Far From Botany Bay

by Rosa Jordan

  Some days later Mary was taken into court again and there told that her sentence to hang had been commuted to “transportation upon the seas, beyond the seas” for a period of seven years. Then she was crammed into a wagon and taken to the port, along with the women in her cell and many others. Exactly where beyond the sea they would be sent was a mystery, for it was well known that since the Americans declared independence a decade earlier, the break-away colonies no longer permitted the Empire to dump its unwanted citizens there.

  The crowded wagon rumbled its way along the muddy track until they were in sight of the waterfront. As far as the eye could see, the harbour was lined with rotting ships, each one overflowing with stinking humanity. Slops, they observed, were poured straight down the sides of the ships into the scummy water below.

  “Some’s been confined in these hulks for ages,”

  Cass said stoically. “Reckon it can’t be much worse than other places I’ve been.”

  But when their longboat reached the Dunkirk, its excrement-encrusted side rising above them like a cliff, even Cass blanched.

  “This old hulk?” Mary exclaimed. “I’ve seen driftwood more seaworthy than this!”

  “You think they’d care if the lot of us went to the bottom of the sea? Girl, that’s what they’re hoping,” Cass sneered. “That, or we all be carried off by gaol fever.”

  Ships allowed little enough space for crew, and in these rotting hulks-turned-prisons, six were crowded into places designed for one. Mary’s bed was a single plank, and she rarely moved from it except when compelled to some task, ordered by a guard. The girl, Grace, lay next to her, mostly silent, for which Mary was grateful, as she had no desire to speak. It was as if a great fog had rolled in, dulling her mind and all her senses.

  From time to time Cass intruded on Mary’s isolation, pulling her roughly from the plank and pushing her into line for gruel.

  “I know you’re aiming to starve yerself,” Cass growled. “But not whilst I’m about. This hell-hole is foul enough without the stink of your corpse adding to it.”

  When the night visits began, they only drove Mary deeper into herself. Spence, a big man with muscles wrapped in middle-aged fat, was less brutal than other guards, but by far the most lecherous. Some of the women tried to entice him, hoping for favours in return. But Spence’s taste ran to the youngest women and the most withdrawn. He called them “little virgins”, though there would not be one among them who, if she’d had her maidenhead when taken prisoner, hadn’t already lost it to the police or a prison guard. Florie was the youngest in their corner of the ship, but her pathetic mewing was too much like that of a motherless kitten. It caused Spence to want to kick instead of caress her. It was Mary, silent on her plank, who made his loins burn. He had seen her kind before. Lying so still, moving only when bade to do so, never weeping, asking for nothing, she was like a living doll. A man could do as he liked with her, and imagine her to be anything that pleased him.

  It was some weeks before he took her; saving the best for last, he told himself, as he dallied with others newly arrived. But finally his lust peaked, and he gave himself permission, under cover of darkness, to writhe against Mary’s slight but definite curves.

  The doll-like quality was as Spence had imagined. Her limbs lay loose, moving only as he moved them. At first he was thrilled by the sense of power this gave him, the thought that he could manipulate every part of her body to pleasure his own. But there was more to her stillness than he had bargained for. She did not turn, twist, gasp, or moan. Even her breathing, so light he scarcely felt it, did not change. Frustrated by her stillness, he slapped her. Her face rolled to the side under his blow, and lay there, eyes open, staring emptily, like a dead person.

  As well she might have been, for from the first moment the guard lowered his bulk on top of her, Mary had withdrawn deep into herself. She imagined herself to be dead, and his weight to be the press of moist stinking earth such as one shovels from a barnyard.

  Spence had known unresponsive women before, but a few blows and the reward of a kind word or two was usually enough to wake them up. With Mary, though, the coldness remained, and seeped up from her body into his. Each of the three nights he lay with her, he had a horrible notion that his engorged penis was in the frigid vaginal grasp of a dead person.

  Then he felt a hand, warm upon his thigh, and thought for an instant that Mary had finally been roused. But when his own hand followed the arm, he found it attached to the raven-haired girl Grace, who shared Mary’s plank. He rolled over onto Grace, and molested Mary no more.

