Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  “Christ, Richard, ye’re a commandant’s dream! And for the love of God, will you please call me Stephen? I am so tired of this lopsided friendship! Surely after so many years it is time ye gave in, convict though ye may still be? ’Tis that Bristol prudishness, and I hate it!”

  “Sorry, Stephen,” said Richard, eyes twinkling.

  “Begorrah! Victory at last!” Tremendously pleased at hearing his name come from Richard’s lips, Stephen concealed his joy by frowning. “The marines are boiling because there is never enough rum to give them their full ration—Lieutenant Cresswell is at his wits’ end. Nor does he do any better. King does not care, of course, as long as his port does not run out. Cresswell would far rather drink rum. Port Jackson has little rum either. I warrant that a rum distillery in Norfolk Island would receive full sanction from His Excellency. ’Twould cost far less to make rum than to bring it out on storeships, for even the most idealistic official understands that rum is as necessary as bread and salt meat.”

  “Well, there is certainly nothing to stop my growing my own patch of sugar cane. This soil loves it, and the grubs hate it. Though despite the rats and the grubs, we will harvest both wheat and Indian corn this summer, I am sure of it.”

  “I hope so, for all our sakes. Harry Ball of Supply says that there are many more to be shipped here soon. In Port Jackson things are much worse, despite the lack of grubs.” Stephen shivered. “I do not think, even including the hurricane, that I have ever been so terrified as when the whole vale was one heaving mass of grubs. Not one million but millions upon millions, an army on the move that left Attila’s hordes looking minuscule. Maybe ’twas my Irish blood, but I swear I thought that the Devil had cursed us. Brr!” Shivering again, he changed the subject. “Tell me, Richard, who is attacking the Government sows? One dead and one maimed.”

  Richard studied Stephen’s face with an affection bordering on love. That he felt he could not call what he experienced “love” was not because of its lack of a sexual element; it was because “love” was an emotion he associated with William Henry, with little Mary, with Peg. Whom he had kept below the level of all thought for what had piled up into years.

  Yet now their names fell inside his mind as clear and limpid as the brook farther up across a pattern of stones, as distant as the stars, as close as MacTavish on his lap. It was Stephen, it was calling Stephen by his name. The other names came rushing up, rang on a peal of memories not all the time and all the things that had happened to him could tarnish, diminish, expunge. William Henry, little Mary, Peg. . . . Gone forever, yet not gone at all. I am a vessel filled with their light, and somewhere, sometime, I will know that love again. Not in an after life. Here. Here in Norfolk Island. I am awake again. I am alive. So alive! I will not waste my essence in a thankless exile. I will not belong to that segment of this place who would ruin it for sheer spite. Peg, little Mary, William Henry. They are here. They are waiting to be with me. And they will be with me.

  This had occurred in the silence between two beats of a heart, yet Stephen understood that some enormous change in Richard had just come about. As if he had sloughed off a skin and stood forth in all the splendor of new raiment. What did I say? What brought it to pass? And why did the privilege of seeing it fall to me?

  Richard answered Stephen’s question about the sows. “That is easy,” he said. “Len Dyer.”

  “Why Len Dyer?”

  “He fancies Mary Gamble, who will not give herself to anyone. When he solicited her attentions, he did so as any weasel would—without respect or acknowledgment of her humanity. You know what I mean: ‘Hey, Gamble, how about a fuck?’ So she told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with his tossle—if he could find it. In front of his cronies.” Richard looked grim. “He is a weasel, and needs to be revenged. Mary threw an axe at a boar and was almost lashed for it. So why not attack some of the swine? Mary is bound to be blamed.”

  “Not now she will not be.” Stephen got to his feet and blew Richard an impudent kiss. “I know how to deal with Dyer. Call me Stephen again, please.”

  “Stephen,” said Richard, laughing. “Now leave me to get on with my polishing.”

  Lieutenant King had discovered an easily quarried rock underlying all the land between the old garden hillock and Point Hunter at the far end of Turtle Bay, and also found that it burned to make excellent lime, though his primary purpose had been to use it for stone chimneys and ovens.

