Nanberry

by Jackie French

  Yemmerrawane said nothing. He moved to take Mrs Macarthur’s plate, then one by one he took the plates of all the other guests.

  Except Nanberry’s. Nanberry sat there, embarrassed, the last of his chicken gravy staining his plate. The white servants had gone out to fetch the next course of food. At last he signalled Yemmerrawane again. Yemmerrawane refused to meet his gaze.

  ‘Please take my plate.’

  Yemmerrawane smiled, showing the fresh gap in his teeth. He stayed where he was, next to the wall, carefully not looking at Nanberry.

  ‘I said take my plate!’

  ‘Nanberry.’ Father White’s voice was quiet. ‘That is enough.’

  ‘But Father …’

  Governor Phillip at last noticed what was happening. He rang the bell on the sideboard behind his seat. A white servant appeared. Governor Phillip murmured to him. Nanberry sat there, humiliation hot as a blanket on his face as the white servant took his plate away.

  Why had Yemmerrawane insulted him? Was it because Yemmerrawane was a warrior, had been initiated, and Nanberry had not? Or because Nanberry was an Englishman with black skin?

  It was as though Bennelong had slapped him again.

  Nanberry was no servant, like Yemmerrawane. He was the adopted son of Surgeon White. He should be treated with respect, not just by Yemmerrawane, but by the other English at the table. But none of the settlers had even spoken to him, except the Governor when he had greeted him earlier. As though I am a pet, he thought, like the o’possum, to be fed and stared at.

  Time stretched out. Wine was poured, a bowl of fruit brought in — early peaches from the Governor’s orchards, the first of the melons, strawberries, raspberries. Once more a white servant served Nanberry, not Yemmerrawane. Nanberry ate. The peach flesh was white and juicy. He had never seen a fruit so large and soft. But it could have tasted like wood ash for all he cared.

  Nuts were served: English nuts from the Governor’s trees, or brought in the big ships from far beyond the horizon, almonds and walnuts, not kurrajong or bunya.

  At last the meal was over. He and Father White followed one of the servants — again not Yemmerrawane — who held a lantern of precious whale oil to light their way home.

  It was dark inside the house, but Rachel had left a slush lamp, a wick floating in a dish of emu oil, burning by the stairs. The Surgeon lifted it and began to climb up to his bedroom.

  ‘Father …’

  The Surgeon turned. ‘Yes, lad?’

  ‘I … I am sorry if I embarrassed you tonight.’

  It was too dark to see the expression on his adoptive father’s face. ‘You weren’t at fault.’

  No, thought Nanberry. It would be easier if he had been. He could learn to behave properly, just as he had learnt how to dress, how to speak like an Englishman. It was the English who wouldn’t learn. And the Cadigal too. Neither really knew the other — or wanted to learn — even though they had lived on the same harbour for nearly three years.

  He knew the Governor liked him. He used him to translate when he needed to speak to the clans around the harbour and even as far away as Parramatta. He had been a guest at the Governor’s table, while Yemmerrawane was, after all, just a servant, waiting on them all. Father White and even Rachel were good to him too.

  But …

  ‘I don’t belong. I have no friends.’ The words were almost too quiet for the Surgeon to hear.

  ‘What was that, lad?’

  ‘I have no friends. I work for the Governor, I do my jobs here. But I don’t belong. Father, I want to leave.’

  ‘Go back to your own people?’

  ‘You are my people now!’ The anguish in his cry echoed up the staircase. Outside the o’possum gave a startled grunt, and leapt to another tree.

  ‘I’m sorry, lad. I know … I do understand.’ The Surgeon’s voice had a thread of bitterness. ‘I know too well what it’s like to be lonely among a mob of fools. But I don’t know how I can help.’

  ‘Send me to sea. Let me be a sailor.’

  ‘What?’ Father White stared at him in the flickering light of the slush lamp. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re asking. It can be Hell on earth on those ships, lad. Poor food, the lash if you do the slightest thing wrong. I’m a naval surgeon, boy. Do you know how many sailors never make it home from their first voyage? Half are dead by forty, old men, teeth lost to scurvy, a leg crushed or an arm. How many sailors with whole bodies have you seen?’

