You’re going to forget a great deal as you become an older man. The English language, for one thing. But that won’t really matter. Being a man of few words you’ve never had any great passion for it, never really felt the need to push it to its limits the way men like Tuckey do. You’ll also forget much about your childhood and even your memories of your time on the prison hulks will slowly recede.
But you won’t forget tonight, will you?
The moon, near full, low in the western sky. The silence of the camp. The tightness in your gut and the panic that sets in when you realise you are being chased by men with guns. How the bush suddenly comes alive with screams and shouts and the sound of musket fire as you and Will Marmon and four others are hunted down like animals. Those red-coated marines are cursing and they want to put a musket ball right through the back of your head. Some of them have had to put down their rum; others probably have a scantily dressed woman convict in their tent who is wondering where in hell everyone has gone.
Of course you will remember this night. Many years later you will concede it was a stupid idea, hatched by men so lacking in geographical knowledge they thought Sydney was just a few miles to the north and China just a brisk walk from there. ‘The attempt was little short of madness,’ you will say, ‘for there was before me the chances of being retaken and probable death or other dreadful punishment.’
It’s not as though you haven’t known what happens to convicts who decide to do a runner from Sullivan Bay. In the last few weeks up to a dozen of them have fled, including that annoying, Classics-spouting George Lee. Well, Lee will never be seen again. His mate, David Gibson, wandered back into camp more than a week later, a ‘mere skeleton from his privations in the bush’. Some have been recaptured more than 60 miles away and are happy to return and be tied to the flogging post rather than endure another night on the run.
But despite all this – and all the warnings the Lieutenant-Governor kept pumping out of that little second-hand printing press down near the beach – you insisted on doing it. On Christmas Eve when revelries were in full swing Daniel McAllenan (Irishman, horse stealer) broke into the commissary’s tent and stole a gun. The theft alerted Collins that something might be in the air and so he doubled up on the night patrols and increased perimeter security around the camp. That wasn’t so much of a problem for you – as a bricklayer you had been given special privileges, including a tent on the edge of the settlement.
Just after 9 pm you and Will Marmon and McAllenan, along with several others, launch your escape. The night is suddenly plunged into a maelstrom of noise and chaos. There’s a loud shot and some shouts. One of your group, Charles Shore, has been wounded, a pellet lodging in his stomach. They will send a wagon to collect him soon, but the pursuit will continue.
And you? Those huge feet are propelling you through the bush at an almighty pace. ‘After running the greater part of the first three or four hours to make our escape more certain, we halted for rest and refreshment,’ you will recall. ‘We were now fairly launched on our perilous voyage and it became necessary to reflect on our position and to examine our resources.’
Let’s see. What do you have there? Apart from the gun there’s an old iron kettle, a very small collection of tin pots – what is this, an escape party or a group of jam-preserving enthusiasts? – and barely two or three days’ worth of rations. The next morning you come face to face with a tribe of spear-carrying Aboriginals, but they depart fairly quickly after you fire a warning shot from the gun.
Still, the enormity of your plight begins to set in. It doesn’t take long before McAllenan, taking the gun from you, begins to have second thoughts and turns to make the long journey back to the settlement. Even your mate, Marmon, is struggling. He might be fit but scurvy is starting to slow him down and, not long after, he says farewell, the whipping post back in Sullivan Bay far preferable to this.
But there’s no way you’re going back. You and two others – most likely George Pye, a sheep stealer from Nottingham, and James Taylor, who stole a horse in Lancaster and joined you on the hulks at Langstone – push on. The heat gives way to a cold change sweeping in from the south bringing heavy rain and an abrupt drop in temperature. You come to a river – perhaps the one that Collins should have discovered two months ago when the Calcutta first made its way into the bay – and, being the strongest swimmer, help the other two to cross it.
The days are long and your rations are running out. You have almost completed a full circuit of the bay – more than a hundred miles. But surely the nights are the worst. For a small group of ignorant Englishmen constantly looking over their shoulders for pursuers, listening to the creaking of old gum trees and surrounded by the sheer melancholic emptiness of the country around you, the desolation is almost suffocating.
