That provoked gales of laughter. “Keep them, ye hedonists! Neither Johnny nor I would sleep in anything other than a hammock.” He looked at Richard with a derisive gleam in his fine blue eyes. “When men make love, Richard, they do not need to have a big bed. ’Tis women like comfort.”
Richard took Ned Westlake and Harry Humphreys with him to the new sawpit in Arthur’s Vale together with Jim Richardson and Juno Anderson, as this John called himself.
Naturally the pace slowed greatly, much to Lieutenant King’s displeasure. “It has taken ye five days to produce but seven hundred and ninety-one feet of timber!” he said to Richard indignantly.
“I know, sir, but two of the four teams are new to the work and the other two are busy instructing,” Richard explained respectfully but firmly. “Ye must expect less wood for a while.” He drew a deep breath and decided to say it all. “Also, sir, ye cannot expect the sawing teams or me to strip bark as well. The old sawpit has Joseph Long permanently stripping and one of the others assisting him, whereas the new sawpit has no regular hand preparing the logs. I am sharpening, and I have no time to do aught else because I have to do the big sets for Marriner as well as keep my men going here. Is it not possible for those who fell the trees to debark them the moment they are down? The longer the bark stays on, the more risk there is of the beetle which eats the wood getting into it. And there should be one man felling who has the skill to look at each tree before it is felled to assess its sawing worth. Half the logs we receive are of no use, but by the time we can look at them ourselves, the men who have hauled them to the sawpit have vanished. So we have to waste our valuable time shifting them to the burning heap.”
Oh, the Lieutenant did not like that speech! His face was frowning direfully before half of it was said. In which case, thought Richard, holding those angry hazel eyes without flinching, I am in for a flogging for insolence. Yet better now than later, when the situation grows worse because he decides on a third pit, leaving us with only one spare saw now that I have amended the eight-footer into a cross-cut tool.
“We shall see,” said King eventually, and marched off in the direction of the carpenters and his new granary. Every inch of his retreating form radiated offended feelings.
“What,” asked King of Stephen Donovan over lunch in Government House, “d’ye make of the supervisor of sawyers?”
The very pregnant Ann Innet did not sit with them to eat, just brought the food and disappeared. The port decanter was half-empty and would be a marine before lunch was over; the Commandant was always more mellow in the afternoons than in the mornings, a fact Richard Morgan was unaware of. Port was King’s besetting sin; never a day went by that he did not get through at least two bottles of it. No keg port for Philip Gidley King! He liked the best, which came already bottled and was laid down carefully for at least a month before he personally decanted each bottle.
“Richard Morgan, ye mean?”
“Aye, Morgan. Major Ross said he would be an asset, but I am not so sure. The fellow had the effrontery to stand up to me this morning—virtually told me I am going about things the wrong way!”
“Yes, Morgan has the sinew to do that—but not, I hazard a guess, in an insolent fashion. He was on Alexander and proved of great service in the matter of Alexander’s bilge pumps—d’ye not remember coming aboard her shortly before we reached Rio? ’Twas Morgan said flatly that only chain pumps could remedy the problem.”
“Gammon!” snapped King, blinking in amazement. “Utter gammon! I recommended chain pumps!”
“Ye did indeed, sir, but Morgan was before ye. Had Morgan not convinced Major Ross and Surgeon-General White that hard measures were necessary, ye would never have been summoned to Alexander,” said Stephen valiantly.
“Oh. Oh, I see. But that does not alter the fact that Morgan exceeded his authority this morning,” King maintained stubbornly. “It is not his place to criticize my arrangements. I ought to have him flogged.”
“Why flog a useful and hardworking man because he has a head on his shoulders?” Stephen asked, leaning back easily and declining the port. Another glass of it and King would be more malleable. “Ye know he has a head on his shoulders, Mr. King. His intention was not insolent—he is a man cares about his work, is all. He wants to produce more,” Stephen labored.
The Commandant looked unconvinced.
“Sir, be fair! If I had suggested the changes—what precisely were they, may I ask?”