  When Supply arrived in December with enough convicts to bring the population up to 132, she bore orders from Governor Phillip that rations were to go down to two-thirds, as they were already at Port Jackson. For the growing Norfolk Island this news was not so calamitous; though the millions of grubs had eaten every leafed thing they crawled on, the wheat crop off eleven acres came in splendidly and the rain held off right through its harvesting. The Indian corn did even better, the pigs were multiplying quickly—as were the ducks and chickens—and it was banana season. For those who would eat fish, there was fish.

  Endurance and tenacity had turned Richard Morgan into one of the more privileged convicts, for no other reasons than that he gave absolutely no trouble, worked indefatigably and was never sick. So to Richard went enough of this new stone and mortar to build himself a decent chimney. All the sawpits were sawing flat out—what more could a commandant ask of his supervisor of sawyers? Luckily more saws arrived from Port Jackson on Supply; Governor Phillip, planning to more than triple Norfolk Island’s population, had decided that Port Jackson needed saws less than Norfolk Island did. A decision he would find reinforced when Supply returned bearing the first consignment of splendid clean lime.

  When Supply also brought more women than Lieutenant King could find a use for, Richard had a brilliant inspiration: he put six of them to sharpening saws. It was, he admitted to himself ruefully, an alternative he should have thought of long before. The work suited females of a certain temperament—it could be done sitting down in the shade, it was not exhausting, it required fine attention to detail and yet could be pursued in a spirit of camaraderie. As one woman was needed at each pit to touch up the saws halfway through each cut and yet more women were put to stripping logs of bark, romances developed between those who were unattached. Though a woman soon learned that Richard Morgan was married already and not interested in amorous intrigues.

  Two-thirds rations were a symptom of the fact that two years had gone by without a single ship from England; the long-awaited Guardian storeship which carried so much marine private property as well as tons of flour, salt meat, other provisions and animals had never arrived, and no one knew why. Every day on top of South Head at the entrance to Port Jackson the sentinel on watch gazed out to sea with painful urgency, had been doing so for a year; a whale spout was a sail, a water spout was a sail, a little low white cloud was a sail. But none of them was a sail. The foods that Sirius had fetched back from the Cape of Good Hope in May of 1789 were running out, and still no ship came. The only ray of hope Governor Phillip had was Norfolk Island, where at least some things grew, other things could be caught, and there were no marauding natives to worry about.

  Conditions in Port Jackson were appalling, the latest arrivals off Supply vowed; people there were literally starving to death, looked like skeletons. Rose Hill showed some promise, as did other areas to the north and west of Port Jackson like Toongabbe and the Boundary Farms, but though they were now producing a few vegetables, a decent crop of grain was still years off.

  Nothing for it, Governor Phillip decided after Supply returned to Port Jackson with lime and timber; he would have to send Sirius somewhere to obtain food in vast quantities. The Cape of Good Hope, he realized now, was simply not a large enough community to furnish adequate flour and salt meat, nor even sufficient animals. It sold its surpluses to the Dutch, English and other East Indiamen making port there, a matter of provisions for crews between 20 and 50 in number. To feed a thousand-plus mouths even for a mere twelvemonth was not in Cape Town’s p
ower; Sirius had returned half-empty.

  Therefore Sirius would have to sail to Cathay, where rice and smoked meats were abundant—not to mention tea and sugar, both of which would sweeten a convict’s lot, albeit the nourishment in them was slight. In Wampoa the Governor also hoped to purchase rum off the European emporiums. 1790 was off to a worse start than 1789, though he had not thought that possible.

  And in the night marches Phillip wondered if perhaps there had been a massive political upheaval in England—if Mr. Pitt had tumbled—if a Royal decision had been made not to continue with the Botany Bay experiment—and just forget about those already at Botany Bay. Not knowing was terrible, especially as the months dragged by with his nightmares still unappeased. It really did begin to look as if they were as marooned as Robinson Crusoe.

