The ink with which I seek to tell this tale is not, it is true, the majestick Tyrian purple of which Old Gould would wax lyrical, that dye the ancients obtained from shellfish, squeezing the pus that purpled in sunlight from a small cyst behind the whelk’s head, a dye so precious that only the richest & most powerful could afford robes of this colour, but rather an urchin purple—and that seems right for one who, far from being born in the purple, fought & kicked & killed for the sake of a colour that fades far too quickly. I make no apologies for what is then both obvious & necessary: that the prose which follows is also of a similar hue.
II
HIS TRAJECTORY WAS as silent & dark as his countenance, which he was later to take to hiding behind a gold mask, though whether out of shame or modesty or embarrassment none seemed to know; no more than they knew about his family or his military background. He was, like the bushranger Matt Brady who came to haunt him ever more, an enigma, though of a different kind, for where Brady was forever invisible, elusive both in life & dreams, the Commandant was everywhere to be seen. Yet none claimed intimacy or understanding, for that would have been to invite death.
There were stories, whispered and, much later, after his purported demise, shouted, that the Commandant had never been popular but was regarded as an idiot. It was undeniable that his precisely parted & oiled hair, his parrot’s beak of a nose that he inexplicably allowed to protrude through a hole in his gold mask, the slightly ovine set of his eyes, & a mouth that even when gilt-edged appeared weak & crooked, conspired to give an appearance which in power was callous & formidable, but outside of power seemed merely simpering.
The strangest of all the stories was also the most persistent: that he—like us—was a crawler, a man transported for unspeakable felonies, a lag who worked on the Parramatta gangs, who had been reconvicted & sent to Norfolk Island where he had become a fly man, beyond fear of God or indeed of any man.
When that settlement sacred to the genius of torture had been finally closed & its miserable inhabitants sent to Van Diemen’s Land, his ship had met with a great storm leading to its wrecking on a Bass Strait island. The only survivor was him, now representing himself as Lieutenant Horace, whose corpse—its white face pocked with a hundred holes eaten by sea lice—had washed up alongside him on the beach that early evening as the sky above his terrified eyes had darkened, not with dusk, but with a thrumming river of moonbirds.
Such a sight he had never seen! Hundreds of thousands of moonbirds, perhaps millions, eclipsing the falling ball of sun, all swiftly gliding in one direction on long wings that seemed but rarely to lazily flap, returning to their sand-dune burrows in what was for him always a dreadful presage of night.
Trees, shelter & comfort were, on the other hand, strangers to the island. In addition to him & the moonbirds, its principal inhabitants were fleas, flies, rats, snakes & penguins whose relentless screeching of an evening combined with the cold howl of the westerly gales to render his nights an unceasing horror.
He survived for several months upon the moonbirds’ fatty mutton-like meat & the solace provided by the one book washed up with him, Huntington’s History of the Napoleonic Wars, until rescued by two Quaker missionaries who were scouring the distant wild islands of the strait for native women either purchased or abducted from their tribes by sealers. They in turn would purchase or abduct the women, & then interrogate them in order to write a fulsome report on such abuses for the London Society of Friends, which was sponsoring their mission. He had, by the time the two Quakers rowed their small whale boat into the rocky, wind-swept crag that had been his home for so long, succeeded in metamorphosing into something else, having acquired the greasy odour of minor authority, & beneath the moonbird down that lightly fluttered over his face & clothes he had even then begun convincing himself of the inevitability of invention.
With the Quakers, a black woman, & three children of another black woman who had died, for whom the Quakers had bartered some axes & sugar with a sealer, they headed southwest. They sailed for a week across the rest of the strait, then down the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land until they came to the notorious penal settlement of Sarah Island, the subject of another of the Quakers’ investigations.
Here the rescuers & the rescued parted ways, the latter armed with a high-pitched rhetoric of penology acquired from the earnest, thoughtful Quakers, & his own, older & lower knowledge of the animality of men, two strings which when stroked by the violin bow of his growing ambition created a powerful dissembling chord. The then Commandant, Major de Groot, welcomed one more soldier to join with the undermanned military guard of the penal settlement, while Lieutenant Horace welcomed the opportunity to augment his own invention with some actual record of service.
