Into White Silence

by Anthony Eaton

  I made my way across and put my head through the door of the cabin he’d indicated. It was indeed going to be cosy. Truth be told there wasn’t really enough room in there to fit in more than my head, even without the bedding and our belongings installed. Two bunks lay athwartships and a small storage cupboard was mounted on the aft bulkhead. The room was filled with a remarkably pervading chill. As I drew back out into the wardroom, Mr Rourke indicated two doors set into the aft bulkhead.

  ‘Captain’s cabin’s in there, and mine’s beside it.’

  Leaving the wardroom, he removed a kerosene storm lantern from an alcove in the chartroom, lit it and then led me through a narrow hatch in the chartroom deck, down another steep ladder and into a surprisingly cavernous space, deep in the hull and taking up most of the lower deck of the ship.

  ‘Main stores will go in here,’ he told me. Forward of this space and directly amidships was the engine and ahead of that the boiler room, coal bunker and water tanks. The dirty yellow light thrown by the lantern as he waved it around cast odd, leaping shadows off the bulkheads and the bare wooden ribs of the ship, and my breath steamed in the sparse illumination.

  Moving forward, he led me down three steps and into a claustrophobic passageway running along the port side of the ship. There he indicated a tiny, dark, cupboard-like space wedged between the water tanks and the boiler room.

  ‘That’ll be the darkroom and, if we need it, the brig.’

  The door to the tiny alcove could be barred from the outside if necessary and looking at it, I shivered, not just from the cold.

  ‘Hopefully, though, only the photographer will need to use it,’ Mr Rourke added. My tour of the ship then complete, we made our way back up on deck, depositing the hurricane lamp back in the chartroom en route. After the chill and gloom below, I can honestly say that I was much relieved to emerge back into the sunshine of a bright Hobart morning.

  * * *

  FOUR

  THE BLEAK HISTORY OF EDWARD PATRICK ROURKE (PART ONE). PREPARATIONS AND PLANNING. A COMPANY IS FORMED. DOGS AND BRIBERY. AN EVENING MEETING.

  In many ways, it is remarkable what Edward Rourke managed to achieve in such a short amount of time, especially given the conditions under which he had chosen to operate; finding men suitably qualified and willing to undertake such a risky venture was never a problem for leaders such as Shackleton and Mawson. Their expeditions were funded largely by public donations, received much positive newspaper publicity and were therefore surrounded by an air of unmistakable glory and high adventure. In the Edwardian era, a public call for participants in one of these seemingly glamorous undertakings was all that was required to draw an enormous response. Rourke, however, having chosen to assemble his own expedition in utmost secrecy, had no such luxury.

  He had his reasons for this, however, and to understand them fully, indeed to understand Edward Rourke at all, a visit to his past is necessary.

  It will come as no surprise to anyone with a passing knowledge of Rourke’s family history that he should have chosen secrecy and paranoia as the vehicles by which he would organise his exploration of the eastern coastline and his long tilt at reaching the pole. The Edward Rourke who greeted Downes in the expedition office that morning was in many ways far removed from the much younger man who’d stood atop North Head in Sydney some twenty years earlier and sworn to achieve greatness. The Edward Rourke who commissioned the building of the Raven was a man who had learnt the hard way not to trust, anyone or anything.

  But even that is getting ahead of ourselves. The real origins of the man who would become Edward Rourke began almost a hundred and thirty years before he and Downes rowed out to tour the Raven, as a young nation struggled into existence on the hostile beaches of an indifferent continent.

  In late June 1790, three ships – the Surprize, the Scarborough, and the Neptune – sailed through the Sydney heads and dropped anchor in Port Jackson, offshore from where today the grand sails of the Opera House gleam in the sunlight. These three vessels, along with the supply ship HMS Guardian, the Lady Juliana and the Justinian, had set sail from England around 19th January 1790, carrying in their holds a cargo of 1006 wretched men and women, all bound for servitude in the distant British penal colony of Sydney.

