Bitter Eden

by Salvato, Sharon Anne

  The crew sighted the African coast about four and a half months after leaving England. Again they ran into bad weather. Sudden squalls and storms struck the ship and were often as not followed by deadly calms. Tension and fear mounted among the passengers and crew. The stop in Rio had been a pleasant diversion, but it had also served to remind of the long voyage and increase the need to finally stop traveling upon this empty ocean. Even those practical stalwarts who decried superstition and such airy things as luck found they could not control the primitive within them. At night they looked into the great blackened

  bowl of the heavens and saw no boundaries to its vastness. At dawn the sun began its ascent from the left, moving precisely across the brilliant tropic skies, pressing down on the ship that now seemed so tiny in an empty universe.

  The men and women aboard the George III had traveled long and through seas that were little traveled. They were tired and apprehensive of the ending to this trip. The talk among the new settlers was not so readily spiced with braggadocio dreams of great success now; it was beginning to be tempered with fear of the unknown. A storm sounded to them that all the old and ancient gods rose before them shouting their wrath. The calms became so bright and airless it was difficult to think that they were real at all. This far into the voyage any delay was bad. One that carried fear with it was demoralizing.

  Apprehension brought on by a deadly silver sea heaving against a creaking wind-dependent ship brought an end to the weak thread of common sense that still held aboard ship. One woman, the wife of a settler hoping to make his fortune in Van Diemen s Land, watched her son be wrapped in a sheet of canvas to be thrown overboard. He had succumbed to typhoid. Clutching her husband's arm, she stared out over the water, not daring to look at the grim activity. She didn't cry or make a move. Then in that silence following a prayer, the mute woman broke free of her husband, clawing at the seamen trying to wrap her son for a proper sea burial. Held back by her husband and two crewmen, she strained against him, then fell limp, only to revive and race for the side of the ship to follow her son to his watery grave.

  The civilian passengers held meetings on deck, most of them refusing to remain in their cabins because of the fear of typhoid. They blamed the convicts for the

  illness that beset them. They also blamed the convicts and their evil influence for their abandonment by God's grace. They petitioned the captain to improve conditions. He looked helplessly to the sky, ominously devoid of the little wind-bearing petrels; he had no idea what might come of them, or what he might do to change things.

  Below in the prison the convicts lay listlessly, unable to help themselves. Crowding and the odors emanating from the sick-ridden prison quarters and the ship's hospital added fervor to the idea that it was the fault of the convicts that the ship was threatened with disease. The ship's officers took up the cry, certain that their cargo was not of human variety, but some complex animal the Devil had created to torment the good people of this earth. It was due to the depravity of these two-legged beasts that the George III sat becalmed. For those demons decent people were suffering, becoming ill, dying while God vented his wrath on the evil ones.

  Righteous indignation surfaced among the crew. If God wanted the convicts punished, it was their duty as good Christians to see the punishment was carried out. One of the passengers suggested that the ship was becalmed because the captain had been negligent of his duties. After all he was known to be easy on his prisoners—during this entire voyage they could count on one hand the number of convicts who had been flogged, and none had been hanged or keelhauled.

  Two more days of calm and the continuing rise of fear and discontent among passengers and crew, and the captain considered the few options he had. He chose the quickest, most expedient method of satisfying the primitive urge for a sacrifice to the gods. He would punish the prisoners.

  He was selective. He chose the worst of the lot,

  those who were not likely to survive the voyage anyway, and those about whom no one cared. These men, ten of them, were taken to the bowels of the ship. Peter, because of his murder conviction and designation as an incorrigible, was one of the ten.