After Major de Groot’s funeral, the Surgeon & the Commissary had quarrelled as to who was the senior official, & ought assume command. When they proved unable to resolve the impasse themselves, Lieutenant Horace stepped into the breach. Declaring himself the only man capable of maintaining order amongst the soldiers & discipline amongst the convicts, he made himself the new Commandant. In a fashion peculiar to himself, he took advantage of his own limitations by declaring that while he had no knowledge of civil law, he understood well enough the law of men under arms, & he had the pompous old Danish clerk, Jorgen Jorgensen (until his death I never saw him without the most preposterous of affectations, a lapis lazuli necklace which he claimed to have won off General Blucher in a game of skat whilst sojourning in Dresden), prepare a declaration of martial law, the first document of what I later discovered was to be a long & remarkably fecund collaboration.
Even by the ugly standards of that ugly island, Jorgen Jorgensen—in spite of his affectations—was a miserable looking piece of pelican shit, all elongated & sharp angles, a coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off. Invariably he wore an overly long & rusting sword that trailed in the dust & mud behind him, with his principal companion—a mangy three-legged dog he called Elsinore—hopping along in its rutted wake. As he walked he often mumbled to himself, & sometimes he sang for the dog, which could stand on its two good hind legs & whistle in response. Like his dog, Jorgen Jorgensen possessed the trick of whistling the same tune as his master. At some point, this minor clerk decided that his master would no longer be Major de Groot, but Lieutenant Horace.
No-one thought overly much of Lieutenant Horace taking command, viewing it as a formality that had to be observed until Governor Arthur in distant Hobart Town appointed someone fit & proper for the post, neither attribute being in evidence with Lieutenant Horace, who merely shrugged aside the disrespectable oddities of his own behaviour, such as the retention of the black woman the Quakers had left in his care in exchange for a solemn promise of moral & spiritual enlightenment. The convicts called her Twopenny Sal, but the Commandant—as he soon insisted on being called—with whom she first found work as a domestick, then later favour as a mistress, insisted on calling her the Mulatto. In his mind perhaps such miscegenation with someone of mixed race origins was somehow more acceptable than that with a woman so obviously a Van Diemonian native. In this, as in so many other things—such as his own unfitness for the post—he at first laughed along with everyone else, saying, ‘Touch me, see, I am just like you, you can touch me.’ But even as he spoke the moonbird down was falling away from his face & something else, like rock, was being revealed.
III
IN THE BEGINNING, as at the end, it was as the Commandant had long suspected: he was immortal. It was said by the handful who knew where the penal colony’s Registry was that even there no precise records were to be found of the boat on which he arrived, or, for that matter, of his military history, for Jorgen Jorgensen had many years before, on the order of Major de Groot, checked through all the shipping registers & found no mention of a Lieutenant Horace.
After the Major’s untimely demise, rumoured to have been the consequence of poison, official documents were found (though, admit
tedly, these were loose inserts in Major de Groot’s letter books) that referred to letters signed by Major de Groot appointing Lieutenant Horace as his successor. Subsequently, according to an addendum in the margins, these letters had been unfortunately lost in a small fire that had taken hold of the Registry immediately after Lieutenant Horace assumed control of the settlement.
At first the new Commandant was a model of obsequiousness to his distant superiors. He had Jorgen Jorgensen pen long reports on his various improvements to the machinery of penal administration—his dietary reforms that made less food go further in ways guaranteed only to enhance the health & vigour of his convict charges; his new individual sleeping cages the length of a man & the height of a forearm intended to prevent unspeakable sin amongst the convicts; his rocking chamber pot with its elliptical bottom that needed two hands to successfully operate, thereby rendering impossible the crime of Onan, who needlessly spilled his seed in the sand.
No replies ever came.
No word of praise, of encouragement, or even, for that matter, of approbation or admonishment.
