Lieutenant (4 page)

Two years after the day on
Resolution
that he tried not to remember, the war ended.
Ended
was the word people used, but everyone knew that
lost
was the one that hung behind it. That ragtag bunch of barefoot rebels had somehow defeated the might of His Majesty King George the Third. It was a humiliation that could never be mentioned. The king’s soldiers and sailors did not know how to take up their lives in the shadow of the word never spoken:
defeat
.

When he met Silk near the Hard in Portsmouth Harbour, Rooke saw there had been an alteration in his friend. He could still amuse with some bit of nonsense about the day he left his cap behind in the Royal Oak. But something in him was blighted by what he had seen, and by defeat. And by the half-life of half-pay. The word he used for it was tantalism. There was a bitterness in the way he said it. A man on half-pay did not quite starve, but he did not properly live either.

To war and a sickly season
: now Rooke understood that reckless toast too well. The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.

Something had shifted in the friendship between Rooke and
Silk. They had both watched Private Truby wondering why he could not get up, and that had forged a bond deeper than mere good fellowship.

There on the Hard, on that day of cold glum cloud, they did not mention that monstrous thing, but wrung each other’s hands so hard it hurt.

Silk was returning to his home in Cheshire. Looking at his pinched face, Rooke did not ask whether it was true his father was a dancing master.

When his health returned sufficiently, Rooke eked out his half-pay with a little tutoring of dullards in mathematics and astronomy, Latin and Greek, fuming with irritation at their slowness. Anne would come into the parlour when they left and see him glowering into the fire. She never sighed and sympathised the way his mother did.
Oh Dan
, she would cry,
what was the point
of being hit on the head, if it did not give you the blessing of being as stupid
as the rest of us?

He would offer her the poker and suggest she might hit him again, until the desired effect was arrived at, and thanked God for such a sister.

But in the mornings he would wake up in the attic room under the shingles, in the bed that had only ever been meant for a child, and think of the wasted time behind him, and the years stretching ahead: he was twenty-three, and how could he ever again find a life?

D
aniel Rooke was a boy collecting pebbles when Cook had landed in New South Wales, a place almost as far on the globe as you could travel in any direction without starting to come back. Its remoteness was turning out to be its greatest asset. His Majesty had formed the view that New South Wales was ideally suited to swallow the overflow from his prisons.

Midway through 1786, when Rooke was twenty-four, Dr Vickery wrote to him suggesting that the proposed expedition might have need of an astronomer. Rooke did not hesitate, replied the same day.

To Major Wyatt, the commander of Rooke’s regiment—an irritable man whose small knowing eyes missed nothing—Dr Vickery explained why an astronomer, along with the prisoners
and the marines, should go to New South Wales. He predicted, he told Wyatt, that the comet of 1532 and 1661 would return in the year 1788. This would be as significant an event as the return predicted by Dr Halley of the comet now named after him. However, unlike Halley’s Comet, the one predicted by Dr Vickery would be visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. The Royal Observatory would be prepared to supply Lieutenant Rooke with instruments, if Major Wyatt would exempt him from ordinary duties.

Rooke suspected that Major Wyatt was probably not entirely convinced of the significance of the comet of 1532, and had only the sketchiest notion of who Dr Halley might have been. But Wyatt was not prepared to argue with the Astronomer Royal.

Rooke reminded himself that New South Wales was a smooth page waiting to be written on.
Quadrupeds, birds, ants and
their habitations
: for the sixteen years since the visit by
Endeavour
they had gone about their business under the antipodean sun. Now he was being offered the chance to see them, and to be perhaps the only astronomer to record the return of Dr Vickery’s comet.

Ten years before, Rooke knew he would have felt such an opportunity no more than his due. He had been blessed with intelligence, and this prospect offered him the chance to use it. It would have seemed the way things ought to be, one piece of the smooth machinery of the world moving in harmony with another.

Now he did not trust that machine. He did not think he ever would again. Life might promise, but he knew now that while it gave it also took.

