Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Among the last things to come off her were several casks of tobacco and some crates of cheap Bristol soap. Though the soap did go into Government Stores for general distribution, the tobacco never saw the interior of a pipe bowl-much to the disgust of the seamen, who deemed a puff only slightly less desirable than a swig of rum. George Guest and Henry Hatheway, both from rural parts, went to Major Ross and informed him that in Gloucester gardens wives dealt with slugs, caterpillars and grubs by plundering their husbands’ tobacco. They steeped the leaves in boiling water, then sudsed the liquid with soap and sprinkled the concoction upon their vegetables. The first rain washed it away, but until that fell, wriggly pests turned up their noses and refused to eat such horrid-tasting food.

From that moment on, no one was allowed to throw away a single drop of soapy water. A small group of women was put to stewing the tobacco, which, experience revealed, retained its potency through several infusions. As for soap-why, it could be made just as it was made in poor farmhouses and cottages from one end of the British Isles to the other: fat and lye. Lard was the fat of the pig, and the settlement had plenty of it. To obtain lye was easy: soak the thoroughly burned ashes of unwanted potato, carrot, turnip and beet leaves, boil the mess down a little, and strain. The liquid part was lye. Watering cans were scarce, but a woman armed with a bucket of sudsed tobacco solution and a pewter dipper with holes punched in its bottom sprinkled the growing vegetables-and crops!-quite efficiently enough. To be ready for the next wave, the grub poison was stockpiled in empty rum pipes.

In such practical matters the Commandant shone. His mind had progressed from manufacturing salt, sausages and grub poison to whether he might use some of the sawdust in smokehouses instead of turning it all into the soil. What could not be salted down might perhaps be smoked, including fish. Owning a large work force, Ross was determined no member of it would be idle. The first step was to produce as much food as possible; the second step was to get as many of his charges as possible maintaining themselves without consuming Government food. This latter step was clearly the only justification for the whole Botany Bay experiment-what was the point of dumping thousands of convicts and guards at the far ends of the earth if the Government had to keep feeding them ad infinitum?

At which moment, Supply having gone two weeks earlier to bear the dreadful news about Sirius to His Excellency, the birds arrived on Mt. Pitt, a 1,000-foot sprawl at the northwestern end of the island. A very few days verified King’s report on these big petrels; they came in from the day’s fishing on dusk to waddle to their burrows, equipped with so little brain and so much ignorance of the ways of men that they allowed themselves to be captured without flight or resistance.

Paths were cut through the vine (coming to be called “Samson’s sinew” from its immense girth) up the flanks of the mountain from the new Cascade road, and work was finished in time for the bird catchers to set out in daylight of the first day, armed with sacks. Salt meat rations were cut to three pounds a week and the quantities of bread, rice, pease and oatmeal were halved. The Mt. Pitt bird would have to fill up the ration gaps.

Rum was reduced to a half-pint of very watery grog a day even for the officers, which did not worry Lieutenant Ralph Clark in the least; he was still able to trade his share of it for badly needed shirts, underdrawers, stockings and the like; hardly any of his property off Sirius had reached him, though he caught glimpses of it on some convict’s back. Nor had Major Ross got his property off Sirius, but he bore his losses with a great deal less whinging than Clark, a natural complainer.

Potatoes were issued whenever they were dug at the rate of a few between each dozen people, and harvested vegetables were shared equally. Perhaps because green vegetables owned so little substance-and especially because scurvy was nonexistent-there were always more than enough of them to go around; people would rather eat anything (except fish) than a huge bowl of spinach or runner beans.

It was going to be a long, desperate business. Supply, the Major knew, would not return. The thirty-four-year-old Channel tender would have to sail to the East Indies for food, else those at Port Jackson would certainly starve to death; those at Norfolk Island would probably not, but would be reduced to scratching a primitive living. And the great experiment would fail.

Robert Ross believed as ardently as Arthur Phillip that whatever perils and privations the future might hold, those people in his charge must not be permitted to sink below the Christian standards of any British community anywhere. Somehow morality, decency, literacy, technocracy and all the other virtues of proper European civilization must be preserved. Were they not, then those who did not actually die would be nothings. Where Ross differed from Phillip lay in the more abstract virtues of optimism and faith. Phillip was determined that the great experiment would succeed. Ross simply knew that all of it-the time, the money, the property, the pain-was utterly wasted, sucked into the maw of ignominy to leave no trace behind. Which conviction, rooted though it was, did not deter him in the slightest from exerting his every effort to deal with matters those posturing fools in London had not even taken into account while they listened to Sir Joseph Banks and Mr. James Maria Matra and drew up their fine Heads of a Plan. How easy it was to move human pawns on a global chessboard when the chair was comfortable, the stomach full, the fire warm and the port decanter bottomless.

The dietof Mt. Pitt bird brought no protests from anyone. Its flesh was dark and tasted slightly but not offensively fishy, it oozed very little fat when spitted or stewed, and at the beginning of this winter breeding every female bird carried an egg inside her. Once the feathers-easily plucked out-were removed, the body was not large, so one bird fed a child, two a woman, three a man, and four or five a glutton. The official catchers were instructed to bring down enough birds for smoking too. At first Ross tried to limit both the number of birds and the number of people let walk up the mountain in search of them. When Law Martial and the sight of Dring and Branagan after 500 lashes (administered in increments) did not deter people from venturing after this fantastic change from salt meat, fish and vegetables, Ross shrugged his shoulders and ceased trying to put a curb on bird-getting. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, head of Government Stores, began to record the figures as best he knew them: the catch crept up from 147 birds a day shortly into April to 1,890 a day one month later. Of these some were smoked, but the vast majority were thrown away uneaten; what all the bird catchers wanted to eat were the unlaid eggs and only the unlaid eggs. Clark himself was an unabashed egg fancier and great bird gatherer.

For Richard, who walked the five-mile round journey every other day and enjoyed his Mt. Pitt poultry very much, the arrival of the bird led to the temporary loss of his garden guard. John Lawrell was apprehended by the Law Martial patrol after curfew dragging a sack; when told to halt he tried to flee, got a musket butt on the head and was thrown into the guardhouse. A week later he was released, still nursing his aching pate, and given a dozen lashes with a medium cat.

“What on earth possessed ye, John?” Richard demanded at Turtle Bay, whence he had marched the moaning Lawrell as soon as his day’s work at the sawpits was done. “Sixty-eight birds!” He threw a dipper of salt water onto Lawrell’s back unsympathetically. “Will ye stand still, damn it? I would not need to do this if ye’d just get up the gumption to walk farther into the water and duck down.”