Remember Me

by Lesley Pearse

  So when the guard told her she might visit the men in their cell, she couldn’t help but think that this was the first step to being released. The English captain hadn’t come to see her, perhaps he’d even left Kupang.

  The men’s cell was much lower down in the Castle than hers, a big, dark, dank room with its slit-like window too high up in the wall to see out. They crowded round her, kissing and hugging the children, asking how she had been treated, and it was a minute or two before she noticed Will had remained sitting on a stool, his back to her.

  ‘Don’t you want to see Emmanuel and Charlotte?’ she asked.

  ‘He doesn’t deserve to see them ever again,’ Bill growled. ‘He peached on us.’

  Mary looked hard at her friends, pleased to see that they all still looked well and their clothes were clean. But their glances towards Will were malevolent. Even Jamie Cox and Samuel Bird, who had followed him blindly for so long, looked as though they hated him.

  Mary had had time to consider what Will was supposed to have done, and she’d come to the conclusion that he was unlikely to have gone purposely to Wanjon to inform on them. He would know that he would be counted as guilty as the rest of them, and though he might not be hanged for escaping because his sentence was already up, stealing Captain Phillip’s cutter would still warrant a death sentence.

  ‘I really can’t believe that of Will,’ Mary said, moving closer to him. He still hadn’t turned to look at her. ‘Tell me. Did you inform on us?’

  ‘They all believe I did,’ he said in a low voice. ‘So you might as well too.’

  Mary caught hold of his chin and jerked him round so she could see him. She gasped. He’d been badly beaten, she assumed by the other men. Both eyes were hidden by purple, swollen flesh, his lip was cut, and his shirt was covered in bloodstains.

  ‘You deserve that for ignoring my warnings to keep out of sight,’ she said sharply. ‘You’re a louse, Will Bryant, a loud-mouthed, full-of-yourself, no-good bastard. But I still can’t believe you’d turn us in.’

  ‘I didn’t, I swear I didn’t,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I was drunk, some English sailors came in the bar, and we got swapping stories.’

  Mary nodded, she could imagine it. The other men had talked about what they’d been through in their open boat after the shipwreck, and Will had to go one better and boast he’d been through worse.

  Still she was furious with him – if she’d come face to face with him the day after they’d been arrested, she would have tried to kill him with her bare hands. But time, and the belief that Wanjon might still intervene on their behalf, had calmed her down enough at least to try to understand why and how Will had got them into this.

  ‘So, when were you brought here?’ she asked.

  ‘That same night,’ he said weakly. ‘I was just leaving the bar and the guards grabbed me. They took me to Wanjon early the next morning. He said you were all on your way here. He’d already got my log of the voyage from the place I was staying in. I couldn’t do anything but tell the truth, he’d got me cornered.’

  Mary closed her eyes in an effort to calm herself. She felt confused by conflicting emotions. She had always cared a great deal for Will, and it was tragic to see him brought low like this. Although he should have kept his big mouth shut, she also knew none of them would have stood up to close and prolonged questioning. Their story was too full of holes.

  But she certainly didn’t blame the other men for beating him. Both James and William had said he should destroy the log, and she knew exactly why he hadn’t. He saw himself as a hero, and he wanted the whole world to acknowledge him as such. Even if he hadn’t blurted it out here when drunk, he would have shouted it out sometime. The log was proof of his incredible feat. He probably hoped he could make money out of it too.

  ‘Why couldn’t you be satisfied with what we had?’ she asked bitterly. ‘We were safe, Emmanuel was getting better. We were all happy, for God’s sake. But you had to have more. Drink, other women –’

  ‘I didn’t have other women,’ he interrupted her.

  Mary gave a hollow laugh. ‘I’d bet anything that you were staying with some whore. She’ll be the one that handed the log to Wanjon or one of his guards, for a bit more money than you gave her.’

  He turned his head away and she knew then that that much was true. It hurt so badly that she felt sick.

