Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  Something went “Whoof!” so suddenly that he jumped; a long, sleek, iridescent body shot past and rose clear of the sea’s surface in an arc of absolute freedom, total joy. A dolphin? A porpoise? There were others frolicking, a great band of them playing chasings with dirty, decrepit Alexander.

  The tears poured down his face, but he made no attempt to wipe them away. All of this was a part of this. The beauty of God and the ugliness of Man. What place could Man have in such a gorgeous universe?

  The floggings sobered everyone as Alexander continued on her way south toward the Canaries, which was just as well; John Power had learned from his friend Mr. Bones that a convict he knew slightly, Nicholas Greenwell, had been pardoned the day before the fleet left Portsmouth and was smuggled off in secret. Lieutenant Shairp had remembered the discontent following the pardon of James Bartlett while Alexander had lain off Tilbury.

  “I never noticed the fucken bastard was missing at first, then I assumed he’d died,” Power said to Richard and Mr. Donovan up on deck where the wind blew their words away. “Bastard! Oh, bitch! I should have been pardoned, not Greenwell!”

  Power constantly maintained that he was innocent, that it had not been he who was with Charles Young (of whose present whereabouts he knew nothing) when a quarter-ton of rare wood belonging to the East India Company was spirited off a London wharf in a boat. The watchman had recognized Young, but would not swear that Power was the second man. As usual, the jury hedged its bets by returning a verdict of guilty; best be on the safe side in case the second man had been Power, even if the watchman was not sure. The judge, concurring, handed down seven years’ transportation.

  “It should have been me!” Power cried, his dark face twisted in pain. “Greenwell was a robber, pure and simple! But I ain’t got his connections, just a sick dad I am not there to look after! Bitch, bugger, fuck ’em all!”

  “There, there,” soothed Donovan, suddenly very Irish, for all that he said he was a good Protestant Ulsterman. “Johnny, ’tis too late to cry. Remember the cat and get yourself home the minute your sentence is over.”

  “My dad will be dead by then.”

  “Ye cannot say that for sure. Now do what Mr. Shortland told ye to do, else ye’ll be back to idleness.”

  The rage simmered down, the pain did not. John Power surveyed the tall fourth mate with eyes full of tears, then marched away.

  “It is a wonder,” said Richard thoughtfully, deciding it was high time things were brought into the open, “that ye do not fancy him. Why a stringy old man like me?”

  The too-handsome face aped astonishment but the eyes danced. “If I do fancy ye, Richard, ’tis an unrequited passion. Even a cat can look at a king.”

  “Bog trotter.”

  “Mud skipper.”

  “What is a mud skipper?” asked Richard, intrigued.

  “A miraculous fish-out-of-water I read of. Maybe ’twas Sir Joseph Banks described it, I do not remember. It skips on mud.”

  More deaths had occurred; there were now 188 convicts left on board Alexander.

  At about the moment that Thomas Gearing from Oxford was in extremis, Teneriffe loomed out of fog and drizzle so quietly that the inmates of the prison, ordered below, scarcely knew when their ship made harbor.

  Having had little to do for three weeks save feed the convicts and dwell upon their own injuries, the marines now went seriously on duty. Their most onerous task at sea was to boil up kettles of the salt beef chunks which Sergeant Knight was supposed to weigh up on the scales Lieutenant Shortland, the naval agent, had himself checked. As the naval agent was not present to witness this ritual, however, Sergeant Knight simply chopped the beef or pork into half-pound bits for the convicts and pound-and-a-half pieces for the marines. The convicts were supposed to get pease or oatmeal as well, but Sergeant Knight confined such treats to Sundays after prayers had been said. He was fed up with playing nursery maid to a lot of felons before Alexander put to sea—scales, for pity’s sake! Even if Lieutenant Shairp came down to watch, Knight made no attempt to weigh or be fair about the rations, and Shairp said not a word. Better fucken not say a word!

