by Jock Serong
They all slept on around him, and of the boy it was hard to tell but his little garden was walled by silence. In the distance the glow outlined the dune behind the beach not far away, the breaking surf mere yards off our port side as we followed the coast.
All along the dark swell of the hillside were the tiny speckles of the natives’ fires, like the last living embers in a darkened hearth. These we had seen on the west coast of New Holland, and again in the south as we approached Van Diemen’s Land, even on its grimmest escarpments. Occasional flits of movement, the tiniest echo of a voice that might be no more than a seabird, or might be a fellow human across the water. But we had seen nothing of the kind around Preservation. Not a curl of smoke by day, not an ember at night. They were gone from that bouldered landscape, and not by our hand. Further proof that I had landed our ship in a place beyond the reach of all meddlers, whether pink or brown.
The fires on this coast were a reminder of the thing we knew instinctively: any overland journey would necessitate us dealing with the natives. At that stage they were a code to us, a cipher. For the lummoxes snoozing around me, the natives represented everything that was confounding about New Holland. Like the trees we came to know, that shed bark but keep leaves, these were occupants of an inverted world—wily and calibrated to a different understanding. And later we learned that this was why they drew violence from Englishmen’s hearts. Not only did they speak a different language but they thought a different thought.
I had no advantage at sea, but I knew I would have the advantage on land. If it came to violence the natives would do us easily, and only the cunning would escape it. Those people watching us behind their fires could be the agents of my triumph.
I was an arm’s length from the tiller. The swell had gathered more power from the persistent wind, and soon its bashing and heaving would wake them all. The opportunity provided by this fortuitous watch—me, him and the boy lascar—would soon pass.
The sea would take a few, the natives the rest.
Slupslup, the greedy water on the stern. Clark stared bitterly out to sea, as though the answer awaited him there. And maybe it did. I had a hand on the tiller and he hadn’t seen. Drew it into my armpit so we slewed to port, degree by degree. With my other hand I could reach the line that controlled the sail and I took in a few feet of that so the sail tightened and we gained speed. More angle, more speed, and Clark hadn’t noticed a thing. His boy was asleep. High on the next wave I’d got her squared to the swells, pointing straight at the coast.
She ran down the face of the cresting wave and it was so simple from there. More pressure on the line and the sail quivered with the force in it. The longboat surged forward and drove itself in, nose down and ploughing into the green water at the base of the wave. The bowsprit went in like the stem of a mosquito and I could barely contain a laugh, to think I’d stung the ocean into slapping us.
Clark suddenly twigged but he was too late. The weight of the wave behind us, and the stopping force of the buried nose—it was inevitable now. I was sprung high into the air at the stern, the wind a-swirl round my face and hair and men awoke, screamed and clung as they found themselves standing vertical. For only an instant, however.
Thereafter we inverted completely and all was water and sound.
15
I wrote these things down so I wouldn’t have to answer your tedious questions, lieutenant.
No. I cannot fathom the cause. Mr Figge had the tiller.
Then? Then the morning came. We sat in a line on the beach watching the longboat break up. There was a discussion that started and faltered several times about whether we should build up the fire to try to signal someone. But the hard fact of the matter was that we were nowhere. We were only slightly less nowhere than where the Sydney Cove herself was. The conversation would wander over that topic for a while, then die. Mr Figge was the only one adamant about anything: that we must get up and walk north.
The other option that was raised—I think it was Mr Kennedy raised it—was that we could try to fish the boat out of the surf, repair it again and sail it back whence we had come, to Preservation. I cannot for the life of me imagine what this would have achieved—other than to ensure the deaths not only of ourselves but of all involved. As much as I dreaded the prospect of walking to Sydney, which we believed to be more than five hundred miles distant, there was no reasonable alternative.
We watched the birds diving for fish in this emptiness and the words were nothing.
