XV

WITH A FRESH WIND at her back the cutter sailed, amid fair weather, across a fathomless turquoise sea, the water so clear that the voyagers could see far down into its depths. Dense forests of coral, some treelike and branching, some mushroomlike and round, spread out beneath them in gaudy colors of pink and yellow and red and brilliant blue. Blue butterfly fish, black and white angelfish and parrotfish in all colors of the rainbow swam in and out of the coral forests, dark grey eels with gold eyes and blue mouths emerged from crevices to gape, open-mouthed, at the spectacle around them. Fanlike green seaweed waved to and fro in the gentle currents. Through this slow-moving, dreamlike world drifted lionfish and grouper, sharks and jellyfish—a mysterious and mesmerizing procession of beautiful, poisonous creatures living in the warm, shallow waters of protected lagoons.

Herons and terns flew above the lagoons, and spotted crabs walked along their shores, parrots screeched in the island trees, while insects of many varieties buzzed through the air, landing on Mary and Will and the others and causing them to slap at their arms and legs and scratch where they were bitten. At night, when the turquoise water deepened to ultramarine blue and a tropical moon rose to shine on the glistening white sand, the muttonbird began its raucous crying, a rasping, grating screech far harsher than the call of a parrot.

The travellers might have been bewitched by the beauty around them, had they not been so hungry. For they soon consumed all the dried turtle meat they had brought with them, and could not find any more turtles to feast on. Nor could they catch enough of the abundant fish in the lagoons to keep themselves alive. They found crabs and shellfish in large quantities, but “none of them very fit to eat,” Martin wrote. “But being very hungered we were glad to eat them and thank God for it. If it were not for the shellfish and the little turtle [meat] that we had we must have starved.”¹

Thin and weathered, weary of the long weeks of travelling, the convicts came at length to the Gulf of Carpentaria, a long stretch of open water with no protecting reef and swept by the monsoon wind from the north. They started southward down the coast of the gulf, only to encounter aboriginal people of a kind they had not met before. Stout, corpulent, ink-black and very warlike, these tribesmen, far from scattering when the convicts fired a musket round over their heads, fired back—with bows and arrows, which the aboriginals in more southerly latitudes had lacked. One of the arrows, lethal and very sharp and eighteen inches long, struck the cutter, but no one was harmed.

Escaping this attack, the convicts went on southward, but two days later, as they were rowing in toward shore to fill their water beakers, they met with a terrifying sight.

Two large, long fighting canoes, each carrying thirty or forty aboriginal warriors, bore down on them rapidly, powered by paddles and sails woven from plant fronds. On a raised platform stood the warriors, weapons ready, led by their chief. Within moments the two canoes were joined by others.

“We did not know what to do,” Martin recalled later, “for we were afraid to meet them.” But there was no time for discussion. The cutter turned and made for the deep waters of the gulf, with the war canoes in rapid pursuit.

“They followed us until we lost sight of them. [We] determined to cross the gulf which was about five hundred miles across. As luck would have it, we outran them.”²

They outran the war canoes—for the time being—but were now far out of sight of land, with very little fresh water and only a sketchy chart to guide them. In his laconic account of the voyage, James Martin says nothing about the state of the voyagers’ spirits, whether they had become short-tempered and testy with one another—or even violent—after so many weeks living cheek by jowl in cramped quarters, whether they argued about what they should do or where they should go, whether Will and Mary were at odds, though they had been before. Now, setting off to cross the five hundred miles of the gulf with no islands to offer shellfish or water, and with every likelihood of encountering more of the frightening war canoes, the convicts must have been under very great strain.

For Mary, among the rough men, all of them shaggy-haired, bearded and stinking from nearly two months at sea, the task of enduring from day to day must have been monumental. Keeping the children alive took most of her strength and more than mere strength, for she had to feed Emanuel and she must have had little milk to give him. She had been “poorly,” according to Martin, for weeks, the children peaked and lethargic. One hopes and imagines that the men were chivalrous and charitable to Mary and the children, but they too were focussed on their own survival.

All must have reacted in character to the venture they now undertook, the crossing of the wide gulf virtually without food or water: Mary with stoic endurance and rock-stubborn courage, Will capable but mercurial and hot-tempered, his energies running in fits and starts, James Martin observant, practical, analytical, Sam Bird the cunning Londoner doing his part, though he was weakening, blustering through.

Will Morton scanned his chart, watching for any indication that they might be off course, Nate Lilley pulled faithfully at his oar. The senior men, toughest of all, were stalwart, William Allen the experienced seaman, holding the tiller steady amid the strong swells, and tall, strong John Butcher the Worcestershire farmer, his ruddy face wind-roughened, lending his coarse-fibred vitality and sheer physical resilience.

