Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  “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 eldes
t 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?”

  “I can teach,” said Lucas, a very slight and small man, “but I have not the strength for the pull. I understand what you are saying—you will have to sharpen because that must be done first.”

  Richard found a ten-foot saw with reasonably sharp teeth. “This is the best of a bad lot—Nat, or Nathaniel?”

  “Nat. Are you Richard or Dick?”

  “Richard.” He looked up at the sun. “We will have to get a shelter over the pit as soon as possible. The sun is much stronger here than in Port Jackson.”

  “It is more overhead by four degrees of latitude.”

  “However, a shelter will have to wait until after Golden Grove departs.” Richard sighed. “That means hats and a good supply of drinking water. Is there some place Joey can take our belongings before we start? I had best stay here and start sharpening.” He sat himself down in the bottom of the sawpit against its eastern edge, still shaded, crossed his legs under him and pulled a twelve-foot saw onto his lap. “Joey, pass down my tool box and then go with Nat, like a good fellow. You others put your things away too, then straight back here.”

  All of which means that I am once more a head man in charge of men who cannot function without constant direction.

  The most popular saw was obviously the twelve-footer; staring up at the log, over five feet in diameter, Richard fully understood why. There were two twelve-footers, one fourteen-footer, one ten-footer and an eight-footer. In another pile beneath the old canvas lay a dozen hand saws also in desperate need of sharpening.

  He wrapped his right hand in a bandage of rags, picked up a coarse, flat file wider than the tooth, laid it against the metal at the slight angle necessary to “set” the cutting bevel and drew it downward, always stroking toward the edge of the blade. After the coarse filing of the first section of saw was done, he fine-filed it, then shifted the saw along his lap to come at the next section. When it was all done he would have to remove the rust.

  Above him, a little later, he could hear Nat Lucas explaining the saw to Bill Blackall, deputed to work on top of the log, and Willy Marriner, who was to be the bottom man.

  “Each tooth is angled in the opposite direction,” Nat was saying, “so that the cut is wide enough to allow the body of the blade to pass easily through the timber. If the teeth were all angled the same way, the body of the blade would be wider and would jam. In due time ye’ll learn to saw by eye, but to begin with I’ll give ye a cord line to saw against. Norfolk pine has to be debarked because the bark oozes resin and would stick the saw in the cut better than glue after two rips. For your first cut ye start on the outside of the log at one side, making your second cut the outside of the log on the other side. Then, alternating sides, ye work inward an inch at a time to make inch-thick sheets until ye get to the heartwood, which ye’ll saw for two-inch-wide scantlings at first, then four inches wide and finally six inches wide for beams. ’Tis only on the pull upward—the rip—that the saw cuts, and the man on top is in control. Because he bends and pulls from a crouch upward some two feet—more if he is really strong—his is harder work. On the other hand, the man underneath in the pit gets a face full of sawdust. He returns the saw down by pulling from chest level to groin, farther if the man on top is one of those strong enough to rip up on a three-foot pull.”

  Marriner appeared in the pit at the far end of the log, where the pair would begin, and gave Richard a wry look.

  Nat Lucas was still talking, now to Bill Blackall. “There is a knack in standing, and I recommend bare feet. If ye get your foot in the path of the saw ’twill rip through a shoe like butter, so shoes afford no protection. Ye’re standing on a slight curve, one foot either side of the saw, so ’tis easier to balance and hang on firm in bare feet. Ye pull equally with both hands—rip! A pit saw is designed for cutting down the grain, so it is not as hard as cutting across the grain. Since no one in London put in any big two-ended cross grain saws, we use axes to fell and then use a rip saw to cut the logs into twelve-foot lengths, which is hideous hard work.”

  “Can ye do without the eight-footer?” Richard called.

  “Aye, if we have to. Why, Richard?”

  “It will take a long time, but I have the instruments to turn a rip saw into a cross cut saw of a sort.”

  “Oh, God bles
s ye!” came the fervent reply. Nat’s voice went back to Bill Blackall. “Sawing is a thinking man’s job,” he said. “If ye learn from how it happens, ye’ll learn to get the most result from the least effort. Only big men have the strength for this, and I warn ye, for the first few days ’twill kill ye.”

  “What happens when I get to the support beam?” Blackall asked.

  “Ye get help to shift the whole log farther down, which is fairly easy to do once the wedges come off. Then ye wedge it again to keep the sawn section together. And by the time this becomes too hard, ye finish the cut by splitting the rest of the log with a steel wedge and hammer—’tis as straight as a die.”

  A good man, Nat Lucas, was Richard’s verdict, patiently filing.

  Lucas, who used a hand saw to cut the inch-thick sheets of timber into ten-inch-wide planks and trim the rounded edges off the outside boards, had set himself up with his saw horses beneath the shade of a pine on the margin of the clearing, and was supervising a large number of other men doing the same thing, including Johnny Livingstone and a dozen off Golden Grove. Lieutenant King’s orders were that every possible available person was to lend a hand until Golden Grove’s holds were full, and that made the sawpit the center of all activity for the following fourteen days.

  Fourteen days during which Richard saw very little beyond saws, files and the sawdust-smothered figure of the bottom man. At first he had hoped to take a turn on the saw itself, but the pace of work meant that he was always sharpening, hand saws as well as pit saws. How, he wondered, was this relative handful of saws to last until more came from England? Every time a tooth was filed, it lost some of its substance.

  He had worked until dusk on that first day, when Joey came to find him and tell him there was food. They all ate around a big fire of pine offcuts, for the moment the sun went down a chill greater than that in Port Jackson at this time of year descended. They were served salt meat and fresh-baked bread (it was only six days old—Norfolk Island had been given no hard bread, only flour) and—wonder of wonders!—uncooked green beans and lettuce. Richard ate ravenously, noticing that the loaves of bread were larger and the portions of salt meat less shriveled than what he would have been served in Port Jackson.