I studied the lascars more closely now. They were the majority of us: what if they no longer shared our purpose? What if they turned mutinous? You hear of it. They looked to the serang for leadership—wizened old fellow, slow in all things but with a kind of stoicism about him. Nearly among those who lost their lives at the pumps, which demonstrated that they do reach an age where you are better to leave them behind. Lascars have a feeble grasp of hierarchy: they will readily follow such an old peasant, one who barely says a word. They have no interest in seeking out and following the authoritarian. Plentiful and cheap they may be, but they are the softest parts in the machine and liable to fatigue in a way that cogs and wheels do not. One must guard against failure at the weakest link.
The old boy held them together, I will credit him that. Even there on the beach, they sat with their legs crossed, waiting on his every utterance, Mussulman and Hindu alike. The boy lived in a state of fealty to his father as much as to me. Which is why my fear was rising: if the thirteen of them acted in some form of concert, if he exhorted them to do so, then our numbers, and by ‘us’ I mean Mr Figge, Kennedy, Thompson and me, would be insufficient to resist them.
And to whom did it fall, lieutenant, to be the old man’s opposite number? Kennedy was a craftsman but otherwise a simpleton. All the acumen of a tree nail. Thompson was a brute and a man no one would follow. And Mr Figge? You must be forming your own ideas about him by now. He wore this air of insouciance, as though our trials were none of his concern. He seemed the least interested in leadership and yet, by some trick of his demeanour, the most confident of survival. It is for that reason, maybe, that I did seek out his counsel from time to time.
Let me tell you what we had—it is in my nature to construct inventories. We had rice. We had a couple of tomahawks, some knives, a pot for cooking, some bolts of heavy cloth, and tins for carrying water. Mr Figge had a tinderbox. We had a musket and two pistols, some ammunition for these, and a pair of small swords. When we loaded the boat I believed the combination of these weapons would enable us to bring down game—seabirds, as we initially hoped—in order to feed ourselves. In this, it turned out, I was profoundly mistaken.
We were wearing the clothes we were wrecked in. The first time, I mean. Well, what do you think, man? No one had been able to salvage a sea chest of their belongings. We were in shirts and breeks, perfectly fine in that weather as long as we were dry and moving about. Crossing rivers, or in the early mornings, the cold was a problem. Kennedy and Thompson had hats, but neither Mr Figge nor I had been able to save ours in the sea.
The four of us wore goatskin straights on our feet. As you would know, lieutenant, these are ideal for moving about the ship but they are a poor protection when traipsing in the bush. The choice was an invidious one: either tackle the bush, where the straights would be inadequate, or walk the beach, where each footfall would further abrade them until they broke apart and fell away. The lascars had been barefoot all along, and within a week we would be as well, turning our toenails to horns and splinters. Extraordinary how the pain of damaged feet compounds other miseries.
Kennedy had retrieved his wood saw and a hammer and chisel from a box in the bow of the longboat. Having lost everything in the world, his complaint was that they would rust on him.
And the only other items I can think of, lieutenant, are a pencil and the journal which you have in your possession. Again, a duty thrust upon me. It wasn’t my book, nor my pencil. I offered the items to Mr Figge. I said to him that
I would have to lead the party in all things, and that it might be a fair division of labour if he took responsibility for recording our exploits in the journal. He gave every appearance of being an educated man. But he f latly refused. I have no regard for posterity, he told me.
Kennedy collected the timbers that had washed ashore. He lay two sections of the boom parallel and braced a frame between them to create a sort of wide ladder, the rungs made fast with mitres and rebates. He carved handles into the ends of the booms, then lined the underneath with cuts of sailcloth and a section of the hull’s copper sheathing so it would glide over the sand. And thus he had created a sled, onto which we loaded our belongings. I assigned the lascars to dog it: their faces were sceptical as they each picked up the handle-ends and considered the task.
We drew away from the landing place, the sled leaving a smooth track in the untouched sand.
I looked back only once.
There was the carcass of the longboat, a furlong off the beach, ribs poking from the yellowy waters of the sandbank. A small shark was nosing into it, drawn by the stink of us. Its back was a dull military grey, but the tips of its fin and tail glowed a queer olivine in the sunlight.
