South of Darkness

by John Marsden

  Gazing through the porthole, at my tender age, I could not of course have formulated such thoughts. But I did in my childlike way wonder at the tapestry I was observing, and at what a busy God it must be to create a vastness such as this, with its manifold threads. And for most of its expanse, these sights went unseen by any mortal. Was there meaning, then, in the shape of a ripple in the water that was gone in an instant and was observed by none but its Creator?

  I became aware of a man standing behind me waiting for a turn at the porthole, and I stepped back to allow him access. Somehow, despite growing up in the slums of London, I had acquired some semblance of manners, or perhaps it was more that I was fearful of the other members of this cast of ruffians and villains. The man, whom I appreciated had not thrust me out of the way in the rough manner that I had experienced often enough from both men and women in my life, stepped forward. As the light from outside fell on his face I cried out in amazement.

  ‘Carmichael!’

  ‘Why, my young friend Barnaby.’

  It was indeed Carmichael Lance, the prisoner who had helped me in Newgate by advising me to plead not guilty, and who had shared his food with me. I had never been more delighted to see anyone in my life, and he seemed pleased enough to see me too.

  ‘So, I trust you looked His Honour straight in the eye and told him you were as innocent as a newborn?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I said proudly. ‘And I think the jury took a shine to me.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, you appear to have avoided the gallows, or you wouldn’t be in this den of iniquity. I imagine the jury saw you as “one who has gone astray like a lost lamb”. What did you get?’

  ‘Seven years transportation,’ I said.

  ‘Ah well, who knows what will happen at the end of this voyage? Assuming we survive the savage seas. And let us assume that we will survive, otherwise we shall make ourselves miserable. We are miserable sinners enough; let us not be miserable sailors.’ He looked around and then drew a little closer to me. ‘Now, my young friend, have you had time to make the acquaintance of any of your fellow prisoners?’

  ‘Not really. Just the ones I shared the tumbrel with, coming from London. Some were in Newgate with me, but not in my quarters.’

  ‘So it sounds as though, like me, you avoided the Hulks. That was well done, though I must admit that I did not anticipate being cooped up here for so long before we sailed. But you have avoided that fate too. Well, you were good enough to listen to my advice last time we met, young Barnaby, so I am going to presume to give you a further piece of it.’

  ‘Yes indeed, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Choose your friends wisely,’ he said. ‘Be wary of those who are most ardent to make your acquaintance. God knows I am no tabernacle, but the deeds of some of these men are enough to make Heaven weep.’ He paused. ‘Think of this as your Slough of Despond mayhap, and that will give you the strength to persevere, to see beyond. At the end of the voyage we may find a destination with something extraordinary for those whose hearts remain true.’

  ‘My Slough of Despondent, sir?’

  He laughed. ‘I thank you for bestowing the epithet of “sir” upon me, but I fear it is out of place in these circumstances. Slough of Despond, not Despondent. Yes. Many will bog down on this voyage, Barnaby. Some will emerge from the bog and others will perish in it. But I believe we are heading towards a light which shines for us.’

  His eyes burned as he said those last words. He seemed a very different man at that moment from the one I had met in Newgate Prison. I said: ‘The other men speak very differently about it, sir . . . I mean, Carmichael.’

  ‘They are not people of imagination or vision, my young friend. They are not educated people.’

  He put his eyes to the porthole and gazed through it as though he could see somewhat further than I or perhaps anyone else had done. I returned to my hammock, where the men were talking to each other in a way to which I had already become accustomed, not only on the tumbrel, but also in Newgate. As I was to find out, the established patterns of these conversations did not much alter during most of the journey from Portsmouth to Botany Bay. They consisted firstly of highly coloured and detailed recountings of the crimes for which they had been convicted, secondly of highly detailed (but frequently unconvincing, even to my immature ears) recountings of crimes for which they had not been caught, and thirdly of vulgar and salacious accounts of their adventures with women. These last were also frequently unconvincing.

