Morgan’s Run (77 page)

“Oh, don’t fucken preach!” Richard snapped. “Your trouble is that ye’re never sure whether to be a Catholic or a Protestant anything, let alone martyr! Why not simply admit to yourself that ye’re lovesick for Johnny and want to wallop Hunter?”

Blue eyes blazed at eyes gone absolutely grey for a full minute; neither man moved a muscle. Then both mouths started to quiver at the same instant; they howled with laughter.

“It clears the air,” Stephen said, mopping his face on a rag.

“Aye, that it does,” gasped Richard, borrowing it.

“Ye’d better eat Johnny’s share of the soup now that ye’re here—why did ye come back?”

“I think because you didn’t answer my question, to which I no longer require an answer. Ye’re right, Stephen. Lizzie is something I have to suffer through, including not liking myself.”

John Lawrell
moved in, and moved out again so quickly that the poor fellow’s weak head spun; Richard had a comfortable hut up for him within a month, erected at the far end of his little acre with its door and window apertures facing away from his own house. If Lawrell snored after that, Richard was too far away to hear. With regard to his duties he proved excellent, but he had one flaw: he loved to play card games and had to be restrained from gambling away his scant rations.

Sydney Town was mushrooming into veritable streets of small wooden huts, banged together by Nat Lucas and his carpenters as fast as Richard’s sawpits could feed him planks and beams. With neither the time nor the equipment to put a shiplap or dovetail on the boards to join them in a finished way, thin battens were nailed down the gaps—a style not unattractive if, like the interior of Richard’s house, the wood was sanded to a dull polish. Government House, enlarged by King to a size permitting him to entertain half a dozen dinner guests in better days, finally sported sheet glass in its small-paned windows, courtesy of Governor Phillip. Every other residence, including those commodious enough to satisfy the naval and marine officers, had to make do with shutters or naked apertures. One pit was put to sawing the basis for creating shingles; all the roofs would eventually be shingled, though the timber had first to be seasoned in sea-water for six weeks before it could be split. This meant temporary roofs of flax thatch; the task of venturing far and wide in search of flax was handed over to Sirius’s sailors, whom Ross flatly refused to let do nothing.

Liberated from the need to supply Port Jackson with lime, at least for the present, the deposits of calcarenite stone were worked for foundations and chimneys. Having found a good local hardwood the shingle sawpit also cut, the four coopers the island now possessed began to make barrels. Ross had set women to grinding King’s crop of wheat in hand querns, deeming barrels of flour safer from rats than loose grain. Aaron Davis, who had ended in working as a baker at Port Jackson, was appointed community baker. Not that bread was something the community saw every day; Sundays and Wednesdays were bread, Mondays and Thursdays were rice, Saturdays were pease, and Tuesdays and Fridays a porridge of Indian corn mixed with oatmeal.

Eyeing his rapidly proliferating swine, Ross built a small hearth and furnace and started producing salt. What parts of the beast not suitable for salting down were minced and became sausages sheathed in intestine.

“The best thing about a pig,” Major Ross was heard to say, “is that the only inedible part of it is the oink.” As he was known to possess absolutely no sense of humor, the general assumption was that he had spoken seriously.

Sirius, which continued to lie with her stern on and off the reef, was gradually stripped of every salvageable item, from some of her six-pounder guns to the last of the many kegs of nails His Excellency had sent from his settlement, turning to brick and stone, to this settlement of perpetual wood. Saddest loss was the scrap iron Sirius had carried for Norfolk Island’s smithy, still down in her holds and too risky to go after. Almost all the canvas she flew had washed ashore tangled in lines and spars, and her cutter had survived together with its oars; lopping down the masts had wrecked every other boat she owned.

