by Jock Serong
It takes me only an instant to see the two words on that plate: Sydney Cove.
4
Grayling hurried from Figge’s quarters to the small house nearby where the other two survivors had been placed. Walking the narrow path, he ref lected on Figge’s strange demeanour: the switches between listlessness and vigour; that extraordinary voice. The man was a lamp that flared in response to changes in the air.
At first, the Hamilton letter had made perfect sense to him; he’d read it the night before, squinting in the near dark. The captain’s prose was crisp and direct. His ship was lost but the cargo had been salvaged and he sought rescue for his crew. No sentiment, no embellishment.
And there the cold logic ended. He had sent his supercargo, a family connection of the trading house, on the rescue mission rather than leave him to guard the cargo. Why? Why had he sent Clark?
And deeper than that, what duty did the colony owe to go and retrieve the crew and cargo of a foreign vessel, a speculative business venture pursued in open violation of the governor’s edict to stop drowning the place in rum? How many more of these ill-advised voyages had set out, and ended in undocumented disaster? Lost with all hands around the cliffs of Van Diemen’s Land? Would the trading houses involved have reported their demise to the colony? Probably not. And the colony had no way of knowing they were coming.
Grayling was glad it was the governor, not he, who must decide whether a rescue should be mounted. It was morally right, of course, to save a stranded crew. But the retrieval of their corrupting cargo? It should be left to bleach in the sun.
The Eora were gathering in small groups under the trees on the slope between Government House and the township. Friendly greetings imitating Englishness in daylight; neither party under any illusion about what was going on after dark.
See the tall man here, a scarecrow hung on ancient bones. The natives hadn’t looked like this when he arrived four years ago. Lean, yes; not gaunt. The man’s feet were whited with dust from the path; he smiled and doffed an imaginary hat. Was he party to the outrages reported nightly by the settlers further out? Did he know the natives responsible? Did he seethe, under his grin, at the collective punishment meted out to the nearest and the slowest, regardless of anything they had actually done? Grayling tried to return the man’s greeting in good humour, as was his way.
The house was one in a row, enclosed by neat pointed paling fences laced with tall geraniums. The door formed a face with the glazed windows, framed by a hairline of casuarina shingles, that gazed out over the sea. Looking towards Home, thought Grayling; perpetually checking for sails. The row and every house in it were simple and functional: straight lines sawed and hammered in defiance of a disordered world.
His knock was this time answered without reply by a short man, with the stem of a churchwarden pipe poking from his pudgy fist. His face plunged Grayling into gloom.
‘Doctor Ewing.’
‘Joshua.’ Ewing lowered his eyes, shifted his bag from left hand to right. ‘One’s never idle in this profession.’
‘So? How are they?’
‘Oh, these two will be fine with rest. They’ve all got terrible… feet?’ Upward inflection, as if it surprised him. ‘I understand they’ve walked a great distance, but even that doesn’t go all the way to explaining it. Deep lacerations, blisters. So forth.’
‘The boy?’
‘The lascar? Difficult to assess, given he speaks no English. On physical examination there’s no significant wounds: just your bites, stings, abrasions. Distressed. I don’t know. Something stirs him.’
Grayling wondered if the boy was troubled by his close proximity to his master, the supercargo Mr Clark.
‘Perhaps he’ll settle down,’ Ewing continued. ‘Now, Mr Clark on the other hand…Ah, forgive me, that was unintentional.’ He smiled feebly. ‘Mr Clark has those hand wounds in addition to everything else.’
‘Yes, I heard about that.’
‘Says the natives speared him.’
‘Through both hands?’
‘Indeed. Separately, but more or less simultaneously.’
Grayling tried again to imagine this, and again it eluded him. The morning sun made shadows on the surgeon’s face, under the heavy brows. The shadows looked like doubt.
‘Do you think…? No, never mind. I will ask him myself.’
Even after the ravaged features of Figge, the sight of William Clark’s face was a shock.
