Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Stephen blinked. “D’ye dislike them so much, Richard?”

“I like some of them very well. It is the villains always spoil things-and for what? Can they never learn? Take poor Bryant. They have vowed to get him, you know, and they will.”

“As Superintendent of Convicts I will exert every effort to make sure they do not get him. Bryant has a very nice little wife and they love each other madly. Were anything to happen to him, she would become a lost soul.”

1789 wasnot coming in well. There had been intermittent rain and gales which ruined the rest of the barley, spoiled some casks of flour, made fishing impossible on most days, and life in the denuded collection of wooden huts a jeremiad of wet clothes, damp bedding, mold on precious books and precious shoes, summer colds, sick headaches and painful bones. Halfway through February the Commandant released Francis and Pickett from their storehouse and returned them to their huts free of manacles but heavily ironed on their legs. Of Supply there was no sign; the last ship to call had been Golden Grove, and that was now four months ago. Were they never going to see another ship? Had something happened to Supply? To Port Jackson?

Everybody was grumpy thanks to the foul weather, none grumpier than the Commandant, who was engineer enough to realize that he did not dare commence building a dam in the midst of such downpours, and had a crying baby in the house. Most of the work had to be postponed and too many people had little to do beyond grumble. The only truly happy persons were the three men at Ball Bay, snug under the pine trees in a good house, well provisioned, and able to rock fish no matter how hard it rained.

Even so, the 26th of February came as a mighty shock. Dawn arrived with high winds just to the south of east and seas so high that the surf broke all the way into the beaches of the lagoon. To Stephen and Richard, who walked as far out on Point Hunter as they dared, the sight of the coastline to the west was a terrifying vista of white water crashing down so hard and high against the cliffs that the spray soared up over 300 feet and blew inland as far as the mountain four miles away.

“God help us, we are in for the father of all gales!” Stephen shouted. “We had best be sure they are battening down the hatches!”

By the time they fought their way around Turtle Bay and turned to look back, not only had lofty Phillip Island disappeared; so also had Nepean Island, close in shore. The world was a seething mass of waves as big as those in the southern ocean on the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope, and the wind continued to rise even as it swung to the southeast, throwing the whole force of sea and sky straight at the settlement. Bent double in the blast, people were shooing pigs and poultry into the storehouses and huts, piling logs against their doors and climbing inside through their windows.

So huge were the noises of howling wind and thundering water that neither Richard nor Stephen noticed the shrieking groan of a 180-foot pine behind Turtle Bay as it lifted itself piecemeal out of the ground; they simply saw it fly, its massive roots and tapering top giving it the look of an arrow, thirty feet up in the air back toward the hills. More pines followed it, the bombardment of a fortress by an army of giants, the wind their bows, the pine trees their arrows, the white oaks their grapples.

Stephen struggled on down the row of huts making sure that all the hatches were battened; finding his own house door already bolstered by a pine log, Richard elected to stay outside, thankful that Joey and MacGregor were safe. As far as his own skin was concerned, he would far rather be out than in, blinded to his fate-horrifying thought! He sat on the ground with his back to the lee wall and the log to witness the cataclysm, massive pines and huge old white oaks flying to crash into the swamp, the hillsides, the lashing spray.

Then the rain came, so horizontal that Richard remained dry even as he looked upon the deluge. Thatched roofs farther down were lifting to blow away like umbrellas, but the vastest winds seemed to be thirty feet above the ground, which was what saved the settlement. That, and its lack of trees. Had Lieutenant King not ordered total visibility, the huts, store sheds and houses would have been buried together with those inside them.

It started at eight in the morning; it began to blow itself out at four in the afternoon. The huts in this middle section where Richard and Joey lived kept their roofs, as did the bigger houses, all shingled rather than thatched with flax.

But not until the next day-innocently balmy, the breeze a zephyr-did the sixty-four people of Norfolk Island see what havoc the hurricane had wreaked. Where the swamp had been was a tumbling river lapping around the flanks of the old garden hill; the ground everywhere was feet deep in pine branches, pine tails, bushes, sand, coral chunks, leaves; and the windward sides of the buildings were smothered in debris so blasted into the wood that it needed great effort to pull the debris off. There were literal fields of felled pines, their root systems so mighty, their tap roots so long, that imagination foundered at gauging the strength of those winds. Where they had grown were craters many feet deep, and looking up to where the forest had not yet been touched by any axe, the pine casualties were as numerous. Many hundreds of trees had come down just within sight of Sydney Town; three acres of recently cleared ground on the far side of the swamp were solidly covered with pines. Not fifty men cutting down trees every day for a month could have produced so much timber.

“This cannot be anything but a true freak of nature,” Lieutenant King said cheerily to his assembled family, even its serpents in a chastened mood. “Nowhere that I have been on this island have I seen any evidence that a hurricane like this has ever struck before, at least in the however many hundreds of years it takes for the pines to grow to two hundred feet. It has simply never happened.” His expression changed to something approaching a Wesleyan preacher in full fire-and-brimstone spate. “Why did it happen in this year? Those of ye who have transgressed should examine your souls. This is God’s work! God’s work! And if it is God’s work, ask yourselves why He has sent this visitation upon the first men ever to inhabit one of His most precious jewels? Pray for forgiveness, and do not transgress again! Next time God might choose to open up the earth and swallow ye whole!”

Brave words which actually sank in for several weeks after the event; then, as is the wont of men, the lesson was forgotten.

Lieutenant King had cause to wonder if perhaps his own hot temper was a contributing factor toward God’s tantrum; a tree killed his privately owned sow and her litter of piglets.

That the devastation was island-wide was evident in the logs and branches which dammed up the stream in Arthur’s Vale, carried down from the hills during the torrents of rain. Spring cleaning took days for the men, weeks for the women, who bore the brunt of it, and it was a full month before the lagoon turned from the red of washed-away soil to its customary aquamarine.

But when Supply arrived in the roads on the 2nd of March, Richard and his sawyers went back to work in the sawpits. The New South Wales settlement was still hungry for planks, scantlings and beams, not to mention ship’s spars. At least no one had to ply an axe; the timber was already on the ground, though of course much of it was old and rotten.

Among others, Supply brought an experienced sawyer, William Holmes- why did they have to be Williams? After the trees at Port Jackson, Holmes said, Norfolk Island’s pines were a mere nothing.

Aware that the Commandant was lusting after a third sawpit, Richard told Holmes to find three other men from among Supply’s new infusion of convict blood and take over the sawpit on the beach. A good man; he brought his wife, Rebecca, with him, and the pair settled quickly into community life. That left Bill Blackall and Will Marriner in charge of the Arthur’s Vale sawpit; while I, said Richard to himself with iron determination, take Private Wigfall, Sam Hussey and Harry Humphreys to the new third pit farther up the vale. It will be far more peaceful and I will ask Lieutenant King if I may build myself a good house nearby. Joey Long must fend for himself. All I will take are my books, my bed and feather bedding, half of our blankets and my own belongings. And one of MacGregor’s pups, since Mr. King is allowing Joey to take two of Delphinia’s five, the males. A good ratter up the vale will be a blessing.