Morgan’s Run (52 page)

Surgeon Balmain had the answer for the general mood of gloom and depression in the prison; he made them fumigate, scrub and whitewash again.

“I want,” said Bill Whiting passionately, “to do two things, Richard. One is to grab fucken Balmain, explode gunpowder in his face, scrub him with oil of tar and a wire brush, and paint him solid white. The other is to change my fucken name.
Whiting!
”

Cape Town
was beautiful, yes, but could not hold a candle to Rio de Janeiro in the judgment of the convicts, doomed always to look, never to sample. Not only had Rio been visually stunning, but it had also been filled with happy and natural people, with color and vitality. Cape Town had a more windswept and bleakly dusty kind of appeal, and its harbor lacked those hordes of gay bum boats; what black faces they saw did not smile. This might have been a simple reflection of its sternly Calvinistic, extremely Dutch character. Many buildings were painted white (not the favorite color of Alexander’s convicts) and there were few trees inside the town itself. A grand mountain, flat and bushy on top, reared behind the tiny coastal plain, and what the books said about it was quite true: a layer of dense white cloud did come down and spread a cloth over Table Mountain.

They had been 39 days at sea from Rio and arrived at the height of the southern spring on the 14th of October. It was now 154 days—22 weeks—since the fleet left Portsmouth and it had sailed 9,900 land miles, though it still had a long way to go. At no time had the eleven ships become separated; Governor/Commodore Arthur Phillip had kept his tiny flock together.

For the convicts, making port consisted in decks which didn’t move and food which didn’t move. The day after they arrived fresh meat came aboard, accompanied by fresh, soft,
marvelous
Dutch bread and a few
green
vegetables—cabbage and some sort of strong-tasting, dark green leaf. Appetites revived at once; the convicts settled to the critical business of trying to put on enough condition to survive the next and final leg, said to be 1,000 miles longer than the trip from Portsmouth clear to Rio.

“There have been but two voyages gone where we are going,” said Stephen Donovan seriously, wishing Richard would let him donate some butter for their bread. “The Dutchman Abel Tasman left charts of his expedition more than a century ago, and of course we have the charts of Captain Cook and his subordinate Captain Furneaux, who went down to the bottom of the world and a land of ice on Cook’s second voyage. But no one really
knows.
Here we are with a great host aboard eleven ships, attempting to reach New South Wales from the Cape of Good Hope. Is New South Wales a part of what the Dutch call New Holland, two thousand miles west of it? Cook was not sure because he never laid eyes on any southern coast joining the two. The best he and Furneaux could do was to prove that Van Diemen’s Land was not a part of New Zealand, as Tasman had thought, but rather the southernmost tip of New South Wales, which is a strip of coast going over two thousand miles north from Van Diemen’s Land. If the Great South Land exists, it has never been circumnavigated. But if it does exist, then it must contain three million square miles, which are more than in the whole of Europe.”

Richard’s heart was not behaving placidly. “You are saying, I think, that we have no pilot.”

“More or less. Just Tasman and Cook.”

“Is that because the explorers all entered the Pacific Ocean by sailing around Cape Horn?”

“Aye. Even Captain Cook chose Cape Horn most of the time. The Cape of Good Hope is regarded as the way to the East Indies, Bengal and Cathay, not to the Pacific. Look at this harbor, filled with outgoing ships.” Donovan indicated more than a dozen vessels. “Yes, they will sail east, but also north, taking advantage of an Indian Ocean current to get them as far as Batavia. They will reach those latitudes at the beginning of the summer’s monsoon winds and will be blown farther north. The winter trades send them home, laden, with three great currents to help them. One runs south through a strait between Africa and Madagascar. The second sweeps them around the Cape of Good Hope into the south Atlantic. The third carries them north along the west coast of Africa. Winds are important, but currents are sometimes even more important.”

Donovan’s seriousness had increased, which worried Richard. “Mr. Donovan, what is it ye’re not saying?”

