Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

Others were building around them with varying degrees of success. No one had any real enthusiasm for the task, but it was easy to see by the middle of that second day ashore which groups were either well led or had a mind for construction, and those owning neither. Tommy Crowder’s lot had started to wall their hut with a palisade of very thin saplings, an idea Richard resolved to imitate. Education and broader experience definitely showed; the Londoner Crowder had had a very checkered career and was besides a clever man.

There were a few marines around and about now, checking progress and counting heads; some convicts had absconded into the forest, including a woman named Ann Smith. Probably headed for Botany Bay and the French ships, which gossip said were staying a few days.

“Christ, what a place for ants and spiders!” said Jimmy Price, sucking at the edge of his hand. “That bugger of an ant bit me, and it hurts. Look at the size of the things! They are half an inch long and ye can see their nippers.” He cast a splendid, white-skinned tree a glance of loathing. “And what is it that deafens us with its-its croaking? My ears are ringing.”

His complaints about the croaking were as justified as about the ants; it was a good year for cicadas.

Billy Earl came through the trees white-faced and shaking. “I just saw a snake!” he gasped. “Christ, the thing was taller than Ike Rogers in his boots! Thick around as my arm! And there are huge fierce alligators on the other side of the cove, so Tommy Crowder told me. Oh, I hate this place!”

“We will get used to the creatures,” Richard soothed. “I’ve not heard that anybody has been bitten or eaten by anything bigger than an ant, even if the ant is the size of a beetle. The alligators are giant lizards, I saw one run up a tree.”

The house was finished by mid afternoon of that humid, torrid day full of surprises and terrors. The sun went in and the clouds began to pile up in the skies to the south of them. Black and dark blue, with faint flickers of lightning. They had built the hut in the lee of a large sandstone rock that had a little pocket in its under side, as if scooped out by a spoon.

“I think,” said Richard, looking at the approaching storm, “that we ought to put our belongings under our rock just in case. These palm fronds will not keep rain out.”

The tempest arrived an hour later with greater ferocity than that one at sea off Cape Dromedary, and more terrifying by far; every one of its colossal, brilliant bolts came straight to earth amid the trees. No wonder so many of them were split and blackened! Lightning. Not thirty feet in front of where they huddled, a huge tree with a satiny vermilion skin exploded in a cataclysm of blinding blue fire, sparks and thunder; it literally disintegrated, then burned fiercely. But not for long. The rain came in a cold, howling wind to put it out and wreck their palm-frond thatching within a single minute. The ground turned to a sea and the thick, hurtful rods pelted down, soaked them to the point of drowning. That night they slept amid the frame of their hut with chattering teeth, their only consolation the fact that their belongings were safe and dry under the rock ledge.

“We have to have better tools and something to hold our house together,” said Will Connelly in the morning, close to tears.

Time, thought Richard, to seek a higher authority than Furzer, who could not organize himself to save himself. I do not care if convicts are forbidden to approach those in authority-I am going to do just that.

He walked off in the cool air, pleased to see that the ground was so sandy it was incapable of turning to mud. When he reached the stream at the place where the marines had put three stones across it as a ford, he caught a glimpse of naked black bodies farther up the brook, smelled a strong odor of rotting fish. Not his imagination, then; he had been told that the Indians stank of a fish oil quite the equal of Bristol mud. When they came no closer he skipped across the stepping stones and turned to walk into the bigger settlement on the western side of the cove, where most of the male convicts were already encamped and all the female convicts would be located (the women were still being landed, a few at a time). There also stood the hospital tent, the marines’ tents, the marquees of the marine officers, and Major Ross’s marquee. On this side of the cove, he noted, the convicts lived in tents. Which simply meant that not enough tents had been put on the ships. Thus he and the rest of the last 100 male convicts had been relegated to the eastern side under whatever kind of shelter they could manufacture, out of sight and out of mind.

“May I see Major Ross?” he asked the marine sentry on duty outside the big round marquee.

The marine, a stranger to Richard, looked him up and down in contempt. “No,” he said.

“It is a matter of some urgency,” Richard persisted.

“The Lieutenant-Governor is too busy to see the likes of you.”

“Then may I wait until he has a free moment?”

“No. Now piss off-what’s your name?”

“Richard Morgan, number two-ought-three, Alexander.”

“Send him in,” said a voice from inside.

Richard entered a space fairly well lighted by open flaps on all sides, and having a wooden plank floor. An interior curtain divided it into an office and what were probably the Major’s living quarters. He was there at a folding table which served him as a desk and, typically, alone. Ross despised his subordinate officers quite as much as he did his enlisted men, yet defended the rights, entitlements and dignity of the Marine Corps against all Royal Navy comers. He considered Governor Arthur Phillip an impractical fool and deplored lenience.

“What is it, Morgan?”

“I am on the east side, sir, and would discuss that with ye.”

“A complaint, is it?”

“Nay, sir, merely a few requests,” said Richard, looking him straight in the eye and conscious that he must be one of the very few persons at Port Jackson who rather liked the picturesque Major.

“What requests?”

“We have nothing to build our shelters with, sir, apart from a few hatchets. Most of us have managed to get up some sort of frame, but we cannot thatch with palm fronds unless we have twine to tie them down. We would happily dispense with nails, but we have no instruments to bore holes, or saw, or hammer. The work would go faster if we had at least some tools.”

The Major rose to his feet. “I need a walk. Come with me,” he said curtly. “Ye have,” he went on as he preceded Richard out of the marquee, “a level head, I noted it in the matter of Alexander’s pumps and bilges. Ye’re a no-nonsense man and ye don’t pity yourself one wee bit. If we had more like ye and less like the scum of every Newgate in England, this settlement might have worked.”

From which Richard gathered, walking at the Major’s rapid pace, that the Lieutenant-Governor had no faith in this experiment. They passed the bachelor marine encampment and approached the four round marquees in which the marine officers dwelled. Lieutenant Shairp was sitting in the shade of an awning outside Captain James Meredith’s dwelling in the company of the Captain, drinking tea out of a fine china cup. On sight of the Major they rose to their feet, but in a manner which suggested that they actively disliked their outspoken, salty commandant. Well, everybody knew that, including the felons; fueled by rum and port, the divisions in the ranks of the officers led to quarrels, courts martial and, always, opposition to Ross. Who had his supporters in some circumstances, however.

“Are the sawpits under construction?” asked the Major frostily.

Meredith waved in a direction behind him. “Yes, sir.”