by Rosa Jordan
“How can we feed a thousand more when we can’t even feed ourselves?” Mary ranted.
Will mopped the last drop of broth from his bowl with a bit of johnnycake and jammed it into his mouth. “Won’t be no thousand more. Lady Juliana’s crew claims half perished on the voyage, and them that survived are worse off than the ones that landed today.”
“How is that possible?” Mary gasped, shifting Emanuel to her other breast.
“Is your memory of the crossing so short then?” Will asked crossly. “All’s needed is a handful of sick ones to start, and from what I heard, they set sail with more than that. Some thieving contractors, and a captain in league with them and vile as a slaver to boot.” He paused. “Them contracting bastards tried to cheat the First Fleet, too. And would’ve got away with it if Old Phillip hadn’t been such a stickler. I don’t know that he cared a fig for the convicts, but he wasn’t ready to see his crew starve or die of some ship-borne plague.”
“We were lucky,” Mary murmured. “You think it is as bad as it can get, but in truth, there is always worse to be.”
It would be some time before the full extent of the Second Fleet’s tragedy was confirmed. Of one thousand and six convicts, two hundred and sixty-seven had perished at sea during the eleven-month voyage, and another hundred and fifty had died soon after landing. That was not quite half of those who had set sail from England, as Will had been told, but for the stunned colonists and skeletal survivors, it was close enough. Those who had come with the First Fleet had had their share of sufferings but, like Mary, admitted amongst themselves that their lot couldn’t hold a candle to the abuses suffered by this wasted cargo of human bones.
Vermin-ridden sick and dying convicts were not the only horrors the Second Fleet delivered. It had also brought more soldiers, especially recruited to act as guards in the penal colony. The Botany Bay Rangers, as they were called, were a vile lot, most with histories as criminal as the convicts they had been sent to control. They mingled freely with the convict population, and what they wanted, they took. Mary and other women spoke in whispers of what might lie in store for them. Up until now those among them who were married—and nearly all were—had been subjected to the whims of only one man and felt reasonably well-protected from the others. They had no assurance at all that things would remain that way.
Cass and Florie were unkempt wenches with missing or rotting teeth, more likely to offer their bodies for booze than to have a man demand sexual favours from them. But for Mary and Colleen, the danger was great. Colleen, who had always walked with pride beside her Johnny, took to covering as much of her body as she could with filthy rags as a means of escaping notice, and hunching like a hag when compelled to go out in public.
Mary, for her part, stayed in her bush-concealed hut with the children, only going out as necessary to get their daily ration. She used a rag to cover her sun-bleached hair, and smeared herself with filth, even leaving some of Emanuel’s faeces on her person to add to the repellent smell. She sometimes felt James’s eyes upon her as he recorded the rations doled out, and burned with shame. But what other defence did she have?
Fetching water was another daily chore, but that was less of a problem. Because Will must be down to the dock at first light, Mary rose early to make breakfast. When he was gone, she went for water while her children and most of the colony still slept.
Although it was spooky to tread the path to the stream before the sun had risen, those moments of solitude had their value. Pausing on the return to rest from the burden of water she lugged, Mary would look out to sea and recall the freedoms she had known there as a child. Or she would watch clouds being blown across the sky in a stiff morning breeze and imagine sailing away from Botany Bay.
Florie, in drunken moments, dreamed of finding buried treasure with which to buy her liberty, and Colleen, even when she was sober, spoke of returning to Ireland with Johnny to lead a revolution. But when it came to fantasies, Mary had not changed since she was a girl. However improbable her dreams, she sought to ground them in the possible. Her imaginings took her ever to ways and means. It was this that engaged her mind the morning she encountered James Brown upon the path.
It was a foggy morning, and she started when she saw a man’s shape emerging out of the gloom. But an instant later he spoke, having recognised her before she recognised him. “Good morning, Mrs. Bryant,” he said in his usual formal way.
“Ah, good morning, Mr. Brown,” she exclaimed, relieved that it was a friend. “What brings you to fetch water so early in the morning?”
“I’m busy all the day,” he explained. “The stream is less stirred up of a morning than it is in the evening. And you?”
Mary lowered her voice. “’Tis avoidance of the Rangers, who stir up more than mud in this colony.”
“A sad truth you speak,” he acknowledged. “Is this why I see so little of you these days?”
“Yes,” Mary admitted, pleased that he had noted her absence. “That is also why, when I go out to fetch our ration, I exaggerate my filth and seek to appear as a hag.”
“A difficult task for you, Mrs. Bryant,” he said gallantly.
Sensing that the conversation was skirting the edge of intimacy, Mary picked up her pails and made to go. Then, as James stepped aside and she was about to move past him, she suddenly set her pails down again, and spoke. “Sir, might I ask you a question?”
Surprise showed in his eyes. “Most certainly. Anything at all.”
“I was wondering . . . how long is your sentence?”
“Twenty years. I have seventeen yet to go.”
“Twenty years!” Mary exclaimed. “For a crime you didn’t commit!”
A smile played about his lips. “And how do you know that?”
Mary blushed. “On the crossing I heard you say the charge was a case of cinnamon gone missing, which was none of your doing. I’m sure you spoke the truth.”
