The Devil's Eye (23 page)
Bathurst Bay, Monday 6 March 1899
Willie strapped Sam’s leg tight to the plank with belts.
‘I can swim,’ said Sam. He’d asked to be propped up against a rock so that he could see the point of the cape, half a mile away.
‘Not in this sea,’ said Willie.
‘When this settles down, we’ll have to swim for the shore,’ said Sam.
‘We’ll wait for a boat.’
Sam said, ‘There’s no one left.’
‘Someone must be afloat. A steamer will come soon,’ said Willie, although it hardly seemed possible that the world might still possess a steamer. Just before dusk a steamer did appear, from the north.
Near where the lightship should have been it appeared to stop beside what, by then, Willie was sure was a schooner. It was too far away to make out which schooner. The steamer must have lowered a whaleboat; a speck passed from the steamer through the rough seas to the hulk, and after a short time returned.
In a belch of smoke the steamer then continued towards them. There was something obscene about its confident approach, its perfectly enormous bulk. Willie thought, how dare such a thing exist!
Willie and his men waved and shouted from the top of the rocks, and then the steamer’s lights came on. Willie gasped. It was lit from stem to stern, a vision of perfect civilisation. People lined the deck.
As it passed by, heading south, it showed a clean, haughty hull to the waves.
‘Who was it?’ asked Sam, when Willie came down.
‘I don’t know. They mustn’t have seen us.’
‘I’m so thirsty,’ said Sam. But the crew had already tried every puddle that had collected on the rocks. There was no fresh water at all. They turned their heads to the heavens with each passing shower and tried to soak up what they could with their shirts.
‘There’ll be another steamer tomorrow,’ said Willie.
During the night Willie remembered the pearl. He reached into his pocket, but it was no longer there.
Thursday Island, Tuesday 7 March 1899
In the afternoon and on time, the
Duke of Portland
steamed up the Ellis Channel.
From the Residence, John Douglas watched the wind sweep the channel clear of rain to reveal the trail of smoke, unmistakable, but still a long way off.
He found that he could not move.
Between hope and despair Douglas had been sitting on his verandah since dawn. A rain squall would throw a grey veil across the channel and then the sun would expose the green waves with their dazzling white tops, before the next black cloud rolled over Horn Island.
Mr Beach had come mid-morning to tell him the telegraph lines were still down. A little later Douglas turned to say something to him and found the chair empty.
Maggie had sat there a few years earlier; she had sat there with him one Saturday, he recalled. Hope was at the hospital and they had the house to themselves and they sat and talked and drank tea all day and watched
the boats in the channel. What had they talked about? A man she’d met, called Porter. She was so happy.
The steamer approached.
There was still time for God to recant, of course. The longer he sat there, the longer his heavy heart would keep beating and those in it would remain alive.
When the steamer rounded the fairway buoy, though, he simply had to rise. He made his way stiffly down the steps, down the grass street, through the empty town to the Government Jetty.
The Thursday Island Government Resident leant on his cane and watched the
Duke of Portland
edge towards the wharf.
Behind him he heard a bell; something familiar about the sound. Hugh Percy Beach wheeled his bicycle between the hats and parasols and stopped beside him.
‘Telegram,’ he heard Beach say. ‘Urgent.’
Douglas felt his heart lurch. ‘From Cooktown?’ he asked.
But not this time. The telegram was from Frank Jardine in Somerset again, who was hoping Douglas had received word from Brisbane about why it was taking so damned long to repair the line.
‘Thank you, Mr Beach.’
The
Duke of Portland
was now rumbling in front of him and he could hardly breathe.
He held his cane unsteadily and looked up at the passengers who’d come to the railing to look down. None looked happy to be there, but all seemed anxious to deliver their news.
The crowd behind him, almost everyone who lived on Thursday Island, held its breath.
The gangway had come down with a clatter and he heard a couple of men start with the normal cheer, and then they were hushed.
As the first passengers came ashore, they were gathered up and hurried aside. A coloured woman with two small children about her skirts, whom Douglas dimly registered as the wife and children of Marcos Perez, began sobbing.
John Douglas was hardly aware of them.
