Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘You must sing the chorus with me,’ Hinetitama appeals to the crowd. ‘I shall sing it now, so that you may recall it.’ She glances at Teekleman, who takes up his fiddle, and to the first strains of the chorus she begins to sing in a fine, clear voice.

  So take up your doxy and drink down your ale

  And dance a fine jig to a fine fishy tale

  We’ll fly the Blue Sally wherever we sail

  And drink to the health o’ the great sperm whale!

  Hinetitama repeats the chorus twice so those who do not know it, though there are not too many from the sound of the response, may learn the words. Then to the opening accompaniment of Teekleman’s fiddle, which appears to be in most glorious form, she begins to sing ‘John Rackham’.

  Come gather around me, you jack tars and doxies

  I’ll sing you the glorious whaleman’s

  tale Let me tell you the story, of death and the glory

  of Rackham . . . who rode on the tail of a Whale

  It started at dawn on a bright Sabbath morning

  When Lord Nelson’s body came ’ome pickled in rum

  Every jack tar mourned the great British sailor

  And drank to their hero as church bells were rung

  I be born to the sound o’ the bells of St Paul’s

  Where they buried the sealord all solemn and proper

  That very same day harpooner John Rackham

  Rode the tail of a whale around Davey Jones’ locker

  The watch up the mainmast gave out a great shout,

  ‘A six pod to starboard all swimming in strong!’

  So they lowered a whale boat, harpoon gun and line

  Three cheers for the crew then the whale hunt was on

  John Rackham, he stood to his harpoon and line

  ‘Row the boat close, lads, ’til we see its great chest

  Steady she goes now, keep the bow straight

  Or this great fearless fish will bring all to their rest!’

  The boat’s bow, on a crest, held still for a moment

  Sufficient for Rackham to make good his aim

  Then the harpoon flew screaming to carry the line

  And buried its head in a great crimson stain

  ‘Steady now, lads, let the fish make his dive

  Then he’ll turn for the top and the fight’ll begin

  Ship your oars, boys, take the ride as he runs

  For the Sperm has a courage that comes from within’

  Ten fathoms down the fish turned from its dive

  As the harpoon worked in, on the way to his heart

  Then he spied the boat’s belly directly above him

  And he knew they’d pay for this terrible dart!

  Fifty tons rose as the fish drove like thunder

  Like a cork in a whirlpool the boat spun around

  The jaws of the whale smashed through its planking

  And the sharks made a meal o’ the pieces they found!

  John Rackham was saved as the fish drove him upwards

  He found himself up on the nose of the whale

  With a snort he was tossed sky high and then backwards

  And landed most neatly on the great creature’s tail

  ‘Let me live! Master Whale, I’ve a child to be born!

  Spare my life and I promise to name it for you!’

  ‘That’s a fanciful tale,’ cried the furious whale

  ‘But how can I know what you say will be true?’

  John Rackham he pondered then started to smile

  ‘Not only its name, but its soul to you too!

  And we’ll make a white flag with your picture upon it

  A great sperm whale emblazoned in blue!’

  The great fish turned and swam straight to the ship

  With a flick of his tail threw him safe in a sail

  Then the deadly dart finally pierced his great heart

  Now we fly the Blue Sally to honour the whale.

  ‘Everybody now, one last time!’ Teekleman shouts. The crowd, flushed by the joy of their own singing, respond even more fulsomely to the final chorus.

  So take up your doxy and drink down your ale

  And dance a fine jig to a fine fishy tale

  We’ll fly the Blue Sally wherever we sail

  And drink to the health o’ the great sperm whale!

  There is thunderous applause and much stomping as the final chorus is completed, it has been most beautifully sung and those present cannot imagine how it could be better rendered. Hinetitama is flushed with the excitement and the success of the performance and she is happy beyond words for she has been rescued from a life of tedium and frustration.

  Folk crowd around her to offer their congratulations and it is then that Isaac Blundstone, at Teekleman’s instigation, places a double of gin in her hands. It is the first drink Hinetitama has had in eight years and as the perfumed liquor slips down her throat her entire body seems to come alive.

  Chapter Five

  HAWK , DAVID AND ABRAHAM SOLOMON

  Melbourne 1893

  Hawk arrives in Melbourne on 1 May 1893, the very day of the collapse of several major banks. The banks have long been carrying the euphoric symptoms of gold fever and have finally been struck down by the disease. They have extended credit to too many unlikely projects and explorations devised by dreamers, schemers, believers, confidence men, chancers and those too ignorant to understand what they were doing. The day of reckoning has finally arrived and some of the major banking institutions in the land find themselves victims of their own greed and naiveté. Having over-extended themselves with their incautious lending they are now faced with too many outstanding loans defaulting to have any hope of balancing the books or of continuing to trade. They close their doors to lick their wounds and fail to open them again. Tens of thousands of small depositors lose their shirts and in the process learn that banks are run by men who have no special talent and are as easily infected by opportunity and greed as everyone else. It is a very sobering day for every Australian colony.

