The Far Horizon

by Gretta Curran Browne

  Having claimed a preference to be left alone, he kept two or three servants busily employed answering his calls hour after hour, attempting to attend to his needs, only to be roared at again and again that he did ‘not like to be touched!’

  At midnight his servants were rescued from their exhausted confusion by the arrival of General Macquarie.

  ‘I'm sorry to disturb you, Captain,’ Lachlan said with a quiet gentleness. ‘I just came to find out, at which hour of the night, do you intend to allow the rest of us to sleep?’

  ‘It's well for you that you can sleep!’ Pritchard roared. ‘Your cabins are bigger and more comfortable than mine!’

  Lachlan glanced around the captain's sleeping cabin which was indeed very confined, and must be even moreso when the servants were in attendance.

  ‘It's the blasted guns!’ Pritchard roared. ‘I told you, sir, this ship is a man-of-war. And because of that I must share my sleeping compartment with an eight-pounder cannon!’

  He grunted sourly. ‘The reason being, of course, that some guns had to be removed and found storage space in order to provide spacious and comfortable accommodation for yourself and Mrs Macquarie.’

  ‘In that case,’ Lachlan said, ‘allow me to offer you the comfort of my own cabin, at least while you are ill.’

  ‘Oh that would be a blessing!’ Pritchard cried. ‘More space for my servants and more air for me.’ He wiped at the sweat on his face. ‘But where will you sleep?’

  ‘With my wife.’

  Lachlan studied the shocked expression on the captain's face. ‘It's not unusual, you know, for a man to sleep with his wife.’

  ‘It's something I have never done at sea,’ Pritchard replied sourly; and as his wife always remained at their home in Portsmouth, Lachlan fully understood why.

  Lachlan turned to George Jarvis who was standing by the door. ‘The captain is removing temporarily to my cabin, George. Make the arrangements with his servants, will you. And send for his first lieutenant.’

  I can't walk,’ Pritchard said sullenly. ‘Legs are gone. Ceased up without warning. Rheumatism is as big a curse to a seaman's legs as rot is to a ship's hull.’

  Nor would he allow any of his own men to carry him, not even his servants. ‘I don't like them to touch me! Makes them familiar, lessens their respect! In his own ship a captain must always be king! At least to his crew!’

  ‘Some soldiers, then?’ Lachlan suggested, inwardly admiring his own patience.

  ‘Not soldiers! Too clumsy. I don't want to be trundled about like a cannon.'

  Captain Pritchard cocked an eye. ‘What about your own servants, General? Are any strong enough to haul me forward without damaging my hull?’

  ‘Very well,’ Lachlan agreed patiently, ‘I’ll send for some of own my servants.’ He turned to George. ‘See if Joseph Bigg is awake, and if not wake him and – ’

  ‘What about him?’ Pritchard interrupted curiously, pointing a finger at George. ‘He don’t look like no ruffian but he’s still a servant isn’t he?’

  George offered Lachlan a careless smile, but Lachlan’s tone to Pritchard was cold. ‘No, sir, he is not a servant. He is a member of my family.’

  ‘What?’ Captain Pritchard looked astounded. ‘But he’s a brownie! An Arab of some sort – ’

  ‘Who may as well help you to get some sleep,’ George concluded, giving Lachlan a significant look conveying his lack of offence at the captain’s understandable ignorance. ‘Will you let me help you, sir?’

  ‘There, see, I knew you were a good `un,’ said Captain Pritchard sitting up in his bed, ‘as refined as any white man. Now you take me by my top half, and leave my feet to the other servants.’

  Inside her cabin Elizabeth lay in her berth, leaning up on one elbow, her expression disbelieving as George Jarvis and Joseph Bigg carried the captain through the mess-cabin to his new sleeping quarters, still shouting as many orders as he had breath to voice.

  ‘Avast! Avast! Avast!’

  ‘Bloody ‘ell, what does that mean?’ she heard Joseph Bigg exclaim frustratedly.

  ‘Stop,’ she heard George reply. ‘Avast is naval language for stop, Joseph.’

