Buckley's Chance Page 9

  Marmon, barely alive, will make it back to camp just before the ship leaves. He will slowly recover from his bout of scurvy and receive a conditional pardon in 1816.

  Collins will never see his wife or England again. When the Ocean arrives in Van Diemen’s Land and everyone disembarks after a short journey up the Derwent River, he will name the new settlement Hobart Town – a nod to the good Lord Hobart himself back in London.

  But his melancholy will only deepen. Hobart will experience years of famine and borderline existence. A tired Collins will be criticised by his superiors, his judgement questioned. Barbed reports will arrive in London. Some of the most wounding will come from the acid pen of William Bligh, the fourth Governor of NSW, who will spend time in Hobart in exile after the Rum Rebellion in Sydney in 1808.

  The vindictive and temper-prone Bligh already knows too much about rebellions – his epic journey in a small rowboat after the mutiny on the Bounty is already the stuff of legend. He will complain to Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, that Collins’ habit of walking the streets of Hobart with his latest mistress, Margaret Eddington, is unbecoming of a man charged with the welfare of a young colony, ‘… a moral and civil point of view as great an insult as could be offered’.

  Hopes of a return to England and his despairing wife will fade. Collins will father two children with Eddington, a 16-year-old when Collins first takes her into his bed.

  Two years later, recovering from a cold, he will take a sip from a cup of tea before falling back into his chair, one arm outstretched, as though warding off that evil genius that had been pursuing him for much of his life.

  He will die destitute, just a month after turning 54. Back in London Maria will discover that her handsome husband, who fathered four children to other women, owed almost 300 pounds.

  Those who attend his funeral will never forget one of the largest ever seen in these new colonies, filled with pomp and circumstance and solemn speeches about the greatness of the man. It will also come at great cost – almost 500 pounds, a fee that will leave the mandarins in London grumbling that the man was now a strain on the coffers in death, as he was in life.

  And then, as so often in life, David Collins will be forgotten.

  More than a century later well-meaning officials will begin digging in an unmarked grave to have his coffin removed and given a more decent burial place. They will prise the lid open and be astonished at what they find; inside the coffin of Huon pine are sheets of lead and dried twigs and leaves. Within that, another casket, a second one of sturdy pine. And there, lying inside it to the astonishment of those gathered around, will be a tall, handsome man, perfectly preserved in his red dress uniform with a sword by his side.

  There will barely be a blemish on his face, not a grey hair to be seen. All those embalming herbs, all that lead, all that Huon pine, will have awarded a small and belated victory to a man who spent his life desperately craving attention and recognition.

  As for you, William Buckley.

  You will be remembered for what comes next.

  PART II

  WILLIAM ENTERS A NEW WORLD

  11

  ‘A SPECIES OF MADNESS’

  ‘The whole affair was, in fact, a species of madness,’ you will reminisce five decades later when you are an old man with a faltering memory, shaking your head at the sheer absurdity of the scheme.

  To think you could have made it to Sydney. You travelled in the wrong direction for a start. But even then, even if through some sheer fluke you had made it to Port Jackson, then what? The irons would have been slapped back on your ankles and another of those sadistic guards would have smiled and then built up a sweat flaying your back. After that? Years on a chain gang, clearing land for others to profit from. Or, more than likely, sent on a ship to join David Collins on another of his ill-fated ventures. At least the pair of you could have kept one another company in your misery.

  Now where do you find yourself? Your companions, starving and bitter and remorseful, turned back to try to rejoin the settlement at Sullivan Bay before it departed for Van Diemen’s Land. They had tried to convince you to join them. But that was never going to happen. Did you have anything to say to them?

  ‘I turned a deaf ear, being determined to endure every kind of suffering rather than again surrender my liberty.’

  Stubborn bastard. Better this meagre diet of shellfish than a return to hard biscuits and salted pork. But how good would a meal like that taste right now? You have been wandering for weeks and nothing in life has tested you like this. The physical pain – the hunger cravings and muscle aches and dehydration – are one thing. But alone in this country, the silence broken only by the odd bird call or the wretched howling of dingoes at night … that has been something else. Makes a man think about what he has lost and left behind. A day seems to go on endlessly, a week in a blur of foraging for food and water – and avoiding those natives.

  The day after your fellow absconders left you, you came across more than a hundred of these Aboriginals. They apparently had seen you, too, and began making their way toward you. Well, that caused you to panic and you ran straight to a nearby river and dived in. Problem was, you were carrying a fire stick – probably a smouldering remnant from your last campfire – and its warm embers that had helped make those bitter, salty shellfish more edible were immediately extinguished. By the time you reached the other side of the river they had pulled back and you had made your way to a beach, covering yourself with leaves and boughs as night descended.

  It rained. Cold and wet, you barely slept. As soon as the sun rose the next morning you continued moving south, the trek becoming more hopeless by the hour. You forded saltwater streams, climbed rocky outcrops, doing your best to stay on the coast and near its sandy beaches rather than move inland with all its unknowns. All that water around you and none of it drinkable. The best you could do was to cup your hands and reach into the boughs of trees where a little melted dew might be on offer.

