Redemption - Leon Uris [2]
Winston S. Churchill
Part One
Footsteps
1
1895
If the earth were flat, New Zealand would have fallen off it a long time ago, it’s that far from Ireland.
Can ever a man be more stricken and disoriented than a penniless immigrant, out of steerage, upon arrival in a land so far removed?
The canvas cots in the passenger hold of the tramp steamer Nova Scotia were stacked so tight a man could not roll over or even sleep on his side. Heat from the adjoining boiler room often drove him on deck in any weather to keep from fainting. After he forced down the slop fed him in a zoolike manner, he’d head for the railing, often as not.
When the hills behind Lyttelton came into view ninety-two days after departure from Derry, Liam Larkin dropped to his knees and thanked the first thirty or forty saints who came to mind.
He wobbled down the gangplank, one of God’s forgotten miseries, where he presented himself, pale and trembling, to his sponsor, Squire Bert Hargrove. A lot of the lads landed skinny and shaken from the long voyage, but as Bert looked Liam over, he thought he’d bought himself a bad nag. At least Liam Larkin and Bert Hargrove shared enough of a basic language so they could understand one another…barely.
Certain he was in for three years of Caribbean-like slave labor, the anxiety ebbed from Liam into a state that resembled euphoria.
Liam shared a clean bunkhouse with a wooden floor and a heating stove with six other station hands. Three of them were paddies like himself, contracted for forty months’ labor to pay off their passage. In actual fact, Liam was replacing one who was about to strike out on his own. So, by God, maybe it wasn’t going to be total slavery.
He knew he was going to be worked hard, but he had never known much more than hard work. Bert Hargrove was pleased. He’d bought himself a good horse.
Some of the changes dawned on Liam subtly while others crashed through. The vast and incredible difference was that this land was not fueled by anger…or fear…or hatred. Was this an actual place? he asked himself every night.
Take the scroggins. Indeed, the station house and the bunk house were fed from the very same kitchen and the food was served to the men by the three Hargrove daughters. And a man could eat all he could hold. Liam thought back. Maybe six times back in Ireland in his village of Ballyutogue he had left the table with his belly bulging. He ate here this way every single night. The cook knew fourteen ways to prepare mutton, which was a hell of a lot better than fourteen ways to cook potatoes. There were vegetables he had neither seen nor heard of.
Food was only one matter. In the beginning New Zealand reminded him of Ireland, it was that green and hilly, and likewise the weather was either dirty, going to be dirty, or had just been dirty.
The hills were grander than hills, they were wondrous white-haired old mountains. Where they sloped toward the sea, they plummeted as fjords so fearsome as to shock a man’s breath away. Not only did this land run higher, it ran deeper with black earth.
New Zealanders were a stoic lot, not unlike the dour Ulstermen of County Donegal. Like the Ulstermen, loyalty here was to the Crown. Yet the tone of New Zealand patriotism was placid. Could it be such that he would never again have to hear the terrorizing rattle of the Lembeg drum and the hysterical rantings of the Orangemen and their preachers?
As with Ulster, New Zealand’s union with Britain was the centerpiece of its existence. But how could two places, islands…green…with mountains and sea…be so different and share the same planet? There were no whipping posts here, no hanging tree, no agony of the oppressed, poor little sheep rustling, smuggling, and moonshining, and he never saw an eviction, not one, not once.
Even the native Maori had apparently been subdued rather easily and were left with their culture and their dignity. Or so it seemed.
Aye, New Zealand was Protestant country, but an absence of game and fishing wardens in the bountiful streams told the whole story.
Fortunately,