The tone of the letters the Commandant had Jorgen Jorgensen write began to alter. He began listing the problems of trying to run a settlement composed of the worst types of convicts engaging in unspeakable sin with soldiers of almost equally bad character—the latter only distinguishable from the former by the dull pink of their faded red uniforms; the dilemma of trying to ensure the settlement’s survival, much less—as he was expected—making it pay its way, when he was given so few tools, no skilled labourers to make boats or to build houses, no cash & no spare food that might be bartered with passing traders. He begged for a little more in the way of rations. A few more soldiers. Some officers of some calibre, rather than as they routinely were, in disgrace for having defrauded regimental funds or having slept with the commanding officer’s wife on Mauritius, or, worse yet, the commanding officer himself in Cape Town.
No replies & no supplies & no reinforcements were forthcoming.
His letters grew petulant, & then angry, & finally insulting. A short, curt memorandum arrived in reply. It was signed by an underling of the Colonial Secretary. It repeated the terms of his commission as an officer & reminded him of the sacred duty of his role until such time as the Governor appointed a successor to Major de Groot.
It became clear to the Commandant that his letters, for all the good they seemed to do, might as well have been thrown into the ocean & eaten by the huge whales out beyond the heads, whose almost hourly passing in large pods was signalled by distant small rainbows of whale spout. It was at this point that the Commandant entered a slough of despond lasting several months, during which he neither shaved nor changed clothes.
When he emerged from the winter of his solitude he was wearing a gold mask that perennially smiled & other evidence of the profound effect his long isolation following his shipwreck had had upon his mind—a magnificent new blue uniform, reminiscent of that worn by Marshall Ney at the battle of Waterloo, featuring oversized feathered epaulettes startlingly similar in form to outstretched moonbird wings. Whether he adopted the mask simply to hide who he had been & prevent the possibility of exposure as an impostor, or whether he wore it to invent himself as someone who was neither Lieutenant Horace nor yet whoever it was he had been before the shipwreck, but as a new creature altogether, the Commandant, I know not.
All I can report was that the smiling mask was soon everywhere, glinting, gleeful, reflecting to us our own greed & desires, so omnipresent that no-one seemed to notice when it quietly & quickly usurped the broad arrow as the symbol of government property, stencilled on barrels & tools alike, later branded on our forearms, in a spectacular fusion of state & self & concealment so characteristick of the great man.
The Commandant had the first of innumerable long conversations with Jorgen Jorgensen after which the Dane took to penning stolid reports for the Colonial Office of steady, if unspectacular growth. In his reports progress was hampered, but never halted nor overly impeded, by the inevitable problems of isolation, of indolent & incompetent convict workers, of shortages of skilled workmen & tools. It was a picture of a well-led, respectable establishment achieving small profits & some reclamation of both land & criminal souls. But only Jorgen Jorgensen noticed that the saliva that glistened in the recesses of the Commandant’s gilded lips was black from the mercury he was already taking to treat his syphilis.
The Commandant then ordered the commissariat store to be opened up for trade. He ordered that the settlement’s entire stock of barrels of salted pork be traded with a Nantucket whaling merchant for two old whalers, which he sent out with new convict crews in search of the great fish of Jonah. One sank with all hands lost just out of Hells Gates, but the other returned to a starving settlement living on rationed flour & fish, with two humpback whales in its hold, & the Commandant began a trade in whale oil.
With his profits he bought more boats, & had others go back to the island upon which he had been marooned & hunt the moonbird for its flesh & the seals for their skins. He formed those convicts he trusted into an elite guard, had them shoot dead half his soldiers, & by not informing the colonial authorities, kept receiving their wages as dead-pay. He doubled the rate of felling of Huon pine, & halved the amount he sent back to the colonial authorities, then as trade grew brisk, quadrupled his felling & quartered the amount he sent now only as a forlorn tribute to Hobart Town, along with letters speaking of the almost insurmountable problems of poor tools, sawyers of no experience, epidemics of unspeakable sin, & weather so awful the rivers were frozen for six months of the year.