II
16
By the time a week was done we had fallen into a rhythm. We were following a vast beach, seemingly endless, stretching resolutely east as though it would take us into the heart of the rising sun. There was no feature, nothing at all, to break up the stretch of the horizon. Only sand and the blue arc of the sea and the line of the commencing sky. No visible islands, no reefs, not a headland or a sandbank and rarely even a bird.
There being no other qualified candidate, I knew it to be my responsibility to take care of navigation. Mr Figge had made his indifference clear, neither Thompson nor Kennedy had any understanding of such matters, and the lascars are of course preconditioned to follow. Sydney lay north, not east, but I had considered this—the Sydney Cove had pressed deeply westward, meaning that we must have been recovering that same ground by walking east. It seemed logical that eventually the coast must turn northward.
The beach was narrow, despite its heroic length. At times we despatched a lascar to walk inland: they reported the same each time. There were lakes in there, swamps, but the way seemed impassable. I had myself ventured to the top of the dunes to look inland, and that was what I too had seen: a deep depression in the land, many miles wide, its low places spotted with lakes. Beyond it, steep rises that may have been the foothills of a greater mountain range. Forested, mostly: tall eucalypts that receded in the faraway hills until they turned grey-blue. But in the places that were bare of trees there lay meadows of unknown pasture. Some providential hand had divided the countryside into stands of eucalypts and tracts of meadow, resembling the ordered work of a cropper—but never square, never fenced. The lakes and waterways prevented us traversing it, but otherwise it looked to be agreeable country.
We had been lulled by the beach into thinking there was not much alive around us, that the place existed in windblown suspension. But the view over that dune put an end to any such belief. The abundance in the wetlands was extraordinary: birds I recognised, such as pelicans, grebes, ducks and cormorants; and some, like the black swan, that mocked familiar forms. There must be food for all of them: fish or shrimp sustaining them all, and I was heartened. The dwindling supply of rice would not spell our end. We could go on eating what was around us, if we could work out how.
The vegetation up on the dunes was rude and unfamiliar. Thick shrubs, growing on both faces of the sandy slope and all the way down to the beach. Their leaves were leathery and dark, with serrated edges like a carpenter’s saw. But what was remarkable about them was the flowers: just like a chimney sweep’s brush, only these were a most pleasing yellow. These shrubs were by far the most abundant living thing on those dunes. Aside from them, saltbush maybe. Some spiky grasses. That coast is a wasteland.
Onward, eastward, the sled trailing behind. Into the sun in the morning, casting long shadows ahead of ourselves in the afternoons. The mornings were cold, I might’ve said, but the sun had strength during the day. The Europeans among us felt its sting, though whether the sun had any effect on the lascars I could not tell. They walked together, clustered at the rear. The boy I would keep with me whenever I could. Still I was having to domesticate him to his duties, keep him from the simpering closeness to his father. Kennedy and Thompson were inseparable, grumbling about the lascars, about the walk itself. At each stop they were the hardest to move, at each meal the greediest.
I walked at the head of our little group most of the time, Mr Figge mostly content to amble off at a slight remove. The lascars fell behind with the sled. Complaining, I suppose, though one never knows for certain what their patois is about.
Figge had one pistol. Thompson had insisted on having the other—for what reason I do not know. I had relented only because I was fairly sure the seawater had rendered them useless. The musket was soon thrown away on account of its great weight.
A walk of this length along any beach, as you can imagine, lieutenant, takes the mind through states of intense concentration, meditative calm, and sometimes into close study of what seems ephemeral. For hours on end I would examine the things passing under my feet. It was a clean beach, littered only with little white bones, very light and shaped like hulls. Dwelling upon its pristine state led me to conclude that what happened to our little longboat was exceptional: this was not a wild coast. There was simply not the flotsam to indicate bursts of temper in this sea: just the meandering tracks of seabirds and small fragments of pink and white shells (though no amount of searching would reveal the source of these, which we thought might be food).
