“Find Jimmy,” said Neddy to Job Hollister, “and change places with him. You dig. I have a better use for nimble Jimmy.”
Jimmy arrived trembling from the unaccustomed effort of digging.
“Have ye a head for heights?” Neddy asked him.
“Aye.”
“Then rest a moment before ye climb yon palm. Ye’re the most agile and smallest of us. Richard sent us the second hatchet, so tuck it in your waistband. Once ye get up the palm, chop down the fronds one at a time.”
The sun was westering, which gave them some means of orienting themselves—south and west of the area where the Governor was going to erect his portable house, a couple of storehouses, and the big round marquee in which Lieutenant Furzer had established himself and the commissariat. They had had the presence of mind to bring their wooden bowls, dippers and spoons, also their blankets, mats and buckets; Richard found the stream and put Bill Whiting to setting up the dripstones, then fetching water. It looked clean and healthy, but he trusted nothing here.
Of all of them, Bill Whiting looked the worst. His face had long since lost its roundness, of course, but now there were black crescents beneath his eyes. The poor fellow trembled as if he had a fever. He had not; his brow was cool. Simple exhaustion.
“It is time to stop,” said Richard, collecting his brood. “Lie down on your mats and rest. Bill, ye need a walk—yes, I know ye do not feel like walking, but come with me to find the commissariat. I have an idea.”
Lieutenant James Furzer was nothing like organized; that was too much to hope for. Richard and Bill entered chaos.
“Ye need more men, sir,” said Richard.
“Volunteering?” asked Furzer, recognizing their faces.
“One of us is,” said Richard, putting an arm around Whiting. “Here is a good man ye can trust, never been in any trouble since I met him in Gloucester Gaol in eighty-five.”
“That’s right, ye were the larboard head man on Alexander, and none of your men gave trouble. Morgan.”
“Aye, Lieutenant Furzer, Morgan. Can ye use Whiting here?”
“I can if he has brain enough to read and write.”
“He does both.”
They walked back to their camp bearing some loaves of hard bread, all the commissariat was able to issue. It had been baked in Cape Town and was very weevily, but it was food.
“We now have a man in the commissariat,” Richard announced, doling out the bread. “Furzer is going to use Bill to help deal with the salt meat. Which we cannot have until the kettles and pots are unloaded because from now on we cook for ourselves.”
Bill Whiting was looking a little better already; he would be working inside a shaded place, no matter how stifling, and doing something easier than clearing, sawing or gardening, which seemed to be what everybody was going to do eventually. “Once Lieutenant Furzer gets himself settled, we are to be issued with a week’s rations at a time,” Bill contributed, grateful for Richard’s perceptiveness. “There is supposed to be a storeship coming on from Cape Town soon, so we have enough provisions to last.”
At nightfall they put bags of clothing down as pillows and used their Alexander mats and blankets as ground cover, their old and tattered great-coats over them. Though it had been such a hot day, the moment the sun went down it grew cold. Their weariness was so great that they slept despite the unmentionable things which crawled everywhere.
Morning brought a sultry, steamy end to darkness’s chill. They went back to building their hut, hampered because they had nothing whatsoever to keep the palm fronds in place except long, strappy palm leaves they tried to turn into twine. The shelter itself seemed strong enough, though it worried Richard and Will, the best engineers, that they had no better foundation than six inches of sandy soil. They piled that soil up around their support posts and began to cut more saplings to lie flat on the ground as anchors, notching their supports and sliding the new poles into the notches.
Others were building around them with varying degrees of success. No one had any real enthusiasm for the task, but it was easy to see by the middle of that second day ashore which groups were either well led or had a mind for construction, and those owning neither. Tommy Crowder’s lot had started to wall their hut with a palisade of very thin saplings, an idea Richard resolved to imitate. Education and broader experience definitely showed; the Londoner Crowder had had a very checkered career and was besides a clever man.
There were a few marines around and about now, checking progress and counting heads; some convicts had absconded into the forest, including a woman named Ann Smith. Probably headed for Botany Bay and the French ships, which gossip said were staying a few days.
“Christ, what a place for ants and spiders!” said Jimmy Price, sucking at the edge of his hand. “That bugger of an ant bit me, and it hurts. Look at the size of the things! They are half an inch long and ye can see their nippers.” He cast a splendid, white-skinned tree a glance of loathing. “And what is it that deafens us with its—its croaking? My ears are ringing.”
His complaints about the croaking were as justified as about the ants; it was a good year for cicadas.
Billy Earl came through the trees white-faced and shaking. “I just saw a snake!” he gasped. “Christ, the thing was taller than Ike Rogers in his boots! Thick around as my arm! And there are huge fierce alligators on the other side of the cove, so Tommy Crowder told me. Oh, I hate this place!”
“We will get used to the creatures,” Richard soothed. “I’ve not heard that anybody has been bitten or eaten by anything bigger than an ant, even if the ant is the size of a beetle. The alligators are giant lizards, I saw one run up a tree.”
The house was finished by mid afternoon of that humid, torrid day full of surprises and terrors. The sun went in and the clouds began to pile up in the skies to the south of them. Black and dark blue, with faint flickers of lightning. They had built the hut in the lee of a large sandstone rock that had a little pocket in its under side, as if scooped out by a spoon.
“I think,” said Richard, looking at the approaching storm, “that we ought to put our belongings under our rock just in case. These palm fronds will not keep rain out.”
The tempest arrived an hour later with greater ferocity than that one at sea off Cape Dromedary, and more terrifying by far; every one of its colossal, brilliant bolts came straight to earth amid the trees. No wonder so many of them were split and blackened! Lightning. Not thirty feet in front of where they huddled, a huge tree with a satiny vermilion skin exploded in a cataclysm of blinding blue fire, sparks and thunder; it literally disintegrated, then burned fiercely. But not for long. The rain came in a cold, howling wind to put it out and wreck their palm-frond thatching within a single minute. The ground turned to a sea and the thick, hurtful rods pelted down, soaked them to the point of drowning. That night they slept amid the frame of their hut with chattering teeth, their only consolation the fact that their belongings were safe and dry under the rock ledge.
“We have to have better tools and something to hold our house together,” said Will Connelly in the morning, close to tears.
Time, thought Richard, to seek a higher authority than Furzer, who could not organize himself to save himself. I do not care if convicts are forbidden to approach those in authority—I am going to do just that.
He walked off in the cool air, pleased to see that the ground was so sandy it was incapable of turning to mud. When he reached the stream at the place where the marines had put three stones across it as a ford, he caught a glimpse of naked black bodies farther up the brook, smelled a strong odor of rotting fish. Not his imagination, then; he had been told that the Indians stank of a fish oil quite the equal of Bristol mud. When they came no closer he skipped across the stepping stones and turned to walk into the bigger settlement on the western side of the cove, where most of the male convicts were already encamped and all the female convicts would be located (the women were still being landed, a few at a time). There also stood the hospital tent, the marines’ tents, the marquees of the marine officers, and Major Ross’s marquee. On this side of the cove, he noted, the convicts lived in tents. Which simply meant that not enough tents had been put on the ships. Thus he and the rest of the last 100 male convicts had been relegated to the eastern side under whatever kind of shelter they could manufacture, out of sight and out of mind.
