The Playmaker

  From the beach now receding rose a wail of loss which some in the longboat found amusing.

  The arrival of the native in Sydney Cove was something of a raw comedy. A crowd from the women’s camp saw the native roped to the thwarts of Lieutenant Ball’s craft and came rushing to witness his landing. When he was untied and dragged ashore, in the humid afternoon which did not seem to mark the turning of the year, but to subsist in the meat of some great, unlabelled lump of time, one of the she-lags, a former passenger on the Friendship, made a speech in mock praise of the native’s manhood, saying it did her good to see at last a man properly endowed after the small company she had been keeping.

  Harry Brewer, who was observing the landing himself, untypically cursed her and accused her of having had two men on Christmas Eve. “I would have thought you saw enough combined length then, Amelia,” he roared.

  The native, pulled along now by the rope around his waist, seemed terrified of the women, perhaps not knowing they were the same species of being as the Indian wife on the northside of the harbour from whom he had been separated. At their core, Ralph wished he could tell the native, under the layers of convict cloth, lies that same bounty of the womb.

  H.E. and Harry had taken some pains to choose a companion for this captured Adam. They had decided on a young convict called Bill Bradbury, who had first been sentenced for stealing in London seven years past—he had been merely fifteen then. He was selected for this post because he did not have any of the feverish anger which marked the other lags. Walk behind them and it was as if you saw it splashing from them, hissing in the sand. Bill Bradbury was about to be attached to Arabanoo on permanent terms. An iron wristlet would be locked onto the native’s wrist, and from it would run a length of rope which Bill Bradbury held. If a man had to be led with a rope, said H.E., it was better it should be by the wrist rather than by the waist. He hoped the native would thereby become aware that he was not a slave or a captive, but merely an enforced guest waiting to discover the extent of his host’s hospitality.

  Harry squeezed the man’s upper arm as Bill Bradbury took the dangling rope and, under a guard of Marines, began walking the Indian toward His Excellency’s house, which at this stage of history, the turning of the first year, was still that early bizarre construction of canvas and lathes. Bill Bradbury suffered with a good will the taunts of his fellow lags, the viperous anarchic humour of the women. “Walking your terrier, Bill?” they shouted.

  But Bill’s manner was a comfort to Ralph, who, though his shoulders still smarted from the digging stick, had a sense of a violation having taken place.

  “You’ll be right as ninepence, Charlie,” Harry kept assuring the captive. But from the native’s mouth came a constant, low noise which the crowd drowned, a noise something between a single moan and the multitudinous buzzing of wasps.

  A hut had been built especially for him; it stood in the garden a little beyond H.E.’s residence. The crowd of convicts dispersed nearing this place, as they saw that His Excellency was working in the open at a portable table set under the scattered shade of a eucalyptus tree. H.E. stood up, laying a glass paperweight down on the page he had been writing. He was then, as ever, engaged in preparing letters and dispatches to London—official reports, informative personal accounts for his Hampshire neighbour, Sir George Rose, who was secretary of the Admiralty. He knew that across the stream Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell were writing to everyone they could claim acquaintance with—every official they had ever met at a dinner party, the theatre, a gathering at the Admiralty. They did this with a visible energy. Animus drove their elbows. They sweated ink. Whereas H.E., putting down his paperweight on another page of closely reasoned report, had all the leisure of a man who knows he is remaking an earth—or more than that, creating a new one. It was only a partisan who had no time to rise from his desk and greet a grand symbolic event such as the entry of the Indian into the city of lags. H.E., being no partisan, rose.

  For the arrival of the native was in fact a vast event to H.E. As Davy and Watkin, Ralph and Harry would soon discover, he had just received from the Supply a report from Lieutenant King, the Commandant on Norfolk Island, a place where—according to the earliest voyagers, wrong-headed Cook and Banks—flax was supposed to grow. As well as that, a native pine there was said to reach astonishing heights. So behind H.E.’s dispatch of young King with a handful of Marines and lags to the small and far-off island was the chance that the flax bushes there and the pines might be of such quality as to unseat the Baltic as the traditional source for those essentials to the movement of humankind across the seas.

