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

by David Field

  ‘It could be a girl,’ she reminded him.

  He sat back and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I realise that you went through a bad time giving birth to Matthew, but at least we have the hospital doctor at hand here and Sarah seems to know what she’s doing...’

  Martha put her fingers to his lips to silence the flow of reassurance. ‘I wasn’t upset just because I’m pregnant — in fact it’s the best thing that’s happened all year. But that’s the point, Daniel — it’s the only thing that’s happened all year. You really do have no idea what it’s like being stuck in this tiny prison, day after day, week after week, with only Matthew for company. Even Rachel seems to be missing most of the time, visiting the farms with George.’

  ‘You need an interest — a hobby,’ Daniel suggested.

  Martha laughed hollowly. ‘Typical man! Buy the little wifey a tapestry to work, encourage her to read a riveting novel, buy her a musical instrument to practice on. Meanwhile, you go out there every day, doing your soldiering. Every day’s different for you — you don’t have the soul-crushing boredom of routine, the misery of preparing the same meals week in and week out.’

  ‘What about that theatre that Elizabeth wants you to start up?’

  There was another hollow laugh as Martha stood up and stirred the soup with the ladle that she wrapped in a cloth before handling it. She looked back at Daniel over her shoulder. ‘If anything would be likely to tip me over the edge it’s the thought of having to spend time with that snooty cow Elizabeth Macarthur. She’s been promoted from “tedious” to “insufferable” since John got his promotion and she never stops going on about their “estate” in Rose Hill, as if it wasn’t just half a mile down the road. Every time you fail to avoid her company, she bleats on about the latest addition to the new house out there on Elizabeth Farm — “My darling John named it after me, you know”,’ — she added, in a perfect impersonation of the woman that made Daniel laugh.

  ‘I just wish there was something I could do to brighten your day,’ he said.

  ‘There is,’ Martha replied, nodding at where Matthew had fallen asleep under the table where he’d crawled during the earlier argument. ‘You’ve already got me pregnant, so we’ve got nothing to lose. Mary Murphy — the fallen convent girl — would be mightily impressed if you’d lead her by the hand into the bed in the next room.’

  16

  Daniel was even more apprehensive of Martha’s fragile state of mind when George announced that he and Rachel would be moving out from next door into the house that the governor had commissioned for them, at government expense, on their newly acquired additional land, which George had christened ‘Annandale’ in honour of his birthplace in the Scottish Borders. The only compensation was that John Macarthur had recently acquired, through the medium of a supply ship sent by the governor to Cape Town, a hold full of pure Merino lambs that had originated in Spain and had been purchased from the widow of their owner. His fleece count promised to be three times greater than previously and when the first fleeces were successfully sold by sample to a London dealer, John and Elizabeth moved out from the barracks, in great pomp, to Elizabeth Farm, leaving Daniel and Martha to take over the Barracks Commander’s three-roomed house.

  Macarthur was still in notional command of the outpost, however, and Daniel had cause to be grateful that it was Macarthur who was called upon to deal, in his official capacity, with an incident involving some of his men at the Dawes Point cottage of John Baughan, a convict whose skills as a carpenter had earned him considerable favour with Francis Grose, to the extent that he had been allowed to erect and live in a cottage in a very desirable area of Sydney while constructing a mill under marine guard.

  However, one of the marines guarding him — Jacob Talbot — was also an emancipated convict, although no one except the two men in question was aware that while they had both been convicts, Baughan and Talbot had become sworn enemies. Baughan seized his opportunity when he found Talbot asleep on night duty outside his cottage and stole his musket, which he returned to the lieutenant of the Sydney Guard. Talbot was placed in irons awaiting disciplinary proceedings, but contrived to get a message through to his former colleagues in Parramatta, who marched by night to Baughan’s cottage and totally demolished it, Baughan himself barely escaping with his life.

  Everyone waited for the predictable court-martials of those responsible and their likely hanging or flogging. Macarthur was hastily consulted and offered total financial compensation to the aggrieved Baughan, which he accepted. The governor, rather than risk further confrontation with Macarthur, whose commercial co-operation was essential for the efficient running of the colony, withdrew the warrants of arrest that had been issued against the perpetrators on the ground that sufficient justice had been done, while at the same time issuing a proclamation that any further such behaviour — on anyone’s part — would be regarded as an act of mutiny, with capital consequences.

  But a precedent had clearly been set and the writing was writ large on the wall. The Corps was arguably beyond the control of the governor, as several prominent citizens in the colony lost no time in advising the Duke of Portland in despatches sent to London by the next returning vessel. Portland responded by ordering Hunter to rein in the New South Wales Corps and to recruit companies of ‘Volunteers’ to assist the fulltime professional soldiers should the colony come under attack, either from natives who were increasingly expressing their discontent at what they regarded as the encroaching occupation of their traditional lands, or from convict uprisings.