It was the Second Fleeters Will Morton, Nate Lilley, Will Allen and John Butcher, one imagines, who anchored the crew psychologically. They had been through so much, living for months chained together in the dark holds of the transport ships, with water up to their waists, starved, beaten, shackled to dead men. Having lived through months of hell they were far tougher than any men, anywhere, had any right to be, their strength of will unrivalled.

In truth, however, much about the long voyage of Mary and Will and their companions is undiscoverable, because of the opacity of the sources. It may well be that by the time the travellers reached the Gulf of Carpentaria, some in the party were ill, perhaps too ill to row or bail, lying like dead weight in the bottom of the boat and a source of worry and strain to the others. Some may have begun to wander in their wits, to hallucinate or become hysterical as a result of malnutrition and severe thirst. All were gravely overtired, their equanimity and even their sanity under assault. It is significant that in James Martin’s account of the voyage, he is all but silent about the final few weeks—which may have passed for him, as for the others, in a blur of pain and cravings and disconnected sensations.

Merely to go on: that was the challenge for them all. To set and sustain their course, bail out the water when the sea rushed in, stay as dry as they could, not fight over what remained of food and water. And keep, in the deepest part of their psyches, a steady flame of hope.

On the fifth day of open water travel across the wide gulf, the cutter came within reach of the western shore, and searched in vain for freshwater. Then, hardly pausing, the voyagers decided to go straight on across the Arafura Sea toward the island of Timor, easternmost of the Indonesian islands under Dutch rule. Their destination was the settlement of Kupang, which they knew of from Captain Smith. Once they reached Kupang they could find water and food, and then get on with the task of finding a way to disguise their identities and make new lives.

The wind was with them as they made their way swiftly across the emptiness of the Arafura Sea. They were parched and blistered from the sun, stiff and sore and longing for a respite from the punishments and discomforts of the voyage, but they knew that they were in the last stages of their long journey, and the knowledge must have helped them hang on through the last few days. It had been decided among them what they would say when they met the Dutch authorities, how they would account for themselves. They would say that they were survivors from the wreck of a whaling ship that sank or went aground. Will would introduce himself as the first mate of the ship, travelling with his wife and children. The others would pose as seamen. They must have colluded in inventing an elaborate story, giving a name to the invented whaler and deciding precisely when and where she foundered, who her captain was, what her tonnage and where her home port. None of the men, except possibly Will Allen, knew anything about whaling; they must have hoped that none of the Dutch at Kupang did either, and that they would not be closely questioned.

It was the strong, spicy scent of cloves in the air that told the travellers they were nearing their destination. That, and the increasing heat and humidity. Soon the indistinct outline of land came into view, its mountain peaks rising as if out of the sea. They followed along the southern coast of the island, passing promontory after green promontory, the entire place a lush, green Eden where tropical forests adjoined acre after acre of carefully manicured cultivated land. Soon the perfume of ginger and frangipani mingled with the fragrance of clove to produce a powerful, heady scent. They rounded the western end of the island and glimpsed a fortress, built on high stone ramparts and surrounded on the lower slopes by houses set in flowering gardens. A crowd gathered as the cutter approached the wharf. After sixty-nine days and nearly thirty-three hundred miles, the long fatiguing journey was finally over. They had safely reached Kupang.

The strangers who got out of the small boat, helped by hospitable, sympathetic Malays and Dutch colonists who rushed forward to greet them, were unwashed and bedraggled. Their clothing was torn, their skin red and scorched by exposure to the tropical sun and covered with blisters and sores. Hollow-eyed, unsteady on their feet, stinking of sweat and encrusted with salt, the eleven passengers stepped out onto the wharf, reduced to tears by the first kind welcome they had experienced in ten weeks.

Food and water were offered them, and they ate and drank greedily, only to have their bodies reject what they had so eagerly consumed. It was days before they could keep anything down but tea and milk, weeks before their sunburned, ulcerated bodies began to heal. In the meantime the governor of Timor, Timotheus Wanjon, treated them as honored guests. “He behaved extremely well to us,” wrote Martin, “filled our bellies and clothed [us] double with every [thing] that was worn on the island.” Mary was wrapped in a sarong, the men too given sarongs and embroidered tunics. Emanuel was swathed in a length of batik cloth, and Charlotte given a smock of the kind the Malayan children wore—when they wore anything at all.