  ‘I might not be the prettiest, cleverest woman in the world,’ she said brokenly, ‘but I was true to you, Will. Even when we were starving back in the camp, you never had to fear I would steal some of your rations, or your money. I made the best of what was there, and I should have killed to keep you and the children safe.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

  ‘Is “sorry” going to help Charlotte and Emmanuel when we are hanged?’ she asked, her face contorted with anguish.

  ‘We won’t be hanged,’ he said.

  ‘We will be if we get sent back to England,’ she retorted. ‘And if we get sent back to New South Wales we’ll be flogged and put in chains again.’

  She turned away from him, unable to cope with the picture either of those punishments brought to mind. She would rather have died at sea than live to see the day when her husband would put fame and money before her, their children and his friends.

  On 5 October, Mary, Charlotte and Emmanuel were brought out of their cell to sail with the men on the Dutch ship Rembang. Captain Edwards had chartered this ship to take them, his eighteen crew members from the Pandora and the ten remaining captured mutineers to Batavia. Mary had no real idea where this was, all she knew was that it was another island in the Dutch East Indies with a big port. It seemed Captain Edwards planned to get another ship from there to Cape Town, then on to England.

  In the two months they had been gaoled in Kupang Castle, Mary had clung to the hope that Wanjon might let her and the children stay here. She knew she had his sympathy for he sometimes let her and the other men out of the prison, always just in pairs, but it meant Mary could go to the village, let the children play on the beach and talk freely with whoever accompanied her.

  She was never allowed to go with Will, however, perhaps because Wanjon thought that was too much of a risk. The only time she saw Will was in the Castle yard, and his endless apologies only served to upset her further. He was not the man she’d known so well any more. Being ostracized by the other men, especially James Martin, Jamie Cox and Samuel Bird, once his closest friends, had made him withdrawn and inclined to emotional, often nonsensical outbursts. He would frighten the children by holding them too tightly, and when Charlotte ran away from him or Emmanuel hid behind Mary’s skirts, Will would cry like a child. He would tell Mary he had always loved her, and beg her to forgive him. Wearily she would say she had, but in her heart she felt she never could. Often she wished she was able to ignore him as the other men did, but pity for him got the better of her.

  They were only told a few days before the Rembang was due to sail that they’d be on her. As Mary had found one or two people who spoke some English when she was let out of the Castle, she could only view this with further dismay.

  She had learned about Captain Edwards’s fearsome reputation. The tale about the Pandora’s ‘box’ where the mutineers were held and four died was common knowledge. It seemed that the Rembang had an extra deck. It didn’t take much imagination to see that this structure, with no portholes or hatches in it, just small holes along the roof, was yet another ‘box’. And that was where Captain Edwards intended to hold her and the men.

  She had also been told that Wanjon had asked Captain Edwards to honour the many bills for food, accommodation and clothing Will had signed for. Edwards had refused, and Wanjon told him that he would be given no provisions for the month-long voyage unless he paid up. Mary knew that meant Edwards would have a grudge against them right from the start.

  All in all, Mary knew that the trip to Batavia was going to be just like being back on the prison hulk in England, with little food,
in darkness, and in chains. She was right on all counts. The extra deck had been divided into three, the front for the escaped convicts, the middle for the crew of the Pandora, and the aft for the mutineers. Yet even more frightening than the dark was the ‘bilboes’, a long pole fixed to the floor, from which sliding shackles were attached to their ankles, rendering them unable to move at all.

  Mary took one last look at the port before she was shoved into their new cell. It had rained during the night, and the whole town glistened in the sunshine. She saw women from the village with babies in their arms waving to her from the wharf where stalls were piled high with fruit and vegetables. Fishermen were carrying huge baskets of freshly caught fish, and the young boy she had so often tried to converse with, who trundled a small cart laden with coconuts, called out to her. The smell of sandalwood hung in the air like an aromatic, invisible cloud, and her eyes filled with tears at saying goodbye to the place which had become so precious to her.

  ‘Why is he doing that to you, Mumma?’ Charlotte asked as one of the ship’s crew fastened the shackles around Mary’s ankles. ‘How can you walk now?’

