Morgan’s Run (55 page)

N
othing very much happened over the next few days ex
cept that the seven slow ships turned up surprisingly soon after the Racers; they had been blown by the same winds and kept close enough behind to experience the same weather. Heaving in the restless water, all the ships remained at anchor unloaded, people crowding their rails, anyone with a spyglass peering at shoregoing parties of marines, naval officers and a few convicts, and at many Indians. None of this shore activity appeared significant. Rumor now said that the Governor did not consider Botany Bay an adequate site for this all-important experiment and had gone in a longboat to look at nearby Port Jackson, which Captain Cook had noted on his charts, but had not entered.

Richard’s feelings about Botany Bay were very much like those in every other breast, free or felon: a shocking place, was the universal verdict. It reminded no one of anywhere, even sailors as traveled as Donovan. Flat, bleak, sandy, swampy, inclement and dreary beyond all imagination. To the inhabitants of Alexander’s prison, Botany Bay loomed as a gigantic graveyard.

Orders came that the site of the first settlement was to be Port Jackson, not Botany Bay; they made ready to sail, but the winds were so against and the swell coming across the narrow bar so huge that all thought of leaving had to be abandoned. Then—
a miracle!
Two very big ships were sighted beating in for harbor.

“ ’Tis as strange a coincidence as two Irish peasants meeting at the court of the Empress of all the Russias,” said Donovan, who had shared a spyglass with Captain Sinclair and Mr. Long.

“They are English, of course,” said Jimmy Price.

“No, they are French. We think the expedition of the Comte de la Pérouse. Third-raters, which is why they are such big ships. One therefore must be La Boussole and the other L’Astrolabe. Though I imagine that we are a greater surprise to them than they to us—la Pérouse left France in 1785, long before our voyage was being talked about. Unless they have learned of us somewhere along their way. La Pérouse was given up as lost a year ago. Now—here he is.”

Another attempt to get out of Botany Bay was made on the morrow, with equal lack of success. The two French ships were not in sight at all, blown away southward and seaward. Toward sunset Supply managed to wriggle through the swell and headed north the ten or eleven miles to Port Jackson, while Governor Phillip’s chicks stayed another night in limbo.

A southeaster in the morning made things better, for the French ships too; La Boussole and L’Astrolabe passed inside Botany Bay as the ten ships of the English fleet hauled anchor and made for that dangerous entrance. Sirius, Alexander, Scarborough, Borrowdale, Fishburn, Golden Grove and Lady Penrhyn all departed gracefully. Then unlucky Friendship could not keep in her stays, drifted perilously close to the rocks, and collided with Prince of Wales. She lost her jib boom and compounded her woes by running into Charlotte’s stern. A considerable part of her decorative galleries destroyed, Charlotte almost went aground.

All this havoc caused much mirth on Alexander, shaking her own sails free to take advantage of the southeaster. The day was hot and fine, the view off the larboard side fascinating. Crescent-shaped yellow beaches foaming with surf alternated with reddish-yellow cliffs which grew ever taller as the miles passed by. A wealth of trees, somewhat greener than those in the distance at Botany Bay, spread inland beyond the beaches, and the smoke of many fires smudged the western sky. Then came two awesome 400-foot bastions, between them an opening about a mile wide. Alexander heeled and sailed into a wonderland.

“This is more like!” said Neddy Perrott.

“If Bristol had such a harbor, it would be the greatest port in Europe,” said Aaron Davis. “It could take a thousand ships of the line in perfect safety from every wind that blows.”

Richard said nothing, albeit his heart felt a little lighter. These trees at least were a kind of green, very tall and numerous, shimmering with a faint blue haze. But very strange trees! They had height and girth of wood, yet were leafed in sparse and ungainly fashion, like shredded flags. Little sandy bays free of surf scalloped the harbor to north and south, though the headlands inside were lower save for one immense bluff exactly opposite the entrance. They sailed to the south of it into what seemed a very long, wide arm, and six miles down in a small cove they found Supply. No need for anchors, at least to begin with. As each ship floated in slowly, it was simply moored to trees on shore, so deep was the water. Still and calm, as clear as ocean water, and full of small fish.

The sun had gone down in a welter of flame the seamen said promised a fine day on the morrow. As usual when things were out of kilter, no one remembered to feed Alexander’s convicts until after darkness fell.

Richard kept his thoughts to himself, understanding that even Will Connelly, the most sophisticated among his little band, was too naive to confide in the way he could with Stephen Donovan. For though he deemed Port Jackson a place of surpassing beauty, he did not think it oozed milk and honey.

They landed
on the 28th of January in the midst of chaotic confusion. No one seemed to know what to do with them or where to send them, so they stood with their possessions around their feet and experienced solid land for the first time in over a year. Oh, solid land was hideous! It tossed, it swooped, it refused to stay still; like the rest who had not suffered much from seasickness, Richard was to be constantly nauseated for six weeks after he disembarked. And realized why sailors on terra firma walked with big, wide, slightly drunken footsteps.

The marines were as bewildered as the convicts, who milled about until some marine junior officer yapped at them and pointed them in a direction. Finally, amid the last hundred or so male felons, Richard and his nine satellites were told to go to a fairly flat, sparsely treed area on the eastern side, there to make camp.

“Build yourselves a shelter,” said Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark vaguely, looking blissfully happy to be on dry land.

Using what? Richard wondered as the ten of them staggered across ground tufted with crunchy yellow grass and dotted with occasional rocks to a place he decided was where Clark had indicated. Other groups of convicts were standing about the area in a confusion equal to their own; all Alexander men. How can we make shelters? We have no axes, no saws, no knives, no nails. Then a marine came along carrying a dozen hatchets and thrust one at Taffy Edmunds, who stood holding it limply and looking helplessly at Richard.