  The convicts were lined up on the ladder descending into the lower holds. One by one they were taken to the hold, the same area where irons were taken off or put on. Sweat stood out in beads all over Peter s body, grouping and running down in rivulets as screams and the sweet, sickening odors of cooking meat wafted toward him. Panicking, sensing what was to come, he backed away when the guard came for him. He grasped the ladder, trying to force his way over the other convicts as he managed to climb two rungs up the hatchway. With guards above and below the convicts couldn't move. His sweating grip loosening, Peter slipped back down the ladder. The guards grasped him by the shoulders. He struck out blindly, wrenching free of one guard as he leapt to the side, once more trying to climb the hatchway over the other convicts.

  The guard shouted for help. Three men came to his assistance. The largest pushed through. He grabbed hold of Peters hair, forcing his head back, then pressed on his windpipe until he had Peter on his knees.

  Peter twisted, grasping the guard's hands, pulling with all his strength to free himself. The guard laughed, his knee coming hard into Peter s stomach. The other guards stepped forward, each taking one of Peters arms. The rest followed behind as he was dragged to the hold.

  He was thrust onto his back across a wooden beam six inches wide, and secured there so he couldn't move. His shirt was opened from the front and pulled

  back so it would not be in the way. Next to him, so close he could feel its heat, was the forge fire with the brands glowing red in its pit.

  The burly, soot-encrusted custodian of the fire pulled out one of the brands bearing the letter M . The man held the brand close to Peter's face until he could feel his skin tighten and dry with the heat.

  The forgeman laughed. "T'would make a mess o' your purty face now, wouldn't it?" Then he looked up at the guards. "Our captain's a soft-hearted bastard, he is. Last one I shipped with branded 'em all. The whole bloody lot of 'em. Right there . . ." He pressed his thick, blunt finger into Peter's forehead.

  The thought of that searing hot iron coming down on his brow was more than Peter could bear. His body tightened inside to a tight coil. He shuddered, turning his head from side to side, avoiding the sight and the heat coming from the brand. With a strong filthy hand, the forgeman roughly forced Peter to keep his head still, staring straight into the glowing iron. He brought the brand closer to Peter's eyes.

  "I leave it there long enough, it'll blind you. Want that? Eh? Like that?" He looked up at the guards. "He doesn't seem to like the sight o' it, does he?" The guards laughed. "Well, take a good look for it's all yours. Your name's right on it. Murderer. Look at it!" He plunged the brand back into the fire and brought out a fresh one that glowed white, then red as it cooled before Peter's eyes.

  Fear-crazed, no longer able to think of the brand falling, Peter struggled, straining against the chains that bound him to the beam until the muscles of his arms, chest, and neck stood out in tight corded knots.

  "He's not lookin' so grand an' brave now, is he? They're all alike in the end. Every bloody one o' the bloody gaolbirds is a coward at heart. They all sweat |

  blood and mess their pants when they finally get what's comin of their evil ways," the guard said.

  Trembling, knowing there was nothing he could do, no compassion or mercy to be accorded, no pleas or reason he might call upon, Peter spat into the face of the leering guard hovering over him to better enjoy what was taking place.

  The forgeman laughed, hitting the guard jovially on the shoulder as he reached into the pit again exchanging the brand for a fresh white hot one.

  The brand came down like perpetual fire on Peter's chest, held in place until the sizzling sounds and the stench of his own flesh combined with the inescapable, burning pain and melted into a vast graceless blackness.

  He awakened in his bunk i
n the prison confine. The scent of burnt hair and flesh were still in his nostrils; the pain still ate his flesh, fiery and encompassing. He turned his face to the wall trying to blot out a memory that could never be erased.

  A deep sense of degradation engulfed him even worse than the pain. He shivered in the airless bunk. He squeezed his eyes shut and then opened them, wondering if he still had his sight. For a moment he stared into the oak panel of the wall; then he looked down at his mutilated chest to see the M of a murderer emblazoned there for all his life.

  Prison was more than just punishment for a crime committed. It had become the outlet for the deep and primitive hatreds of men; an outlet for yearnings of power, exercised in sadism by the powerless. What had been done to Peter and the other convicts was not unusual. But neither was it necessary or a part of their prison sentence.

