Wild Island (18 page)

‘Will they though?' asked Bergman. ‘I'm not so sure. Arthur held them together, as I said before, and now he's gone they are less united. It may be a matter of
sauve qui peut
. They must fear what else may come to light if their affairs begin to be examined by the Colonial Office in London. Henry Melville's new book is full of allegations against Arthur and his friends. If only a quarter is true, they'd have embarrassing questions to answer.
The History of the Island of Van Diemen's Land
. Have you seen it? Melville sent it to England last year to be published; he was afraid Arthur might somehow stop it if he went ahead with it here.'

‘Ah, well,' said Lempriere. ‘Perhaps Franklin will find the strength to dismiss Montagu. He had Gregson released from prison, which was a blow against the Arthurites.'

‘But did he know that?' said Bergman. ‘I don't think so. Franklin had only just arrived. He was shown a petition and set Gregson free as a piece of inaugural grace. He had no idea of the strength of the Arthur faction then. Does he even now?'

No one answered.

‘It's an interesting study in human nature.' Boyes was pensive. ‘Franklin, who believes a man must be forgiven to seventy times seven as the Bible says—and Montagu, who can't comprehend how one could have the advantage and not use it. Franklin, who feels a duty to love his fellow men, and Montagu, who takes violent, irrational hatreds against certain individuals. He loathes Maconochie, and Alfred Stephen, and Cheyne, the new Superintendent of Public Works . . .'

Another short, comfortable silence.

‘All this talk of factions, opposing sides,' said Booth irritably. ‘I don't like it. The newspapers start it. Why can't a man be a friend to both Franklin and Montagu?'

The other three considered him.

‘You look as though you could do with a week in bed,' said Bergman.

‘A touch of the old fever, that's all.'

‘You're fortunate down here. A safe distance from these slings and arrows.'

‘Tempests in teacups,' said Booth wearily.

‘Sometimes. This may be more.'

‘It must be especially galling to Montagu that it's Alfred Stephen who's brought this Clapperton business down on them,' said Lempriere. ‘Wasn't Stephen a friend to the Arthur faction at one time?'

‘They fell out a year ago over that row at the inn at New Norfolk.'

‘A quarrel over a late-night card game? That doesn't sound like Montagu.'

‘No, nobody's suggesting Montagu was actually involved, but he was there. It was the Governor's nephew, Henry Arthur, at the centre
of it. “Shots were fired,” the
Courier
said, when someone accused Henry Arthur of cheating.'

‘That's hardly new . . .'

Bergman smiled. ‘You can't help wondering what England would think if they could hear us: the Bennett affair, the Clapperton case, the Greenwood business—and half a dozen others.'

‘When Arthur was here these things could be kept quiet,' said Boyes, shrugging. ‘But it's curious. Something about that night at New Norfolk made his followers very nervous. They certainly closed ranks to keep it from him. He was waiting to hear of his next appointment at the time, and a scandal at that moment was the last thing he wanted. And then Henry Arthur resigned and went to Port Phillip; Alfred Stephen quarrelled with the others, and is off to Sydney.'

‘Henry Arthur and Thomas Mason are a pair of rogues. And as for John Price, a more unpleasant . . .'

‘He's to marry Franklin's niece.'

Another silence.

‘Can no one persuade her against it? Invent a delay while her parents' approval is sought?

‘She is an orphan. Sir John is her guardian. She needs only his permission . . .'

Boyes shrugged, sighed. ‘The Franklins have known Price less than six months—and he certainly appears eligible at first sight. Third son of a baronet—who is said, however, to be both eccentric and impoverished. John Price has sold his worthless land at the Huon to Lady Franklin.'

‘It's not worthless,' Bergman protested. ‘It's heavily wooded, and needs more effort and outlay to develop than John Price expected. Lady Franklin's plan for it seems excellent to me, although the press is quick to mock her. Gilbert Robertson is the only one who understands.'