  Lieutenant King had taken with him a flax weaver who had now proclaimed the flax bushes to be of very poor fibre. The great pines, lopped down, proved to be riddled with knots.

  So the promise Cook had given had been aborted and nature had refused to supply an antipodean balance to the Baltic. To compensate, Lieutenants Ball, Johnston, and Clark had found a native, and great things could be done there, in the unknown constellations of the Indian soul. H.E. walked towards the native with his arms thrust out, wearing his strange smile.

  He began ineptly by starting the naming game, and George Johnston had to explain why the Indian, the man ab origine, might not be so pleased to play the game which had entrapped him that morning.

  “Phillip,” said the Captain, H.E., slapping his own chest, bony and fever-white through his opened shirt. “Manly,” he said, pointing to the new man, choosing to name him.

  Arabanoo made a speech and Ralph wondered if it was in protest at the name. He raised his arm, the one with the wristlet, and grasped the elbow with his other hand, as if he were asking for an ascent to the heavens, an escape. It was then—perhaps for the first time—he noticed the bracelet around his wrist and the rope Bill Bradbury lightly held. He seemed at first delighted with the ring of iron. “Ben-gad-ee!” he called, which, said Davy Collins, was the tribal word for ornament. Then of course he saw how Bill Bradbury was attached to him and looked back to H.E. and began to rage, as if H.E.’s temperate voice had deceived him. He tried to tear the manacle off with the thumb of his left hand. As he tore and raged he fell to his knees. In front of the Marines and remaining lags, the Captain dropped too.

  This kneeling of H.E.’s was not an organised and careful bending of the knee, of the type appropriate to a middle-aged viceroy with a damp fever in his side. It was an urgent, abandoned, excessive genuflexion. H.E. put his arms around the native’s shoulders and began to soothe him. The native wept against H.E.’s shoulder and then began to handle the fabric of his shirt and to feel H.E.’s body beneath it. This led him to a desperate sort of embrace.

  “Be-anna,” he said, apparently to his own surprise. Father.

  By New Year’s Day, it was apparent the native had a name he wished to assert over any which might be laid on him by H.E. The name was Arabanoo. He had kept Bill Bradbury awake all night, mourning away the last hours of one year and greeting the first of the new with tears. He had uttered incantations, but offered Bill no rancour or abuse.

  At the dawn of the New Year he was bathed in a half barrel full of hot water. The fish oil came loose from him and turned the water to stew. Then Harry Brewer and Bill Bradbury dressed him in his naval jacket.

  The man, by the frankness of his feelings, elicited great affection from Bill, as from H.E. He seemed to accept now that he was bound to H.E.—the feeling of the ribs beneath the cloth of H.E.’s shirt had had such power. But if while Bill was walking him in the garden he got a glimpse across the blue dazzle of harbour to the north side, on one of those mornings when the humidity had not come up and the harbour water seemed as sharply worked and solid as terrazzo, he would begin to weep. And worst was in the evenings, when he would see, under that rock ledge where the iguanas were captured, the sharp speck of a campfire. “Gwee-un,” he would tell Bill Bradbury. “Gwee-un.” According again to the relentless Davy, in the subtle tongue of the ab origine Indians, the word indicated not me
rely a flame but a circle of kinship bound by fire.

  Ralph, though he himself had no chance of seeing around the bends of space to Betsey Alicia’s hearth in Plymouth, nonetheless found the Indian’s exclamation poignant.

  On the night of the New Year H.E. gave a dinner, and those officers who had time for H.E.—Davy Collins, Surgeon Johnny White, Watkin Tench, and Will Dawes the astronomer—came. So also did those who had middling, only a little, or no tolerance for the viceroy. Seated at the more junior end of the table, Ralph would be left later with a memory of reiterating many times—having had a glass and a half of brandy and being bad with liquor—that he took no pride in the triumph of the Indian’s capture. The native himself—clothed as a British naval petty officer now—seemed reconciled to this, his first formal dinner. The iron cuff had been taken from his wrist. He ate at a pace. At first he used his fingers, but Watkin showed him what to do with his fork, and he took to it with a delicate but energetic style.