“Aye, ye’re a clever man. Very well, I will be frank. That second current—the one which flows around the Cape of Good Hope—flows from east to west. Wonderful going home, Hell outbound. There is no avoiding it because it is over a hundred miles wide. Going northeast to the East Indies it can be overcome. But
we
have to seek the great westerly winds well
south
of the Cape, and that for a mariner is a far harder task. The length of our last leg will be much increased because we will not find our eastings in a hurry. I have sailed to Bengal and Cathay, so I know the southern tip of Africa well.”

Curiosity suddenly piqued, Richard stared at the fourth mate in some wonder. “Mr. Donovan, why did ye sign on for this vague voyage to somewhere only Captain Cook has been and seen?”

The fine blue eyes burned brightly. “Because, Richard, I want to be a part of history, no matter how insignificant a part. This is an epic adventure we have embarked upon, not a trudge to the same old places, even if those places have alluring names like Cathay. I had not the connections to midshipman into the Royal Navy, nor to get myself on some Royal Society expedition. When Esmeralda Sinclair asked me to come aboard as second mate, I leaped at the chance. And have suffered my demotion without protest. Why? Only because we are doing something no one has ever done before! We are taking over fifteen hundred hapless people to live in a virgin land without having done any sort of preparation. As if we were shipping ye from Hull to Plymouth. It is quite insane, ye know. The height of madness! What if, after we get to Botany Bay, we find it is not possible to scratch a living? ’Tis too far to go on to Cathay with so many people. Mr. Pitt and the Admiralty have thrown us onto the lap of the gods, Richard, with no forethought, no planning, no compunction. An expedition of skilled craftsmen should have gone two years earlier to tame the place a little. But that did not happen because it would have cost too much money and not ridded England of a single convict. What d’ye truly matter? The answer to that is—ye don’t matter beyond a parliamentary enquiry or two. Even if we perish, this expedition is great history and I am a part of it. And happy to die for the chance.” He drew a breath and smiled brilliantly. “It also offers me an opportunity to join the Royal Navy as something like a skilled man of officer material. Who knows? I may end up commanding a frigate.”

“I hope ye do,” said Richard sincerely.

“I would give it all up for you,” Donovan said mischievously.

Richard took the statement literally. “Mr. Donovan! By now I know ye well enough to understand that your deepest passions are not of the flesh. That is a typical Irish exaggeration.”

“Oh, flesh, flesh, flesh!” Donovan snapped, tried beyond calm endurance. “Honestly, Richard, you could give lessons to a papist celibate! What do they do to people in Bristol? I never met a man so riddled with guilt about what are natural functions as you are! Don’t be such a dolt! The company, man, the
company!
Women are no company. They are hamstrung into smallness. If poor, they drudge. If well off, they embroider, draw and paint a little, speak Italian and issue orders to the housekeeper. Of good conversation they have none. Nor are most men satisfactory company, for that matter,” he said more evenly, putting a rein on his temper. He tried to look carefree. “Besides, I am not a true Irishman. There is much Viking blood in Ulstermen. Probably why I love going to sea to visit new and strange places. The Irish in me dreams. The Viking needs to turn dreams into realities.”

But the realities of Cape Town were not the stuff of dreams. The Dutch burghers who ran the town (which had a considerable English population, there to look after the interests of the Honourable East India Company) rubbed their hands in glee at the prospect of fat profits and prolonged the negotiations for victualling the fleet into weeks. There had been a famine—the harvest had failed two years in a row—animals were in short supply—and so on, and so forth. Governor Phillip sat through meeting after meeting with calm unimpaired, perfectly aware that these were tactics aimed at securing higher prices. He had never expected it to be otherwise at Cape Town.

Perhaps too he understood better than some of his subordinates that these long stops in port were all that kept the convicts—and the marines—going. It had been he who had arranged for the oranges, the fresh meat and bread, whatever vegetables were to be had. The maritime world was not organized to carry hundreds of passengers for a year. Therefore let them fuel their bodies on decent food in port for long enough to sustain them on the next leg: a thought the convicts and marines had conceived for themselves.