  ‘I have seen sailors with dark skins,’ said Nanberry softly. ‘Sailors from Africa. Sailors who are natives from America. Here, to the English, I will always be a savage. To the Cadigal I am nothing. But on a ship … in other lands, perhaps …’

  He wished he could see the Surgeon’s face. At last the voice on the stairs above him said, ‘Very well. I’ll speak to the Governor. I’m sure he’ll agree to send you as Captain Waterhouse’s cabin boy for the next trip to Norfolk Island and back. Will that do you?’

  Nanberry felt his face become a grin. He had thought he would never laugh again. Now he felt like dancing. He would go on a ship! With Captain Waterhouse, the bravest man in the colony!

  ‘Thank you, Father!’

  ‘Don’t thank me till you find out what it’s like. You may find you hate it. You probably will.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Nanberry confidently. He had known what he wanted without realising it since he had seen the first big ship. To sail into that thin line between the sea and sky …

  ‘Go on, up to bed with you.’ Father White held the slush lamp high so Nanberry could see his way. ‘I’ll sit down here for a while.’

  ‘To write your book?’

  ‘Perhaps. Good night, boy.’ The Surgeon’s voice was gentle as he returned to the kitchen.

  Nanberry climbed the stairs. The memory of tonight’s humiliation vanished. Soon he would be on a giant ship. He would be a sailor. Let Yemmerrawane laugh at that.

  Chapter 36

  RACHEL

  SYDNEY COVE, NOVEMBER 1790

  The noise downstairs woke her. At first she thought it was just the o’possum, trying to get into the food safe and the corn. But then it came again. She reached for her shawl, unlatched the shutter to let in moonlight and trod quietly down the stairs, her hair in its bed plaits down her back.

  The Surgeon sat in the kitchen, barely visible by the red glow of the coals in the fireplace.

  ‘Sir?’

  He looked up. The tears glinted on his cheeks.

  She had seen him with his arms still drenched red after surgery; had seen him walk among rows of corpses, calmly giving orders for them to be buried. She had seen him with the Governor’s blood on his shirt. She had never seen him cry before.

  She hurried towards him. ‘Sir, what’s the matter?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing. No matter. Go back to bed.’

  ‘Not until you tell me what is wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’ The despair in his voice made her shiver. ‘What is right? We have come to a clean land and made it a stinking swamp. We came with brave ideas of a new city and have only a huddle of huts. Our colonists are drunkards who would rather steal than work. Our soldiers sulk and see every labour as below them. There is nothing good about what we have done to this land.’

  ‘There is you. You are a good man. The best I have ever known.’

  ‘Me?’ He made a sound almost like a laugh. ‘I have been worst of all. How many hundreds of natives died and I couldn’t save them? And now this boy … the one I thought I had helped … I have failed him too.’

  She stood still and quiet in her white nightdress. ‘How have you failed him?’

  ‘I have let him think he might be an Englishman, but he is not. Back home he would be a curiosity. A servant, if he is lucky. He … he asked me if he could go to sea tonight. To be a sailor.’

  ‘You agreed?’

  ‘I have said I’ll get him a job as a cabin boy. Captain Waterhouse is a good man. His ship is better than most.’
<
br />   ‘Is a sailor’s life so very bad?’

  The Surgeon stared at the stars glimmering through the window left open for the o’possum. ‘It’s hard company. So many sailors are press-ganged, forced onto the ships when they are drunk, or ordered to sea instead of facing the hangman’s noose.’

  ‘But others choose to go. For adventure. To see the world.’ She hesitated. ‘And some who are press-ganged choose to stay with their ships, even when they reach another port.’

  ‘It’s that or starve.’

  ‘Not for all.’

  ‘No. Not for all. Maybe …’ He shook his head again. ‘Rachel … I am just so lonely. It has been three and a half years now, with no one to talk to. No softness in my life …’

  He had never called her Rachel before. She took another step towards him; put her hand on his shoulder. He reached up and stroked her hair.

  She had sworn never to do this, but her master was a good man. A man who did good. A man who needed her. She said, ‘I am here.’

