Morgan's Run

by Colleen McCullough

  King shrugged. “Women are women. They are neither the cause nor the trouble.”

  “Whom will ye punish?”

  “As few as I can,” King said, looking worried. “Otherwise I stand no hope to keep control of Norfolk Island, ye must surely see that, Mr. Donovan. Hardly a musket fires and there are many more of them than of us. But most of them are sheep, they need leaders. That is our salvation provided that I do not punish the sheep. I will have to wait until Supply comes, send word to Port Jackson on her, and then wait for her to return before I will be able to ship the ringleaders to stand trial in Port Jackson.”

  “Why,” asked Stephen dreamily, “do I have a feeling that ye’ll not solve Norfolk Island’s difficulties by shipping them to Port Jackson and the Governor’s justice?”

  King’s eyes flashed angrily. “Because,” he said grimly, “I am well aware that most of those on Golden Grove were sent here to rid Port Jackson of them. His Excellency will not want them back, especially branded as mutineers. He would have to hang them, and he is not a man likes to see others at the end of a rope. If he is forced to hang, he would rather that the crime was committed under the gaze of those around him, not a thousand miles away in a place he has been using as an example of felicitous success. Norfolk Island is too isolated to prosper under a system which delegates the real authority to men who are not here, to men who are more than a thousand miles away. The Government in Norfolk Island ought to have authority over Norfolk Island’s affairs. But I am strapped. I must first wait months, then no doubt will not get answers which improve Norfolk Island’s lot.”

  “Just so,” sighed Stephen. “It is a cleft stick.” He leaned forward eagerly. “Sir, ye have a master gunsmith right here in the island who was not implicated in the plot—Morgan the sawyer. May I humbly request that ye set him at once to fixing our firearms? Then on every Saturday morning the free men, marines and Morgan will shoot for two hours. I will undertake to set up a proving butt beyond the eastern end of Sydney Town, and also undertake the supervision of firing practice. Provided that ye give me Morgan.”

  “An excellent idea! See to it, Mr. Donovan.” The Commandant grunted. “If, as I expect, His Excellency does not want any of our mutineers sent to trial in Port Jackson, then he will have to send me a bigger detachment of marines under the command of a proper officer, not a mere sergeant. And I want some cannons. Plus powder, shot and cartridges aplenty for the muskets.” He looked brisk. “I shall draft a letter this instant. And from now on, Superintendent of Convicts, ye will see a stricter discipline enforced. If flogging is what they want, then flogging is what they will get. I am hurt! Wounded to the quick! My happy little family has serpents in its midst, with many more serpents to come.”

  It was John Bryant the fanatically devout Catholic who bore the brunt of convict resentment once the hearing of testimony was over. His evidence was all the more damning because he also told of a plan aboard Golden Grove to take her over—a plan foiled when he informed Captain Sharp. The blame for the Norfolk Island revolt fell upon William Francis and Samuel Pickett, who were to be kept permanently in double irons and permanently locked up. Noah Mortimer and Thomas Watson were put in light fetters at the Commandant’s pleasure, and the rest of those questioned were dismissed.

  The most tragic consequence of the January plot concerned the beauty of tiny Sydney Town, graced by the presence of tall pines and leafy “white oaks.” Lieutenant King took every last tree away, even cleared lower vegetation; a marine could stand at either end of the settlement and see any coming and going between the huts, even after dark. Tom Jones, an intimate of Len Dyer’s, received 36 lashes from the meanest cat for contemptuous sexual references aimed at Stephen Donovan and Surgeon Thomas Jamison.

  “The climate has changed,” said Richard to Stephen as they dealt with muskets preparatory to the first shooting practice, “and it saddens me. I like this little place, could be happy here were it not for other men. But I do not want to live in this village any longer. The trees are gone and so is the privacy—a man cannot piss without a dozen others watching. I want to be somewhere on my own so that I can mind my own business and confine my contacts with my fellow convicts to the sawpits.”

  Stephen blinked. “D’ye dislike them so much, Richard?”

