‘The Captain considers us astonishing. Such a penal colony! So few weapons, so few soldiers, so many more convicts than when he was last here—and only a flimsy wooden stockade to contain them! He cannot understand it. Why are prisoners allowed to act as domestic servants and boat crews? And such a ridiculously small number of solitary cells. To be sure there are leg irons, the triangle, the lash, the promise of bloody flayed flesh for those who make sins . . . er, misbehave . . . but mon Dieu, it is not enough!’
We French, he says, we do things differently. We comprehend prisons, punishment. We know what we are about. Protestants do not understand the nature of good and evil. We admit the English are incomparable in certain matters (‘but he does not say what,’ added Lempriere in a wry aside to Booth) but two things the French understand better than the English: love and prisons. No, three things: food, love and prisons. Four things only: food—which is of course to include wine—and prisons, and love, and perhaps la mode, aussi.
Captain Laplace laughed and began again, explaining to Lempriere—Booth could guess now—the adventure of yesterday. Well, it had been amusing. Booth could not help smiling himself. He and Laplace had been out together in the number one whaleboat, and at a certain point Booth had begun to sense an unusual mood among the six convict oarsmen. He had spoken to Laplace in bad French, warned him to be ready in case there should be an attempt to take over the boat (Laplace had not understood a word). And then, in English, as though answering a question put to him by Laplace, he had said loudly that of course he always carried pistols and would instantly shoot without mercy to foil any attempt at escape.
But the truth was, he had forgotten to bring the guns! Laplace and Lempriere were laughing. Booth smiled broadly and explained that he believed the lash to be a punishment of dernier resort, indicating a failure of his system. He would rather have healthy able-bodied men who could work, than keep a hospital full of flayed invalids who were an expense first and a trouble later, seeking every chance to escape.
Laplace shrugged. ‘It depends on your purpose,’ he said. ‘Is this settlement meant for punishment or reform? Or for the business of colonising? How do you dare train up a boat crew to such fitness?’ He waved his arm in the general direction of the cove. There had been a friendly race between a crew from L’Artemise and Booth’s number one whaleboat two days ago, and the French had lost by a wide margin. Laplace went on, ‘These felons can chase a whale ten miles in a heavy sea, and you trust them not to use it against you?’ He shrugged, made one of those explosive French sounds, threw up his hands.
‘The purpose of this establishment is both punishment and reform,’ Booth answered, sounding pompous to his own ears. ‘These men must eventually form the free population of the colony, but at present they must be kept at work.’ That was the necessity: building, always building. England was sending its prodigal sons in ever-increasing numbers. Booth repeated what he’d said to Arthur two years ago: keep them working and fed; be stern but fair. The Government will gain by the work, the prisoners will have no time to think of escape.
They had reached an open central area of the gardens, where there was a toolshed, water-butts, and a section of overhanging roof for shade. Here Mr Manton, the Wesleyan missionary, joined them. The conversation continued: reform or punishment, good and evil. Lempriere was talking about Rousseau, Laplace emphasising the dangers of becoming too close to one’s prisoners, of knowing them too well. Manton kept clearing his throat as a prelude to interrupting—with his usual harangue on the forgiveness of sins, probably. Booth was free to pursue his own thoughts.
Although he would not admit it to Laplace, he believed his whaleboat crew was hatching a scheme of some sort. Yesterday’s episode had made him certain. And whatever it was, Woolf was certainly in it. His eyes had slid away towards another prisoner, George Moss, when the guns were mentioned. Like Woolf, Moss was a London Jew, and the two men, reasonably enough, seemed to be friends. Nothing unnatural, a bond of race and experience, no doubt.
And yet Mick Walker was their accepted leader, and surely Walker would not countenance any such plan? He had too much to lose. St John Wallace appeared to be training him as a kind of model prisoner, for demonstration purposes. Maconochie would have approved. ‘Monstrare, to show.’ Men, not monsters. Walker must know he was likely to gain considerably by this treatment. An early ticket of leave? A pardon? It depended on what influence Wallace could bring to bear, either with Franklin or at home. But the Arthur faction wouldn’t like it.
