Читать книгу Settlers and Convicts - Alexander Harris - Страница 7

Table of Contents

A splitter's hut and timber—The face of the mountain—Rainy weather in a bark-hut—Cedarsawyers in the gullies—A scene from our hut—Bushrangers—Plunder of the settler's stores—Conversation on their return—Their departure—Futile attempt to track them

IN two days' time I had found a fall of timber (as a group of trees is termed), which, with due information from my quondam guide, now my mate, I had no doubt would suit my purpose. They were fine tall black butts, even as a gun-barrel, and as straight in the grain as a skein of thread. We "tumbled" two or three for trial, taking off and splitting up a cut the required length of the slabs: these were to be let into groundplates below and wall-plates above, all round, to form the sides of the hut. The slabs all ran out beautifully; you could scarcely tell them from sawed stuff; there was hardly a splinter on half a dozen of them. When work goes like this it is rather a pleasure than a toil, and for about another week or so we went rattling on like sticks a cracking. It was a new kind of work to me, certainly, but still so similar to what I had been used to, that I understood how to do every part of it directly I saw it before me. This is generally the case in a variation of work where the same tools are still used. We were up by day-break, worked for about two hours, and then had our breakfast, which was of damper, salt pork fried, and good tea,—for tea and sugar are used among bushmen very prodigally. My mate and myself often used a pound of tea and six pounds of sugar between us in a week. The same is the case with tobacco. I mostly used close on half a pound weekly, till I found its undermining effect on my constitution, and began to try to leave it off. After breakfast we pelted away again till twelve o'clock, and then had dinner, which was damper, pork, and tea again, and laid down till the heat of the day was over, which was about three o'clock where we were: we then worked for another hour, had a lunch of damper, and tea, and pork, and knocked along till night. About 8 P.M. we had our supper, pork, tea, and damper, and soon after 9 were under the blankets.

My mate quickly slept; I did not. It soon became quite a custom to lie and ruminate. Everything was so new and so strange, and I seemed so independent. These ruminations originated in me habits of reflection which never left me, and have been serviceable in all my subsequent life. The spot where we had pitched our tent was a small grassy forest on the hill side; and everywhere around it, down below in the endless ravines, and up above towards the insurmountable heights of the range, was thick tangled brush growing amidst lofty trees, so thick set that beneath them was perpetual shadow, or rather something more gloomy still. The ground was covered with decaying leaves and old water-logged windfall trees, so rotten that the foot could break its way deep into the substance of that gnarled wood which at one time would have stopped a cannonball. Wherever you went, creeks of crystal ice-like water, plunging down the mountain side, each in its stony bed, kept up a murmur day and night; never changing save when increased by rains into the roar of a torrent. This mountain, or, more properly, heap of mountains, ran down, where we were at work, nearly into the sea, and for many miles every way the character of the vegetation was as I have described. Here and there certainly a little patch of grassy forest would assert a place for itself on the shoulder of a hill, and partly down the side; but generally the entire surface of this mountain, for many miles up and down the coast every way, was clothed with this thick brush; besides which so irregular and broken and confused was the surface of the range itself that even the best bushmen felt timid of committing themselves to it. Thus, in one of these little grassy forests in the midst of the bush, on the shoulder of an easy ridge about two miles back from the sea, and so far up that we could see the sea like a broadish sheet of water below us, was pitched our little hut. It was no more than a few sheets of the bark that we had stripped off our black butts, leaned together, top to top, tent like, with one end stopped by another sheet, and the fire a few feet in front on the ground at the other. Here we had been, say ten days, when it began to rain; and, as is the case generally at this season of the year in Australia, when it sets in for a week's rain, it rained with a will. I began to be initiated into the disasters of a bush life. The rain came through the roof of the hut as if we had been making arrangements in its favour; and no sooner had we stopped it there than, coming down the hill, it began to run through the bottom of the hut like a mill-stream; and as we had, in our confidence of fine weather, laid our beds on the ground, they got thoroughly soaked. Scarcely had we in the pouring rain dug a trench round the back of our hut, to turn the water, when we found the rain had put the fire out; and as we happened to have come out without tinder-box, flint and steel (an omission for which, when a more practised bushman, I should never have forgiven myself), Dick had to go to the farm to get one. When he came back it was dark and still raining, and I, in my inexperience, had not been mindful to get any dry wood; which he had then to take his axe and get as well as he could in the dark. Had I been left to seek it, I suppose my search would have been a long one, but Dick went straight to a tree whose butt the bush-fires had hollowed out, and soon knocked off a lot of dry splinters from the inside. Nobody but he who has experienced it has any comprehension of the enjoyment of supper when it does come after these bush troubles throughout some dismal rainy day, and of that nerve-tuning smoke, when supper is over, that puts an end to even the bare recollection of them.

