Wild Island (7 page)

It was months before I could let her out into my part of the attic and properly clean her cell, and more than a year—the following summer—before we began to sit on the tiny square of roof-leads in the sun. This had to be given up when Rochester came home. Bertha escaped twice over the roof by crawling up the gable in an ape-like way, scarcely believable in so big a woman. She set fire to Rochester's room and later attacked a guest. It was her stepbrother, Richard Mason, although I did not know it at the time. I had no choice then but to return to a stricter regimen. After the failed wedding I discovered that Bertha and I were the same age: thirty-four that year. Our prospects for the future now seemed equally uncertain.

3

THE FRANKLINS
'
INAUGURAL VISIT TO THE PENINSULA BEGAN AT
the coal mines, eight miles north-west of Port Arthur. The official party sailed down the estuary from Hobart at the end of March, and Booth rode up to meet them.

The outstation at the mines lies close to the shore, just behind a sandy beach, which runs out into the bay across two hundred yards of luminous shallows. Booth had designed a jetty seven hundred and sixty feet long and ten feet wide, to carry rails across the sands to where a sudden dark blue line indicates a fall into deep water. This tramway allowed convicts to push coal carts directly from the mines to transport ships anchored at the outer end, where the jetty was enlarged to form a wharf fifty feet wide. The
Eliza
anchored here, and Lady Franklin's first words on stepping ashore were an exclamation about the jetty.

‘Beautiful,' she told Booth. In all her travels she had not seen anything quite like it, not even in Russia, where wood is used so exquisitely. She wanted to know if the timber was eucalyptus, or the remarkable native pine? The dense, slow-growing species, ideal for shipbuilding? Her interest was clearly unfeigned, but to Booth seemed odd for a woman, and yet he felt a similar pleasure in the jetty's lines. His greater astonishment came when she made it clear
that she too would descend into the coal shaft. Sir John clearly enjoyed Booth's amazement.

‘My wife is m-more than equal to it, Captain Booth,' he said.

Was he slow-witted, as rumour implied? What he said was cogent enough when you got to it, but his manner was ponderous, with an occasional stammer. Some big men are quick and agile; he was not. Lady Franklin smiled and said her boots were stout, her bonnet indestructible. But she would remove the bonnet if Captain Booth thought it advisable, if the coal galleries were low. Her clever face was eager. She stayed down the mine all the time of the inspection but later admitted she felt oppressed by the narrow passages and the surprising degree of heat underground. She made no complaint, however. Did not sigh, faint, or appear to think any special attention due to her, but was clearly relieved to reach the surface again.

The Colonial Secretary, Mr John Montagu, next in seniority to the Governor in the colony, had murmured, ‘My dear lady!' when Lady Franklin spoke of going into the mine. Now, as they returned, he said to her, ‘Did you find the Dark Pit illuminating, ma'am? Did the Nether Regions answer your expectations?'

Was it meant sarcastically? She gave him a long look before saying, ‘Some experiences can only be got at first hand, do you not think? All their strange force expires in the retelling.'

It was difficult to imagine Montagu desiring any such experience, Booth thought, eyeing his immaculate black frock coat, tall black hat, urbane smile. Former Army, he had fought at Waterloo when he was seventeen and had been mentioned in despatches; yet that was hard to believe now. Paperwork—columns of figures, lists, private notes—rather than anything adventurous came to mind when you looked at him.

Montagu had come to the island in '23 as Governor Arthur's private secretary—through a family favour, people said. Montagu had recently married Arthur's niece, Jessie. ‘Warming-Pan' Montagu, the newsapers called him. Not so much for his dislike of the cold, although that was
well known, but because of his temporary stays in increasingly senior positions, keeping them warm for friends and relatives.

Un frisieux
, said Lempriere. Cold-blooded? A cold fish? And was this merely descriptive, or was some moral judgement implied? At any rate, Montagu had made himself indispensable to Arthur in a number of barely legal dealings—or so the
Colonial Times
said. Arthur and Montagu had certainly planned the downfall of their friend Mr Burnett, the ill, inefficient, former Colonial Secretary, and as soon as he was ousted, Montagu had been given the position. He had expected to move up again when Arthur departed, some said: to be appointed Lieutenant Governor himself. If that was true, there was no disappointment on show now. He was paying court to the Franklins like any contented subordinate.

