Far From Botany Bay

by Rosa Jordan

  Scrapper honed his skills of mimicry and that comic genius became a great favourite with both groups. Will, Matey, and Pip, who had started out telling stories which were more or less autobiographical, began to drift from the truth for the sake of improving the drama or showing themselves in a more heroic light. James finished Gulliver’s Travels, and embarked upon Shakespearean plays, sonnets, and poems, even though of the latter, the only one he could remember word for word was The Phoenix and The Turtle. Mary’s Bible stories continued to be popular, although never so much in demand as Luke’s intricate tales of elves and fairies. Soon everyone knew the words to the mournful ballads Cox favoured, and they sang or hummed along with him as, one by one, they drifted into troubled sleep.

  The Java Sea

  Kupang to Batavia

  In early October, on as beautiful a day as ever seen in Kupang, the prisoners were brought up from the dungeon and marched to the dock. This was the first chance Mary and her group had had to see the men from the Bounty in broad daylight. They marvelled at the intricate tattoos the mariners had got while marooned in O’Tahiti. Morrison, a man with flowing black hair, had a star of the Order of the Garter on his chest. Millward had an emblem of O’Tahiti tattooed across his stomach. Seventeen year old Ellison had his name on his arm, and Heywood, only sixteen, had tattoos all over his body, including one on his leg which he told them had been taken from the design on a coin from his home, the Isle of Man.

  One of the Bounty men, Michael Bryn, was so blind that he could not have been a mutineer had he wished. He said he had been taken on the voyage by Bligh solely to play the fiddle. When Pip remarked timidly that it would be nice to have the good cheer of fiddle music, Morrison remarked bitterly, “Good cheer ye’d have aboard the Bounty when that fiddle played, or ye’d have been wise to pretend. Once when two of us refused to dance, the captain had us flogged.” Indeed, a welter of criss-cross scars like those that marked Will’s back was proof that Morrison, Burkitt, Millward, and the black-bearded Muspratt had all been flogged by the Bounty’s captain for one reason or another.

  Once on the dock, their attention turned to the ship they were to board, which bore the name Rembang. Seeing it was crewed by Hollanders, James whispered to Mary, “Edwards must have leased this vessel from the Dutch East India Company in order to transport himself, his mariners, and all the prisoners back to England.”

  “Will Edwards be the captain in charge, or does the ship come with its own?” Mary wondered. But no one knew the answer to this.

  Whatever powers Edwards exercised on the ship he had acquired, one thing was obvious: he had ensured that the conditions they would endure on the Rembang would be vastly worse than any they had suffered before. Mary gasped when she reached the hold in which they were to travel and saw a long iron bar fastened to the floor. To it were attached sliding shackles—one for the ankle of each prisoner.

  “Bilboes!” moaned Matey. “Damn me, but it don’t get no worse than this!”

  As the metal cuff was locked around her ankle, Mary fervently hoped that none of the men had ankles thick enough to cause the flesh to rot as it had on Johnny’s legs during the months he had been shackled during their transportation. Only one detail in the horror of their new situation gave Mary a sliver of relief: the children were left unfettered because there were no shackles small enough to confine their tiny ankles.

  At first they made an effort to keep up their spirits with the kind of singing and story-telling that had sustained them during the final days of imprisonment in the dungeon. To this end, the Bounty crew members, who were shackled in the same hold, joined in with tales of their own. Those from Botany Bay listened with great interest as they described the mutiny in detail, and their part—or lack of part—in it.

  Most claimed they had been uninvolved. Muspratt and Millward feared that because they had deserted earlier and been caught, brought back to the ship, and flogged, Bligh was likely to suppose they had supported the mutiny and would see them hanged for it.