  ‘Look, stop wittering and avast heaving I say!’ Pritchard roared. ‘Have a care for my larboard side! Now hoist together. Hold on … hold on – you must heave me in at the larboard side! Now hoist! Now slew me round to starboard! Steady... steady …’

  Some minutes later, Lachlan wearily stepped through the adjoining door and looked bleakly at Elizabeth, the captain's voice behind him, still haranguing George Jarvis and Joseph Bigg. Nothing anyone did or said could please him.

  Lachlan pulled the door firmly shut behind him. ‘At least he is now bedded.’

  ‘Is he to remain here with us throughout his illness?’

  ‘I'm afraid so.’

  She buried her face into the pillow as the captain's voice roared on.

  Lachlan untied his neckcloth and sat down on the berth beside her. ‘This,’ he said tiredly, ‘has been a very bad night.’

  She sat up and put her lips to his shoulder. ‘My poor darling,’ she murmured.

  He glanced at her. As usual she had taken down her bronze hair and brushed it, long and loose, over the shoulders of her white nightgown. She did not look like the Elizabeth of the day. In the day, in the eyes of all watchers, she was always the strait-laced and sensible Elizabeth. But once in the privacy of their rooms, that side of her known only to him unfolded itself.

  In the adjoining cabin the uproar continued, Pritchard shouting to Joseph Bigg to fetch his own servants, then roaring at George to ‘Come back here Jarvis! I told you, I must NOT be left alone!’

  Lachlan sighed. ‘Everyone else, perhaps, but his temper will not faze George.’

  Both listened as the captain's voice barked on through the thin wood-panel of wall that divided them.

  ‘No, Jarvis, I don't want any medicine! Put it down! And to hell with your cursed calmness! I've been watching you for weeks, my lad! You have the manner of someone above your true station! Dressed like a gentleman you may be, but you're nothing more than a brown-skinned galley slave!’

  ‘We are all mere puppets of our heavenly master.’ George's voice sounded amused.

  ‘Damnation, Jarvis! Are you always so calm? Do you never get vexed or befuddled?’

  ‘What we shall be is written, and we are so.’

  ‘Well, drot! Is that what your great prophet Mohammed says, eh?’

  ‘No, Captain, those are the words of a Persian Poet who lived six hundred years ago. Omar Khayaam.’

  ‘There you go again! As cool as a whore's heart! I don't know why or how Macquarie tolerates you.’

  ‘In life as on ship,’ George's voice sounded resigned, ‘we must tolerate those we must tolerate.’

  Lachlan frowned at Elizabeth. ‘I don't merely tolerate him.’

  ‘George knows that.’ She let out a gentle breath and lay back on the pillows. ‘But tonight we are all tolerating the captain.’

  The hurricane lamp on the wall threw its usual shadows around the room, moving slightly from side to side with the ship's gentle motion. A black streak of shadow had fallen on her bronze hair, reminding him of the skin of an Indian tiger cub.

  He bent down and kissed her.

  *

  They awoke in the morning to the blissful sound of silence.

  ‘I suppose,’ Lachlan said as he dressed, ‘I should go in and enquire of our neighbour.’

  ‘If you must.’ Elizabeth looked at him tiredly. ‘But if he starts his shouting again I will go in and box his ears, I will.’

  Lachlan gently tapped on the adjoining door, and then gingerly opened it, but the bird had flown. The cabin was empty.

  Up on deck, the ship's first lieutenant wearily explained what had happened. ‘As soon as your people had left him, General, he sent for us and insisted upon being transported back to his own cabin.’

  Lachlan couldn’t believe it. ‘So all tha
t moving him in the night was for nothing?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir.’

  ‘Is his condition any better?’

  ‘His condition is the same, sir, but his temper is much worse.’

  Lachlan blinked. ‘Worse? Is that possible?’

  The lieutenant sighed apologetically. ‘I'm sorry, General Macquarie, but the captain is always unwell when we spend too long in an unscheduled port. He rarely enjoys the sight of land, except when it's Portsmouth. Like the rest of us, his world is the open sea.’

  ‘Will his health recover once we set sail again?’

  ‘Oh, certainly.’

  And so it proved, three days later, when the almost-recovered soldiers had been evacuated from the hospital in St Sebastian and returned to their ship.