  Branding was no longer an acceptable practice. In polite London circles and in Parliament it was de-

  claimed loudly. But it had been the order of the day aboard prison ships for a long time. A general rule, outlawed, was now practiced at will and without record. Its exercise depended on the captains, who ran their ships with absolute authority.

  Technically Peter had the right to register a complaint. But his evaluation as a prisoner was dependent upon the same man responsible for the branding, and any complaint he might make would be processed through that man. With the ship's surgeon always ready to agree with the captain and the mate, there was no one to whom Peter could speak and not expect reprisal.

  Reformers were the only ones who professed to care. But unfortunately reformers tended to think in terms of laws. They spent their time before the Houses of Parliament and celebrated their success when a scrap of paper was signed by prime ministers and kings. But aboard the vessels, the floating hells, the branding went on, and there were no kings or prime ministers there to stop their wordy laws from being broken. Van Diemen's Land was sixteen thousand miles away from England, and there was no paper law in the middle of an ocean, unless it was carried in the hearts of the people.

  Peter cringed against the wall of the prison, trying to bury himself in its rough-planked sides, knowing abandonment. He would not expect to reach out as one man to another again. Only men were fit to have communion with other men. He was no longer a man. He was a convict.

  Among the thoughts that devastated him, then burned into his mind the fears that the brand had burned into his flesh, was that the men who tortured him were very like other men he had known and liked. He had called some of them friends. But he had always

  been different from them. He had thought he was right, had thought he was trying to foster good. But if he were evil, he wouldn't even have known what good was. Had they seen that in him? Had they always sensed that one day he would wind up as he had, a convict, a branded murderer?

  The humiliation drove so deeply inside him, and the confusion was so great, he no longer thought of his innocence. Innocence was a clouded, abstract concept he no longer understood.

  As he stood at the edge of the cattle pen the following day, he placed Callie's scarf on the burn. It was soft and could be kept wet and cool. He guarded his chest, which the other prisoners were likely to bump or touch. He watched the officers and passengers lounging under the striped canopy on deck fretfully fanning themselves as they talked or played cards. He could be called insolent for looking at them as he was, but he no longer cared. He continued to stare from over the rail of the pen. Some of the crew fished, others laughed now that a breeze was again blowing, and some of the passengers had begun again to talk optimistically of their business ventures. They spoke in the same excited but courteous way he once had. These men, of whom he had been one, were the same men who kept him bound, in pain, always aware that he was not fit to so much as cast his eye upon them without permission.

  Was there any difference between these men and Sam Tolbert, Rufus Hawkes, or even his brother, Frank Berean? What would they have done to him given the chance? What hidden hatreds had his own wife felt when she turned from him to seek Albert Foxe? He remembered when Albert had arrested him during the Swing riots. Albert hadn't wanted to release him. Peter had known it then. He had been

  freed only because of Callie. Now he wondered if Albert would have enjoyed watching him hang if Callie hadn't come along. He thought he would have.

  One hundred and sixty-seven days after leaving England, they came in sight of Van Diemen's Land. It had been nearly a six-month voyage during which many men and young boys had died, and at whose end no man held in the prison cage of the 'tween decks would be the same man who had begun the voyage in England. They were far nearer to being the beasts their captors called them.

  Van Diemen's Land was discovered in 1642 by Abel Jansen Tasman. He believed it to be a part of the Australian continent, and named it after Anthony Van Diemen, the governor general of the Dutch possessions in the East Indies. No one realized it was an island until 1798, five years before the English took possession of it. During the early 1820s it was first used as a penal colony, being dubbed "the Botany Bay of Botany Bay."

  As they approached the island, the Mewstone, a great conical rock a few miles from the ruggedly mountainous south shore, came into view. Patches of snow lay on lofty peaks. Great basaltic cliffs rose up from the jutting, jagged shoreline.