  “I participated,” admitted Thomas Ellison. “I woke from my hammock and went out to hear what the ruckus was about, and one of the mutineers shoved a musket in my hands. I went topside, understanding that a mutiny was under way, but more observer than participant, for I had not yet grasped where things stood. Then I saw that they were putting Captain Bligh overboard, along with as many others as the boat could hold, until he asked that no more come in, for fear of sinking them all.”

  “I begged leave to go with the captain,” said Morrison. “But at his order we had no choice but to remain with the Bounty.”

  “I was taken into Christian’s confidence,” confessed Burkitt, “so I knew mutiny was afoot. But later I regretted

  having thrown in my lot with him. When we reached O’Tahiti to pick up women and supplies, I and some others asked him to put us ashore there.”

  “Ah, but life was good in O’Tahiti,” reminisced Ellison. “A more beautiful isle with more beautiful women does not exist on earth.”

  There were sighs all up and down the line of shackled men as they imagined the beautiful island with its beautiful women described in loving detail by those who had been marooned there.

  “Sure weren’t nothing like that in Africa where I got marooned,” Matey grumbled. “If O’Tahiti was all that fine, how come you let Edwards grab you? You knowing the island from living there two years and him a stranger to it, seems like you coulda give him the slip.”

  “Greater fools than that we were,” moaned Morrison. “We dressed in what was left of our uniforms and rowed out to meet him, expecting to be received like honourable men.”

  “Don’t I rue the day I decided not to go with Christian after all, but to stay in O’Tahiti,” Burkitt groaned. “Edwards disbelieved every word we told him, and clapped us in irons from then till he sunk the ship in the Coral Sea.”

  “How got you from there to Kupang?” James wanted to know.

  “An armourer’s mate risked his life to set us free. The ship was already on her end, so we fell into the sea. Over the next few hours we were picked up by one of the ship’s boats. On account of Edwards intended to use us as slaves, I s’pose, ‘cause that’s what he done,” Morrison explained. “There was a sand spit not more than two miles off, but with scarce a sprig of vegetation, mind you.”

  “We was stranded on one like that for a few days,” Pip remarked. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Maybe not for you,” Ellison shot back. “But Edwards made it hell for us. The ship’s sails that were salvaged he had spread in such a way as to give shade for him and his men. But we who’d been shut up in Pandora’s hold already five months, our skin was white as the dead. During the day he worked us like slaves and wouldn’t allow us any shade. All we could do, when we had the chance, was bury ourselves up to our ears in sand to keep from cooking to death. We suffered horribly from sunburn in that first week.”

  Coleman picked up the story. “Once the captain organised what supplies could be salvaged from the wreck, he took the two boats he had and made the run for Kupang. Us Bounty boys what survived the wreck got brung along so Edwards could put us to the oars. And that he did, with treatment brutal as any slave’s ever been dealt.”

  The Bounty sailors continued for some time, recollecting the horrors they had endured at Edwards’s hands, tales which sobered every prisoner for what it portended about their chance of arriving alive in England.

  James endeavoured to change the subject by asking for news from Europe, but the mariners had little, since the Bounty had departed Portsmouth in 1787, just six months after the Charlotte. All they had to pass on were scraps picked up from the Pandora’s crew, about upheaval in France that had led to a mob storming the Bastille to gain weapons and free some prisoners, plus other riots before and since.

  “I heard how French women even marched on Versailles in October of ’89
,” Morrison chuckled. “On account of there being a shortage of bread.”

  Mary smiled grimly, recalling that it was in October 1789 that she had first rowed out to the Waaksamheyd and offered herself to Smit—that action also prompted by hunger, along with the certainty that if she remained in Botany Bay her children were going to starve.

  “Them on the Pandora what deigned to talk to us said that at the time of their departure from England, Louis the Sixteenth was still on the throne but not expected to stay there long. And what’s troublin’ the royals ain’t half the price common people are paying, for they’re in the thick of it all,” Muspratt commented.

  “What chance of the chaos spreading to England?” James asked.

