Wild Island

by Jennifer Livett

  Constable Walker took them downriver in a skiff and landed them at Black Snake Inn, where they could meet Cox’s coach going north. Mr Stephen assured them the matter would be kept entirely quiet, in everyone’s interests. At the Black Snake there was difficulty over the coach seats, and then just as they were boarding the diligence at last, they saw Booth! She was so ill with worry she had had pains in her chest all the way home. When they reached ‘Rutherlea’ again, she had never been so glad to see any place in her life.

  St John Wallace had found them by accident. He had read a pamphlet against transportation written by her father, and called at the school while he was in the north. Her father introduced several of the schoolmasters, naming among them Mr Rowland Fairfax.

  Rowland died two years after Catherine told me this story. Catherine and I corresponded until she died twelve months ago. Her daughter Maria had only the one child, a boy, a great comfort to his mother and grandmother, but he disappointed his father’s family by having no interest in farming. He converted to the Church of Rome in his twenties, and by the age of thirty-four was a Catholic priest in Melbourne, where many lady parishioners apparently sighed over his dark good looks, which were believed to be of Italian origin. They were devastated when he died of a fever on a visit to Rome. They are all three dead now, he, Catherine and Maria, and I have kept Catherine’s secret, as I promised, until it can harm no one.

  Lord Stanley to Sir John Franklin,

  Your proceedings in this case of Mr Montagu do not appear to me to have been well judged, and your suspension of him from office is not, in my opinion, sufficiently vindicated. I find no reason to impute to Mr Montagu any unworthy or dishonest acts. He is entitled to be entirely acquitted of blame. It is gratifying to me to have it in my power to offer to him the vacant office of Colonial Secretary at the Cape of Good Hope, which he has cheerfully accepted. I have undiminished confidence in his disposition and ability.

  This letter began to be distributed on street corners in Hobart that autumn. The Franklins refused to believe it was genuine, since they had heard nothing further from England, but a month later they received the original. Lord Stanley had given a copy to Montagu, and only later posted it to Sir John. The printed version had come from a copy that Montagu, in his triumph, sent straight to Forster.

  Franklin was stoical, Jane incredulous. How could this happen? How dare Lord Stanley treat her husband in such a fashion, lay him open to such public humiliation? She asked the question (more than once) of Mr Bicheno, who now arrived to take the position of Colonial Secretary. He could supply no answer. He was large and benign, similar to Sir John in appearance. They made, as Jane said, ‘a droll-looking pair, so alike in age and size and bonhomie’. Had they always been working together, she added, their time in the island would have had a happier outcome. This new contentment did not quite make up for the humiliations of the ‘Black Book’, a volume Bicheno had unwittingly brought with him, sent from Montagu to Swanston, a compilation of documents supposed to prove the Franklins’ depravity, beginning with Montagu’s claim that Lady Franklin was ‘a scheming dangerous woman, with an altogether malign influence on her imbecile husband’. It was handed about among the Arthurites and a copy ‘for the better information of the public’ was available for perusal at the Derwent Bank.

  Now the Franklins waited to discover whether Sir John would be replaced. They had expected this to be mentioned in Lord Stanley’s letter, but there was no news until, in The London Times dated the 24th February 1843 and received in Hobart in July, Jane saw a notice that Sir John Eardley Wilmot had been appointed Governor of Van Diemen’s Land.

  Two weeks after she saw it, Sir Eardley Wilmot arrived. By error he landed on an unfrequented part of the coast—and still Sir John had received no letter of official notification that he was to be recalled. At last the Gilmore came in with it, a duplicate; the original arrived on the Eamont a day later. Forced to make a hurried, undignified, inconvenient exit from the ‘Palace’, the Franklins went to stay with Ainsworth, and later moved to the cottage at New Norfolk. Jane was ill with suppressed anger, Sir John almost bemused, it seemed, by the sudden turn of events. In the meantime, the Rajah returned, Miss Kezia Hayter and Captain Ferguson were married, and the vessel sailed again with the newlyweds and the Franklin party aboard. At Port Phillip the Franklins transferred to the Flying Fish, bound for England.