  This went on for how long? Days? Weeks? How exhausted can a man become before he just curls up and surrenders? The very act of climbing over more rocky outcrops came close to defeating you. And then came a little luck. A small well – clearly dug by human hands – provided fresh water. Not long after, next to a small stream that ran into the ocean, the glowing leftovers of a small scrub fire lit a few days before. One of the trees had still been smoking, enough to make a new fire stick.

  Food, fire, fresh water. But just when things were starting to look up, sores began breaking out all over your body, matching the weeping blisters on the soles of your feet. It was then that you knew this escape, this constant running, and then walking … and now little more than pathetic hobbling … had to stop. It was time to rest.

  So here you are, perched at the top of a massive rock you will one day call Nooraki, sheltered by an outcrop of land, looking out to sea. You have built a shack of sorts out of dried seaweed and old tree limbs. Some builder you turned out to be. Old Master Wyatt would shake his head in disgust if he saw this pathetic shelter. Nearby, a stream of fresh water tumbles into the ocean. There are wild berries to be picked and a weed called pig face that tastes like insipid watermelon. But it’s enough. Your body is healing. The sores are fading and the blisters are now callouses. Your beard has thickened and your hair tumbles over your shoulders and down your back. You stink, actually. But you’re starting to think that perhaps this isn’t all that bad. The solitude is sometimes overwhelming but the tranquillity almost makes up for it.

  And then one day the serenity is broken. For the first time in many months you hear the sound of human voices.

  You’re a stubborn bastard. Where would we be without them? Stubbornness is what brought you to this place and that very same trait drove this land’s original inhabitants, too. Their journey started just as far away – but much longer ago. Let’s go back a few hundred thousand years to one of the first group of Homo sapiens. They seem content sitting a
round a fire somewhere in eastern Africa. They have just picked clean the bones of an antelope and as night descends they scratch their full and slightly hairy bellies, yawn and prepare to sleep.

  Tomorrow they have plans to travel north. Just a few miles at first. But it will be the first steps on a journey that, over tens of thousands of years, will see them spread around the globe in a relentless march unmatched by any other species.

  Hard to imagine them succeeding without vast quantities of pig-headedness. Over the coming centuries, as the continents grind against one another, as the seas rise and fall, they will encounter so many obstacles. There will be dangerous creatures preying on them, other hominid species like Neanderthals competing against them, as well as massive climactic changes thrown at them – from insufferable heat to frigid ice ages. Good thing a little doggedness and intransigence is hard wired into their DNA. Without it they might sprint back to that little campfire and just hang around waiting to become extinct from hunger and sheer boredom. Hunger – you know that too now. And boredom as well.

  12

  ‘THEY HAVE SEEN A GHOST’

  The voices belong to three Aboriginal men. They stand on the escarpment, spears in hand, possum skins covering their shoulders. Your first instinct is to creep into a crevice and try to hide, but they have already seen you and are now shouting. You can only assume they are asking you to surrender and, with nowhere to go, you step out and approach them.

  Well, at least what happens next takes you into familiar territory. ‘They gazed on me with wonder: my size probably attracting their attention,’ you will later recall.

  Not just your size, although that has been enough to surprise strangers for years. It’s your skin. Despite the tan from months in the sun it’s unlikely they have seen anyone like you before. They seize your hands and then strike their breasts and begin singing and wailing. And then they begin to inspect this hut of yours, this ragged shanty of old limbs and seaweed. One of the men dives into the sea and comes out shortly after with a crayfish that is thrown on to a hastily made fire. Once cooked it is shared equally.

  You remain cautious. Nothing in life has prepared you for something like this. When this cordial greeting and sharing of food is over the three beckon you to follow them and you do, leaving the beach and moving inland where you finally arrive at two small huts and spend the night. After a sleepless evening the three men indicate they want to continue moving inland but now the stubbornness in you – or is it fear? – returns. You refuse. One of them points to your worn-out stockings, stained and ridden with holes and loose threads. He wants them, forcing another refusal.

  ‘After sundry striking of the breasts and stamping with the feet they were content to leave me unmolested,’ is how you will later put it. But that man is fixated with those stockings. He returns shortly with a woven basket filled with wild berries and tries to exchange it for them and once again you refuse to hand them over. Isn’t this how so many first encounters between different cultures begin badly? Not with the rattling of sabres and firing of guns, but over the small things – a misinterpreted wave of the hand or a well-meant offering that instead causes offence. Or a pair of lousy, worn-out, stinking stockings you should have discarded weeks ago …

  When the man departs again and disappears, you decide to leave, too. Not a good decision, not one of your finest moments. For the next few days you wander through the bush, hopelessly lost among those gnarled eucalypts shedding layers of bark like flayed skin. It’s cold and begins to rain and the only shelter to be found is inside a hollow tree. You can light a fire here, keep warm and stay hidden. Now you’re starting to think straight …

  ‘My fire attracted the notice of wild dogs and oposums, whose horrid howls and noises were such as to render sleep impossible. The cries of the latter were like the shrieks of children, appearing to be at times over me and at others close to my ear.’