  As soon as he heard they were ready to sail, Captain Pritchard rushed directly to the quarterdeck where he dressed himself while giving orders to his first-lieutenant, which were then repeated over the ship through the lieutenant's trumpet.

  ‘Stand by on the capstan!’

  Captain Pritchard pulled on his seagoing coat.

  ‘Hands aloft! Loose Tops'ils!’

  Seeing General and Mrs Macquarie watching him, Captain Pritchard touched his hat cheerfully to them, his personality transformed.

  ‘Man the braces!’

  Elizabeth was smiling with relief. ‘There appears to be nothing wrong with his legs or his health now!’

  George Jarvis frowned. ‘No, not his physical health, but I am still not sure about his mind. There is a word for it, when a man has two personalities …’

  ‘Mad!’ Elizabeth decided, linking her arm in George’s and giving him a loving squeeze.

  The three of them stood together at the rail, looking back at Rio de Janeiro as the ship swung away from her. The Sugar Loaf began to dwindle into a smudge and before them lay miles upon miles of open sea.

  *

  Upon reaching Cape Town, Lachlan left Elizabeth in the entertaining care of the British Consul and his wife, allowing himself and George Jarvis no time to spare on socialising. It took four days of hard work to load a ship with fresh water and supplies, but that was Captain Pritchard's concern. Lachlan was more preoccupied with obtaining supplies for New South Wales.

  ‘If the Government storehouses in Sydney are empty,’ he said to George, ‘then they must be refilled, and as soon as possible.’

  He hired a large trading vessel and had it loaded with six thousand pounds of flour, one hundred tons of grain, and all other essential supplies that the Cape could provide.

  His final purchase – which he entrusted to George, Jarvis, aided by six soldiers, was to purchase every pair of men’s regular shoes in every size available, eventually filling six crates; followed by the purchase of ten bales of red broadcloth and ten bales of white linen.

  Captain John Antill, Lachlan’s military aide, was surprised by this final purchase.

  ‘The regiment is well kitted-out, sir, and we have our own supplies of shoes and broadcloth on board.’

  Lachlan nodded, ‘We may be well supplied, Captain, but the soldiers of the New South Wales Corps are going to be sent back home in disgrace because of the mutinous behaviour of their senior officers, so the least I can do for them is to make sure they arrive back in England looking as good as when they left it, as well-dressed soldiers of His Majesty’s 46th Regiment.’

  When Captain Antill made no reply, Lachlan looked at him questioningly. ‘Would you wish to arrive back in England barefoot and in rags, Captain? After three years of service on the other side of the world, would you wish your family and neighbours to see you in such a state?’

  Captain Antill’s young face flushed crimson at the very thought of such an embarrassment. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Nor I, nor any one of my soldiers in the 73rd,’ Lachlan replied tersely.

  Antill flushed again. ‘My apologies, sir.’

  A short time later Lachlan returned to the waterfront where the crates were still being hauled aboard the trading vessel with the help of ropes.

  As soon as she was fully loaded and ready, the ship’s captain was instructed to weigh anchor and set sail with all possible speed for New South Wales.

  Three days later, the Dromedary and the Hindostan, carrying the 73rd Regiment, set their sails and left the port of Cape Town heading towards the same destination of New South Wales.

  Chapter Seven

  Week after week they saw nothing but an immense empty ocean without even a bird to keep them company, without even a sight of another ship, until it seemed as if the Dromedary and the Hindustan had the whole world to themselves, a world without other humans, a watery world without end.

  Elizabeth's mood had completely changed. The Dromedary no longer felt like a familiar home to her now, but a prison.

  The mornings which she usually spent in her cabin reading books and writing letters in a social manner had now lost all their joy. In Cape Town, Lachlan had bought her a quill-pen with a new-fashioned steel nib, and she used it now lethargically:

  We are all very tired of living at sea. The motion of the ship has given me a confounded fuzz in my head, which makes me feel very much out of sorts; I can't enjoy anything, I feel very cross –

  Elizabeth found Lachlan at the desk in his cabin, frowning as he carefully studied his papers on New South Wales, lists upon lists of convicted prisoners and the reason for their transportation.

  ‘Lachlan, we have been at sea for seven months now.’

  ‘So?’ he answered, not taking his eyes from the papers.

