Cry of the Curlew: The Frontier Series 1

by Peter Watt

  The first mate had been instructed to ensure their silence for a share in the ‘entertainment’ in the cabin. Horton had waited with lustful anticipation for his chance to join Mort. The captain was probably just ‘teasing’ the girl with a hot candle, Horton thought uneasily. Or squeezing her nipples just a little roughly. Nothing really serious.

  The agonised screams tapered to a whimpering and Mort had called softly to his first mate to enter the cabin. When he did so, it was not as he had expected.

  The young native girl was stripped naked and strapped face down over the old-style whipping bench. Although he was used to inflicting pain on women, he had never expected to see the extent a man could go in extracting pleasure from pain as Mort had perfected.

  The captain stood naked behind the helpless girl with his body slick with the dying girl’s blood. His eyes glittered with a feverish light, like the lanterns of hell shining out of a grinning skull. When Horton stepped inside the cabin, he sealed forever a perverted and demonic pact with the devil incarnate.

  The young girl was beyond even terror. Her eyes rolled back into her head as Mort slowly passed the sharp tip of the blade through the fleshy parts of her thighs. The tightly restrained girl had tensed in a futile effort to resist the blade. Her agonised scream penetrated the gag in her mouth as he withdrew the blade and blood flowed down her leg forming a pool around the base of the bench. Horton could see the girl’s body had been punctured in many places. Mort stepped back with a maniacal smile to admire his work and gestured to Horton to take his pleasure.

  The first mate overcame his initial shock to take his turn. He stepped behind the girl and dropped his trousers and gripped the girl by her slim hips. Grunting like a pig, he raped her with brutal thrusts until his back arched and he shuddered violently. He was vaguely aware that he had heard Mort crooning strange words to the victim as he had taken his pleasure. Words about never being able to laugh at little boys when they were hurting and only wanted love. Words of a madman . . .

  He pulled his trousers up as Mort took his place with arrogant casualness. The sharp point of his sword slid between the girl’s legs and even the hardened criminal from The Rocks could not restrain the involuntary gasp of sympathy for the girl’s imminent excruciating agony.

  With a sudden and powerful thrust, Mort forced the sword into the girl until it was buried to the hilt. She screamed with a final despairing voice for the hell that had come to her on earth. Mercifully the sword ruptured her heart so that she died relatively quickly.

  It would not be the last time Horton would witness the hideous ritual. The second time came easier for the first mate and thenceforward he was a devotee of Mort’s twisted and brutal rituals with the young island girls.

  The longboats grounded on the coral beach as a huge yellow moon rose into the night sky obliterating the stars with its brilliant glow. The tropical moon was welcomed by the blackbirders who assembled silently on the beach. They were no longer like excited and chattering children. They were now what they had once been in their own lands – warriors stalking an enemy village. Mort had calculated they would be in position well before first light.

  He gazed over the calm lagoon at the Osprey and could see that she was perfectly silhouetted by the rising moon. Under other circumstances, the silhouette of his ship against the big round yellow moon would have been a beautiful picture worthy of a romantic painting. But the kanaka ship had long lost her soul so that the silhouette took on a black and sinister shape and there was little that was romantic about the intentions of the blackbirding captain and his raiding party.

  He then glanced back at the longboats, resting with their bows on the beach, and decided that they did not need concealing in the jungle, which pleased his crew as the longboats were heavy to haul up from the water.

  Mort left two of his men with rifles on the beach to guard the boats before leading the remainder of his raiding party into the inky blackness of the tropical rainforest. They would march in single file along a native track through the jungle until they came to the village, where they would halt and fan out into a U-shaped formation for the attack. Then they would sweep through the sleeping village and the U-formation would close to a circle trapping everyone inside.

  If all went well, his men would take young men and women as prisoners. Later they would be ‘convinced’, after they were well out to sea, that being indentured was a preferable choice to attempting to swim a hundred miles home through shark-infested waters. Those who resisted at the village were to be slain. Mort’s men carried with their weapons ropes for securing prisoners and axes for taking heads.