Booth had heard Jane Franklin speak of her idea of forming a new settlement at the Huon River, and had thought it excellent as well, but too difficult to put into practice. During the inaugural tour, Jane had learned that many settlers could not buy land in the island because
it was sold only in large parcels, generally more than two hundred acres, often more than five hundred, which put it beyond the reach of those with modest capital. They wanted smallholdings of five, ten or twenty acres, which at present they were forced to rent from the owners of big properties.

Small tenant farmers were thus at the mercy of wealthy landlords, many of whom were absentees living in England. The rents left the island, but worse still, tenants could not afford to make improvements because these became the property of the landowner. Even clearing was often done at the tenant's expense, to the benefit of the owner. There had been cases where smallholders had built huts, barns or fencing, and were afterwards given notice to quit, so the improved property could be rented at a higher rate to a newcomer.

England's policy could not be changed, so Lady Franklin had begun a private scheme. As Bergman now explained, her six hundred acres on the Huon River was gradually being surveyed and carved into allotments of five or ten acres. (In a few cases the measure was as little as one or two.) She was selling these to poorer settlers who could prove their
bona fides
—had even sold one to a former convict. Repayment was set at ridiculously low interest, and even this was deferred for the first few years, allowing the new owners to put what little money they had into developing the land. The scheme was in its infancy, and yet, Bergman said, he had already seen one grateful farmer trying to press two grimy ten-shilling notes into Lady Franklin's hand with gruff thanks.

‘It's a pity she didn't buy land nearer the town for it.'

‘You know there is none, except what would cost a fortune. Most of the desirable land was granted or sold in the early days, and Arthur took the rest.'

‘If John Price has sold his land, where will he live with his bride?'

‘He's leased a small farm on the eastern shore near the Mad Judge's property.'

Boyes was evidently still thinking of Mary Franklin, because he said suddenly, ‘A young woman dances with a presentable young man
once or twice and fancies herself in love. If you tell her he's a vicious specimen, she'll probably cling to him all the more loyally and think the worse of you. Pray for your daughters, gentlemen.'

‘If Franklin doesn't dismiss Montagu, he'll have more to worry about than his unfortunate niece,' said Lempriere.

‘True. But I'm inclined to agree with Booth; why let oneself be forced into partisanship? I shall be a “trimmer”, as people used to say bitterly in my father's time,' said Boyes. ‘One who trims his sails to the prevailing wind. A kinder name is “diplomat”.'

‘But suppose you have to defend a principle, or a friend?' asked Bergman.

‘How often does it come to that?'

‘I prefer to keep out of it,' said Booth.

‘Perhaps you can, down here. But as our friend Maconochie might put it,' said Bergman, ‘“He who wad sup wi' the devil maun keep a lang spune.”'

He smiled, rose, and thanked Booth for the evening.

10

ON THE
ADASTRA
MEALS CAME AND WENT; WE SAILED ON AND ON
.

Nights seemed even longer as we reached the middle of the voyage, in spite of the increasing hours of daylight. The cabins were too hot for sleep and the dark hours stretched and warped like a vast slow arc from dusk to dawn. I would often return to the deck and lean on the rail gazing at the heavens lit with stars, the inky roiling sea. Quigley might pause to talk if he was on watch; St John, McLeod and Seymour were also regulars. Bess Chesney and Louisa either slept soundly or endured their wakefulness below. With the ship aslant, rushing steadily on through the warm dark, it seemed natural to be silent, or to speak of things too private for the sunlight. One night I asked Seymour whether he believed Anna's recovery would be permanent.

‘I have been thinking about it,' he replied, ‘and the truth is, I do not know. It is clearly an affliction in which the body and mind—or spirit, if you like—are connected, and this kind of ailment we know little about. Some physicians think the mind is like a great house: a Gothic castle with secret chambers, dark corners, winding stairways. As I say, we simply don't know.'

His expression was unreadable, his face half in shadow. ‘Shall I tell you why I concluded Jane Eyre and Rochester should turn back?' I was eager to hear his reasons. We had all, I think, wondered at the
decision. ‘It was because although Rochester's case is curious, I have seen another, very similar, on my first voyage out. I was assistant surgeon on a transport carrying two hundred and thirty felons and twelve passengers. One of these was a Mr Thomas McClelland—young, handsome, well bred—going out to the colony to be Attorney General. This is not confidential, I should say; unfortunately it is now well known in Hobarton.

