Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Things became complicated when Lieutenant Furzer refused to accept the Wallace look-alike because he looked so Scotch (though he did not say that-it was Christmas, after all).

“What shall we do with him?” asked Shairp.

“Esmeralda and his bum boy Clark?” asked Johnstone.

The entire quarterdeck sneered.

“Then I have a mind to give young MacGregor to the prison for Christmas. No convict has a dog,” said Shairp.

The entire quarterdeck thought this an excellent idea, worth toasting in a postprandial amalgam of port and rum.

On Christmas Day the two marine parents appeared in the prison as soon as dinner was finished, Shairp carrying little MacGregor. Both officers were falling-down drunk, though that was not an occurrence peculiar to the festive season. No one ever got any sense out of a marine officer after dinner time on any ship save Friendship, where the lemonade-sipping Ralph Clark used his rum ration to trade to carpenters for writing cases and bureaus, and convicts for tailoring everything from shirts to gloves.

The lots for MacGregor were cast using four decks of cards: those who drew an Ace of Diamonds were in the running. To whoops and cheers, three men showed an Ace of Diamonds. Shairp, sitting on the table, then asked for three straws, though he was so drunk that Johnstone had to wrap his hand around them snugly.

“Long straw wins!” cried Shairp.

Joey Long drew it, weeping in delight.

“The long straw to Long!” Shairp was so amused that he fell off the table and had to be helped tenderly to his feet by Richard and Will, while Joey took the wriggling scrap and covered it in kisses.

“We will keep him with his mama until we get to Botany Bay,” caroled Johnstone. “Once ashore, MacGregor is yours.”

God could not have been kinder, thought Richard as he drifted into a rummy sleep, for once not consumed with a desire to get up on deck. Since Ike died, poor simple Joey has had no purpose. Now he has a dog to love. God has emancipated one of my dependents. I pray the others are as fortunate. Once we leave these confines it will be much harder to keep together.

The paceincreased to over 207 land miles a day until the end of December; the weather was as foul as it could be-heavy seas, squalls, howling gales. At south of 43° the winds really roared.

1788 arrived in filthy weather with the wind against; the New Year storms blew on the bow as the latitude crept up to 44°. Then along came a breeze so fair that it shoved the three ships along at 219 miles a day. As the southern capes of Van Diemen’s Land were expected at any time, Lieutenant Shortland signaled that cables were to be put to anchors just in case. The gale increased and Friendship lost her fore topmast studding sail boom and rent the canvas to pieces, but still no land.

Afraid of reefs and uncharted rocks, at seven in the evening of the 4th of January, Shortland ordered the ships to stand to. Next morning came the long awaited cry: “Land ahoy!” There it was! The southernmost tip of New South Wales! A massive cliff.

Once around the southeast cape their course altered radically from east to north by northeast; the last 1,000 miles to Botany Bay were the most frustrating of the whole voyage, so near and yet so far. The winds were against, the currents were against, everything was against. On some days the three ships ended miles south of yesterday’s position, on other days they stood and tacked, stood and tacked what seemed eternally. Then there were days when the winds were, as the sailors put it, “horrible hard-hearted.” One night Friendship split her fore top main stay sail, followed by her peak halyard in the morning. They would inch up to 39°, fall back to 42°. Friendship’s main stay sail split to shreds-her fifth sail disaster since Cape Town. They battled to make any kind of headway.

Though this lack of progress did not dampen the spirits of the convicts the way it did those of the ships’ navigators, lack of palatable food had much the same effect. There were brief glimpses of New South Wales, too far away to gauge what sort of land it was. Luckily a new delight arrived; countless seals frisked and frolicked around the ships, absolute clowns as they floated with their flippers on their chests, dived, twisted, huffed and snuffled. Gorgeous, jolly creatures. And where they were, so too were hordes of fish. Chowder appeared on the menu again.

By the 15th of January they had struggled north to 36°and at noon saw Cape Dromedary, which Captain Cook had named for its resemblance to the Ship of the Desert.

“Only a hundred and fifty miles to go,” said Donovan, off his watch and ready to fish.

Will Connelly sighed; the weather was so hot, albeit cloudy, that he could not settle to read, had elected to fish instead. “I am beginning to believe, Mr. Donovan,” he said, “that we will never get to Botany Bay. Four more men have died since Christmas Eve and all of us below know why. Not fever or dysentery. Just despair, homesickness, hopelessness. Most of us have been in this terrible ship for over a year now-we boarded her on the sixth of January last year. Last year! What an odd thing to say. So they died, I believe, because they had passed the point where they could credit that a day would dawn when they were not in this terrible ship. A hundred and fifty miles, ye say. They may as well be ten thousand. If this year has taught us nothing else, it has shown us how far it is to the end of the world. And how far away is home.”

Donovan’s mouth tightened; he blinked rapidly. “The miles will pass,” he said eventually, eyes riveted on his line, floating from a small piece of cork. “Captain Cook warned of this counter current, but we are making headway. What we need is a fair breeze out of the southeast, and we will get it. A sea change is coming. First a storm, then a wind out of the southeast. I am right.”

They tacked and stood, tacked and stood. The seals were gone, replaced by thousands of porpoises. Then, after a suffocatingly hot and humid day, the heavens erupted. Red lightning of a ferocity and brilliance beyond English imagination empurpled clouds blacker than Bristol smoke, cracked with deafening thunder; and it began to rain a wall of solid water, so hard that it fell straight down despite a wildly blowing northwest wind. At an hour before midnight, with dramatic suddenness, the show was over. Along came a beautiful fair breeze out of the southeast which lasted long enough to see white cliffs, trees, yellow cliffs, trees, curving golden beaches, and the low, nuggety jaws of Botany Bay.

At nine in the morning of the 19th of January, 1788, Alexander led her two companions between Point Solander and Cape Banks into the reaches of a wide, poorly sheltered bay. Perhaps fifty or sixty naked black men stood gesticulating on either headland, and there at rest on the bosom of choppy steely water was Supply. She had beaten them by a single day.

Alexander hadsailed 17,300 land miles [4]in 251 days, which amounted to 36 weeks. She had spent 68 of those days in port and 183 of them at sea. All told, 225 convicts had sampled her, some for a single day; 177 arrived.

The anchorsdown and Lieutenant Shortland gone in the jollyboat to Supply to see Governor Phillip, Richard stood alone at the rail and gazed for a long time at the place to which, by an Imperial Order-in-Council, he had been transported until the 23rd of March, 1792. Four years into the future. He had turned nine-and-thirty in the south Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.

The land he surveyed was flat along the foreshores, slightly hilly farther away to north and south, and it was a drab, sad vista of blue, brown, fawn, grey and olive. Blighted, juiceless.

“What d’ye see, Richard?” asked Stephen Donovan.