  That day Will Bryant had got among a school of bream, a fish of delicate and sweet flesh. There were pounds of bream at the table. One of H.E.’s pigs had been killed as well, and its roasted features were a temporary diversion from the hunger which was growing in the town.

  Watkin was enchanted by the man and, typical to his nature, kept count of what Arabanoo ate—near to five pounds of fish and three of pork. Robbie Ross, however, did not see the man’s appetite as an engrossing phenomenon. Sitting at H.E.’s right side, he asked a question which proved to Davy and Watkin his relentless talent for taking from any situation the least of lessons. “Do you think, perhaps, Your Excellency, we might wish to exchange him for a black laddie of less pronounced appetite.”

  H.E. said that if a little pork made the boy at home, that was to everyone’s benefit. Robbie replied, “Then I’m right glad the other one slipped away. Twae of yon savage would have eaten the antipodes out.”

  The Marine band played away in the other room, and the native, sitting on a sea chest by the window, swayed with it, as if he were willing to obey the rites of the spirits, the fallen stars. He had also taken a liking to brandy—which he called “The King” since he had heard that toast proposed earlier in the evening the first time that brandy was drunk. As the young Irish surgeon Dennis Considen began to sing “Young Desire’s Plan” in a honeyed tenor, the native subsided onto Watkin’s shoulder. Watkin and Davy Collins withdrew from the sea chest, to enable the ab origine Adam to be spread out.

  “At last,” said H.E., with a fond smile, “he knows there is nothing to fear.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Enchanting the Indian

  The native—whom H.E. had begun by calling by the pet name Manly but now called Arabanoo—did very little work as an ambassador to the Cadigal people on the settlement side of the harbour. He became more and more a richly favoured courtier, and while H.E. and Davy and Watkin took delight in his manners, his forthrightness, his courtliness towards the convict women, many officers—including George Johnston, who had captured him—saw him merely as an indulged favourite.

  It had grown apparent he was not made to carry messages between the penal governance and the Cadigal. Some weeks after Arabanoo’s capture and his enchantment by H.E., a group of sixteen lags had without authorisation wandered south, seven miles overland, to the shores of Botany Bay. There they were attacked by the Cadigal. One of the convicts, defending himself with his shovel, was caught on the back of the head by a native club and fell dead with a shattered skull. Seven others were wounded by thrown clubs and spears. This extraordinary belligerence from the natives panicked the party of lags. They began to flee among the low, salt-smelling paperbarks. Never had such a strong party of Europeans been set upon so vigorously. Apart from the victim.

  Some lags paused by their wounded friends to break the shafts of the spears off—the wounded might walk or even run if this were done. But a good half dozen of the group abandoned everyone and came sprinting down on the town screaming that the forest was full of the dead. Calming a little, they said they had been attacked while picking the native sweet pea—an enterprise which H.E. and Surgeon Johnny White considered a corporal work of mercy in view of the shrub’s potency in the treatment of scurvy.

  A company of Marines was sent into the woods to retrieve the dead. It was not Ralph’s company, and Ralph was pleased. He knew the felons were lying about their purpose in travelling to Botany Bay, that they were thieves of women and fishing nets and spears.

  The rescuing detachment lurched forth from town unevenly, torn between disgust for the convicts’ lying and cowardice and, on the other side, a vengeful unity with the white flesh which had now been violated by savage weapons of stone and bone. Private Marines in their shirtsleeves, sitting in front of the unmarried barracks, understood as well as Ralph that the sixteen felons had been down to Botany for no decent purpose, and called after the departing company, “Tell they lags that a man shouldn’t carry stolen goods in his back. The hand is better! The hand!”

  It happened that all the wounded were rescued—the Cadigal had given up chasing them. Johnny White and young Balmain and Considen cut the barbs out of their arms and legs and buttocks, using an astringent to prevent rotting of the wounds. The weapons had had subtle points, difficult to extract without wide and excruciating slicing. Some of the wounded—twitching with the pain which Johnny certainly did not intend but which created a confessional impulse—admitted the true reasons they had gone south. This was reported to H.E., who agreed with Judge Advocate Davy Collins that the Cadigal had been provoked and had answered the provocation like reasonable people.

