XVII

HEAT, HIGH HUMIDITY and fatal malarial fevers were the things Batavia was known for. The Dutch colonizers had been there for two centuries, giving their fortresslike settlement the new name Batavia in preference to the traditional Javanese name of Jacatra, and making it look as much like a Dutch town as possible, with multistory brick houses and tall-steepled churches and long, straight canals like the canals of Amsterdam. Except in the sprawling Chinese quarter, where the potent liquor called arrack was brewed and much lucrative traffic in trade goods went on, Batavia was a town of Dutchmen, Dutchmen who drank heavily and smoked their outsize white meerschaum pipes and enjoyed themselves all the more lustily for knowing they were stalked by the deadly fever and that most of them would not survive for long.

Captain Edwards, wanting to prevent the further spread of malaria among his crew, ordered all those aboard the Rembang who were ill to be rowed ashore and taken to the hospital. Emanuel was among those sent ashore, pale and weak, his skin hot to the touch. Mary held him in her arms as the Rembang’s longboat was rowed across the harbor and into one of the town canals. A putrid odor rose from the stagnant canal water on which floated garbage—and worse. According to Surgeon Hamilton, who was accompanying the sick to the hospital, “some dead bodies floating down a canal struck our boat, which had a very disagreeable effect on the minds of our brave fellows, whose nerves were reduced to a very weak state from sickness.”

The ghoulish collision with the corpses must have had a horripilating effect on Mary as well, who may have been as ill as her son and imagining that she might die in Batavia. In the filthy, mosquito-ridden hospital, centuries old and in a deplorable state of decay, it was as if the sick, injured and dying were forgotten and abandoned. Few of those who entered the hospital were cured; they died swiftly, or wasted slowly in their suffering, until their bodies were removed and thrown into the canal to make room for more victims.

Whether she lay, neglected and fever-ridden, on the dirty floor of the dank old building, full of the reek of massed unwashed humanity, or sat with her weakening baby, well enough to be in anguish over his condition, Mary must have been in great agony of spirit over the following several weeks. The wretchedness of her dear son, crying almost continuously, unable to rest or eat, the disease invading his brain until he writhed and moaned in his delirium, was surely heartrending. And the impact of his suffering was only underscored by the presence of so many others, carried in or brought in on pallets by the score each day, all of them groaning and crying or shrieking in delirium in a dismal chorus of pain and futile complaint.

The heat grew worse, a heavy muggy heat that drained Mary of energy and made the hours pass in an oppressive haze of thirst and sweat and discomfort. Mosquitoes rose in clouds from the still, odorous waters of the canals. Flies crawled over the carrion, lizards slithered up and down the hospital walls, their tongues darting out to catch the insects that buzzed and whirred and clustered on every available surface. Death was everywhere, in the oppressive heat, almost unbearable at midday, that caused Mary to feel faint, in the animals devouring and being devoured, grinning from the corpses, their limbs stiffly extended, their eyes staring, their mouths set in a smiling rictus.

And in Emanuel’s white small face, as he grew ever more shrunken and skeletal until he became too weak to cry or even to lift his thin arms. He passed from life on December 1, 1791, three weeks after the Rembang landed in Batavia, and was buried in haste in a cemetery that already held far too many graves, and his mother mourned him.

Six days later Will Bryant caught the fever and was taken to the hospital, where after two weeks he too succumbed and died, and was taken to lie beside his son.

Mary, now transferred with Charlotte and the remaining convicts to a Dutch guard ship, must have been numb with fatigue and sorrow—and was ill herself. When by Captain Edwards’ orders she and Charlotte were put aboard the Dutch ship Horssen for the journey from Batavia to Cape Town, the Dutch captain did not shackle her as ordered but let her retain her freedom of movement so that she could look after her four-year-old daughter.

For as the Horssen left Batavia and made its way through the Straits of Sunda toward the Indian Ocean, passengers and crew were shivering and sweating with malaria. Nearly everyone was sick. One by one the men began dying, their bodies shrouded in lengths of linen and dropped over the side of the ship. Soon the surviving members of the crew were so ill it took a great effort on their part to rouse themselves sufficiently to rid the ship of the dead.