I cast back to my brothers and sisters; the dead, the living. Matters between us that seemed so important had been reduced to triviality by my distance from them. The only way to survive such privations is to harden, to cast sentiment aside. But I hear their voices, even now talking to you, and I heard them clear as the wind on that beach. They were not kind. I—
No, no. Never mind.
We would eat at dawn and at dusk, stopping through the day to pick tentatively at whatever we could find. We had very little water, and would begin our day by wringing moisture off the grasses and into our parched mouths. We discovered that for our evening meal we could steam the rice in a bed of torn greenery with just a little of our water. It was…edible.
We struck the first river mouth within a few days—you might have the date there in the journal. My theory, based on the frequency of the river crossings and the foothills we could see in the distance, is that there must have been a substantial mountain range somewhere further inland that was depositing all this water at the coast. The first one was no great obstacle: it had split and forked across several sandbars so that we were able to wade it. Nor did it flow very fast: I surmise that we were crossing it at the end of the dry season. The lascars took the sled on their shoulders and were able to carry the provisions clear.
But the river mouths further on, of which there were several crossing that beach, presented us with more difficulty. At these, we were forced to stop and make camp, walk the bank inland in search of a place to ford, and if we could not find one, then resign ourselves to the making of a raft. Each time, Kennedy would bellyache about the labour involved and how it all fell to him. Yet he took great pleasure in being the only one with the necessary skills. We began to take the sled apart and to refashion it so that it gradually became a raft. I sent the lascars into the heathland, where they would fell hardwoods with the tomahawk and drag the logs back. My God, they were slow: infuriatingly so. Each time, we were camped by the river for several days, waiting upon the log gathering and Kennedy’s carpentry. Kennedy would lap the logs together and fashion heavy pegs where lapping wouldn’t do. He was most ingenious in this work, but even then, our results were mixed: the first few times we tried rafting we all ended up in the water. The damned things would come apart under pressure
or just sink. Fortunately, these early disasters—Ha! More shipwrecks!—only happened at places where the water was low enough that we could wade out of trouble.
We lost boat timbers this way, and we replaced them with forest timbers. And so, with distance, we shed the last traces of our seafaring selves. The shipwreck was smeared all the way from Preservation halfway up this beach and, eventually, was gone altogether: a made-up cart-raft had taken its place.
The flats around the edges of these estuaries were populated by thousands of tiny white crabs. They massed on the hard sand, creating the illusion from afar that the ground had turned liquid and was flowing. The overburden of their holes, dotted everywhere on the sandbanks, revealed their positions, and it was just a matter of being quick enough of hand and foot to sweep them into a shirt or onto a sheet of calico. The lascars thought this a fine game—they were quicker than us. Thompson tried the same thing and wound up flat on his face in the wet sand. The spectacle reduced one of the Bengalis to helpless laughter, and he wore the first mate’s fist in his mouth. At first, we fussed a great deal about cracking the crabs open and cooking them. But we found that we lost too much of the nourishment in doing that, so we simply ate them raw and crunched our way through the shell. We were sick the first few times we tried it. After that, our guts hardened to the sea-taste and the digestion of fragments.
Mr Figge, being taller, was not so fast with the crabs, but nor was he fussy. He would eat them just as readily as he’d eat a gull or gnaw at something that turned up in the tide-line. A man of curious appetites, to say the least.
17
Mr Clark, I’ve heard every word of yours, here with my back against the door. Now I see that you intend to hide as much as you tell.
The doctor visits once each day. A hand on my forehead; a cloth on my wounds if he can be bothered. His concern is for you, and that is fair. My suffering is nothing compared to yours. I am tired, still footsore, but able to walk out of here if I choose. But to where? My father is gone. What is there in the world outside for me? My employment with you, but where does that stand now? There are no guarantees about what you may require in the future. This town holds no promise for me. Indeed, it holds great danger.