  “I like some of them very well. It is the villains always spoil things—and for what? Can they never learn? Take poor Bryant. They have vowed to get him, you know, and they will.”

  “As Superintendent of Convicts I will exert every effort to make sure they do not get him. Bryant has a very nice little wife and they love each other madly. Were anything to happen to him, she would become a lost soul.”

  1789 was not coming in well. There had been intermittent rain and gales which ruined the rest of the barley, spoiled some casks of flour, made fishing impossible on most days, and life in the denuded collection of wooden huts a jeremiad of wet clothes, damp bedding, mold on precious books and precious shoes, summer colds, sick headaches and painful bones. Halfway through February the Commandant released Francis and Pickett from their storehouse and returned them to their huts free of manacles but heavily ironed on their legs. Of Supply there was no sign; the last ship to call had been Golden Grove, and that was now four months ago. Were they never going to see another ship? Had something happened to Supply? To Port Jackson?

  Everybody was grumpy thanks to the foul weather, none grumpier than the Commandant, who was engineer enough to realize that he did not dare commence building a dam in the midst of such downpours, and had a crying baby in the house. Most of the work had to be postponed and too many people had little to do beyond grumble. The only truly happy persons were the three men at Ball Bay, snug under the pine trees in a good house, well provisioned, and able to rock fish no matter how hard it rained.

  Even so, the 26th of February came as a mighty shock. Dawn arrived with high winds just to the south of east and seas so high that the surf broke all the way into the beaches of the lagoon. To Stephen and Richard, who walked as far out on Point Hunter as they dared, the sight of the coastline to the west was a terrifying vista of white water crashing down so hard and high against the cliffs that the spray soared up over 300 feet and blew inland as far as the mountain four miles away.

  “God help us, we are in for the father of all gales!” Stephen shouted. “We had best be sure they are battening down the hatches!”

  By the time they fought their way around Turtle Bay and turned to look back, not only had lofty Phillip Island disappeared; so also had Nepean Island, close in shore. The world was a seething mass of waves as big as those in the southern ocean on the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope, and the wind continued to rise even as it swung to the southeast, throwing the whole force of sea and sky straight at the settlement. Bent double in the blast, people were shooing pigs and poultry into the storehouses and huts, piling logs against their doors and climbing inside through their windows.

  So huge were the noises of howling wind and thundering water that neither Richard nor Stephen noticed the shrieking groan of a 180-foot pine behind Turtle Bay as it lifted itself piecemeal out of the ground; they simply saw it fly, its massive roots and tapering top giving it the look of an arrow, thirty feet up in the air back toward the hills. More pines followed it, the bombardment of a fortress by an army of giants, the wind their bows, the pine trees their arrows, the white oaks their grapples.

  Stephen struggled on down the row of huts making sure that all the hatches were battened; finding his own house door already bolstered by a pine log, Richard elected to stay outside, thankful that Joey and MacGregor were safe. As far as his own skin was concerned, he would far rather be out than in, blinded to his fate—horrifying thought! He sat on the ground with his back to the lee wall and the log to witness the cataclysm, massive pines and huge old white oaks flying to crash into the swamp, the hillsides, the lashing spray.

  Then the rain came, so horizontal that Richard remained dry even as he looked upon the deluge
. Thatched roofs farther down were lifting to blow away like umbrellas, but the vastest winds seemed to be thirty feet above the ground, which was what saved the settlement. That, and its lack of trees. Had Lieutenant King not ordered total visibility, the huts, store sheds and houses would have been buried together with those inside them.

  It started at eight in the morning; it began to blow itself out at four in the afternoon. The huts in this middle section where Richard and Joey lived kept their roofs, as did the bigger houses, all shingled rather than thatched with flax.

