forming a ring that did away with all competition; they had taken up all the good land, which they farmed with free convict-labour; they were exploiting the place for all they were worth. But infinitely worse than all that, worse than their corrupt selling to govern. ment at starvation prices, was their treatment of the wretched prisoners. I have been aboard more than one hell-afloat, and they make a man’s heart sick, but I have never seen anything to touch the cruelty in New South Wales. Floggings of 500 lashes, 500 lashes, were commonpiace, and even in the short time I was there two men were whipped to death. I tell you this because these fellows know damned well that people fresh to the place are shocked and look upon them as blackguards; they are very touchy about it, very apt to take offence, and you may easily find yourself called out for a trifling observation. So it seems to me that distant civility is the thing: official invitations, no more. There is no one here who could possibly be accused of want of conduct, but a quarrel with a blackguard is like a court-case with a pauper: the whole thing is a toss-up
– there is no justice in either – and while you have nothing to win, he has nothing to lose.’
‘Did you say a court-case, sir?’ asked West.
‘Yes, I did,’ said Jack. ‘What I really meant was that a blackguard can point a pistol as well as a decent man, and that it is much better to avoid the possibility of such an encounter.
There was a jumped-up fellow here called Macarthur who put
a bullet in Colonel Paterson’s shoulder, though Paterson was all an officer should be and the other was a scoundrel.’
‘I met Macarthur in London,’ said Stephen. ‘He was there for his court-martial – acquitted, of course – and Southdown Kemsley, with whom he had been in correspondence on sheep, brought him to dinner at the Royal Society Club. Loud, positive and overbearing: at first extremely formal, then extremely familiar, full of lewd anecdotes. He wanted to buy some of the King’s merinos, and he proposed calling on Sir Joseph Banks, who supervised the flock; but Sir Joseph, who was in close touch with the colony, had had such reports of his undesirability that he declined receiving him. His regiment was
universally known as the Rum Corps, because rum was its first basis of trade, wealth, power, influence and corruption. I believe that there are changes now that Governor Macquarie has come out with the Seventy-Third regiment, but the old Rum Corps officers are still here, in the administration or sitting on great stretches of good land granted to themselves by themselves and more or less running the country, alas.’
The dinner did not end on this solemn note; indeed it ended in very cheerful song. But the next day’s breakfast was a gloomy affair, although the coast of New South Wales was clear all along the western horizon and the pilot was already aboard. There was a most unaccustomed silence on either side of the coffee-pot, and Jack for one looked yellow, puffy, liverish; he had not taken his morning swim and his eyes, usually bright blue, were now dull, oyster-like, with discoloured bags below them. His breath was foul.
‘The Doctor was not drunk too, was he?’ asked Bonden in the cuddy where Killick was grindingbeans for a second pot.
‘Drunk, no,’ said Killick. ‘I wish he had been. It would make his crabbedness more natural.
I don’t know what has come over him, such a mild-spoken cove.’
‘He slapped Sarah and Emily till they howled again; and he checked Joe Plaice something cruel for walking backwards into him on the forecastle: “Can’t you see where you are a-coming to, God damn your eyes and limbs, you fat-arsed bugger of a longshoreman?” Or words to that effect.’
‘I tell you what it is, Stephen,’ said Jack after a prolonged silence. ‘I do not think the gunroom’s turtle was quite wholesome.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Stephen. ‘Never was such a healthy, clean-run reptile. The trouble is, you ate too much, as you did the day before, and as you do habitually whenever it is there to eat. I have told you again and again that you are digging your grave with your teeth. You are at present suffering from a plethory, a common plethory. I can deal with the symptoms of this plethory; but the self-indulgence that lies behind them is beyond my reach.’
‘Pray do deal with them, Stephen,’ said Jack. ‘We shall drop anchor this afternoon unless the breeze fails us. The Governor is sure to ask us to dinner tomorrow, and I could not face a laid table as I feel now.’
‘You will have to take physic, of course; and it will confine you to the seat of ease for most of the day and perhaps part of the night. You obese subjects are often slow-working, where the colon is concerned.’
‘I shall take whatever you order,’ said Jack. ‘To clean and refit a ship properly and without loss of time, you have to be tolerably well with the authorities, and to be tolerably well with the authorities you have to eat their food hearty and drink up their wine as though you enjoyed it. At present the thought of anything but bare biscuit’ – holding up a piece – ‘and thin black coffee makes my gorge rise.’
‘I shall fetch what is required,’ said Stephen, returning some minutes later with a pill-box, a bottle and a measuring-glass. ‘Swallow this,’ he said, passing a pill, ‘and wash it down with that,’ passing the half-filled glass.
‘Are you sure it is enough?’ asked Jack. ‘I am not one of your light-weights, you know, not one of your borrel shrimps; and it is a very small pill.’
‘Rest easy while you may,’ said Stephen. ‘You may be the biggest born of earth, but black draught and blue pill will search your entrails and stir your torpid liver; it will sort you out finely, so it will.’ He put the cork back into the bottle with a thump and walked off, reflecting upon exasperation, an
emotion aroused by some persons and some situations in an eminent degree.
Having edged three dead rats out of the sick-berth he did some work on his records: then he rolled a little paper cigar and climbed to the quarterdeck to smoke it. There had been some candid remarks about tobacco below, and he was obliged to admit that the cold stale smell of several dead cigars that seeped from his lower cabin into the gunroom did make it more like a low pot-house at dawn than was altogether agreeable.
Martin had already been on deck for some time, watching the magnificent harbour opening before them. ‘Here is Sydney Cove at last,’ he said, with a somewhat irritating enthusiasm.
‘It grieves me to contradict you,’ said Stephen, ‘but this is Port Jackson. Sydney Cove is only a little small bay, about five miles down on the left.’
‘Good Heavens! Do you tell me that they are the same? I had no idea.’
‘Sure, I have not mentioned it above a hundred times.’
‘So this is the home of the Port Jackson shark,’ cried Martin, looking eagerly over the side.
‘Ha, ha,’ said Stephen, to whom the thought had occurred many and many a time before, but not today. ‘Let us see if we can fish one up.’ He picked his way through a party of men on their knees, improving the look of the quarterdeck seams, and reached for the mizentopsail halliards, to which the shark-hooks and their chains were made fast. But before he could seize them Tom Pullings was there. ‘No, sir,’ he said very firmly. ‘Not today, if you please. There can be no shark-fishing today. We have been preddying the decks ever since two bells in the morning watch. Surely, sir, you would not want Surprise to look paltry in Sydney Cove?’
Stephen might have advanced that it was only a small inoffensive shark, not above four feet long, that it had a unique arrangement of flat grinding teeth of the first interest, and that the inconvenience would be trifling; but Tom Pullings’ immovable gravity, the immovable gravity of all the Surprises on deck, who had stopped work to look at him, and even of
the pilot, a man-of-war’s man himself, checked the words in his throat.
‘We will fish up a couple for you the day after tomorrow,’ said Pullings.
‘Half a dozen,’ said the bosun.
‘Oh if you please, sir,’ cried Jemmy Ducks, coming aft at a run, ‘Sarah has swallowed a pin.’
The medical men had more trouble, spent more time with this one pin than with the results of many a brisk action, with splinter-wounds, fractures and even the minor amputations; and when at last it was recovered and the exhausted, emptied child had been put to bed they found they had missed the entire approach to Sydney, the shores and the stratified