  Before Sirius could be readied for a long sea voyage, Supply had time to make yet another round trip to Norfolk Island with more convicts, swelling its population to 149 all told. The Governor then planned that Sirius (on her way to the Orient) and Supply would sail together to Norfolk Island, bearing 116 male convicts, 67 female convicts, 28 children, 8 marine officers and 56 troops. Which would inflate the island’s population overnight to 424 souls—tripled within a month, quadrupled within four months.

  The gentle, cultivated little governor knew some of his people very well indeed, particularly Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, who had served with him on Ariadne and Europe before joining Sirius for the voyage to New South Wales. Every time Supply returned to Port Jackson she bore despatches from King, all of which reinforced His Excellency’s reservations about leaving King to govern a populace suddenly numerous enough to render most faces anonymous. King was a patriarch, wildly devoted to his son by Ann Innet—Norfolk! Really! If that name did not indicate King’s innate romanticism, nothing could. And Norfolk Island was about to become a place ill suited to government by a romantic.

  His Excellency had other considerations besides, principally two: one, that Major Robert Ross was a carping Scotch thorn in his side; the other, that he desperately needed to send someone he could trust—a romantic someone—back to England in a tearing hurry. This envoy would have to find out what had gone wrong, and eloquently persuade whoever was in power that New South Wales had enormous potential, yet could not possibly realize that potential unless a little capital was invested in it. Less than £50,000 was ridiculous considering that the Honourable East India Company spent more than that per annum in bribes. King the Governor trusted, Ross he did not. Nor, for that matter, did he trust Captain John Hunter of Sirius, another possible candidate—and another Scotchman, croaking harbingers of doom that all Scotchmen were. Ross and Hunter were sour about New South Wales, saw no potential in it whatsoever, and were more likely to recommend to the Crown that the whole experiment be forthwith canceled. Therefore Phillip knew he could not send either Ross or Hunter to England as his envoy. He knew his judgment was correct. New South Wales would thrive. But not yet. It needed time and money.

  So when Supply sailed for Norfolk Island with the complement of convicts which would bring its population up to 149, she bore a letter for Lieutenant King commanding him to return to Port Jackson with Mistress Innet and Master Norfolk King, there to be drilled in the details of his vital mission to England. To take his place at Norfolk Island, Phillip would send a full Lieutenant-Governor rather than a mere Commandant—Major Robert Ross. Thus killing lots of birds with the same stone, for with Sirius going on from Norfolk Island to Cathay, he would also be rid of Captain John Hunter for months. And there would be 424 people at Norfolk Island, leaving only 591 people in Port Jackson.

  Sirius and Supply arrived together on Saturday the 13th of March, 1790. Landing on Norfolk Island had to commence on the leeward side at Cascade; after that wet, storm-tossed summer, the equinoctial gales and rains had arrived with a vengeance. The track across the island was hideous enough, but at Cascade itself matters were even worse, as the hills plunged straight into the ocean. The only way up to the crest of them was through a precipitous valley adjacent to the landing rock. This cleft ascended over 200 feet so steeply that the women convicts could not climb it without assistance, especially with water tumbling down it and the ground slippery as ice from mud.

  Sawyers and carpenters excepted, every convict was sent across the island to help get the new arrivals and the baggage up the cleft to the top and then across the island to Sydney Town, Major Ross in the vanguard.

  “I felt exceeding sorry for the poor bastard,” said Stephen to Richard over a lunch of cold, unsweetened rice pudding mixed with a morsel of salt pork and a handful of parsley. They were sitting together in Richard’s house watching the rain pelt down through the unshuttered lee window. Stephen had contributed the flour and the salt pork, Richard the rice and parsley.

  “Major Ross, you mean?”

  “Aye, the same. He and Hunter loathe each other, so Hunter made sure he sent Ross off Sirius in a longboat loaded to the gunwales with chickens, turkeys, crates, kegs—Ross’s calf muscles were so cramped that he had terrible trouble jumping from the boat to the landing rock, couldn’t stand when he got there. And no one helped him—Hunter’s men to the core. I think they fancied the sight of the Major swimming for his life, but he ain’t Major Ross for naught, fucked ’em good by getting ashore as dry as the rain permitted. They ought by rights to have sent his stuff off with him, but ’tis still on Sirius and no doubt will be the last cargo unloaded. I met him and tried to help him up that deathly haul to the top, but would he let me? Not he! Marched up it soaked to the skin with his chin in the air and his mouth the double of a staple. And marched straight across the island on that horror of a track with me floundering in his wake like a seal on a beach. The image of a horse’s rear end he might be, but ah, he is a lovely man!”