“Indeed, that was true. It was not I who stole the cinnamon, but some acquaintances who required the means to buy arms. In seeking to throw off the yoke of the British Empire, we Canadians are little different from our Irish brethren.”
“Ah,” Mary said. “But your connection to the rebels was not known?”
The smile vanished and the brown eyes turned serious. “Had it been known, I would have hanged. And had I claimed innocence and pointed a finger at them, I would have been set free. That was the bargain they offered. Thus I was given twenty years, not for the cinnamon, which they knew well I did not steal, but because I denied any knowledge of those who did.”
Mary nodded thoughtfully. “Colleen says it was like that for her and Johnny. Had they been willing to name names, their sentences would have been shortened.”
James shrugged. “Not that it matters. Once transported to this blasted place, what chance have any of us of ever earning passage back to England?”
“This of which you speak is ever in my mind,” Mary confessed.
“And in mine,” James said, with a piercing gaze which seemed to say much more.
Mary held his gaze for a moment, trying to glean all that was being said without words. Then she took up her burden of water again. “Good day, Mr. Brown. I must go now, for the children will waken soon, and I’d not want them to find me gone.”
One winter day in August, as Mary squatted by the fire cooking a johnnycake for herself on the flat of an upturned spade, Colleen came up the path in a rush. Mary thought, as Colleen hurried toward her, that the dirt the Irish lass had deliberately smeared on her person had done little to conceal her loveliness. A frizz of curls surrounded her face like a copper halo, and her white teeth flashed in a radiant smile. Instinctively Mary glanced at Colleen’s breasts, saw how full they had become, and guessed the news before Colleen could blurt it.
“Oh Mary, I am, I really am!” Colleen held the burlap
shift against her belly which as yet showed no trace of swelling.
“Bless you!” Mary said, although she secretly wondered how anyone could feel good about bringing a child into the wretched uncertainty of this place. “What does Johnny say?”
Colleen face was suffused with hope and joy. “He says seeing how this baby will be born free, as soon as it draws breath, that part of him that’s in our child will be free as well.”
“He’s a lucky man, your Johnny is.” Spontaneously, Mary lifted the johnnycake off the upturned shovel and thrust it toward Colleen. “Here. You have it.”
Colleen put her hands behind her back. “Don’t be daft, Mary!”
Mary caught one of Colleen’s hands and shoved the johnnycake into it. “It’s my present for the baby. You cannot refuse.”
Almost involuntarily, Colleen brought the hot johnnycake to her mouth, holding it barely a second to cool before she swallowed it down. “Ah Mary,” she whispered, “how can you bring yourself to share when there’s so little?”
“Friends share,” Mary replied firmly.
Colleen gave her a troubled look. “Cass says none are friends in Botany Bay.”
“Cass is wrong.”
Hunger in the colony was mitigated in October with the return of the ship Supply, which the governor had sent out six months earlier. The Supply came laden with rice and salted meat, plus news that a Dutch ship had been contracted to bring an additional three hundred and fifty tons of food.
The mid-December arrival of that Dutch ship, the Waaksamheyd, caused shouts of joy to ring out from every part of the settlement. When Will came in that evening, he could hardly eat for all he had to tell. “Ah, Mary, if you could see what she carries! Barrels upon barrels of rice and pork and beef and sugar. ‘Tis a vast amount more than what came on the Supply.”
“This is what you’ve heard?” Mary found it hard to contain her own excitement.
“This is what I saw with my own eyes, when I was ordered out to deliver fresh fish for the crew that stayed aboard.”
*
As they lay in bed that night, Mary was aware that Will had not, as was his custom, fallen directly to sleep. She turned toward him to let him know that she too was still awake.
“Did any among the crew speak English?” she asked.
“Aye, one chap. He told me of a mutiny.”
“What? On their vessel?”
“No, no. An English ship. The Bounty. A year and a half ago, off O’Tahiti. The mutineers set the captain adrift in an open boat, him and eighteen others. What a brutal bunch they must’ve been!”
“They’ve caught and hanged them, have they?” Mary questioned.
“Nay. The story’s more fantastical than that. The mutineers made their getaway with the ship, and ain’t been seen hide nor hair of since, except for putting into O’Tahiti to carry off some women. That you can believe, can you not?”
“Sure, mutineers would think like that,” Mary agreed.
“What’s hard to believe is this. That old sea-dog Captain Bligh made it all the way to Timor, upwards of four thousand miles from where they started out.”
“Four thousand miles in an open boat? How many survived the journey?”
“Every man, save one killed by savages on the first day out, when they was trying to make landfall on an island.”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit too fanciful to be true?”
“This mariner who told the tale said he heard all about it in Timor, when they put in at Kupang. That’s where Bligh and his men fetched up, this being June before last, some sixteen months back. In Kupang they got taken on by a whaler, and was all of them back in England in sight of a year.”
They said no more but neither did they sleep. What each pictured was more improbable than the story just recounted, but they did not share their thoughts; not Will, because his were yet to be fully formed, and not Mary, because hers, formed long ago, wanted refreshing.