  Hawk cannot quite believe his luck when he reads in the Age that an almost completed brewery project in

  Ballarat has come to a halt for lack of funds and that it is the collapsed Bank of Victoria which has financed the project. He thinks perhaps that he may be able to bridge the gap and finance the completion and in return be rewarded with a major shareholding in the new brewery.

  To his enormous surprise, the company register reveals that the shareholders in the brewery are David and Abraham Solomon. Hawk appoints a firm of accountants to look into the affairs of Solomon & Co. and discovers the Bank of Victoria holds the combined assets of the company against the loan it has given David Solomon to build the brewery. The irony is that among the many harebrained and unlikely schemes the bank has extended credit to, this one has all the hallmarks of a sound investment. It becomes a case of the good collapsing with the bad.

  With its line of credit destroyed Solomon & Co. is effectively insolvent and will be forced to declare itself bankrupt as the collapsed bank cannot finance them to completion. They, in turn, now lack sufficient collateral to secure a loan to complete the brewery project from one of the few banks which haven’t gone to the wall. David and Abraham Solomon have the makings of a first-rate asset on their hands but for a simple bridging loan and, in the prevailing climate, they have no chance of obtaining one.

  The liquidator for the Bank of Victoria will be most anxious to sell the collateral it holds and Hawk finds himself in a position to make them an offer for the Ballarat brewery and also for the entire assets of Solomon & Co. at a fraction of its true value. This will allow the bank with the sale of all the additional collateral it owns from its other loans to eventually pay its own shareholders five shillings in the pound, one of the more creditable performances within the discredited banking community.

  Over the years David Solomon has built the grain and timber business Hannah inherited from George Madden into a fair-sized
conglomerate that includes wool, coal, timber, mining stock, cattle, barley, wheat and a quite decent portfolio of Tasmanian real estate.

  It is an intelligent diversification not entirely dissimilar to the one Hawk and Mary devised over the years. But whereas the Potato Factory has always bought with cash and never taken a loan, David’s shrewd business brain has built Solomon & Co. using very little of his own capital. He has financed each new enterprise by borrowing from the banks and using his existing assets as collateral and security against defaulting. In the past he has always retained sufficient assets to recover if a particular project should fail; in effect, never putting all his eggs in one basket.

  Though there have been some close calls, the market has always held up sufficiently long enough for him to redeem himself. David seemed fireproof and the bank had come to trust his business judgment and progressively extended his line of credit.

  However, this time David has gambled everything to build the most splendid brewery in the colony of Victoria and has been caught well and truly with his trousers down. Hawk, in looking at the prospects for a new brewery in Ballarat, agrees that if it were to be allowed to come online, it would have taken Solomon & Co. from a modestly sized conglomerate into the big league. Instead, Solomon & Co. is effectively finished, dead in the water.

  Hawk is forced to speculate as to why, as an enormously wealthy and successful man in his seventies, David Solomon would risk everything he has acquired, simply to own a brewery. For a man who has shown such good business judgment it is a surprisingly naive mistake to make.

  Then it begins to dawn on him. It is not done out of simple greed as he’d first supposed. The brewery represents something in David’s mind of enormous emotional importance. The Ballarat project has the potential to have almost double the bottling capacity of the Potato Factory. The old man simply wished to show Mary Abacus, before she died, that he was superior. That anything the person he hated the most in the world could do, he could do better.

  For a businessman as astute as David, this was a childish thing to have attempted. But in some things perhaps we never mature beyond our ability to hate. Hate fostered in the young often brings with it an enormous sense of inferiority, the need to prove oneself in order to overcome the humiliation one has been made to feel as a child. The brewery was not only to be David’s ultimate triumph over the adversity of his childhood, but also to serve as a symbol of the fulfilment of his promise to his mother Hannah that he wouldn’t rest until he had wreaked her vengeance on Ikey’s whore, until he had beaten Mary at her own game.

  The day David heard of her passing he flew into a terrible temper, breaking furniture and raging for two days, at one stage invading the kitchen and throwing the pots and pans about, pouring hot soup over the cat and breaking almost all the crockery and glassware while causing the servants to run for their lives. Iron Mary had once again robbed him, cheating him out of his moment of triumph.

  With the imminent collapse of Solomon & Co. Hawk instructs his accountants to act as broker and make an offer for all of their assets. While the liquidator may have made more money had he sold each of these ad hoc, the prospect of taking a large debt off his books in one fell swoop is too attractive for him to ignore and he accepts an offer which gives Hawk control of Solomon & Co. at a bargain-basement price. Within three months of arriving in Victoria Hawk has achieved what he’d anticipated might take him three or four years to build or acquire.

  On paper it seems to be a brilliant investment. David’s assets are soundly based and simply need an injection of working capital to continue to succeed. The ever cautious Mary had accumulated a large number of investments which could quickly be converted into liquid assets. Although Hawk is forced to use a good deal of these to make the acquisitions, he does not stretch his resources beyond anything he cannot cover if things were to suddenly go wrong.