  But not until the next day—innocently balmy, the breeze a zephyr—did the sixty-four people of Norfolk Island see what havoc the hurricane had wreaked. Where the swamp had been was a tumbling river lapping around the flanks of the old garden hill; the ground everywhere was feet deep in pine branches, pine tails, bushes, sand, coral chunks, leaves; and the windward sides of the buildings were smothered in debris so blasted into the wood that it needed great effort to pull the debris off. There were literal fields of felled pines, their root systems so mighty, their tap roots so long, that imagination foundered at gauging the strength of those winds. Where they had grown were craters many feet deep, and looking up to where the forest had not yet been touched by any axe, the pine casualties were as numerous. Many hundreds of trees had come down just within sight of Sydney Town; three acres of recently cleared ground on the far side of the swamp were solidly covered with pines. Not fifty men cutting down trees every day for a month could have produced so much timber.

  “This cannot be anything but a true freak of nature,” Lieutenant King said cheerily to his assembled family, even its serpents in a chastened mood. “Nowhere that I have been on this island have I seen any evidence that a hurricane like this has ever struck before, at least in the however many hundreds of years it takes for the pines to grow to two hundred feet. It has simply never happened.” His expression changed to something approaching a Wesleyan preacher in full fire-and-brimstone spate. “Why did it happen in this year? Those of ye who have transgressed should examine your souls. This is God’s work! God’s work! And if it is God’s work, ask yourselves why He has sent this visitation upon the first men ever to inhabit one of His most precious jewels? Pray for forgiveness, and do not transgress again! Next time God might choose to open up the earth and swallow ye whole!”

  Brave words which actually sank in for several weeks after the event; then, as is the wont of men, the lesson was forgotten.

  Lieutenant King had cause to wonder if perhaps his own hot temper was a contributing factor toward God’s tantrum; a tree killed his privately owned sow and her litter of piglets.

  That the devastation was island-wide was evident in the logs and branches which dammed up the stream in Arthur’s Vale, carried down from the hills during the torrents of rain. Spring cleaning took days for the men, weeks for the women, who bore the brunt of it, and it was a full month before the lagoon turned from the red of washed-away soil to its customary aquamarine.

  But when Supply arrived in the roads on the 2nd of March, Richard and his sawyers went back to work in the sawpits. The New South Wales settlement was still hungry for planks, scantlings and beams, not to mention ship’s spars. At least no one had to ply an axe; the timber was already on the ground, though of course much of it was old and rotten.

  Among others, Supply brought an experienced sawyer, William Holmes—why did they have to be Williams? After the trees at Port Jackson, Holmes said, Norfolk Island’s pines were a mere nothing.

  Aware that the Commandant was lusting after a third sawpit, Richard told Holmes to find three other men from among Supply’s new infusion of convict blood and take over the sawpit on the beach. A good man; he brought his wife, Rebecca, with him, and the pair settled quickly into community life. That left Bill Blackall and Will Marriner in charge of the Arthur’s Vale sawpit; while I, said Richard to himself with iron determination, take Private Wigfall, Sam Hussey and Harry Humphreys to the new third pit farther up the vale. It will be far more peaceful and I will ask Lieutenant King if I may build myself a good house nearby. Joey Long must fend for himself. All I will take are my books, my bed and feather bedding, half of our blankets and my own belongings. And one of MacGregor’s pups, since Mr. King is allowing Joey to take two of Delphinia’s five, the males. A good ratter up the vale will be a blessing.

  All of these resolutions came to pass. They were a grief to Stephen Donovan only, who did not see as much of Richard as he had when it was a simple matter of calling in at his door on the way to Turtle Bay for a swim.

  Lieutenant John Cresswell and a detachment of 14 more marines arrived with winter; the work force was now formidable enough and the policing of it strict enough to see the bulk of the Commandant’s most cherished schemes come to pass, including his dam. Richard’s house was several hundred yards above it, almost at the point where the forest commenced. Peaceful.

  Paths suddenly loomed high on Lieutenant King’s agenda. One such path was cut all the way across the island—three miles—to the leeward side at Cascade Bay, so called because the most spectacular of the many small waterfalls tumbled down a cliff there to cascade into the sea. A jagged but platformish outcrop of rock just offshore made landing there feasible when Sydney Bay’s prevailing winds prevented any thought of landing across the reef. The Cascade path was also necessary because most of the best flax grew around Cascade, and Lieutenant King resolved to set up his canvas-from-flax industry in a tiny new settlement not far above the landing place he would call Phillipburgh.