  Chapter 37

  NANBERRY

  PACIFIC OCEAN; SYDNEY COVE, JUNE 1791

  Waves with white froth, swelling high above the ship, trying to smash the little vessel to tinder. A hammock warm from the body of the man who had gone to take his place up on deck as the next lot of crew had their few hours of sleep. Mutton so salty it left blisters on his mouth and ship’s biscuit that crawled with weevils. No place to relieve himself except on the perch at the rear of the ship, the sea slapping below him. Sunlight cleaning the sky and spearing off the sea.

  A world of sea and sky, and the far-off thin scrape of the horizon.

  He had been sick the first two days; had had to run to do Captain Waterhouse’s bidding in between vomits over the rail. By the end of the second day he crawled to his bunk, on his knees with weariness.

  On the third day he woke up with his stomach where it should be. Even emptying Captain Waterhouse’s chamberpot didn’t make it heave. There was fish and potato stew for breakfast. He ate ravenously, perched on a great coil of rope, the sails flapping, ropes creaking, the lookout high above on the mast. One day he would be up there, high over the ocean. An albatross sailed lazily past it. He felt like waving to it. ‘Hello, friend! I am master of this world too.’

  And then the smudge of green that was Norfolk Island. Impossible to find a green speck in an endless ocean, but somehow Captain Waterhouse had done it, not just once but many times.

  This was how Governor Phillip had found New South Wales, after a journey almost as long as the seasons all put together. He had followed the stars like the moon found its way across the darkness. For the first time he felt true awe of the English. Houses, muskets, metal axes, fields of corn were nothing compared with the glory of surging with knowledge across a trackless ocean.

  It was hard. He was the youngest on board. Even if his work was mostly cleaning for Captain Waterhouse, fetching and carrying, it still pushed his body to its limits. But he loved it. This was what a warrior did: accepted pain and hardship, whatever it took to do all that a man was capable of doing.

  He would be a sailor, a man who conquered not just another few warriors, but the sea.

  The southerly filled their sails as the ship bounced into the smoother waters of the harbour. The wind smelt of ice, of the mysterious land the other sailors had told him about, where the water turned solid and could burn your fingers and rot your toes away, where rain fell in white flakes from the sky.

  One day I’ll go there, he vowed. One day I’ll go everywhere.

  But it was good to see the harbour again — to smell the trees, the soil, the cook fires. It was even good to smell the privies of the colony, as the ship anchored and the ship’s boat brought the sailors back to shore.

  He had half hoped Father White had heard the Supply’s sail had been seen out at sea and would be waiting for him in the crowd on the quay. But the message mustn’t have reached him, or perhaps he had work he couldn’t leave.

  Nanberry waved goodbye to Johnnie One-Leg, the cook, and Fat Jack, who was so thin you could feel his back when you poked his belly, and shouldered his duffel bag for the walk up the hill, ignoring the yells around him.

  There was always a crowd when a ship came in: women after the sailors’ money, grog sellers, shanty owners offering a place to sleep. But mostly the convicts and brats and soldiers were just there because a ship arriving was something new to see, like a hanging or a flogging, something to break the boredom of their days.

  Once, you had known everyone in the colony by sight, even if you didn’t know who they were. But more and more convict ships came now, more sick and starving to be tended at the hospital till they could work on the farms or roads. The colony was full of strangers now. There wasn’t a face in the crowd that he knew.

  He stared. The people at the other end of the cove weren’t looking at him and the other sailors from the Supply, but at a canoe pulled up on the muddy sand. It wasn’t a woman’s bark canoe; it was the biggest he had ever seen, chopped from a whole tree trunk. A net inside was filled with the silver gleam of fish.

  He wriggled his way through the crowd, careful to keep tight hold of his duffel bag in case some rogue grabbed it. Who could have built a canoe like this? A young man with dark skin, in a red shirt and tattered trousers, passed over a giant fish in exchange for a loaf of bread. As Nanberry watched, the youth lugged out a sack of fish. He grinned and grabbed a hatchet from a balding convict in return.

  It was Balloonderry.

  ‘Balloonderry!’ he called.