  Mary couldn’t answer, she was too overwhelmed by the impossibility of caring for both her children under these conditions. But Charlotte’s questions were halted when the door was slammed shut and bolted, leaving them in pitch darkness. She let out a piercing scream, and falling over the pole in the darkness, she landed in Mary’s lap on top of Emmanuel.

  ‘The captain had a cabin for you and the children aft of the ship,’ Jamie Cox said from across the darkness of the cell. ‘That bastard Edwards said you had to stay in here with us. He wants his pound of flesh because he’s disappointed he didn’t catch all the mutineers from the Bounty.’

  ‘I’ll cheerfully swing for him,’ James Martin growled, then after a moment’s pause spoke to Will. ‘Well, you’ve got your ship at last, big man,’ he said jeeringly in the darkness. ‘How d’you like your cabin? How does it feel to have yer missus and babbies with you?’

  Day by day the agony of that dark cell grew worse. When the sun shone outside, it was so hot they felt they were being cooked alive; when a storm broke out, they were soaked through. They were given only the bare minimum of food and water to keep them alive, and the way they were shackled meant they couldn’t even move to relieve themselves. Mary screamed for mercy, if only for Charlotte and Emmanuel, but if anyone on the ship heard her, they ignored her. On the rare occasions the door was opened, she saw for herself that the improvement in her children’s health in Kupang had been undone. They sat crying in bewilderment, caked in the filth all around them, and after only a few days Emmanuel went down with fever.

  The men hardly spoke. When Mary could see their faces, their eyes were haunted. Nat and Jamie whimpered in their sleep, Bill swore, and James seemed to be constantly awake, his eyes glowing in the dark. Only Sam Broome tried to pretend everything would turn out all right, but Mary knew he was acting that way for the children’s benefit.

  They ran into a cyclone, and water poured in, threatening to drown them. As the ship pitched and rolled, thunder crashed and lightning momentarily lit up each of their terrified faces. Mary prayed then that the ship would go down and put an end to their suffering.

  They heard the crew of the Bounty shouting and swearing as they pitched in to help the Rembang men. Much later she was to hear that many of the Dutch crew went below decks to play cards while the English struggled to keep the ship off the rocks.

  Will caught the fever too, crying out in his delirium for his mother. Mary could do nothing to help him, for she couldn’t move and had both the children in her arms. Jamie came out of his anger at his old friend sufficiently to give him sips of water, but the mood of the other men was ugly towards Will.

  ‘Die thinking of what you brought us to,’ William Moreton shouted out on several occasions. ‘I hope you burn in Hell, you bastard.’

  The Rembang sailed into Batavia on 7 November. A whole month at sea had seemed more like a year to them. Apart from the foul conditions they were chained up in, which became worse daily, and the hunger and thirst, it was almost like being blindfolded too, for they had been unable to see out. They didn’t know whether they had passed other islands, big land masses, or whether they were just sailing on the open sea. They had lost all sense of time and distance too.

  Hamilton, the ship’s surgeon, came into the hold briefly, holding a handkerchief over his nose against the smell but retching anyway. He barely looked at the men, but ordered that Emmanuel was to be taken to the hospital, and Mary would go with him. The remaining convicts and mutineers were to be moved to a guard ship until such time as a ship bound for England could be found.

  ‘Charlotte must come with me too,’ Mary pleaded, fearful for her little girl being imprisoned in another ship without her protection. ‘She’ll get sick too without me.’

  Hamilton was a hard-faced man with a bushy beard. ‘She’ll get sick in the hospital even faster,’ he said. ‘They call this place the Golgotha of Europe, and the hospital is a stinking hole. But take her with you if you must.’

  Mary didn’t understand what he meant then as she had imagined Batavia would be much like Kupang. A month’s sea voyage must mean it wasn’t so very far away, and she’d heard Batavia was the centre of the Dutch East India Company’s operations. But she was soon to discover the difference. The first thing she saw when she was taken up on deck was dead bodies floating in the water, and she vomited over the side.