And here I must tell the reader that we were not altogether alone in these savage solitudes. As I have already hinted, the costly and fragrant cedar was at this time a common forest tree in the shady recesses and beside the cool stony creeks of this vast old mountain. When I add that at the time of which I write, nearly a hundred pair of sawyers had gradually come down from Sydney and gathered into this mountain, and were (as they also continued to be for years afterwards) slaughtering away in all directions, it will not be wondered at that the pride of the Five Island Cedar Brush is long since gone; and especially when it is considered that no more is done by the brush-sawyer than just to break the logs down into planks, many of which contain four, five, six hundred square feet. These logs being then freighted to Sydney and on to England are cut up in timber-yards as they are wanted. It is far from unlikely, reader, that the very table thou art now reading on is a part of the thewes and sinews of one of these stately gallants of my old mountain woods. Meantime imagine that, scattered at various distances from us all over the seaward side of the range where the cedar grows, were these hundred pairs of sawyers, each pair (usually) having its one or two labourers or axe-men, whose business was to save the sawyers' time by falling the trees, crosscutting them into logs, building scaffold-pits, making roads and bridges, and helping at any heavy lifts. Some of these gangs were within less distance of us than the farm was, but there was no road from their huts to ours, and to travel the cedar-brush in the twilight of a rainy day is next to impossible. So my mate had gone to the farm. Another point was, that Dick was nearly due for his ticket of leave (a permission given by government to well-behaved convicts to work for themselves several years before their sentence expires); and as at this period great numbers of the labourers employed by these sawyers were bushrangers, and to have been known to have had any communication with such would have caused the forfeiture of his ticket, poor Dick was very cautious of going where any of them were. He had seen a deal of trouble, and, I firmly believe, would rather have gone twenty miles another way for a firestick than half a mile to where there was a bushranger.

The reader may suppose this first wet day over, and may imagine it going on patter, patter, patter all night, as we lay not very comfortably on our wet beds, with, however, the dry side turned upwards, and all the old clothes and blankets we could spare laid on the top to keep the damp from soaking up to us: and he may suppose the next day passing and passed; our fire kept good; our pipes filled and emptied again, and again, and again; several extra pots of tea drank out of a sheer want of occupation; and ourselves venturing out two or three times in the course of the day to look if it were likely to clear up, but discerning nothing with our eyes but trees upon trees below, around, above, with an occasional little column of smoke curling slowly up from where they were freshening the fire at some sawyer's gunyah in a gully; and feeling no breath of air, but only the constant sprinkle of the rain; and hearing nothing but the sudden dead crash down of the big limb of some fast decaying tree breaking off soddened and overweighted by the wet; or it might be at distant intervals a something like the low harsh sound of the sea rattling the pebbles of a pebbly beach a little down in the woody depth to the left, but as faint and soon gone as the sigh of the dying. And, furthermore, let the reader suppose the day closed, supper over, a good pile of logs on the fire for the night (over which by this time we had got a couple of sheets of bark placed so as to turn the rain), a cheerful blaze mounting silently upwards, and us in bed.

