Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Many among the audience, free or felon, had seen a hanging; in England they were occasions of fete and celebration. But many had not, preferring, like Richard and his men, to leave that kind of macabre pleasure to others.

The first condemned man, Barrett, was placed atop the stool and the Publick Executioner was directed to put the looped rope about his neck, tighten it. This he did white-faced and weeping, but he refused to kick the stool away until several marines put powder and ball in their muskets and aimed at him from point-blank distance. Very pale but composed, Barrett kept himself steady. A die-hard. Because the drop was not sufficient to break his neck, he lunged and writhed at the end of his rope for what seemed an eternity. When he did eventually die, it was from lack of air. A full hour later the body was removed and the stool positioned to receive Lovell.

Lieutenant George Johnston, the Governor’s aide-de-camp now that Lieutenant King was gone to Norfolk Island, stepped forward and announced that Lovell and Hall had been granted a twenty-four-hour reprieve. The convicts were then dismissed. Phillip’s lesson was wasted; those of a mind to steal would continue to steal, and those of a mind not to steal would not. The most that hanging could do was to reduce the number of thieves by simple subtraction.

While Richard was moving away he chanced to look at the ranks of the women convicts, and there he saw some scarlet ostrich feathers nodding over a glamorous black hat. Stunned, he stopped in his tracks. Lizzie Lock! It had to be Lizzie Lock. She had been transported along with her cherished hat. Which looked remarkably fine in light of its travels. But then, she had probably looked after it better than she had her own person. Now was not the time to try to approach her; a moment would arrive. Knowing she was here was sufficient comfort.

On the morrow everybody was again compelled to assemble-in the midst of pouring rain-only to be informed that His Excellency the Governor had reprieved Lovell and Hall in favor of exile to some place as yet to be determined. However, said Lieutenant George Johnston in minatory tones, His Excellency was seriously considering shipping all recalcitrants to New Zealand and dumping them ashore to be eaten by the cannibals. Once Supply could be spared, that was where they were all going, and he meant every single word of it, make no mistake! In the meantime, exiles were to go in irons to a barren rock near the cove which had already earned the name “Pinchgut” and subsist there on quarter-rations of bread plus a little water. Yet Pinchgut, the noose and the threat of cannibal feasts did not stop the desperate from stealing food.

If the convicts concentrated upon edibles, the marines preferred to plunder rum and women; marine floggings went from 50 to 100 to 150 lashes, though the flogger never laid it on as hard as he did were his victim a convict-understandable. That the marines could concentrate upon booze and sex lay in the fact that they doled out the food; no matter how this operation was supervised, the portions for marines were always much larger than the portions for convicts. Again, understandable.

The natives were becoming harder to control into the bargain, took to filching fish, spades, shovels and what few vegetables had managed to survive on a fertile isle to the east of the cove where the big Government Farm was under construction in the hope that the ground would be ready for wheat by September. If this ground could ever grow wheat. Men sent to cut rushes for thatch in a bay farther around than Garden Island were first attacked by some Indians, who wounded one; after that two men were killed in the same place. A search up the stream to its swampy source revealed the carcasses of several big lizards decomposing in it, a signal that the natives were neither stupid nor unaware of how to foul water.

Guard duty for the marines grew more taxing as the settlement expanded on a needs-must basis. A tree Sir Joseph Banks had classified as casuarina was found to yield very good shingle timber, but was located some distance away around the stream swamp, and excellent brick clay was discovered a mile inland. The parties foraged into virgin territory and had to be guarded. To make matters worse, the natives were less gun-shy and bolder in their stealing forays, it seemed aware that the orders were not to harm them at any cost.

Governor Phillip went to explore another harbor in the north called Broken Bay, only to return dejected; it afforded good shelter for ships, but had no arable land whatsoever. His Excellency had the best reasons for his dejection. The Heads of a Plan as prepared at the Home Office had blithely assumed that crops would shoot out of ground needing only to be tickled, that splendid timber would be readily available for all conceivable purposes, that the livestock would multiply by leaps and bounds, and that within a year New South Wales would be virtually self-sufficient. Hence the neglect on the part of the Home Office, the Admiralty and the contractor to make sure that there really were three years’ worth of supplies with the fleet. The reality was more like a year, which meant that the first storeship due would not come in time. And how could men-or women-work fruitfully when they were perpetually hungry?

Two months around Sydney Cove, as the original landing place was called, had proven only that this place was hard, indifferently and indiscriminately cruel. It seemed mighty, changeless and alien, the kind of land wherein men might eventually scratch a subsistence living but never truly prosper. The natives, primitive in the extreme to English eyes, were a very accurate indicator of what New South Wales promised: misery allied to squalor.

The lastweek of March saw a cessation in the thunderstorms and the worst of that humid heat. Those possessed of hats had turned them into Yankey headpieces by snapping tricorn brims down all around, but Richard had kept his tricorn a tricorn because he had his bark shelter to work in and his straw sailor’s hat-and because he liked to be properly dressed for Sunday service. The habits of Bristol died hard.

Sunday service was held in any one of a number of places, but on Sunday the 23rd of March-the third anniversary of his conviction and sentence at Gloucester-it happened near the bachelor marines’ camp on a stack of rocky shelves which gave the congregation some chance to see and hear the Reverend Mr. Richard Johnson exhort them in the Name of the Lord to rein in their shameful urges and join the ranks of those who were marrying.

Having resolved on a course of action, Richard had wanted to pray and receive enlightenment, but the sermon did not do a thing to help. Instead, God answered him by presenting him with the figure of Stephen Donovan, who ranged himself alongside Richard and walked with him around the cove, across the stepping stones and down to the water’s edge near the new farm.

“Terrible, is it not?” asked Donovan, breaking the silence as they sat, arms around their knees, on a rock five feet above the placidly lapping water. “I hear that it takes six men a whole week to grub out one stump from yon wheat field, and that the Governor has decided the ground will have to be hoed by hand to receive the grain, for put a plough in it he dares not.”

“And that in turn means that one day I will not eat,” said Richard, taking off his best coat and disposing his person in the shade of an overhanging tree. “How thin the shade is here.”

“And how hard the life. Still,” said Donovan, flicking dead leaves into the water, “it will improve, you know. ’Tis like any brand-new venture, at its worst during the first six months. I am never sure why it then begins to look more bearable, save perhaps that the strangeness goes away. One thing is certain. Whenever it was that God made this corner of the globe, He used a different template.” His voice dropped, grew softer. “Only the strong will survive, and you will be one of those who survives.”