  Above and beyond the differences natural in a group of almost forty men unable to escape from each other’s company, the marines were very unhappy. Moving up into steerage should have mollified them, but it did not. Oh, it was a great deal more comfortable to occupy that peculiarly shaped space wherein the ceiling was far larger than the floor, admittedly. But the tiller came inboard along the ceiling—and groaned—and screeched—and clattered hollowly—and occasionally walloped a body swinging aloft in his canvas nest when the helmsman swung the wheel hard over just as the sea was running the wrong way. They had air and light from several ports, the stink was not unbearable, and the crew had been decent enough to leave steerage relatively clean.

  Yet what they did not have far outclassed all of these improvements: they were not getting their full half-pint of rum every day. Captain Duncan Sinclair, in whose purlieu the liquor lay, had taken it upon himself to water the rum down to what was known as “grog.” There had been a furious outcry about it before Alexander left Portsmouth and for a few days thereafter the rum was served the way it was supposed to be served—neat. Now they were back on watery grog, had been since the Scillies. No dreamless sleeps despite the tiller, and definitely no kindly thoughts. On board ship rum was the beginning and end of all earthly pleasures to a sailor or a marine, and now both kinds of seafaring man were on grog. The hatred for Sinclair among crew and marines was as immense as it was intense. Not that Sinclair cared, dwelling on high in a roundhouse he had turned into a fortress. A little further into the voyage he intended to start selling the rum he was currently hoarding. If the bastards wanted a full half-pint of neat rum, then they could pay for it. He had to pay for his roundhouse, as he knew perfectly well that the Admiralty would not.

  Now, with port in Santa Cruz attained, was the prospect of going ashore to find as much rum as a marine could drink—and Major Ross issued orders that no marine was to have much shore leave! Lieutenant Johnstone had informed them in his languid voice that a full guard would have to be mounted during daylight hours, as Governor Phillip did not want the convicts confined below decks interminably. Further to that, Johnstone announced, Governor Phillip and his aide-de-camp Lieutenant King were expected to come aboard at some unpredicted time while at Teneriffe. So woe betide the marine whose choking black leather stock was not properly fastened around his neck or whose knee-length black leather spatterdashes were not properly buttoned. The ship was stuffed with the most desperate criminals, said Lieutenant Johnstone with a weary wave of his hand, and Teneriffe was not far enough away from England to relax. Sergeant Knight, facing court martial over his grog protests, was not a happy man. Nor were his underlings.

  To make matters worse on Alexander, the ship had not inherited one of the senior officers. Now that they were deliciously tucked into cabins on the quarterdeck, Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp were not in any way dependent upon their subordinates for any of their creature comforts. They had servants (officers’ servants were always crawlers) and a galley of their own, the chance to keep their own livestock on board to supplement their table, and the use of a ship’s boat if they felt like visiting friends on one of the other transports while Alexander was at sea. What the privates, drummers, corporals and lone sergeant had not taken into account was the remorseless nature of their task, to feed and guard nearly 200 felons. Port, they had been sure, would see the felons locked up. Now they discovered that this lunatic governor insisted the felons have freedom of the deck even in port!

  Of course the rum came on board the moment the crew was set at liberty, the marines having contributed to a pool which ensured that, shipbound or no, they would still be able to moisten their parched throats with something stronger than Sinclair’s fucken grog. Luck served them another good turn when, late in the afternoon of the 4th of June, Alexander was the first ship Governor Phillip and his part
y boarded to inspect. Captain Sinclair actually waddled out of his roundhouse to converse politely with the Governor while the convicts were lined up on deck under the eyes of the marines on duty, eyes bloodshot and breath reeking, but leather stocks and spatterdashes perfect.

  “It is a tragedy,” said Phillip, walking around the prison, “that we cannot afford better accommodation for these fellows. I see fourteen too sick to parade and I doubt there is room for more than forty men at a time to get a little exercise in these aisles. Which is why they must be given as much freedom of the deck as is possible. If ye have trouble,” he said to Major Robert Ross and the two Alexander lieutenants, “double-iron the offenders for a few days, then see how they go.”