  Kupang was a place Dutch East India Company employees felt fortunate to be posted to. It might be noisy and crowded with people of every nation, but the air was clean and invigorating, the climate perfect. It was also very beautiful just beyond the town, with jungle, mountains and idyllic beaches.

  But Batavia sweltered in a hot, steamy atmosphere. The Dutch had built canals through the town, and the stagnant, putrid water bred diseases that killed Europeans like flies. Mary saw that the ship’s crew were reluctant to go ashore, a sure sign it wasn’t a good place. She overheard one of the English sailors who had been here before claim that even the healthiest ship’s crew would be decimated by fever within weeks.

  As Mary was led away by two guards, carrying Emmanuel in her arms, with Charlotte trailing along behind, she looked back at her friends on the deck and tears filled her eyes.

  They were all gaunt and filthy. The only touch of colour in the group was Samuel Bird’s red hair, but even that was muted by dirt. Nat Lilly and Jamie Cox, the two smallest, looked like little boys. Bill Allen was making a show of looking tough, and James Martin was rubbing his eyes with his fists. Sam Broome and William Moreton were supporting each other. Then there was Will standing apart from them all, swaying on his feet with the fever.

  Mary’s heart sank. They all looked so sick that she felt sure she was never going to see any of them again. But the guards dragged her away, and she felt even more demoralized, for the teeming hordes of small, brown-skinned natives who milled around them were sickly-looking too.

  The surgeon’s words about Batavia came back to her as she saw crudely constructed shanties instead of fine houses. The sticky heat, the revolting smells and the flies which bombarded her made her feel queasy and terrified for her children.

  Her first impression of the two-storey hospital was that the builders had left it only half built. A few windows were shuttered, but the rest were just holes. There was a foul-smelling bonfire smouldering in the yard in front of it, and at least a hundred people were sitting or lying outside. Many of them had filthy, bloodstained bandages around their heads or limbs, flies had settled on those too weak to swat them off, and the sound of their wailing and groaning was terrible to hear. Charlotte clutched her mother’s dress, whimpering with fright, but the guards prodded Mary on through the door, which suggested to her that the people outside were in better condition than those within.

  The smell inside made Mary recoil in horror. It was utterly evil, so thick she could barely breathe. She
knew then that nothing short of a miracle could prevent Emmanuel from dying. Even on the ship he’d given up crying, he just lay in her arms staring up at her. She had kept trying to make him drink, but he couldn’t keep anything down. One moment he was so hot she could have fried an egg on his forehead, the next he was shivering violently.

  An aging nun with a filthy apron over her white habit came forward. The guards said something to her in Dutch, and she peered at Emmanuel, making a tutting sound with her tongue, and indicated that Mary was to follow her.

  As they passed several rooms, Mary saw that each held thirty or forty adult patients lying on mats, but she was led into a room at the far end of the hospital where there were only babies and small children being nursed by their mothers.

  The nun left after pointing out where the spare mats, washing bowls and buckets were kept. There was no explanation as to where the water was, whether a doctor was coming, or where food came from.

  Mary put two mats in a corner, laid Emmanuel down and sat Charlotte beside him, telling her not to move. Then she picked up a bucket and asked the nearest woman in sign language where she could get water.

  As night fell Mary lay down with the children. She had got water from a well outside to wash all the ship’s filth off them, and found a grimy kitchen from which she could get a daily meal of rice. Anything else had either to be bought from a formidable-looking native woman who presided in the kitchen, or brought in from outside.

  She heard the familiar sound of rats scuttling around the room, even above the moans and cries of the mortally sick, and put her arms protectively around Charlotte and Emmanuel. Her last thoughts before she fell asleep from exhaustion were to wonder how you got food and water if you were a patient without friends or relatives, and if a doctor ever came near the hospital.

  She found the answer to her questions in the next day or two by observing and communicating in sign language with the other mothers. A doctor visited occasionally but saw only those with money to pay him. A handful of Dutch nuns did what they could, but faced with the huge numbers of sick people, it was like trying to empty a lake with a thimble.