  “They said there was some talk going round,” Burkitt admitted. “But King George is doing his utmost to make sure them radical notions about taking away the rights of king and clergy don’t find a following at home. Mostly, it’s just talk.”

  At that they lapsed into silence, because in point of fact, it was all “just talk,” and bore no more relation to their present situation than Luke’s tales of the doings of fairies and elves.

  They had not even begun to adjust to the discomfort of their new situation when things grew even worse. They suffered not only from being shackled and forced to lie on bare boards in their own filth, but within a week of casting off, all were struck down by diarrhea. Mary was caught between giving her children as little as possible of the slop they were fed, to spare them the terrible stomach cramps that followed, and knowing that if they did not eat, or at least drink, they would die of starvation and dehydration. The cramps, which she herself suffered, were so bad that in the end she let the children do as they would, eat if they desired or lie listless and starving if they lacked the strength. She never expected them to survive until they made port in Batavia, but somehow they did. This was due in no small part to the fact that they were not in bilboes. They wandered up and down the line of shackled prisoners, where they were treated with tenderness by all who were not themselves too sick to respond.

  The Rembang was a month on its northwest run through the Java Sea from Kupang to Batavia. By the time they anchored in the harbour of that fetid capital in November’s midsummer heat, all were down to skin and bones, the children most pathetic of all. However, it was not one of the children but Matey, whom Mary believed to be as tough as the sea itself, who lifted his head one day and, eyes burning with fever, begged for water in a piteous voice. James, shackled in such a way as to be unable to aid the man, called out to Mary to pass a cup of water to him, if any be left in the bucket. She stared at him blankly and did not respond.

  “Charlotte, Emanuel,” James urged. “Get hold of your mother. Get her to stand up.”

  The children, weak though they were, began to pummel Mary until she lifted her head.

  “Mary,” James pleaded. “I think Matey is suffering from fever. We must get help or we’ll all die right here.”

  “What can I do?” she asked dully.

  “That you, Mary?” Will called from the other side. “Oh, Mary!”

  “Pick up the cup,” James urged. “Get some water and pass it to Matey.”

  She picked up the cup and in an automatic gesture, dipped into the bucket. The only sound was the scrape of metal on dry metal. For a moment she stared at the cup as if she had no idea what its purpose was. Then, propelled into action by some inner demon, she began to bang it against the bars. It was as if that noise wakened more of her, because she set up such a clanging one might have thought there were ten demons on the loose.

  Shortly a Dutch sailor appeared, “Godverdomme! Ssush!” he shouted at her.

  “I will speak to the captain,” Mary shouted back.

  The sailor spat through the bars and turned away. Immediately Mary started banging the cup again. Up and down the line, other prisoners, both from the Bounty and Botany Bay, began to do the same.

  “Tell him Mary Bryant says it’s for the safety of his ship,” she called.

  “Dutch captains do not need vomen to tell them how to make safe their vessels,” sneered the sailor.

  “Tell him yourself, then,” Mary retorted. “There’s fever down here.”

  It was as if she had turned into a spectre before his eyes. “Fever?” he repeated in terror. “The doctor mit Captain Edwards, I tell to him.” And he fled.

  Mary turned around, gave James a bleak look, and saw her children for what felt like the first time in a fortnight. Charlotte nuzzled her for attention, and Mary’s arm encircled her. Emanuel, though, lay listless, causing her to remember him as he had been once before, when they had been washed out to sea in the cutter and she thought he was dying. She took him into her arms and rocked him gently. His weight was next to nothing.

  When she looked up again there was an Englishman standing at the bars, one she had not seen before. Immediately several of the Bounty prisoners called out, “Doctor Hamilton! Thanking you, Sir, for being so kind. Show us some mercy, if you please, Sir. We swear to you we never were mutineers!” And other remarks along those lines.

  “What’s this about fever?” Hamilton snapped.

  “See for yourself, Sir.” James motioned to Matey, who was still moaning for water. “That man yonder is burning. If it’s the fever he has, there will be no containing it down here in the hold.”