Among the last things to come off her were several casks of tobacco and some crates of cheap Bristol soap. Though the soap did go into Government Stores for general distribution, the tobacco never saw the interior of a pipe bowl—much to the disgust of the seamen, who deemed a puff only slightly less desirable than a swig of rum. George Guest and Henry Hatheway, both from rural parts, went to Major Ross and informed him that in Gloucester gardens wives dealt with slugs, caterpillars and grubs by plundering their husbands’ tobacco. They steeped the leaves in boiling water, then sudsed the liquid with soap and sprinkled the concoction upon their vegetables. The first rain washed it away, but until that fell, wriggly pests turned up their noses and refused to eat such horrid-tasting food.

From that moment on, no one was allowed to throw away a single drop of soapy water. A small group of women was put to stewing the tobacco, which, experience revealed, retained its potency through several infusions. As for soap—why, it could be made just as it was made in poor farmhouses and cottages from one end of the British Isles to the other: fat and lye. Lard was the fat of the pig, and the settlement had plenty of it. To obtain lye was easy: soak the thoroughly burned ashes of unwanted potato, carrot, turnip and beet leaves, boil the mess down a little, and strain. The liquid part was lye. Watering cans were scarce, but a woman armed with a bucket of sudsed tobacco solution and a pewter dipper with holes punched in its bottom sprinkled the growing vegetables—and crops!—quite efficiently enough. To be ready for the next wave, the grub poison was stockpiled in empty rum pipes.

In such practical matters the Commandant shone. His mind had progressed from manufacturing salt, sausages and grub poison to whether he might use some of the sawdust in smokehouses instead of turning it all into the soil. What could not be salted down might perhaps be smoked, including fish. Owning a large work force, Ross was determined no member of it would be idle. The first step was to produce as much food as possible; the second step was to get as many of his charges as possible maintaining themselves without consuming Government food. This latter step was clearly the only justification for the whole Botany Bay experiment—what was the point of dumping thousands of convicts and guards at the far ends of the earth if the Government had to keep feeding them ad infinitum?

At which moment
, Supply having gone two weeks earlier to bear the dreadful news about Sirius to His Excellency, the birds arrived on Mt. Pitt, a 1,000-foot sprawl at the northwestern end of the island. A very few days verified King’s report on these big petrels; they came in from the day’s fishing on dusk to waddle to their burrows, equipped with so little brain and so much ignorance of the ways of men that they allowed themselves to be captured without flight or resistance.

Paths were cut through the vine (coming to be called “Samson’s sinew” from its immense girth) up the flanks of the mountain from the new Cascade road, and work was finished in time for the bird catchers to set out in daylight of the first day, armed with sacks. Salt meat rations were cut to three pounds a week and the quantities of bread, rice, pease and oatmeal were halved. The Mt. Pitt bird would have to fill up the ration gaps.

Rum was reduced to a half-pint of very watery grog a day even for the officers, which did not worry Lieutenant Ralph Clark in the least; he was still able to trade his share of it for badly needed shirts, underdrawers, stockings and the like; hardly any of his property off Sirius had reached him, though he caught glimpses of it on some convict’s back. Nor had Major Ross got his property off Sirius, but he bore his losses with a great deal less whinging than Clark, a natural complainer.

Potatoes were issued whenever they were dug at the rate of a few between each dozen people, and harvested vegetables were shared equally. Perhaps because green vegetables owned so little substance—and especially because scurvy was nonexistent—there were always more than enough of them to go around; people would rather eat anything (except fish) than a huge bowl of spinach or runner beans.

It was going to be a long, desperate business. Supply, the Major knew, would not return. The thirty-four-year-old Channel tender would have to sail to the East Indies for food, else those at Port Jackson would certainly starve to death; those at Norfolk Island would probably not, but would be reduced to scratching a primitive living. And the great experiment would fail.

