A Far Distant Land: A saga of British survival in an unforgiving new world (The Australian Historical Saga Series Book 1)

by David Field

  Before long, Daniel was distracted by shouting from the forest. He looked up to see Private Milward anxiously beckoning him over. Daniel strode quickly over to where a man lay on the ground, clutching his bare foot, white in the face and breathing rapidly and shallowly.

  ‘Sir, this man has been bitten by some sort of serpent,’ Private Milward explained, himself white in the face. ‘I saw it myself, slithering into that long grass over there.’

  Daniel looked down at the man. ‘Show me the wound,’ he said.

  The man removed his hand from the area of flesh just above his left ankle, which had two holes in it, about half an inch apart and oozing blood. The man sank back onto the earth, shivering uncontrollably and whimpering in fear and self-pity. Daniel stripped off his red dress coat, tore a strip from his shirt sleeve and knelt beside the man. He looked back up at Milward with instructions to watch carefully, then bent his head over the wound. He sucked as much blood as he could from the wound without swallowing it, spat it out onto the ground and repeated the process four times before pausing for breath. He looked back up at Milward. ‘Do you think you could do what I just did, three times?’

  Milward turned pale again, but nodded and replaced Daniel beside the injured man, while Daniel busied himself twisting his ripped shirt strip into a tight bandage. As Milward’s head came up for the third time, Daniel tied the bandage as tightly as he could around the victim’s leg, just above the puncture mark. He looked back down at the man’s face and asked, ‘Does it feel as if you’ve suddenly lost all feeling in your foot?’

  The man nodded and Daniel stood up.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘that means that the circulation has stopped. Hopefully the poison won’t spread any further, but this man must be carried down to the shoreline immediately and handed over to the nearest ship’s surgeon, preferably one who’s served in the tropics, which is where I learned that little trick. In the meantime, tell the men to watch where they put their feet — even the ones with boots or shoes on.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Milward replied, ashen-faced as he beckoned two men over and detailed them to carry their colleague down to the shore with a request for a surgeon.

  When Daniel climbed back up the rope ladder onto the deck of the Lady Penrhyn, it was almost dark. He called immediately for the mess allocation chart for the convict deck. Unable to find Mary Murphy’s name on it, but well aware of the clerical incompetence of naval personnel assigned to non-naval duties, he climbed down the companionway, gritting his teeth against the stench and walked down the middle gangway between the messes that looked for all the world like animal pens at a country market. Each mess contained ten women and was constructed out of thick wooden staves that ran from the floor of the convict deck to the roof, which was of course the floor of the main deck above it. The staves were like a fence through which one could keep an eye on the mess from the outside, but each mess had a heavy metal lock set into its solid entrance door.

  As he walked down the centre aisle, he was subjected to the same verbal insults, lewd catcalls and carefully aimed spits that all his men had to endure and to which even he had become inured over the months. Halfway down on the left, he saw Mary sitting crouched in the far corner of her mess, with the rest of the women who were locked in with her gossiping among themselves. They looked up as he stopped by the entrance door, turned back to the guard with him who was carrying the keys and lantern and ordered him to unlock the mess door without opening it. While this was being done, he pointed sternly at Mary and shouted an order, ‘You! Out!’

  Looking scared, Mary scrambled to her feet and scuttled to the door. Daniel nodded and the door was opened for long enough to enable Mary to squeeze out before it was slammed shut behind her. Daniel took her arm and guided her back towards the companionway.

  Back up on deck, Daniel released her arm and smiled down at her. ‘Forgive my ungracious manner down there, but I didn’t want them to think that you were being singled out for special treatment, or they’d only have made your life a further misery. Are the other women in Mess 11 the only ones who bully you?’

  ‘Yes — why?’

  ‘Can you cook? Tomorrow morning I have to send forty women ashore to work in the mess tent, preparing food for the men on the work details. If I send you as one of the forty and leave the rest of those dreadful women in Mess 11 where they are, you’d be free of their persecution, wouldn’t you?’

  She stared at him for a moment as she took in the full import of what he was telling her, then tears began to well in her eyes and one rolled down her cheek as she nodded.

  ‘God bless you, sir. What’s your name, so that I can pray to God to bring down eternal blessings upon you for your kindness?’

  ‘Daniel — it’s Daniel.’

  ‘Well, Daniel, if there’s anything a poor lass like me can ever do for you, just say the word.’

  ‘You might not think that, when you’re out there in the heat, working over open fires and suchlike,’ Daniel replied. ‘As for tonight, I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to go back below decks. If you stay above decks tonight, we can just slip you in with the others detailed for the onshore cooking tent when we bring them on deck at first light.’

  He looked around the ship’s deck and his eyes rested on a ship’s cutter hanging from a pulley and lashed down to the inside of the port gunwales. He walked over to it and lifted the canvas that kept the rain out of its scuppers. He turned back towards Mary and pointed down inside it.