  Balloonderry laughed. ‘The sailor is back,’ he said in their own language. ‘It’s good to see you, Nanberry Balloonderry, my brother.’

  ‘It’s good to see you, Balloonderry Nanberry. The canoe?’ he added eagerly. ‘Did you build it?’

  Balloonderry grinned. ‘It took me a whole season to make one that floated. I used my white-ghost axe. The white ghosts down at Parramatta are hungry for fish. Just like the white ghosts here. They don’t know where the schools hide when the winds come, or when the mullet feed. I am the best fisherman in the colony.’

  ‘You like the English now?’

  Balloonderry hesitated. ‘They are interesting. Some of their things are good.’ He met Nanberry’s eyes. ‘But I am still Eora.’ The word meant of the people — the whole people. There were so few Cadigal, Guringai, Dharug now. The old clan barriers were fading.

  ‘You haven’t been initiated,’ said Nanberry carefully.

  Balloonderry looked at him sternly. ‘I have been showing the Governor the land of Parramatta. I have been doing many things. But I will be initiated soon.’

  ‘You know the Governor now?’ How could so much have happened since he last met his friend?

  Balloonderry laughed again. He said carefully in English, ‘I stay at Governor Phillip’s house at Parramatta. Today there are many, many fish. I bring fish here.’

  His English was good. Not as good as Nanberry’s, but better than Bennelong’s or Booroong’s, better than any other black person Nanberry knew. Once again he felt pride that this young man was his brother. ‘You speak like an Englishman,’ he said.

  ‘It’s useful,’ Balloonderry admitted in their own language. ‘The white ghosts are too stupid to learn our tongue.’ His eyes strayed to the Supply, swaying at anchor on the tiny waves of the harbour. ‘And you sailed in that?’ There was no mistaking the admiration and envy in his voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is so good to see you, brother.’

  ‘And you.’

  Balloonderry gazed at him. ‘Come and stay down at Parramatta. We’ll fish together. You can tell me about sailing in the big ship.’

  It would be a while before the Supply sailed again. Nanberry needed to see Father White, to eat Rachel’s cooking, to sleep on a mattress and not think the ground below his feet was going up and down.

  He grinned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In a few days I will be there.’

  Chapter 38

&
nbsp; NANBERRY

  SYDNEY COVE, JULY 1791

  It was good to be home, to tell Father White about the towering waves and hear his stories of ships he had sailed in too. Why had he never known how many ships Father White had sailed on when he was younger?

  Rachel fussed and made him wash his hair before he came inside, to get rid of the ship’s lice. She boiled his clothes too, holding them on a stick and shoving them into the big pot while he changed into his spare trousers.

  He loved it all.

  Rachel and Father White shared a room now. He didn’t give the matter much thought. That was what men and women did.

  Even after a week at home, it was good to sleep as late as he wanted to, his body recovering from the effort of the voyage. It was even good to feed the o’possum young gum leaves, to watch the silly creature hold them in its paws and nibble them, staring back with its big black eyes.

  Best of all was to sit at supper as the early night wrapped its coldness around the colony, the fire flaring in the hearth, Father White on one side of him and Rachel on the other, the table piled with weevil-less fresh bread, butter that didn’t stink, roast lamb with potatoes and greens, a giant pudding filled with apples from the storeroom and dried grapes.

  ‘More lamb, sir?’ Rachel filled the Surgeon’s plate again. Nanberry held out his plate too.

  The Surgeon took a bite of lamb. ‘I forgot to tell you — you know that young native fisherman who’s been supplying the garrison down at Parramatta?’

  Rachel nodded. ‘I traded some hearth cakes for his fish when he came to the quay last week.’

  ‘Well, you may not get the chance to buy any again. Some rogues wrecked the lad’s canoe a few nights ago down at Parramatta. The boy was quite cut up about it. Appeared at the Governor’s house at Parramatta covered in red mud, danced about and yelled.’

  ‘What did the Governor do?’

  The Surgeon shrugged. ‘They found the men who did it. Convicts, jealous of the boy’s trade. They got a good flogging. Phillip gave the lad a few trinkets and told him one had been hanged. A lie of course, but it seemed to calm the boy down.’ He took another bite of lamb.