  When news of the arrival of the second fleet reached England, many months later, it sent shockwaves through British society, caused an official enquiry into the conditions under which the ships operated, and led to murder charges against one of the captains, who was tried and later acquitted in dubious circumstances. None of that, however, made any difference to the 256 men and 11 women who perished between England and Australia in the dank, dark holds of the ships.

  Of those who survived the journey, at least 486 were ill, wracked with scurvy, dysentery, typhoid, smallpox and malnutrition. Most had been kept chained below deck for the entire duration of the voyage, soaked for hours or even days at a time in sea water, stripped of bedding, clothing and any vestige of dignity. All were infested with lice, many were naked and needed to be carried ashore. Those who’d died on the last leg of the voyage were flung without ceremony into the harbour and for the next week their bloated and rotting corpses washed up on the shores of Port Jackson. At night, the residents of the Sydney settlement shivered at the sound of dingoes fighting over the remains.

  Rather than being a lifeline, the arrival of the second fleet was almost a deathblow for the fledgling colony. Already desperately undermanned and only just starting to deal with the chronic food shortages that had stalked it for the last three years, the colony suddenly found itself reeling under the influx of almost 500 mortally ill and dying individuals, instead of the healthy, fit, indentured labour and supplies that it had been expecting. The colony’s small hospital quickly reached its capacity and a makeshift one was fast established in tents on the beach, where the critically ill could be tended as they were brought ashore.

  Among the colonists who hurried down to help tend the sick and dying was Mary Kathleen O’Rourke, the twenty-two-year-old wife of Irish farmer-convict Patrick Michael O’Rourke, who’d been shipped out to the colony on the first fleet two years earlier, having been found guilty of the theft of a pig. As the Neptune dropped anchor and began to offload its miserable cargo, Mary, then in the sixth month of her first pregnancy, received word of the terrible event and made her way, along with many of the colony’s other women, convicts and free settlers alike, down to the beach to do what she could.

  ‘It were terrible to see the poor wretches being dragged ashore from them awful ships,’ she later told her employer, Mrs Elizabeth Ardagh, a matron of the colony for whom Mary worked as a maidservant, and who later recorded her employee’s description in a letter to her sister back in England. ‘Many so weak as couldn’t stand for themselves and they were thrown into the boats as you would a side of meat or a sack of oats. In the tents most lay like the dead, with festering sores and breath like sulphur, and those that couldn’t be helped with vinegar or wine we had carried to the pit for burial with the others.’

  There were two, though, who managed – perhaps through some miracle but most likely through far more human means – to survive the journey and emerge from the hold of the Neptune alive and comparatively unscathed: a young woman whose transport records list her as Prudence Chastity O’Reilly, and her infant daughter, Nellie Elizabeth.

  Prudence, it would appear, was somewhat ironically named, given the nature of the crime for which she had been sentenced to seven years of transportation ‘to parts beyond the seas’. The child, Nellie, had been born in the squalid confines of the Neptune just two days before her arrival in Sydney, and thus was carried ashore wailing but otherwise alive and certainly healthy, at least compared to the other poor souls who were spewed forth from the murky interior of that death ship. I have not been able to find any record of Nellie’s male parentage and it would appear that Prudence never gave any indication either, however it is worth noting that many of the convicts, Prudence O’Reilly
among them, had been housed aboard the Neptune for several months prior to their departure from England, along with many of that same vessel’s officers and crew.

  Either way, Prudence, having clearly secured some degree of protection and provision for herself which enabled her to reach Sydney alive, was dispatched by Governor Phillip, along with her daughter and many of the other surviving female convicts of the fleet, to the newly established farming settlement at Rose Hill, which is known today as Parramatta.

  I’ve not been able to find any evidence that Mary O’Rourke and Prudence O’Reilly ever met, though in the small world of colonial Sydney, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. The former died in 1815, having outlived her husband, who had been killed in a farming accident some years earlier. Of Prudence’s death there appears to be no record. What is beyond any doubt is that their children were at some point introduced to one another, because on 14th March 1813, twenty-three-year-old Nellie Elizabeth O’Reilly married Timothy Patrick O’Rourke, also twenty-three, in a simple protestant service held at St Andrew’s Church.