  Thea called us Ma and Pa, even though she knew—we made no secret of it—that Louisa was her real mother. We said nothing about McLeod. I still don’t think that was wrong. We finished rebuilding the cottage I’d bought from old Mr Coombes, adding several more rooms, and moved there. Fludde reclaimed her daughter Betty from the Orphanage, and she was brought up with Thea. A quiet child with light-brown hair and her mother’s swift, interrogating, self-sufficient look, Betty, more than Thea, always wanted to draw when I drew, and read avidly from the moment she learned to. Thea would throw herself sprawling in a chair and read for a whole afternoon with an intent expression, but what she loved most was animals and an active life of walking and riding.

  Every summer we spent two months living on Gus’s land beside the Huon River, in a little cabin that always reminded me of Dinah Carmichael’s: a great fireplace made of stones, curtained-off bed-places and a long table with chairs. The children of the family living nearest us there were three boys, who grew up almost as brothers with Thea and Betty. We rowed on the lucent tea-coloured water among the reeds and moorhens, walked on the quiet tracks between the great gums, read away wet days before the fire. Here I learned to love the landscape I had once feared, and to see in it not always beauty, but glimpses of the sublime.

  31

  IN 1851, SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE FRANKLINS LEFT VAN DIEMEN’S Land, Gus, Thea, and I travelled to England for a year. Tasmania had sent three hundred and ninety-four items to the Great Exhibition in London, which Gus was eager to visit, and we thought Thea old enough now to enjoy the travel and benefit by a stay in the great city. She was thirteen that year. I was also curious to see London again myself, although my old hungry yearning for it had long gone. We arrived in mid-September, by which time the price of entry to the Exhibition had dropped to a shilling and it was full of families. Someone had written to The Times suggesting that a portion of the entrance money should go towards the search for Sir John Franklin and the Erebus and Terror, vanished six years before into the vast white secrecy of the Arctic.

  Faced with the splendour of the Crystal Palace, the huge glass arcades, the magnificent tree growing in the main hall—the grandeur of it all—I felt, as I said to Gus, very colonial. I admired it, and yet could not help feeling I preferred the simplicity we were accustomed to. Gus laughed and looked at me affectionately.

  ‘The difference between grand and grandiose is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps,’ he said. ‘We’re country mice these days.’

  Once inside, the Exhibition was almost beyond imagining.

  ‘Oh, look, Ma! Pa, look!’ Thea was still the bright, forthright child she had always been, only fitfully aware of being now a young lady. She pored over the machinery and tools with Gus; the working looms, printing presses, daguerreotype machines, and her favourite, the vast steam hammer which could gently crack an egg. At last I urged them on to the Russian vases twice the height of a man, the life-sized elephant statue, the plethora of clothes and textiles, the vast array of musical instruments. We bought a Tempest Prognosticator worked by leeches, and illustrated cards to send home. Like the Queen and Prince Albert, we visited three times that autumn, wandering through the crowded rooms until we were so weary we could marvel no more.

  For Thea, London itself was also a great exhibition; every street an astonishment of finery and filth; trains and thronging people. For me it was much the same, but not exactly the place I’d carried in my imagination for twelve years. I felt a similar jolt of strangeness when we called on Jane Franklin. She and Sophy had been living in her father’s house in Bedford Place, but had recently
moved to rooms in Spring Gardens, not far from the Admiralty.

  When we were first shown in to see her she seemed for a moment a stranger: a small, thin old lady wearing the kind of lace cap Jane had always disliked. But the room was familiar: Persian carpets, flowers, books, curios, the writing slope put aside on a chair. And as soon as she smiled and spoke, her personality was vivid and irresistible as ever, the sense of a quick, eager intelligence that Robert Murray and others had so deeply resented in the Governor’s wife. She kissed me, took Gus’s hand and pressed it, turned to Thea with a smile, ‘This is Thea. What glorious hair! You are as beautiful as your mother.’ She smiled. ‘Both your mothers.’

  Thea’s hair was a glory, a joyous thing; strangers often smiled with pleasure at the shining fall of copper-coloured waves down her back. Her face lacked Louisa’s madonna perfection, but I loved it all the better for the more generous mouth, the clear, considering grey eyes with no trace of Louisa’s fierce blue discontent.