  They passed the dangerous Actean Reef, rounded the rocky straits of Tasman's Head, going up Storm Bay along the east side of Bruny Island. All along they passed massive columns of basalt, regally primitive sentries of a regally primitive land of fern and pine.

  The ship was guided by a pilot boat up the treacherous river Derwent to anchor in Sullivan's Cove. All the prisoners were brought on deck in irons as the ship was brought in.

  Hobart Town, the capital of Van Diemen's Land, sat on the Derwent on beautifully undulating ground. The streets were spacious and laid out at right angles. Most of the houses were sturdily built of brick and slatelike shingles. Gardens graced most of the houses. It was a picture of peace and contentment, a testament to the efforts of convicts enslaved by settlers in a land so new and so far from England.

  On their arrival the convicts were questioned and categorized.

  "What was the nature of your crime?"

  "I committed no crime/' Peter said.

  The man looked at him, waiting, warning with his eyes that insolence should not be tolerated once, and would not be twice. "What was the nature of your crime?"

  "Murder."

  "How many times were you apprehended previously?"

  "None."

  "Has it been necessary to take disciplinary action against you at any time during this voyage?"

  Peter hesitated. "Yes, sir."

  "Your parents' names?"

  "James and Margaret Berean of Kent."

  "Can they read and write?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Their occupation?"

  "My father is dead. My mother lives on my brother s hop garden in Kent."

  Each piece of information was written into a record book. As the convicts were brought into the square, the colonists looked the men over, asking questions and examining them. Requests were put in for the best, strongest looking of them, and those who were most highly skilled to be assigned to the settlers as

  laborers. Some of the men were separated from the group immediately. They would go to the settlers after they had been processed and their status as convicts established.

  Men being transported for the second time, incorri-gibles, and those considered dangerous, life-termers, or murderers, were to be sent to penal colonies of harsher security and discipline. Heated words were exchanged over the commandant's refusal to allow Peter to be taken for free labor.

  "He's the biggest damned buck you've shipped. I don't want no ninny who can't lift the water bucket. Why, that man's worth two mules working."

  Coolly, the commandant looked over Peter's record, and then at the irate colonist. "Would you risk having your throat slit in your own
bed for the sake of a well-drawn bucket of water? This man is one of the worst of this shipment. His size makes him all the more dangerous to handle. When he has been controlled and taught to obey, he'll be made accessible to any settler who wishes to take him on."

  Peter was returned to the ship to be sent to Sarah Island. They set sail for Macquarie Harbor, a short but tortuous, wind-blown distance. The ship was anchored for three days as the storms that buffeted the rocky shores made it too hazardous to chance going on. In this area of the island it rained ten months of the year.

  Sarah Island lay about twenty miles from the sea up the inlet leading to Macquarie Harbor. In spite of the storms and rain there were magnificent snow-covered mountain ranges. Frenchman's Cap, forming half a sphere, rose perpendicular five thousand feet above sea level.

  Peter saw Huon pines, Forest Tea trees, black swans, gulls—raw, striking, primordial majesty wher-

  ever he looked. One year ago he would have longed to walk this island, touching its soil, spiritually possessing its mountains and unexpectedly lush valleys. The sin, he decided, was not in his inability to ever come to know it as he might wish, but that it had ever been used to such a purpose as this.

  He stood, still in irons, on the deck of the George Illy wind-driven rain lashing cleanly at his face, realizing how long it had been since he had been able to feel anything but hate and anger. For those few minutes that he stood there alone he looked upon nature in all her awesome glory, and he was free, breathing crisply cold air.

  Chapter 33

  As they approached New York Harbor, Callie and Stephen stood on deck searching the horizon for familiar landmarks that meant welcome home.

  Natalie hovered at Stephens side. The voyage had been exhausting for her. She had been seasick, and the tossing frigate had done nothing to dispel the nightmares that afflicted her. Fleetingly she looked at the clutter of masts and buildings. "Is this where you live, Stephen?"