Morgan’s Run (93 page)

The pigsty and privy were difficult to site until Richard thought of a way to determine the course of the underground stream which fed the spring; nothing must contaminate it. Remembering what Peg’s brother had done when he had needed to dig a new well, Richard cut a forked rod from a sappy green shrub, held on to each fork with a hand, and attempted to divine. The sensation was curious when it happened, as if suddenly the wood shivered into life and fought him gently. Yet Kitty could not make the tip stir any more than could Stephen.

“It is our skin,” said Stephen, ruefully eyeing his palms. “Hard, dry and calloused. Your skin, Richard, is soft and moist. I think the diviner’s skin completes the water chain.”

Whatever lay at the root of the magic in it, Richard had no choice other than to site both pigsty and privy north of the house; there were underground streams everywhere south of it.

The saddest consequence of the move no one could have predicted, though Richard blamed himself for not foreseeing it. On the very Sunday that they said an unregretful farewell to the acre at the head of Arthur’s Vale, John Lawrell was caught by a married marine corporal playing cards with William Robinson Two in his hut. Major Ross had told the marine that he might shift himself and his family into the vacated house for the last few months of his duty, and the fellow had eagerly rushed to see it. Fervently religious, he was scandalized by what he saw as he peered through Lawrell’s hut door.
Playing cards on Sunday!
Lawrell and Robinson were sentenced to 100 lashes each for gambling on a Sunday.

“Oh, it is too bad!” Richard cried to Stephen. “They meant no harm to God or men. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong in it, they are simply friends who spend Sunday afternoons with a deck of cards. Not gambling, just amusing themselves. If I spoke to the Major—”

“No, you cannot,” said Stephen firmly. “Richard, leave it go! Since his near-mortal illness the Major has had a bee in his bonnet about God and our lack of a chaplain here. He is now quite convinced that the rising incidence of local crime is thanks to godlessness and improper observance of Sundays. Well, he is a Scotchman, and much influenced by that pitiless Presbyterian ethic. Lawrell is no longer under your protection—nothing ye could say will alter the Major’s decision. In an odd way it reflects well on you, or so the Major sees it. You depart, Lawrell sins.”

“I want no approbation at the cost of another man’s flesh,” said Richard bitterly. “Sometimes I hate God!”

“’Tis not God ye hate, Richard. ’Tis the fools of men who call themselves God’s servants ye really hate.”

Salamander arrived
on the 16th of September carrying 200 male convicts and more men of the New South Wales Corps. By the time she sailed the population of Norfolk Island had risen to 1,115. Both deaths and floggings had soared since Mary Ann; the first death from illness or natural causes had not occurred until the end of 1790, when John Price, a convict off Surprize, had expired from the after-effects of his awful voyage.

Now the ratio of males to females increased dramatically in favor of males, but not strong, healthy males. Many of the new arrivals were so sick that they would eventually die, while some of the less enfeebled ones preyed constantly upon gardens or tried to rob the Stores, after anything to make life more comfortable. Governor Phillip’s intractables gravitated immediately into the Francis-Peck-Dyer-Pickett camp, joined by scarred and disillusioned men like Willy Dring, whom Richard remembered from Alexander as not a bad sort of young fellow. Fierce quarrels broke out every day and the gaol was always full, the grindstone fully powered. The sight of ironed men, even an occasional ironed woman, became more common. Sydney Town, Queensborough and Phillipsburgh were good places to be out of. Nat Lucas, closest to Sydney Town among Richard’s friends, had commenced to clear the upper slopes of his increased Arthur’s Vale portion and was building a new house as far from the flat as he could.

Of course Richard had brought cuttings and small offshoots of his bamboo and sugar cane, having removed enough of the grown bamboo to provide himself with several fishing poles. He no longer went to Point Hunter to fish with a hand-line; Stephen had also abandoned that site. Too many used it, and it necessitated a walk through Sydney Town besides. More and more Sydney Town looked as Richard fancied Port Jackson must, except that the buildings were wood. Norfolk Island lime had gone back to His Excellency in Port Jackson aboard Mary Ann and Salamander to provide mortar for bricks and sandstone blocks; Port Jackson, more usually called “Sydney” these days, was also expanding.