He had prayed so hard for Maggie’s face to appear, had stared so forcefully at the deck above him that for a moment he thought he saw her, looking down from the railing.
‘Maggie?’ He raised his hand.
But at the top of the gangway, it was Hope who held a little girl. It was Hope who cradled Alice, who had her head buried under Hope’s chin.
Hope walked slowly down the gangway, and when she stepped onto the jetty, the old man’s cane fell with a clatter.
And Alice Porter, turning at the sound and seeing her grandfather, opened her arms wide and leant towards him.
A month later, in the week following Easter, the Protector of Aboriginals and Constable John Kenny of the Native Police sat in a dinghy beside two 200-pound bags of flour and a number of parcels. The dinghy was rowed by the Native Police trooper Euro and Roth’s servant, an Annan River boy called Frank.
‘Tell me I’m wrong, Jack,’ said Dr Walter Roth, ‘but you’ve put on weight.’
It was just after dawn and there was a small swell off Cape Melville. The sea was otherwise calm, the sky clear.
‘You are wrong, Dr Roth.’
‘Nonsense. I’m a doctor.’ Roth was smoking and had his feet up on the seat beside Kenny.
‘I have new khakis. They’re a bit on the small side.’
‘And very dashing, I dare say.’
Kenny had believed that he was immune at last to Roth’s attempts to entrap and ridicule him.
Beyond the approaching beach, the landscape was prickly with shattered timber. A line of wreckage still
marked the high tide, and above it were the graves. They stretched from one end of Bathurst Bay to the other. Kenny had planted many of them himself, a single board in the sand marking each dead man. Some boards by now had the burnt ends of joss sticks wedged into their shattered ends, an attempt by some returning survivors to honour their dead. Bleached animal bones marked many of the graves. Those were the work of the local Aborigines.
‘Hard to believe,’ Kenny murmured.
When Kenny and Roth had first seen Bathurst Bay from the hills, there was not a vessel in sight, the pearling fleets indeed seemed to have gone.
But as they climbed down towards the bay, the truth became clear. They passed the hulls of luggers a full mile inland before they reached the beach.
In the bay itself, masts and spars sprung like drowned forests from the water. A group of men lay exhausted and silent on the beach, and during that first day others came ashore. Some of the stronger swimmers from the Torres Strait and the South Sea Islands were still crawling out of the water the next day. The day after that, though, the only men Kenny saw floating ashore were dead men. Later that week one group of fellows carrying a raving man on a plank walked down the beach from the headland, and claimed that they had been on Boulder Rocks without water for three days.
The pearling fleets that had been fishing further north, in the Claremonts, had been spared the worst and during the first bleak days they arrived to drop anchor behind Flinders Island, well away from the graveyard that was Bathurst Bay. Salvaging started even as Kenny began burying the dead.
Dinghies came into the bay to collect survivors and take them to a camp set up on Flinders Island. Roth was amongst them. He’d stumbled against the jagged end of a broken tree and a six inch splinter was lodged deep in his calf muscle. It was beginning to turn septic.
‘Don’t worry about me, Jack,’ he told Kenny as they loaded him into the dinghy. ‘I’ll be right once I find a clean knife and bathe the leg in whisky.’
By the time a lugger was organised to take Kenny’s patrol back to Cooktown, he had buried eighty bodies. The natives had come down from the hills and buried as many again.
The only white man who came ashore to help Kenny bury the dead was Tommy de Lange.
‘You’ve asked the blacks to report a white woman washed ashore?’ asked Tommy.
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing yet?’
‘No.’
He learnt from Tommy de Lange that Captain Porter’s daughter had been put on the first steamer, heading south—even though the
Crest of the Wave
had survived the terrible night, it was still in danger of
sinking all that following day. The child was to be taken to the Cooktown Hospital and Hope Douglas.
Two days later a steamer coming up from Cooktown stopped, but Porter refused to abandon his schooner or the search for his wife. Hope Douglas held Alice up to the railing and her father blew her a kiss, telling Hope to take Alice to Thursday Island until he found the child’s mother.
For several weeks, Porter searched the sea and Tommy de Lange the shore, but they found only dead men.
