Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [69]
She had said all this to Will a few days ago, but he’d just laughed at her. ‘A boat, a sextant and some charts! Why don’t you ask for the moon too, my lover?’ he said.
Mary was well aware of the difficulties involved, but she didn’t agree that it was impossible just because no one else had dared to do it. She knew that Captain Phillip and his officers had tried to communicate with the natives and got nowhere, but she had made inroads in that direction herself and been successful.
She attributed this to Charlotte. While the natives might be intimidated by men in uniforms, they weren’t frightened of a small child almost as naked as one of their own. While walking along the beach and around to the next cove, collecting wood for a fire, Mary had become aware she was being watched by a group of women natives and their children. She sat down with Charlotte on her lap and sang some songs to her, and to her delight she heard a voice joining in. It was that of another small girl, and when Mary turned and smiled at her, the child came closer.
Mary did the same again for three consecutive days, and on the fourth the little girl came and sat beside her, the mother standing a little way back, watching. It wasn’t long before other children joined them, and after only a few more days, they all knew some of the words to Mary’s songs.
She showed the native women some leaves of ‘sweet tea’, the vine-like plant the convicts used as a drink. This was the closest thing they had to a cure-all. It seemed to alleviate hunger pains, it comforted and revitalized, and it was believed to ward off diseases as those who drank nothing else seemed to suffer less from dysentery. The convicts had exhausted all the sources of the plant close to the camp, and Mary hoped the natives would show her where there was more. They did, taking her there so fast she had to run to keep up with them, and they even picked it for her.
In general the convicts hated the natives. This was partly because these people were so free, while they had to work, but more because they felt they were inferior beings. Convicts were used to being looked down on as the lowest of the low, and to their minds the natives were lowlier still. They bitterly resented the way the officers gave these savages presents and insisted they were to be treated with deference, while the convicts were subjected to cruelty, with no allowances made for their needs.
Mary had never felt this way, although she didn’t see the natives as beautiful people. To her mind the stink of the fish oil on them, their splayed noses and the ever-present bubbles of snot nestling above their thick lips made all but the children ugly as sin. But she was intelligent enough to realize that they probably thought white people just as ugly, and furthermore this was their land, and they were perfectly adapted to it. Her interest in them had been furthered by Tench’s enthusiasm. He believed that the way truly to settle this new country was to learn to understand its people. Mary, however, didn’t want to understand them in order to settle here; she was hoping for their help in her escape.
She persisted in making friends with them. And with a warm smile, and showing interest in their children, it wasn’t hard. She told them her name, they reciprocated. They touched her hair and skin, laughingly holding their own black arms against hers to show the difference. Mary drew crude pictures of native animals in the sand and they told her their names. She drew a picture of one of the boats, then a very long wavy line to show them how far the white people had come to get here. She wished she could illustrate how different her homeland was from theirs, but that was too difficult. She wondered too if they had any conception at all of the nature of the white man’s colony, and what the word ‘convict’ meant.
As Tench had pointed out, until the white man came these natives wouldn’t even have understood the notion of theft. They weren’t acquisitive people, and they left their tools, canoes and other items lying around. Much of their hostility