Mr Matthew Forster, Chief Police Magistrate, had also declined to go down the mine. In his case it was from complete lack of interest, Booth thought. Forster, another prominent ‘Arthurite', was a ‘sporting gentleman', which meant gambling—cards, horse racing, dog fighting, anything that offered itself. He had been a Brigade Major for years in Ireland, and retained a hearty, half-belligerent barracks manner, but looked now like a pugilist gone to seed. His black frock coat fitted too tightly across his wide shoulders and barrel chest; a great belly was pushed up above a low narrow waist—by a corset, surely—so that he resembled a pouter pigeon.

Even so, Forster was not unlikeable, to other men at least. Lizzie Eagle said he gave her the shudders. Certainly his head was overlarge, misshapen. His eyes bulged and his sight was poor, which explained the lorgnette always on a black silk ribbon around his neck. Forster was famously vain in spite of his disadvantages, or perhaps because of them. He wore a dandified cravat today, with a gold pin, and a double heavy gold watch chain. He was married to Jessie Montagu's sister, Helena, which made him brother-in-law to Montagu.

The party re-boarded the
Eliza
and sailed further up the bay into the inlet leading to Eaglehawk Neck. The waters on this inward, Hobarton side of the peninsula were sheltered, ending in a mile or
so of beach with rocks at either end. They disembarked and Montagu and Forster walked over to the barracks, while the Franklins climbed the short, sandy path to the top of the dune that formed the spine of the Neck, to look out at the parallel beach on the eastern, ocean side. Here the sight was spectacular, a vast panorama of the open sea rolling in two thousand miles from New Zealand, crashing in great curling breakers onto a long crescent of pale sands.

The narrow neck on which they stood, Booth explained, formed the only land passage between Forestier Peninsula to the north and Tasman Peninsula to the south. This made the latter almost an island: a perfect natural prison, as Governor Arthur had recognised. Even so, in the first year or two after Port Arthur was established there had been escapes—until Ensign Peyton Jones of the 63rd Regiment conceived the idea of the dog-line. Booth pointed to the line of eleven lampposts spaced at intervals across the neck below them. Each post had a large, savage dog chained to it, with a barrel for a kennel. But the line had not worked at first.

‘The first time I came up here there were nine dogs, and the corporal in charge regarded them rather as pets, I discovered. I walked straight between them to the hut, where he was asleep at the table with his head on his arms.'

Later that night, in the privacy of the officers' tent, the barracks having been given up to the visiting party, Booth came in for a ribbing over his evident bemusement at the Governor's wife. He shook his head, laughing at himself. Lady Franklin was so unlike her predecessor. Mrs Arthur had always been
enceinte
or too embroiled with children to venture far—even if she had wanted to, which she gave no indication of. Booth predicted he would not be the only one in Van Diemen's Land to be set aback by Lady Franklin. But you could not help liking her, admiring her. When you came across such quick understanding in a woman, such good humour . . . They mocked him all the more, of course.

Next day the weather changed. On the journey overland from Eaglehawk Neck down to Port Arthur it rained persistently. The
visitors were caped, umbrella'd, and wrapped in shawls, cloaks, pelisses and surtouts. Pale faces peered out into the wet. The scarlet jackets and white cross-straps of the soldiers showed vividly against the shining grey-greens of the wet bush. Sir John rode Booth's horse (poor Jack!) and there were a variety of borrowed mounts for the other gentlemen. Convict bearers carried the makeshift sedan chairs for the ladies. Lowering skies pressed wreaths of mist down between the hills. Booth was disappointed. He had wanted the Franklins to have their first sight of the settlement cove with the sun on it, the whitewashed buildings looking sheltered and delightful as they so often did. Sir John dismounted and Lady Franklin too insisted on walking.

‘Her Ladyship had us deployed in two minutes,'
Booth mentally composed a letter to his sister Charlotte, dear Char: the family correspondent, who had seen Franklin's appointment to Van Diemen's Land in the
Gazette
, and demanded a full account of the Arctic Lion, The Man Who Ate His Boots, and his blue-stocking wife.