Say what you like about David Collins, but don’t say the man does not have a temper when he is pushed far enough. On New Year’s Eve – several days after your escape – the Lieutenant-Governor has Matthew Power hunched over the printing press publishing his latest missive to the Sullivan Bay camp. He cannot, he says, but ‘pity the delusion which some of the prisoners labour under, in thinking that they can exist when deprived of the assistance of government. Their madness will be manifest to themselves when they shall feel, too late, that they have wrought their own ruin. After those who have absconded he shall make no further search, certain that they must soon return or perish by famine.’
As if constant desertions are not enough, Collins has an even greater problem on his hands. Since Christmas there has been growing drunkenness and – far worse for a man who has lived with a reverential respect for authority – insolence. He has had two marines arrested, suspected of plotting a mutiny, and sentenced them to 900 lashes.
It is by far the most brutal punishment handed out since leaving Portsmouth back in April. Collins demands everyone gather in the parade ground shortly after seven in the morning. Two floggers – one right-handed, the other left-handed – carry out the Lieutenant-Governor’s orders. Skin and blood soon cover the ground. The doctor on duty will stop one of the floggings after 500 lashes, the other after 700. Days later, when the skin has healed, the pair will be hauled back for the remainder.
Collins is running out of patience. He wants to leave this place and head south before he has a complete insurrection on his hands. His hunch that some of the convicts will return is correct. McAllenan has stumbled into the settlement and handed back the stolen gun.
It prompts another notice to the camp. ‘The Lieut. Governor hopes the return of … McAllenan will have convinced the prisoners of the misery that must ever attend those who are mad enough to abscond from the settlement. To warn them from making an attempt of a similar nature they are informed that, although this man left his companions on the fifth day after their departure hence, they all began to feel the effects of their imprudence, and more of them would have returned had they not dreaded the punishment which they were conscious they deserved … their provisions were nearly expended and they had no resources. They lived in constant dread of the natives, by whose hands it is more than probable they have by this time perished.’
Well, not quite. There are three battling hunger and fear. But you’re still running. You have long since left the place they will one day call Melbourne and moved south-west, down through the You Yang hills, discovering a small bay connected to Port Phillip where you eat shellfish that affects ‘us all very seriously’. After 10 days on the run you reach the opposite side of the bay and can see the Ocean – you mistake it for the Calcutta – at anchor.
By this time Pye and Taylor have had enough. But none of you can possibly swim the handful of miles across the bay and through such rough water. So you set about making signals – ‘by lighting fires at night and hoisting our shirts on trees and poles by day’.
At one stage a small boat leaves the Ocean and begins making its way toward the beach. ‘Although the dread of punishment was naturally great,’ you will recall years later, ‘… the fear of starvation exceeded it, and they anxiously waited her arrival to deliver themselves up, indulging anticipations of being … forgiven by the governor.’
But that boat soon turns around and you are left there on the beach, clothes torn, faces browned and hollow, stomachs empty. But don’t forget something, William. You still have hope. A man can always hope.
David Collins is fuming. The man is like a dog at a bone. All of these escapes … why, it’s a slight against his own character. He is still astonished that men he has treated so fairly would choose to flagrantly thumb their noses at him and leave the settlement. It’s blatant ingratitude – that’s what it is. And now the frustration of the last few months – indeed, the past 20 years of a life filled with disappointment – begins to spill over.
It’s time for another notice to the settlement. ‘How is it possible that strong hardy men who were always able to consume even more than the liberal allowance of provisions which is issued to them, can exist in a country where nowhere affords a supply to the traveller?’ Collins asks.
‘The lieutenant governor can by no means account for this strange desertion of the people; were they ill-treated, scantily-fed, badly clothed or wrought beyond their ability, he should attribute it to these causes. But as the reverse is the case he is at a loss to discover the motive.’ And with that Collins issues a warning to those who may be thinking about helping others to escape. ‘It is his fixed determination to punish them with greater severity than he would the infatuated wretches themselves. He is concerned that the several prisoners who are now absent must be left to perish, as by McAllenan’s account they are beyond the reach of every effort he might make to recall them to their duty.’
Collins will hear no more about the absconders. You’re dead to him – you, Pye and Taylor. Collins has a new colony to establish. In Sydney, the NSW Governor has agreed he should head south to Van Diemen’s Land and now he must supervise the loading of the Ocean with the remaining provisions before it slips anchor at the end of January.
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.