Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [85]
Mary didn’t answer him, for she knew from personal experience that she would probably do absolutely anything, however repulsive, to keep herself alive. Now she had two children to care for, her survival instinct was even stronger.
The loading of the longboats began. They watched the first few people climb slowly and hesitantly down the rope ladder, and even from the shore they could see how difficult it was for them. But they were the lucky ones; before long the sailors and troops were practically hurling people into the boats, as if they were sacks of goods, because they weren’t capable of walking, let alone climbing.
As the boat rowed in closer, a gasp went up, for the people were like skeletons. There was no eager expectancy on their faces, and they lolled as if close to death – indeed, one was dead on arrival. Two more were to take their last breath as they lay where they’d been placed on the wharf.
‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing,’ Will said, the horror in his eyes matching his cracking voice. ‘God save us from men that would let this happen.’
‘They aren’t men,’ Mary said in a loud, clear voice, feeling she could strangle those responsible with her own bare hands. ‘They’re beasts.’
Her anger fuelled her, stopped her considering the risk of infection to herself or even caring about the smell any more. The convicts were almost naked, their bodies covered with sores, wriggling maggots and faeces. She bent over one man to try to get him to drink some water, and he tried to cover his exposed penis because she was a woman.
‘I’ve seen plenty of those before,’ she said gently, touched that even in such a terrible state and close to death, he could still concern himself with propriety. ‘You’re safe now, there’s food and drink, water to wash, but you’ve got to fight to get better. Don’t you dare give up on me!’
‘Your name?’ he asked, his cracked lips splitting open with the effort to speak.
‘Mary,’ she said, wiping his face with a wet rag, ‘Mary Bryant. And yours?’
‘Sam Broome,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘God bless you, Mary.’
The sights grew worse as the day progressed, men with dysentery so bad that the fluids ran out of their bodies where they lay. Surgeon White said they were all suffering from scurvy too and ordered men to go out into the bush and pick quantities of the ‘acid berries’ he’d found had anti-scorbutic properties.
It seemed 267 people had perished before even reaching Port Jackson, and many others had died since. In fact the bodies of those who died after coming through the Heads were thrown overboard. Of the survivors, 486 were desperately sick, and most of them were not expected to recover. Mary heard as she helped one woman with a tiny infant that she hadn’t even had her shackles removed for the child’s birth. She was to be told that again several more times during the day.
Later that evening in the drawing room of Government House, Captain Phillip sat with Captain William Hill of the Juliana, and raged about the obscenity he’d seen that day.
‘I have spoken to the captains of the Neptune and the Scarborough,’ William Hill said. ‘In my opinion they should be hanged.’
William Hill was considered a hard man, but he had made sure the women convicts on his ship were well cared for. Some of their number had been old and feeble when they embarked, and he’d had a handful of deaths, but the rest of the women were probably better fed than they’d ever been in their whole lives. In Hill’s opinion it would have been far more humane for the courts back in England to have sent all these people to the gallows than to allow blackguards like Captain Trail of the Neptune to profit by their slow and painful deaths.
‘I understand there was a question of the prisoners on the Scarborough plotting to take over the ship,’ Phillip said, his small face purple with anger. ‘That would necessitate putting the ring-leaders in chains. But the conditions on the Neptune