Laplace had asked Booth about Walker after the boat race, astonished by the prisoner’s extraordinary beauty, he said. Trust the French to say such a thing out loud. Laplace appeared puzzled when Booth explained Wallace’s interest, and had at last shrugged, smiled, dismissing the matter with the remark that all Englishmen preferred other men to women, it was well known. Booth had smiled at the time, but it came into his mind with sudden unease that the interviews between Wallace and Walker were something like a courtship. A mutual pleasure in discovering each other’s qualities—although naturally you wouldn’t say so in official correspondence. Wallace had been away from the settlement for some weeks now, for Christmas and the birth of his child. It would be wise to keep an eye on how things progressed when he came back.
Booth’s mind returned to the rest of the crew, all on extra rations and treated with great leniency. He must surely be mistaken about their mood. What could they possibly gain? But a sixth sense told him otherwise. Looks exchanged . . . or rather a deliberate not-looking at each other, like guilty children. A taut readiness, holding their breath to see if they were going to get away with it. Whatever ‘it’ was.
They treated him differently since his marriage to Lizzie. Before, they had showed a stolid acceptance, an acknowledgement of his superiority not only as Commandant but as a man. They knew him to be their equal in capacity for endurance. Now there was a new kind of assessment in their eyes, impassive, equivocal. They thought he’d gone soft. Perhaps they envied him. It was true that he spent less time tramping up and down, more time with Lizzie. Those weeks of illness had changed him. Physically he was not so strong, but more than that he had felt death’s black wing brush his face, and life had begun to seem short and precious. These days he wondered more often than before what these men felt, what they thought. Which did not mean he was less diligent or allowed them to slacken, but it was probably time he changed to some other kind of work. He had written several times requesting to be transferred, applying for other positions, but it was always the same: there was nothing available at present, or if there was, others had prior claim.
Laplace was still talking about the dangers of growing to like your prisoners or be interested in them. You must keep them as you would valuable working animals: in constant awareness of your mastery. Manton spoke of conversations he’d had with Wallace about their souls, the struggle to consider each one as a spiritual being animated by a spark of the divine, and yet also a creature in bondage to evil. Laplace said it was not for a guest to criticise, but he thought the English were mad.
Next morning Lizzie was sick again. She was with child; they both knew it. He was delighted, she less so, he thought. He stayed with her until she crawled back to bed and slept. By the time he’d walked down to his office it was after eight o’clock. Lieutenant Williams was waiting for him. Gimpy Noles, a convict cook, had pleaded illness at muster this morning and been carried up to the hospital, where he told the doctor that an attempt was to be made to take one of the whaleboats.
Booth gave new orders. The number one boat to be hauled up on the slip whenever it was not in use, instead of tied at the jetty. The number two to be kept in the boatshed; number three on the derricks. All sails to be taken out of the boats and stored in the boatshed, a huge waste of effort but an excellent precaution. A guard must be on the shed at all times. Colour-Sergeant Killion to start at once, Sergeants Mawle, Fleming and Towson relieving on four watches. That should make them think.
&n
bsp; Half an hour later, Booth was on his way down to the boatshed to speak to Killion, when there came the unmistakeable crack of a gunshot and then another, followed by shouting. He saw his whaleboat, black with a red streak around it, white below the waterline, flashing through the water past the jetty with a convict crew. The muster bell began to ring. It took fifteen minutes to get the number two boat out because it had just been put away, and then get a volunteer crew in and the pursuit under way. By that time the escapees had over a mile’s start.