The visitors told Governor Wanjon and his staff their story of shipwreck and survival, and were much admired and praised. Mary was particularly singled out for her strength and courage in enduring the hardships of the open sea and protecting her children. Evidently the convicts were believed; Captain Smith, the only person who could have contradicted their story, was not present to betray them, and no one else had any idea who they really were. They were British, and the Dutch knew that the British had a penal colony in New Holland, thousands of miles to the south. But it would not have occurred to anyone in Kupang that a group of convicts from Port Jackson could sail a small boat all the way to Timor; that would have been unthinkable. To be sure, the English Captain Bligh had made a thirty-five-hundred-mile sea journey in an open longboat, and had landed on Timor only two years earlier. But Captain Bligh was an experienced naval officer, and these poor starveling wretches were civilians, ordinary seamen and a seaman’s wife and children. That they might have accomplished a feat equal to Bligh’s was beyond imagination.

So began, for Mary, the most peaceful and idyllic season of her adult life. Each day she ate her fill, each night she slept on clean sheets in a soft bed provided by Governor Wanjon. There were no shackles, no guards, no regulations, no rough taunts and jibes—only a delicious freedom, approving glances, empathetic people to nurse her back to health and to offer her whatever she needed. To find herself surrounded by warmth and solicitude, after so many years of coldness and punitive deprivation, must have made Mary’s tears flow daily. Harshness gave way to softness, rigor to relaxation and ease. Gradually, as she put on weight and her raw skin began to heal, Mary must have felt her muscles unclench and her nerves cease to be locked in constant vigilance.

Everything about Kupang, even the relentless ninety-degree heat and near hundred-percent humidity of the dry season, invited Mary to indulge her senses and take her pleasure. A profusion of orchids and sweet-scented shrubs lined her paths. A cooling breeze from the ocean swept over her as she sat on the wide verandah in the evening. Enticing music, unlike any she had ever heard, a metallic chiming and clanging of gongs and keys, drifted through the city from dozens of gamelan orchestras playing in mansions and squares and public buildings. To eat she had sticky rice sweets wrapped in banana leaves and filled with the juice of brown sugar, skewers of spicy roast meet, mangos and papayas, red rambutan and greenish durian and purple mangosteen. Cold beer made the food go down well, and there was always coconut juice and sweet coconut flesh in abundance.

Of course, Mary had to be careful about what she ate, and about what she gave Charlotte to eat. Some of the fruit in the marketplace was unclean, and she was cautioned that eating it could bring on severe diarrhea, dehydration and death. There were fevers in Timor; the surgeons at the town hospital dispensed “bark of Peru” (chinchona bark, or quinine) mixed with wine to counteract them. When Mary strolled through the marketplace she saw the “Jamu ladies” who sold an array of traditional herbal medicines to treat fevers and colds—indeed, to treat everything from sore throats to infected teeth to impotence.

A variety of exotic goods, offered by an ethnically diverse group of traders, filled the marketplace. For Kupang, small though it was, was a major trading center and ships from all over Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Europe called there. To wander past its crowded stalls was to encounter fragrant sandalwood, spicy padang food, mounds of rice and lengths of colorful batik cloth. There were shadow puppets and carved wooden door frames, intricate silver jewelry, opium scales and blowguns and brassware from India.

Five times throughout the day the call to prayer was heard floating over the rooftops, for Timor was overwhelmingly Muslim in population and on Fridays, men and boys in bright sarongs and tightly fitting black caps gathered at the mosques for prayers.

The strangeness of it all, the oppressive heat and lavish color, the sheer prodigality of life in the tropics must have given Mary much to ponder as she recovered her strength and thought about her situation. With the others, she had taken her freedom, made good her escape. Against high odds, she and her children had been spared death or disaster. But where was she to go from here? What sort of future was she to have?

The men found work in Kupang, and settled in.³ No doubt they used aliases—Will took Mary’s maiden name and called himself “William Broad”—and continued to maintain the deception that they were honest seamen who had survived shipwreck. But by staying in Kupang instead of moving on, looking for berths on outgoing ships or resettling in even more remote locations, the convicts were taking a considerable risk. And they seem to have been shortsighted in exposing themselves to that risk.

As long as they remained in Kupang, they were bound together by their common secret. The safety of each of them depended on the loyalty and silence of the others. But Will, ever restless and ambitious, was discontented, and could not find a comfortable life amid the flowering gardens and clove-scented wharves of the Dutch settlement.

What happened was most likely very simple: Will wanted his independence.

He had never considered his marriage to Mary to be legal; what emotional ties there were between them seem to have frayed past any possibility of repair. Any love he felt for his small son and stepdaughter may only have made him conflicted—and irritable. Possibly he acquired a mistress in Kupang, causing a rift with Mary. Or possibly it was Mary who was wayward, or perhaps she hounded him past endurance about what she perceived as his inadequacies, or about his obligations to her and the children. What is certain is that a growing hostility developed between them—a hostility that was to lead, over the next several months, to their downfall.