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!”
“But useful. Here, share my fish. The coble got out today and Johnny is dancing attendance on Captain Hunter, so I have his share too. A welcome change from Mt. Pitt birds.”
“I would rather eat fish any day,” said Richard, tucking in, “and why the craze for female birds gravid with egg I do not know. I will repay this kindness by digging ye a handful of potatoes tomorrow. Mine are coming on nicely, one reason why I am glad to have Lawrell back on duty now I can keep a third of my produce.”
“Is anybody speaking to you yet?” Stephen asked when they were done, the dishes washed, the chessboard set up.
“Not among those who have sided with my wife—Connelly, Perrott and a few others from Ceres and Alexander days. Oddly enough, the group who knew her in Gloucester Gaol before my time there—Guest, Risby, Hatheway—have sided with me.” He looked disgusted. “As if there are sides to take. Ridiculous. Lizzie is very satisfied with her lot, up there on the Government House knoll clucking and fussing over Little John, though she don’t try it with the Major.”
“She is in love with you, Richard, and scorned,” Stephen said, thinking that enough time had gone by to bring this aspect up.
Richard stared in astonishment. “Rubbish! There was never love between us. I know you hoped that marrying her might lead to love, but it did not.”
“She loves you.”
Troubl
ed, Richard said nothing for a while, moved and lost a pawn, essayed a knight. If Lizzie loved him, then her hurt was far greater than he had thought. Remembering what she had said about Lady Penrhyn and the stripping of women’s pride, that was how he had seen the worst aspect of his crime against her—as a public humiliation of unpardonable kind. She had never said she loved him, never indicated that by word or look. . . . He lost his knight.
“How goes it between the Marine Corps and the Navy?” he asked.
“Very touchy. Hunter has never liked Major Ross, but his exile here only serves to enhance his loathing. So far they have managed not to have an actual falling out, but that is definitely coming. Limited to Sirius’s cutter, he can undertake no long sea excursions, so he spends most of his time rowing around his nemesis, Nepean Island—looking, I suspect, for navigational evidence to bolster his defense when he comes to court martial in England. Once he has sounded every inch of the bottom and compiled his chart, he will do the same sort of thing everywhere on these coasts.”
“Why has Johnny half-returned to him, if that is not an intrusion into your private world?”
Shrugging, Stephen turned the corners of his mouth down. “No, I will answer. ’Tis very hard for a seaman to resist the authority of the captain unless he is of mutinous make, and that Johnny is not. Johnny is Royal Navy and Hunter next to God.”
“I also heard that Lieutenant William Bradley, Royal Navy, has quit the naval officers’ quarters and moved himself out along the road to Ball Bay.”
“Ye deduced that, no doubt, from sawing timber for his new house. Aye, he has gone, and no one mourns the fact. A very strange man, Bradley—talks to himself, which is why he needs no company other than himself. As I understand it, the Major has put him to rough surveying of the interior. A great affront to Hunter, who is adamant that naval persons of any rank ought not to toil on land.”
Ignominiously beaten, Richard rose to kindle a pine knot in Stephen’s fire. “I would like my revenge, but if I do not go now I will be caught out after curfew. D’ye care to walk to the mountain with me tomorrow for another lot of birds?”
“Since we ate all the fish, gladly.”
Stephen waved him off down the vale, trying to imagine the expression on Richard’s face when he entered his house. Sirius’s sail had been released from duty as shelter and had been divided up among the free men for use as mattresses or hammocks; thanks to King’s wheat crop as well as the fact that the settlement owned neither horses nor cattle, there was ample straw for stuffing. To Stephen, officially the captor of the sail, went as much as he wanted, so he had taken enough for his own needs and Richard’s. Long weathering and a few soapy washes in fresh water softened the canvas sufficiently to turn it into reasonable sheets, not to mention stout trowsers. Parties of women skilled with a needle were sewing away to produce new trowsers for the enlisted marines and sailors, who were obliged to give up a pair of old trowsers to a convict in return for a pair of new ones. No one truly appreciated the amount of sail a ship the size of Sirius carried until it was liberated for other uses.
“I cannot thank you enough for the canvas,” Richard said when he met Stephen on the Cascade road at sundown on the following day. “Using blankets as a bottom sheet on one’s bed wears them out in no time. The canvas will last for years.”
“I suspect it may have to.”
They climbed up the farthest path, which was the least popular one as it involved the longest walk, and gathered a half-dozen birds each high on the mountain, where the creatures still thronged in countless numbers. All that was necessary was to reach down and pick one up; a quick wring of its neck, and into the sack. The eggs were laid now, though the amount of birds being caught had not diminished; Clark’s tally was growing into many thousands, and took account only of birds handed over to Government Stores plus whatever he and his fellow officers collected.