  Hunter passed these instruction on to his aide-de-camp George Johnston, who happily delegated the task to officers beneath him in Sydney, but told Macarthur to do as he thought best, fearful that Macarthur would simply pass the order down the line to the already overworked and over-stretched Daniel, who was about to become a father for the second time and whose wife was beginning to crack under the strain of barracks life.

  Macarthur, for his part and under pressure from his own socially ambitious wife, was rapidly becoming the wealthiest man in the colony, thanks to the virtual monopoly he enjoyed over rum imports from India and other parts of Asia and supplies of mutton to the Commissary Store at a price that was only just below what it would have to pay were it to import the carcasses from England or South Africa, on fleets whose inadequate refrigeration techniques often resulted in the ships containing long-dead mutton being smelt before they were seen. There were only two such experiments before the scheme was abandoned and in the meantime Elizabeth Farm fleeces were fetching top prices in Leeds and Manchester, given their superior quality. The wealth that these exchanges created enabled Macarthur to establish a crude form of bank before any were established in the settlement, since he could write bills of exchange and promissory notes against his ‘futures’ expectations in the English markets.

  Free settlers who had moved to the colony in the hope of making their own fortunes resented George Johnston almost as much as they did John Macarthur, because of George’s large estates and rapidly increasing cattle herds that competed for grazing acreage not only with those of the would-be cattle barons among the emigrants, but also with the government herds that were threatening to wander beyond the slim fences of the Government Farm and were regularly being speared by wandering native tribes who treated the convict-staffed establishment as a free larder. Letter after angry letter reached the Duke of Portland in London and at the suggestion of Sir Joseph Banks he consulted Banks’s protégé William Paterson, who was no great admirer of Johnston, Macarthur and their cronies.

  Paterson advised Portland that Hunter was clearly not capable of enforcing his authority over the Corps and that in particular there was no immediate hope of any end to the monopolistic grip over the supply of liquor in the colony being exercised by ‘The Rum Corps’ as they were nicknamed in Whitehall. Paterson was made up to Lieutenant-Colonel and instructed to pack his sea chest in anticipation of a return to New South Wales to preside over the replacement of
one governor by another.

  In November 1799, Paterson stepped onto the wharf at Sydney as the new Commandant of the New South Wales Corps, determined to enforce his instructions from London to break the growing economic power of the Corps by restraining the trading activities of its officers. He also carried Banks’s verbal instructions to demean the efforts of Hunter’s administration, so that Banks could replace him with his own nominee for the post and every vessel that left Sydney contained letters of complaint that were written in order to exaggerate the crisis in the eyes of those reading them in London.

  In particular, Paterson criticised the commercial stranglehold over the colony that the officers beneath him had been allowed to strengthen during Hunter’s watch, which he — Paterson — was having severe difficulty in reducing. He also reported unfavourably on the lax treatment of Irish convicts who had been sent out as political prisoners following the recent rebellion in their home country and who Hunter had sent out west, where they were proving difficult for the Parramatta soldiers under Daniel to hold down and usefully employ in government schemes.

  That was all the ammunition that Banks required and less than a year later, Philip Gidley King, former Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island and chosen favourite of Banks, arrived with a commission to replace Hunter signed by the Duke of Portland, Hunter’s previous champion, who had lost the political fight at the London end.

  In a well-choreographed move, Hunter’s departure was accompanied by the appointment of Paterson as Lieutenant-Governor and to him fell the detailed responsibility for bringing down the Corps, now symbolised by George Johnston and John Macarthur. In an attempt to isolate Macarthur and prevent him from being assisted too closely by George, Paterson insisted that since George was still the governor’s aide-de-camp anyway and was required to visit the governor’s domain every day, he should also be given responsibility for the day-to-day protection of the governor, in addition to his existing duties in Parramatta.

  When George complained, Paterson reminded him that it was high time that Macarthur earned his military salary out there and spent less time on his sheep. Governor King also began his own policy of economic warfare with the military monopolists, establishing a public warehouse in which goods were imported from England and offered for resale to the free settlers at prices that ensured only a modest profit, but which allowed more coinage to circulate freely in the colony, in an effort to break the now almost traditional valuation of everyday goods and services in terms of rum or animal flesh. He also began the construction of a brewery to appeal to the tastes of those who would prefer not to drink spirits, while seeking to impose standard measures for basic goods and opening a government printing works in which promissory notes could be produced, in order to counter the increasing number of forgeries. Finally, he imported considerable herds of both cattle and sheep, which he installed on government farms, or sold to settlers at prices considerably lower than those charged by Macarthur and George.

  He also encouraged the increased extraction of coal from the recently opened mines in the valley named ‘Hunter’ after his predecessor, in order that it might be exported back to England to raise more coinage for circulation in the colony. More and more free settlers were given large land grants and supplied with livestock on credit, in the hope of bringing down the market price of slaughtered beasts.

  Before long, there was a widening three-way rift between the military monopolists, the free settlers and the emancipated convicts who were flooding onto the employment market and in some cases being recruited into the volunteer regiments of ‘Loyal Associations’, to ensure that the Corps were not the only ones upon whom the community relied for its security.