  From the deck of the barque, Horton had watched the longboats run ashore on the beach. The rising moon had cast a silver path to the shore. He could see the distant landing party form up on the coral sand, then plunge into the jungle. There was little for him to do until their return in the early morning except ensure the watch did not go to sleep and that the small brass cannon at the Osprey’s stern was manned at all times.

  Precautions were necessary in the waters hostile to blackbirders. The first mate was aware that sandalwood ships, previously visiting the islands, had fallen victim to the swift war canoes of the fierce island warriors. He suspected that the captains of the unfortunate ships had been lax in keeping sentry duty. He had no intention of repeating the mistake, as headhunting and cannibalism were still practised in the islands despite the missionaries’ zealous attempts to stamp out their ancient and traditional ways.

  The moon shrank as it rose into the night sky while Horton perched himself on a hatch cover and idled with a short length of rope, twisting the Indian hemp fibres into a new knout.

  As he worked on the latest addition to his already sizeable collection of knouts, he thought about the immediate future. Tomorrow, all going well, there would be a new victim to provide entertainment for himself and Mort. He did not know where and when the captain had first started his bestial practice. Nor did he care, for he had soon acquired a perverse understanding of the feeling of absolute power the torture of the young girls gave Mort.

  A big fish splashed on the silvery and smooth surface of the lagoon and a bigger fish snapped it in two. Horton heard the noise and it made him aware that he should check the Islanders manning the stern gun.

  He rose from the hatch cover and padded silently to the stern, where he found the two men chewing betel nut. In the grip of the mildly narcotic drug, they were dozing with their backs against the gun and the first thing they knew of Horton’s presence was when his newly plaited knout came down with painful stinging blows on their shoulders. They yelped and scrambled to their feet as they covered their heads.

  Horton grinned as he walked away from the two Islanders, now wide awake. The new knout worked just fine.

  Sweat trickled uncomfortably under Mort’s cotton shirt as he crouched waiting in the night shadows of the jungle. All had gone according to plan and he had led his raiders into a position where they could settle down and wait for the first rays of the rising sun to touch the eastern horizon with a gentle kiss of pink.

  He scratched irritably at his chest and cursed the oppressively humid tangle of rainforest undergrowth. Huddled around him, his raiding party also crouched and stared at the tiny cluster of thatch huts by the sea. Maybe no more than fifty people lived in the little fishing village, he had calculated, from the small number of palm leaf and thatch huts built on stilts to catch the ocean breezes.

  According to his previous experience, he knew that he had sufficient numbers to carry out his mission and it was obvious that the sleeping villagers were not expecting trouble. It was ironic that the advent of the damned missionaries had brought a kind of peace to the once warring peoples of the South Pacific, he mused to himself with ironic satisfaction. And in bringing an uneasy peace to these people, the missionaries had unwittingly made the blackbirding captain’s task easier.

  He slid the infantry sword from the scabbard and, with a few muttered orders, h
is raiding party slipped away into the night to take up their positions around the unsuspecting village. For Mort, it was just like the old days of carrying out the bloody dispersals on the tribespeople of Queensland.

  The village dogs barked and the scrawny village pigs squealed. But they were too late to warn the sleeping inhabitants that the raiders were descending on them with rifle and axe. A volley of shots and blood-chilling war cries tore the villagers from their sleep. Panic stricken, they clung together with only a handful of quick-thinking natives fleeing into the jungle, successfully breaking through the cordon of Osprey crewmen in the predawn darkness.

  As it was not a large village, little resistance was offered. For those few who bravely tried to stand and fight, death was inevitable. Lead bullets cut them down and the razor-sharp axes wielded with deadly efficiency swiftly severed valuable heads from the bodies of the slain.

  The horrific attack was over in minutes and the terrified screaming of the villagers became a despairing wail as they realised that they were now helpless prisoners of the black raiders, who herded them roughly at gunpoint to a clearing at the edge of the village. The wailing of the women who had lost sons, fathers and husbands became one strident sound, callously ignored by the raiders as they secured their prisoners with ropes.