  Grace was bony as a skeleton but definitely alive. Her silence soon gave way to whispered pleadings, but she didn’t ask for much and, when he gratified her whim for a comb, her body amply repaid him. It was on the night he gave her the comb that their thrashings pushed Mary onto the floor. There she remained, preferring its sticky filth to the nauseating odour of their unwashed private parts.

  One morning Grace woke with fever. She begged Spence to take her to the infirmary but he refused, and came that night as usual, to root about in her burning body. Only on the third night, when he found Grace unconscious, did he order her taken out.

  “You can have your bed back now,” Florie whispered to Mary.

  Mary looked toward the plank, but others were already fighting for it. She shook her head and stayed where she was.

  “Grace is gone for good,” Florie whispered. “Died on the way to the infirmary.”

  Mary wound a long strand of unwashed hair around and around her finger and said in a distant voice, “Now all the Graces I’ve known are dead.”

  Within the week, the guard, Spence, disappeared, and his death, also of fever, may have been what saved the others. Word got out that typhus was spreading from the prison ships to the mainland. Citizens began to clamour that criminals confined on the hulks must be taken out of the harbour and away.

  Thus, five months after Mary set foot on the Dunkirk, she and many other prisoners were loaded into longboats and taken to the Charlotte. The Charlotte, along with ten other sailing vessels, was anchored on the Motherbank outside Portsmouth. This “First Fleet”, as it was called, consisted of two warships, three supply ships, and six convict transports. Its assignment was to convey seven hundred and fifty-six prisoners to a distant land. Of the prisoners, one hundred and ninety-two were women and five hundred and sixty-four were men. They, along with the mariners who transported them, were to found a prison colony in a place called, by Captain Cook in his log, Botany Bay.

  “A wild and woolly place it is,” said a young sailor who rowed them from the Dunkirk out to the Charlotte. “A fit place for you lot.”

  “Botany Bay,” Mary mused. She recalled her father’s praise for Captain Cook’s navigational adventures down on the bottom of the world. Her mother had looked bewildered and remarked that the Good Book spoke of the four corners of the earth, so how could anyone sail across the bottom side? Her father had only smiled. “You’ve been to sea with me, my love, and seen ships and shores come up over the curve of the earth. Two hundred years and more it’s been known that if one sails forever east or west, them that survive the journey end up back where they started out, same as a bug that walks around an apple.”

  “How far is this Botany Bay?” Mary asked the sailor at the oars.

  “Some twelve thousand miles and across two seas.” The boy looked grim and it occurred to her that he was more frightened than she. “They say the voyage will take the best part of a year.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me how far it is,” Colleen said, looking radiant. “My Johnny’s being transported, too.”

  “Twit!” snorted Cass. “You and the boy charged with treason, and you think they passed on hangin’ to give you a honeymoon? It’s some greasy sailor you’ll be layin’ under, and lucky if it’s only one.”

  Colleen bit her lip
and turned away.

  “Try to catch the eye of an officer,” Cass muttered to Mary. “Or a kitchen hand.”

  “What will they do to us?” Florie asked fearfully.

  “Same as always,” Cass said heavily. “Whatever they like.”

  As Mary stepped onto the deck of the Charlotte, the ocean breeze dissipated her mental fog. For the first time in many months she took note of her surroundings.

  *

  The Charlotte did not have the jerry-built lean-tos, platforms, and deckhouses that had given the Dunkirk hulk the feel of a tenement slum. There was confusion on the deck with so many new arrivals, but signs of order, too.

  “Name?” asked a man with a ledger in his hand. By the soft look of the hand that held the pen, Mary took him to be an officer.

  Before she could answer, the quartermaster shouted, “Hey, Brown!”

  Brown turned to answer and she saw that his shirt was split up the back. So he was a prisoner, same as her. The man handed the quartermaster a list from the ledger, then turned back and looked Mary in the face. Like his name, his hair and eyes were brown.