Like Figge he was severely sunburnt, and in addition to the overripe swelling and flayed patches there was bruising, his skin split like soft fruit over one eyebrow.
His hair had been brushed and oiled and his whiskers freshly shaved, revealing a deep gouge under one side of his chin. His hands rested on the bedclothes at his sides, bandaged like those of a pugilist.
There was a softness about his dark eyes, an almost childish vulnerability. Grayling concluded it was his lashes: the upper row long and dark, the lower ones thin, almost absent. He looked, Grayling thought, hard done by.
‘Mr Clark.’ By habit he advanced his hand, then swiftly retracted it.
The man looked over Grayling’s shoulder, apparently to ascertain whether he had entered alone. He said nothing. Grayling introduced himself, taking refuge in formality. ‘I have your journal,’ he added. ‘Thank you for your efforts in keeping it.’
‘Yes, I…’ Clark raised his bound hands. ‘It dropped away, rather. Once this happened.’ His speech was thick and slow, his accent familiar to Grayling: Edinburgh, not Glasgow. Voice younger than his pummelled face.
‘May we talk, Mr Clark?’
Clark shrugged. ‘We may try.’
‘Just before the substantive matters,’ Grayling looked around, then opened the folder as he had done in Figge’s room. ‘Where is the, your manservant?’
Clark nodded to indicate a door in the opposite wall. ‘They have him in the next room.’
Grayling asked the manservant’s name and Clark told him it was Srinivas; no surname that he knew of. He was a Bengali, Clark thought; he assumed so, only because he had met him in Calcutta. His age was oh, it was maybe fifteen, though Clark believed he always got it wrong with the lascars; someone had said so. Had they?
‘Good.’ Grayling let him mumble down to silence. ‘Now, do you feel strong enough to discuss this?’
‘I am quite well, thank you.’
‘I’m grateful.’ He smiled a smile that spoke of bland officialdom, though his heart was roiling. ‘I wonder if the best starting point would be the voyage? I have Captain Hamilton’s letter here to help us with our memories.’
William Clark watched the young lieutenant hold the letter up. Whether through injury or apathy, his head remained squarely in the middle of the pillow: he chose to engage his inquisitor by turning his eyes that way. The sidelong gaze made clear his mistrust. The wrapped hands remained by his sides; his hair in seaweed drifts over the pillow.
Slowly and reluctantly, his cracked mouth opened and the words walked themselves into the light.
5
We departed late from Calcutta. Early November, and the monsoon had ended many weeks before. My family’s firm does not abide idleness, lieutenant, and especially not when the season for heading east offers such a brief opportunity for getting underway.
But finally we slipped down the Hooghly from Fort William. That putrid river carries all the sticks and broken baskets and rotting carrion of a civilisation in its mud, and stinks of it, too.
Six months ago, and my life is inverted.
I went to Calcutta armed only with a sense of duty. I don’t care what you hear, no one goes there out of ambition. Both parents and four of my siblings called to their eternal rest, so it fell to me to consider the futures of the other eight. And of the family name, of course; the company. I am a nephew.
If I’d had my way in life I would have built some cosy business in Edinburgh, married at a suitable age and sunk my bones in an armchair when Providence allowed it. Life doe
sn’t fall that way for all of us, does it, lieutenant? You look like you come from wealth, if I may say so. You’d be, what, twenty-five? I’ve got three years on you but in truth neither of us knows the world.
Within a year in Calcutta I had established myself. A place in the business and, as a consequence, in society. That society—the colonies are wretched places. The damned humidity, and the pretention with it! Off I’d go to their salons and I’d play my part, but by the time that first year was up I was done with it.
They wanted to send the Sydney Cove. The company wanted to send it because, as you would be aware, it has worked before. The livestock aboard, the china, the shoes, the fabrics, all of that was just a front for the rum. It was always about the rum, you understand?
Well, I imagine you do.
