That gradually paling water made the island seem as if it grew there as part of some gigantic marine plan, as natural as inevitable.

They were sailing from west to east in catspaws of breathy breeze which came from the southwest, then from the northeast. Two other isles attended the big one: a tiny low isle close in shore bristling with pine trees, and a larger isle perhaps four miles to the south, craggily tall and vividly green save for a few clumps of dark pines. White waves broke at the base of all the cliffs and against some sort of bar in the direction they were heading, but the ocean was quiet and calm.

Golden Grove anchored some distance off the reef where the surf broke in placid flurries; beyond it a lagoon glittered almost more green than blue, and having two beaches, the western one straight, the eastern one semi-circular. The sand was apricot-yellow and merged at its back right into the pines, thinned out by men, and the tallest, biggest trees Richard had ever seen. Amid them along the straight beach lay a small collection of wooden huts.

A large blue flag with a yellow plus was flying limply from a staff very close to the straight beach, on which people were busy manning two tiny boats. Golden Grove’s jollyboat went over the side and across to the reef to meet them; the tide had flooded in sufficiently for the jollyboat to cross the reef into the lagoon, where it would remain. The longboats, said Lieutenant Blackburn firmly, would go no farther than the outside of the coral, there to transfer cargo to the smaller boats for the run to the sand.

One of the two tiny boats approached the ship, a man clad in white, dark blue and gold braid standing in its bow, his powdered wig and hat on his head, his sword at his side. He came aboard, shook Captain Sharp warmly by the hand, and Blackburn, and Donovan, and Livingstone. This was the Commandant, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, whom Richard had never really seen before. A well-made man of medium height, King had sparkling hazel eyes in a tanned face which was neither plain nor handsome; it owned a firm, good-natured mouth and a large, though not beaky, nose.

The pleasantries over, King turned to the convicts. “Who among ye are the sawyers?” he asked.

Richard and Bill Blackall shrinkingly held up their hands.

King’s face fell. “Is that all?” He toured the ranks of the 21 men, pausing before Henry Humphreys, a big man. “Step out,” he said, and continued touring until he found Will Marriner, another strong-looking man.

“You step out too.”

There were now four of them.

“Have any of ye had experience as sawyers?”

No one answered. Stifling a sigh, Richard found himself, as usual, the one who had to speak in order to save the group from official irritation in the face of silence.

“None of us is experienced, sir,” he said. “Blackall and I know how to saw, though neither of us has worked as a sawyer.” He indicated Blackall with one hand. “I am actually a saw sharpener.”

“And,” Donovan put in quickly, “a gunsmith, Lieutenant.”

“Ah! Well, I do not have enough work for a gunsmith, but I certainly do for a saw sharpener. Names, please.”

They gave their names and convict numbers.

“Numbers,” said King, “are unnecessary in a place owning so few people. Morgan, Blackall, ye’ll head the sawpit—go ashore with Humphreys and Marriner in the coble at once. To start work, not sit about. We have to fill Golden Grove’s holds with timber for Port Jackson before she sails, and losing my only experienced sawyer in a boating accident has meant there is not near enough done. The saws are nigh as blunt as a Scotchman, so ye’ll have to start sharpening this very minute, Morgan. Have ye any tools? We have only two files.”

“I have plenty of tools, sir,” said Richard, and proceeded to do what experience had taught him was politic: ask for what he wanted before ignorance or misinformation burdened him with people he either did not know or did not trust. “Sir, may I take yon Joseph Long? I know him and can work with him. He has not the build for a sawyer and his wits are weak, but he will do as he is told and can be of use at the sawpit.”

The Commandant of Norfolk Island’s eyes went to Joey and lighted upon the dog, clasped in Joey’s arms. “Oh, I say, what a little beauty!” he exclaimed. “A male dog, Long?”

Joey nodded wordlessly, never having been the recipient of a simple remark from an official before. Orders he had heard aplenty, snapped or barked, but never the kind of thing one ordinary man said to another.

“Splendid! We have but one dog here, a spaniel bitch. Does he rat?
Say
he rats, please?”

Joey nodded again.

“What dashed good luck! Delphinia rats too, so we will have ratting pups—oh, do we
need
ratting pups!” King realized that the five were still standing watching him, fascinated. “What are ye waiting for? Over the side and into the coble!”

“I always heard that the Navy was mad,” said Bill Blackall as the boat pulled away.

“Well,” said Richard, uncomfortably aware that the two oarsmen, both strangers, could overhear, “ye must not forget that there are but few people here. The Commandant and they must be very used to each other by now. They are probably short on ceremony.”