  Before his death, Mary’s husband, having completed his sentence in good standing, had earned his ticket-of-leave and with it acquired a small land parcel which, through much toil and effort, he and his wife built into a comfortable, if not always profitable, farm. After Patrick’s death, Mary – an incredible woman – not only kept the farm functioning, holding it in trust for her son, but expanded and developed it greatly.

  Thus Timothy O’Rourke inherited at his majority a sizable and well established acreage, along with his mother’s flair for managing it. He and Nellie Elizabeth were, by all accounts, a happy and prosperous young couple, typical in many ways of those first and second generations of settlers born in the colony: determined to grow and expand it into a place of which they could be proud.

  Their first child, Patrick James O’Rourke, was born in the colony in 1815 and was joined in the following years by three sisters and a brother. Unlike his father and grandfather before him, Patrick O’Rourke showed little inclination towards agricultural life and no desire to take over operation of the family farm. As a young man, it would seem that Patrick decided he’d prefer to earn rather more income for rather less effort than was required on the land. Against his parents’ wishes, he took passage first back to England and then, having decided that the mother country was, in his words, ‘nothing more than a grey mire of failed opportunity’, onwards to the United States of America.

  After his arrival in New York City in May 1842, Patrick’s trail vanishes until 1851, when he arrives back in New South Wales aboard the trading ship Frontier, bringing with him a young wife of American-Irish extraction by the name of Myra-Jane O’Rourke (née Blake), and a seven-year-old son named Thomas Patrick, known to everyone as Tommy.

  In the archives of the State Art Gallery of New South Wales is a portrait of the extended O’Rourke family, executed soon after the return of Patrick and his new brood. During the years of Patrick’s travels, the O’Rourke family had continued to fare well and his father was regarded as one of the more important landholders in the New South Wales colony, a fact immediately clear in the portrait.

  Timothy O’Rourke, now in his sixties, sits in the centre of the painting, resplendent with waistcoat and pocket-watch and a pair of impressive white moustaches, waxed and turned upwards at the tips in the fashion of the time. Behind him, his right hand resting on his father’s shoulder, stands Patrick – at around thirty-six years of age a dashing figure with a stocky but slim build, neatly and fashionably attired, with waxed hair and piercing eyes. To his immediate left stands his wife, Myra, a petite and dark-complexioned woman with her hair pulled severely back from her face in a manner that seems to suggest grim determination. Between them, standing beside his grandfather’s chair, young Tommy regards the artist with the same deep grey eyes as his father and the same serious expression as his mother.

  As portraits of that era go, the one of the O’Rourkes is nothing extraordinary, except for the fact that it must have been commissioned and painted during a tumultuous time in the family history.

  From what I’ve been able to determine, life in the New South Wales colony did not at all suit Myra. Though her background remains shrouded in mystery, several accounts of her demeanor after arriving in Sydney as Patrick’s wife paint her as a fiery and, to put it delicately, uncompromising young lady.

  Timothy O’Rourke describers her in a journal entry dated November 1855:

  ‘My son’s wife is a complete harridan!’ he declares. ‘She complains constantly – if it is not too cold, then it is too hot. If not too dry and dusty, then too wet and rainy. She complains of boredom, but is quite content to remain seated in the parlour for days at a time, doing needlework when there are far more pressing issues of household management with which she could easily concern herself. Furthermore, she constantly nags and berates my son for his apparent shortcomings and failure to provide for her. All of this I could possibly forgive, or at the very least tolerate, if it did not take place in her whining, clamorous tone of voice …

  While the elder O’Rourke’s assessment of his American daughter-in-law is far from flattering, neither, it would appear, was his eldest son any more suited to life on the land than he had been when he’d first fled the colony, all those years before. The entry continues.