On the way back they passed through a vast clearing where the timber was already felled—some acres of it—on the flattish crest of the hills which divided the direction of the streams from those flowing north to Cascade Bay, those flowing east to Ball Bay, and those flowing south to the swamp or what was becoming known as Phillimore’s stream, around the corner from the far beach. Here in this clearing—what was Major Ross’s purpose?—it was possible to look north at the mountain.
Cloudless darkness had fallen, the stars so dense and brilliant that a man could fancy there must be an intensely glowing white layer behind the darkness of the sky, and that God had pricked the heavens to let some of that silver firmament shine through. Where the bulk of the mountain should have loomed as a black shadow, what looked like streamers of darting fireflies flickered in and out of the gloom, shifting and sparkling rivers of flame; the torches of hundreds of men coming down the slopes.
“Beautiful!” breathed Richard, stunned.
“How could a man tire of this place?”
They remained watching until the lights died away and then resumed their walk amid dozens of panting, sack-laden predators, torches all around them.
* * *
Winter came, drier and colder than last year’s; the wheat and Indian corn were planted over many more acres than King’s eleven, but were slow to come up until a welcome day of squally rain followed by a day of sun saw the vale and hillsides turn magically from blood-red soil to vividly green grass.
The official tally of Mt. Pitt birds rose to over 170,000—an average of 340 birds per person over 100 days. The island was still under Law Martial; Major Ross cut salt meat entirely from everybody’s rations, aware that the thousands of petrels remaining on the mountain would fly away once their chicks were strong enough to take wing. There had been plenty of heavy floggings administered by Jim Richardson, whom Richard had used as a sawyer until he broke his leg. To wield his assortment of cats put no strain on the afflicted member, and he quite liked this exclusive occupation. The odium in which he was regarded by almost all of his fellows, free as well as felon, worried him not in the slightest.
There had also been some hangings. Not of convicts: of sailors. Captain Hunter’s servants, assisted by Ross’s servant the noble Escott of Sirius fame, pillaged the Major’s scanty supply of rum, drank some of it and sold the rest. In his role of judge, jury and executioner, Lieutenant-Governor Ross hanged three of the offenders, though not Escott and not Hunter’s chief minion, Elliott. Escott’s other punishment was to be stripped of his Sirius valor; Ross gave the official credit for swimming out to the wreck to a convict named John Arscott. Escott and Elliott were let off with 500 lashes from the meanest cat, a punishment which, as the Major had promised in his address at the beginning of Law Martial, laid them bare to the bone from neck to ankles. This total was administered in a series of five floggings of 100 lashes each, 100 lashes being considered the most any man could bear at one time. The flogger started at the shoulders and moved slowly down the body over back, buttocks and thighs to finish at the calves. Murmurs of mutiny arose among the sailors, but in the face of this terrible crime against the free, rum-drinking community Captain Hunter was unable to support his men’s cause, while the furious marines looked only too happy to shoot a mob of sailors down. Thanks to Private Daniel Stanfield their muskets were in excellent condition and they kept their cartridges dry; musket practice under Stephen and Richard still happened on Saturday mornings.
Major Ross arrived at Richard’s house in the aftermath of the rumstealing disaster, face even grimmer than usual.
This task is killing him, thought Richard, ushering the Major to a chair; he has aged ten years since arriving here.
“Mr. Donovan,” Ross announced, “imparted some interesting facts about ye to me, Morgan. He says ye can distill rum.”
“Aye, sir—given the equipment and the ingredients. Though I cannot promise that it will taste any better than the stuff produced in Rio de Janeiro, from reports of that. Like all spirits, rum should be aged in the cask before being drunk, but if ye want what I think ye want,
there is not the time. The results will be raw and nasty.”
“Beggars cannot be choosers.” Ross snapped his fingers at the dog, which bustled over to be patted. “How are ye, MacTavish?”
MacTavish wagged his undocked tail and looked adorable.
“I was a victualler in Bristol, sir, among other things,” said Richard, throwing a log onto his fire, “so I understand better than most how big are the horns of this dilemma. Men who are used to rum or gin every day cannot live happily without it. That can be as true of women. Only the Law Martial and lack of equipment has prevented construction of a still here already. I will gladly build ye the still and work it, but. . . .”
Hands out to the fire, Ross grunted. “I know what ye’re implying. The moment ’tis known a still exists, there will be those who will not be content with a half-pint a day and others who will see profit in it.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Ye have a fine crop of sugar cane, as does the Government.”
Richard grinned. “I thought it might come in handy.”
“Are ye a drinker yourself these days, Morgan?”
“Nay. On that I give you my word, Major Ross.”
“I have one abstemious officer, Lieutenant Clark, so to him I will apportion supervision of this project. And tear my ranks apart looking for privates. Stanfield, Hayes and James Redman I can trust neither to imbibe nor to sell, and Captain Hunter”—his face twisted, was disciplined—“recommends his quarter gunner Drummond, his bosun’s mate Mitchell, and his seaman Hibbs. That gives ye a total of six men and one officer.”
Morgan’s Run Page 58