  Mary rose and said, “Better the guards lower our ration by bucket and not come below while the fever burns. Pray have me unshackled that I may carry water—of which we have none at the moment—to those too ill to move.”

  “You’re safer at a distance,” Hamilton noted dryly.

  “‘Tis of no interest to me whether I live or die.”

  “I should think you would have some fear of Hell, Madam.”

  Mary turned her gaze on him, that direct look so

  inappropriate for a woman of her class when speaking to a man of his, and asked, seriously, “Can there be more heat there, Doctor? Or more suffering?”

  Hamilton turned away. To the guard he said, “Send for the armourer’s mate.”

  Mary was unshackled and a short time later the hatchway was opened to permit the lowering of a bucket of water. Mary gave water to Emanuel and Charlotte, then went to Matey. She tried to lift the old man’s head to give him a drink, but he snarled like a wounded animal and curled into a protective ball. Then, suddenly flinging himself upright, he pushed her aside with unnatural strength and shrieked at Will, “Filthy snitch! Murderer!”

  With that he collapsed against Mary’s legs and died.

  Will may or may not have heard him, for he was sick as well, and moaning piteously. Mary ripped a bit of fabric from her tattered sarong, dipped it into the bucket, and began to do what she could to lower his raging fever.

  “Ah Mary, why did I do it?”

  “God only knows,” she said dully.

  “Is there a God?”

  “Who knows?”

  “He’ll be so angry with me for what I done. But I did love you, Mary. Had my eye on you from the first. I’m crazy in love with that Cornwall girl, I told my mates, and someday she’ll love me, too. But you never did, did you, Mary?” His voice faded to a whisper. “Never, never.”

  “Wild, foolish William,” she whispered sadly. “You understand so little.”

  Mary was not required to nurse Will or any of the other men after that, for by nightfall all the sick ones were removed to hospital in Batavia in hopes of preventing the fever from spreading to the rest of the ship. Only Emanuel remained, because Mary concealed the fact that he was ill, and continued to cool and hydrate him as best she could.

  It was remarked at least once a day that Edwards seemed intent on lying in the stinking port of Batavia until all had perished. What they did not know then, but later learned, was that he had had considerable difficulty in finding
ships to transport them onward. During the delay, hardest hit were the mariners who had taken shore leave. Within days of Matey’s death, seven of the Pandora crew took sick and died, and as many from the Rembang crew.

  The tolling of bells could be heard from the town, and the sound of drunken sailors singing Christmas carols in English and Dutch, when Mary next saw Dr. Hamilton. He descended into the hold, accompanied by one of the English mariners. Mary, sitting on the filthy floor with Emanuel in her arms, did not bother to rise.

  The doctor spoke to her through the bars. “I am sorry to bring such news on Christmas Eve, Mrs. Bryant, but your husband has passed away.”

  “Most surely he suffers less now than those he betrayed,” she said bitterly.

  Hamilton ignored her remark, and further informed her, “Captain Edwards ordered burial earlier this afternoon, with none from your party in attendance.”

  “What does it matter?” Then, struggling to her feet, Mary asked, “Tell me, Doctor, is the moon full?”

  He gave her a startled look. “Why, I believe it is. Or nearly so.”

  “Pray allow me a moment on deck.”

  “Why, I could not grant such a request if I were inclined to—which I most certainly am not,” he said bluntly.

  “But you must,” Mary stated. “You see, my son has died.”

  Involuntarily, Hamilton took a step back and glanced down in horror at what he had taken to be a sleeping child. “I . . . I will inform Captain Edwards. Perhaps he will consent to read a service tomorrow.”

  At that, the wall behind which Mary had concealed her feelings cracked, and she cried out, “This baby requires no prayer nor forgiveness for anything! If Captain Edwards is a praying man, let him pray for his own black soul!”