Hell's Gates Read online

  As the Larmairremener warriors observed the three whites, they realised that although the men were starving, they seemed to have no knowledge of the land and could not see any of the food that was around them and there for the taking. The grasslands and open woodlands of the Big River tribe’s territory supported large populations of kangaroos that the clans used for both food and clothing. The warriors had seen whites occasionally, but never coming from the west; they usually came from the south and the east. Their observations had convinced the Big River people that these men knew absolutely nothing about the land or the animals and their rhythms and laws. It was this ignorance which had convinced the younger men of the tribe that the elders were mistaken when they said that the whites might be the ghosts of tribespeople who had died. Some of the old men even claimed to recognise long-dead relatives among the strangers. It was true that the colour white signified death, but these people could not be ancestors. The elders tried to explain that death was a terrible process, and that human memory could be easily confused when it passed through this frightening time. Although they kept their disagreement to themselves out of respect, many of the younger men were now convinced that the elders were mistaken, and that these people were really men just like themselves. The time was fast approaching when they would have to be firmly resisted, and any who did penetrate into clan or tribal territory should be killed outright.

  But as they observed the three whites who had come over the mountains from the border country between their own land and that of the South-West people, the younger Aboriginal men soon realised that they were not only harmless, but also bewildered and lost. The decision had been taken to let them pass through clan country to see what they would do. Perhaps they would give some indication of the white men’s real intentions. As one young warrior had suggested, it was important to observe your enemy and get to know his way of operating and the weaknesses embedded in it.

  One day, as the Larmairremener men watched the three strangers, one of them trod on a tiger snake. The white men stopped for several days to look after their companion, but they did not seem to know how to treat the bite and what remedies to use. Then, the two assisted the injured man to continue their journey. The Larmairremener had not seen many white men before; their land was a long way from the country that the new arrivals had invaded with their four-legged animals. Despite white people’s reputation for violence among the tribes, they at first seemed kind to their sick companion and posed no threat.

  After a couple of days struggling onward, the whites stopped again. The injured man was obviously getting worse. Then the other two did something that utterly shocked the warriors looking on from the bush – one of them took an instrument that they had used to chop trees and killed the man when he was asleep by splitting his head open.They butchered him like a dead kangaroo, and cooked and ate parts of him. The rest of his body they left for the Tasmanian devils to scavenge. There was no ceremony, no burial, no respect for the man’s spirit.

  The two surviving men then resumed their seemingly purposeless journey through the Big River tribe’s country. They eventually crossed out of Larmairremener land and into the territory of the Braylwunyer clan – but not before the elders of the two clans had discussed at length what they should do about the white men. In the end they decided to do nothing; they would simply let the young warriors observe them and make sure that they did not invade or pollute any sacred sites.They felt that these barbarians would eventually either kill each other or die from starvation anyway. Three nights later the shorter of the two men killed his companion in his sleep with the chopping stick. He then butchered, cooked and ate parts of the dead body. Again he abandoned the remains without ceremony, and the Tasmanian devils had another feast.

  Eating gave the sole survivor energy for a short time, but it did not sustain him and he was soon hungry again. A day later the Braylwunyer men watched as he stumbled into a camp abandoned by one of their own hearth-families who had moved on that very morning. He ate scraps of food from the ground. The more they watched him the more befuddled they became at the man’s actions.They had heard much from the Lennowwenne, the southernmost clan of their own tribe, who lived right on the edge of the area that the whites had taken. The more they saw of these men, the more they were determined to resist such a sub-human species. These creatures seemed to have no law, no custom, no respect for the land, nor its animals and people.

  After eating the ducks the white man pushed on through the open forest that covered the low, rolling hills. The morning mist gradually lifted and the sun came out. By midday it had become very warm. The man even began to sweat a little. It was the first time that he had felt really warm and dry for months. However, by mid-afternoon he was exhausted again, and when he arrived at a small, clear creek he stopped. It was about two hours before dark.

  Somehow he felt that he was no longer under pressure, that he was safe and very close to reaching his goal of Table Mountain. It was his determination to get there that sustained him. As he curled up to sleep that night on soft grass below a rocky outcrop, he tried to think back over all that had happened to him. But if the sequence of events was somewhat confused in his mind, there was one thing he knew for sure: against all the odds, he had survived the nightmare trek across the wilderness. He believed that escape from Van Diemen’s Land was still a possibility. He had heard artful and well-travelled men like Bob Greenhill talk about escape to China, or to an island in the vast Pacific Ocean, where there were many beautiful women. He had no idea where any of these places were, or what the people who lived there were like. He hoped that the women were more willing than the screaming Aboriginal woman he had raped when he was on the run after he had bolted a second time. In a way, he wished Greenhill was still around. He was a smart man who had known a lot more about the world than the other filthy dunderheads and thieving bastards with whom he had lived for the last three years.

  He did not know where China was, but anywhere in the world would be a lot better than a place of secondary punishment like Macquarie Harbour, where the best he could hope for was a grope in the dark of the dormitory with another convict. He had lost track of the days since he had escaped from the harbour, largely because he could not add up or count; in fact, he could scarcely read or write his own name. He had tried to improve his reading ability on the Castle Forbes coming out from Ireland, but lacked application.

