The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  The gentlemen postured like statues, gazing heroically out to sea, one arm behind their back, and trying to exude foresight or destiny or resolution, practising for when they might became famous and immortalised; but in the end they just looked disdainful, which was more natural to their attainment. In spite of themselves, they provided the rest of us with entertainment. Some of us took to standing bravely up forrard (that is one of the common nautical expressions I now had at my fingertips) in exact imitation of them; though it was impossible to keep one’s hat on up near the bow, which somewhat reduced the effect of the satire.

  As we neared the tropics, and the unrelenting sun became more vertical, awnings were stretched across the ship, one up on the poop for those most deserving, and another right across midships, where the rest of us jostled for whatever piece of shade we could make our own. At night, when it was uncomfortably warm below decks, sweltering in fact, some of the men slept in the open, in their shirts; but they had to be below decks again at first light, when the women came up to wash. It was all the dickens of a mad scramble. I have to confess to joining in that lark for one or two evenings. The blaze of the stars above was astounding; it certainly did not encourage sleep.

  Every attempt at elegance and propriety crumbled away rapidly enough, and nowhere more patently than when our ship crossed the line. The crew by right of ancient custom threw caution to the non-existent winds, and the novices among them into a great canvas bath, together with all sorts of disgusting additives, the least repugnant of which appeared to be tallow. King Neptune with his grampus prod presided over the saturnalia, together with his raucous brother-in-arms Davy Jones. Several of the sailors seemed to be clad, or unclad, as mermaids, much to the shock of the ladies, still wedged up against the barricade across the front of the quarterdeck, I noticed, from where they had an advantageous if secure view of the ceremonial shenanigans down on the main deck; and of the crew regaling themselves on the liquid tribute they had managed to extort from the more intimidated of the passengers.

  A small group of adventurous young sparks, undoubtedly wishing to impress some fair ones among the spectators, nudging and egging each other on to keep up their courage, allowed themselves to be led up to King Neptune—and of course the obligatory ritual dunking. Soused and dowsed, they splashed around like so many bobbing apples in the old Christmas game. It was in several senses then, for the crew as for us, a rite of passage.

  In the main we were discouraged from mingling with the sailors, though in these tedious latitudes they had little to do, and occupied themselves with making sandals from lengths of frayed rope, or carving pieces of wood, or they just lounged about yarning. One of them showed me a piece of bone into which he was cutting a design, and then rubbing it with gunpowder to show up the fine lines of his work. He called it scrimshaw. If the seamen can trade for a whale’s tooth or a walrus tusk, they prefer to engrave that. Several of them were quite good artists in their own way—they were proud to show me the pictures they had painted on the top of their sea chests, invariably of a stiff-looking sailing ship heading towards the right hand end of the trunk. They pointed out that it meant sailing from port; it took a moment for me to catch the joke.

  Which is to say, of course, that they had invited me down below to their quarters where, out of sight of the officer on duty, they occasionally and furtively smoked a short pipe. The captain was terrified of a fire down below; my father would have rejoiced in his alarm. One of the men had a fiddle and another an instrument called a concertina, which looks like a little Chinese lantern tipped on to its side, and they sang rollicking songs and stamped their feet and drank some of the refreshments I had thought to bring along with me.

  We were soon on first name terms. They could hardly go on calling me Mr Dibble when we were sharing the same bottle. So it was Bill, and Jack, and Mickey and Tom, and Ethan, though on deck, above board you might say, it was surnames only. One of them, a fellow called Brand—flamin’ Brand his mates called him—knew all sorts of old sea songs and shanties, some not fit to be remembered, but the rest of the crew were very boisterous about them. He said if he had nothing else to leave he would at least pass those on to his progeny, if ever he had any. Or any he’d admit to, said Trumble from one side. Hor hor hor.

