Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  The winter straggled on and I forced myself to believe that Bergman was still on the east coast. Bess Chesney moved to town. Susan Ross had transferred her school from ‘Carrington’ in Richmond to ‘Paraclete’, a pretty, Italianate house on Knocklofty hill at the northern boundary of Hobart Town. James Ross had built ‘Paraclete’ years earlier on his first land grant, but after his death Susan could not afford to keep both properties, and ‘Carrington’ was put up for sale. ‘Paraclete’ was smaller but close to town, which she hoped might attract more pupils. Polly’s cousins, William and Julia’s children, were to move with the school as full boarders, and Polly wanted to do the same, urging that Liddy must also go with her. Bess Chesney deplored the idea, but could refuse them nothing.

  For a month Bess suffered the dullness of the girls’ absence on Saturdays and Sundays at Richmond, and then she made up her mind to move to town as well, to ‘see a little society before she was quite past everything’. Polly and Liddy and the cousins could then stay with her weekly, as before. William and Julia could have ‘Kenton’, and come to her when they wanted a taste of city life. She bought a large cottage in Argyle Street near the Scotch Church, and it was there, in August, that we heard the sound of cannons in the harbour.

  ‘Seven guns,’ cried Mrs Chesney. ‘An English ship.’

  Her manservant, John Crabbe, who was on a stepladder putting up curtains, said, ‘And here is the answer from the Battery, ma’am. Seven again. The Magnetical Expedition, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Lord, John. What do you know of magneticals?’

  It was the Terror that day, under the command of Captain Francis Crozier. The Erebus, with Captain James Ross, arrived two days later. Both ships were ‘bombs’ or bombardiers, built to carry fixed mortars for firing at shore targets from the sea: harbour entrances, gun emplacements. The mortars, weighing three tons each and many times more powerful than cannons, had such violent recoil on firing that they must burst apart the hull of any ordinary ship. Thus ‘bombs’ had triple reinforced hulls, which made them perfect for use in the polar regions, where they could withstand the great force of the shifting ice-fields.

  Jane Franklin called them ‘the Captains’; to everyone else they were ‘Ross-and-Crozier’. Never the other way around, although Crozier was several years older than Ross: forty-five that year. Ross was the taller, and ridiculously thin. Spindly, leonine, heroic-eccentric. The handsomest man in the Navy, some said. His red-grey hair sprang mane-like from his brow in great sculptured waves. His gestures were large, his talk cheerfully ferocious. He was leader of the expedition as a whole. Crozier was shorter but still tall: Irish, plump, dark, round-faced, milder. The crown of his head was bald, with a frizz of tiny black curls at ear-level. He was not quieter than Ross exactly, he loved to dance and had a fine baritone singing voice, but Ross was the virtuoso talker, declamatory, eager. Crozier, who seemed always to be watching his friend with admiring amusement, fell in love with Sophy almost immediately—too late, alas. She was smitten with James Ross from the moment she saw him, she said.

  ‘Such perversity,’ murmured Mary, smiling, watching Sophy watch Ross. It was September 1840, three weeks after the arrival of the ships and early spring again, late afternoon. We were on the Domain above the Government Gardens at the site where they were building the Observatory, one of the main reasons for the visit of the Magnetic Expedition. On this voyage Ross and Crozier were expected to determine the exact position of the South Pole, but also to set up an observatory which would join Van Diemen’s Land to a chain of such establishments around the globe. After a week’s work the former bush was now a raw wasteland echoing to the sound of axes, saws and hammering, strewn with peg-markers and string-lines, piles of bricks and timber. Men ran across planks laid on the mud, pushing barrows laden with bricks, digging trenches, carrying timber. Two hundred convicts and a large proportion of two ships’ crews swarmed like ants from a disturbed nest, with the same obscure, urgent purpose. Ross, ten yards on our left, leaning close to Sophy, pointed into the sky and described with one arm an arc to the ground. I had thought Bergman might be here, but he was not.

  ‘Ross has a fiancée in England, as Sophy knows perfectly well,’ she continued. ‘Her name is Anne. She has been waiting eighteen months and it will probably be another two years before she sees him. Is it merely accidental that Sophy always chooses gentlemen already promised elsewhere?’