A thin moon lay on the shoulder of the night sky, putting Mary in mind of a stray curl from her golden-haired infant. For days she had waited for this night, with just enough light to make her way down to the boats but not enough to be seen by a sentry from far down the beach. She waded into the dark water and untied the line of the smallest rowboat from her husband’s larger fishing boat. She pointed it seaward, gave it a shove away from shore, and pulled herself up and over the side. Using an oar, she poled until she could no longer reach bottom, to avoid any sound of splashing. Then she sat straight, took both oars in hand and rowed hard for the Waaksamheyd. The heavy work she did day in and day out had given her strong arms, and she was along side the Dutch ship in less than a quarter hour.
“Permission to come aboard, if you please,” she called up in a clear voice that gave no hint of the terror she felt.
A response came in Dutch. Although she did not understand the words she knew the meaning, for any watchman on any ship would have asked the same question: “Who goes there?”
“A woman, with a message for Captain Deter Smit.”
Again the watchman responded in Dutch. As his footsteps echoed away, she surmised that he had gone to fetch someone who spoke English, or possibly the captain, as she had pronounced Smit’s name clearly, the way Will said it was spoken by the crew.
Mary waited for what seemed an eternity before she heard footsteps returning, this time the heavy tread of two men.
A foreigner’s voice, speaking accented English, called out in a tone that was neither gracious nor friendly, “Who are you, Madam, and what do you want?”
“Mary Bryant, Sir. A moment of your time, if you can spare it. May I board?”
There was a silence, then a gruff response. “As you please.”
A rope ladder was thrown down. Mary fastened her rowboat to it and climbed swiftly up. It was long ago that she had last performed such a feat, and she was pleased to find that, like many skills one learns in early childhood, this one had not been forgotten.
Upon reaching the deck, she entered a circle of light cast by the watchman’s lantern. She stood straight and still (and clean, for she had bathed fresh and combed her hair before coming), and appraised the two men as they appraised her. By the watchman’s deference, she presumed the second person to be not the English-speaking seaman Will had mentioned, but Captain Smit himself. He matched Will’s description of the Hollander as not a young man nor a very tall one. Mary further noted that nothing about this captain looked soft.
Of course he would be accustomed to traders, including women offering themselves. The word “no” seemed ready on his lips, but she could tell that he had a curiosity that wanted satisfying. He might be wondering how a landlubber could stand with bare feet so confidently planted on his deck. Or what reason a woman clothed in a burlap shift might have to smile with the joy she was feeling at this moment.
“Well, Madam?” he asked sharply.
“’Tis the feel of the ship, Captain Smit,” she said, offering first the why of her stance and her smile. “My father was a seafaring man, and many a time I went with him. Sometimes I feel like a fish on land, not able to get enough air.”
“If you have come to beg passage as a stowaway, don’t waste my time,” he snapped. “No convict shall put to sea on this ship.”
He started to walk away, but turned when she spoke. “I’m looking for nothing of the kind, Captain Smit. I have a good husband asleep over there, and two children who’ll find me making johnnycake in the dawn. But between now and then, is there not time for a landlocked girl to listen to the talk of a man who’s sailed the world?”
For a long moment he stared at her, lantern-light reflected in his eyes so she could not tell their true colour, or what thoughts might lie behind them. Then he said in the same gruff voice, “Your father spoiled you, Mary Bryant. That much I can see. Come.”
She followed him across the deck and along the corridor to his quarters. As she stepped inside, the terrible anxiety that had gripped her during the planning of this excursion, and the horrors she had imagined should the captain choose to report her rather than receive her, fell away. As a man grows calm when he lies upon a woman’s breast decades beyond the time when a mother comforted him there, so Mary was calmed by the captain’s quarters, much like the ones where she had been welcomed and entertained as a child.
“Sit,” commanded the captain. “What will you drink, Madam?”
“Tea, if you please, Captain Smit.”
“You are the first I have met in this place who does not beg for rum,” he remarked.
Mary did not reply, nor did she sit. Instead, she moved to the wall and examined the chart pinned there. “Do show me where you came from, Captain Smit, and all the places you’ve been.”
Behind her, she heard the captain give a command to the cabin boy in Dutch, to have the tea brought, she supposed. Then Smit stood beside her, a smile of derision on his lips.
“So this cheeky convict reads navigational charts, does she?”
Mary ignored the sarcasm. “Charts I learned to read at my father’s knee, and read better yet than books.”
Smit gave her a second glance, then turned his gaze to the map. “We took on stores in Batavia, and came down this way.” He ran his finger down the west coast of Australia.
“What of this route?” Mary asked, running her own forefinger across the top of Australia and south along the east coast to Botany Bay. “Is it not smoother sailing?”
“Smoother, perhaps. But the Coral Sea’s a tricky one. Natives who live along the coast have a knack for navigating through the reefs, but few white men have lived to tell of such a voyage.”
“How do they do it? The natives, I mean. Do they know the reef so well?”
There was a tap on the door and, at Smit’s bidding, the cabin boy entered with tea and biscuits. Smit said, in a slightly peevish tone, “Did you not hear me tell you to sit?” Without waiting on Mary, he sat himself.