  Mort stood trailing his sword in the sand, watching his men go about their grisly work. He smiled. Give niggers a worthwhile occupation and they were easily led, he thought with a touch of pride for their absolute ruthlessness. He was never happier than when he stood as the master amid death and destruction.

  Two of the Osprey crewmen squatting beside a grisly pile of freshly severed heads grinned happily up at their leader. ‘Damned good work,’ Mort muttered and stood impassively by as those not guarding prisoners fanned out, searching the huts for anything of value to loot. When the booty was removed, the looters torched the huts and a few pigs were dispatched with axes to provide fresh pork for the crew.

  The dry thatch roofs and coconut log frames crackled sluggishly, then blazed furiously as the flames spread, twisting and spiralling. The early morning sky was lit with an evil glow that marked the death of the village.

  When the village was totally engulfed in flames, Mort had the bound prisoners file past him. As he inspected each one, he searched the cowed villagers for a victim for his pleasure. His feverish eyes came to settle on one young girl who stood beside an old woman. Her bare and budding breasts bespoke her blooming womanhood as did the hint of a swelling of her hips and buttocks. The influence of Christian modesty had not yet reached her tiny atoll island and she was naked except for a small woven grass loincloth.

  She attempted to avoid the white devil’s scrutiny but even with her eyes downcast she could feel the burning intensity of the man’s stare upon her. It was an irresistible impulse that caused her to glance up. Quickly she turned her head away. The pale blue eyes were not of a human, she thought, with a chilling shiver of terror. There was a bestial madness in his eyes that she recognised from the stories that the missionaries had preached about the devil.

  ‘A good haul. Sixteen men, all in their prime. Nine women. Only three young ’uns, and a few old ’uns,’ Mort said as he appraised the huddle of prisoners on the deck of the Osprey, surrounded by their captors, who taunted the cowering natives still stunned into submissiveness by the swift ruthlessness of the unexpected attack. The village was gone now and the column of smoke rising in the distance above the jungle clearly marked its destruction.

  ‘You keepin’ the old ’uns?’ Horton growled to Mort, as they were of no use in the Queensland fields as labourers. But the young girls would fetch at least twenty pounds each from the plantation owners. At least the male plantation owners.

  The Osprey still had other islands to visit but Mort did not expect any further trouble. His method of recruiting would be less violent. The pile of heads, which his raiding party had forced the prisoners to carry back to the long-boats, would ensure recruits would be volunteered by island chiefs eager to take possession of the grisly trophies as a means of impressing their women. He expected to have a full hold of recruits when he returned to Brisbane. But he knew one of the young girls would never reach the Brisbane River.

  ‘You know what to do, Mister Horton,’ he said as he studied the youngest of the girls he had chosen on the island. ‘I’m sure the Kuri will enjoy his work,’ he added and the first mate bawled to the leader of the Islander crew to report to him.

  The leader was a powerfully built young man who had been a feared warrior on his own island. A long and livid scar across his chest bore testimony to his fighting prowess.

  ‘Kuri . . . you kisim head belong lapun manmeri. You savvy?’ Horton said to the Islander, who grinned with child-like understanding for the murderous task he was about to carry out. Still grinning, Kuri slipped the iron tomahawk from his waist belt, and grabbed the nearest old man from the huddle of prisoners on the deck. The old man struggled feebly as he was dragged to the stern of the Osprey by the Islander who forced the old man’s head down over the stern with one hand.

  Kuri was careful in his aim. A miscalculation could easily slice off his own arm and the tomahawk’s blade flashed in the early morning as it severed the skinny neck with one swift and lethal strike. Kuri held up the head triumphantly and the blackbirders shouted their praise for his deft stroke.

  Blood spurted into the clear waters of the lagoon from the decapitated torso and Kuri was careful not to get the blood on the wooden deck that Mister Mort insisted be kept spotless. The prisoners wailed in their terror as they clung to each other while the headless body of the old man toppled over the stern and splashed into the lagoon, staining the crystal waters red.