The Horssen sailed on, officers filling in where the crew was depleted, through muggy days and weeks, with water rationed to one quart per day per person. Mary and Charlotte did not die, but unknown to Mary, several of her companions in the escape from Port Jackson succumbed. Will Morton, navigator of the escape, and Sam Bird of Croydon, both of whom had been put aboard the Dutch ship Hoornwey, died on their voyage.¹ And Banbury Jack, ever the most daring of the escapees, escaped once again, by jumping overboard in the narrow Strait of Sunda and swimming toward shore.

The odds were against him; if the sharks didn’t eat him, and the currents didn’t carry him in the wrong direction, he would still have had to swim through the high surf near shore and risk being driven down into the razor-sharp coral by the pounding waves. And his hands were shackled, so that he could not swim properly. Unless, of course, he had found a way to overcome the odds, loosing himself from his fetters before he leaped into the water, timing his jump so that he avoided both unfavorable currents and high surf, and choosing a moment when the ship was very close to shore. No one knows for certain what happened to Banbury Jack. Maybe he made it to safety.

For three months the Horssen fought her way toward the Cape, the sailing rough and the weather hot, until on March 18, 1792, she landed at last in Table Bay. By good fortune there was a British ship in port, the Gorgon, and on board the Gorgon were men familiar to Mary and the remaining convicts who arrived on the Hoornwey.

The Gorgon had come from Port Jackson, where a number of marine officers, their wives and children had come aboard for the homeward journey to England.

“We was put on board the Gorgon,” James Martin wrote in his memoir, “which we was known well [sic] by all the marine officers which was all glad that we had not perished at sea.”² The surviving convicts, Mary and James Martin, Will Allen, Nate Lilley and John Butcher, reunited for the first time in three months, now discovered that to their former guards, the marine officers from Port Jackson, they were not pariahs but celebrities, heroes who had achieved an all but impossible feat of seamanship. Captain John Parker and his wife, Captain Watkin Tench and Lieutenant Ralph Clark were familiar faces, as were the few additional passengers on the Gorgon, officers’ wives and children and ex-convicts whose terms had expired and who were going back to England as free men.

It must have been an odd sort of reunion for them all; on the one hand the marines and others were genuinely glad that at least five of the escapees, plus little Charlotte, had survived their bold journey to Timor, but on the other hand, everyone knew that the Gorgon would be taking Mary and the others back to England to be punished for their crime. Perhaps, privately, Parker, Tench and the others wished that their captives could be pardoned and freed. But in their official capacity they could not express such an opinion, they could only say how glad they were that the remnant of the escape party was still alive.

And they could exchange news with the convicts, hearing the details of their remarkable voyage, their time in Timor and Batavia, the misfortune (as it surely must have seemed) of their recapture. From the ex-convicts, the marines and their wives Mary must have learned of the arrival in Port Jackson of the Third Fleet, ten ships bringing more than eighteen hundred convicts, many of them with severe dysentery.

Slowly, despite the obstacles of illness and harsh weather and poor soil, the penal colony was growing. Yet everyone aboard the Gorgon, from Captain Parker to the youngest cabin boy, was relieved to be away from Sydney Cove, returning to England. Everyone, that is, but the Bounty mutineers and the five escape survivors. For them, the Gorgon voyage, and the few comforts it offered, was their last taste of relative freedom. Once the ship reached London, they would be imprisoned, to await trial and execution.

Meanwhile, however, they were well treated. The stern Captain Edwards, with his Bounty mutineers, was a louring presence on the Gorgon during the voyage, but he was no longer in command, he was merely one passenger among many. Captain Parker’s greater humanity and leniency set the tone for the convicts’ treatment, and he saw to it that Mary and Charlotte had decent accommodations and were adequately fed.

The Gorgon rounded the Cape and began her journey to the West African coast. “Very hot,” Lieutenant Clark wrote in his journal. “At night, below the gun deck, there is hardly any living for the heat.”