  Lined up with the other convicts on deck wherever there was space to stand, Richard found himself looking at a man who could have been Senhor Tomas Habitas’s brother. Governor Phillip had a long, curved, beaky nose, two vertical worry lines hedging in the bridge of that nose, a full and sensuous mouth, and a balding dome of head; he wore his own hair, curled into rolls above his ears and confined in a queue on the back of his neck. Richard remembered that Jem Thistlethwaite had said that the Governor’s father, Jacob Phillip the language teacher from Frankfurt, had fled Lutheran-inspired persecution of German Jews. His mother was respectably English, but her relative Lord Pembroke had not seen fit to assist the promising young man educationally or financially, nor had he given Arthur Phillip a push up the naval ladder. All done the hard way, including a long stint in the Portuguese navy—yet another link with Senhor Habitas. As he stood there understanding that this was as close as he would ever get to His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales, Richard felt oddly comforted.

  Phillip’s aide-de-camp and protégé, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, was still in his twenties. An Englishman who probably had quite a lot of Celt in him, judging by the way he talked constantly and enthusiastically. The English showed in his meticulous recounting of facts, figures, statistics as the party toured the deck. Major Ross clearly despised him as full of waffle.

  Thus it was Tuesday before the convicts had the leisure to look at Santa Cruz and what parts of Teneriffe their moorings in the harbor revealed. They had been fed that midday with fresh goat’s meat, boiled pumpkin, peculiar but edible bread and big, raw, juicy onions. Neither vegetable found favor with many, but Richard ate his onion as if it were an apple, crunching into it and letting the juice run down his chin to join the tears its vapors produced in abundance.

  The town was small, treeless and very tired and the land around it was precipitous, dry, inhospitable. Of the mountain Richard had so hoped to see after reading about it, nothing was visible above a layer of grey cloud which seemed to hang over the island only; the sky out to sea was blue. Teneriffe had a lid jammed upon it like the hat on a donkey he saw near the stone jetty, the first truly novel impression he had of a non-English world. Bum boats either did not exist or were turned back by the longboats patrolling the area where the transports were all moored together. Alexander lay between two anchor cables suspended taut from the sea bed by floating kegs; because, one of the more sober sailors explained to him, the harbor bottom was littered with sharp chunks of iron the Spanish (who brought it out as ballast) simply dumped into the water as they took on cargo. If the cables were not kept taut, the iron tended to fray them.

  They had chosen a good time of year to arrive, he learned from another sailor who had been here several times; the air was warm but neither hot nor humid. October was the most unendurable month, but from July to November hideous winds blew as hot as a furnace from Africa, and carried on them a wealth of stinging sand. But Africa was several hundred miles away! A place, he had always believed, of steaming jungles. Obviously not at this latitude, which was fairly close to the place where Atlas held the world up on his broad shoulders. Yes, he remembered, the deserts of Libya went all the way to Africa’s west coast.

  On Wednesday, Stephen Donovan came down to the prison to find him shortly after dawn.

  “I need you and your men, Morgan,” he said curtly, mouth tight in displeasure. “Ten of ye will do—and make it lively.”

  Ike Rogers was a little better with every day that passed at anchor; yesterday he had eaten his onion with such relish that he found himself the recipient of several more. The pumpkin had also been devoured, though he seemed to have no appetite for meat or bread. His loss of weight was increasingly worrisome: the full, brash face had fallen away to bones and his wrists were so thin that they were knobbed. When Joey Long refused to leave him, Richard decided to take Peter Morris from Tommy Crowder’s cot.

  “Why not me?” demanded Crowder peevishly.

  “Because, Tommy, the fourth mate does not come down into the prison looking for men to clerk for him. He is wanting labor.”

  “Then take Petey with my blessing,” said Crowder, relaxing; he was in the midst of delicate negotiations with Sergeant Knight which might lead to a little rum, even if at an inflated price.

  On deck the ten convicts found Mr. Donovan pacing up and down looking like thunder. “Over the side and into the longboat,” he rapped. “I have barely enough sober men to bring the empty water tuns up, but none to take the tuns to the jetty and fill them. That is going to be your job. Ye’ll be under orders from the cargo hand, Dicky Floan, and ye’re going because there are not enough sober marines to put a guard on you. How many of ye can row?”

