a desire to get up on deck. Since Ike died, poor simple Joey has had no purpose. Now he has a dog to love. God has emancipated one of my dependents. I pray the others are as fortunate. Once we leave these confines it will be much harder to keep together.
The pace increased to over 207 land miles a day until the end of December; the weather was as foul as it could be-heavy seas, squalls, howling gales. At south of 43° the winds really roared.
1788 arrived in filthy weather with the wind against; the New Year storms blew on the bow as the latitude crept up to 44°. Then along came a breeze so fair that it shoved the three ships along at 219 miles a day. As the southern capes of Van Diemen’s Land were expected at any time, Lieutenant Shortland signaled that cables were to be put to anchors just in case. The gale increased and Friendship lost her fore topmast studding sail boom and rent the canvas to pieces, but still no land.
Afraid of reefs and uncharted rocks, at seven in the evening of the 4th of January, Shortland ordered the ships to stand to. Next morning came the long awaited cry: “Land ahoy!” There it was! The southernmost tip of New South Wales! A massive cliff.
Once around the southeast cape their course altered radically from east to north by northeast; the last 1,000 miles to Botany Bay were the most frustrating of the whole voyage, so near and yet so far. The winds were against, the currents were against, everything was against. On some days the three ships ended miles south of yesterday’s position, on other days they stood and tacked, stood and tacked what seemed eternally. Then there were days when the winds were, as the sailors put it, “horrible hard-hearted.” One night Friendship split her fore top main stay sail, followed by her peak halyard in the morning. They would inch up to 39°, fall back to 42°. Friendship’s main stay sail split to shreds-her fifth sail disaster since Cape Town. They battled to make any kind of headway.
Though this lack of progress did not dampen the spirits of the convicts the way it did those of the ships’ navigators, lack of palatable food had much the same effect. There were brief glimpses of New South Wales, too far away to gauge what sort of land it was. Luckily a new delight arrived; countless seals frisked and frolicked around the ships, absolute clowns as they floated with their flippers on their chests, dived, twisted, huffed and snuffled. Gorgeous, jolly creatures. And where they were, so too were hordes of fish. Chowder appeared on the menu again.
By the 15th of January they had struggled north to 36°and at noon saw Cape Dromedary, which Captain Cook had named for its resemblance to the Ship of the Desert.
“Only a hundred and fifty miles to go,” said Donovan, off his watch and ready to fish.
Will Connelly sighed; the weather was so hot, albeit cloudy, that he could not settle to read, had elected to fish instead. “I am beginning to believe, Mr. Donovan,” he said, “that we will never get to Botany Bay. Four more men have died since Christmas Eve and all of us below know why. Not fever or dysentery. Just despair, homesickness, hopelessness. Most of us have been in this terrible ship for over a year now-we boarded her on the sixth of January last year.
Donovan’s mouth tightened; he blinked rapidly. “The miles will pass,” he said eventually, eyes riveted on his line, floating from a small piece of cork. “Captain Cook warned of this counter current, but we are making headway. What we need is a fair breeze out of the southeast, and we will get it. A sea change is coming. First a storm, then a wind out of the southeast. I am right.”
They tacked and stood, tacked and stood. The seals were gone, replaced by thousands of porpoises. Then, after a suffocatingly hot and humid day, the heavens erupted. Red lightning of a ferocity and brilliance beyond English imagination empurpled clouds blacker than Bristol smoke, cracked with deafening thunder; and it began to rain a wall of solid water, so hard that it fell straight down despite a wildly blowing northwest wind. At an hour before midnight, with dramatic suddenness, the show was over. Along came a beautiful fair breeze out of the southeast which lasted long enough to see white cliffs, trees, yellow cliffs, trees, curving golden beaches, and the low, nuggety jaws of Botany Bay.
At nine in the morning of the 19th of January, 1788, Alexander led her two companions between Point Solander and Cape Banks into the reaches of a wide, poorly sheltered bay. Perhaps fifty or sixty naked black men stood gesticulating on either headland, and there at rest on the bosom of choppy steely water was Supply. She had beaten them by a single day.
Alexander had sailed 17,300 land miles [4] in 251 days, which amounted to 36 weeks. She had spent 68 of those days in port and 183 of them at sea. All told, 225 convicts had sampled her, some for a single day; 177 arrived.
The anchors down and Lieutenant Shortland gone in the jollyboat to Supply to see Governor Phillip, Richard stood alone at the rail and gazed for a long time at the place to which, by an Imperial Order-in- Council, he had been transported until the 23rd of March, 1792. Four years into the future. He had turned nine-and- thirty in the south Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.
The land he surveyed was flat along the foreshores, slightly hilly farther away to north and south, and it was a drab, sad vista of blue, brown, fawn, grey and olive. Blighted, juiceless.
“What d’ye see, Richard?” asked Stephen Donovan.
Richard stared at him through eyes misted with tears. “I see neither paradise nor Hell. This is limbo. This is where all the lost souls go,” he said.
PART FIVE
Nothing very much happened over the next few days except that the seven slow ships turned up surprisingly soon after the Racers; they had been blown by the same winds and kept close enough behind to experience the same weather. Heaving in the restless water, all the ships remained at anchor unloaded, people crowding their rails, anyone with a spyglass peering at shoregoing parties of marines, naval officers and a few convicts, and at many Indians. None of this shore activity appeared significant. Rumor now said that the Governor did not consider Botany Bay an adequate site for this all-important experiment and had gone in a longboat to look at nearby Port Jackson, which Captain Cook had noted on his charts, but had not entered.
Richard’s feelings about Botany Bay were very much like those in every other breast, free or felon: a shocking place, was the universal verdict. It reminded no one of anywhere, even sailors as traveled as Donovan. Flat, bleak, sandy, swampy, inclement and dreary beyond all imagination. To the inhabitants of Alexander’s prison, Botany Bay loomed as a gigantic graveyard.
Orders came that the site of the first settlement was to be Port Jackson, not Botany Bay; they made ready to sail, but the winds were so against and the swell coming across the narrow bar so huge that all thought of leaving had to be abandoned. Then-
“ ’Tis as strange a coincidence as two Irish peasants meeting at the court of the Empress of all the Russias,” said Donovan, who had shared a spyglass with Captain Sinclair and Mr. Long.