Arrived at this stage, let me caution my reader not to expect from the title of this chapter some dismal record of a night of horrors. My object in this publication is to convey an idea of facts as they occur in Australian every-day life; in short, to correct the erroneous statements that are abroad, not to add to them. I spent nearly twenty years of a bushlife in New South Wales, during the whole of which time I never sustained the slightest bodily injury from a bushranger; nor did I ever suffer from aggression of higher enormity than some slight theft. So that when, since my return to England, I have met with the tales that are so prevalent respecting their sanguinary acts, I have always felt them to be virtually exaggerations. The insulated facts might be true enough, but then they are the exceptions, not the usual custom; and this should have been stated in the narration of them, otherwise that impression comes to be attached to every-day life which really and properly belongs only to its rarest and merest exceptions.

It might be about half-past ten, but was not more than eleven o'clock, my mate snoring as usual, I thinking over the novel world around me, when I suddenly heard, first the clatter of horses' feet on a stony corner of the hill just above us, and then the voices of men talking; and the dog, which was a rare old fellow of the bull breed, rushed off almost without stopping to open his eyes in the direction the sound came from; the next instant I heard him at bay, and then came a volley of oaths that if we did not call off the dog, the speaker would shoot him. Of course I jumped out of bed and ran out in front of the hut and called the dog in; but Bully knew his customers better than I did, and not a foot would he come away; and I could hear him plunging about in the brush trying to get an opportunity to lay hold. By this time Dick was awake and out with me, and snatching up a fire-stick he went directly to where the dog was barking, and I followed him. We found him darting round four men and two pack-horses, who had got within about a hundred yards of the hut before Bully checked them, but had ever since halted, having quite as much as they could do to take care of the calves of their legs. On our reaching them, one of the men, a little short fellow as broad as he was long, said, "Now, my lads, call off your dog unless you want him shot; we don't want to do you any harm, but we want a guide, and one we mean to have:" at the same time that he said this, however, he covered me with his piece, and one of his pals (companions), seeing this, did the same by my mate. Necessity, wherever it shows its head, is your only lawgiver, so we complied without the least hesitation; and Bully once called off and ordered away to the hut fire, took no further active part in the affair beyond every now and then manifesting a quite uncontrollable inclination to sneak up towards one or other of our visitors' legs.

The custom of the bush led to our immediately putting down three quart pots of water (we had not a fourth) to make tea for them, and they filled and lit their pipes, but nothing particular was said on either side; for I had come to the conclusion that they were bushrangers from their arms and the meanness of their dress, and their unshaven beards, whilst they on their part seemed to think it quite unnecessary to give us any explanation whatever. At length the short man who was the former spokesman said, "How far is it to your cove's?" (master's.) "About a mile and a half," my mate answered; "but the road is very bad of a night—there is no beaten track, only a marked tree line;" (it is the custom in new countries to take a good-sized chip, say as large as a sheet of note paper, out of both sides of trees within easy sight of each other, and that range true along the shortest line to any place whither it is desired to make a road:) "we just marked the line the day we came out here to split, but there's no beaten track."

"Well, one of you knows it well enough to find it in the dark; we have been told so by them that know in the mountains."

"My mate," said Dick, "is hardly a month in the country."

"Oh! we know that; he's one of the free objects—bad luck to 'em! what business have they here in the prisoners' country? But after all, it's prisoners that's worse to one another than these emigrants are to them."

"To be sure," said another; "there's bad and good of all sorts, mate. I never think a bit worse of a man for being of one country than for being of another; there's bad and good of all sorts as there is of all religions. If you act as a man, lad (addressing me), you will be respected by every man that knows himself, let you be free or bond."

"Well," continued the first spokesman to Dick, "if you are ——'s government man, we are told you know every inch of this bush, and you must go with us and show us your cove's farm; we want to see what he's got in his stores. There was a boat load for him at the boat-harbour last week, for I saw it landed; has he got any of the grog left?"

