Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

On the 4th of June came the King’s birthday and a celebration, perhaps Governor Phillip’s way of injecting some heart into his dwindling, apathetic chicks. Guns thundered, marines marched, a bit of extra food was issued, and after dark a huge bonfire was kindled. The convicts were given a whole three days off work, but what mattered far more was the gift of a half-pint of rum broken down into grog by the addition of a half-pint of water. The free people each received a half-pint of neat rum and a pint of porter, which was a thick, black beer. To mark the occasion with some official deed, His Excellency the Governor determined the boundaries of the first county in New South Wales and christened it Cumberland County.

“Tchah!” Surgeon-General White was overheard to exclaim. “It is without a doubt the largest county in the world, but there is absolutely nothing in it. Tchah!”

This statement was not quite accurate; somewhere in Cumberland County were four black Cape cows and one black Cape bull. The precious Government herd of cattle, pastured near the farm under the care of a convict, took advantage of his rummy state, swished their tails and broke out of their compound. The search for them was frenzied and signs of their passing were found in heaps of dung and chewed shrubs, but they had no intention of being recaptured, and were not. A disaster!

Supply had come back from a second trip to Norfolk Island with some cheering news and some depressing news. The pine logs could not be loaded whole thanks to lack of an anchorage, nor could they be towed because they were so heavy they sank, but they could provide plenty of sawn beams, scantlings and boards for Port Jackson. This meant that Port Jackson could erect better wooden buildings than palm log, and concentrate upon a liquor store in stone-Fishburn and Golden Grove were stuck until some secure premises were erected on shore for the liquor.

On the other hand, Supply reported, growing plants in Norfolk Island was proving almost insuperably difficult because the place was infested with literally millions of caterpillars and grubs. Lieutenant King was so desperate that he was sitting his handful of women convicts among the plants to pick the grubs off by hand. But as fast as they picked, two replaced every one grub removed. Such rich, deep, fertile soil! Yet he could not grow in it. What did shine through in Lieutenant King’s despatches, rumor had it, was an unquenchable enthusiasm for Norfolk Island. Despite its myriad pests, he truly believed that it had more potential to support people than did the environs of Port Jackson.

Among theailing were pockets of healthy convicts, the majority of them led by resourceful men with the ability to general their dependents toward good health, a minority led by men of different resource-robbing the weak. There were no regulations to the effect that convicts who encountered patches of wild parsley or the sweet tea vine (samphire was just too far away) must surrender their spoils to those in command. The chief restriction on plant-gathering expeditions was fear of the natives, who were getting bolder and now even came into the camp from time to time. The Governor was hoping to capture and tame a few-introduce them to the English language and English ways-and thus, by returning them, Anglicized, to their tribes, persuade these wretched people to ally themselves with the English effort. Did they, he was convinced, their own standard of living would be immeasurably improved; it never began to occur to him that perhaps they preferred their own way of life-why should they, when it was so draggled and pathetic?

To English eyes the indigenes were ugly, far less prepossessing than African negroes because they stank, daubed themselves with a white clay, mutilated their faces either by knocking out an incisor tooth or perforating the gristle between their nostrils with a small bone. Their unashamed nakedness offended grossly, as did the behavior of their women, who on some occasions would coquette brazenly, on others scream vituperation.

Poles apart, neither group stood a chance of understanding the other, nor did sensitivity rule conduct. Inundated by exhortations from the Governor that the natives were to be handled through kid gloves, the convicts grew to loathe these feckless primitives, especially as they were immune from punishment when they stole fish or vegetables or tools. To make matters worse, the Governor always blamed the convicts for the occasional attacks and murders; even if there were no witnesses, he assumed that the convicts had done something to provoke the natives. Whereas the convicts assumed that this was not so: the Governor would side with Satan if a convict were involved because convicts were an even lower form of life than natives. Those first few months at Sydney Cove cemented attitudes which were to persist far into the future.

The winterwas cold, yet not unbearably so; no one would freeze to death. Had the invaders been decently fed, they would probably not have shivered the way they did. Food warmed. A few hut owners piled sandstone into unmortared chimneys and reduced their residences to cinders so frequently that the Governor issued orders-no chimneys were to be put on any save brick or stone houses. The smithy burned down; luckily perishable items like bellows were rescued, as were the rest of the tools, but clearly the smithy would have to go high on the priority list of solid buildings. So too the bakehouses, one communal, the other devoted to baking bread for Sirius and Supply.

Ned Pugh from Gloucester Gaol presented himself to his old comrades. He had been sent to Friendship with his wife, Bess Parker, and their little girl, two years old when they landed in New South Wales. Within three weeks Bess and the child were dead of dysentery. Ned was so inconsolable that Hannah Smith, a convict who had become friendly with Bess between Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, took him under her wing. She had an eighteen-month-old son, who died at Sydney Cove on the 6th of June. Nine days later she and Ned Pugh married. Aside from lack of food they were prospering; Ned was a carpenter by trade and a good worker. A child was on the way and both prospective parents were determined to keep this one.

Maisie Harding, the cheerful giver of favors in Gloucester Gaol, had not been transported, though she was a fourteen-yearer reprieved from the noose; what had happened to her, no one knew. Whereas Betty Mason had come out on Friendship, pregnant yet again to her Gloucester gaoler. Her baby son died at sea out of Cape Town, and that plus her yearning for Johnny the gaoler had eroded her thought processes; she turned bitter and hard, was one of those who was occasionally lashed for stealing men’s shirts. Though Lizzie Morgan stoutly maintained that another convict woman had it in for her and victimized her.

In Richard’s hut all was well apart from perpetual hunger. Lizzie was so well known to at least half the men that they accepted her as a sister returned to the fold; the only one she could not charm was Taffy Edmunds, whose misogynistic tendencies worsened. He refused to be fussed or clucked over, did his own washing and mending, and came to life only on Sunday evenings, when the group lit a fire outside next to the fallow vegetable garden and he could sing counter to Richard’s baritone.

Richard and Lizzie had their own small room, added onto the basic structure, though they slept apart even through the coldest weather. On some nights when sleep was far away Lizzie would toy with the idea of making overtures, but never did. She was too afraid of rejection, preferred not to test the temperature of his affections and drives. Men were supposed to suffer powerfully from sexual deprivation, but among her ten men there were three who seemed to give the lie to this-Joey Long, Taffy Edmunds and her own Richard. She knew too from congress with the other women at the laundering place and around and about that Joey, Taffy and Richard were not unique; there were certainly some men who liked men, but there were others scattered here and there who elected to be monks, who had shut themselves away from sexual solace of any kind-even, she suspected, tossing off. If Richard tossed off, it was extremely silently and without moving. So she was afraid, too afraid to attempt anything he might dismiss her for.