Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Above and beyond the differences natural in a group of almost forty men unable to escape from each other’s company, the marines were very unhappy. Moving up into steerage should have mollified them, but it did not. Oh, it was a great deal more comfortable to occupy that peculiarly shaped space wherein the ceiling was far larger than the floor, admittedly. But the tiller came inboard along the ceiling-and groaned-and screeched-and clattered hollowly-and occasionally walloped a body swinging aloft in his canvas nest when the helmsman swung the wheel hard over just as the sea was running the wrong way. They had air and light from several ports, the stink was not unbearable, and the crew had been decent enough to leave steerage relatively clean.

Yet what they did not have far outclassed all of these improvements: they were not getting their full half-pint of rum every day. Captain Duncan Sinclair, in whose purlieu the liquor lay, had taken it upon himself to water the rum down to what was known as “grog.” There had been a furious outcry about it before Alexander left Portsmouth and for a few days thereafter the rum was served the way it was supposed to be served-neat. Now they were back on watery grog, had been since the Scillies. No dreamless sleeps despite the tiller, and definitely no kindly thoughts. On board ship rum was the beginning and end of all earthly pleasures to a sailor or a marine, and now both kinds of seafaring man were on grog. The hatred for Sinclair among crew and marines was as immense as it was intense. Not that Sinclair cared, dwelling on high in a roundhouse he had turned into a fortress. A little further into the voyage he intended to start selling the rum he was currently hoarding. If the bastards wanted a full half-pint of neat rum, then they could pay for it. He had to pay for his roundhouse, as he knew perfectly well that the Admiralty would not.

Now, with port in Santa Cruz attained, was the prospect of going ashore to find as much rum as a marine could drink-and Major Ross issued orders that no marine was to have much shore leave! Lieutenant Johnstone had informed them in his languid voice that a full guard would have to be mounted during daylight hours, as Governor Phillip did not want the convicts confined below decks interminably. Further to that, Johnstone announced, Governor Phillip and his aide-de-camp Lieutenant King were expected to come aboard at some unpredicted time while at Teneriffe. So woe betide the marine whose choking black leather stock was not properly fastened around his neck or whose knee-length black leather spatterdashes were not properly buttoned. The ship was stuffed with the most desperate criminals, said Lieutenant Johnstone with a weary wave of his hand, and Teneriffe was not far enough away from England to relax. Sergeant Knight, facing court martial over his grog protests, was not a happy man. Nor were his underlings.

To make matters worse on Alexander, the ship had not inherited one of the senior officers. Now that they were deliciously tucked into cabins on the quarterdeck, Lieutenants Johnstone and Shairp were not in any way dependent upon their subordinates for any of their creature comforts. They had servants (officers’ servants were always crawlers) and a galley of their own, the chance to keep their own livestock on board to supplement their table, and the use of a ship’s boat if they felt like visiting friends on one of the other transports while Alexander was at sea. What the privates, drummers, corporals and lone sergeant had not taken into account was the remorseless nature of their task, to feed and guard nearly 200 felons. Port, they had been sure, would see the felons locked up. Now they discovered that this lunatic governor insisted the felons have freedom of the deck even in port!

Of course the rum came on board the moment the crew was set at liberty, the marines having contributed to a pool which ensured that, shipbound or no, they would still be able to moisten their parched throats with something stronger than Sinclair’s fucken grog. Luck served them another good turn when, late in the afternoon of the 4th of June, Alexander was the first ship Governor Phillip and his party boarded to inspect. Captain Sinclair actually waddled out of his roundhouse to converse politely with the Governor while the convicts were lined up on deck under the eyes of the marines on duty, eyes bloodshot and breath reeking, but leather stocks and spatterdashes perfect.

“It is a tragedy,” said Phillip, walking around the prison, “that we cannot afford better accommodation for these fellows. I see fourteen too sick to parade and I doubt there is room for more than forty men at a time to get a little exercise in these aisles. Which is why they must be given as much freedom of the deck as is possible. If ye have trouble,” he said to Major Robert Ross and the two Alexander lieutenants, “double-iron the offenders for a few days, then see how they go.”

Lined up with the other convicts on deck wherever there was space to stand, Richard found himself looking at a man who could have been Senhor Tomas Habitas’s brother. Governor Phillip had a long, curved, beaky nose, two vertical worry lines hedging in the bridge of that nose, a full and sensuous mouth, and a balding dome of head; he wore his own hair, curled into rolls above his ears and confined in a queue on the back of his neck. Richard remembered that Jem Thistlethwaite had said that the Governor’s father, Jacob Phillip the language teacher from Frankfurt, had fled Lutheran-inspired persecution of German Jews. His mother was respectably English, but her relative Lord Pembroke had not seen fit to assist the promising young man educationally or financially, nor had he given Arthur Phillip a push up the naval ladder. All done the hard way, including a long stint in the Portuguese navy-yet another link with Senhor Habitas. As he stood there understanding that this was as close as he would ever get to His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales, Richard felt oddly comforted.

Phillip’s aide-de-camp and protégé, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, was still in his twenties. An Englishman who probably had quite a lot of Celt in him, judging by the way he talked constantly and enthusiastically. The English showed in his meticulous recounting of facts, figures, statistics as the party toured the deck. Major Ross clearly despised him as full of waffle.

Thus it was Tuesday before the convicts had the leisure to look at Santa Cruz and what parts of Teneriffe their moorings in the harbor revealed. They had been fed that midday with fresh goat’s meat, boiled pumpkin, peculiar but edible bread and big, raw, juicy onions. Neither vegetable found favor with many, but Richard ate his onion as if it were an apple, crunching into it and letting the juice run down his chin to join the tears its vapors produced in abundance.

The town was small, treeless and very tired and the land around it was precipitous, dry, inhospitable. Of the mountain Richard had so hoped to see after reading about it, nothing was visible above a layer of grey cloud which seemed to hang over the island only; the sky out to sea was blue. Teneriffe had a lid jammed upon it like the hat on a donkey he saw near the stone jetty, the first truly novel impression he had of a non-English world. Bum boats either did not exist or were turned back by the longboats patrolling the area where the transports were all moored together. Alexander lay between two anchor cables suspended taut from the sea bed by floating kegs; because, one of the more sober sailors explained to him, the harbor bottom was littered with sharp chunks of iron the Spanish (who brought it out as ballast) simply dumped into the water as they took on cargo. If the cables were not kept taut, the iron tended to fray them.

They had chosen a good time of year to arrive, he learned from another sailor who had been here several times; the air was warm but neither hot nor humid. October was the most unendurable month, but from July to November hideous winds blew as hot as a furnace from Africa, and carried on them a wealth of stinging sand. But Africa was several hundred miles away! A place, he had always believed, of steaming jungles. Obviously not at this latitude, which was fairly close to the place where Atlas held the world up on his broad shoulders. Yes, he remembered, the deserts of Libya went all the way to Africa’s west coast.