  Seven of the party were condemned to floggings—seven separate flogging triangles were in fact placed in front of the provision store for that purpose. At two in the afternoon, H.E. brought Arabanoo over from the east side of the cove with the idea that he would witness the lashing of these men. Then, travelling along with an armed column, he would carry the news of the apt punishment back to the Cadigal themselves. He would tell the Cadigal in their own tongue that H.E. did not propose vengeance but that he expected freedom of legitimate passage.

  Fourteen floggers—seven right handed, seven left handed—were appointed. They carried in their hands the standard cats—rope teased out into nine separate, wire-hard heads. These were simply items of civilisation which, everyone in the lagtown understood one way or another, could no more have been left behind in the known world than could the shovels and adzes. So it was all accustomed commerce and as tedious as any military or judicial duty. It was a balance of flush and sweetheart blows; soft and hard.

  It seemed Arabanoo lacked any sense of the boredom of flogging or the balance of soft and full-on. After Davy had played the word game a while, so that Arabanoo could understand that these men were about to be chastised for wrongs against the Cadigal, Arabanoo’s ab origine cousins, the fourteen floggers took to work. For perhaps ten strokes the native watched astounded. Then he began to whimper. The whimper augmented to a roar of disgust. He covered his eyes, taking his hands away only to ascertain that the blows were still landing. As indeed they were—the incisive crack of the exactly timed blow, the leather dullness of the sweetheart. Before forty blows had been landed he was on his knees wailing. There was too much noise to broach the language game with him again, to try to make the rightness of the whole business apparent. In the end Bill Bradbury, his convict keeper, led the appalled Indian away, H.E. pensively following.

  This was the first time it came to H.E. and the others that perhaps the task they had proposed for Arabanoo was too large. H.E. and Davy, and Ralph himself, were both gratified and shamed at the horror Arabanoo had shown for what must have been to him a mysterious and novel infliction. But they were as bereft of an ambassador now as they had been before Arabanoo was captured.

  It was within a mere week or two of Arabanoo’s failure to absorb the social meaning of the flogging that authorised parties, travelling south and east of Sydney Cove, began to discover the first si
gns of a savage form of smallpox—nowhere to be seen among the lags or soldiers—in the abandoned corpses of Cadigal people. Natives could not be found except those who were dying or dead. These carried such marks as their fellow Indians had never seen, not since the beginning of time. Ab origine.

  So that even if now Arabanoo was willing to be a competent envoy, there was no one left for him to speak to.

  H. E. Began now to bring him nearly every day to the glade to see the playmaking. This suited the native better than witnessing appropriate punishment. Ralph, observing him, was sure he took delight in the jokes—he could tell when they were well acted even though he could not know what they meant. He would walk towards the women with a most endearing smile and a bent head and sometimes, gently, he would feel their lower arms in a peculiar way, childlike, but less insistent than a child. On the days Dabby Bryant was playing the country wench, Rose, Arabanoo seemed particularly amused and delighted, particularly disarming and fondly touching. So much so that the suspicion came to Ralph as a shock that Dabby Bryant had somehow delivered Arabanoo of evil nights, and thus it seemed to Ralph for the first time the enchantment the lagtown held for Arabanoo might not be totally the knock-kneed grandeur of H.E.

  This idea teased Ralph. It was known that male lags seduced the native women when they encountered them. But that Dabby Bryant should fall upon Arabanoo seemed to him a prodigy. Some would of course find it indecent, some would say, “The she-lags are as lickerish as that.” But Mrs. Bryant’s lavishness didn’t seem to Ralph to have much to do with the accustomed ideas of propriety, with recklessness on one hand or tidy desire on the other. It was possible she had succoured both Arabanoo and Bill Bradbury on the same floor. England, Cornwall, and Before the Flood twined as one.

  Ralph had a sort of power both as officer and playmaker to ask her if it were so. But as her happy client he did not know how to go about it. So—like Arabanoo—he listened to Rose’s robust lines, which were Dabby’s robust lines as well. He enjoyed a sense of the strange innocence of Mrs. Bryant calling to the strange innocence of Farquhar’s Rose, and the echo coming back again from Rose to Dabby, creating in Ralph as in the Indian a generous affection and a lust without urgency.