Now that Richard lived on Morgan’s Run, he and Stephen had taken to fishing from the rocks near a small, sandy beach between Sydney Bay’s landing place and its western headland, Point Ross. The walk was no longer than that to Point Hunter, the eastern headland, and having poles to fish with greatly helped their chances of kingfish and other large denizens of surface waters.

“What d’ye think of these rumors that a huge revolution has happened in France?” Stephen asked as they cleaned a six-foot kingfish under the shade of an overhanging rock.

“It happened in the American colonies, so why not? I wish that Mary Ann or Salamander had carried gazettes from London, but I think we will have to wait until Gorgon arrives in Port Jackson before we find out what actually has happened. Gorgon will also carry more than personal letters from wives to men like Ross and Ralphie darling.”

“Have ye ever written home, Richard?”

“Nay, never. I want to have something to say before I do.”

Stephen gazed at him in wonder. Something to say? What was Alexander? What was Port Jackson? What was Norfolk Island?

“I see no point in writing sad letters,” Richard explained. “When I write, I want to be able to tell my family and friends in England that I have survived and even prospered a little. That my life in the Antipodes is not an empty vessel.”

“Yes, I understand. Then ye’ll be writing soon. If, that is, ye have not forgotten how to form the alphabet.”

“I do that as well as ever. I do not write letters, but if I am not too tired, I transcribe notes upon whatever I am reading.”

They walked back to Morgan’s Run the long way to give some of the magnificently meaty fish to Olivia Lucas, met D’arcy in town and gave him some, then waded upstream past Richard’s old house and climbed the cleft.

Kitty was beginning to look a little pregnant, and had shown that she was an ideal wife for a Norfolk Island settler by learning to ply a hammer, cope with minor emergencies like one of Augusta’s daughters in the vegetable patch, sand and polish interior walls as Richard put them up, chop down quite large trees, deal with the firewood, carry water, wash, cook, clean, and sew. In her spare time, she informed Richard gravely, she was unraveling some linen cloth and weaving the strands into what she hoped would form wicks. Then she would make tallow out of the hard back fat when Richard killed a pig, and dip candles. That way they would not have to purchase tallow candles from Stores, which charged a penny each.

“Ye’re doing too much,” Stephen chided her as they sat to eat the kingfish, baked in the oven wrapped in plantain leaves.

“Stephen, do not start!” she said dangerously, eating with gusto all the while. “Richard is always at me about it. Truly I am well, strong and full of vim. And I have discovered that I am happiest when doing things. Especially because this is
my
house, I have been with Richard since before its beginning.”

“When I find a man I can trust, Kitty, I will pay the Government for his labors and put him to the tasks ye’ll not be able to do once ye become heavy.”

“That is where George Guest went wrong,” said Stephen. “If he had waited until he was out of his sentence and then come to an arrangement with Major Ross about hiring two laborers, neither he nor they would have been flogged.”

“George is a good fellow, but
too
keen to get on. He thought to get the work done cheaper by hiring two marines directly rather than paying the Government to hire on his behalf. That is not how English government works. I deplore English government, but I see no sense in trying to hoodwink it. I will get my man for ten pounds a year, which I can afford. After, that is,” he said with a smile, “I have paid my debts.”

“Ye work too hard yourself, Richard.”

“I do not believe so. Rock fishing on a Saturday morning is a wonderful rest, so is gardening and mucking out the pigsty after Sunday service. Luckily the Major’s objections to Sunday activities do not extend to things which might eventually arrive in the Stores. His shibboleths are limited to drinking and gambling.”

“On the subject of drinking, the New South Wales Corps men have set up a very nice still with Francis Mee and Elias Bishop.”

