Good news perhaps to learn that starvation was postponed, but repeal of Law Martial and news of Guardian made the Major wish he was a genuine drinking man.

Some stores off Justinian and Surprize were landed over the next days, but none of the convicts—47 men and 157 women. The women were all off Lady Juliana; she had been the first of five ships to make Port Jackson during June. Naturally Phillip had expected a storeship. To find instead that this first vessel to reach them after so long held nothing more useful than women and clothing was appalling. Then storeship Justinian had sailed in, to be followed at the end of the month by Surprize, Neptune and none other than Scarborough, on a second venture to New South Wales.

“Oh, what a shock!” said Surgeon Murray of Justinian to a big audience of marine and stranded naval Norfolk Island officers. His face paled at the memory, he drew a long breath. “Surprize, Neptune and Scarborough brought an additional thousand convicts to Port Jackson, but two hundred and sixty-seven of them had died during the passage. They landed only seven hundred and fifty-nine, of whom nearly five hundred were gravely ill. It was—I thought that His Excellency the Governor was going to faint, and no one blamed him. You can have no idea, no idea. . .” Murray gagged. “The Home Department had changed contractors, so the victualler of the three ships was a slaving firm, paid in advance for each convict with no stipulation that he be landed alive and well. In fact, it was to the contractor’s financial advantage if the convicts died early in the voyage. So the poor wretches were not—fed. And they were confined for the whole length of the voyage in the old kind of slave fetters—you know, a foot-long, rigid iron bar welded between the ankle cuffs? Even had they been allowed on deck—they were not—they could not have gotten up to the deck. They could not walk. Hard enough on negroes for a six or eight weeks’ passage, but ye can imagine what the fetters did to men incarcerated below deck for nigh a year?”

“I daresay,” said Stephen Donovan through his teeth, “that they died in hideous misery and pain. God rot all slavers!”

When no one else offered a comment, Murray continued. “The worst was Neptune, though Scarborough was not much better—she had near sixty extra men in less space than on her first voyage. Surprize was the best of the three, she lost but thirty-six of her two hundred and fifty-four on the way out. We wept when we were not vomiting, I tell ye frankly. They were living skeletons, all of them, and they kept on dying as they were helped from the holds—the stench! They died on the decks, they died as they were put into boats, died as they were carried ashore. Those who were still alive as they got near to the hospital had to be treated outside until their vermin were dealt with—they seethed with thousands upon thousands of lice, and I do not exaggerate—do I, Mr. Wentworth?”

“Not one iota,” said the other visitor to the officers’ mess, a tall, fair, handsome fellow named D’arcy Wentworth, who had been posted to Norfolk Island as an assistant surgeon. “Neptune was the ship from Hell. I sailed on her as a surgeon from Portsmouth, but never once was I asked to go below during the voyage—in fact, I was forbidden access to the prison. The smell of the prison was in our nostrils the whole way, but when I went down into the orlop at Port Jackson to help—Christ! There are no words to describe what it was like. A sea of maggots, rotting bodies, cockroaches, rats, fleas, flies, lice—but some men were still alive, can ye imagine it? We surgeons expect that any who do manage to survive will emerge raving mad.”

Knowing more merchant masters than the navy men, Stephen asked, “Who is the captain of Neptune?”

“A beast named Donald Trail,” said Wentworth. “He could not understand what all the fuss was about, which made us wonder how many live slaves he delivers to Jamaica. The only thing interested him—or Anstis, for that matter—was selling goods to those in Port Jackson at such exorbitant prices only his rum was bought.”

“I have heard of Trail,” said Stephen, looking sick. “He can keep a negro alive because he can sell the live ones only. To give him a contract that was tacit permission to murder is murder. God rot the whole Home Department!”

“He did not even treat his free paying passengers well, is the mystery,” Wentworth said, shaking his head. “Ye’d think he would at least be conscious enough of his own skin to pander just a little to them, but he did not. Neptune carried some of the officers and men of a new army regiment recruited solely to do duty in New South Wales. Captain John MacArthur of the New South Wales Corps, his wife and babe, their son and servants were jammed into a tiny cabin and forbidden access to the great cabin or the deck save through a corridor filled with women convicts and overflowing buckets of excrement. The babe died, MacArthur quarreled fiercely with Trail and his sailing master and transferred in Cape Town to Scarborough, but not before the squalor had made him quite gravely ill. I understand that the son is seedy too.”

“How did you fare, Mr. Wentworth?” asked Major Ross, who had listened without a word.

“Unpleasantly, but at least I could get up on deck. After the MacArthurs left I was able to put my woman in their cabin—a vast improvement for her.” He looked suddenly nasty. “I have important relatives in England, and I have written to demand that Trail be made to answer for his crimes when Neptune gets home.”

“Do not hope for it,” said Captain George Johnston. “Lord Penrhyn and the slaving group carry more weight in the parliament than a dozen dukes and earls.”

“Tell me more about what happened to these poor wretches at Port Jackson, Mr. Murray,” Major Ross commanded.

“His Excellency the Governor ordered a huge pit dug well out of town,” Murray went on, “and there the dead were placed for Mr. Johnson to conduct a funeral service. A dear man, Mr. Johnson—he was very good to those who still lived, brave in going below Neptune’s deck to fetch men out, and tender in his last rites. But the pit cannot be closed. The corpses have been piled over with rocks so that the natives’ dogs cannot get at them—they will scavenge anything—and bodies were still going into it when Surprize sailed for Norfolk Island. Men were still dying by the score. Governor Phillip is beside himself with grief and anger. We carry a letter from him to Lord Sydney, but I fear ’twill not reach the Home Department before the next lot of convicts are sent—under the same slave contractors and on the same terms. Paid in advance to deliver corpses to Port Jackson.”

“Trail liked to see everybody die early,” said Wentworth. “Neptune lost soldiers too.”

“I take it that most of the thousand-odd aboard Neptune, Surprize and Scarborough were male convicts?” asked Ross.

“Aye, there were but a handful of women, in Neptune, in that filthy corridor. The women were sent earlier in Lady Juliana.”

“What was their fate?” asked Ross grimly, seeing in his mind’s eye 157 walking skeletons being landed at perilous Cascade.

“Oh,” said Surgeon Murray, brightening, “they fared very well! Mr. Richards—he who contracted for your fleet—victualled Lady Juliana. The worst one can say about that ship is that her crew—she carried no troops—had as good a time as they would have in a rum distillery. A cargo of women? Little wonder that her passage out was exceeding slow.”

“We can be thankful for small mercies, it seems,” said Ross. “No doubt our midwives will shortly be busy.”

“Aye, some are with child. Some already have babes.”

“What of the forty-seven men? Are they old Port Jackson men, or are they off these ships from Hell?”

“New arrivals, but the very best of them. Which is not saying much. But at least none is mad and all can keep food down.”