  ‘What do you think of London?’ Jane asked her.

  ‘I like the zoo, my lady,’ said Thea. She hesitated. ‘But I do not think I should like to live here always.’

  Jane smiled and said, ‘You prefer your island? I’m inclined to agree with you. Hobart is very lovely.’

  ‘I like the Huon even better,’ said Thea.

  ‘Oh, the Huon!’ Jane turned to Gus. ‘I suppose I should not recognise it now?’

  As Gus, Thea and Jane began to talk about the Huon, Sophy drew me aside. She was now ‘quite stout’, as she had warned in a recent letter. Black bombazine stretched tightly across her ample bosom (always apt to heave), her troubled heart. I had come to the conclusion many years before that she did not like being young. She found it too agitating, too beset with troubling decisions: all those messy, perilous possibilities of love, marriage, children. Now she had apparently decided at the age of thirty-eight to embrace elderliness as a safe port beyond the storms of youth. She wanted to thank me, as she had already done in letters, for my attentions to her poor dearest brother Tom. He had died two years earlier in Hobart—the weak chest again. During his last illness he had lived with Mary and John Pride, who had moved to New Town.

  ‘And now her fifth child by That Man!’ hissed Sophy. ‘Poor Mary, she always seemed so stoical, so determined not to let us see she regretted her marriage. And so we were quite unprepared for that ghastly outburst just before we left. It upset us all—as though we had not enough troubles at the time.’

  In the last two weeks before the Franklins’ departure from Hobart, Mary had fallen into a strange madness of grief. She trailed behind Jane and Sophy, weeping as they supervised the packing. We tried to reassure her. Tom Cracroft and Henry Kay were staying on, and she had many good friends in the town; but Mary could not be consoled—and the talk of leaving Tom sent Sophy into floods of tears.

  ‘Our nerves were in shreds by the time we boarded the ship,’ Sophy added. ‘And we were desperately anxious all the way home. Not just on Mary’s account. We were braced to endure more newspaper scandal over the Montagu quarrel—and we knew my uncle would never have a suitable post while Lord Stanley was in office.’

  But when they arrived in London they discovered to their chagrin that nobody cared a fig about Montagu’s wickedness or Lord Stanley’s ill-treatment of Franklin. England was in crisis, the Government tottering over the repeal of the Corn Laws. A squabble in a distant colony was like the cry of a spoilt infant. Lord Stanley had refused to re-open the case or even grant Franklin an interview.

  ‘It was unjust, disgraceful.’

  Only the old ‘Arctics’ were sympathetic. Sir John Barrow had already begun preparations for a new expedition to decide, finally, the question of the Northwest Passage. He wanted his dashing young protégé, James Fitzjames, to lead it, but Fitzjames had annoyed the Admiralty and the Royal Society, and they wanted Ross and Crozier—and Ross had married his Anne at last, and promised not to leave England for two years. In May 1845, eleven months after the family returned to London, the Erebus and Terror set off with Franklin as Captain of the Erebus and leader of the best-equipped expedition in the history of Arctic exploration. Fitzjames was his second, Crozier was commander of the Terror.

  All this we learned from letters at the time, and during ’48 and ’49 we waited for news of their triumphant return, but none came. There was still none a year later when the decade ended. Sophy’s letters had begun to rage against the Admiralty, reluctant to send search vessels. Jane was raising money for a private search, churning out letters of appeal for help. The American shipping magnate Mr Henry Grinnell had subscribed $5,000, and then raised it to $10,000. After Jane’s next letter he made it $15,000, and when he read the note she sent to thank him, he raised the sum to $30,000. A letter she wrote to the President of the United States was said by the MP Sir Robert Inglis to be ‘the most admirable letter ever addressed by man or woman, to man or woman’.

  Now, a year later, there were more difficulties, Sophy confided. ‘Aunt’s family have turned against her. That is why we are here in Spring Gardens—why we had to leave her father’s house. He insists she must give up spending money on the search for Uncle. He wants her to leave all in the hands of the Admiralty—who do nothing! Her sister Mary Simpkinson—and Mary’s husband, and her son Frank—all support old Mr Griffin, of course.’