  ‘You can sleep under there. I’ll go and get you my cloak, to wrap yourself in when the night air turns colder, just before dawn. As soon as the sky lightens in the morning, slide out from under and go and stand near the companionway hatch, as if you’d just been ordered up on deck.’

  Mary reached out to him. ‘Couldn’t you get under there with me and keep me safe?’

  Daniel looked carefully up and down the main deck. It was deserted. He allowed Mary to guide him by the hand and they both crawled under the canvas, where Mary immediately rolled into his arms. Daniel felt a warm glow of contentment as he held her to him and finally fell asleep with the musky smell of her long black hair in his nostrils.

  The next morning they woke at the same time and slid out from under the canvas onto the main deck. Mary scuttled to the foc’sle and Daniel went below decks to the Lieutenant’s cabin in order to shave and change into his spare shirt. When he came back on deck, George Johnston was standing under the main mast with a dark-haired young woman with a long, handsome, but serious face. She was carrying a small child and looking nervous.

  ‘This is Rachel,’ Johnston told Daniel. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve added her to your list to go ashore on the cooking detail. The convict hold is hardly a healthy place for her young daughter — or anyone else, for that matter. I see you’ve already selected one for yourself from down there.’ He gestured to where Mary was huddling under the foremast, trying to look inconspicuous.

  Daniel waved her over. ‘Stand here, next to Rachel,’ he instructed her. ‘The rest’ll come up after two bells, but I’m afraid you two ladies will have to forego your usual sumptuous breakfast.’

  Forty minutes later, as the last of the line of embarkees was being assisted down the rope ladder into the third boat of the morning to cast off for the shore, Mary and Rachel were the final two in the line. They halted briefly, each awaiting the hand of a seaman to assist them over the side and Mary reached up quickly, pulled Daniel’s head down by the collar of his tunic and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you for selecting me, Daniel,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t regret it.’

  2

  Daniel stood silently to attention at the head of his column, the four lines abreast that had been ordered out onto the new parade ground in front of the temporary marine barracks on the north bank of the Cove. In reality, the ‘barracks’ consisted merely of a row of tents pitched among the rocks, but at least those rocks gave them partial protection a
gainst the gales that swept in from the north. However, on days like today, when the wind was from the south-east, the canvas flapped angrily in the gale and the peg lines threatened to pull free completely from the loose sand into which they had been hammered. Periodically a tent would blow down in weather such as this, which did nothing for the image of the regiment as an efficient fighting force.

  The drum began to beat slowly, as Private Fraser was stripped of his uniform jacket and blindfolded. Then, escorted by two fellow privates, he was marched slowly up and down between the ranks to the remorseless beat of the drum. This was his penalty for being caught in a female tent only yards from the barracks, but closer to the rocky shoreline. He was being ‘drummed out’ of the regiment and would now have to fend for himself, entitled to neither military fare nor convict rations. He was lucky that he was not being either flogged or hanged.

  The men were dismissed and Daniel wandered back towards the shoreline, past where a team of convicts, under instruction from a ship’s carpenter, was erecting the prefabricated frame for the governor’s house which had been brought from Portsmouth on the Borrowdale and only required further timber from the forest behind in order to be complete, after which his furniture could be installed. It would be the first complete construction in the colony, but would be followed eventually by a stone replacement for which foundations were already being dug on the south side and in front of which a garden plot was already marked out. Lesser mortals would be allocated to the many huts that were under construction further back up the beach.

  It was approaching the middle of the day and there was already a bustle of activity in and around the mess tent, inside which Daniel knew he would find Mary, but the handful of men detailed to transport the prepared food to the work parties were not under his direct command and he had no excuse to be wandering over there.

  He stopped briefly amid all the hustle and bustle around him and asked himself why he was even contemplating seeking out a single convict woman, when he had been responsible for over a hundred of them while they had been at sea. He could pretend to himself, if he chose, that he was merely ensuring that those who had persecuted her had not been allocated to the mess tent, and to a certain degree that was the case. They were into their third week ashore and all the remaining women were now on land, allocated to washing the clothes of the convict labourers and sewing up the tears in their rudimentary garments caused by the rough work that they were carrying out.

  Some of the women had small children, like the one who George Johnston had obviously taken a fancy to, and a separate tent had been allocated to nursing mothers and pregnant women, to whom had been allocated lighter duties. There were some one hundred and fifty women ashore and rumour had it that the vessels that had brought them here would soon be raising anchor and sailing out of the cove, so why was he constantly thinking back in his mind to the time they had all spent on board? If he was to be brutally honest with himself, he couldn’t completely erase from his mind the memory of that cool night under the canvas, in which he had held in his arms one of the most strikingly beautiful women he had ever laid eyes on.