  Mary Boyes reminded me of Nina, my stepmother: a long face with mild, drooping brown eyes full of amusement, nut-brown hair always escaping at the back. We had met frequently at Government House, becoming close that winter, when Boyes asked me to paint her portrait.

  ‘I can’t imagine Sophy ever leaving “Aunt” and “Nuncle”, can you?’ she continued. ‘Is it possible to be in love with a whole family? Perhaps she is deterred from marriage, as anyone might be, by the experience of her poor cousin Mary . . . But look, there’s Henry Kay, such a charming sight in his uniform. You can see why Jane Franklin was worried when she found he was with the Expedition.’

  Jane had thought Eleanor might fall in love with Lieutenant Kay, the very model of a dashing young officer. He was the son of Eleanor’s aunt on her mother’s side, Mrs Kay, and therefore Eleanor Franklin’s first cousin. Jane disapproved of marriages between first cousins.

  ‘How could she guess Eleanor would be blind to Kay’s charm, all her horizon being filled with Gell,’ added Mary, ‘. . . who begins to respond, I think?’

  ‘Eleanor is an unlikely choice for him.’ I watched Ross point again at the sky. The men planning to watch the stars, the women interested in a different kind of magnetic attraction.

  ‘No one could call her bookish,’ Mary conceded, ‘but I imagine he’s one of those men who prefer their wives to leave the learning to them. Eleanor is clever in her own way—and profoundly devout, which may be more important to him. He’d have to be a fool not to consider it. He has no fortune, while she will inherit her mother’s money when she comes of age. And some of her father’s too, eventually, I suppose. Not a vast fortune, but highly respectable. Oh, Hatty, hark at me, I sound just like my mother.’

  ‘She’s very young,’ I said.

  Mary smiled, ‘Not so young as I was at sixteen. Were you not in love at that age? Poor Crozier. He kneels at Sophy’s feet and she falls over him to get to Ross. George calls them the Three Blind Mice. He drew a wicked sketch. Ross as the leading mouse—a lion-mouse,’ Mary began to laugh, ‘wearing a Captain’s hat and looking blindfolded through a telescope at the South Pole. Sophy behind him, blindfolded too, her hand stretched forward onto his shoulder, with Crozier behind her in the same way, all three stumbling along in a line.’

  Mary wiped tears of laughter from her face. ‘So comical, but George tore it up. He knows he’ll get himself into trouble one of these days.’ She shivered suddenly. ‘It’s cold. Let’s go back and have tea. You can see how my garden comes along.’

  The Boyes had lived in town until two years earlier, at Fitzroy Place, just up the hill from Government House, near the barracks. But new cottages had begun pressing close around them, so they had moved out this mile or so to New Town, as other senior officials were doing. Hobart was changing, growing, Mary said—except the Mountain, which had no doubt been brooding over the sea here in the same way when the Romans invaded England.

  26

  BOOTH, STANDING A HUNDRED YARDS BEHIND THE BEACH AT Slopen Main, experienced a surge of joy in defiance of the vexations crowding his mind. The water of the estuary was blue, the sky bluer still. His spirits had always been lifted by these first intimations of spring, the brilliant light, the mild, lively little breeze. It was late October, more than a month until summer, and yet as sublimely fair a day as a man could wish. His eyes fell to the beautiful drainage trench at his feet: five feet wide, four deep, half a mile long and heading for the beach, and he grew hot with irritation again. It must now be abandoned. Looking up, he saw Bergman, who had been away on the east coast for
a month, striding towards him looking warm and dusty, flapping his wide-brimmed hat against the early flies.

  ‘A handsome ditch,’ Bergman said as he came up, smiling. ‘Is it deep enough? What happens at the beach end, some sort of lock-gate?’ Booth made an irritable sound. ‘Word has come to leave it. There’s to be no station here, only on the island.’ He nodded towards the glittering sea and tiny Slopen Island, little more than a large rock offshore.