  The sailors have a strange kind of jumping dance which they call a hornpipe—they fold their arms and skip about, and then while they keep jigging up and down they imitate pulling on ropes, or climbing up the shrouds, or looking out to sea first one way and then the other, odd gestures that act out their sea-going duties, and all the while the fiddle and the concertina play faster and faster, and the onlookers clap faster and faster too. Round and round the dancers go, kicking out their feet and being careful not to hit their head on the low beams holding up the decking above them. It was all strangely jerky in the half-light of their quarters, the lantern swinging and their shadows flying out like exploding monkeys.

  They encouraged me to join in, but the best that I could manage was something like a jig, to their very great mirth; and we all ended, it goes without saying, in a bit of a reel.

  Pusser says you’ve got another name, said one; maybe it was Trumble, he seemed to be more outspoken than the others.

  Oh oh, thought I to myself, here it comes. For I was born in the years of excitement, after the defeat of Napoleon, and my father in a patriotic fit had named me Quercus. Hearts of oak and so forth. He was not a fighting man, but he had gloried in Boney’s downfall, as had so many of our countrymen.

  Burster. Cork arse, hor hor hor.

  I’d heard the like often enough. Once my new-found nautical friends had had their laugh at my expense, they let it drop, more or less. Though up on deck I did hear from time to time, here comes Corky.

  They were as jolly a group as my erstwhile race-going acquaintances. One difference, though, was that most of them had tattoos, and I doubt that was the case with my young gallants. Which was a thing I could hardly know, for those had always worn a jacket, if not a well-cut coat. Down here in the crew’s quarters was a whole world of maritime art that I had known nothing about; though I felt it advisable to leave when a sailor took off his shirt to show me a tattoo that was, I’d have to say, quite properly not on display when he was working on deck.

  It was of course only a matter of time before I was at last spotted by an officer, and asked to keep to my own part of the ship in future. My new friends were a well-meaning bunch of fellows, and we used to wink at each other from time to time thereafter. Towards the last stretch of the voyage they presented me with a blue peaked cap, like a pilot’s cap such as I had seen about Portsmouth, I thought. That gift was to remind me of our rousing choruses, and I took to wearing it when I sat in a nook somewhere out of the way of the deck’s clutter, and sketched whatever and whoever took my fancy. Sometimes, just for the conceit of it, I used to block out a quick silhouette and present it to the unaware subject. For my new friends in the fo’c’sle, as they called it, I made sketches of our revelries, for a memento.

  Trumble of course would have the last say, as always. That cap, he told me, that’s the sort a bargeman wears. In Holland and Belgium, like. Keeps his ears warm when he hasn’t got his missus, hey Corky? Hor hor hor. The point of which eluded me, I admit. But I liked my gift enormously.

  On one occasion my sketching had an unintended and unanticipated consequence. A rooster, being recruited for a celebratory meal once the ship had found its way back into wind and waves again, escaped from its pen and, chased about the deck, flapped its wings and was whirled up into the great sail above. With the cow in a holding pen, earning its passage by supplying us with fresh milk, the idea occurred to me that if I imagined one of the dogs on board standing on the cow’s back, and the ship’s cat above that, there would be a kind of animal stepladder up to the brave chanticleer’s surprising new roost; and so I quickly sketched that, and gave it to the doctor who was presiding over our table, where we clubbed together for a bowl of punch. He thought th
is new version of the musicians of Bremen all at sea was capital, and tacked my sketch to the main mast. I was well pleased with it too, though of course it did not compare with George Cruikshank’s lively illustration in my copy of the Grimm brothers’ German stories.

  But the unhappy upshot of what was intended only in fun was that the captain, a prickly and humourless man, took it all amiss, as somehow a mockery of the ship and its freight, if not of his dignity. He worked himself into a fury, and in his blustering up and down the deck he kicked at the doors of the various remaining cages and hutches; the livestock got out, and my innocent sketch more truly presaged the ever-threatening burlesque of misrule than I had envisaged. The children had great sport chasing after all the piglets and poultry, and catching the runaways, and returning them to their pens.