  “Mary Broad.” She watched as he wrote it on the page, marvelling at the cleanliness of his hands and the beauty of the letters formed by those long, tapered fingers.

  Then he looked past her to Florie, who was next in line, and asked again, “Name?”

  The quartermaster stood with the captain, a small, dry-looking man whose name, she would learn, was Arthur Phillip. They were comparing a list with a pile of barrels. The lid of one had been pried off. Captain Phillip did not like what he saw inside.

  “How the devil can I keep fifteen hundred people alive for nine months feeding them dung such as this?” the captain stormed. “Don’t stow it; I’ll have a word with Lord Sydney.”

  Florie sidled up to Mary and whispered, “Wouldn’t I like to catch the eye of that one!”

  “Which one?” asked Mary, who had been gazing about the ship. The old transport was about a hundred feet long, and no more than thirty feet wide. Although she had not been aboard a ship since she was ten years old, she saw that the Charlotte was in a better state of repair than the Dunkirk. Everywhere men were at work, scraping, caulking, and mending. Something like excitement welled in her breast. This ship was being readied for a voyage on the high seas!

  Florie jerked her chin at the man called Brown. “You didn’t see his eyes? Imagine lashes like that brushing your cheek!”

  In fact, Mary had noticed his eyes, but only much later did she realise what it was about his brown eyes that she found so different from those of other men she had encountered during her imprisonment. They were kind.

  For the next two months, the Charlotte lay at anchor. It was far enough from shore that the roll of sea and ship was constant, yet close enough that desperate convicts might attempt to escape. Thus, only prisoners with some task to perform were allowed on deck. The majority were confined below in windowless, unlighted quarters. The rocking motion of the old wooden ship rarely bothered Mary, but most of her companions were terribly seasick. The reek of vomit and the stench of diarrhea were ever in the air.

  At last, on May 13, 1787, the First Fleet set sail for what was to be the longest voyage ever made with so great a number of people. Once each ship cleared the harbour, its prisoner passengers were allowed on deck. Mary climbed the ladder up into fresh air with the relief of one being released from the hole of a stinking privy.

  Few of the convicts had ever been more than a dozen leagues beyond where they were born. Had they been bound for America they would have felt less hopeless, for it was a known place, and some who had gone there had returned. Botany Bay was infinitely further away. For all they knew, it lay within the boundaries of Hell itself.

  They lined the railing and strained their eyes for a last glimpse of England, which most of them would never see again. Women wept without restraint and many men sobbed with them. One could almost imagine, as the Charlotte’s sails billowed out, that it was not the wind that filled them but the convicts’ keening cries of anguish.

  Of the convict women, only three were dry-eyed: Cass, who prized her toughness too much to let anyone see her carry on; Colleen, who believed her Johnny was aboard although she had not yet glimpsed him; and Mary, who, along with a handful of crew members, stood at the opposite railing, staring not back at England but out to sea. It was but two weeks past her twenty-second birthday. Next to freedom itself, she could not have asked for a better gift.

  *

  From what Mary had overheard of the captain’s curses the day she came aboard, she knew that the contractor had short-changed them on rations. If the sailors knew hunger on this voyage, the convicts would know more. But hunger was not something Mary feared. She filled her lungs and thought that if she could draw the clean salt air into her belly, she could live on it alone. Then she remembered that her belly already held a load, which was daily growing. Although hunger didn’t concern her for herself, a child had been planted in her womb. It had only her body for nourishment, and it must be fed.

  It took about two weeks to reach the Canary Islands. Mary had been there on one of her father’s voyages, but it was when she was very young and she remembered little of their time on shore. Even so, as she watched the crewmen jauntily coming and going, she felt pangs of envy, and a deep loneliness for her parents. She thought of trying to escape, but something held her back. It was not the baby, for, in truth, that unseen, unborn thing meant little to her yet. She stayed aboard because the journey itself called to her. This might be a prison ship, but for Mary, as for her father, any voyage had always been a kind of freedom.