  Richard went into Sydney Town but rarely, for it was rapidly mushrooming into an actual street of huts and houses. Save for attending divine service each Sunday and collecting his rations, he had no need to visit the place. MacTavish was every bit as good a watchdog as his father, and all the company Richard wanted save for Stephen, who had become so firmly “Stephen” in his mind that it was increasingly hard to remember that he was “Mr. Donovan.”

  His house was ten by fifteen feet, had several big window apertures to let in plenty of light, and Johnny Livingstone had made him a table and two chairs. His roof was thatched with flax, but he had been promised shingles before the end of the year. It had a wooden floor some inches off the ground and foundations of round pine logs; the pine rotted quickly once embedded in soil, so this method of construction enabled him to ease out a rotting foundation post without dismantling the house, which was lined with thin pine boards of the most attractive kind because the Commandant had inexplicably taken against this particular grain—the wood owned a rippling pattern which reminded Richard of sunlight on calm water. Privately he wondered whether the ripples were evidence of the way the pine compensated for the perpetual winds; no one knew of any other tree anywhere which could grow absolutely straight in the teeth of a high prevailing wind, yet the Norfolk pine did, even on the most exposed clifftops. After that colossal hurricane all the young trees had bent over to touch the ground or snapped their tops off, but within two months the bent ones were ramrod straight again and the snapped ones sprouting two separate tops.

  Burglaries had increased now that the population stood at 100 souls, but thieves left Richard Morgan severely alone. Anyone who had watched him pull the fourteen-foot saw through three full feet, the muscles of his naked back and chest moving beneath the brown skin, decided that he was not a man to offend. He was, besides, a notorious loner. The community’s loners, of whom there were a number, were viewed with a superstitious shiver of fear; there had to be something mentally wrong with a man who preferred his own company, who did not need to see himself reflected in somebody else’s eyes or hear himself praised, drawn into an entity larger than he was. Which suited Richard perfectly. If people thought him dangerously strange, all the better. What surprised him was that more men did not elect to become loners after years of being jammed cheek by jowl with others. Solitude was not only bliss, it was also a healing process.

  The hard core of January’s mutineers got John Bryant at last
midway through winter. Francis, Pickett, Watson, Peck and others off Golden Grove were cutting timber on Mount George when—who knew how, who knew why?—Bryant stumbled into the path of a falling pine. His head crushed, he died two hours later and was buried on the same day. Half crazed with grief, his widow wandered Sydney Town keening and moaning like an Irishwoman who spoke no English.

  “The mood is very nasty,” Stephen said as he walked back to Richard’s house after the funeral.

  “It had to happen” was all Richard said.

  “That poor, wretched woman! And no priest to bury him.”

  “God will not care.”

  “God does not care!” Stephen snapped savagely. He entered the house without needing to bend, noting its scrupulous tidiness, the lined walls and ceiling, and the fact that Richard was slowly polishing them. “Christ,” he said, sagging onto a chair, “this is one of the very rare days in my life when I could do with a beaker of rum. I feel as if I am to blame for Bryant’s death.”

  “It had to happen,” Richard repeated.

  MacTavish, in whom the Scotch terrier line had run true, leaped into Richard’s arms without making a nuisance of himself in the usual manner of a young dog; he has trained it, Stephen thought, with the same thoroughness he devotes to everything. How does he manage to look exactly as he did when I first met him? Why have the rest of us aged and hardened while he has preserved intact every iota that he always was? Only more so. Much more so.

  “If ye get me a few stalks of the sugar cane running riot,” said Richard, gently thumping the dog’s lower spine with the flat of his hand, “in two years I will give ye all the rum ye can drink.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, plus two copper kettles, some copper sheet, a few lengths of copper tubing and some casks cut in half,” Richard went on with a smile. “I can distill, Mr. Donovan. ’Tis another of my hidden talents.”