Richard took Ned Westlake and Harry Humphreys with him to the new sawpit in Arthur’s Vale together with Jim Richardson and Juno Anderson, as this John called himself.
Naturally the pace slowed greatly, much to Lieutenant King’s displeasure. “It has taken ye five days to produce but seven hundred and ninety-one feet of timber!” he said to Richard indignantly.
“I know, sir, but two of the four teams are new to the work and the other two are busy instructing,” Richard explained respectfully but firmly. “Ye must expect less wood for a while.” He drew a deep breath and decided to say it all. “Also, sir, ye cannot expect the sawing teams or me to strip bark as well. The old sawpit has Joseph Long permanently stripping and one of the others assisting him, whereas the new sawpit has no regular hand preparing the logs. I am sharpening, and I have no time to do aught else because I have to do the big sets for Marriner as well as keep my men going here. Is it not possible for those who fell the trees to debark them the moment they are down? The longer the bark stays on, the more risk there is of the beetle which eats the wood getting into it. And there should be one man felling who has the skill to look at each tree before it is felled to assess its sawing worth. Half the logs we receive are of no use, but by the time we can look at them ourselves, the men who have hauled them to the sawpit have vanished. So we have to waste our valuable time shifting them to the burning heap.”
Oh, the Lieutenant did not like that speech! His face was frowning direfully before half of it was said. In which case, thought Richard, holding those angry hazel eyes without flinching, I am in for a flogging for insolence. Yet better now than later, when the situation grows worse because he decides on a third pit, leaving us with only one spare saw now that I have amended the eight-footer into a cross-cut tool.
“We shall see,” said King eventually, and marched off in the direction of the carpenters and his new granary. Every inch of his retreating form radiated offended feelings.
“What,” asked King of Stephen Donovan over lunch in Government House, “d’ye make of the supervisor of sawyers?”
The very pregnant Ann Innet did not sit with them to eat, just brought the food and disappeared. The port decanter was half-empty and would be a marine before lunch was over; the Commandant was always more mellow in the afternoons than in the mornings, a fact Richard Morgan was unaware of. Port was King’s besetting sin; never a day went by that he did not get through at least two bottles of it. No keg port for Philip Gidley King! He liked the best, which came already bottled and was laid down carefully for at least a month before he personally decanted each bottle.
“Richard Morgan, ye mean?”
“Aye, Morgan. Major Ross said he would be an asset, but I am not so sure. The fellow had the effrontery to stand up to me this morning—virtually told me I am going about things the wrong way!”
“Yes, Morgan has the sinew to do that—but not, I hazard a guess, in an insolent fashion. He was on Alexander and proved of great service in the matter of Alexander’s bilge pumps—d’ye not remember coming aboard her shortly before we reached Rio? ’Twas Morgan said flatly that only chain pumps could remedy the problem.”
“Gammon!” snapped King, blinking in amazement. “Utter gammon! I recommended chain pumps!”
“Ye did indeed, sir, but Morgan was before ye. Had Morgan not convinced Major Ross and Surgeon-General White that hard measures were necessary, ye would never have been summoned to Alexander,” said Stephen valiantly.
“Oh. Oh, I see. But that does not alter the fact that Morgan exceeded his authority this morning,” King maintained stubbornly. “It is not his place to criticize my arrangements. I ought to have him flogged.”
“Why flog a useful and hardworking man because he has a head on his shoulders?” Stephen asked, leaning back easily and declining the port. Another glass of it and King would be more malleable. “Ye know he has a head on his shoulders, Mr. King. His intention was not insolent—he is a man cares about his work, is all. He wants to produce more,” Stephen labored.
The Commandant looked unconvinced.
“Sir, be fair! If I had suggested the changes—what precisely were they, may I ask?”
“That no one is inspecting the trees before they are hauled to the pits—that no one is stripping the logs of their bark—that stripping ought to be done when the trees are felled—that the sawyers waste too much time dragging unusable logs to the burning heap—and so on, and so forth.”
Sip away, Lieutenant King, sip away. Stephen said nothing as his superior sipped away. Finally, one glass of port later, he held out his hand and looked imploring. “Mr. King, if I had said what Morgan did, would ye not have listened?”
“The simple fact is, Mr. Donovan, that ye did not.”
“Because I am elsewhere and ye have a supervisor of sawyers—Morgan! They are all sensible observations and all designed to see more timber sawn. Why put wagon harness on your saddle horses, sir? Ye have an excellent team of woodworkers and carpenters, and I note ye display no aversion to listening to whatever Nat Lucas has to say. Well, in Richard Morgan ye have another Nat Lucas. If I were you, I would use his talents. His sentence finishes in two years. Were he to develop a fondness for this place, ye’d have some continuance, as with Lucas.”
And that, Stephen Donovan decided, was enough on the subject. The petulance was leaving King’s face, and he did have many good qualities. A pity that he so disliked being told where he had gone wrong by a convict.
By the end of November the humidity was such that the hours of labor were changed. Work commenced at dawn and continued until half past seven, when everyone had half an hour for breakfast; at eleven in the morning work ceased and did not resume until half past two, then ended at sunset. And the first harvest came in, an acre of barley which yielded 80 gallons of valuable seed despite the grubs and rats. This was followed by 3 quarts of wheat from the 260 ears the grubs and rats had not destroyed; could the pests only be controlled, this magnificent soil could grow anything.
The little red plums—cherry guavas—had ripened and were so delicious that the temptation to eat too many was hard to resist; resigned to gluttony, Surgeon Jamison declared that no free man or felon would be let off work because of diarrhoea. The bananas were ripe too. Catches of fish came in on occasions Richard looked forward to very much. In this taste he had few companions—and quite a lot more fish than he was entitled to. He had discovered that the fish lasted another day if it were submerged in a cold and shady current of salt water, so was happy to trade his next day’s ration of salt meat for someone else’s despised fish. Such delicious fish! Not unlike a snapper, it could be grilled in a fire and eaten down to the very few bones. Shark was good eating, so too were the hundred-pound ugly monsters which lurked in reef crannies, and a local kingfish that grew to a length of eight feet. The only trouble was that the fish were capricious; on some days the coble would come in with a hundred, on other days with none.
Toward Christmas, Lieutenant King decided to send Assistant Surgeon John Turnpenny Altree, Thomas Webb and Juno Anderson to live permanently at Ball Bay, a stony beach on the eastern side of the island wherein Supply was occasionally forced to anchor. His intention was that the three men should clear and keep clear a channel through the round, kettle-sized rocks so that a ship’s boat could land; the basalt boulders stove a boat’s keel in. This decision of King’s was one which provoked covert winks and smirks all round. Altree, a strange and ineffectual man who had not been able to face doctoring the female convicts of Lady Penrhyn, avoided women as if they carried plague. Wherever he went, so too would Thomas Webb go, eased out of his brother’s life by Beth Henderson and fled to Altree for succor. Delighted at the prospect of abandoning his wife and his job as a sawyer, Juno Anderson went to dance attendance on the two free custodians of Ball Bay. It was no more than a mile away, but was so cut off by the forest that Joe Robinson, trying to find his way back to Sydney Town, was lost for two nights. A path to Ball Bay was therefore mandatory, though no trees were felled to make it. The massively thick, strangulating vine between the pines was easily severed by one blow from an axe, and its bark, the path hewers discovered, made quite good twine provided the lengths were kept short.