  I had been astonished – and remained so – at their boastful attitudes towards the conduct which for many of them had brought them to the very shadow of the gallows. Reformers would have been bitterly disappointed at the absence of repentance among these hardened offenders. There were those who were genuinely contrite, and who had fixed their minds upon nobler goals, but they were in a small minority.

  Only occasionally would the conversation turn to the gentler topic of past lives, perhaps lived more wholesomely, more optimistically: and then tales were told of farms or villages or schooling. In short, tales of childhood. The names of fathers and mothers, sweethearts and wives, children, brothers and sisters, would be invoked, often wistfully, and with contrition and regret. I found myself more attracted to these stories than the others.

  I should add that a fourth topic had become more and more common as we approached the harbour of Portsmouth, and it was to consume an increasingly large proportion of the men’s attention as we made our insignificant way across the ocean. It was speculation on the conditions that we could expect to find in the new colony. That particular afternoon many were engaged in propounding their theories or sharing the stories they had heard. Pierre De Lafontaine, who like most forgers I have met had the gift of the gab, was describing a wondrously large wild man, a ‘monstrous giant’, who had been brought back to our native shores just recently from Botany Bay. Pierre De Lafontaine had an accent that was strange to my ears. The men called him Frenchie, for he was a native of France, but he spoke with great energy, his face alive and his eyes alight. ‘Twelve foot tall was zis man, and all covered wiz fur, he could have been a bear but for his face, that was all ’uman, the most frightenin’ sight. He could have picked up four of us and smashed us against the nearest tree, he was so ’uge, he was ’orrible.’

  Looking around at the other men I could see their faces. Despite the bravado they affected at every opportunity, it was obvious that they were terrified by Pierre’s description.

  ‘Where did you see him?’ one of them asked in a low growl, almost like a bear himself.

  ‘Oh, I did not see ’im myself, you understand, but he ’as been shown up and down the country, I am surprised none of you ’as seen ’im. My friend saw ’im, he said it was the most wondrous sight, but very frightenin’. He ’ad teeth like the tusks of an elephant. Oh yes, my ami said so many people were fainting that they ’ad to drop a curtain in front of the giant to ’ide ’im from the people again.’

  ‘I’ve heard that the Indians have captured half the prisoners what went out there,’ said another man, a lugubrious-looking fellow with eyes like a basset hound. He was possibly big enough to take on the giant of whom Pierre had spoken. He could only fit into his hammock by lying with his knees folded. ‘Took them and ate them, so they say.’

  ‘Aye, the bloodthirsty bastards, they got into one of the barracks at Botany Bay and slit the throat of every second man as they lay asleep in their beds, and snuck away, and not a man knew until the morning,’ said a fellow named Chris Norfolk, who seemed an excitable type. He was always prowling around and talking to anyone who would listen, about any subject under the sun. When he could not find an audience he talked to himself, as though it were all one and the same to him.

  ‘What would they do that for?’ I asked, wide-eyed. It was my first contribution to the exchange.

  ‘For the simple pleasure of it,’ Chris Norfolk respon
ded. He sat up, which, with our limited experience of hammocks was still a precarious undertaking. ‘You have to understand, they want blood in the same way that we desire our victuals. They are savages, the same as wild animals. Don’t think of them the way you think of us civilised folk. Have you seen what a fox does in a henhouse? It bites the head off every bird, not because it wants to eat every one, indeed it cannot, but because it likes to spread havoc and destruction. No, these folk know nothing of civilisation.’

  He lay back down again and, to my surprise, opened his flies, pulled out his member and began to work on it with much energy. As the voyage proceeded, I was to learn that this was his invariable response to any happening or conversation that excited his interest. I found myself drawn to watch, out of the corner of my eye, with a kind of unwilling interest, but shortly found the sight too confusing and overwhelming for my immature senses, and turned away.