  It is a melancholy testament to the wickedness of the world that not all the animals found their way to their proper habitations; unmistakable odours of broiling chicken and rabbit wafted up from below decks that evening.

  And so we pressed on, when the winds were kindly, ever south; at other times we all but drifted. The tropic seas were for the most part little more than gentle swells. The dazzling light lay all around us, scintillating off the ocean surface, and as those endless days wore on it seemed to grow in fullness and then turned into a great glare, and later a strange haziness, and the shade of the awning slipped over to one side of the deck and the empty sails flapped half-heartedly from time to time. At such times even the incessant chatter below decks fell away, and all fell under the spell of a general lassitude. By way of compensation the sunsets were tremendous, the iridescent colours stretching from the horizon to us, from us to the horizon.

  At somewhere near the midpoint of our voyage, when at night the familiar constellations had turned themselves about and huge clouds of glittering new stars were rising, I would lie back with my hands clasped behind my head, staring up at the tracery of the rigging, and the sky above. How do we persuade ourselves it is round, when it is a flat page we look at? It was as though those intermediate black silhouettes criss-crossing in straight lines against the further blackness suggested its vast warp. And the stars too seemed to have lined up in an enormous curve. For a while I watched the stars that make the Southern Cross swing gently to one side and then to the other of the mast top, though not long enough for that new constellation to move around the sky. I lay listening to the chuckle of water down the length of the hull, and myriad strange creakings and rustlings, and the voices of mothers quietening their children, and like them fell asleep at last. Tomorrow would be another day. And so too would the one after that.

  Somewhere far ahead, no doubt—a distant thought—would be stormy seas.

  Sketch 3

  In which I start on my own account

  THE NEW SETTLEMENT is at a sufficient distance inland for the inhabitants to have no sense of being connected to the sea. You leave your ship of passage and trail inland far enough to preclude any sudden change of mind, any second thoughts about whether this is where you want to be. You are committed, once you are here. That is a nice variation, perhaps not all that significant in the end, from the practice in the older Australian colonies. The key difference is that in going to those other destinations you are committed ahead of time.

  However, it is not really all that far from the coast. You can still see the flat blue gulf from various places about the infant township. Here are enough glimpses of the sea to keep the experience poignant; and, I might add, enough glimpses to have teased the first planners to contemplate digging a canal all the way in from the port. It remains a puzzle how they thought to keep it filled with water.

  There is so much that is interesting, though, that before long you forget those long views. What an extraordinary place this is. The town has been planned out, with regular wide streets and spaces for town squares, and the whole is surrounded by open bushland that already looks somewhat like an extensive park: stands of trees amid plenty of grass, a few shallow creeks—little more than ditches really—on a level plane, all ready made for riding about. Trees standing in the middle of where roads are to be. You have to cast further afield for hunting, for kangaroos mainly. That can be great sport, if you have a good horse to dash after your game, and a pack of dogs. The country towards the quite attractive range of hills, the Tiers as they are being called, is more heavily treed, almost a forest. There are plenty of duck along the main watercourse, and different kinds of parrots and pigeons and other birds to shoot, and fish to catch.

  Where the streets are, or where they have been planned, inconvenient trees are being grubbed out, though the road surface has not settled back as evenly as could be wished. A few carriages are to be seen, and many more drays and wagons. Building goes on apace everywhere. Already the Governor’s house stands at one end of the main thoroughfare, in what will be extensive grounds overlooking reed beds and a rudimentary ford across the little river leading down towards where I saw the native camp. It is what one hopes might one day become picturesque, a kind of promissory note towards a view.

  Along the line of the main roads are rather more fine-looking establishments and cottages than I expected to see. Some of these had been shipped out from England in bits and pieces and assembled; even the glass for the windows had survived the journey intact, though doubtless the exceptions to that are lying about among the spoil at Port Misery. Some have been built of bricks, likewise imported. Some are of weatherboard. The components of a ready-made church were thoughtfully sent out; but at its first assembly, there was a dismaying revelation. The boards did not fit together, and the struggles of the workmen to trim and cut corners put into my mind that, even in the brave new world, old Job was worth remembering: except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. As happens when there be too many trimmers.