  He found himself just outside the mess tent, looking through its flap in a subconscious search for Mary. Inside was all steam and bustle, as men came and went with pots of stew and loaves of freshly-baked bread whose wafting aroma made Daniel’s stomach rumble. There was a hiss from somewhere and he located the source of the sound at the far side of the mess tent; Mary was waving to him and beckoning him over to where she stood, almost completely hidden by the side canvas. He walked over to speak to her and as he got closer he could see the sweat running down her face in rivulets from under the coarse bonnet into which her luxuriant black hair had been crammed. There were sweat stains under the armpits of the simple brown gown that she had somehow acquired to replace the rice sacks in which she had been clad when he last saw her, but she seemed so pleased to see him that she didn’t care about her appearance.

  She grinned at him and brought her other hand from behind her back to reveal within it a sizeable bread bun. ‘Good day, guardian angel. I hope you like cheese, for this one has half a block baked into it. I made it just for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mary,’ Daniel murmured as he took the loaf from her and began eating hungrily. It was the best thing he’d consumed since their embarkation dinner at The Partridge on Portsmouth dockside. He swallowed the portion he had chewed off, cleared his mouth and asked, ‘Are they treating you properly in there?’

  ‘Yes, thanks to you. The work’s hot and hard, but the days pass quickly enough.’ Mary looked him up and down appraisingly. ‘You’re thinner than when I last saw you.’

  Daniel realised that he might be getting her into trouble, standing there openly eating a loaf of bread that she’d obviously purloined from the mess tent and keeping her from her duties. He was about to thank her again politely and walk away when she asked: ‘So how come I see you every day, walking up that hill? Have you got a woman hidden up there in the trees?’

  Daniel blushed. ‘No woman — just eighty or so convicts felling trees and building huts.’

  ‘Who’ll be living in them?’

  ‘No idea — officers and marines, I suppose.’

  ‘And will you get one all to yourself, so you can hold lassies tight against the night air?’

  ‘I really have no idea,’ Daniel replied, then realised that he’d left half the question unanswered and that clarification was needed. ‘What I mean is, I don’t know how many men will be allocated to huts. As for women, there are strict rules against cohabitation — I just watched a marine drummed out of the regiment for doing just that.’

  Half an hour later, Daniel was watching the men on the building detail, under the half-hearted supervision of Private Webber, who’d been excused attendance at the drumming out parade. One hut was virtually complete, with the final few slabs being nailed into place by a couple of sweaty convicts whose previously fair skin had turned a bright lobster red as the result of three weeks of labouring under the remorseless sun. The rain didn’t seem to come until late in the afternoon and was usually accompanied by thunder and lightning, so it had been possible to move ahead with the hut construction almost without delay, hampered only by the periodic shortage of materials from the forest behind them, in which the occasional curious tanned face could be seen peering out from the vegetation, looking for a chance to steal a valuable tool. Several other huts were in various stages of completion and things were obviously going well.

  ‘How soon d’you reckon that one’ll be finished?’ came a voice from behind him.

  Daniel turned round and there stood George Johnston with a big self-satisfied grin on his boyish face.

  ‘By the end of the day, probably,’ Daniel told him. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  George looked longingly past him at the nearly completed hut and replied without averting his gaze. ‘When it’s completed, get one of the men to carve a nameplate above the door that reads “First Lieutenant George Johnston, Adjutant to the Governor”.’

  ‘I thought Major Ross already had an adjutant.’

  ‘He does, but the governor wanted one of his own and I got selected. Mainly because the governor and Ross can’t even agree on what day it is. If it were left to Ross, we’d be building a massive stockade against the natives and taking pot shots every time they appeared. Seems that Governor Phillip can’t even be civil in Ross’s presence and he needed someone to relay his instructions, so I became his message boy. In return, I get the first hut that’s available, to denote my exalted rank and emphasise the importance of the office of the governor himself. I’m now supervising the erection of that fine stone house he’s going to be living in.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Daniel replied woodenly, concerned to learn of the conflict between the two most important men in the colony.

  ‘Anyway, Rachel and I can move in tomorrow, by the sound of things.’ George looked back at Daniel for the first time. ‘Rachel’s expect
ing again — mine, this time,’ he announced proudly, ‘and I’ve been allowed to select a goat from the herd grazing in the garden where the governor’s stone mansion is. That’ll supply her first-born, Roseanna, with milk, but she’s going to need a nursemaid while Rachel deals with the new arrival. Any ideas? You saw more of the women below decks than I did.’

  Daniel was about to point out that George had obviously seen more of one particular woman than anyone had, but checked himself when he thought back to his recent conversation with Mary. ‘There’s that one you saw me with on deck just before we took the first party ashore — “Mary”, her name is and she was telling me how much she misses acting as a substitute mother for her two young sisters. She seems pretty well domesticated.’

  George gave him a knowing leer. ‘I thought I saw you chatting to her outside the mess tent when I was looking over there a while ago. Can’t blame you for favouring a bonnie one like that — when we move into this hut, which hopefully will be tomorrow, send her over to meet Rachel. If she’s any good and doesn’t list infant murder among her convictions, she may be just the ticket.’

  ‘We aren’t — that is, we’re not...’ Daniel started to explain, before George silenced him with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Don’t bother trying to explain, Daniel — just send the lassie over to see Rachel tomorrow.’