Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“Aye, we are short on ceremony, but very glad to see some new faces,” said one of the rowers, a man in his fifties with a Devon drawl in his voice. “John Mortimer, late Charlotte.” He tilted his head at his opposite number. “My son, Noah.”

They did not look a bit like father and son. John Mortimer was a tall, fair, placid-looking man, whereas Noah Mortimer was short and dark-and rather self-opinionated, if his expression was anything to go by. It is a wise man knows his own father.

The coble, so called because it was clinker-built in the manner of a Scotch fishing dinghy, very flat-bottomed, glided across the reef without grazing itself and stroked the mere 150 yards across the lagoon to the straight beach, where some of the surviving members of the community stood waiting: six women, one-the oldest-big with child, and five men whose ages, if their faces reflected their years, varied between shaveling young and grizzled old.

“Nathaniel Lucas, carpenter,” said a man of thirty-odd, “and my wife, Olivia.”

An attractive and intelligent-looking couple.

“Eddy Garth and my wife, Susan,” said another fellow.

“I am Ann Innet, Lieutenant King’s housekeeper,” said the eldest female, one hand a little defensively on her swollen belly.

“Elizabeth Colley, Surgeon Jamison’s housekeeper.”

“Eliza Hipsley, farmer,” said a handsome, strapping girl, her arm protectively about another girl of the same age. “This is my best friend, Liz Lee. She farms too.”

Good, thought Richard, I know where I stand with that pair, as must any man of perception. Eliza Hipsley is terrified at the advent of so many new men, which means that she is not sure of Liz Lee. And Len Dyer, Tom Jones and their like will be hard on them. So he smiled at them in a way which told them that they had an ally. Oh, names! Out of the seventeen women Norfolk Island would now own, five were Elizabeths, three Anns, and two Marys.

Like several of the other men, the lone marine had not bothered to introduce himself. “Lieutenant King has ordered us to work now,” said Richard to him. “Could I trouble you to show us the sawpit?”

Lieutenant King’sresidence, somewhat larger than the others, stood on a small knoll directly behind the blue-and-yellow landing flag; a Union flag on a second staff closer to the house lay with equal limpness down its mast. The gubernatorial mansion probably contained three small rooms and one attic; no doubt the shed at its rear was its kitchen. There seemed to be a communal oven and cooking area, a smithy, a few buildings which looked as if they stored supplies, each about ten feet by eight, if that. On another rise to the east were extensive cultivated gardens to which all the women, including Ann Innet, were hurrying. And between the two hillocks, among the pines, stood fourteen huts of wooden planks, each very well thatched with some kind of tough, strappy plant; the walls facing the ocean were blank, indicating that their doors looked inland.

The sawpit was close to the beach at the end of a cleared path free of stumps which ran back into the pines; the area around it had also been cleared to make room for dozens of twelve-foot logs, the smallest five feet in diameter. Though he badly wanted to stop to inspect these gargantuan trees he was supposed to reduce to beams and boards, Richard dared not; King’s orders were specific and the marine, who had grudgingly admitted that his name was Heritage, did not look the kind to be nice to felons.

Somehow he and his inexperienced little band had to produce enough sawn timber to fill Golden Grove’s holds, he presumed within the space of ten to fourteen days. Two small mast logs and what appeared to be a spar had already been prepared and lay to one side, together with a stack of planks. The mast logs and the spar were probably for one of the ships left at Port Jackson.

The sawpit itself was lined with boards to prevent its walls crumbling; it was seven feet deep, eight feet wide and fifteen feet long. Two squared-off beams were mounted across it at five-foot intervals, with rocky rubble banked against the ends of the beams to form sloping ramps. A log minus bark had already been rolled up onto the beams, lying wedged and supported on them lengthwise above the pit, but no one was working and he could see no one in attendance. He found five pit saws varying between eight and fourteen feet in length lying in the bottom of the pit covered with an old sail.

Along came Nathaniel Lucas.

“This is the worst air for iron and steel tools I have ever encountered,” he said, dropping into the pit as Richard uncovered the saws. “We cannot keep the wretched things free of rust.”

“They are also horribly blunted,” said Richard, running the ball of his thumb along one large, wickedly notched tooth. He grimaced. “Whoever sharpened this saw seems to think that the blade bevel goes in the same direction from tooth to tooth instead of in opposite directions. Christ! It will take hours and hours to rectify that, let alone get an edge on the thing. Is there anybody here can teach Blackall, Humphreys and Marriner how to saw?”

“I can teach,” said Lucas, a very slight and small man, “but I have not the strength for the pull. I understand what you are saying-you will have to sharpen because that must be done first.”

Richard found a ten-foot saw with reasonably sharp teeth. “This is the best of a bad lot-Nat, or Nathaniel?”

“Nat. Are you Richard or Dick?”

“Richard.” He looked up at the sun. “We will have to get a shelter over the pit as soon as possible. The sun is much stronger here than in Port Jackson.”

“It is more overhead by four degrees of latitude.”

“However, a shelter will have to wait until after Golden Grove departs.” Richard sighed. “That means hats and a good supply of drinking water. Is there some place Joey can take our belongings before we start? I had best stay here and start sharpening.” He sat himself down in the bottom of the sawpit against its eastern edge, still shaded, crossed his legs under him and pulled a twelve-foot saw onto his lap. “Joey, pass down my tool box and then go with Nat, like a good fellow. You others put your things away too, then straight back here.”

All of which means that I am once more a head man in charge of men who cannot function without constant direction.

The most popular saw was obviously the twelve-footer; staring up at the log, over five feet in diameter, Richard fully understood why. There were two twelve-footers, one fourteen-footer, one ten-footer and an eight-footer. In another pile beneath the old canvas lay a dozen hand saws also in desperate need of sharpening.

He wrapped his right hand in a bandage of rags, picked up a coarse, flat file wider than the tooth, laid it against the metal at the slight angle necessary to “set” the cutting bevel and drew it downward, always stroking toward the edge of the blade. After the coarse filing of the first section of saw was done, he fine-filed it, then shifted the saw along his lap to come at the next section. When it was all done he would have to remove the rust.

Above him, a little later, he could hear Nat Lucas explaining the saw to Bill Blackall, deputed to work on top of the log, and Willy Marriner, who was to be the bottom man.

“Each tooth is angled in the opposite direction,” Nat was saying, “so that the cut is wide enough to allow the body of the blade to pass easily through the timber. If the teeth were all angled the same way, the body of the blade would be wider and would jam. In due time ye’ll learn to saw by eye, but to begin with I’ll give ye a cord line to saw against. Norfolk pine has to be debarked because the bark oozes resin and would stick the saw in the cut better than glue after two rips. For your first cut ye start on the outside of the log at one side, making your second cut the outside of the log on the other side. Then, alternating sides, ye work inward an inch at a time to make inch-thick sheets until ye get to the heartwood, which ye’ll saw for two-inch-wide scantlings at first, then four inches wide and finally six inches wide for beams. ’Tis only on the pull upward-the rip-that the saw cuts, and the man on top is in control. Because he bends and pulls from a crouch upward some two feet-more if he is really strong-his is harder work. On the other hand, the man underneath in the pit gets a face full of sawdust. He returns the saw down by pulling from chest level to groin, farther if the man on top is one of those strong enough to rip up on a three-foot pull.”