Of course he would go to New South Wales. In some faraway place within him where eagerness still smouldered, he even looked forward to it. He bought notebooks and ledgers and experienced the first pulse of pleasure he had felt for a long time, running a hand over the blank leaves that he would fill with the data of this unknown land: the weather, the stars, perhaps the
quadrupeds
and even the
habitations of ants
.

Silk’s letter to Rooke, urging him to volunteer, had arrived by the same mail as Dr Vickery’s. Between the lines of the letter Rooke felt the new life breathed into his friend by this windfall. He had already volunteered and already been promoted. First Lieutenant Silk was now Captain-Lieutenant Silk. But rank was no longer the extent of his ambition.
Mr Debrett of Piccadilly has
promised me
, Silk wrote. ‘
Whatever you can give us from New South
Wales, we will publish.’ Those were his words, and I do not intend to
disappoint him!

Silk was no more a soldier than he was himself, Rooke saw. He too had been marking time, waiting for his vocation to become possible. Rooke realised that when Silk told those stories in the mess it was not simply to entertain. For Silk, the making of the tale—the elegance of its phrases, the flexing of its shape—was the point of the exercise. The instinct to rework an event, so that the telling became almost more real than the thing
itself—that had been born in Silk the way the pleasures of manipulating numbers had been born in Rooke.

I will not take no for an answer,
Silk wrote.

Anne had kept the globe he had made when he was fourteen. It was dusty and something had spattered against South America, but it still rotated.

‘The night sky is different there,’ he said. ‘See the way the earth is tilted? I will see stars there that we never see from here.’

He watched her thinking it through.

‘The moon, you will still see the moon? But upside down?’

She was unsure, he could tell, and was afraid of disappointing him with her stupidity. She was not stupid, only clever enough to recognise the limits of what she understood.

Outside, the rain whispered on and on, a voice just beyond the range of hearing. He got up and went around behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders and feeling the warmth of her against his chest. She spun the tremulous little globe around and around.

‘I will look at the moon every night,’ she said, ‘and think of you looking at it too.’

He could see something droll occur to her as she turned to look up at him.

‘Of course, so that I can see it just as you will, I shall be obliged to stand on my head, but that, my dear and esteemed brother, is a difficulty I am prepared to confront!’

When he took out the red jacket again for the first time he felt a swell of nausea. He could smell in its fabric the sweat of his terror, thought he could smell the gunpowder. He put it on, though—a new jacket would be too great an extravagance—and breathed deep to accustom his nose to being a soldier again.

He had come close to dying. Within half an inch, they had said. But he had been spared, and now this thing was being offered. What it meant he did not know, but he was willing to accept that this was the orbit his life was intended to follow.

B
egin as you mean to go on
, Rooke’s father had always told him, so Rooke made sure he was conspicuously an astronomer on board
Sirius
. He did not have to pretend. By the time he had made his sextant observations, compared them with the figures Captain Barton and Lieutenant Gardiner had got and worked out the average, that was already a goodly space of the afternoon. Then the geometry of latitude and longitude began. It could not be hurried.

As captain of the fleet’s flagship, Barton was wary at first of this young soldier who thought he could navigate. His face fell naturally into alarming sternness, so that Rooke thought he would be ordered off the quarterdeck like an upstart. But Barton’s sternness hid a kindly heart, and when he saw Rooke’s abilities he forgave him for being a lieutenant in the
marines rather than the navy.

Lieutenant Gardiner had been Barton’s right-hand man for three years, and was the officer to whom he had always turned in the past for a second set of observations. In Gardiner’s position, another officer might have resented Rooke. But Gardiner, a burly sunburnt sailor, was big in every sense, everything about him on a generous scale.

On their first meeting he enfolded Rooke’s hand in his own and looked square into his face. ‘Welcome, Mr Rooke. Three of us on the job, the ocean might as well be the king’s highway!’