  ‘Do you think,’ she asked him seriously, ‘that Captain Pritchard has got his charts wrong and we are not only lost, but lost within that triangle from which ships never emerge?’

  He looked up at her vaguely. ‘What triangle?’

  ‘I've heard the seamen speak of it,' she told him gravely. ‘A lost triangle of ocean that is walled by thick mists of fog, and any ship that loses its way and mistakenly slips through the fog into the triangle never finds it way out again, never. “The Sailors Eternity” they call it.’

  He laid down his papers and looked at her, and now that she had achieved his full attention she voiced her worst suspicion of all.

  ‘Do you remember that blanket of fog we encountered a few weeks ago? It lasted all through the night, a thick cloud of fog, but in the morning it had cleared. And since then we've not seen even a bird...’

  ‘Elizabeth, don’t be silly.’

  ‘What!’

  Lachlan spoke quietly. ‘Elizabeth, are you still suffering from confusion in your head?’

  ‘No – and what has my head got to do with it?’

  ‘I know that we have been at sea a long time,’ he replied, ‘and it can lead to disorientation. But I assure you, we are not lost in any mythical “Sailors Eternity,” we are right on course, heading for the Bass Strait.’

  She turned and left him without a word, feeling very cross at his accusation that she was being silly. She went on deck and met Mrs Ovens who was shaking her head slowly.

  ‘It's all too silent for me,’ said Mrs Ovens fearfully. ‘Oh, Mrs Macquarie, m'dear, I fear we may be lost and no one is telling us.’

  ‘Nonsense!' said Elizabeth, tapping the cook's plump hand reprovingly as she would to a silly child. ‘I assure you, Mrs Ovens, we are not lost at all, but right on course, heading for the Bass Strait.’

  ‘And where might that be?’

  Elizabeth drew in a deep breath of sea air. ‘Oh, not very far from our destination of New Holland.’

  Mrs Ovens looked pleased, although – as she said to Joseph Bigg later – she was surprised when Mrs Macquarie had said that, about New Holland – because she had always understood they were going to New South Wales.

  Joseph Bigg looked down his nose at the fat little cook and said condescendingly, ‘It's in New 'Olland, is New Souf Wales.’

  ‘Is it? Well no one told me that!’

  ‘Well now I'm telling you, ain't I
? New Souf Wales is in the continent of New 'Olland. Right slap bang in the middle of it!’

  ‘Then how comes they say we'll be there as soon as the ship docks? A ship can't dock in the middle of a continent. Even I knows that.’

  Joseph Bigg disregarded her question entirely and returned his eyes to the open sea.

  *

  In his cabin, Lachlan was still engrossed in his papers on New South Wales, and still frowning. While studying the records of his future charges, he had been utterly astonished at the number of crimes which had been marked down by the British magistrates as indicating "inherent evil" in the culprits, and which had resulted in transportation to the other side of the world.

  A young girl of ten had filched a pie; another had stolen a lady's lace handkerchief; another a pair of stockings; another a strip of lace from her mistress's sewing-box.

  Boys who had stolen carp out of someone else's pond or snatched fish out of private rivers; cooking a rabbit in the open after sundown. The list of young men and women who had married secretly, without the permission of their masters, was endless, and the sentence unduly severe – fourteen years in Botany Bay.

  ‘Look,’ he said to Elizabeth later, ‘look at these lists of hardened and vicious criminals! Some are no more than children! Look at this one – a young girl of twelve, of a good family, who foolishly borrowed and rode a neighbour's pony in a schoolgirl frolic – sentenced to seven years in Botany Bay! That neighbour must have been the Devil himself.’

  Elizabeth was also appalled as she read through the lists. There were vicious criminals there to be sure, but most were young adults who had committed various offences, none of any great calamity, but amongst them were scores upon scores of children whose crime would be considered as little more than a misdemeanour by any rational person.

  ‘And look here,’ said Lachlan. ‘An English soldier wounded on the battlefields of Europe and left crippled in one leg – seven years in Botany Bay for stealing a broom! A broom, for God's sake! He probably wanted to use it as a crutch.’

  He returned to the records and read on through the lists of hardened criminals awaiting the iron hand of his rule.