“Aye, we are short on ceremony, but very glad to see some new faces,” said one of the rowers, a man in his fifties with a Devon drawl in his voice. “John Mortimer, late Charlotte.” He tilted his head at his opposite number. “My son, Noah.”

They did not look a bit like father and son. John Mortimer was a tall, fair, placid-looking man, whereas Noah Mortimer was short and dark—and rather self-opinionated, if his expression was anything to go by. It is a wise man knows his own father.

The coble, so called because it was clinker-built in the manner of a Scotch fishing dinghy, very flat-bottomed, glided across the reef without grazing itself and stroked the mere 150 yards across the lagoon to the straight beach, where some of the surviving members of the community stood waiting: six women, one—the oldest—big with child, and five men whose ages, if their faces reflected their years, varied between shaveling young and grizzled old.

“Nathaniel Lucas, carpenter,” said a man of thirty-odd, “and my wife, Olivia.”

An attractive and intelligent-looking couple.

“Eddy Garth and my wife, Susan,” said another fellow.

“I am Ann Innet, Lieutenant King’s housekeeper,” said the eldest female, one hand a little defensively on her swollen belly.

“Elizabeth Colley, Surgeon Jamison’s housekeeper.”

“Eliza Hipsley, farmer,” said a handsome, strapping girl, her arm protectively about another girl of the same age. “This is my best friend, Liz Lee. She farms too.”

Good, thought Richard, I know where I stand with that pair, as must any man of perception. Eliza Hipsley is terrified at the advent of so many new men, which means that she is not sure of Liz Lee. And Len Dyer, Tom Jones and their like will be hard on them. So he smiled at them in a way which told them that they had an ally. Oh, names! Out of the seventeen women Norfolk Island would now own, five were Elizabeths, three Anns, and two Marys.

Like several of the other men, the lone marine had not bothered to introduce himself. “Lieutenant King has ordered us to work now,” said Richard to him. “Could I trouble you to show us the sawpit?”

Lieutenant King’s
residence, somewhat larger than the others, stood on a small knoll directly behind the blue-and-yellow landing flag; a Union flag on a second staff closer to the house lay with equal limpness down its mast. The gubernatorial mansion probably contained three small rooms and one attic; no doubt the shed at its rear was its kitchen. There seemed to be a communal oven and cooking area, a smithy, a few buildings which looked as if they stored supplies, each about ten feet by eight, if that. On another rise to the east were extensive cultivated gardens to which all the women, including Ann Innet, were hurrying. And between the two hillocks, among the pines, stood fourteen huts of wooden planks, each very well thatched with some kind of tough, strappy plant; the walls facing the ocean were blank, indicating that their doors looked inland.

The sawpit was close to the beach at the end of a cleared path free of stumps which ran back into the pines; the area around it had also been cleared to make room for dozens of twelve-foot logs, the smallest five feet in diameter. Though he badly wanted to stop to inspect these gargantuan trees he was supposed to reduce to beams and boards, Richard dared not; King’s orders were specific and the marine, who had grudgingly admitted that his name was Heritage, did not look the kind to be nice to felons.

Somehow he and his inexperienced little band had to produce enough sawn timber to fill Golden Grove’s holds, he presumed within the space of ten to fourteen days. Two small mast logs and what appeared to be a spar had already been prepared and lay to one side, together with a stack of planks. The mast logs and the spar were probably for one of the ships left at Port Jackson.

The sawpit itself was lined with boards to prevent its walls crumbling; it was seven feet deep, eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. Two squared-off beams were mounted across it at five-foot intervals, with rocky rubble banked against the ends of the beams to form sloping ramps. A log minus bark had already been rolled up onto the beams, lying wedged and supported on them lengthwise above the pit, but no one was working and he could see no one in attendance. He found five pit saws varying between eight and fourteen feet in length lying in the bottom of the pit covered with an old sail.

Along came Nathaniel Lucas.

“This is the worst air for iron and steel tools I have ever encountered,” he said, dropping into the pit as Richard uncovered the saws. “We cannot keep the wretched things free of rust.”

“They are also horribly blunted,” said Richard, running the ball of his thumb along one large, wickedly notched tooth. He grimaced. “Whoever sharpened this saw seems to think that the blade bevel goes in the same direction from tooth to tooth instead of in opposite directions. Christ! It will take hours and hours to rectify that, let alone get an edge on the thing. Is there anybody here can teach Blackall, Humphreys and Marriner how to saw?”