  Bergman grimaced. They had both recommended Slopen Main as a site for one of the first Probation Stations on account of its abundant fresh water, a good track in from the coal mines, and a small constable’s station already in place. This consisted of a cottage, barn and stable built a decade earlier when Lawyer Gellibrand had owned the land. When Governor Arthur resumed the peninsula for prisons, Gellibrand had accepted an alternative grant, but he had already begun draining the marshy ground and cleared twelve acres behind the beach near the lagoon, a perfect site. But on an inspection visit, the Governor revealed a stubborn, inconvenient attraction to Slopen Island, and announced the first station would be there.

  In vain Booth and Bergman had pointed out that the island had no water and was too small for subsistence agriculture—not to mention the problem of transporting building materials across by boat. In spite of this, building on the island had begun.

  Bergman had then been called away, but Booth had persisted, suggesting to Franklin that it would be easier to build on the island if they at least extended the station at Slopen Main to include a Barracks and storehouse. The Governor had seemed to concede, but now, a month later, with the trench well under way and a preliminary survey completed, the written order had come: there would be no Probation Station at Slopen Main, only on the island. The station at the coal mines would be enlarged, and another established at Saltwater River, a few miles south.

  Booth explained all this to Bergman as they turned back towards the mines, passing a labouring gang hauling timber. As soon as they were out of earshot, Bergman said, ‘Stuart says you’ve resigned? It can’t be true?’

  Booth nodded. ‘Forster was here last week. Said he was shocked to find the Barracks not yet built on the island. Men living in tents and “primitive” bark huts, standing idle.’ He grimaced and flung one arm out in exasperation. ‘Not yet built! What does he expect?’

  Bergman grunted in sympathy. ‘But you didn’t resign over Forster’s idiot remarks?’

  ‘No. I kept my temper, told him we’d made excellent progress considering we’re working with men straight off a transport, mostly unskilled. Two experienced overseers when we need five. Men idle because there are not enough hammers, nails, picks, shovels. No forge. Everything dependent on the weather for getting boats to and fro.’

  Booth added grimly, ‘I wanted to make him understand that this is just the beginning—because he doesn’t, or doesn’t choose to. It’s not just this site—it’s the whole mad enterprise! Forster should be jumping up and down, writing home a barrage of complaints—but he won’t risk offending Whitehall. Simply tells me to get on with it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Told me he wouldn’t accept excuses for my incompetence. Said he’d write an adverse report of me to London—and if I continued to add insolence to my other failings, he’d dismiss me. Stared goggle-eyed at me through that blasted eye-glass and walked away. Probably intends to let Montagu deal with the problem when he comes back. If he comes back. Two days later I received notice to appear at another tribunal—to answer why I’ve given extra rations to the labouring men. Twelve hours a day working their guts out to build at the speed we need! And my judges were to be—you won’t believe this—the Medical Officer here and the Supervisor at the Mines. Men under my command!’

  Bergman grimaced again.

  ‘I wrote back,’ Booth continued, ‘not to Forster, to the Governor—saying that conditions here are nearly impossible. If I cannot even issue extra rations without an Enquiry in which men under my command are appointed to judge my orders, my position is untenable. Regretfully therefore . . . and etcetera . . .’

  ‘But you don’t really want to leave . . . ?’

  ‘Not without another position to go to. But you should have heard Forster, Gus. Threatening me, and enjoying it. When the truth is he needs me here—to get the Stations built and serve as his scapegoat. It wouldn’t be easy to replace me just now.’

  At least he hoped not. If his resignation were accepted, he must rejoin his Regiment—in India now—and Booth was appalled to find how profoundly the thought dismayed him. They turned away towards the lagoon again and entered a grove of she-oaks. Bergman said suddenly, ‘Why not come up to town for a few days? Have a private word with the Governor? Forster’s caused him trouble too. They’ve let things slide while Montagu’s been away. And now the Magnetic Expedition is here, Sir John is even less inclined to stick to his desk. But Montagu is coming back in March. Four months—which will put the wind up a few people, Forster among them.’