  He knew he had been on the journey for a long time, and had come a long way through very difficult country. His predominant feeling just before he fell deeply asleep that night was that his luck had, at last, turned. Perhaps, finally, things were going his way. As it panned out, he was both right and wrong.

  He was never to know just how remarkable his feat of endurance had been.

  1

  ‘ I WAS THE CONVICT SENT TO HELL ’

  The Master of the Castle Forbes, Captain Thomas L. Reid, noticed a change in the weather in the early afternoon of the seventh day of January, 1820. It had suddenly become colder, the clouds were growing darker and gloomier, and a light drizzle had started, sure signs that a storm was brewing. For several days now they had been running in a reasonably calm sea with full sail, due east before a west-sou’-westerly wind, and in the previous twenty-four hours they had made good time, sailing just over 100 nautical miles (185 kilometres). They had picked up a lot of speed since Reid had brought the Castle Forbes a couple of degrees further south into the Roaring Forties.

  This was his first time as a master in these isolated seas. Reid was a careful captain who always knew his position exactly by solar and lunar observation as well as by his own calculations based on the ship’s chronometer. The ship was travelling in an easterly direction along latitude 43°25’ south, and crossing longitude 99°60’ east. The Castle Forbes was a newly built merchant ship of 439 tons burthen on her maiden run to New South Wales, having been launched in Aberdeen in 1818. Like most British merchantmen of the time, she was three-masted with square-rigged sails, f
lat-sided and flat-bottomed, and massively constructed for maximum carrying capacity rather than for speed, with a lot of ballast to prevent her capsizing. A commercial vessel on charter to the British Admiralty, the Castle Forbes was carrying an exclusively human cargo: 140 Irish male convicts, out of Cove (today known by its Gaelic name, Cobh) in Cork Harbour on 3 October 1819, on a non-stop run to Sydney Town in the colony of New South Wales. She was already some three months into her journey.

  Journey of the Castle Forbes to New South Wales.

  As soon as they entered the great Southern Ocean well to the south of the Cape of Good Hope, Reid had set his course on 40°30’ south latitude to stay about three to four degrees to the north of the mountainous Crozet Islands, which lay directly in his path.Together with icebergs, the islands could be a hazard for mariners, especially in fog. But by now the ship had left the Crozets far behind and was out in the vast emptiness of ocean that lay to the south-west of the isolated and largely unexplored western tip of the mainland of New Holland. Reid could afford to take his ship a little further south to pick up even stronger winds. But if they ran into trouble in these waters, there was absolutely no refuge to make for and certainly no one to rescue them. Even today, with satellite communications, the rescue of mariners in trouble in the Southern Ocean is still a difficult and dangerous task. Out in these vast seas humankind is bluntly reminded of its fragility in the face of the brute force of the natural world.

  For the ‘Roaring Forties’ and ‘Ferocious Fifties’, as mariners have called these southern seas for several centuries, really do live up to their epithets.The weather is often abominable, and a calm or moderate sea can be suddenly replaced by a fierce storm or a savage squall.With no land mass to get in the way, except faraway South America’s Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, the winds and currents of the Southern Ocean are immensely powerful and remarkably consistent. We now know that the Antarctic circumpolar current connects the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins and carries a vast volume of water around the polar continent. It is a major influence upon the temperature, rainfall and weather of the whole of the southern hemisphere, and is essential for the circulation pattern of all the world’s oceans. Like the circumpolar current, the southern winds travel generally from west to east in a broad circle around the Antarctic continent. With no land mass to obstruct them, they pick up force and whip up enormous seas. Because of these prevailing winds, sailing through the Roaring Forties was the optimum way to go from England or Ireland to New South Wales for a sailing ship like the Castle Forbes. Occasionally such ships could travel up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) in twenty-four hours.

  But the flip side of a strong tail wind is rough weather. For sailors like Reid and his crew, trained and experienced in the weather patterns of the seas around the United Kingdom, the Mediterranean, Baltic or even the north Atlantic routes to the United States and Canada, the Southern Ocean was a new experience, and was terrifying. Once a ship had emerged from the South Atlantic Ocean, passed below the Cape of Good Hope and established itself on an easterly course somewhere between 35° and 45° south, it was often driven along carrying very little sail by gales, strong currents and mountainous seas that towered over the stern of the boat. They often averaged 8 knots per hour in these southern regions and occasionally reached speeds of 12 knots or more. For early nineteenth-century sailing ships this was extraordinarily fast. But this speed came with fierce winds, horrendous seas and frightening, dangerous storms. The Castle Forbes was sailing into one right now.