The men braced themselves against the pitching of the ship, squinting into their sextants. At each reading the numbers they got were never quite the same. That was the nature of the job. But Barton and Gardiner did not cling jealously to theirs, as Rooke had seen navigators do on
Resolution
, as if the numbers on a piece of brass were a measure of manhood. Gardiner flirted with the sun as it slipped in and out of cloud, shouting at her to
show yourself, my beauty, none of this modesty!
He was always ready to assure Barton that Rooke had charmed her with a superior steadiness of hand and eye.
She is a tease, sir, and today it
is Mr Rooke she favours
.

While Rooke travelled on the flagship, Silk was at the rear of the eleven ships, on board
Charlotte
. Rooke saw him only when the ships put in to various ports on the way south.

‘Damned unfortunate,’ Silk said when they met on the quay at Rio.

‘Unlucky,’ Rooke agreed, keeping to himself the thought that he enjoyed the straightforward company of the navy men, even though they did not have such art with the turn of a phrase.

Silk was pulling a worn notebook out of his pocket.

‘I have made a start with my narrative, Rooke, listen to this, I am referring to Captain Cook’s report of having nosegays thrown at him by young ladies here.
We were so deplorably unfortunate
as to walk every evening before their balconies without being honoured
with a single bouquet, though nymphs and flowers were in equal and great
abundance
. Now tell me frankly, Rooke, as a friend, what do you think?’

‘Very clever, very deft of phrasing,’ Rooke said. ‘But have you really walked there every evening?’

‘Ah, Rooke the man of science! Let us call it poetic licence, my friend.’

It was foreign to Rooke, the idea of taking the real world as nothing more than raw material. His gift lay in measuring, calculating, deducing. Silk’s was to cut and embellish until a pebble was transformed into a gem.

Captain Barton set the fleet’s course but above Barton was the commodore, in whose hands all decisions finally rested. James Gilbert was an angled sort of man, all elbows and shoulders at different heights, a slight figure who took cautious steps on the
sloping deck, and always that tilt to his thin body, and the sour look on his face. On board
Sirius
Rooke never saw the commodore’s mouth bend into any but the most formal of smiles.

Of course the commodore’s joylessness might have been the pain in his side rather than his temperament.
It is always with him,
to a greater or lesser degree
, the surgeon had told them in the mess.
The kidneys, in my view, or perhaps the gall bladder
. Surgeon Weymark loved to eat and laugh, a tall man carrying an enormous belly before him like a figurehead, but there was compassion under his bonhomie. He tried every potion on the commodore, bled him and cupped him and palpated his side for an hour each morning to try to dislodge the pain, and was troubled that none of it had any effect.

When the commodore joined his officers on the quarterdeck, Gardiner went quiet and Barton’s face folded down into professional severity. Rooke reminded himself what unremitting pain did to the look on one’s face, but James Gilbert was a man it was difficult to warm to, sharing nothing of his thoughts with other men.

Each day at noon during the months at sea, the commodore and Captain Barton, with Rooke following respectfully behind in his capacity as astronomer, made their way together down the ladders. In the belly of the ship was a cabin guarded night and day by a sentinel. As the men approached, the sentinel moved aside to let them enter the only place in this crowded ship that was not full of bags and barrels and things folded and bound.
On a table screwed to the floor of this empty cabin, in a box screwed to the table, snug between two red silk cushions, lay the timekeeper made by Mr Kendall.

It was a package of Greenwich time that would travel with them, inviolate as a pea in a pod, all the way around the globe. When it was darkest night in New South Wales, the timekeeper would still be striking noon at Greenwich.

In its inner workings Mr Kendall’s timekeeper was the descendant of the brass insect slowly beating its wings that Dr Vickery had shown Rooke as a boy, but in shape this one was like any pocket watch, except that it was the size of a soup plate. It was a nice bit of wit on the part of the watchmaker, Rooke thought, to have made this gigantic thing as if it could be hung from some colossal waistcoat pocket.

With Barton and Rooke standing close by in case the ship lurched, the commodore lifted the timekeeper out of its nest and removed the pair-case, revealing the busy secretive mechanism within, the wheels twitching time forward tooth by tooth. He took the winding key from its slot in the box, inserted it into the hole in the back of the workings, and turned it. Then he replaced the case and slipped the thing back between its cushions.