A month later, Kenny was ordered to accompany Dr Walter Roth back to the scene. Roth had secured them berths aboard a schooner searching for the missing
North Wales.
They’d boarded the
Canomie
at Cooktown with Euro, Frank, a hundred Government-issued red shirts, a hundred turkey-red dresses, eight dozen tomahawks, one ton of flour, two gross of pipes, 1231/2 pounds of tobacco and two hundred knives.
They’d already delivered their gifts of thanks to the natives of Bathurst Bay. This was the last visit ashore. Holding up his flask as the
Canomie
’s dinghy approached the sand at Barrow Point, Roth said, ‘They threw in a bottle of Government whisky. I do love Mr Dickson.’
He passed the bottle to Kenny, who took a mouthful just to spite him.
‘Steady,’ said Roth. ‘We haven’t had breakfast yet.’
Kenny looked along the beach, so calm now. Apart from the wreckage, and the graves, and the torn and dead trees of course, not to mention the stench…well, perhaps one
could
guess that something terrible had happened here a month earlier.
‘Here we are,’ said Kenny. ‘Back where we started.’
‘All good stories end where they start,’ said Roth. ‘You notice that? They start with a question, say, “Why does the porcupine have spines?” And then, after examining the essence of the porcupine and learning something of its character, the story comes to its conclusion—“and that’s why the porcupine has spines”.’
‘Why
does
the porcupine have spines?’ asked Kenny.
‘It doesn’t really matter. When we return to where we were, we see it differently, having learned something new.’
‘Such as what, in this case?’
Roth seemed to struggle for an answer. He finally said, ‘That Indian fellow, Thomas. The cove with the hole in his side who’s responsible for getting us up here in the first place. Ever catch up with him in the end?’
‘No. Seems he walked out of the hospital the Friday before the storm. Someone saw a coloured man who might have been him at the Cooktown wharf. He probably joined a fishing boat.’
‘That so? Do you think he might have come back up here?’
Kenny said it was hard to say, but a number of Cooktown luggers were still missing.
Roth thumped his knee with the palm of his hand. ‘There you are, then. All good stories end where they start.’
Kenny looked over the side, down into the sea. The water had cleared, but bits of wood still bumped against the dinghy’s hull. The rowers skirted around the submerged trunk of a large tree. Strands of rope flowed past like a woman’s hair.
‘I had a letter from Hope Douglas the other day,’ Roth said.
So had Kenny. He kept his mouth firmly shut.
‘Seems she’s determined to stay up on Thursday Island to help care for her sister’s child. Captain Porter’s not been quite right since he lost his wife. They managed to tow his damaged schooner back to Goode Island, but he’s still aboard. Thinks it can be repaired.’
‘Well, that’s good news.’
The boat scraped the sand. No natives came down to meet them. They dragged the final bags of flour and other gifts up to the top of the beach and to where Kenny recalled was the main camp.
The camp was bare, empty, but for a scrawny native dog that ran away with a bright white bone in its jaws.
Euro pointed along the beach to where a black man stood. The man promptly turned and vanished.
‘Another one with a bad conscience?’ wondered Roth.
Kenny sent Euro into the bush to find him and bring him back.
‘To give them gifts,’ said Roth to the trooper before he went.
Kenny hadn’t been here since the night of the storm. The graves stretched down the beach, but other people had buried the dead when they’d washed up along here. Most were no doubt the bodies from unregistered privateers who fished for shell and bêche-de-mer in the Howicks. Their names would never have been recorded and would never be known.
Roth ignored the graves and picked his way around the meagre campsite. It had been reoccupied since their last visit. He found some yams, blankets, clothing. Little else. Kenny went off with Frank and, after a time, returned without the saddles he’d been hoping were still there.
‘No doubt the poor devils ate them.’
Three hours later, Euro returned with a hungry-looking man.
‘What name belong this man?’ asked Kenny.
‘Katarra,’ said Euro, answering for him. ‘My cousin. From Normanby River. Salt-water people. Winjarko country.’
‘What on earth is he doing down here?’
‘He says all the tribes are visiting relatives. To see if they are still alive.’