Men like poor, timid John Allen and Sam Hussey were distinctly peculiar, twitched or muttered or stayed too long in one position. The real villains were outstanding ones—Will Francis, Josh Peck, Len Dyer and Sam Pickett. Some were married and had been allowed to bring their wives, in every case because one or the other or both were odd—John Anderson and Liz Bruce; the fanatical Catholics John Bryant and Ann Coombes; John Price and Rachel Early; James Davis and Martha Burkitt.
Sergeant Thomas Smyth, Corporal John Gowen and four privates of marines made up the guard detachment, though guard on Golden Grove was so relaxed a business that Private Sammy King was able to commence a touching and passionate affair with Mary Rolt, one of the peculiarities (she conducted whole conversations with herself). A temporary aberration, it seemed, for after she and the Private became lovers her imaginary dialogues stopped completely. A sea voyage, Richard mused, could indeed be highly beneficial.
For him it had commenced badly; Len Dyer and Tom Jones lay in wait for him below to teach him how they felt about convicts who not only hobnobbed with free men but with Miss Molly free men into the bargain.
“Oh, grow up!” he said wearily, not backing down. “I can take both of ye with one hand tied behind me.”
“How about six of us?” asked Dyer, beckoning.
Suddenly there was MacGregor, snapping and snarling; Dyer aimed a foot at him, caught him on the hind leg just as Golden Grove heeled hard over. The rest of it happened very quickly as Joey Long hurled himself into the fray and three of the six attackers lost interest in anything but their rising gorges. Richard put a shod toe into Dyer’s backside right behind his testicles, Joey climbed on Jones’s back and started biting and scratching, and MacGregor, uninjured, sank his teeth into Josh Peck’s heel tendon. Francis, Pickett and Richardson were busy vomiting, which came in very handy; Richard finished the fight by rubbing Dyer’s face in spattered deck and putting all his weight into kicking Jones and Peck in the groin.
“I fight dirty,” he said, panting, “so do not lie in wait for me again. Otherwise ye’ll never sire children.”
It was politic, however, he decided after making sure that Joey and MacGregor were all right, to shift themselves and their stuff up on deck. If it rained they would shelter under a boat.
“I hope,” he said to Stephen Donovan later, “that ye can handle yourself, Mr. Donovan. Tom Jones and Len Dyer do not care for Miss Mollies. Ye’ll be supervising them, not to mention Peck, Pickett and Francis. Though the last man is their leader, he let Dyer do the job. Therefore he is dangerous.”
“I thank ye for the warning, Richard.” Donovan studied him thoughtfully. “No black eyes or bruises that I can see.”
“I kicked them in the balls. Seasickness,” Richard grinned, “was a great help. My luck held, you see. Just as they rushed me Golden Grove found a wind and some of the stomachs revolted.”
“ ’Tis true, Richard, ye do have luck. It seems odd to say that of a man unlucky enough to have gone down for something he did not do, yet ye do have luck.”
“Morgan’s run,” said Richard, nodding. “Luck runs.”
“Ye have had your runs of bad luck too.”
“In Bristol, aye. As a convict I have had very good luck.”
Lord Howe Island marked a kind of halfway point, and save for the day they spent in its vicinity the weather was glorious. That meant the ship’s company never saw this magical island of turtles, palm trees and soaring peaks, 500 miles east of the coast of New South Wales. They ploughed onward, another 600 miles to go.
This was Richard’s first venture into the mightiest of all seas, the Pacific, which he had thought to find no different from the King’s herring pond, or that unnamed monster of an ocean south of whatever lay between New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land. But the Pacific was different; it must, he decided, leaning for hour after hour over the rail looking into illimitable distances, be unfathomably deep. Seen close up as the tremendous yet tranquil swell cradled Golden Grove, its waves were a luminous ultramarine shot with pure purple. Of fish they caught none, though of denizens there were plenty—huge turtles skimmed along, porpoises leaped. Massive sharks cruised by scornfully ignoring the baited lines, their dorsal fins three feet clear of the water, their length terrifying. A sea of giant sharks rather than whales. Until the day when they were surrounded by leviathans, voyaging south to summer while Golden Grove, inexplicable marine creature, surged northeast. Strange. He had never really felt lonely on the way to New South Wales, but now he was perpetually conscious of his loneliness. The sense of belonging a year ago probably lay in the fact that there were always ten sets of sail in sight. Here no ship ventured except Golden Grove.
At some time during the eleventh night he became aware that he was not lifting and falling gently; Golden Grove had backed her sails and was standing. We are here.
The deck was absolutely quiet because the sailors had nothing to do and the helmsman, out in the open on the quarterdeck, had only to keep the tiller steady. The night was still, the sky cloudless save for that haunting wilderness of numberless stars, no moon to dim them as they wheeled in some incalculable cycle across the heavens. Anything so thinly and ethereally brilliant, he felt, ought to be audible: what privileged ear could hear the music of the spheres? His ear heard naught but the creaks and washes of a ship standing in an easy sea, and the shadow-sounds of night birds flitting like ghosts. Land is there, invisible. Yet another shape to my fate. I am going to a tiny isle in the midst of utter nowhere, so remote that even men have not dwelled in it until we English came. Counting us, there will be about sixty Englishmen and Englishwomen.
One thing is certain. This place can never be home. I come alone through a lonely sea, and I will leave alone through a lonely sea. Nothing so far away can have substance, for I have reached that point on the globe where I begin to swallow my own tail.
PART SIX
From
October of 1788
until
May of 1791
The women were ordered to ftay below, but at dawn all the men had their belongings on deck and waited for morning to reveal Norfolk Island. Light came in the midst of a stunning sunrise, high billows and wisps of rainless cloud turning slowly from purple-shot plum through fiery scarlet to the glory of pure gold.
“Why does sunrise feel so strange?” Joey Long asked as he stood with Richard at the rail, MacGregor panting at his feet.
“I think because it is the reverse of sunset,” said Richard. “The colors go from dark to light until the clouds are white and the sky is blue.”
MacGregor barked to be picked up; Joey obliged. The dog was on a homemade leash his master had manufactured out of tiny scraps of leather even Lieutenant Furzer could not find a use for; more accustomed to freedom, MacGregor disliked the leash but wore it with resignation. The voyage had provided him with plenty of pickings, and Captain William Sharp had been delighted to let the little terrier have the run of the holds. The ship’s cat (MacGregor had no patience with cats) had retired to the forecastle in a huff and left the field to this impertinent intruder.