As they sped through the cleaving, glassy water, Booth sat in the stern, so furious he could not speak, his jaw clenched so tightly that later it ached for days. In hindsight it was all so clear and the nub of it was Walker. Which he hadn’t wanted to believe and so he’d closed his mind to it. They couldn’t have done it without bloody Walker, damn him, who’d probably had the crew ready the last few days with some vague plan they’d made after they won the race against the French. How bloody pleased they’d been about that, all the cheering, and he’d been so stupidly pleased too, thinking, well, the French will see you can have a penal establishment that isn’t just a welter of blood.
Walker must have heard the new orders this morning and known that unless they acted at once their chance was gone. It would be too difficult to steal a boat if it was on the slips or in the shed, useless to try for a quick escape once the sails were kept separately. And so
Walker had decided it was now or never. He’d used the new orders as an excuse to man the boat on the pretext of taking it back to the slips from the jetty. Oh, the coolness of it! Poor Killion had accepted this and only noticed the oddity as they pulled away, eight rowers instead of six: all the number one crew, with an extra two who shouldn’t have been there. Killion was probably just beginning to wonder about that when they picked up speed and went past the slips without stopping, and then a sail was hoisted and their intentions were plain.
None of it was as Booth had imagined. He’d been assuming that if they were going to try something it would be while he was in the boat with them and out some distance from the settlement. Behind the Isle of the Dead, perhaps. That’s what he’d have done himself, in the hope that it would have taken longer for the sentries to see what was happening and get a pursuit going. It would have been inconvenient for them to have him in the boat, but they could easily have pitched him out into the water. Whether he drowned or reached land would hardly have signified: this was the end of them anyway. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. They’d all hang now. The stupid pitiful bloody waste of hanging a man like Walker, like Woolf, or poor young Dido Thomas. If they didn’t starve or drown first.
Perfect weather for it and perfect timing. L’Artemise had departed on the tide last night and there was nothing coming in from Hobart today to intercept the bolters as they ran down the bay out to sea. Four of the eight men were his strongest rowers, and the number one boat handled far better than this bloody number two. For two hours he stared through the telescope at them every few minutes. The enforced inactivity chafed at his spirit. If he could have rowed half as well as any one of these men he would have taken a turn at the oars, sweated off his fury, but he would only slow them down. There was no perceptible change in the distance between the two boats until they came through the Heads and out into the open sea; then the bolters rigged a strange little extra spritsail—a scrap of canvas—and turned south.
‘What the hell . . ?’ he said, surprised. ‘South? Why south, for God’s sake?’
He’d expected they’d go north, straight for the Bass Strait islands, Sydney.
‘Afeared o’ the signal if they’d’a went north, sir,’ said Dales. ‘Afeared o’gettin’ took by a boat put out from t’ Neck.’
Which made sense. Although if they’d stood well offshore and struck the sails as they went past the outstation, they’d have been hard to spot. How many times had he stared from a lookout, wondering if some larger wrinkle in the fabric of the sea was a whale under the surface or merely another wave? They were heading out to sea now, away from the coast, sou’-sou’-east. Walker must know the dangers of the south and west coasts? Forty-foot waves, storms, treacherous currents and reefs.
‘P’mission speak, sir. Mebbee thinkin’ o’ Port Davey, sir? Shipwright’s place,’ said Collier. ‘Get unsels a brig an’ main prog an’ likewise.’
‘If so, they won’t bloody well make it. But you’re right; they can’t have much food or water. Do we know what they’ve got?’
Heads shaken. They could have no provisions in the boat, surely. The one great flaw in seizing the moment. Maybe a small scran-bag secreted in the boatshed, but that wouldn’t feed eight for long.
The day wore on, the sunshine became an afternoon haze, the wind freshened and the convicts drew ahead. Around three they vanished from his telescope. They were perhaps thirty miles from the settlement, heading due south now, twenty miles off the coast. He gave the order to turn back.
Some time after midnight he was at his desk, writing again. Lizzie had come out of bed to greet him and exclaim, but he had sent her back to bed.
