Wild Island (3 page)

Spotswood's early land grant at the north end. In practice, both peninsulas fell to Booth's care. Some days he covered sixty miles on foot and by boat, hopping from promontory to promontory, sorting out problems at the boat-builders, outstations, jetties, coal mines—and his newest scheme, four miles of convict-powered railway from Port Arthur to Norfolk Bay, now half finished.

He walked about (like God in the Garden, he thought) because his position did not entitle him to a government-issue horse. Last winter he had bought one for himself, a biddable elderly nag named Jack, but his request for a forage allowance had been refused. Useful to ride quickly around the sprawling settlement, but the longer bush tracks were not as yet in a condition to allow riding.

For Booth, the long walks were the best part of his work. He tramped joyfully through dense, silent eucalypt forests where the sun fell in dazzling shafts through the canopy; and across sublime beaches and rocky headlands where gull rookeries pocked the tussocky ground and whitened the rocks with guano. In four years he'd come to love it all. Sometimes, hiking alone, he burst into song out of the fullness of his content. But occasionally now he felt his age. Lizzie was seventeen.

‘Where was Birch found?'

‘Floating in the shallows at Point Puer,' said Casey. ‘Your chest is sound, but don't overdo things. Not that you'll take any notice.'

Birch and Jones, two young overseers from the boys' prison at Point Puer, had bolted on the eighteenth of December, an exquisite summer's day giving no warning of the sou'westerly that blew up in the night. Their curious escape engine washed up the following day—a raft with a clever outrigger and a well-equipped tool box lashed aboard. (How had they got away with that?) It was now down below the steps of Booth's cottage in the side-yard where he kept his collection of such things. Rafts, coracles, dugouts, leaky tubs: all inventive, eccentric. Made of pilfered scraps kept in dangerous secrecy and fashioned into the shapes of imagined freedom.

But why did they do it? Birch and Jones, for instance. They were overseers, well fed and housed, far better off than they would have been as apprentices with a hard master. Jones had been an excellent mechanical. Both were cheerful and content enough, it seemed. It irritated Booth, this waste of men, good brains. But some spirit seemed to seize them . . . He had felt it himself, of course. Had imagined living Crusoe-like on one of the little offshore islands, but with ‘a good-tempered member of the fair sex to share my fate', as he'd written to his sister. Was Lizzie good-tempered? Not always. She was no Mrs Crusoe, certainly.

‘I'll take breakfast with you,' said Casey, ‘since Power is cossetting you and has made a kedgeree which it is your Christian duty to share. We'll do the inquest this morning as soon as I've had a closer look at the body. I shall want you there.'

Booth suppressed irritation. Casey behaved as though the MO outranked the Commandant. He was a civil appointment, twenty-seven, high-handed, from Dublin via Liverpool, where he had survived the cholera. Too brilliant for this place, that was the trouble. He had a hungry intelligence with nothing to feed on here. There were a thousand prospective patients—felons, military and civilian officers, wives and children—but the colony was mostly in rude health. Casey's daily lot was toothaches and common ailments, consumption and occasional accidents, with a score of lunatics at the asylum and an accouchement now and then. And floggings, of course.

After three years of this, dissatisfaction made Casey almost constantly irritable, although he'd cheered up no end last year when he had to cut Edward Howard's arm off. A difficult amputation just below the shoulder, done in only ten minutes from tourniquet to sewing up, with nothing but brandy and laudanum to quiet the patient. The main bone had been smashed when Howard, a convict bolter, was shot accidentally as he was retaken. The prisoner recovered remarkably quickly, but Casey's feat passed unnoticed. Six months later when the Colonial Surgeon, Dr James Scott, performed the same operation in
Hobart Town, all the senior medical men gathered to watch, loud with praise.

When Casey heard this he'd become morose and quarrelsome. He and Booth had nearly come to blows last November. Casey came raging in at midnight just as Booth returned from one of his scrambles up to Hobarton and back in the same day. Demanded to know where the hell Booth had been and why he, Casey, had not been told, etcetera, etcetera, insisting he was in charge when Booth was away.

