Far From Botany Bay

by Rosa Jordan

  Will grinned. “I’ve got strong teeth, but I don’t bite.”

  “Just don’t—.”

  “Don’t what?” Will lifted his arms as if to embrace her.

  “Don’t touch me!” Mary hissed.

  “Why, what a funny —.”

  “Call a man’s grasp funny if you like, but none’s brought me joy! I’ll be over this rail before any on this ship has his way with me!”

  Her vehemence so startled Will that he took a step back and held up his hand in alarm. “Hey there! What kind of talk is that for a girl with a babe in her arms? I was just looking for a bit of fun, and if it’s no fun for you, why, one’s no party.”

  “Just so you know,” Mary said faintly.

  Will’s eyes softened. “I only crave to pass time with you because we’re both from Cornwall.” The sincerity in his voice was soothing. “A word now and then, why, it’s like a breath of home. Be honest now. Don’t you feel a teeny bit of the same?”

  Mary hesitated, then replied, “I . . . I suppose so.”

  “Well then, there you have it. It’s friends we are, with something in it for both of us. And now a good night to you, Miss Mary.”

  Will walked away, whistling.

  Mary looked after him, pondering his strange remark. A man as a friend? She supposed she had counted some of the men her father had crewed with as friends, but that was when she was a child. As a grown woman she had had few friends, and none of them had been men.

  Months passed. Those bright October days off the tip of Africa dwindled to a distant memory. There were some who felt sure that any time now, the ship would sail off the edge of the earth, and others who suffered so much they wished it would. But Mary remained in good health, and her child thrived. Baby Charlotte was five months old when the ship sailed into Botany Bay.

  After the shouting and gawking that accompanied the first sightings of land died down, Captain Phillip put a party of men ashore. They returned to report that the site where Captain Cook had landed decades before was not well suited for settlement, so Phillip moved the fleet into a harbour just north of Botany Bay. He named it Port Jackson, but to the prisoners and to much of the world for years to come, the convict colony would still be known as Botany Bay.

  Captain Phillip called the convicts to attention and took stock of the motley lot. A farmer by upbringing, he could not think what had possessed the Crown to suppose that raw land could be tamed and a law-abiding English colony established by rabble such as this. But Phillip was a man driven by duty, and his duty he would do.

  “Convict men will go ashore at once,” Captain Phillip informed them. “You will construct accommodations for officers, crew, women, and lastly, yourselves. How many masons are there among you?”

  One hand went up.

  “How many carpenters?”

  Cox raised his hand.

  “Sawyers?”

  No one responded.

  “Fishermen?”

  Will Bryant and Bados raised their hands. Captain Phillip ignored the black man and nodded to Will.

  “You with a trade, pick from the others as many as you’ll be needing to do your job.”

  Will glanced over at Bados. “You African?”

  “West Indian,” Bados replied. “From the island of Barbados.”

  “Well, Bados, can you throw a net?”

  “Sure can,” Bados grinned.

  Will turned to Luke. “What about you, Luke? Know anything about fishing?”

  Luke smiled his slow, easy smile. “Dropped a line in a stream here and there. If there’s more to it than that, why, you’d be the man to teach me.”

  “What about me?” Matey demanded. “I’m a tar through and through. Ain’t nothin’ on land that beckons me.”

  “Okay, Mate,” Will said agreeably. “You’re in.”

  Matey grabbed Scrapper by the arm and pulled him into the group. “What about young Scrapper here?”

  Will looked at the young tough doubtfully. “Him? Why I doubt he can even swim.”

  “Who’s needin’ to swim lessen you sink us?” Scrapper shot back. “I lived around the docks all me bloody life, and ha’nt seen a net yet I can’t mend. Sure and that’s some use to a fishin’ crew.”

  “So it is,” Will admitted.

  “Please, Master Bryant,” Pip stood on tiptoe and called over Bados’s shoulder, “can I come with you? I’m a good hand, and awful quick to do what I’m told; just ask anybody.”