As the regulation stipulated, the sentinel was called in and each of the men told him in turn:
The timekeeper has been wound
. When the sentinel had heard the words from each of them—and only then—he moved aside from the door and allowed them to leave.

The rigmarole was wonderfully droll, Rooke thought. If he had seen it, Silk would have had the mess highly entertained, imitating the way Rooke solemnly mouthed:
The timekeeper has
been wound
to the wooden-faced sentinel who had already been told it twice.

There was another thing about the ritual of the winding. Rooke was the lowliest sort of officer, a man of no importance. But during those few minutes in the cabin, rank was nothing. For that time, the astronomer Rooke was the equal of the commodore himself.

In fine weather, the whole business was redundant. But when sextants could not find the sun or moon in cloud, or the ship pitched too wildly to fix a sighting, the timekeeper, still faithfully telling the time in Greenwich even after months at sea, might be all that protected them from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of New South Wales.

Botany Bay proved itself immediately impossible as a place of settlement, so the commodore directed the fleet a few miles further north. It had taken nearly nine months to arrive at New South Wales: what could such a short distance further matter?

From the sea it looked as though the commodore had made a mistake. Rooke and Gardiner leaned on the rail watching as
Sirius
skewed to port and led the fleet towards what seemed no
more than a notch in a high yellow cliff. They heard the sheets rattle in the blocks as the sails were slanted and
Sirius
headed for the maelstrom of white water at its base.

But the commodore had not been mistaken. Beyond the cliff an enormous body of quiet water curved away to the west.
Sirius
glided past bays lined with crescents of yellow sand and headlands of dense forest. There was something about this vast hidden harbour—bay after perfect bay, headland after shapely headland—that put Rooke in a trance. He felt he could have travelled along it forever into the heart of this unknown land. It was the going forward that was the point, not the arriving, the water creaming away under the bow, drawn so deeply along this crack in the continent that there might never be any need to stop.

As
Sirius
rounded a rocky island, Rooke saw men running along the shore, shaking spears. He could hear them on the wind calling the same word over and over:
Warra! Warra!
He did not think that they were calling
Welcome! Welcome!
He suspected a polite translation might be something like
Go to the Devil!

With a rumbling rattle and splash the anchor was let go. When Rooke looked again, the men had gone.

They were anchored at the mouth of a small cove, sheltered by high ridges on either side. At the head of the bay was a slip of sand where a stream flowed into the cove. Behind it a shallow wooded valley ran back into the country.

The sailors readied the cutter for the shore party. A sergeant and four armed privates climbed down, then the commodore
and Captain Barton. Surgeon Weymark, with an ease surprising in such a big man, followed. Rooke did not wait to be invited, but climbed down after him. He did not want to miss the chance of being among the first to step onto this place, that might have been Saturn for all anyone knew of it.

On the sand at the head of the cove Rooke felt the ground tilt under him. He snuffed up lungfuls of the air: dry, clean, astringent, sweet and sour both at once, warm and complicatedly organic after all those many weeks of nothing but the blank wind of the sea.

Weymark took a step that the ground rose up to meet and laughed so his belly shook. He was just starting to say something when they saw five native men step out of the bushes fringing the sand. From behind him in the boat, Rooke heard a series of small sounds that he knew were made by muskets being put up to shoulders.

‘Steady, steady now,’ he heard the sergeant say, his voice tight.

The men were dark and naked, their faces shadowed in the sunlight.
Natives
, Rooke thought,
I am face to face with natives!

They were strange and ordinary at once: men, like himself in essence, the same shoulders and knees and private parts, although theirs were not private. A muscular grey-bearded man stood at the head of the group, the others behind him, each holding a wooden shield and spear. They watched, densely black in the sunlight.

‘The trinkets, sergeant, where are the trinkets?’

The commodore turned back to the boat, reaching impatiently for the bag the sergeant handed him. He shook a string of beads so it caught the sun.

‘Come, my friends,’ he called. ‘Look, I wager you have never seen this before!’