These few words supplied a link in my mind. I thought from the first I had seen this short sailor-looking man before, and now I recollected to have noticed him among the sawyers at the boat-harbour a few days previously. At this period the little horse-shoe bay that constituted —— boat-harbour often presented a scene more like what may be imagined to belong to a pirate's isle than anything else. It was a little bay with a sandy beach, backed by a flat covered with grass, flags, and herbs, which again gave way to thick brush, and not very far off began the rise of the range. On this green sward might be seen, sometimes, half a dozen groups, each gathered round a keg of rum, often of ten, seldom of less than five gallons; for the boats which came for the cedar plank generally brought for the various pairs of sawyers, who supplied the freights, kegs to order. A more unlicensed and reckless mob than was thus sometimes gathered on that else lonely beach, prolonging day and night their carousal until all the liquor was gone, it would be impossible to find anywhere. The bushrangers often mingled with the boisterous assembly, and took their tithe of the revel; the police at this time rarely penetrated hither in search of them, and if they had done so it would have been with but small success, for nobody was inclined to aid them. Partly this was because the bushrangers laboured for the sawyers at a lower rate than other men could, partly because a bush-working man is always from his solitary situation quite at the mercy of the bushranger, and partly because, having mostly been prisoners themselves, it was a point of honour among the sawyers to help them as much as they could. In the lawless scene of Bacchanalianism that I had witnessed a few evenings before, when I had run down to the boat-harbour to ascertain if some things I expected from Sydney had come in Mr. ——'s boat, I now recollected that I had seen our present guest, and truly enough, as he said, by the same boat (schooners and sloops chiefly carry on this trade) had come down from Sydney for my employer a large keg of rum, another of wine, a basket of tobacco, a couple of chests of tea, and some bags of sugar, besides blankets and clothing; and this was the luggage for their share of which our visitors had brought the two pack-horses.

It was with great reluctance that poor Dick submitted to make the inevitable acknowledgment that there was indeed safe lodged in the stores at the farm this object of their marauding journey. He, however, endeavoured to make the best of his predicament by bargaining that he should not be taken within sight of the house, promising to wait faithfully at the corner of the fence until their end was attained, to conduct them back again the same way; and it appeared they had another guide a little way off in the bush, behind our hut, who would not come forward, and who was to take them back to a spot they were better acquainted with in the mountain. Probably this was some free man, working near, who was in league with them; such things are too often known in this colony.