  Richard was grinning from ear to ear by the end of this tale, but got up without comment to put the dishes outside the door in the rain, then tidied the table. Of course the whole community had known within hours of Supply’s last visit that Lieutenant King was to go and Major Ross was to come, news greeted wellnigh universally with groans and curses. The holiday had come to an end, Major Ross would see to that. To the Dyers and Francises, an awful prospect. But to Richard Morgan, a not unattractive prospect. Oh, Lieutenant King had been a good commandant, but even 149 people were too many for his style. All King could do was pluck at his wig and set men to cutting timber, sawing it, and building huts out of it. Norfolk Island was less than ten thousand acres in extent, but surely Sydney Town was not the only spot where this enormous new influx of people could be accommodated? Phillipburgh and the flax was King’s only attempt at putting people elsewhere; the truth was that he liked to see the members of his extended family all gathered in the tiny sea-level shelf around Sydney Town. When Robert Webb and Beth Henderson emigrated along the track to Cascade, King had been quite distracted; Richard Phillimore off Scarborough was anxious to be gone around the eastern corner of the far beach to farm a small valley he fancied, but King did not want to let him go.

  Whereas Richard thought the most sensible thing to do with Norfolk Island was to open it up, settle people anywhere in it that they fancied. What he dreaded was to see the Sydney Town settlement advance up to the head of Arthur’s Vale, where he enjoyed the fact that there were no abodes near him, and could call the privy he had dug into the hillside entirely his own. His bath lay along the stream in the midst of the fern tree forest, a by-water he had cut and dug out so that his body did not foul the main course of water—if a healthy body could, which he doubted. But under King, he could see the day coming when Sydney Town would reach him. Not that he hoped for more wisdom from Major Ross; only that Ross was a very different kind of man and might therefore have different solutions for this relatively monstrous and sudden growth in population.

  “I take it, then, that the Major is already drying his coat in Government House?” Richard asked as they walked, heedless of the rain, back down the stream toward the pon
d and dam.

  “Oh, nothing surer. Poor Mr. King! Half of him is in raptures over this huge mission he is to undertake for the Governor, while the other half is beside itself at the thought of what Major Ross will do to Norfolk Island.”

  Private Wigfall, who had lunched with some of the new marines—among them were several of his Port Jackson friends—saw Richard coming and dashed for the pit. They were halfway through a 30-foot log and down to the heartwood—scantling time, after which would come beams. Stephen Donovan continued in the direction of the first of his dozen gangs, engaged in making sluices for the dam wall of basalt boulders, pounded limestone and piled earth. Even in this rain the dam was holding, which had surprised everybody; the rain had been drumming down for days and days.

  Within the space of four days the population of Norfolk Island swelled from 149 to 424; more extra people had arrived on Sirius and Supply than had ever lived there before March of 1790. Both ships also carried additional provisions of everything from flour to rum.

  “But not nearly enough!” cried Lieutenant King to Major Ross distractedly. “How am I to feed everybody?”

  “That will not be your concern,” said the Major bluntly. “Ye’re Commandant only until Supply sails, which will not be long once the seas abate and she can land her stores on this side of the island. Until ye go, I will defer to your judgments. But feeding this lot devolves upon me. As does housing it.” He put his arm about his ten-year-old son, Alexander John, who had been appointed a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps after the death of Captain John Shea resulted in an upward movement of the officers and created a vacancy right at the bottom. Little John, as he was known to all, was a quiet child who knew better than to make his father’s life more complicated than it already was; he bore his lot with resignation, knowing full well that this unorthodox promotion did not endear him to his fellow officers. His father, standing atop the eminence upon which humble Government House was built, gazed across the sea-level shelf at the same kind of chaos had ensued after the landing at Port Jackson.