  As the sky darkened and the rain became heavier, Reid was joined on the poop deck by the Surgeon-Superintendent of convicts, Dr James Scott, a naval reserve officer and an able, sensible, if somewhat autocratic 29-year-old Scotsman. Standing next to the helmsman, they discussed the situation. Fortunately, that morning the convicts had already been allowed on deck in groups for two-hour stints of fresh air and exercise. Scott had made sure that this occurred on almost every day of the journey, except when it was too rough. He reported to Reid that everything had been secured in the prison. The captain had already ordered a reduction in sail and that the ship should be battened down and prepared for the storm. It was now just a matter of waiting for the inevitable. The Lieutenant’s Guard of twenty-six non-commissioned officers and soldiers, with their women and children, had retired to their quarters, except for those guarding the convicts. Only Reid, Scott, the officer of the watch and some of the other officers and seamen remained on deck.

  The storm gathered strength as the afternoon wore on. Reid ordered all remaining canvas be taken down, except for a close-reefed foresail to assist in steering. Taking in sail was a tricky process for the sailors aloft in the rigging, especially as the wave heights increased and the ship began to roll with the heavy swell. The Castle Forbes’s sails were taken in successfully, but even with almost bare poles the ship was gathering speed as she ran before a following sea with winds out of the west-nor’-west. The seas grew bigger, with strong cross-swells. It became a herculean struggle for the helmsman as he fought to hold a heading straight before the weather, which fortunately for them was running pretty much in their direction.

  Massive swells gradually built up behind the stern of the Castle Forbes; wave heights of 26 to 27 metres (85 to 90 feet) are common in Southern Ocean storms. At times the ship was almost surfing down, crashing into the bottom of the trough with an awful, jarring shudder. The vessel hardly had a chance to right itself before it began to climb up the next sloping wall of water. The sky darkened and rain poured down in torrents. With nightfall the situation became even more extreme. The gale kept up, intensified by squalls, with icy rain, sleet, thunder and lightning. Despite it being close to the southern midsummer, it was intensely cold. Storms like this can abate quickly or last for several days. Sometimes calm would return, only to be followed by violent, fresh gales, showers of hail or even snow.

  The men working on the slippery deck faced grave danger of being washed overboard. Once a man was in the water he would have to be left behind, even if someone noticed that he was gone. The ship could not be turned around without the risk of broaching, so there was no possibility of rescue. Captain George Bayly, one of the most experienced nineteenth-century captains in the southern seas, reported that as a young seaman he nearly lost his life working the sails on a convict ship off south-western Australia in 1824, four years after the Castle Forbes made her first run to New South Wales. ‘About 7 PM I was sent out to loose the jib [the triangular sail at the front of the boat]. The wind was on the starboard quarter, the vessel going about 8 knots and rolling heavily. While in the act of casting off the gasket [the rope used to secure the sail] she gave a tremendous roll to windward and rolled the sail upon me. I attempted to get hold of the boom, but missed my hold and fell back downwards. Providentially I fell on the martingale stay [a short, perpendicular spar at the front of the boat used to give stability to the jib boom] and succeeded in grasping it and getting on board again.’ If he had fallen overboard he would have been run down by the boat. Bayly was lucky; many sailors were not.

  If it was frightening for the sailors working on the slippery, pitching deck in this kind of weather, it was even worse for the convicts below decks and behind bars in the prison section of the Castle Forbes. They could do nothing, and even if they had been to sea before, they would never have experienced anything like this. Their fate was in the hands of the crew and dependent on the competence of the master. The prison deck was largely in darkness in stormy weather, even during daytime, because the air scuttles were shut to keep water out, and it was nearly impossible to keep a lantern burning. The convicts soon found their clothes and bedding wet through as the prison was flooded by the water which broke over the deck and poured down the main hatchway. Because the heads (latrines) were open to the sea, water washed backwards up through them into the convicts’ living area. As the ship pitched violently, everything that was not screwed down or firmly tied was thrown all over the place. Tables,
chairs, dishes, crockery, cutlery, kettles, saucepans, food of all sorts, buckets of human waste, furniture and loose objects went flying everywhere, and even convicts in their bunks could easily be thrown out if they did not hold on tight. Movement around the prison deck was very difficult. Bayly said that people could not walk upright but were ‘slipping and sliding along the greasy deck; many not being able to walk went down on all fours like so many sloths or bears or whatever creeping animal you may be pleased to compare them to’.

  It is hard to imagine what men with diarrhoea and dysentery did under these conditions – and Scott’s medical log tells us quite a few were suffering from these illnesses on the Castle Forbes.Those who were seasick simply vomited where they lay. The movement and noise of the storm made sleep impossible; modern sailors in the Southern Ocean have compared the sound of mountainous waves that build up in a southern storm to that of a fast-approaching express train.

  It was difficult to prepare anything to eat, especially hot food, under storm conditions, so if the tempest lasted a couple of days people would get hungry and weak. However, food would probably be the last thing on the minds of most, especially if they were suffering from seasickness. It is often forgotten in these days of refrigerators and frozen, processed foods that right into the late nineteenth century ships’ decks often resembled stinking farmyards, with sheep, pigs, ducks, hens and sometimes even cattle carried for fresh food. On the Castle Forbes the terror of these animals in the storm can only be imagined. A particularly severe storm might wash most of them overboard, and the entire ship’s company would then be reduced to salt meat and ship’s biscuits for the rest of the voyage.