  And as for Patrick – I despair for his complete lack of ambition. At every turn, it seems, he is misconstruing my instructions and in the process mismanaging our holdings quite terribly. I praise the Almighty on a regular basis that I at least have his younger brother, Arthur, to remedy his foolishness, though I am not at all certain how much longer I can allow the present state of affairs to continue …

  Not a great deal longer at all, it would appear, because by mid-1856, Patrick and Myra O’Rourke had moved from the family holding into Sydney-town proper, and Timothy O’Rourke had officially cut ties with the two of them, disavowing all obligation to them and legally disinheriting his eldest son, along with his wife, grandson and any future offspring that the two might produce.

  The city they moved to was no longer a sleepy penal settlement of tents and makeshift shanties. By the mid 1850s, with its population fast approaching 50 000 and constantly swelling under the influx of migrants seeking new opportunities, Sydney found itself in the midst of a property boom as colonial landholdings were divided and subdivided. Tenements sprang up overnight and were almost as quickly demolished again to make way for flash townhouses. The centre of town was a labyrinthine tangle of steep and dank alleyways along which the city’s sewage sludged its way towards the harbour. By 1856, when Patrick, Myra and Tommy O’Rourke established themselves in a tiny semi-detached terrace house in The Rocks, Sydney had become a heady mix of affluent and effluent.

  It is at this point, perhaps as a response to being cast out of the family, that Patrick shed the O before his surname and records begin to refer to him simply as Paddy Rourke. It would also appear that, without any real skills or visible means of support and despite having no further access to the growing wealth of the extended O’Rourke family, Paddy somehow did quite well for himself. He worked all manner of jobs, from labouring to clerking and, despite his lack of ability managing a farm, it would appear that he did have a knack for investment, especially where games of chance against unsuspecting strangers were concerned.

  This growing personal wealth led to opportunities involving various and generally increasing degrees of legality and, within just a few years, the family was able to move into a much larger home in the wealthy suburb of Paddington and Paddy and Myra Rourke found themselves mixing in ever more interesting circles. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald from 1863 lists them among the attendees at a ball hosted by a notorious Sydney property magnate, who at that point owned a significant proportion of the city’s slums, and whose descendants sit in the New South Wales parliament to this day.

  Sadly, their growing wealth did little to improve the
state of their marriage and, in 1869, Myra Rourke vanished off the face of the earth. The social columns in both the Herald and the Telegraph mention Paddy being frequently seen in the company of one Elspeth Butterworth – daughter of a publican and reputedly a lady of somewhat flexible virtue. When asked about his wife, Paddy is reported to have told friends and associates that she had returned to the United States to visit her family. One who received this excuse was Lady Victoria D’Arcy, a member of a small group of women who often met for tea and a game of bridge in the afternoons, and which had included Myra Rourke.

  ‘It seems exceedingly strange to me,’ Lady D’Arcy wrote to Mrs Mary Macarthur, another member of the group, ‘that Mrs Rourke could or would depart so suddenly and without having declared her intentions to those friends closest to her.’

  Lady D’Arcy clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so. No record could be found of Myra Rourke having taken passage aboard any ship departing Sydney at that time and, on the 18th June 1869, constables visited Paddy Rourke at his home where they discovered all of Myra’s belongings, including her jewellery and clothing, still on her dresser and hanging in the wardrobe. Questioned about this, Paddy replied that his wife had ‘bought herself everything new to make her trip’.

  Of Myra herself, though, no trace was found, and without a corpse no charges were pressed against Paddy, though some months later the naked, dismembered and decomposing body of a ‘female of clearly European descent’ was discovered in a cask in the cellar of a local tavern as it was being demolished to make way for terraced housing.

  The ensuing scandal, while not seeming to make a dent in Paddy Rourke’s now substantial income, certainly had an impact upon twenty-five-year-old Tommy, who had remained Paddy and Myra’s only child and had been brought up by his mother with the best education and prospects that her husband’s enigmatically acquired money could buy. Suddenly finding himself shunned, even by his closest friends, and keenly missing the presence of his mother, the young man followed in his father’s footsteps and in early 1870 left Sydney for England aboard the wool clipper White Cloud.