  “It’s men Bryant’s wanting, not fish bait,” Scrapper sneered.

  “Come now, Pip’s a good lad,” Luke offered.

  “Sure, bring him along,” Matey seconded. “Every crew’s got to have a mutt to kick.”

  Will, who had taken note of the fact that Pip called him Master and Scrapper did not, nodded. “All right, Pip.” To Scrapper he added, “And you, lout, leave him alone.”

  Will and his fishing crew were assigned a dinghy. Soon fresh fish was added to the crew’s diet. The leavings made good fish broth for convicts.

  *

  For days Mary and the other women leaned on the ship’s shore-side railing and watched as men felled trees to construct insubstantial lean-tos, and hauled buckets of mud to make bricks for more substantial structures to come. Whatever terrors they had felt for this unknown land vanished in anticipation of setting foot on solid ground; something all of them, once or many times on the voyage, had thought never to do again.

  Few convicts had any construction experience and the sailors who guarded them were equally unskilled. As shacks were thrown up, the impatient women remarked on the location of this one or the sideways slant of that one, noting preferences and dislikes. Mary, although she said nothing, did the same. That one at the edge of the woods, she thought, near those boulders. The stoop, should it ever have a stoop, would be shady in the afternoon and offered a fine view of the harbour.

  At last Captain Phillip set a day for their disembarkation. The excitement of the women was like a fever, so starved were they for the feel of solid ground under their feet. But when morning light revealed a squally day, Captain Phillip delayed the move from ship to shore. He marched to and fro on the bridge, his face darkening as the clouds darkened. The wind was rising and the water had a nasty chop. When Lieutenant Tench asked if he should put the women in the rowboats before the weather grew any worse, Phillip snapped, “I didn’t bring the wretched creatures halfway around the world to have them drown in the harbour.”

  “It’s a fact that in this chop they’ll get as wet as if they swam to shore,” Tench agreed.

  Phillip wavered between caution and the impatience he always felt when there was a job to be done. He did want the overwrought women ashore before the storm broke, for who knew how long it might last? They might be forced to remain aboard for several days longer. If that was not more than they could bear, he felt it certainly more than he could take of their clamouring, high-pitched voices. On the other hand, a sudden squall could easily swamp a dinghy, and it was unlikely that any of the women could swim.

  All day Phillip paced and worried and could not make up his mind. Then, late in the afternoon, the sun broke through for just a moment. In that instant the captain gave in to the pressure of their collective longing and ordered the women rowed ashore.

  No sooner were the women in the boats than it began to rain, but that did not dampen their spirits. Colleen saw Johnny waiting on shore, and leapt out before the dinghy could be drawn into shallow water. He waded out and took her in his arms. Oblivious to her lurching walk and his lopsided gait, they swung each other around and around in a joyful Irish jig.

  Other women splashed ashore, sea legs which had not touched solid ground for a year or more causing them to stagger like drunks. More than a few fell down and pressed their lips to the ground, laughing
hysterically or weeping with joy.

  Mary scooped up a handful of sand and held it out to Charlotte. The baby clutched at it, then tried to thrust a fistful into her mouth. Mary laughed and wiped it away. “Yes, my love, the earth’s that sweet, but meant for your feet, not your face.”

  The sailors who had brought them pushed off, returning to the ship as ordered. Mary finished wiping sand from Charlotte’s face and looked about. In the time it had taken them to travel from ship to shore, the sun had sunk below the horizon. Great dark clouds roiled across the sky. Any minute the light rain would become a downpour, turning dusk to darkness that much faster. Mary looked toward a hillside covered with lean-tos, which the sailors who rowed them over had said were for the women. Should she wait for an assignment, or would it be first-come, first-served?

  Debating whether to be so bold as to simply go and claim the one she fancied, Mary glanced beyond the group of just-arrived women, to see who might be in charge. What she saw at the far end of the beach was a group of men, more than five hundred of them, clustered as if—what?