‘For the first few weeks you'd have thought McClelland the sanest man alive, but three weeks into the voyage he began to complain that he did not really wish to leave England; the position had been obtained for him by influential friends. He begged the Captain to turn back. The Captain treated this with kindly amusement at first, but McClelland became increasingly agitated and would not eat.

‘He tried to throw himself overboard, and at last showed such strong signs of derangement that we were forced to lock him in his cabin, and later, to restrain him. I began to think he could not reach Van Diemen's Land alive. More strangely still, when we did arrive he recovered his sanity with astonishing swiftness. He said Hobarton was more like England than he had expected. Unfortunately, after a year he relapsed into madness again. In McClelland's case, as in Rochester's, the affliction seemed to bear some relation to the fact of leaving England, a fear that in a strange colony he might change, lose hold of the self he had always known . . .'

St John Wallace had joined us, his face like that of a stern angel in the light of the translucent moon, now far over in its arc. He gave a soft laugh and said, ‘And yet rightly considered, it hardly matters where we are in this world, since our true task is to prepare for the next. We are all colonists after a fashion. Pilgrims, exiles, on the way back to our true home.'

He must have been pleased with this conceit because he used it in his sermon the following Sunday, speaking of homesickness for God as the essential condition of mankind. He quoted Wordsworth, saying we are all born into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory'—faint memories of the spiritual home from which we come. Each newborn
infant suffers a Fall out of Eden into the World, as Adam and Eve did. And although these ‘intimations of immortality' fade as we grow, what remains of them is our natural attraction to Beauty and Virtue. We are homesick for God. By cleaving to the Good and the True we find our way home. If we turn aside to sin, we wander lost through many lifetimes. He concluded by saying the felons in Van Diemen's Land were in this state and must be helped to set their feet on the Way again.

‘“Many lifetimes”, Wallace?' Seymour said half-teasingly as we went in to dinner afterwards. ‘Hardly an orthodox position? Does your time in India incline you to believe in reincarnation?'

‘Orthodox or not,' interrupted McLeod, ‘you are dangerously mistaken, Wallace. Poverty and ignorance are the major cause of vice. No
poetry
,' he infused the word with contempt, ‘should obscure the fact that the strongest impulses of humanity are the same as those in animals—hunger, fear, and the will to live and multiply. Poetry cannot be consulted on matters of social justice.'

McLeod seemed intensely irritated by Wallace's views and from that day seemed constantly looking for ways of stirring him to anger, one of his favourite subjects being the age of the earth. McLeod insisted that Lyell's geology and the discovery of the speed of light had proved the universe ancient beyond calculation. How could anyone now believe the world was only four thousand years old, as theologians claimed? And created in seven days? St John maintained a saintly calm under these attacks, which—intentionally or not—had the effect of infuriating McLeod still further.

But he was hurling himself uselessly against the implacable wall of St John's certainties. These were mysteries we were not meant to understand, was the constant mild reply. And what's more, according to the men of science McLeod put so much faith in, the substance we were pleased to call matter was made up of atoms like dust, which could be changed at God's Will. Take the stars: Orion's Belt, for example, the only constellation visible from both northern and southern hemispheres. (It must have been night again, on deck again.)

‘That reddish star at the base? That is Bait-al-Jeux, or Betelgeuse, part of the Winter Triangle. I have been reading Edmund Chilmead's translation of
Riti Ebraici,
a history of the Jewish peoples, where he mentions that the curious name comes from a mistranslation of the Arabic into Latin—by which we know that Betelgeuse must have been visible to Jesus. But the most interesting thing is this: Sir John Herschel, our Astronomer Royal, tells us Betelgeuse has begun—two years ago—to suddenly grow in brightness, until now it surpasses Rigel. The universe is changing, we are born into vital times and called to action.'

‘My action would not be yours,' said McLeod.