Booth had been twenty hours on the go by then, having started for Hobart at four that morning. He wearily explained that this was a
military
establishment: the Commandant's second-in-command was the next ranking
military
officer, Lieutenant Stuart from the Coal Mines. Casey refused to believe it—in the coarsest, vilest language. Booth, exasperated, told him he was behaving like a jilted housemaid. Casey squared up belligerently and for a moment things looked ugly, but then he turned, slammed out and wrote to the Colonial Secretary in Hobarton, who confirmed what Booth had said—which only increased Casey's sullen resentment. The quarrel lasted until Booth's fever on Christmas Day, when Casey's attention was immediate, solicitous, and wonderfully effective. Yes, if ever Booth needed a medico, he'd want Casey—the proud, stubborn Irish bastard.

Power brought in hot water and Casey went out, no doubt to begin breakfast without waiting. Booth shivered as he washed and dressed. But it was never as cold here as at Home. Winter there now, January. Snowing in Basingstoke, probably. He wondered idly whether he would ever see it again. (He would not.) At the breakfast table he found Lempriere drinking coffee and talking to Casey about the weather. So that quarrel was mended, too. How could Casey quarrel with Lempriere, the Commissariat Officer, and the most affable creature in the world? About potatoes—how Irish!—in the allotment that Lempriere shared under regulations with the MO.

Lemp was describing now how one might construct a wind-measuring machine. The study of weather was one of his passionate
hobbies, together with natural science, painting and drawing, and the study of the French horn.

‘
Mon vieux
,' he greeted Booth. Lemp's forebears were from the Channel Islands, France and Portugal, but he'd been born in Hamburg, where his father was a merchant for a time. After fifteen years in Van Diemen's Land he spoke English daily, savouring its oddities; French for pleasure and to educate his children, and German in rare moments of melancholy and
Weltzschmerz
.

‘I have been down at the office,' he said now. ‘Killick is waiting to see you. He was on duty at Mount Arthur until last night and walked in at daybreak this morning. He says he saw a ship entering the Derwent as he started out, and later heard what he thinks was cannon-fire. He believes it's the new Governor arrived early. So I am come to ask if we can have our Metaphysicals tonight instead of tomorrow night? If it does prove to be the Governor you'll be called up to town and we shall miss again as we did last month.'

They had formed the Metaphysicals three years ago. A most select club, they joked: Lempriere, Booth and Casey, with the occasional guest. They debated any subject that took their fancy—from animal magnetism to
Zoonomia,
that strange work by Erasmus Darwin. Booth had borrowed the book from Casey and remembered it being mostly about composting, even of human corpses. But he was sometimes drowsy in the evenings after a vigorous day and several glasses of ‘the blushful Hippocrene', and perhaps he'd got it wrong. Darwin's grandson had visited Hobart last year on the
Beagle
. Another ‘Charles'. An amiable young man, people agreed, but not clever like his grandfather.

In the beginning, the Metaphysicals had met at each of their cottages in turn, but Lempriere's house, built for a family of four, now imperfectly contained Lempriere, his amiable wife Charlotte, their children Edward, Thomas, William, Francis and Mary, and the governess, Miss Wood. Their two servants slept in the kitchen, a brick box at the rear. The MO's cottage was even smaller.

‘Can you find us a dinner, Power? Anything left of the Christmas ham?'

‘Salt beef,' said Power gloomily. There being none fresh on account of the gale and the meat boat not come down. And the weather too bad for fishing and the ham-bone past using he would not be answerable, it must go for soup. Which meant it was gone already, finished up by Power and Mrs Power and their two older children, Billie and Lizzie. (Another pretty Lizzie.) Booth knew better than to argue. He was fond of the Powers, had stood godfather to young Billie and the new one, Harry.

He spent too much time having to think about food. But his kingdom of a thousand souls must be fed each day and nearly everything except vegetables brought in. No cattle or four-footed animals could be kept on the peninsula because they'd make an easy larder for escapees. Most of the meat was brought down by ship from New South Wales ‘on the hoof' from Dr Imlay's brother's property. It came down the east coast, was landed near Imlay's whaling station at East Bay Neck, and driven across the narrow peninsula to Storm Bay, where it was slaughtered and shipped down to the lower peninsula on the more sheltered inner waters.

As it happened, the meat boat managed to get down as far as Wedge Bay that afternoon, having recently been fitted with a steam engine, one of the first in the island. With it came Gus Bergman, who walked the four miles to Port Arthur and came in soaked to the skin, bringing a new ham, a bottle of claret, and confirmation that Killick's thunder had indeed been for the Franklins' arrival. This sou'westerly had blown them here from Cape Town in only thirty-nine days.