  The tales continued. ‘The forest is alive with snakes, so they say,’ said another man who, judging by his long thin frame might have had serpentine qualities himself. ‘And every one of them venomous. One bite and there is no help for a man. He writhes in agony for a few minutes then dies with bloodcurdling screams and the blood rushing out of every orifice.’

  The stories, combined with the motion of the boat, the fetid atmosphere and the spectacle presented by Chris Norfolk energetically manipulating himself just a few yards from me, were not conducive to my peace of mind. I closed my eyes, trying to prevent nausea rising from my stomach. I reminded myself of the one comfort I had: my recollection of the man in the tavern who had been to New South Wales and come back again. I may have been the only person among our number who had actually conversed with a returned convict. I did not mention the fact to anyone, because I did not want to draw any more attention to myself, but I remembered vividly that the man had not spoken of bloodthirsty savages or hair-covered giants or vicious serpents, but of a beautiful warm climate where a man could walk around all day with his shirt off, and where a golden future awaited him. He had made it sound like paradise.

  However, I was soon to learn from Carmichael Lance that the Slough of Despond and many other obstacles beside await the person who would reach paradise.

  Chapter 22

  As darkness crept around us so too a man crept to my bedside and importuned me in crude and vile language. I repulsed him, but he was not the last, and I lay awake in a nervous sweat hoping that I would survive the night. I particularly feared the man Holt, whose first name I still did not know, and who lay just inches from me in the hammock on my right.

  After Newgate I was hardly a stranger to the chaotic darkness that engulfs a prison at night-time. My first night on the Admiral Barrington, while we were still at anchor, had been uneventful. Somehow however, the slipping of the vessel’s chains and her departure from British shores coincided with, or more likely released, an ugly fervour, an animalistic passion, in many of my neighbours.

  I do not believe that such behaviour is restricted to the criminal classes. I have seen enough and heard enough to know that a group of men living together are inevitably coarsened and brutalised over time, and when I have had a choice I have avoided such situations, for fear of the moral turpitude likely to be found therein. But of course I did not have a choice in the close quarters of the Admiral Barrington. Lying in my hammock, awake and in fear, I bethought me that perhaps I should adopt the practice of some women and girls and boys in Newgate and seek out a protector who would reserve me for himself, and in that way limit the assaults upon my virtue. Yet truly is it said that hope springs eternal in the human bosom, and somehow I could not bring myself to such a cold-blooded action as to renounce all hope and place myself willingly in the clutches of such a creature.

  If I have not offended my readers’ sensibilities enough by these reflections, I may do so now by stating that I was also aware, from what I had observed, that the brutes who possess women and children in these ways are not averse to sharing their possessions, for personal gain or to enhance their prestige and power. So the protection they may initially appear to offer is frequently illusory. I say no more.

  In the blackest darkness of the night I had to fight off one man; a fight I would inevitably have lost, except that the descent into chaos initiated by our struggle spread itself quickly to the surrounding hammocks and provoked a storm of protest from my neighbours, so that eventually my attacker had no option but to slink away. It was too dark to see who he was.

  When dawn came it found me tired and unwell. The pitching of the ship did not bother me as much as it did many – I soon learned, to my relief, that I was not particularly prone to seasickness – but the events of the preceding hours, combined with the sight and sound and smell of others retching caused my stomach to rise up in revolt on a number of occasions. In order to quell the feelings I learned to stare fixedly at the ceiling and command my body to be at peace, a procedure that seemed to work moderately well.

  Our rations consisted of three quarters of a pound of biscuit per day, which I generally saved for the evening meal. For dinner, if the weather permitted, we were served plum duff or pea soup or, occasionally, if a pig had been killed, pork pudding.

  For breakfast on this, as on every subsequent day at sea, we had a pot of gruel, which was made more palatable by the addition of sugar or butter, at least until the supplies of these commodities ran low.

