“More are coming, so I understand, though Supply cannot carry many at once. And, since they are finding some trees they can cut in Port Jackson, I fear ye won’t see Taffy landed here in a hurry. Richardson is a good, strong fellow, he will work out, I think. Who knows? Perhaps one of this second four will turn out to have a talent for sharpening. Though why, Richard, ye should want to saw yourself baffles me,” said Stephen.
“Because to the men who saw, my job is child’s play. I sit cross-legged like a tailor and appear to be doing nothing. One reason why I put them all to it, and will go on putting them to it. Each of them knows that if he should prove good at sharpening, he has a comfortable job. When they fail, at least they know that sharpening is a job of patience and skill.”
Stephen lay back on the sand and stretched voluptuously. “Ye would think,” he said, “that Johnny, being a seaman, would be down here with us. But no, he would rather be outside our house, planing or polishing some fancy piece of wood. He will have finished the balusters for Port Jackson’s Government House by the time Supply returns, whenever that might be. How isolated we are! More than a thousand miles across an empty ocean to the only other place an Englishman can be found. I feel it every time I look at the horizon. This isle is a gigantic ship at anchor in the midst of a nowhere, surrounded by infinity. It is completely its own entity.”
Richard rolled over to dry his back. “I do not feel that this isle is small, though I agree about the isolation. To me, Norfolk Island seems quite as large as New South Wales. Here lies a certain privacy. I do not feel as if I am a prisoner, whereas everything at Port Jackson reminded me I was a prisoner.”
“More officials,” said Stephen dryly.
“Is your Johnny getting on with the carpenters?”
“Oh, yes. Mostly thanks to the fact that he sticks to his lathe and has more sense than to tell Nat Lucas how to do his job or how to make sure the others do their jobs. ’Tis I suffer.”
“Just watch your back—I have a feeling.”
“D’ye want me to pull your four new sawyers out of the gang?”
“It has to be either you or Lieutenant King. Whoever.”
“I will do it. King is a will o’ the wisp—he darts here, there and everywhere. Always starting new things before the old are done, and never stopping to remember that he has too few hands to do what has been started, let alone deal with new work as well. That is why I insisted that he finish the granary before he lifts a finger to build the barn or the dam. In the midst of which he wants more houses built, if you please! But then, he has never served on any but big ships, wherein more hands run around than are necessary save in a battle or a blow.”
“Which reminds me, Mr. Donovan. Joey and I are sleeping in double beds with feather mattresses and feather pillows. By rights they belong to you and Mr. Livingstone.”
That provoked gales of laughter. “Keep them, ye hedonists! Neither Johnny nor I would sleep in anything other than a hammock.” He looked at Richard with a derisive gleam in his fine blue eyes. “When men make love, Richard, they do not need to have a big bed. ’Tis women like comfort.”
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—
Mor
gan!
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.
Richard was now down two sawyers, and of prospective sawyers there were none until Supply returned—if Supply ever did. Jim Richardson had ventured out on a Sunday in quest of bananas and broken his leg so badly that it would be months healing; he would never saw again. And Juno Anderson was no loss, a sentiment his wife echoed heartily.
This meant that Richard would have to saw himself; the three-and-a-half-hour midday break would have to be spent sharpening, as would every other second of spare time. But who as a partner?
“Needs must,” said the Commandant, having long since recovered from his miff at Morgan’s presumption. “I shall ask Private Wigfall if he would care to make an additional wage as a sawyer. He has the body and stature of a boxer.”
“A good choice, sir,” said Richard, then pretended to be horrified. “What if Private Wigfall cannot saw straight and has to be the bottom man? It is not seemly for a convict to give a marine free man a face full of sawdust.”
“He can wear a hat,” said King blithely, and hurried off.
Luckily Private William Wigfall was a typical large and burly fellow: habitually phlegmatic, impossible to rile. He hailed from Sheffield and owned no close friends among his tiny detachment.
“My friends all remained at Port Jackson,” he said to Richard. “Honestly, I am right glad for the chance to get away from this lot, not to mention that I will earn more for sawing than I do for being a marine. I will be able to retire earlier. ’Tis my ambition to buy an acre of good ground with a nice little cottage on it somewhere near Sheffield. If I work my passage home as a sailor I will have even more money.”