  In the main, George and Macarthur regarded these policies with tolerant amusement. They were still the largest pastoralists in the settlement and the sheer numbers of animal carcasses that they could send to market at their own chosen prices kept up their own growth in personal wealth, to the point at which their soldiers’ salaries were almost an irrelevance. The significance of their commissions was no longer the incomes they generated, but the positions of physical power that they occupied, in command of fully trained and operational fighting men who were the first line of defence against the natives and the only legitimate means of holding down the diminishing number of convicts working on the government schemes. It was a rapidly changing society, but George, Macarthur and their senior officers were still at the top end of it.

  It wasn’t long before George’s mansion in Annandale was completed by convict labour urged on to greater efforts by weekly bonuses of ‘fly’ rum from one or other of Macarthur’s stills and paid for by George in cattle, which were added to the grazing stocks at Elizabeth Farm. Both men could afford to reward others in return for carrying out their military duties and they slowly grew less fit as they exchanged a daily routine of marching men up and down for the easier task of sitting on long verandas sipping rum cocktails and watching convict labour herding their flocks.

  All of this imposed a considerable additional burden on Daniel, which became almost intolerable when Martha announced that Rachel had invited her and the children to transfer to the more palatial surroundings of ‘George’s Hall’, the six room mansion on the banks of Prospect Creek in Annandale, where Martha had given birth to Rebecca, their second child, in 1799. When Rachel had discovered shortly afterwards that she was also again with child, Martha grasped the excuse to stay on and look after her, while allowing Matthew to experience his early childhood days in the company of Rachel’s two boys, George Junior and Robert. Even after the birth of Rachel’s third son David, Martha had employed one excuse after another to delay returning to the gaunt barracks house in Parramatta and Daniel had reverted to an almost bachelor existence as he continued to supervise the garrison that Macarthur had long since abandoned for Elizabeth Farm.

  George showed only passing interest in the difficulties that Daniel was experiencing in holding down a mutinous crew of Irish political convicts employed at the Government Farm at Castle Hill. Even when armed, his men would only enforce their authority over the convict labourers if they were in pairs and George’s only advice to Daniel was to ensure that every refusal to obey orders was met with a flogging or a withdrawal of food and drink. This just made the convicts more resentful and the hatred that gleamed from their eyes resulted in fewer and fewer of Daniel’s detachment being prepared to accept allocation to the Government Farm. Not only were the convicts on the point of mutiny — so were Daniel’s men and he was seriously contemplating resigning his commission and moving to a free-holding with Martha and the children, an option that was greeted by Martha, when he put it to her, with a snort of dismissal and a reminder that she was more comfortably established in her new existence than she had ever been at any time in her life.

  Daniel reverted to living in a barracks house in Parramatta and George was obliged to take back overall command of the Corps when Paterson succumbed yet again to the heat and humidity and was obliged to relinquish daily responsibility for military matters. With no ‘buffer’ between the governor and his arrogant military officers, relations between the civil administration and the military deteriorated further, to the point at which the soldiers would do only what their officers told them directly, while the officers followed Paterson’s precedent and began penning letters to London, complaining hypocritically about King’s inability to manage a developing community.

  But the following year, Governor King had every reason to be thankful that he still had fighting men who were determined not to let the convicts take over and Daniel found himself at the very centre of events.

  17

  Daniel came instantly awake when a private burst into his bedroom in the Commander’s house that he was once again occupying at the Barracks, while Macarthur was officially on overseas leave.

  ‘Sir, we have a full-scale uprising on our hands!’ the private shouted, his voice driven by adrenalin and tense with fear. ‘Down at the Government F
arm — I’ve sent out word for the volunteer detachment to arm themselves and come to the Barracks and all our fulltime men are assembling on the Parade Square.’

  Daniel shook his head to clear his thoughts and remembered George. ‘Send a fast horse back to Annandale and summon Major Johnston from his bed. Tell the men I’ll be out in five minutes.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the private replied as he headed back outside.

  All that they could tell him, once Daniel ran out to take command of his detachment, was that a private from the Government Farm detail out at Castle Hill had staggered into the guardhouse, badly wounded and severely bruised after falling off his horse as he swerved it through the Barracks gates. He had managed to gasp a few words, before losing consciousness and being left where he fell so that he could be attended to by hospital staff. So far as could be made out, the convicts had overpowered the almost token guard at the Castle Hill farm and were believed to be heading for the Commissary Store at Parramatta in order to acquire weapons and other supplies. What they were intending to do next was anyone’s guess.

  While Daniel was wondering how best to deal with the challenge, men from the local volunteer battalion that had been raised among local farmers and other emancipated convicts began arriving in their makeshift uniforms, carrying muskets, swords and other rudimentary fighting implements. Daniel assigned to them the obvious first task of securing the Barracks entrance against any attempt to break through it in order to gain access to the Commissary, then told his own fulltime marine infantry to load their own muskets and line up in marching formation, in anticipation of breaking out of the Barracks to attack any convict force that threatened to get beyond the volunteers at the gate.