  After breakfast on this second day came a sudden hustle and bustle, with a wave of noise rolling through our quarters, which I soon found was initiated by Surgeon Gossam and a squad of soldiers he brought with him to give extra weight to his commands. To the disgust of the old lags, Surgeon Gossam was fixated on the idea that cleanliness would contribute to the good health of all on board, so to that end various members of our company were deputed to take the slops buckets up on deck and clean them out, whilst others were allocated the tasks of sweeping and mopping and scrubbing the walls and floors.

  I wished fervently to be chosen to go up to the deck, for any reason, however humble, so that I could smell the fresh air and see the vista of ocean and coastline, but I was not honoured with such a summons. Instead I was added to a gang that was cleaning the living quarters.

  The soldiers bustled about; in this early stage of the voyage they were much given to blustering and threatening. It was as though they feared that if they did not do enough shouting on the first day of our cleaning duties we would all be incorrigibly delinquent in our tasks by the second. There may have been reasonable grounds for this apprehension. Some of the men worked with more zeal than others, but although disappointed not to be allowed upstairs, I was still relieved to have something to do and set about my task willingly enough. I was on my hands and knees scrubbing when I saw Carmichael Lance at some distance further down the cabin, engaged in the same task, so I contrived to slip in beside him with my bucket and brush, and we scrubbed together.

  We were not supposed to talk when on these duties, but it was easy enough to maintain a conversation when the soldiers were occupied elsewhere. He asked me about the preceding night, and I confessed with some reluctance and embarrassment that it had not been restful, for the reasons I have enumerated above.

  This morning he seemed to be the Carmichael Lance of old, rather than the visionary of the day before. He was urbane, witty and cynical, but at the same time as concerned for my welfare as he had been at Newgate.

  ‘My dear young friend, you cannot have lived the life you have described to me and be entirely innocent,’ he whispered as the soldier guarding us wandered away. He glanced sideways at my face. I don’t know what he saw there, but whatever it was made him mutter, ‘Well, perhaps it is possible after all.’

  When we next had the opportunity to talk, out of the hearing of the guard, he resumed the subject. ‘I may have been too euphemistic in the warnings I gave you earlier,’ he whispered. ‘I will speak to you now more plainly. You can expect this vessel
to be a veritable bed of vice. You will need to be on your guard. I will give you what help I can, but do not relax your vigilance for a moment. As you have already experienced, because of your age men will seek to bully you and take advantage of you.’ He paused, then added: ‘Men are attracted to innocence, but only so they can defile it.’ I did not really know what he meant by that.

  We worked on in silence for some time. As we were finishing the last section of floor he said to me: ‘Perhaps there is something I can do.’

  I clung to those words during the night that followed, which was much the same as the first. I understood little of men’s lustful feelings, but I had some awareness that they increased over time were they not relieved, and I feared for my future should that prove to be the case.

  I did not get a glimpse of Carmichael the next day. The night was even uglier, but not for any reason connected to me. At about four bells, after we had been locked down, a fight broke out in the darkness to my left. I heard angry voices, getting louder and louder, then a yelp of pain. The noise became an uproar, the air thick with insults and curses, and then a younger voice suddenly cried: ‘Help, help, there’s murder being done. Fetch a lamp!’

  By now Surgeon Gossam had appointed several of our number as so-called captains of the deck, with various responsibilities pertaining to food, cleanliness and good order. Even while the cabin still resonated with the cries of murder, another man, carrying a lantern, went past my berth. I recognised him as one of these captains.

  I believe everyone had been thoroughly awakened at this point, and there were shouts of ‘Shove it,’ ‘Belay that row,’ ‘Shut your traps,’ from all over the deck. I did not dare leave my hammock, but it was evident from the confusion of noise and movement further down the way that many had. I heard the captain of the deck shout: ‘Bowers, fetch the surgeon,’ and I saw a man I believed to be Bowers, another of these captains of the deck, go past, also with a lantern, heading for the ladder. Shortly afterwards I heard him hammering on the hatch and bellowing for the surgeon.