They own distilleries. We own distilleries, I am meant to say. If you can buy and sell land and ships and food here with the stuff, then making rum is simply another way of minting bullion. Oh, they knew the governor was set against it. They knew the state of this place, hooligans rioting at night, taking on the natives for sport. This Corps of yours; hah! Robber barons to a man. It is all just business, is it not? And while you might say it is a distasteful business to be in, if we did not take this opportunity, others would have. There is no room for wringing your hands in commerce, my uncles tell me. Because while you’re at it, some other fellow will empty your pockets.
Anyway. The family knew there was a fortune in it. If that boat could have held one more gallon, believe me they would have shipped it, and to hell with the consequences. I am an ambitious man, but I saw it for what it was. The lust for profit had blinded them.
They bought a banged-up coastal trader, this bumbling old cow called the Begum Shaw. The crooks that offloaded her could scarce believe their luck. They caulked the hull, replaced some of the topsails, did this, did that and then they gave her a new identity before they sailed her back up the Hooghly.
Suddenly, she was the Sydney Cove.
A vanity name: that’s the scale of the arrogance, lieutenant. Sending cargo that was never ordered—contraband, if you will, and naming the vessel to flatter the authorities.
But it was not just a ship that led us into disaster: it was people too, of course. Fifty-five of us: Hamilton and his crew, Figge and me, forty-four lascars. Hamilton was up to the task, just. Prone to bend under influence. I was supercargo under him, responsible for the company’s loot. Chief mate Hugh Thompson, second mate Leisham—do you need me to spell that? All right. The carpenter was Kennedy. I shan’t go through all of them.
The lascar, Srinivas, is assigned to me. His father was the serang. Attends…attended to his duties well enough. There is no doubt in my mind that his devotion waned over the course of our journey, as it did with all the lascars. The ones you retrieve, if ever you pluck them from Preservation, you should put them to the sternest inquiry.
The other man you have is the tea merchant, Figge. You will form your own assessment of him.
So the voyage. Unexceptional, until we turned east in the latitudes below forty degrees. Then the true character of that dreadful tub became apparent. Cranked over in the wind, the fittings would separate, or shear off. The sails tore, the stays parted. There were rats, worms, borers in the timbers and all of this I would have tolerated but for the one thing, the terminal thing. It leaked: a veritable colander. Started about a month out, as we were perhaps six hundred sea miles west of New Holland. We struck a gale from the south-east and suddenly the bilge is filling at six inches an hour. Now a gale like that, it’s seasonal. Not unexpected—Hamilton’s words. A ship constructed for these ordeals will groan and carry on, but it will prevail. But this thing, it was built for the river ports of India. It had no more business out on the open ocean than those natives outside have at your table, lieutenant.
So we’re out there, horizons all round, the sea heaving and lurching, dreadful skies. Mr Thompson was able to isolate it: the boards had sprung under the starboard bow. For the love of God, if you’re going to take the thing to sea would you not reinforce the bow? And it went on, and sickness followed. The lascars were down there knee-deep in seawater rafted with their own effluent, sloshing head-high. It went on and on and on, until we were weary of each other and our splattering guts and the damned ocean and the sky. It went on for the rest of December: the sea shouting like an idiot, sky just staring at us. There was some miserable attempt to roast up the salted pork for Christmas and I released a pipe of madeira to go with it but the lot of us were so wrung out that it ended in blows. I wasn’t involved, of course, but you see the deterioration. Six short weeks and we’re reduced to brawling and the flux.
We tried to fother the bow a couple of times without success: each time we got a sail over the side, the force of the sea would rip out its eyelets and we’d lose the thing. We had the lascars working the inside, neck-deep, jamming all manner of items into the gaps. The air below decks—I cannot describe. We nearly lost a couple of them, had to revive them on deck.