The tea was some time boiling, so one of them proposed to have it in coming back, and the others agreeing, they left one in charge of me, which was quite unnecessary, for I could not have found my way from our hut to another by myself at that time of night. They then set off. From my mate's account afterwards, I learned that on arriving at the farm they left him according to promise at the corner of the paddock fence, but with his hands tied to a rail, in the midst of the pouring rain, and went on to the master's hut by themselves. They got close up to it before the dogs barked, and when they did bark that was all, for they were mostly young dogs and sound sleepers, and not much good as watch dogs. A knock at the door summoned Mr. ——, who was told some travellers who had lost their way were in want of shelter. But the improbability of travellers being lost at that time of a pouring rainy night, in a part where it was almost impossible to get off the high road for the thickness of the brush on each side, with the peremptory tone in which the demand was made, raised his suspicions, and he civilly declined to let them in. This at once provoked them to throw off the mask, and he was told to open the door in such terms as left him no further prudent plea for refusal. Attempting resistance no longer, he unbarred the door, and the marauders then despatched one of their number to the government men's hut to keep guard over them with a loaded piece, whilst the remaining two helped themselves to whatever they pleased from the stores. They conducted their operations like men of business; went straight about what they had determined to do; and when it was done, lingered not a minute on the premises. On going away they told the cove they should leave a man on the look-out, in the bush at the edge of the farm; and if he offered to stir a step himself, or send any of his men for help until eight o'clock in the morning, it would be a bad job for him. This, however, was all bounce. About two o'clock, or a little after, the man who had been left at our hut with me, on hearing our dog bark, ordered me to call him off, giving at the same time that shrill clear coo-eeh which the whites have learnt from the blacks, and which conveys the human voice to so great a distance. I think I have made myself heard with it, of a still night, nearly a mile off. This bushranger's, however, was purposely restrained, and modulated so as to be barely audible at the little distance he supposed his pals to be off; in another minute the short sailor-looking man came lightly and sharply up, into the light of the fire, as a sort of advanced guard, and finding all square, he repeated the coo-eeh in a more careless manner, and presently the other two with Dick and the pack-horses came up. Without the smallest appearance of trepidation or want of composure, the tall man walked up to the fire, put a coal on the top of his pipe, and began to draw away, saying to me, "Come, lad, now let's have this tea; I'm sure we've earned it." I said nothing, for I really did not know what to say; but I sweetened the three pots of tea for them, and put down, on the little stool we used for a table, our damper and a piece of corned pork, which, for a change, we had boiled before going to bed; and after they had had a short whiff of the pipe apiece, they pulled out their knives and helped themselves to a good junk of bread and meat each. During their meal, the man who was left with me, and who, I should have mentioned, had employed himself for a very busy half-hour of his watch in stowing away some of our eatables and drinkables, inquired what luck they had had.

"Luck, lad," said my long friend, "why, the very best of luck; there's a couple of five gallon kegs full of the right stuff slung across Old Bobby, and half a dozen pair of blankets spread over all to keep any water from getting to it; besides a coil of Brazil tobacco between the kegs, as long as all the running rigging of a schooner: and on the mare we've got about sixty weight of sugar and twenty pounds of tea, a nice little bag of flour, I dare say eighty pounds or more, and a few slops."

"Any boots?"

"Yes, lad. I didn't forget you. There's a pair tucked into the mouth of the flour-bag. They're just your fit. I saw them just as I was putting the flour on the horse, and I looked every way for some more, but it was no go. The fat fellow's got a pair for himself, though," he said; at the same time that the individual whom I have described before as having been at the boat harbour, held out one of his feet, displaying a snug Wellington boot of Mr. ——'s.

"I don't believe," he said, "the poor beggar's got another pair to put on to go to court in: he'll have to ride down to Wollongong to fetch the lobsters (soldiers) in his stockings' feet."

"Well, be alive, mates," said he who had remained with me; "we shall be none too soon into the mountain. It'll soon be daylight, and if we don't give the rain time to wash out the horsetracks we shall be done like a dinner. I shall get out these boots and ding (throw away) mine, for I can't walk any farther in them."

The speaker accordingly proceeded, after shaking the logs together so as to make a stronger blaze, to where the mare was quietly picking a few mouthfuls of grass; and, leading her to the fire, he undid the fastenings, and lifting off the bag of flour, brought to light the coveted boots, a pair of common lace-ups. Knocking the flour out of them, he soon had them on his feet, evidently esteeming them a treasure, as they no doubt must have been on those stony ranges, and among so much broken wood, in the dark. After a minute's experiment of their fit and feel, he broke out into a torrent of burlesque gratitude to Mr. ——, for having brought him the "fine boots all the way from Sydney." It was perfectly impossible to resist the current of drollery with which the scamp carried on this farcical exhibition for several minutes. His companions laughed, and then I laughed, and at last poor Dick, shivering as he was with the cold and wet, joined the irresistible peal till the tears came in our eyes all round.