I have not divorced them yet. I still have Taffy Edmunds, Job Hollister, Joey Long, Jimmy Price, Bill Whiting, Neddy Perrott, Will Connelly, Johnny Cross and Billy Earl. Most of them rustics, many of them illiterate. Thank God that Tommy Crowder and Aaron Davis have found Bob Jones and Tom Kidner from Bristol—that means they have enough in their circle to fill a hut. If filling a hut is the official intention. Does no one have
any
idea what we are supposed to do? This is the worst planned expedition in the history of the world. The higher-ups have sat on Sirius for the best part of nine months, but all they have done, I suspect, is drink too much. There is no method, no trace of a system. We should have been kept on board until the clearing was done and shelters erected, even if our tables and benches have been dismantled to expose the big hold hatches. At least at night. The marines do not like being shepherds, they clearly want to be nothing but guards in the narrowest sense. Build ourselves a shelter. . . . Well, we have one hatchet.

“Who can use a hatchet?” he asked.

All of them—for chopping up kindling.

“Who can build a shelter?”

No one, save for watching houses being built of brick, stone, plaster and beams. No hedgerow denizens among his flock.

“Perhaps we should start with a ridge pole and a support for either end,” said Will Connelly after a long silence; he had read
Robinson Crusoe
on the voyage. “We can make the roof and walls out of palm fronds.”

“We need a ridge pole, but also two other poles for the eaves,” said Richard. “Then we need six forked young trees, two taller than the other four. That will give us a frame. Will and I can begin on those with the hatchet. Taffy and Jimmy, see if ye can find a marine who can donate us a second hatchet, or an axe, or one of the huge knives we saw in Rio. The rest of you, find some palms and see if the fronds come off by pulling on them.”

“We could escape,” said Johnny Cross thoughtfully.

Richard stared at him as if he had grown another head. “Escape to where, Johnny?”

“To Botany Bay and the French ships.”

“They would not offer us asylum any more than the Dutch did Johnny Power in Teneriffe. And how are we to get to Botany Bay? You saw the Indians on shore there. This is a little kinder, so it must have Indians too. We have no idea what they are like—they might be cannibals like those in New Zealand. Certainly they will not welcome the advent of hundreds of alien people.”

“Why?” asked Joey Long, whose mind could not get beyond the fact that Lieutenant Shairp had not yet given him MacGregor.

“Put yourselves in the place of the Indians,” said Richard patiently. “What must they think? This is an excellent cove with a stream of good water—it must surely be popular among them. But we have usurped it. We are, besides, under strict orders not to harm any of them. Therefore, why court them by escaping into places where we will have none of our own English kind? We will stay here and mind our own business. Now do what I asked, please.”

He and Will found plenty of suitable young trees, none more than four or five inches in diameter. Ugly they might be when compared to an elm or chestnut, but they did have the virtue of growing up without low branches. Richard bent and swung the hatchet, made a nick.

“Christ! The wood is like iron and full of sap,” he said. “I need a saw, Will.”

But, lacking a saw, all he could do was chip away. The hatchet was neither sharp nor of good quality, would be useless by the time the three poles and six supports were cut. Tonight he would get out his files and sharpen it. The contractor, he thought, has supplied us with the rubbish the foundries in England could not sell. And he was light-headed and panting after cutting and trimming the ridge pole; all those months of poor food and lack of work were no preparation for this. Will Connelly took the hatchet to attack a second young tree and proved even slower. But in the end they had their ridge pole and their two main forked supports for the roof ridge, and chose four smaller ones for the side supports. By then Taffy and Jimmy had returned with a second hatchet, a mattock and a spade. While Richard and Will went in search of trees to connect their side support poles and complete the framework, Jimmy and Taffy were set to digging holes to plant the six supports in. Having no kind of measuring device, they paced it out as accurately as they could. Digging revealed that six inches down was bedrock.

The others had found plenty of palms, but the fronds were too high off the ground to reach. Then Neddy had a bright idea, climbed a neighboring tree, leaned out dangerously, grabbed the end of a frond, and dropped off his perch to pull the frond away by sheer weight. It worked with the older, browner appendages, but not with anything looking lush.

“Find Jimmy,” said Neddy to Job Hollister, “and change places with him. You dig. I have a better use for nimble Jimmy.”

Jimmy arrived trembling from the unaccustomed effort of digging.

“Have ye a head for heights?” Neddy asked him.

“Aye.”

“Then rest a moment before ye climb yon palm. Ye’re the most agile and smallest of us. Richard sent us the second hatchet, so tuck it in your waistband. Once ye get up the palm, chop down the fronds one at a time.”

The sun was westering, which gave them some means of orienting themselves—south and west of the area where the Governor was going to erect his portable house, a couple of storehouses, and the big round marquee in which Lieutenant Furzer had established himself and the commissariat. They had had the presence of mind to bring their wooden bowls, dippers and spoons, also their blankets, mats and buckets; Richard found the stream and put Bill Whiting to setting up the dripstones, then fetching water. It looked clean and healthy, but he trusted nothing here.

Of all of them, Bill Whiting looked the worst. His face had long since lost its roundness, of course, but now there were black crescents beneath his eyes. The poor fellow trembled as if he had a fever. He had not; his brow was cool. Simple exhaustion.

“It is time to stop,” said Richard, collecting his brood. “Lie down on your mats and rest. Bill, ye need a walk—yes, I know ye do not feel like walking, but come with me to find the commissariat. I have an idea.”

Lieutenant James Furzer was nothing like organized; that was too much to hope for. Richard and Bill entered chaos.

“Ye need more men, sir,” said Richard.