  We have a good many locally wrought chapels and meeting places too. The new Governor, Colonel Gawler, would like to have attended them all, being a man with a kind of religious frenzy. My father would have fancied his chance at being the Governor’s man. More to my taste is a similar plenty of drinking establishments; watering holes as the bullock drivers call them, some fifty or so, it is said. Most commonly they dispense spirits, as a direct counterpoint to those other places where the spirit gathers together, though my father would not thank me for the facetiousness. There is not yet much in the way of local brewing; in the meantime the publicans have had the foresight to ensure imported deliveries of bottled beer.

  Less impressively, or impressive in quite another way, are a good many huts made of wattle and daub, mud huts really—the colony’s newspaper was at first printed in one such. Some of the cabins are rough structures, thick slabs of bark braced together by saplings. Many of the taverns are of this temporary kind, until more permanent and substantial hotels are built. Which is again to raise the question: just when is the beginning? Has the colony begun yet or is its real beginning yet to come? Those first unsteady official steps through the sand and banks of drying seaweed at Holdfast Bay were undoubtedly an inauguration, but was that the commencement or should we await some kind of colonial establishment before we proclaim we have indeed arrived? Both the Resident Commissioner and the Surveyor-General had huts made of reeds; it can be no surprise that these accidentally burned down, to the great distress of both parties. Officials without an office.

  And of course everywhere are tents, bell-shaped and perhaps with brave little flags at their tip, and sad to see, the first scratchings of tiny gardens in front, where the women have planted the cuttings they tended so carefully on the voyage, making sure the wrappings stayed moist, priceless mementoes from their father’s cottage garden. Given that the seasons are out of kilter here, I have no great expectation that the cuttings will flourish, nor the seeds they have brought with them either. Those plantings are a mark of great faith, or optimism, or desperation, that all will be well. And in what you might think of as the back garden of these temporary residences, makeshift pe
ns for those chickens that survived the long passage by sea, but whose days are nevertheless surely numbered, which makes their fortitude pathetic. Dogs bound about, harassing the chickens and dashing hither and thither, and I regret to say some have so far recovered from their voyaging as to begin the jolly experiment of generating new cross-breeds. It is a scandal how they defy the official principles of orderliness and regularity.

  Whole families live in these tents and marquees and huts and shelters while waiting to find more permanent lodgings or—and this is the sticking point for so many new arrivals—until the surveyor has pegged out the land they were allocated. The newcomers find what accommodation they can wherever they can, and the reserved park lands around the township are in fact in common use, not as the founders might have wished but by the common people notwithstanding, living as best they can in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, amid the litter that has gradually been accumulating amongst the wattle bushes, and the abandoned spoil where some person or persons unknown has been digging up rock for their own building ventures. The Governor has appointed constables to begin shifting the people from this unsightly site. Their encampment must have been particularly uncomfortable in the warm weather, which is to say much of the time. And the exasperation of the flies! You can never be free of them.

  Even those with more solid dwellings live inside or close to Adelaide, waiting for the opportunity to take up their promised land. That has been the universal dream of all who have migrated here, that was what the advertisements tempted them with. The town lots were assigned in the first months of the settlement, to those who had bought an entitlement at the inauguration of the scheme, and what little was left over was soon snapped up. Now those lots are being sold on again, subdivided, at an increase in price. Rural selections are only just starting to become available, even for those who had bought land orders, the delay being because the countryside round about the settlement has yet to be properly surveyed. These indignant owners-in-waiting live in temporary quarters, which proves an unplanned drain upon their capital. Inevitably a good many have started speculating in property in and around the town; the price of land and labour and materials all spirals upwards, and quite contradicts the intended spirit of the new settlement, of available land. Available, apparently, only to those with the deepest pockets.