Though this lack of progress did not dampen the spirits of the convicts the way it did those of the ships’ navigators, lack of palatable food had much the same effect. There were brief glimpses of New South Wales, too far away to gauge what sort of land it was. Luckily a new delight arrived; countless seals frisked and frolicked around the ships, absolute clowns as they floated with their flippers on their chests, dived, twisted, huffed and snuffled. Gorgeous, jolly creatures. And where they were, so too were hordes of fish. Chowder appeared on the menu again.
By the 15th of January they had struggled north to 36°and at noon saw Cape Dromedary, which Captain Cook had named for its resemblance to the Ship of the Desert.
“Only a hundred and fifty miles to go,” said Donovan, off his watch and ready to fish.
Will Connelly sighed; the weather was so hot, albeit cloudy, that he could not settle to read, had elected to fish instead. “I am beginning to believe, Mr. Donovan,” he said, “that we will never get to Botany Bay. Four more men have died since Christmas Eve and all of us below know why. Not fever or dysentery. Just despair, homesickness, hopelessness. Most of us have been in this terrible ship for over a year now—we boarded her on the sixth of January last year. Last year! What an odd thing to say. So they died, I believe, because they had passed the point where they could credit that a day would dawn when they were not in this terrible ship. A hundred and fifty miles, ye say. They may as well be ten thousand. If this year has taught us nothing else, it has shown us how far it is to the end of the world. And how far away is home.”
Donovan’s mouth tightened; he blinked rapidly. “The miles will pass,” he said eventually, eyes riveted on his line, floating from a small piece of cork. “Captain Cook warned of this counter current, but we are making headway. What we need is a fair breeze out of the southeast, and we will get it. A sea change is coming. First a storm, then a wind out of the southeast. I am right.”
They tacked and stood, tacked and stood. The seals were gone, replaced by thousands of porpoises. Then, after a suffocatingly hot and humid day, the heavens erupted. Red lightning of a ferocity and brilliance beyond English imagination empurpled clouds blacker than Bristol smoke, cracked with deafening thunder; and it began to rain a wall of solid water, so hard that it fell straight down despite a wildly blowing northwest wind. At an hour before midnight, with dramatic suddenness, the show was over. Along came a beautiful fair breeze out of the southeast which lasted long enough to see white cliffs, trees, yellow cliffs, trees, curving golden beaches, and the low, nuggety jaws of Botany Bay.
At nine in the morning of the 19th of January, 1788, Alexander led her two companions between Point Solander and Cape Banks into the reaches of a wide, poorly sheltered bay. Perhaps fifty or sixty naked black men stood gesticulating on either headland, and there at rest on the bosom of choppy steely water was Supply. She had beaten them by a single day.
Alexander had sailed 17,300 land miles* in 251 days, which amounted to 36 weeks. She had spent 68 of those days in port and 183 of them at sea. All told, 225 convicts had sampled her, some for a single day; 177 arrived.
*15,034 nautical miles. The nautical mile contained 2,025 yards; the land mile 1,760 yards.
The anchors down and Lieutenant Shortland gone in the jollyboat to Supply to see Governor Phillip, Richard stood alone at the rail and gazed for a long time at the place to which, by an Imperial Order-in-Council, he had been transported until the 23rd of March, 1792. Four years into the future. He had turned nine-and-thirty in the south Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.
The land he surveyed was flat along the foreshores, slightly hilly farther away to north and south, and it was a drab, sad vista of blue, brown, fawn, grey and olive. Blighted, juiceless.
“What d’ye see, Richard?” asked Stephen Donovan.
Richard stared at him through eyes misted with tears. “I see neither paradise nor Hell. This is limbo. This is where all the lost souls go,” he said.
PART FIVE
From
January
until
October of 1788
Nothing very much happened over the next few days except that the seven slow ships turned up surprisingly soon after the Racers; they had been blown by the same winds and kept close enough behind to experience the same weather. Heaving in the restless water, all the ships remained at anchor unloaded, people crowding their rails, anyone with a spyglass peering at shoregoing parties of marines, naval officers and a few convicts, and at many Indians. None of this shore activity appeared significant. Rumor now said that the Governor did not consider Botany Bay an adequate site for this all-important experiment and had gone in a longboat to look at nearby Port Jackson, which Captain Cook had noted on his charts, but had not entered.
Richard’s feelings about Botany Bay were very much like those in every other breast, free or felon: a shocking place, was the universal verdict. It reminded no one of anywhere, even sailors as traveled as Donovan. Flat, bleak, sandy, swampy, inclement and dreary beyond all imagination. To the inhabitants of Alexander’s prison, Botany Bay loomed as a gigantic graveyard.
Orders came that the site of the first settlement was to be Port Jackson, not Botany Bay; they made ready to sail, but the winds were so against and the swell coming across the narrow bar so huge that all thought of leaving had to be abandoned. Then—a miracle! Two very big ships were sighted beating in for harbor.
“ ’Tis as strange a coincidence as two Irish peasants meeting at the court of the Empress of all the Russias,” said Donovan, who had shared a spyglass with Captain Sinclair and Mr. Long.
“They are English, of course,” said Jimmy Price.
“No, they are French. We think the expedition of the Comte de la Pérouse. Third-raters, which is why they are such big ships. One therefore must be La Boussole and the other L’Astrolabe. Though I imagine that we are a greater surprise to them than they to us—la Pérouse left France in 1785, long before our voyage was being talked about. Unless they have learned of us somewhere along their way. La Pérouse was given up as lost a year ago. Now—here he is.”
Another attempt to get out of Botany Bay was made on the morrow, with equal lack of success. The two French ships were not in sight at all, blown away southward and seaward. Toward sunset Supply managed to wriggle through the swell and headed north the ten or eleven miles to Port Jackson, while Governor Phillip’s chicks stayed another night in limbo.
A southeaster in the morning made things better, for the French ships too; La Boussole and L’Astrolabe passed inside Botany Bay as the ten ships of the English fleet hauled anchor and made for that dangerous entrance. Sirius, Alexander, Scarborough, Borrowdale, Fishburn, Golden Grove and Lady Penrhyn all departed gracefully. Then unlucky Friendship could not keep in her stays, drifted perilously close to the rocks, and collided with Prince of Wales. She lost her jib boom and compounded her woes by running into Charlotte’s stern. A considerable part of her decorative galleries destroyed, Charlotte almost went aground.
All this havoc caused much mirth on Alexander, shaking her own sails free to take advantage of the southeaster. The day was hot and fine, the view off the larboard side fascinating. Crescent-shaped yellow beaches foaming with surf alternated with reddish-yellow cliffs which grew ever taller as the miles passed by. A wealth of trees, somewhat greener than those in the distance at Botany Bay, spread inland beyond the beaches, and the smoke of many fires smudged the western sky. Then came two awesome 400-foot bastions, between them an opening about a mile wide. Alexander heeled and sailed into a wonderland.