“That no one is inspecting the trees before they are hauled to the pits—that no one is stripping the logs of their bark—that stripping ought to be done when the trees are felled—that the sawyers waste too much time dragging unusable logs to the burning heap—and so on, and so forth.”
Sip away, Lieutenant King, sip away. Stephen said nothing as his superior sipped away. Finally, one glass of port later, he held out his hand and looked imploring. “Mr. King, if I had said what Morgan did, would ye not have listened?”
“The simple fact is, Mr. Donovan, that ye did not.”
“Because I am elsewhere and ye have a supervisor of sawyers—Morgan! They are all sensible observations and all designed to see more timber sawn. Why put wagon harness on your saddle horses, sir? Ye have an excellent team of woodworkers and carpenters, and I note ye display no aversion to listening to whatever Nat Lucas has to say. Well, in Richard Morgan ye have another Nat Lucas. If I were you, I would use his talents. His sentence finishes in two years. Were he to develop a fondness for this place, ye’d have some continuance, as with Lucas.”
And that, Stephen Donovan decided, was enough on the subject. The petulance was leaving King’s face, and he did have many good qualities. A pity that he so disliked being told where he had gone wrong by a convict.
By the end of November the humidity was such that the hours of labor were changed. Work commenced at dawn and continued until half past seven, when everyone had half an hour for breakfast; at eleven in the morning work ceased and did not resume until half past two, then ended at sunset. And the first harvest came in, an acre of barley which yielded 80 gallons of valuable seed despite the grubs and rats. This was followed by 3 quarts of wheat from the 260 ears the grubs and rats had not destroyed; could the pests only be controlled, this magnificent soil could grow anything.
The little red plums—cherry guavas—had ripened and were so delicious that the temptation to eat too many was hard to resist; resigned to gluttony, Surgeon Jamison declared that no free man or felon would be let off work because of diarrhoea. The bananas were ripe too. Catches of fish came in on occasions Richard looked forward to very much. In this taste he had few companions—and quite a lot more fish than he was entitled to. He had discovered that the fish lasted another day if it were submerged in a cold and shady current of salt water, so was happy to trade his next day’s ration of salt meat for someone else’s despised fish. Such delicious fish! Not unlike a snapper, it could be grilled in a fire and eaten down to the very few bones. Shark was good eating, so too were the hundred-pound ugly monsters which lurked in reef crannies, and a local kingfish that grew to a length of eight feet. The only trouble was that the fish were capricious; on some days the coble would come in with a hundred, on other days with none.
Toward Christmas, Lieutenant King decided to send Assistant Surgeon John Turnpenny Altree, Thomas Webb and Juno Anderson to live permanently at Ball Bay, a stony beach on the eastern side of the island wherein Supply was occasionally forced to anchor. His intention was that the three men should clear and keep clear a channel through the round, kettle-sized rocks so that a ship’s boat could land; the basalt boulders stove a boat’s keel in. This decision of King’s was one which provoked covert winks and smirks all round. Altree, a strange and ineffectual man who had not been able to face doctoring the female convicts of Lady Penrhyn, avoided women as if they carried plague. Wherever he went, so too would Thomas Webb go, eased out of his brother’s life by Beth Henderson and fled to Altree for succor. Delighted at the prospect of
abandoning his wife and his job as a sawyer, Juno Anderson went to dance attendance on the two free custodians of Ball Bay. It was no more than a mile away, but was so cut off by the forest that Joe Robinson, trying to find his way back to Sydney Town, was lost for two nights. A path to Ball Bay was therefore mandatory, though no trees were felled to make it. The massively thick, strangulating vine between the pines was easily severed by one blow from an axe, and its bark, the path hewers discovered, made quite good twine provided the lengths were kept short.
Richard was now down two sawyers, and of prospective sawyers there were none until Supply returned—if Supply ever did. Jim Richardson had ventured out on a Sunday in quest of bananas and broken his leg so badly that it would be months healing; he would never saw again. And Juno Anderson was no loss, a sentiment his wife echoed heartily.
This meant that Richard would have to saw himself; the three-and-a-half-hour midday break would have to be spent sharpening, as would every other second of spare time. But who as a partner?