  All the Bristol men could, which made four; Mr. Donovan, an abstemious man, looked blacker. “Then ye’ll have to be towed in and out—though where I am to find a lighter to do it, I have no idea.” He spotted the naval agent’s second-mate son and grabbed him. “Mr. Shortland, I need a towing lighter for the water tun longboat. Any suggestions?”

  After a moment of frowning thought Mr. Shortland decided upon nepotism and flagged Fishburn, where his father was ensconced. Fishburn answered so promptly that not more than half an hour went by before Alexander’s longboat, loaded with empty tuns all standing upright, was towed away jettyward.

  For such an arid and desolate place Teneriffe had excellent water; it came down from a spring somewhere in the interior near a town called Laguna, was conduited through the customary elm pipes (imported, Richard imagined, from Spain) and ran out of a series of mouths dispersed along a short stone jetty. Unless some ship were filling its tuns, the water dissipated in the salty harbor. Since leaving Portsmouth Alexander had used 4,000 gallons, so there were 26 of these 160-gallon receptacles to fill, and each one took two and a half hours. The system was quite ingenious, however, and permitted the filling of six tuns at once; had the Spanish put in a wooden jetty on piers, a boat containing tuns could actually have maneuvered itself underneath and filled all its tuns without man-handling either boat or tuns. As it was, the longboat had been stacked with six tuns on either side and had to be turned constantly to part-fill the tuns on one side, then turn the boat around and part-fill the tuns on the other side. Otherwise the weight—a full tun weighed over half a ton—would have capsized them. Hence the need for ten men to labor, pushing, pulling and oaring the longboat around, mindful of the fact that Donovan had said they had to finish filling the tuns that day. Tomorrow was booked for Scarborough.

  The second Alexander longboat was brought in by another towing crew and contained fourteen tuns. Hoping for a little shore time, the towing crew was ordered to haul Alexander’s first boat back. Not an order the men would have taken from everybody, but were obliged to; it came from Mr. Samuel Rotton, one of the master’s mates off Sirius, and supervisor of watering. A sickly fellow, he did his job beneath the shelter of a green silk umbrella borrowed from delightful Mrs. Deborah Brooks, wife of Sirius’s boatswain and a very good friend of the Governor’s.

  “Is she?” Richard asked Dicky Floan, who knew all the gossip.

  “Oh, aye. A bit of naughty there, Morgan. All of Sirius is in the know, including Brooks. He’s an old shipmate of Phillip’s.”

  Darkness had long fallen before th
e last tun was filled, and the ten convicts were trembling with fatigue. They had not been fed and for once Richard’s scruples had had to be set aside; it was impossible to labor in the sun, veiled though it was most of the time, without drinking, and the only water to drink came from the pipe originating at Laguna’s spring. They drank it.

  Returning to Alexander well after eight, draped over the tuns in exhaustion, the convicts found that the harbor had come alive with a horde of tiny boats, each dewed with twinkling lights, and fishing for something that apparently was not catchable during the day. A fairyland of bobbing lamps, the occasional golden gleam of nets glittering with whatever milled inside them.

  “Ye’ve done remarkable well,” said the fourth mate when the last of them, Richard, had clambered clumsily up the ladder. “Come with me.” He walked off toward the crew’s mess in the forecastle. “Go in, go in!” he cried. “No one has fed ye, I know, and there is not a marine sober enough to boil anything on their wretched stove without setting fire to the ship. Crew’s not in any better condition, but Mr. Kelly the cook kindly left ye food before retiring to his hammock cuddling a bottle.”

  They had not had a feast like that one since leaving Ceres and their bum boat lunches six months ago—cold mutton that had been roasted, not boiled—a mess of pumpkin and onion stewed with herbs—fresh bread rolls slathered in butter—and the whole washed down by small beer.

  “I do not believe the butter,” said Jimmy Price, chin shining.

  “Nor did we,” said Donovan dryly. “It seems the butter loaded for the officers was put in the wrong sort of firkins—perishables are supposed to go into double-lined containers, but the contractors cut corners as usual and used ordinary ones. So the butter is on the turn and the whole fleet has been issued with it to get rid of it before it spoils. Then the coopers will get to work to make proper butter firkins—which cannot be filled until we get to the Cape of Good Hope. There are no milch cows this side of it.”