It is, I suppose, a property of laughter to reconcile people, for I found after this was over that much of my ill-feeling towards these fellows was gone; and when they drew out a bottle that they had taken care to provide for the night, because the kegs would be difficult to get at, and poured out about a couple of glasses for each in turn, I could not help drinking with them, wishing them at the same time "some better kind of life." At length they packed all up snug again, lit their pipes, gave us very particular injunctions, and struck off into the bush, the rain still falling in torrents. Before they were long gone we heard their suppressed coo-eeh, which we supposed to be the signal for the guide they had boasted they had in waiting for them at a few hundred yards off in the brush. Dick had come off worst of the lot. He had been tied by the wrists to a rail of the fence, and left there during the whole time the bushrangers were ransacking the master's hut, a full hour and a half. It was a southerly gale that was blowing, and the spot where he stood was exposed to its full sweep from the sea. I wondered how he could stand it so long. He told me that, after standing still for about a quarter of an hour, watching the lights moving about at the hut as the bushrangers carried on their search, his teeth began to chatter, and the cold, as he expressed it, began to get to his heart; whereupon he set to dancing to keep himself warm, which he did very industriously, with short intervals, for more than an hour, till he was untied. And surely enough so we found the next day that he had, which indeed was the means of preventing the poor fellow getting flogged and losing his long-expected ticket of leave; for the horses were tracked to and from our hut, notwithstanding the rain; and Mr. ——'s rage at his loss, which was about twenty pounds, was such that I really believe he would have given another twenty to have criminated either the unfortunate fellow who had already been so ill used or myself. The commandant, who was a magistrate also, came up from Wollongong the next day, and he soon saw that we were both entirely guiltless. Mr. —— would not so much as listen to Dick's protestations and defence of himself; but the shrewdness and tact of the commandant (who, however, was one out of a thousand of his cloth) very soon extricated us from all difficulty and suspicion. He said, "Mr. ——, if they tied up the government man, it is not likely they left the free man at liberty: and whether they did tie up the government man, as he says, we can soon ascertain; for a man could not caper about in a pair of heavy boots, as your man says he did, on one spot for a good hour on such a night without making a pretty good puddle." Examination at once affirmed poor Dick's veracity; there was a hole full of water there six inches deep; so the matter, as far as we were concerned, dropped. Our great error was, forgetting in our confusion that the bushrangers' passing our hut, both in going and coming, was likely to fix suspicion of participation on us, we had neglected to go in and report the whole affair just as it happened, before the tracks were run down. This was Mr. ——'s grand problem. "If we were not in league with them," he said, "why had we not come in directly they were gone, or at least at daybreak, and reported all about it?" We, on our part, who did not know that the bushrangers had given him such forcible directions not to move out of his hut till eight o'clock, continued expecting him out at our hut every minute till breakfast-time, cautiously adhering ourselves to the no less stringent instructions left us. At the same time we might, no doubt, have gone in without incurring any risk; for they would scarcely have left one of their party behind to watch us in a part of the bush they all knew so little of as to require a guide. Their ruse was altogether a very complete one, if indeed it did not partake as much of fortunate accident as of able intention. In coming and going their track varied little up to a certain creek; but this creek they had both come out of and gone into again at an identical spot. It was a fine level-channelled creek, generally not above six inches deep and perhaps twelve feet wide, and very clear of fallen timber for a brush-creek. With these rains, however, it was running about eighteen inches deep; nevertheless they had kept its channel, so far as we could judge, for a full half-mile to where a main cedar-road crossed it; for nowhere could we find anything that looked like tracks up the bank out of it, either before reaching this road or afterwards; and if they took this main road, all their tracks on it must have been completely obliterated by nine o'clock in the morning; for not only was it, as most cedar brush-roads are, from the richness of the soil, one long ditchlike line of sludge and water, but by nine o'clock six or seven cedar-drays, each drawn by two or three yoke of bullocks, had passed along it; and as there were no blacks nigh at hand to search the bush for the continuance of the tracks, and the rain still kept falling in torrents all next day, every trace of their point of departure from the main cedar-road, which they had in all probability taken at the creek, was no doubt entirely obliterated before the next morning.