  A chill went down her spine. There was something in the way the men milled about which reminded her of a herd of cattle she had seen once, moving in the same restless, pent-up way. As she and her mother had watched from the lane, the herd, without warning, suddenly stampeded down the hill as if driven by the Devil himself. They broke through a fence and trampled the whole of a neighbour’s field before they regained their senses.

  Suddenly there was a flash of lightning and a thunder clap which seemed to come from directly above. Rain poured down in torrents and a gale-force wind drove waves far up the beach. The women scrambled toward higher ground, toward the men, who were watching them from above. Mary felt rather than saw the danger. She turned and ran the opposite way, toward the little hut at the far end, near the edge of the forest.

  Not until she ducked inside the doorway did she look back. The mob was moving as one, a mindless, stampeding herd. They collided with the sodden cluster of women, and screams such as Mary had never heard filled the air. The group splintered as the women fled in every direction. Some tried to reach the lean-tos, but few made it that far and those who did soon had cause to regret it. As men attacked the women, wind attacked the flimsy huts. In the last seconds before dusk was transformed into pitch black night, Mary saw thatched roofs lift and the poorly-constructed huts disintegrate as if made of straw.

  Wind, or was it the Devil’s own breath? What Dr. White saw from the ship, and later recorded in his diary, took his own breath away. As the women, skirts flung high by the wind, battled the drenching storm, convict men were upon them. Black dark descended, only to be split apart by jagged bolts of lightning. Each flash revealed women fleeing, women nude, women falling, men atop women. Many, many men.

  For a full five minutes White gaped, unable to believe the scene unfolding in broken segments of brilliant illumination. Then a cry went up around him; no, not a cry, a howl. The crew was shouting, “Give us rum and give us leave! Give us rum and give us leave!”

  Dr. White made his way to the bridge, Lieutenant Tench close behind. Captain Phillip turned to them, and in the next lightning flash, they saw the disbelieving look in his eyes.

  “Captain!” Tench shouted to be heard over the storm and ruckus below. “I fear the men are near mutiny.”

  Darkness closed in again. Below them the men chanted, “Give us rum and give us leave. Would you deny His Majesty’s mariners what wretched convicts have in plenty?”

  White, who rarely felt sympathy for anyone, felt something close to sympathy for the conscientious Phillip, that his well-run voyage should end thus.

  “There will be no mutiny on my ship,” came Phillip’s strangled voice.

  For long moments the officers stood mute as the chant of the sailors grew louder and moved nearer to where they stood. White knew that Phillip must choose between protecting the women and holding his command. He did not know what choice he himself would make, but for a ship’s captain there could be but one choice.

  “Give them a ration of rum,” Phillip ordered. “Lower the boats.”

  “Aye, Captain,” said Tench.

  He called out the captain’s orders and heard them echoed by other voices in the darkness. The next lightning flash revealed a crew-turned-rabble downing their rations of rum and piling into the boats. White stood silent, incredulous. Had the storm caused the madness, or had it been aboard this ship all along?

  Mary huddled in a corner of the hut. Through gaping cracks in the lean-to walls, she watched the nightmare unfold in dramatic bursts, illuminated by the worst lightning storm she had ever witnessed. Although men outnumbered women ten to one, it was the women’s voices that dominated; every anguished shriek or sob imaginable, many scarcely seeming human.

  “If they ever tell you Hell is a burning place,” she whispered to the baby in her arms, “don’t believe it. What it is is a wildness of wind and rain and thunder and lightning.”

  Perhaps for the sake of a daughter who must grow up in a world of men, Mary did not speak of how men, as they appeared to her just then, seemed the most hellish element of all.

  With each blinding flash of light Mary saw afresh the terror the men were inflicting on the women. There was Florie stumbling, falling. A heap of men tumbled on top of her, among them Cox the carpenter. And yonder Cass, on her knees at water’s edge. Scrapper jerked her backward on the sand and began rutting between her legs.

  The first boat load of sailors landed, and for a moment Mary imagined that the mariners had been dispatched to restore order. Then, before Scrapper was into Cass, a sailor was into him. When Mary realised what the crew’s arrival meant, her horror doubled.