  Also, she reasoned, the Canaries were islands; thus even if she escaped the ship she would still be trapped. A lone Englishwoman in this land of dark-skinned people would certainly draw attention. Her judgement proved correct for, when a convict named John Power stole a dinghy and slipped away to a small outlying island, he was captured by a search party the very next morning.

  The weather had been fine for the two-week run down to the Canaries, but when the fleet picked up the Brazil Current and started across the Atlantic toward Río de Janeiro, they encountered intolerable heat. Rats, cockroaches, fleas, and lice proliferated, driving them to distraction. Then came tropical downpours and that was worse. Most stayed below, gagging on vile fumes from the bilge. Mary had never felt so ill. She made her way up onto deck to vomit over the railing.

  A hand in the small of her back made her jump. “A wee bit seasick are we?” asked a teasing voice with a Cornish accent.

  Mary glanced around to see a convict whose name she knew to be Will Bryant. He had a cheerful disposition, and was often called upon by the crew for one task or another. He stood leaning on a mop. The rain had soaked his hair, making it appear even blacker than it was.

  “Speak for yourself,” Mary snapped. “I’ve been to sea with my old dad and it takes rougher than this to turn my stomach.”

  “Funny,” he said, looking down at her with amused eyes as blue as her own. “I could swear you’re a bit green about the gills. But maybe not. Might be you just need a taste of rum and a little fun tonight?”

  She turned on him, furious. “Can’t you see, boy? I’m pregnant!”

  Will looked down at her waist, which in truth was not much thickened. “Well then,” he grinned, “we can be all the merrier and no harm done.”

  Mary landed him a slap on the face that would have cracked the neck of a smaller man. Will flinched and his grin went a little crooked. He gave a can’t-blame-me-for-trying-shrug, picked up the mop bucket, and sauntered off.

  Tensed to vomit again, Mary turned back to the railing. But the rain, a warm drizzle, fell soft on her face and arms, and the nausea passed.

  Florie sidled up to Mary and nudged her in the ribs. “Making eyes at you, is he? Good-looking bloke is Will Br
yant, them blue eyes under that mop o’ curly black hair.”

  Mary glanced in the direction Will had gone. He was standing at the far end of the ship with one long leg up on an overturned lifeboat, his head bent to study the water below. A thought—no, not a thought, a feeling—jolted her. Hadn’t she seen him before, long ago?

  “What’s he in for?” she asked Florie.

  “Smuggling. They catched him off the coast of Cornwall.”

  “Smuggling,” Mary mused. Then it came to her— that man whose boat her father had repaired, whom she had looked down on from a hill above. She had not seen the stranger’s face, but he had stood so, with one foot up on an overturned boat, his long legs wide apart, as if proud of his manly parts. Yet many men, especially long-legged ones, struck such a pose. No reason to imagine that the man sharing this voyage to Botany Bay was the same one she had seen that sunny day in Cornwall.

  Even so, her father’s words came back to her. “A smuggler,” he had said of the man in the boat yard. “Such men live for money, and have no loyalty to country, mates, nor kin. Men like that bring naught but grief to the women they bed.”

  Will looked up and Mary turned away so that he should not take her stare for interest. “Not for me,” she said to Florie. “If I had the stomach for any on this ship, it would be Mr. Brown. At least he’s got something on his mind besides—” She stopped, for already she had said more than she had intended.

  Florie looked surprised, and a little awed. “’Tis him you crave? Why, convict and all, Mr. Brown is as good as an officer!”

  “I crave none,” Mary snapped.

  That was not entirely true. Mary had taken the measure of every man aboard, and had already made her choice. “Try to catch the eye of an officer,” Cass had said the day they were rowed out in the longboat. “Or a kitchen hand.”

  It was good advice. Mary saw, more clearly now than before, that it might well be the only way to keep from fetching up half-starved in Botany Bay. But she might be needing more than food. There were no midwives on this ship. Back in Cornwall, women in the agony of childbirth had sometimes been brought to the doctor. That was always a last resort, but on occasions it had been the salvation of mother or child or both. There was a good chance that the ship’s surgeon had had some experience in birthing babies under difficult circumstances. Thus Mary made up her mind to find favour with him.