The ship’s upper deck was crowded with live animals, kangaroos and wombats and koalas, lorikeets and galahs and screeching parrots. The animals were accustomed to high, desertlike heat; the human passengers were not, and once again, as on the Horssen and the Rembang, they began to get sick.

The children suffered most acutely. By the third week of the Gorgon’s voyage several of the marines’ sons and daughters had died, and others were weakening. It may have been an outbreak of malaria, or some other kind of deadly fever—West Africa was known as the “Fever Coast”—but the precise diagnosis mattered little. The ship’s surgeon had no cure for the terrible chills and high temperature, the vomiting and diarrhea, the aching and lethargy that overtook the sufferers and in the end led to their complete physical collapse.

Bleeding them from a vein—the most common treatment for fever at that time—did no good. Cold baths might have helped but they were an impossibility on a sailing ship where there was no ice and the air temperature was far in excess of a hundred degrees. The children languished, watched over by anxious adults who were themselves debilitated by the effects of the unrelenting fierce heat and pitiless sun. Their supplies of fresh food were gone, they were eating salt pork and stale bread, washed down with water green with algae and teeming with wriggling larval life.

“The children are going very fast,” Lieutenant Clark recorded in the fourth week of the voyage. “The hot weather is the reason for it.”

On May 4, 1792, the sixth child to be buried at sea was wrapped in a cloth shroud and put over the side, the grieving parents standing helplessly by. The following day there was yet another small shroud, another hastily spoken prayer by the chaplain, another subdued splash as the seventh body sank into the warm ocean.

Charlotte, her face waxen and her wasted body hot to the touch, lay near death. Mary had done all she could for her, but the heat and fever were overpowering, and the child had not been strong enough to overcome them. At four and a half, Charlotte was old enough to comprehend what lay in store for her when the Gorgon reached England. Her mother would be taken to prison to die, and she herself would face an unknown future alone, in a land she had never seen. Her stepfather, the only father she had ever known, had died in Batavia, along with her baby brother. Soon she would lose her mother as well. Young as she was, Charlotte may well have given in to despair as the fever took over her small body. She may not have fought for life.

As Mary watched her daughter grow thinner and weaker, her pulse racing and her voice so faint it was only a whisper, she must have wept and grieved. She had kept Charlotte alive through so many ordeals, from her birth on shipboard through her early months of life during the rough and stormy passage to Port Jackson, through the hard days of near starvation in Sydney Cove, and then through the long perilous escape journey, and the rough passage from Timor to Batavia. At every stage of their life together, Mary had nurtured and protected her daughter, and Charlotte had proven to be, like Mary herself, a hardy survivor. Now all her hardihood had left her, she had surrendered to the disease that was conquering her frail body. Mary knew that she would not live.

Through the early predawn hours of May 6, 1792, it rained heavily off the coast of West Africa, squalls sweeping across the sky and the sea churning with frothy waves and foam. The rain brought a welcome cooling breeze that rattled the Gorgon’s hawsers and puffed out the sails, making it easier for the passengers to sleep and easing the muggy tedium of the night watch.

Charlotte lay on her cot, motionless save for the rising and falling of her narrow chest. Her eyes were closed, her limbs stiff and rigid. She struggled to breathe. The surgeon had come and gone. There was nothing to do now but wait.

And so Mary waited, sitting by her daughter’s bedside, a swinging candle lantern throwing waves of light across the cot as the ship rolled from side to side. It had been five years and more since she left England, a hardened young woman of twenty-two, for parts unknown. She had been carrying Charlotte then, as yet unborn, the unlooked-for result of her lovemaking with the long-vanished Mr. Spence. Did she think of him now, in the last hours before dawn, or did she ponder the curious synchrony between Charlotte’s life, now approaching its end, and her own prolonged adventure?

It was dim; she was tired from her long vigil. As the ship’s bell sounded the hours, Mary may have nodded off.

On the morning of May 6, Lieutenant Clark made another entry in his journal. “Last night the child belonging to Mary Broad, the convict woman who went away in the fishing boat from Port Jackson last year, died at about four o’clock. Committed body to the deep.”