His trading grew exuberant & exotic: a score of barrels of whale oil for the decadent scent of a single overripe guava, shipwrights’ tools for iguana eggs, a whale boat for a large cargo of green bananas, much prized redcoat uniforms for silk turbans.
In spite of what the Portuguese traders told their Brazilian sailors under their breath as they emptied their ship holds of Moluccan feathers, & contrary to what the barefoot convicts grunted to each other during their cruel, unending ardour of hauling huge Huon pine logs through trackless rainforest to the frozen river’s edge, not all his trade was complete madness.
For the pine, the oil of which he claimed could be used as an aphrodisiac & a cure for the clap, making it a doubly virtuous wonder that both promoted & protected its adherents in the torrents of love, he extracted the finest silk cloth from India. For a horde of sulphur-crested cockatoos he had painted to resemble baby macaws & trained to recite melancholic verse in the manner of Pope & several songs of passion in the earthier argot of their convict trainers, he gained fourteen Brazilian caravels & seven cannons, which he promptly exchanged for a principality in Sarawak that a Levantine merchant had won in a game of tarok on his way south to the fabled kingdom of Sarah Island, the subsequent sale of which financed his palace & the new wharf.
For the continent of Australia over which he had recently claimed sovereignty by having Musha Pug row over to the mainland & there plant the new flag of the Principality of Sarah Island upon an abandoned beach, he obtained a fleet of Siamese girls. At the beginning they set up their trade in groves lined with manfern fronds, but when the evening light grew thin & their groves grew damp, the Siamese girls took to gathering with their manfern fronds along the protected northern wall of the Penitentiary. There they touted for trade & called upon the crawlers to show that they were real men, & drank their semen in the belief that it cured the consumption that had become a plague among so many of them.
His reputation grew, his name began to be spoken far & wide, & boats began appearing with all manner of traders, merchants, beggars & charlatans. The Commandant welcomed them all, & what started off as furtive trading along the southern stockade wall, administered but not controlled by the felons of a Saturday afternoon, grew into a market & the market into a bazaar & the bazaar into the idea of a nation. ‘For what is a nation?’ asked the Commandant of the Surgeon, his high voice weird & bowing as th
e old saw he was repeating, ‘but a people with a trading fleet? A language but a dialect with an army? A literature but words sold as provenance?’
IV
THE COMMANDANT’S IMPERSONATION of Lieutenant Horace had one great & unforeseen consequence: the receipt of the dead man’s mail. This was unremarkable & sporadic, save for a relentless river of letters from the dead lieutenant’s sister, Miss Anne. From certain asides in her writings, the Commandant gathered the impression that Miss Anne’s original brother, before being bored in his death by sea lice, was bored in his life by Miss Anne’s letters. He rarely, if ever, had responded. But Miss Anne’s surrogate brother, the Commandant, proved more dedicated a correspondent. He wrote regularly & enthusiastically, sometimes sending two or even three letters to her every one.
Perhaps at the beginning he was intending to use the letters as a small library of relevant personal information to help in his impersonation of Miss Anne’s dead brother. Instead of himself, he filled his letters—copies of which I many years after came across in a letter book—with questions seeking to tease out details of her family, her world, her interests & passions & enthusiasms.
But the correspondence rapidly took on a life of its own. Whether it was directly implied by her writing, or simply inferred by the Commandant in his reading, he came to believe that his newly found sister was an utterly remarkable being. Miss Anne, delighting in her brother’s fresh interest & growing appreciation of her, wrote more, & wrote more closely to her heart. So changed was Miss Anne’s tone, that it almost seemed to the Commandant that they were being written by an entirely different person, one he now recognised as his true sibling. And as her letters altered, the Commandant no longer found them a necessary task of research, but rather a passion demanding demonstration. For as his confidence in the impregnability of his own position as the leader of the island had grown, so had his sense of isolation from others. Only in Miss Anne’s letters was he able to find both a source of intimacy & inspiration that demanded, he increasingly felt, some requital in kind.
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish Page 12