  Eleanor Franklin, too, wished to abandon the search. She had married Gell (‘the wedding day fixed without Aunt Jane’s knowledge,’ Sophy had written to us, her letters fizzing and crackling with fury) and by 1850 the Gells believed Sir John was dead.

  ‘All this is sad and shocking,’ Sophy’s familiar handwriting had come tearing across the page. ‘The Gells know Aunt has only a life income and no capital. She is living in a straitened manner, which grieves me and would astonish you, Harriet, and all our distant friends. My uncle had only the interest of his first wife’s fortune, whereas my aunt gave him all hers, capital and income. If it were not for her generosity, her own fortune, or rather the remnant of it, would not now pass to the Gells.

  ‘The Gells are opposed to sending another ship and to every plan devised by my aunt,’ she wrote. ‘Gell asks Jane to sign a contract that she will repay all she is spending on the search, back to the time of Sir John’s death, if he is discovered to be dead. . . Gell is requesting plate, linen and pictures belonging to Sir John . . .’

  The lamb-faced clergyman Jane had called ‘her son’ was showing the wolf beneath the skin—unless it was all done at Ella’s insistence, as Sophy believed. As we talked that day in London I began to understand Jane’s situation.

  ‘While Uncle is presumed still alive, Aunt, as his agent, can spend the interest of his monies and her own on the search,’ Sophy said, ‘but if he is declared dead, she will lose control of his estate—and much of her own, which was given into Nuncle’s control when she married. It will almost certainly become part of the residue left to Eleanor—though nobody knows exactly how the will is written.’

  I asked how the search stood at present.

  ‘There is a ship preparing in Aberdeen . . . Which reminds me . . .’ She turned to Jane, and said almost sternly, ‘If you are quite determined, Aunt, on going to Aberdeen, I suppose I had better go to the station and enquire about trains and tickets. For myself, I cannot believe that acting on messages ostensibly from the dead is an entirely Christian . . .’

  She rang sharply for her bonnet and wraps and began fussing with purses and gloves, while Jane said, ‘Leave it until later, Sophy, and then take a hansom.’

  ‘Good heavens, no—the expense! No, of course I shall walk. My leg is almost painless today.’

  ‘Will you allow us to escort you, Miss Cracroft?’ asked Gus. ‘Thea and I? We’ll take you in a cab and bring you back in no time. We’re immensely fond of jaunting about London—and we love railway stations—and have only a limited time to indulge ourselves.’

  Sophy protested but at last capitulated, and when Jane and I were left t
ogether Jane told me this was all on account of a letter from a clairvoyant, which Sophy disapproved of. They had received such letters before, of course—too many—but this one was not in the usual mould.

  ‘The writer is a Captain Coppin,’ Jane said, ‘a bluff old sea-dog, salt of the earth and briny, and what’s more he’s kept the matter quiet for nearly a year, which does not look to me like a thirst for notoriety. I can imagine him smoking a ruminative pipe over it night after night until at last his wife has persuaded him to write to me—about his daughters: Annie, who is ten and very much alive, and poor little ‘Weasy’ (for Louisa), who would have been five except that she has been dead these twelve months.’

  Six weeks after her funeral, Weasy had appeared to Annie, heralded by a ball of bluish light, Jane continued. The Captain’s three other children also saw their dead sister, and later the ghost-child fell into the habit of sitting at the table with them at mealtimes. The Captain, unable to see the little girl, felt at something of a loss. Casting about for conversation, he asked suddenly: was Sir John Franklin still alive? Where was the lost expedition? Then Annie cried out in astonishment because to her the room seemed to fill with snow and ice. She saw large round childish handwriting appear on the wall, saying Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel, and she drew a chart at Weasy’s direction—which the Captain judged remarkably accurate, though Annie had never seen such a chart before. In consequence of all this, the Captain ventured to take the liberty of suggesting that Lady Franklin’s search vessels might be looking in the wrong place, since all their attention seemed fixed on the Wellington Channel.