  This is where all notion of time stops. How many days pass before we find you back in your glorious seaweed hut on the beach? How many weeks watching your clothes fray, the holes in those stockings growing larger? Even worse, as you sit there on that rock looking out over the ocean, searching for the hint of a calico sail on the horizon, the loneliness and despair returns.

  Perhaps there is time to make it back to Sullivan Bay – wherever it might be, given your sense of direction has been turned upside down. Perhaps that morose David Collins will still be there, still waiting for you and damned if you wouldn’t sink to your knees at the very sight of him and kiss the ground and tear off your shirt and enjoy every bloody lash they unleashed on you.

  Off you go then. Broken and beaten, still clinging to that fantasy of staging a miraculous return. You can only manage short distances at a time before exhaustion sets in. You reach a stream you will one day call Dooangawn. Near it is a mound of earth and embedded in it, a spear. You pull it from the ground and use it as a walking stick. But it can barely hold you up; starvation has weakened you to the point where even walking exhausts you and, trying to cross a river spilling into the sea, the high tide almost washes you away.

  Crawl into the bush. That’s it. Sleep the night. Next morning you must find food. Anything will do – a handful of berries, the root of a small plant. And while you are foraging in vain, two women will see you. This is it.

  ‘These women went in search of their husbands with the intelligence that they had seen a very tall white man. Presently they all came upon me unawares and, seizing me by the arms and hands began beating their breasts, and mine … the women assisted me to walk, the men shouting hideous noises and tearing their hair.’

  Who can blame them? They have seen a ghost.

  There was a stubborn bastard on the Calcutta with you who you never knew – Teredo navalis. It’s a bivalve mollusc but don’t be fooled by that. It looks like a worm. It has a thin reddish body with two small chalky plates at its front end that grind away at anything in its path, tenaciously forming a burrow, never stopping in its quest to probe deeper.

  Damn thing is almost indestructible. If anything deserves the Latin for stubborn bastard – pertinax bastardis – surely it is this little wriggler. It can survive for six weeks without oxygen as it bores its way through every obstacle, a very handy attribute given that hundreds of them are now chewing their way through the hull of the Cinque Ports, an old pirate ship that has seen better days and will not be seeing many more.

  It is the Year of Our Lord, 1704 – exactly a century before a starving convict on the run begins to realise he may shortly die because of his stubbornness. The master of the Cinque Ports is Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman as headstrong as the worms burrowing below him – creatures that have been the bane of wooden ships for centuries. Selkirk has been complaining to his skipper, an arrogant, 21-year-old upper-class twit by the name of Thomas Stradling, that the ship is riddled with the things and needs to undergo immediate repair. The crew has been pumping out water from the holds day and night and they are exhausted. Scurvy and fever have claimed the lives of a dozen men, including the previous captain. Supplies of meat and grain are now infested with cockroaches and rat droppings.

  Say what you like about pirates, but don’t say they are indecisive. Stradling has had enough of Selkirk’s complaints and when the Scotsman refuses to quieten down, Stradling abandons him on Más a Tierra, a small, uninhabited island in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago off the coast of Chile. Left with a musket that will soon run out of gunpowder, a cooking pot, a Bible and some bedclothes, Selkirk’s first few months alone are the hardest. More than once he will glance at his gun thinking it might quickly end his misery. At night rats chew on his clothes and nibble his feet. He will catch fish but because they ‘occasion’d a Looseness’ in his bowels, prefers to stick with the local crayfish and the wild goats. You know that feeling from those damned shellfish.

  Time passes and Selkirk changes. His spirits soar. Years of hunting make him lean and fast – so quick he can pursue those goats and run them down thr
ough the jagged crags that hug the island’s mountainside. The soles of his feet harden. He tames a herd of cats to keep the rats at bay. But it is his mind that begins to run free, taking delight in the simple pleasures of reading his Bible, humming songs to himself, observing the wildlife and climbing to his ‘lookout’, a point 1800 feet above the island.

  When Selkirk is rescued almost four and a half years later he has been transformed. Not only does the scurvy-afflicted crew of the Duke discover a man of outstanding physical prowess but they are also captivated by his tranquil nature. He had not surrendered to the scurrying of the rats, the cries of other beasts in the night, even the voices in his own head. The man had triumphed and overcome everyone’s fear – loneliness – because he was headstrong and uncompromising and unwilling to surrender.

  The skipper of the Duke, Woodes Rogers, is astounded and moved to write that: ‘One may see that solitude and retirement from the world is not such an insufferable state of life as most men imagine, especially when people are fairly called or thrown into it unavoidably, as this man was.’

  A heavily bearded Selkirk, clad in skins roughly sewn together, welcomes his rescuers with a hearty goat soup. At first he finds it hard to relate his story, having ‘so much forgot his language for want of use, that we could scarce understand him, for he seemed to speak his words by halves’. But it soon tumbles out and Rogers is so impressed he immediately appoints Selkirk his second mate.

  A decade later the English writer and satirist, Daniel Defoe, is said to be so inspired by Selkirk’s experiences he uses them to form the basis of a novel about a man shipwrecked for 28 years on an isolated island, constantly under siege from cannibals and mutineers. Robinson Crusoe will become the biggest selling and most famous novel in the world.