To the Colonial Secretary—Forster now, of course, with Montagu on the point of leaving:
Sir,
It is with no little degree of mortification and regret I have to report for the information of His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor the escape from the Settlement in a 6 Oar’d Whale Boat (commonly known as the Commandant’s Whale Boat) of the eight persons named in the margin . . .
In his haste and bone-weariness, Booth had forgotten to date the letter. Now, reading it over, he scrawled it in: the thirteenth of February 1839. Except that, since it was twenty past two in the morning, it was already the fourteenth. St Valentine’s Day. Asleep on his feet, he crept into the bedroom, pulling his clothes off. Lizzie was fast asleep, her lips slightly parted. Before he fell into bed he placed on her night table the Valentine’s card and little packet containing new hair-ribbons and a box of marzipan Laplace had brought down from Hobart for him. Better not forget such things with a young bride, no matter who escaped and how many would suffer mortally for it.
20
THERE WAS A ‘BREAKFAST’ AT GOVERNMENT HOUSE ON THE morning of the fourteenth of February 1839, but it had nothing to do with Saint Valentine’s Day. It was the preliminary to yet another excursion. The weather continued glorious, as it had been all summer.
Inside Government House the atmosphere was not so cloudless. The ill-assorted house party was entering its third month, and the prevailing mood was uneasy. Too many people in close quarters, undercurrents of dissension, and the agitation of coming journeys in the air. Almost all the guests were waiting to leave the island, chafing under the strain of enforced idleness. Captain Laplace and his crew had left, bound for Port Arthur and France; John Gould was about to set out for the Wakefield Colony. The Montagus would sail in March, after which the Franklins would visit Port Phillip and the new town of Melbourne. St John Wallace was about to return to Port Arthur. Louisa was still at home after her confinement.
Eliza and I were working now on more studies of foliage, flowers, seeds and landscapes to appear as backgrounds for the birds. John Gould had also become suddenly interested in kangaroos, and while there were no true kangaroos in Van Diemen’s Land, there were wallabies. ‘Wobblies’, as the children called them. He borrowed two, somebody’s pets, and kept them in a run among the native shrubs in Government House garden, and there they grew fat while we drew them.
St John was not staying at Government House, but he was there almost daily for a series of fractious meetings about the new University College the Franklins were trying to establish. Montagu was against it. He wanted a senior school with its charter firmly in the hands of the Anglicans. Any gentleman who wished his sons to be college educated should send them to England. Those who could not afford it must do without.
These meetings were of course closed to Jane, but her husband, the Archdeacon and St John argued the Franklins’ cause. The Cath
olics, Presbyterians, and Wesleyans all wanted a College in principle—but not in the hands of the Anglicans. The wrangling looked set to continue indefinitely. It would resume when Sir John returned in a month. Jane and Sophy would go on from Melbourne overland to New South Wales, the first women to venture on Mr Thomas Mitchell’s newly surveyed road up through the Illawarra region to Sydney. Everything had been arranged and rearranged, discussed a thousand times. Now there was only the waiting to endure.
Sophy was deeply suspicious of Montagu’s new affability. His fury at the Franklins over the Maconochie Affair seemed forgotten. And in spite of their differences over the college, he and Jane were now often in the centre of a group, chatting and smiling, as on that Valentine’s Day morning.
‘It sets my teeth on edge,’ Sophy whispered, adding that you could smile and smile and be a villain.
Many outings had been contrived to relieve the situation; carriage drives and walking parties, picnics and seaweed collecting. There had been visits to the Government Gardens on the Domain, where the youngest Montagu had stayed too long in the sun and been sick among the strawberries. And the children had scratched themselves on the gooseberries and trampled the raspberry canes, to the fury of Mr Jago, the Head Gardener. After that the excursions moved further out: to the land Jane Franklin had bought in Kangaroo Valley, to the Fern Gully and the planned Native Botanical Garden.
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