  The speculative profit and loss statement shows the new brewery should be in a net profit situation in three years and, had the bank not collapsed when it did, the brilliant David Solomon would almost certainly have pulled off his gamble and paid back his enormous borrowing over a comparatively short period. Ballarat’s beer-drinking population is underserviced and, providing the new brewery produces a beer at the right price and suited to the local palate, it is difficult to see how it will not succeed.

  In one major move Hawk has established himself as a brewer of some significance in Victoria. The Potato Factory now owns Solomon & Co. lock, stock and barrel and Hawk is in a position to destroy the elderly David Solomon and his son Abraham. For the second time in his life he has David Solomon completely at his mercy.

  His intention is to do no such thing. At last Hawk is able to achieve what he urged Mary to do for so long, to make restitution for the money they stole from the Whitechapel safe, with interest added. In fact, the value of the Solomon & Co. assets, if the new Ballarat brewery is included and paid for, is nearly eight times the face value of the original fortune stolen. Hawk calculates that it is at the very least the equivalent of Hannah’s fifty per cent entitlement with a decent interest earned on the money over the thirty-eight years since the theft took place. By returning David Solomon’s business to him he will have fully satisfied his conscience.

  However, the gesture is, to Hawk’s mind, too pretentious. There is yet another way which, if taken, will still save the fortunes of David Solomon and his family and serve Hawk’s original intention to expand the Potato Factory onto the mainland.

  Hawk decides to create a new holding company to be called Solomon & Teekleman under which he will place the Potato Factory and Solomon & Co. as separate identities. The idea is to keep Abraham Solomon as managing director of Solomon & Co. and David as its chairman, while Hawk remains in the same positions with the Potato Factory. At the same time he would hold the chairmanship of Solomon & Teekleman. David and Abraham, Hinetitama and he will own all the shares in Solomon & Teekleman with the combined profits of both companies reporting to it to be divided among the joint shareholders according to their shareholding.

  Even in this division of shares, Hawk is scrupulously fair. The Potato Factory is the larger of the two companies though, with the new brewery coming on-line, he estimates by not much more than eight per cent. He calculates the shareholding accordingly. He gives David and Abraham each twenty-three per cent of the shares of the holding company and then converts the ten per cent of the Potato Factory shares owned by Ben and Victoria under the trusteeship of their mother, Hinetitama, into ten per cent of Solomon & Teekleman and the remaining forty-four per cent goes to him.

  What this means in effect is that he is the single largest shareholder and his shares combined with those held in trust for the children will always allow his side to control what has now become a giant corporate entity. As the biggest shareholder Hawk appoints himself the chairman of the holding company.

  Hawk, going through David’s business affairs, sees that father and son are a good combination, with David the developer and Abraham a clear thinker with a cautious mind, his steady right arm.

  As David Solomon is already an old man, Abraham, upon his father’s death or retirement, will remain as a steady and wise influence in the company, acquiring and building its affairs so the next generation will inherit a conglomerate on a very sound financial footing. Hawk is aware of Joshua, Abraham’s six-year-old son, and thinks how well the next generation would be equipped to take over with Ben, Victoria and Joshua sharing the management tasks.

  It is all, to Hawk’s trusting mind, a nice combination, with David and Abraham running things in Melbourne and himself in Hobart and all of it under his own reasonably benign chairmanship. Ever the peacemaker, he has entirely forgotten the words spoken to him by Mary on her deathbed. ‘Never trust that bastard, David Solomon!’

  When David learns who owns his company he makes his previous tantrum seem like child’s play. ‘That nigger bastard! I’ll kill him! How dare he! The ignorant black syphilitic bastard! Mary, yes!
Mary were a worthy opponent, I hated the bitch, but she was clever! This is the second time that schwartzer has humiliated me! That stupid, dumb whore’s son’s got the better o’ David Solomon!’

  Abraham clumsily tries to calm his father. ‘But, Father, he’s rescued us? Saved us from disaster?’

  ‘Saved us? What you mean saved us?’

  ‘The company, saved from bankruptcy.’

  ‘By a nigger bastard what’s going to make us eat shit! You call that saved? You wouldn’t know saved if it were jammed up your fat arse!’

  Abraham sighs, ignoring his father’s insult. ‘No, Father, I don’t think you’re right, he’s a good businessman, he sees that it’s better to save us than to let us sink. It’s commonsense.’

  ‘What do you know, eh? That one’s as cunning as the devil, he’s stole from us before, now he’s done it again, the bastard has humiliated me again!’ David drops to his knees and starts to sob then as suddenly he stops and throws his head back. ‘FUCK HIM! FUCK HIM!!’ he screams. ‘I SWEAR ON ME GRANDSON’S LIFE I’LL GET HIM! GET EVEN!’ Rising, he rushes into the kitchen then outside to the woodpile where he takes up the axe and comes storming back with the heavy axe over his shoulder. ‘Out of my way, out my fucking way!’ he snarls at Abraham and enters his study, locking the door from the inside.

  He remains in his study for three days and with the axe he progressively wrecks every stick of furniture in it. He accepts only water pushed through a small window and refuses anything to eat. Despite Abraham’s constant pleas to come out, it is only after six-year-old Joshua, the apple of David’s eye, has cried for several hours outside his study door that David finally emerges.