Robert Ross believed as ardently as Arthur Phillip that whatever perils and privations the future might hold, those people in his charge must not be permitted to sink below the Christian standards of any British community anywhere. Somehow morality, decency, literacy, technocracy and all the other virtues of proper European civilization
must
be preserved. Were they not, then those who did not actually die would be nothings. Where Ross differed from Phillip lay in the more abstract virtues of optimism and faith. Phillip was determined that the great experiment would succeed. Ross simply knew that all of it—the time, the money, the property, the pain—was utterly wasted, sucked into the maw of ignominy to leave no trace behind. Which conviction, rooted though it was, did not deter him in the slightest from exerting his every effort to deal with matters those posturing fools in London had not even taken into account while they listened to Sir Joseph Banks and Mr. James Maria Matra and drew up their fine Heads of a Plan. How easy it was to move human pawns on a global chessboard when the chair was comfortable, the stomach full, the fire warm and the port decanter bottomless.

The diet
of Mt. Pitt bird brought no protests from anyone. Its flesh was dark and tasted slightly but not offensively fishy, it oozed very little fat when spitted or stewed, and at the beginning of this winter breeding every female bird carried an egg inside her. Once the feathers—easily plucked out—were removed, the body was not large, so one bird fed a child, two a woman, three a man, and four or five a glutton. The official catchers were instructed to bring down enough birds for smoking too. At first Ross tried to limit both the number of birds and the number of people let walk up the mountain in search of them. When Law Martial and the sight of Dring and Branagan after 500 lashes (administered in increments) did not deter people from venturing after this fantastic change from salt meat, fish and vegetables, Ross shrugged his shoulders and ceased trying to put a curb on bird-getting. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, head of Government Stores, began to record the figures as best he knew them: the catch crept up from 147 birds a day shortly into April to 1,890 a day one month later. Of these some were smoked, but the vast majority were thrown away uneaten; what all the bird catchers wanted to eat were the unlaid eggs and only the unlaid eggs. Clark himself was an unabashed egg fancier and great bird gatherer.

For Richard, who walked the five-mile round journey every other day and enjoyed his Mt. Pitt poultry very much, the arrival of the bird led to the temporary loss of his garden guard. John Lawrell was apprehended by the Law Martial patrol after curfew dragging a sack; when told to halt he tried to flee, got a musket butt on the head and was thrown into the guardhouse. A week later he was released, still nursing his aching pate, and given a dozen lashes with a medium cat.

“What on earth possessed ye, John?” Richard demanded at Turtle Bay, whence he had marched the moaning Lawrell as soon as his day’s work at the sawpits was done.
“Sixty-eight
birds!” He threw a dipper of salt water onto Lawrell’s back unsympathetically. “Will ye stand still, damn it? I would not need to do this if ye’d just get up the gumption to walk farther into the water and duck down.”

“Cards!” gasped Lawrell, teeth chattering; the wind was due south and very cold.

“Cards.” Richard led him out of the water and patted his welts dry with a rag. “Ye’ll live,” he said then. “Jimmy Richardson did not lay it on hard, ye’re not bleeding much. Were ye a woman, ye’d not have fared so well. And what do cards have to do with it?”

“Lost,” said Lawrell simply, following Richard down the road past the outermost row of houses. “Had to pay somehow. Josh Peck said I could save them a walk and get their birds for them. But I did not know how heavy the sack would be, so I was too slow to get back before curfew.”

“Then learn from this lesson, John,
please.
If ye must play cards, play with decent men, not cheats and liars like that lot. Now go on up the vale to bed.”

After several moves, Stephen Donovan now had a very good house just to the east of the Cascade road, and Nat Lucas an equally good house on an acre of flat ground beyond him. The swamp did not encroach on this area, but Major Ross was busy trying to drain the swamp by digging an outlet to Turtle Bay. Flat land was arable land, and all the tiny brooks which fed the Arthur’s Vale stream could not contribute enough water to force an exit to the sea; the swamp was a terminus using up growing space.

“Come!” Stephen called when Richard knocked.

“I have just sent my erring guard to bed,” said Richard, sitting down with a sigh. “Peck and the rest called in his card debts by making him bring them birds. Oh, he is a nodcock!”