By the middle of January we’re still out there somewhere off the west coast of the continent and this, you can imagine, should be the austral summer. Glorious soft dawns and hot days, south-easterly afternoons, that is what you’ll hear people say. No such thing for us. The winds kept coming, and Hamilton said it was a year like no other. We fought the leaks until we were shipping about four inches every hour and the lascars were starting to fade. They’d been on those pumps for two or three weeks around the clock by then. It rips at their hands, their backs start to seize; you just don’t get good work out of them.
Well, we came around the south-western extremity of the continent towards the end of January and the misfortune compounded: what should have been a steady south-easterly on the nose as we headed east was an endless sou’wester. Rain in sheets. And this in a vessel that was unworthy at best and downright dangerous the rest of the time. She wallowed like a pig before the wind and she carried all the rain. Some days I couldn’t tell if we were sinking from above or below.
Hamilton was doing his best, I suppose, but the mood on board was descending into despondency. The low granite coast, all those isles as you round the cape, you saw them I’m sure. The cliffs after that, the endless miles of rock and nothing atop: those days were monotonous. And the nights! Gales pressing us against the cliffs, and the swell pressing the weight of the bilgewater through the boards so the hull was breathing through the hatches, and that great liquid mass of the rum in its casks down deep around the keel. Up every pitch and down every drop: casks hitting the hull, chains swinging and ballast shifting around. The bloody horse screaming. In the belly of every wave, this mad chorus of noise. She’d heave up again and the racket would reverse itself then start all over again.
The sails didn’t have the strength to haul the nose up once it was down—she would spear deep into the troughs and everyone and everything would be doused in cold seawater. There were cattle packed below—cattle! And they bellowed in the night, water coming down on them through the hatches. It ran on your head in the cot, got its way through joins and bulkheads and left your feet clammy and trousers damp like you’d soiled yourself, and no prospect of drying out.
The cook made what he could of it but it wasn’t much. The pork gone green, the drinking water brackish so your thirst mounted by the sip rather than abated. The lascars fainted and rolling half-dead in the passageways—no shirts, no shoes. I thought it an outrage at the time and my, how that changed.
All I wanted in the whole of creation was to get off that damned ship. But it went on and it went on until the heeling over swells was more than just the staggering of a poor-made ship. We were losing control of her. Figge took the captain aside and the next thing you know they’re sending poor Leisham up the rigging to furl the topsail. Now you’re a man of the sea, of course. You’ve seen such days and nights. Aside from my voyage from Leith to Calcutta, I had never been to sea and certainly in no way like this. It was evening, great clouds ove
rhead and the wind so loud it carried off the orders. They sent lascars part-way up the yards to relay messages, but it was Leisham they sent all the way, poor devil, and it was bound to end badly. The only surprise was that he’d got the entire thing off its yard and managed to start his descent when he was brought undone.
He slipped, lieutenant. Just lost his footing, simple as that, and for a moment the grip of his hands kept him there but then the force of the downswing ripped him away and flung him—it is the only word I can use—flung him into the night. We never saw him again.
No prospect, of course, of bringing her round to investigate. Nor launching the longboat, or the jolly. He’d improved the ship’s performance, but that only raced us away from him faster. I suppose the ocean took him by its own means, and I pray it was quick.
No one spoke about it after he was gone. The grabbing and the slipping went on without pause. I thought at the time that I should never pass a longer night at sea, but shortly enough I would do so.
Next morning the wind died—as if it had taken what it wanted—and we limped on. The fires of the natives were here and there visible on the hummocks at night, their smoke in the day. It seemed impossible, peering up from the sea, to imagine humans up there. It was bleaker on the cliffs than on the sea itself, a vertical plunge from the flat edge of the land. Not a tree, not a hill. And the fires were moving, following our slow progress, it seemed. The same groups of savages, cannibals perhaps, creeping east beside us on steady ground. Making fires, watching, conspiring at who knew what. Sometimes it could be said with confidence that the fire meant a camp, a bright spark of orange and a string of smoke. But other times it formed a line and swept across a gully or followed a ridge, too long to be a campfire but…orderly. Marked by method.