“Well, that had to happen, especially after the Major grew so religious. Besides, he shipped a good deal of what we made to Port Jackson on Supply last February. ’Tis amazing how the total soars when ye have a humble little pair of kettles going day and night—
and
on Sundays,” Richard said, laughing.

After Stephen left, Richard and Kitty worked side by side in the garden until supper time, eaten just before night fell. The small citrus trees had survived transplanting, as had almost everything. The year had been a fairly grubless one and dry enough that the Government wheat in Arthur’s Vale and the Government corn at Queensborough looked like yielding bumper crops. Of course there had been salt winds galore, but luckily most had been accompanied by squally showers, which reduced their blighting effect. There had been just enough rain to keep the grain coming on. Even with 1,115 inhabitants, Norfolk Island seemed likely to provide its own bread and surplus pork to salt for Port Jackson.

In Sydney
Town, Queensborough and Phillipsburgh the same old squabbles recurred between industrious convict gardeners and lazy marines and soldiers. There were now a great many very sick convicts who literally could not work; some died, and some were subject to the kind of thing rife in Port Jackson—the strong robbed the weak of sustenance and clothing. Those upon whom devolved the burden of feeding the indigent-through-illness men grew sour about having to do so. Especially if they were not yet pardoned or emancipated, and therefore free to keep what they grew on their own blocks or sell to Stores.

Hunger still stalked on the Phillipsburgh-Cascade side of the island; only three miles away by road, it may as well have been as far as Port Jackson, so isolated was it. Phillipsburgh grew less edibles in order to cultivate flax, and importation of edibles from the south side of the island was the responsibility of Mr. Andrew Hume, the superintendent. He did a brisk trade in the acquisition of convict slops and constantly incurred Major Ross’s wrath by short-rationing his workers in order to sell to the New South Wales Corps soldiers, living somewhat closer than the middle of the Cascade road. As almost all the Lieutenant-Governor’s troops were now New South Wales Corps soldiers, Ross found it impossible to police Phillipsburgh and the alliance between Hume and Captain Hill. One starving flax worker ate a forest plant he mistook for cabbage, and died; even then Hume continued in his peculations and frauds, abetted by Hill and his soldiers.

The growing evil was the act of growing food, and the chasm between those who grew plenty and ate well and those who grew nothing widened every day to the whistles and screams of floggings, floggings, floggings. A surgeon was required to witness the application of the cat, so Callum, Wentworth, Considen and Jamison entered into a conspiracy; whichever one was deputed to watch would call a halt after somewhere between 15 and 50 of the total number had been laid on, then make sure that the next installment was not administered before healing was complete. It could take a long time for a convict to receive all 200 lashes, and what usually happened was that Major Ross forgave the culprit the rest before too much damage had been done.

Courts martial also increased as the differences of opinion and resentments arising out of rank and precedence rubbed rawly at abraded military feelings, real or (all too often) imagined. Most of the marines and soldiers, including their officers, were uneducated, narrow, impressionable, hottempered, appallingly immature, and prone to believe whatever they were told. A fancied slight became inflated into an unpardonable insult before it had finished traveling the gossip grapevine, as efficient and widespread among the free as among the felon.

The indefatigable Lieutenant Ralph Clark endeared himself even more to Major Ross by (snooping just a little) detecting the presence of an illicit letter from the Major’s clerk, Francis Folks, to the Judge Advocate in Port Jackson, Captain David Collins. The document accused Ross of extreme cruelty, oppression, depriving the free as well as the felon of rations, and so on, and so forth. Included with it were supporting papers and some opinions on the Lieutenant-Governor’s conduct of Norfolk Island’s affairs which depicted him as a mixture of Ivan the Terrible and Torquemada. Ross’s response was to clap Folks in irons, confiscate the letter, papers and opinions as concrete evidence, and order Folks tried at Port Jackson by the addressee, Collins. Who, though a marine officer, loathed Robert Ross passionately. Even as he acted, the Major knew whom Collins would believe. No matter. The protocols were specific, and Law Martial was a thing of the past. Alas.