  A few feet from Scrapper was a boy—Mary thought it was Pip—pawing at the sand like a burrowing animal to hide himself beneath an overturned dinghy. Close by, Colleen and Johnny stood back to back, each with a spade in hand, fighting a mob of convicts.

  Luke galloped past the door of Mary’s hut, one of several men in pursuit of a woman carrying an infant. One man tackled the woman about the legs. She dropped the baby as she went down, its screams mingling with hers. Luke stumbled over the infant and went sprawling. He sat up dazed, and crawled toward the wailing child.

  “Damn me, if you ain’t the noisiest little pup.” Luke picked up the baby and stumbled along the beach. When Mary next saw him, he was shoving the baby beneath the dinghy. She almost smiled, wondering what little Pip would do to calm the squalling infant.

  Charlotte whimpered. “Shh,” Mary soothed. “It’s scared you are, and aren’t we all in this heathen hell. But by God’s grace one babe’s been saved, and so shall you, my little one.”

  As the roofing thatch was torn away, Mary crouched on the floor and folded her body to shelter the baby from wind and rain. A mighty gust of wind sent the last of the thatch sailing through the night air, and the frame of the lean-to collapsed around them. Miraculously, the slender logs fell in a criss-cross pattern, leaving a little space so that Mary and Charlotte were not crushed or even trapped.

  Mary looked toward the forest, wondering if they would be safer there and whether to make a run for it. But another flash of lightning revealed chaos in that direction, too. She saw James trying to defend an old crone beset by a gang of sailors, until brought to his knees by a kick in the groin. The next blaze of lightning showed sailors competing for the poor old hag’s withered body, and James on his hands and knees, vomiting. Just beyond, at the edge of the forest, stood a row of aborigines. They grinned down at the retching man, then turned their astonished gazes back to the clearing where each new flash of lightning provided them with another glimpse of white man’s civilisation.

  Bados squatted near the aborigines. When the next bolt of light came, an aborigine was standing before him with a naked girl. Bados, head down, seemed to be waving the offer away.


  Mary remained where she was, in hopes that she would not be noticed amidst the debris of the tumbled-down hut. And she might not have been, had Charlotte not cried out. Two men halted a yard away. They stood there panting hard until another flash of lightning revealed woman flesh.

  The sailors, Mary saw, were drunk, and none too steady on their feet. As they started toward her, she laid Charlotte on the ground, stood, and snatched up a hefty stick. She landed a solid blow on the jaw of the first one, but the other one grabbed the end of her stick, and then her arm. She bit the hand that held her as hard as she could, but the man’s other hand struck her just as hard. There was a flash inside her head, and a moment of blackness, but she stayed on her feet. Suddenly she was released and, with the next illumination, she saw why. Will Bryant stood over the man, who sprawled unconscious at his feet. The other sailor stumbled away.

  Mary bent over and picked up the baby. Will’s arms wrapped about her waist and lifted her free of the lean-to’s debris. He carried her into the darkness and forced her down on her back in a narrow space. Mary felt the scrape of stone on both her arms. Then she was in a crevice between two boulders, with Will’s body on top of hers. Feet pounded by on either side, other men pursuing other women. Mary lay on the wet ground breathing hard, waiting for the inevitable. It took her a minute, or maybe two, to realise that Will’s weight was not full on her. He’d left space for Charlotte, clutched against her breast. It took even longer for her to accept the incredible fact that Will was not attacking, but was sheltering her and the baby.

  At dawn, Charlotte’s nuzzling woke Mary. She lay unmoving, fearful of disturbing Will, whose body still rested on hers. But the baby’s squirming had awakened him, too.

  “She’s hungry,” Will whispered.

  He reached down and exposed a breast. Mary moved the baby’s mouth to her nipple. For a few minutes she only heard the rhythmic sound of the baby’s suckling, and from not far away, equally rhythmic sounds of surf lapping against sand.