“Needs must,” said the Commandant, having long since recovered from his miff at Morgan’s presumption. “I shall ask Private Wigfall if he would care to make an additional wage as a sawyer. He has the body and stature of a boxer.”
“A good choice, sir,” said Richard, then pretended to be horrified. “What if Private Wigfall cannot saw straight and has to be the bottom man? It is not seemly for a convict to give a marine free man a face full of sawdust.”
“He can wear a hat,” said King blithely, and hurried off.
Luckily Private William Wigfall was a typical large and burly fellow: habitually phlegmatic, impossible to rile. He hailed from Sheffield and owned no close friends among his tiny detachment.
“My friends all remained at Port Jackson,” he said to Richard. “Honestly, I am right glad for the chance to get away from this lot, not to mention that I will earn more for sawing than I do for being a marine. I will be able to retire earlier. ’Tis my ambition to buy an acre of good ground with a nice little cottage on it somewhere near Sheffield. If I work my passage home as a sailor I will have even more money.”
“D’ye mind if I try being the man on top of the log first?” asked Richard. “My eye is very straight, so I am curious to see if that holds true when I am sawing. Besides, being bottom man is easier on the muscles. Unfortunately ye will not be able to wear a hat—ye have to stand too close to the saw. I will yell as I begin my pull to give ye the chance to look down.”
His eye proved straight; Wigfall’s did not. The work was every bit as grueling as Richard had thought, but Wigfall turned out to be a magnificent partner, capable of a tremendous pull downward. But I could never have done this in Port Jackson on those miserable rations. Here, between the fish, the occasional turtle and the masses of green vegetables and turnips—not to mention the better bread—I can saw without losing more weight than I can afford. For a man of forty, I am in far better condition than Lieutenant King is at a mere thirty.
At Christmastide the Commandant killed a large pig just for his convict family, so on that dark and windy day the porker was spitted over a fire of smoldering coals and roasted until its skin crackled and bubbled up crisply; each man and woman got a double portion, there were scarce potatoes to go with it, and a half-pint of rum to wash the meal down. This was the first roast meat that Richard had eaten since his days at the Cooper’s Arms—incredibly delicious! As were the potatoes. Dear Lord, he prayed that night as he tumbled into his feather bed, I am so very grateful. Only those who have truly wanted can ever enjoy simple plenty.
For the next few days it rained and blew too hard for outside work, though, as both sawpits were sheltered, the sawyers continued to cut logs into planks, scantlings and beams; Government House was receiving some additions, Stephen Donovan was getting a new house in close proximity to the Commandant’s, and all the sawyers were allowed to cut timber to build themselves private dwellings. Nor was Richard, already possessed of a good house, unwilling to saw for his teams’ houses.
New Year of 1789 dawned clear and fine; the convicts were given a half-day off work and a quarter-pint of rum. Thanks to the subtle and unobtrusive exertions of his supervisors, Lieutenant King was settling into something vaguely like a routine—please, sir, if we finish what we have started, it will mean we can devote all our attention to the new work in its turn. . . .
King’s joy overflowed when his healthy son by Ann Innet was born eight days into 1789. As the only person who conducted religious worship, King baptized the boy himself and christened him “Norfolk.”
“Norfolk King has a pleasing sound,” said Stephen to Richard on the sand at Turtle Bay. “I am delighted for him. He needs to have a family, though ’twill not help his naval career to marry Mistress Innet. But a more doting father would be hard to imagine. Things will go hard for him when comes the time he must leave for England—what to do with a much-loved bastard, not to mention the mother? He is very fond of her.”
“He will solve all his dilemmas,” said Richard tranquilly. “A flightier commanding officer would be hard to find, but he lacks neither honor nor a sense of responsibility. There are some things he cannot deal with happily—routine, for one—and he has a hot temper. Witness Mary Gamble.”
