“Ye work too hard yourself, Richard.”
“I do not believe so. Rock fishing on a Saturday morning is a wonderful rest, so is gardening and mucking out the pigsty after Sunday service. Luckily the Major’s objections to Sunday activities do not extend to things which might eventually arrive in the Stores. His shibboleths are limited to drinking and gambling.”
“On the subject of drinking, the New South Wales Corps men have set up a very nice still with Francis Mee and Elias Bishop.”
“Well, that had to happen, especially after the Major grew so religious. Besides, he shipped a good deal of what we made to Port Jackson on Supply last February. ’Tis amazing how the total soars when ye have a humble little pair of kettles going day and night—and on Sundays,” Richard said, laughing.
After Stephen left, Richard and Kitty worked side by side in the garden until supper time, eaten just before night fell. The small citrus trees had survived transplanting, as had almost everything. The year had been a fairly grubless one and dry enough that the Government wheat in Arthur’s Vale and the Government corn at Queensborough looked like yielding bumper crops. Of course there had been salt winds galore, but luckily most had been accompanied by squally showers, which reduced their blighting effect. There had been just enough rain to keep the grain coming on. Even with 1,115 inhabitants, Norfolk Island seemed likely to provide its own bread and surplus pork to salt for Port Jackson.
In Sydney Town, Queensborough and Phillipsburgh the same old squabbles recurred between industrious convict gardeners and lazy marines and soldiers. There were now a great many very sick convicts who literally could not work; some died, and some were subject to the kind of thing rife in Port Jackson—the strong robbed the weak of sustenance and clothing. Those upon whom devolved the burden of feeding the indigent-through-illness men grew sour about having to do so. Especially if they were not yet pardoned or emancipated, and therefore free to keep what they grew on their own blocks or sell to Stores.
Hunger still stalked on the Phillipsburgh-Cascade side of the island; only three miles away by road, it may as well have been as far as Port Jackson, so isolated was it. Phillipsburgh grew less edibles in order to cultivate flax, and importation of edibles from the south side of the island was the responsibility of Mr. Andrew Hume, the superintendent. He did a brisk trade in the acquisition of convict slops and constantly incurred Major Ross’s wrath by short-rationing his workers in order to sell to the New South Wales Corps soldiers, living somewhat closer than the middle of the Cascade road. As almost all the Lieutenant-Governor’s troops were now New South Wales Corps soldiers, Ross found it impossible to police Phillipsburgh and the alliance between Hume and Captain Hill. One starving flax worker ate a forest plant he mistook for cabbage, and died; even then Hume continued in his peculations and frauds, abetted by Hill and his soldiers.
The growing evil was the act of growing food, and the chasm between those who grew plenty and ate well and those who grew nothing widened every day to the whistles and screams of floggings, floggings, floggings. A surgeon was required to witness the application of the cat, so Callum, Wentworth, Considen and Jamison entered into a conspiracy; whichever one was deputed to watch would call a halt after somewhere between 15 and 50 of the total number had been laid on, then make sure that the next installment was not administered before healing was complete. It could take a long time for a convict to receive all 200 lashes, and what usually happened was that Major Ross forgave the culprit the rest before too much damage had been done.
Courts martial also increased as the differences of opinion and resentments arising out of rank and precedence rubbed rawly at abraded military feelings, real or (all too often) imagined. Most of the marines and soldiers, including their officers, were uneducated, narrow, impressionable, hottempered, appallingly immature, and prone to believe whatever they were told. A fancied slight became inflated into an unpardonable insult before it had finished traveling the gossip grapevine, as efficient and widespread among the free as among the felon.
The indefatigable Lieutenant Ralph Clark endeared himself even more to Major Ross by (snooping just a little) detecting the presence of an illicit letter from the Major’s clerk, Francis Folks, to the Judge Advocate in Port Jackson, Captain David Collins. The document accused Ross of extreme cruelty, oppression, depriving the free as well as the felon of rations, and so on, and so forth. Included with it were supporting papers and some opinions on the Lieutenant-Governor’s conduct of Norfolk Island’s affairs which depicted him as a mixture of Ivan the Terrible and Torquemada. Ross’s response was to clap Folks in irons, confiscate the letter, papers and opinions as concrete evidence, and order Folks tried at Port Jackson by the addressee, Collins. Who, though a marine officer, loathed Robert Ross passionately. Even as he acted, the Major knew whom Collins would believe. No matter. The protocols were specific, and Law Martial was a thing of the past. Alas.
Atlantic arrived on the 2nd of November with news that came as a bolt from the blue to all save Major Ross himself. She brought the mail and parcels Gorgon had carried from Portsmouth: yes, Gorgon had finally arrived. Atlantic also brought a new Lieutenant-Governor for Norfolk Island, Commander Philip Gidley King, who had returned from England on Gorgon and brought his bride, Anna Josepha, with him. By the time they quit Atlantic at Norfolk Island she was in the last stages of pregnancy, coddled and cossetted by young William Neate Chapman, King’s protégé and (officially) his surveyor. To a community used by now to the reign of Major Ross, it was hard to tell which of the two, Anna Josepha or Willy Chapman, was the sillier; they called themselves “brother” and “sister,” giggled a lot, eyed each other archly, and drew everybody’s attention to the similarity of their facial features. King’s two boys by Ann Innet did not come, though rumor said that Norfolk, the elder, was being cared for—in England—by Mrs. Philip Gidley King’s parents. King’s own parents were more rigid, which led some to speculate that Anna Josepha’s family was more accustomed to bastards, so perhaps Anna Josepha and Willy Chapman were. . . .
Also disembarked from Atlantic were Captain William Paterson of the New South Wales Corps and his wife—Scotch, of course—and the Reverend Richard Johnson, who had come to bless, marry, and also to baptize 31 Norfolk Island babies. Some of the visitors were staying a short time only. Queen, newly arrived in Port Jackson, was to bring the island yet more convicts—genuinely Irish convicts this time, embarked in Cork.
All of which spelled an end to the marine presence. Major Ross, Lieutenants Clark, Faddy and Ross Junior, and the last of the enlisted marines were to depart the island on Queen. They would spend time in Port Jackson to await the return of Gorgon from a food voyage to Bengalese Calcutta, the home of a sturdy, hardy kind of cattle. The years had gone by in Port Jackson, but of that vanished Government herd no sign had ever been seen.
So confusing! So upsetting! It all seemed to happen in the twinkling of an eye—ships and commandants coming and going, yet more mouths to feed. The old inhabitants of the island walked around in a daze, and wondered whereabouts it was all going to end.
Commander King was horrified at what he saw in his beloved Norfolk Island. Dammit, the place was no better than a wooden version of that den of iniquity, Port Jackson! As for Government House—! How could he ask a new bride to live in such a run down, ramshackle, hideously small residence? And under the aegis of a vulgar trollop like Mrs. Richard Morgan, who had donned all her finery to greet him and usher him through the premises? She would have to go, the sooner the better.