Bergman was a surveyor. Clever, hardworking, amusing, he'd several times been a guest at the Metaphysicals. A Jewish, perhaps, with his finely curved beaky nose and mobile, intelligent face—but none the worse for that. He was here this time to set out the foundations for the new dormitory at Point Puer.

Over a stew with new potatoes, kale and turnips, they talked of the Governor's arrival. Hobarton had leapt into welcoming mood, Bergman reported. Like a fairground, in spite of the weather. Illuminations set up in every shop window and house. Bonfires tonight: fireworks, and
the band of the 21st Regiment marching in the streets. The only sour note came from Mr Robert Murray, editor of the
Colonial Times,
who claimed this welcome had less to do with greeting Sir John than with yet another celebration of Governor Arthur's departure.

‘The new broom,' said Lempriere. ‘Changes,
n'est-ce pas
?'

‘. . . and still nobody can tell me,' said Casey, ‘why London would be after sending a naval man to lead a colony under military rule? Army and Navy together is a recipe for trouble . . .'

‘All the senior posts are civil now,' objected Bergman.

‘But they are all held by former Army men, Arthur's friends and relations,' said Casey. ‘As Gilbert Robertson says in
The Courier
, England has put Sir John in the invidious position of a Whig King with a Tory ministry, and no power of changing it.'

‘The King appointed Sir John. Being Navy himself, he wanted a naval man for it—so Frankland says.'

George Frankland, the Chief Surveyor, had high connections at Home and might be assumed to know.

‘Lady Franklin is said to have had a hand in it too,' added Bergman. ‘Sir John was offered the governing of Antigua but she thought it not enough. One of her friends who is lady-in-waiting to the Queen was asked to hint that something better was owed to the Arctic Lion.'

‘But does he know anything of government? Managing a ship's crew is one thing. A colony of thirteen thousand scattered over a piece of land the size of Ireland—and three-quarters of it wilderness—is another matter entirely.'

‘He has only to continue Arthur's work,' said Booth. ‘People complain of Arthur, but he brought this island out of its first disorder into . . .' ‘By employing his relatives and friends,' said Casey with a grimace, ‘ruining his enemies, and hanging two hundred and seventy poor bastards in his time here.'

Booth shrugged. ‘What else do you do with murderers and bushrangers? Especially when you've not enough prisons, overseers and constables. As for employing his friends, he had to have men he could trust . . .'

‘So he makes his nephew Henry Arthur a magistrate—a known rogue, drunkard and fool? And Henry's brother Charles . . .'

‘Charles is not like Henry, he's an excellent fellow.'

‘I grant you, but . . .'

Power had made a ‘boiled baby' to follow, a suet pudding filled with sweet dark-purple plums— an old variety, cropping heavily this year. The cabbages, too, looked set to be a bumper harvest again. Booth smiled wryly to himself. He would not repeat the mistake he had made two years ago when, with several tons' surplus, he had allotted a quarter of a cabbage a day as extra convict rations. A savage reprimand had arrived from the Governor—and yet Booth had come to admire Arthur by then, and to consider himself a friend of the family. But here was an abrupt lesson in the limits of Arthur's friendship. Booth was castigated for an inexcusable lack of judgement. Exceeding his authority. Wanton indulgence. All surplus crops must be dug in, sent to Hobarton, or used as animal fodder.

Booth had never spoken of this but it must have got about somehow, because James Scott, the Colonial Surgeon, meeting Booth in Hobarton soon after, had cornered him, murmuring, ‘Expect nothing from that quarter, Booth, believe me. I do not mention names. I have treated the lady and her children. Seized her from the brink of death after one confinement—and was never offered so much as a glass of wine after a night of hard watching. Dismissed in the morning with a coolness that chilled my heart. And yet, do you know, I believe he loves her.'

And last year Booth's punishment records for Port Arthur had dropped, simply because the prison was running smoothly. Again came a savage letter from Arthur. Punishment was salutary, numbers must rise. And then, worse. A felon on trial in Hobart was sentenced to a chain gang and warned he'd be returned to Port Arthur if he erred again. Whereupon the man had shouted in court that he'd rather be there, where everything ran to rule. At least you were not at the whim of any devil of an overseer who flogged you at his pleasure and left you to rot afterwards. Arthur, in a white rage, had sent for Booth.