Mary Gamble provoked that hot temper when she threw an axe at a boar and severely wounded it. Furious at the near-demise of this immensely valuable animal, King refused to listen to her frenzied explanation that the boar had charged her and she had thrown the axe in self-defense. Before his temper cooled he levied the atrocious number of a dozen-dozen lashes at the cart’s tail upon her. Once calm returned, he was aghast—strip that gallant creature to the waist before men like Dyer and give her 144 licks of the cat, even the kindest cat among the assortment? Oh, Christ, he could not do it! What if the boar had indeed charged her? The axe she had by right, as she was one of the women deputed to debark pine logs. Oh, Jesus! He had never ordered half that many lashes for a man! What a pickle! So he summoned Mary Gamble to Government House and announced in lordly tones that he forgave her.
His conduct of this debacle told a few of the convicts that he was stupid, soft-hearted and weak; certain plans already in train were advanced in time because it was so obvious that King had neither the stomach nor the kidney for harsh action.
Robert Webb the gardener came to see him urgently. “Sir, there is a plot afoot,” he said.
“A plot?” King asked blankly.
“Aye, sir. A great many of the felons plan to take you, Mr. Donovan, the other free men and all the marines prisoner. They are then going to wait for the next ship, take her, and sail her to Otaheite.”
The Commandant’s face paled from brown to dirty white; he stared at Webb incredulously. “Jesus Christ! Who, Robert, who?”
“From what I was told, sir, all but three of the convicts off Golden Grove, and”—he swallowed, blinked away tears—“a few of our original party.”
“How quickly the rot sets in, Robert,” King said slowly. “If just one fresh intake of felons has caused this, what is going to happen when His Excellency sends hundreds more?” He passed his hand across his eyes to brush away moisture. “Oh, I am hurt! A few of our originals. . . . How could they be so foolish? Noah Mortimer and that silly youth Charlie McClellan are the originals, I imagine.” He set his shoulders and squared his jaw. “How did ye discover this?”
“My woman told me, sir—Beth Henderson. William Francis got her on her own and asked her to see if I would be in it. She pretended to agree to persuade me to be in it, then told me.”
The sweat was running into his eyes; high summer at these latitudes made the uniform of a naval lieutenant—and a commandant at that, doomed always to be in uniform—a torment to wear. “Who off Golden Grove are the three not involved?” he asked, voice thin.
“The Catholic, John Bryant. The sawyer Richard Morgan and his simple hut companion, Joseph Long,” said Webb.
“Well, of the latter pair, one is too busy at the sa
wpits and the other, as ye say, is a simpleton. ’Tis the Catholic Bryant I will learn from, he works with them. Go to his hut from here and fetch him to me as quietly as ye can, Robert. This being a Saturday, Sydney Town is fairly deserted—they all like to think I do not notice that they have vanished into Arthur’s Vale. Also ask Mr. Donovan to report to me immediately.”
Lieutenant King’s talents shone at full brilliance in dealing with concrete peril; it was all over and done with before one of the ringleaders knew he had been detected.
Armed with their rusted muskets, the marines took the dangerous men into custody—William Francis, Samuel Pickett, Joshua Peck, Thomas Watson, Leonard Dyer, James Davis, Noah Mortimer and Charles McClellan. Exhaustive examination winnowed out the real villains; though almost every convict on the island had indicated a wish to be in the coup provided it succeeded, only a handful were actively involved. Francis and Pickett were put into double irons and confined in the stoutest storehouse; Watson and Mortimer were fettered and released until Monday’s full enquiry brought the whole story out.
A startled Richard Morgan was told to walk at once to Ball Bay and fetch its three custodians into the Sydney Town fold, while King arranged his scant supply of free men and marines around his end of the beach and the convicts were ordered on pain of being shot to remain in their huts.
“And as if that were not enough,” said King to Donovan in huge indignation, “Corporal Gowen found Thompson pilfering Indian corn in the vale! From which, given what Robert and Bryant have told me, I gather that men like Thompson thought the island would be taken over by Francis before I could flog him for theft. He is mistaken.”
“They should have waited until Supply was in the roads and our attention was taken up in that direction,” said Stephen thoughtfully, too tactful to add that King’s conduct in the Mary Gamble business was the reason for the plot’s advancement in time. “What of the women, sir?”