Booth must walk here beside her husband, said Lady Franklin, and Mr Montagu beside her, with Mr Forster on that side. Only afterwards did Booth understand that by this means she made certain he was talking to Sir John's ‘good' ear during the first tour of the site. Sir John had been deaf on one side since the battle of Copenhagen, he told Booth later at dinner. The roar of the cannons beside him all day had damaged his hearing. Lady Franklin wanted him to let the doctors look at his ear, but he would not allow it.

‘Only consider the great Duke's experience,' Franklin said, warming to his subject, no stammer now. Wellington had attended trials of the new howitzers during the War, and afterwards complained of a singing in the ears. England's greatest ear doctor poured a solution of lunar caustic—nitrate of silver, you know—into the Duke's ears, after which the Great Man was completely deaf on one side and suffered much with pain and headache.

‘A barbaric treatment, to be sure,' said Casey that night. Booth was lodging with Casey; the Franklins were in the Commandant's cottage.
‘But they had nothing else in those days. Perhaps the Governor's deafness accounts for the rumour of his slow wits?

‘And no trouble yet from Montagu or Forster?' Casey added.

‘No trouble,' said Booth, ignoring both the ‘yet' and the one very small sign he had noticed. It had arisen on account of the continuing rain, which Lady Franklin hardly seemed to notice. At the boys' prison at Point Puer, stray drops evaded the brim of her bonnet and ran down her straight nose. She brushed them aside unheedingly, listening attentively to Sir John's questions and Booth's explanations. The boys were allowed to bathe in the sea in summer? Were taught trades as well as religion? She admired the boots made by the apprentice cobblers and the seating forms made by the carpenters. Where was the fresh water? Ah! A disadvantage, to have to haul it in. She tasted the soup and pronounced it ‘palatable'.

Out in the rain again, Montagu walked beside her, trying to keep a large black umbrella over her head and his own, but in her bright eagerness Jane Franklin was always darting ahead of this protection. Just when he had the umbrella poised equally, she would move forward with an enquiry about sawpits, or to peer at some object of interest. Montagu's dilemma was amusingly clear. Must he stretch out his arm to make the umbrella cover her, thus baring his own beautiful tall black hat to the rain? Or put himself to an undignified trot to keep up with her? Montagu disliked rain as much as the cold, everyone knew. He believed himself more than commonly subject to the grippe. The little comedy appealed to Booth's strong sense of the ridiculous.

Montagu solved the problem by pausing abruptly as though recalling an urgent matter. He beckoned to Forster and they stood talking as Lady Franklin went on, her attention leaping ahead. Sir John's young aide moved in with his own umbrella, catching Booth's eye as he did so, and Booth saw that he too was amused. An indication that Montagu's loyalty would not stretch far? That his own wellbeing was paramount? Booth thought Lady Franklin had also noticed the little stratagem, although she gave no sign of it. The next day, as the rain continued, Montagu stayed indoors.

In a few words, Char, a more agreeable or pleasant visit could not have been
, Booth continued the letter in his head.
Quite pleased at the satisfaction Her Ladyship, Sir John and all parties expressed with their trip
.

The single dissenting voice had been that of Mrs Evans, a sister-in-law of Sir John's, visiting the colony with her doctor husband. Several times she quietly lamented the hard lives of the convicts, clearly afraid to offend, but determined to show she was ‘Anti-Transportation'. The prisoners were well fed and housed, she conceded, but nothing could make up for exile from England. Her protest became more visceral a fortnight after the Port Arthur visit, when the party reached Flinders Island. The Franklins had asked Booth to continue with them on this leg of the tour to see Wybalenna, where the remnants of the aboriginal tribes in Van Diemen's Land had been rounded up and transported to live, or conveniently die. When they came to the black people in the infirmary here, words failed Mrs Evans; she cried out in distress and hurried off to be sick.

Mind you, Booth had been shocked himself. None of the party was prepared for what they saw. Emaciated bodies lying in rooms filled with the stench of illness and death. The black people coughing, groaning, vomiting, or agonisingly silent, all effort on the next breath. Open sores unspeakable, cheap English clothes like a ghastly joke. Booth knew the stories of the last thirty years; barbarous cruelty on both sides, and far worse from whites than blacks, if you had to be truthful. The blacks had been hunted, driven over cliffs, shot, poisoned, burned, hacked . . . and the misery of it was horribly evident here, in the hopeless faces, the bright, haunted eyes.