Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Captain Duncan Sinclair had a furious quarrel with the agent for the contractor, Mr. Zachariah Clark, and rejected the first shipment of newly baked hard bread as rubbishy sawdust. He was busy loading as many animals as his decks could carry, mostly sheep and pigs, half of which were Publick Sheep and Publick Swine, and had to be preserved for Government use at Botany Bay. Chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys went on as well; the poop looked like a farmyard, as did what was left of the quarterdeck; Sinclair’s view forward from his roundhouse now consisted of woolly bottoms. Bales of hay and sacks of fodder were stored under the lower platforms in the prison, leaving scant space for night buckets and the additional belongings many of the convicts had evicted from their cots to make extra room for sleeping. The thieves among them were well known by this time; it was an easy matter for a deputation to visit each of the light-fingered ones until property was retrieved. Most thefts were of food caches and rum illicitly purchased through Sergeant Knight, in great trouble for it thanks to a marine private snitch. Even after so many months at sea, there were those who would almost kill to obtain rum.

None of the Brazilian parrots had survived, but Wallace the Scotch terrier and Lieutenant John Johnstone’s bulldog bitch, Sophia, remained. She was pregnant, apparently by Wallace (Shairp thought it exquisitely funny), and everybody on board was dying to see what the progeny would be like. Rodney the cat’s family had been reduced by gifts of catlings to other ships, but he and it were waxing fat.

When the at-sea provisions started to arrive at the end of the first week in November, Captain Sinclair had the crew scrub that part of Alexander’s hull not sheathed in copper. Inspired by this activity, Surgeon Balmain ordered a fumigation, scrub and whitewash below deck, marines’ steerage as well as the prison. His head was full of the delightful excursions he had taken out of the town to the foothills, choked with the glory of exotic bushes and shrubs in profligate spring flower-and what strange blossoms! Many of them looked like pastel-colored astrakhan mounds framed by giant petals.

“I knew there was something I meant to ask Mr. Donovan to do in Cape Town,” said Richard, savagely slapping a paint brush. “Tell all the vendors of whitewash that our surgeon was not authorized to buy an ounce of the stuff!”

The fleet left that shippy harbor on the 12th of November as a Yankey merchantman from Boston sailed in; its crew crowded to gape, never having witnessed such a mass exodus from any port. Port had occupied thirty days, and every ship was crammed full. The women convicts had been moved off Friendship to make room for sheep and a few cattle; Lady Penrhyn carried a stallion, two mares and a colt for the use of the Governor; other ships held more horses and cattle; there were sheep, pigs and poultry everywhere, and water was looming as a huge problem. A great deal of attention was paid to the accommodation of the horses, which could not be permitted to lie down or move more than a couple of inches in any direction; a horse with sufficient space to be tipped off balance was a dead one. Cattle too were pampered as much as possible.

That lastleg commenced exactly as Stephen Donovan had said it would. Every wind as well as the current ran against the fleet. Nor did they do so modestly; minor gales blew and whipped up heavy seas. The susceptible became seasick all over again. Finally the Commodore ordered the fleet into Sirius’s wake, and there the eleven ships remained while Captain John Hunter, master of Sirius, strove fruitlessly to find a favorable wind. The gales died a day later and the agony of standing and tacking began, never with much if any good results.

In thirteen long days they had managed to get a mere 249 miles southeast of the Cape. Water was back to three pints a day, which every soul aboard every ship found intolerable; four pints were not enough. Alexander’s lieutenants groaned at this order, to be policed as in earlier periods of rationing, which turned it into a proper business. Sergeant Knight had been suspended from duty indefinitely, which meant the lieutenants had to rely upon three very mediocre corporals to do water duty with them while Knight, not at all dismayed by his suspension, lay in his hammock and snoozed on the rum he was buying from Esmeralda against his marine pay. Major Ross had thought that suspension without pay would curb Knight’s activities, but he had no idea how much money Knight had made on the voyage selling rum to men like Tommy Crowder.

Whales abounded. The fascinated convicts spent hours on deck during those first two weeks, trying to count them. The ocean looked as if it had been strewn with boulders spouting fountains, for they were mostly spermaceti whales. A new kind of porpoise appeared, very large and blunt-snouted; some sailors called them “grampuses,” though there was some debate as to what exactly was a grampus. The sharks were so big that they sometimes attacked a small whale, leaping out of the sea to crash with open jaws on the whale’s head, leaving gaping, bleeding craters behind. If they were thresher sharks they also used the long blade uppermost on their tails to cut and slash. On one unforgettable moonlit night, as restless as he was sleepless, Richard saw a titanic battle go on in the midst of the silver sea between a whale and what he swore had to be a giant cuttlefish, its tentacles wrapped around the whale’s body. Then the whale sounded and bore its foe down into the depths. Who knew what might lurk in a realm where leviathans were eighty feet long and sharks close to thirty?

Rumors beganto fly that Governor Phillip intended to split the fleet, take two or three ships and go on ahead as rapidly as he could, leaving the laggards to come on behind. Charlotte and Lady Penrhyn were hopeless, the storeships tended to be slow, and Sirius was a bit of a slug too. The navigators had tried every way they knew to find a favorable wind, including having all vessels stand facing in different directions, with no success.

Two weeks at sea, and they had a little luck at last, found a good fair breeze and surged southeast in company at eight knots an hour. The seas were so enormous, however, that Lady Penrhyn-carrying Phillip’s precious horses-first stood over on her side far enough to dunk the gunwale and the ends of the spars under, then was pooped when a massive wave crashed down on her stern and ran right through the ship. She took on so much water that all hands were put to the pumps and baling buckets. But the horses had not suffered at all, nor had the cattle.

Then the wind swung against once more. Bowing to the inevitable, Governor Phillip decided to separate the fleet. He would remove himself to Supply and take Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship with him, while Captain Hunter on Sirius took command of the seven slower ships. Supply would forge on ahead alone; Lieutenant John Shortland, the naval agent, would board Alexander and command Scarborough and Friendship from her, keeping those three vessels together.

This decision of the Governor’s was not without its critics. Many of the naval, marine and medical officers felt that Phillip should have split the fleet after Rio de Janeiro if he intended to split it at all. A course that was not in Phillip’s nature, thought Richard, overhearing Johnstone and Shairp grizzling because they would now have to share their quarterdeck heaven. Phillip was a mother hen who hated the idea of abandoning any of his chicks. Oh, how he would worry! His segment carried the bulk of the male convicts, who could be put to work at Botany Bay without the chaos of women and children; he estimated that this first segment would make harbor at least two weeks before Hunter’s segment arrived.