Captain Duncan Sinclair had a furious quarrel with the agent for the contractor, Mr. Zachariah Clark, and rejected the first shipment of newly baked hard bread as rubbishy sawdust. He was busy loading as many animals as his decks could carry, mostly sheep and pigs, half of which were Publick Sheep and Publick Swine, and had to be preserved for Government use at Botany Bay. Chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys went on as well; the poop looked like a farmyard, as did what was left of the quarterdeck; Sinclair’s view forward from his roundhouse now consisted of woolly bottoms. Bales of hay and sacks of fodder were stored under the lower platforms in the prison, leaving scant space for night buckets and the additional belongings many of the convicts had evicted from their cots to make extra room for sleeping. The thieves among them were well known by this time; it was an easy matter for a deputation to visit each of the light-fingered ones until property was retrieved. Most thefts were of food caches and rum illicitly purchased through Sergeant Knight, in great trouble for it thanks to a marine private snitch. Even after so many months at sea, there were those who would almost kill to obtain rum.

None of the Brazilian parrots had survived, but Wallace the Scotch terrier and Lieutenant John Johnstone’s bulldog bitch, Sophia, remained. She was pregnant, apparently by Wallace (Shairp thought it exquisitely funny), and everybody on board was dying to see what the progeny would be like. Rodney the cat’s family had been reduced by gifts of catlings to other ships, but he and it were waxing fat.

When the at-sea provisions started to arrive at the end of the first week in November, Captain Sinclair had the crew scrub that part of Alexander’s hull not sheathed in copper. Inspired by this activity, Surgeon Balmain ordered a fumigation, scrub and whitewash below deck, marines’ steerage as well as the prison. His head was full of the delightful excursions he had taken out of the town to the foothills, choked with the glory of exotic bushes and shrubs in profligate spring flower—and what strange blossoms! Many of them looked like pastel-colored astrakhan mounds framed by giant petals.

“I knew there was something I meant to ask Mr. Donovan to do in Cape Town,” said Richard, savagely slapping a paint brush. “Tell all the vendors of whitewash that our surgeon was not authorized to buy an ounce of the stuff!”

The fleet left that shippy harbor on the 12th of November as a Yankey merchantman from Boston sailed in; its crew crowded to gape, never having witnessed such a mass exodus from any port. Port had occupied thirty days, and every ship was crammed full. The women convicts had been moved off Friendship to make room for sheep and a few cattle; Lady Penrhyn carried a stallion, two mares and a colt for the use of the Governor; other ships held more horses and cattle; there were sheep, pigs and poultry everywhere, and water was looming as a huge problem. A great deal of attention was paid to the accommodation of the horses, which could not be permitted to lie down or move more than a couple of inches in any direction; a horse with sufficient space to be tipped off balance was a dead one. Cattle too were pampered as much as possible.

That last
leg commenced exactly as Stephen Donovan had said it would. Every wind as well as the current ran against the fleet. Nor did they do so modestly; minor gales blew and whipped up heavy seas. The susceptible became seasick all over again. Finally the Commodore ordered the fleet into Sirius’s wake, and there the eleven ships remained while Captain John Hunter, master of Sirius, strove fruitlessly to find a favorable wind. The gales died a day later and the agony of standing and tacking began, never with much if any good results.

In thirteen long days they had managed to get a mere 249 miles southeast of the Cape. Water was back to three pints a day, which every soul aboard every ship found intolerable; four pints were not enough. Alexander’s lieutenants groaned at this order, to be policed as in earlier periods of rationing, which turned it into a proper
business.
Sergeant Knight had been suspended from duty indefinitely, which meant the lieutenants had to rely upon three very mediocre corporals to do water duty with them while Knight, not at all dismayed by his suspension, lay in his hammock and snoozed on the rum he was buying from Esmeralda against his marine pay. Major Ross had thought that suspension without pay would curb Knight’s activities, but he had no idea how much money Knight had made on the voyage selling rum to men like Tommy Crowder.