  Birds were massed ahead of them on the water, squabbling and calling. It was good advice, Booth knew, but money was tight again, and if the worst came to the worst they’d need every penny. A trip to town would do Lizzie good, though. Poor girl, she needed a change. She’d had a miscarriage in the winter, and had been despondent since, missing her mother. There’d be the expense of staying in Hobart for three or four nights, but after that Lizzie could go to her sister at Richmond, and he could stay a few days in barracks . . .

  ‘Use my cottage if you like,’ Bergman said. ‘It’s small . . . but if Lizzie doesn’t mind . . . If I have to go away Durrell will look after you. He sleeps in the kitchen at the back. And if I am there, I’ll use the loft over the stable.’

  They spoke of possible arrangements and Booth asked, ‘Any news of Rochester?’

  Bergman hesitated. ‘Nothing since I went with Harriet Adair to see the Carmichaels—and we . . . fell out over how to proceed.’

  ‘You and she . . . Lizzie and I thought . . .’

  ‘So did I—but I was wrong, apparently. I sent a note of apology but I’ve heard nothing since. St John Wallace tells me she has booked a passage for England, leaving in December.’

  A raw nerve, evidently. Booth did not like to probe beyond asking, ‘What will you do?’

  Bergman sounded weary. ‘Wash my hands of the whole business.’ Later that day Booth applied for leave, but he did not tell Lizzie until three days later when, with a swiftness that surprised him, the request was approved. She flung her arms around his neck, ‘Oh, you are a dear man, so you are.’

  They went up in the first week of November, Booth’s request for a meeting with the Governor having been granted with, again, unusual alacrity.

  ‘Sounds to me as though they’re looking for a way out,’ said Bergman, who was in residence at his cottage that week.

  It was so. The Governor made a muted apology; Forster did not appear. Franklin had been shocked, he said, by Booth’s taking the matter so personally. No slur was intended against the Commandant’s exemplary record. It was Forster’s duty to see regulations obeyed—a little over-zealous in this case, perhaps. Forster not well. Everybody under strain. All these confounded changes. Everybody’s interests best served if Booth would withdraw his resignation and bring Mrs Booth to dine at Government House this evening. Meet Ross and Crozier. And the Observatory tomorrow? Heard about the Observatory? Magnetic Expedition?

  Booth had not known how tightly he was braced for disaster. His shoulders relaxed and the albatross weight slipped off his heart again. Dinner that night with the Franklins was informal and easy, and he’d won another battle, if not the war. He could have returned to the peninsula with equanimity, if it had not been for an incident the following night.

  In the afternoon they went to the Observatory with the Franklins, but Lizzie was disappointed by it. She murmured to Booth that she had been to Greenwich seven years ago when she was twelve, and sure she knew this one could not be like that! But, h
onest to goodness, will you look at it! Three little cabins with a flagpole! Why, he had more books and pretty brass instruments himself at home! He was still laughing when Sophy Cracroft came up to suggest a walk in the Government Gardens nearby. She took Lizzie by the arm and went ahead while Booth followed with Lady Franklin, who said, ‘This Magnetic visit has quite restored my husband. You notice it, Captain? He’s back to his old self, merry as a cricket.’

  Booth bowed and smiled. It struck him as an odd remark. Jane was so clever; she had been telling him about the Troughton telescope and ‘the black drop effect’—and yet this comment seemed to miss the point entirely. Sir John’s high spirits since the arrival of Ross and Crozier were surely an indication of how unhappy he had been before? And the cause was plain as a pikestaff, as Lizzie would say; the role of Governor did not suit him.

  But Jane did not see him in all-male company, of course. After dinner last night when the ladies withdrew, the talk had turned to Desolation Island, one of Ross and Crozier’s ports of call on the way here: the strange cloud formations, the giant Kerguelen cabbages. Franklin’s plump face had lit up like that of a ragamuffin gazing in a sweetshop window. Booth had almost laughed. But he recognised the look that followed, too; that of a man planning escape. Franklin was desperate to return to his beloved shipboard life.

  And yet here was Lady Franklin beaming on his arm not twenty-four hours later, and explaining that when her husband’s first term of six years as Governor was over, they would accept another the same length, as Governor Arthur had done.