  Kuri turned away from the stern and strolled back to the huddled villagers. He flashed his captain a smile seeking his approval, and Mort nodded to acknowledge the young Islander’s deftness with the deadly tomahawk.

  By sunset the word had reached the Presbyterian missionary John Macalister, who raged with impotent anger when he was told of the raid and the slaughter of the villagers. He uncharacteristically cursed the blackbirders to hell without recourse to God’s mercy. It was not the strict Presbyterian that spoke, but the tough Scot who loved his flock with the love of a shepherd for his precious highland sheep.

  There was nothing the missionary could do but write another report to Sydney about the activities of the blackbirders in his waters. And another report that would end in some bureaucrat’s top drawer to be forgotten in the interests of keeping the peace among the high-placed owners of the infamous blackbirding ships. What was needed was direct action by the Royal Navy in hunting down the blackbirders and curtailing their godforsaken activities.

  If it had been good enough for the steam frigate HMS Curacao under the command of Sir William Wise to shell the Tannese villagers in ’65, whose only real crime had been to resist the Europeans imposing their civilisation on them, then it was good enough to go after the ungodly blackbirders, the missionary reflected. Why could not the navy hunt down the murdering blackbirders? But he already knew the answer. Britain did not see the Pacific as a major part of its global strategy. The islands in the Pacific were as far from Westminster as Westminster was from the moon.

  The tough little Scottish missionary sat down in his hut to draft his report on the activities of the kanaka ship. He believed it to be the Osprey from descriptions given by the survivors who had eluded the raiders on the island. Even if the British Government was not sympathetic to his complaints, then at least the Sydney papers and the anti-slavery movements might be. They would listen.

  And listen they did! Among the allies the Scot would muster to his cause was one who had a strongly vested interest in seeing the captain of the infamous blackbirding ship swing at the end of a rope. He was a young lawyer by the name of Daniel Duffy.

  THIRTY

  ‘You are to all intents and purposes, Missus O’Keefe, very well off from Mister Hubner’s estate,’ Hugh Darlingt
on of the Rockhampton firm of solicitors Darlington & Darlington said as he leaned back in his chair.

  Kate stared in a daze at the sheets of important-looking papers on the solicitor’s desk. She had heard the rumours around the hotel bar where she had worked for almost five years that Harry had accumulated quite a deal of money from his hard work as a teamster. But the sum the solicitor mentioned was beyond her wildest dreams. Fourteen thousand pounds . . . after probate!

  ‘And Mister Hubner has also left to you all other properties he owned,’ the solicitor continued. ‘Which, I believe, is a house in Townsville, plus four blocks of land. And his wagon and bullock team. I assume you will be selling the latter part of the estate for its monetary value, Missus O’Keefe?’

  Kate was still in a daze. Fourteen thousand pounds! After meeting Harry on the track when she and Luke had travelled west to find her father’s grave, Harry had met up with her at the Emperor’s Arms, where she had worked as a barmaid. Kate had always treated Harry a little more special than the other teamsters who vied for the attention of the beautiful young daughter of the legendary bullocky Patrick Duffy. She had listened to the lonely man talk about his life whenever there were quiet times in the bar, and the news of his death had been a personal loss to Kate.

  ‘Mister Hubner was very fond of you, Missus O’Keefe,’ the solicitor continued, leaning forward in his chair. ‘He said you were the closest thing he had to a daughter. And from what I can gather, Harry had no other relatives living. So I doubt that anyone will contest the will. All Harry owned is now yours.’

  Hugh Darlington could not help but steal more than a glance at the young woman on the other side of his desk. The stories he had heard of the barmaid at the Emperor’s Arms were true. She was indeed very beautiful. He also knew that she was married and had been deserted by her husband years earlier. Despite the rough clientele of the hotel, the young woman had a reputation as a true lady: charming, intelligent and she did not take up the countless offers to share the bed of even the most eligible of the young squatters’ sons who drank alongside the burly teamsters.