In this case, however, all I was able to feel at this exclamation was a rush of numb relief that the interminable blasted journey was finally over and I might soon be back upon dry land at long last.
I hauled my wretched body up from the ship’s railing, having just attempted for the latest of God knows how many times to fill the heaving ocean with the contents of my equally heaving stomach. However, having long since lost the entirety of its contents to previous heavings, no more remained within that chamber to be thus emptied.
As I sagged utterly spent against the railing, that hideous and vivid memory once more came flooding back which had so often plagued me upon this long and gruelling voyage. A vision of similar illness gripping me in the midst of previous duties upon other vessels, important duties which did not brook such interruption. Duties as a naval surgeon, so oft embarrassingly cut short by my forced and rushed departures. Operations abandoned midstream to be salvaged by others whose muttered oaths, shaking heads and disapproving looks had followed me angrily as I had fled those rooms to avoid contaminating my colleagues and my poor patient with the erupting contents of my cursed weak vitals.
There now followed an equally ghastly impression of my poor mother, shaking her grey head in dismay - at yet another graphic and irrefutable report of her son’s abject failure in the line of naval duty.
This in turn was followed by visions of my most recent nightmare: the long months of rolling, pitching, gut-wrenching discontent, confined for what seemed an eternity in the fetid bowels of a vessel tossed like a scrap of debris upon the mighty and utterly unsympathetic seas. My diet during this voyage, of salt beef, flat bread, biscuits and stale vegetables, ameliorated only by the fact that I had kept so very little of it down. The voyage was not, to be sure, the stuff of which dreams are made.
Shaking these wretched recollections from my pounding head, I now slid gracelessly from the rail and dropped to one knee upon the deck. I winced at the painful crack of emaciated bone against hardened timber. Rubbing the bruised knee, I clambered with some effort to my feet, grasping the rail with both hands, and raised my head to blink blearily through reddened eyes. Out over the side of the ship, its immense cream sails already loosened and fluttering, and away through the mist toward the emerging dark shape beyond.
Yes, no mistaking - it was indeed land. To be precise, the Great South Land. The new jewel in the Crown of the British Empire. Not exactly jewel-like now, it loomed up out of the greyness, a dark, low, craggy and eerily indeterminate presence - but it was land nonetheless. I could not suppress a great rasping sigh at the knowledge that at last my gastric torment would be over.
I had arrived at His Majesty’s Colony of Port Fortitude. And, I added to myself with what vehemence I could summon, it was about bloody time.
The problem really started with the Americans. Many problems do seem to start with Americans; but this particular problem was a particular headache for the British Empire in the late eighteenth century - just before this story begins.
The Americans had been part of that great Empire until they turned rather ungratefully against their colonial masters in their impertinent War of Independence – which in 1776 they had the additional temerity to win. They then added insult to insurrection by refusing to allow any more British convicts to be dumped upon what was now, they insisted petulantly, their own sovereign soil.
Damn, thought the British. Now what do we do with all those troublesome convicts? Well, of course we could just hang more of them. That shouldn’t be too hard, since hanging was the penalty for a whole array of offences, most of them well short of serious.
The only problem was an infuriating outbreak of humane jury behaviour. Daunted for some reason by the idea of sending cartloads of offenders off to grisly deaths, modern juries were baulking at convicting on capital charges - preferring to find proven only lesser offences carrying sentences of imprisonment.
Damn again. Now what? Well, how about stuffing them all into the overcrowded, rotting hulks of decommissioned ships floating on the River Thames?
In the long term, this clearly would not do. For one thing, the hulks had begun to breed legions of disease-carrying rats – creatures Londoners were just a little edgy about since the Great Plague. Now the rats were breeding at an even faster rate than the Irish Catholics, who had caught the American disease of rebelliousness (or did the Americans catch theirs?). In any case, their similarly ungrateful uprisings were already producing an increasing proportion of the hulks’ human inhabitants – though in the face of their heroic posturings, it had to be said, most of these Irish convicts were incarcerated not for politics but for petty crimes: stealing, minor assaults and the like.
In any case, the result was: Double Damn.
It was at this point that some bright spark in His Majesty’s Government came up with a seriously original idea: What about sending these prisoners off to the colonies?
Well, yes, of course it had been done before. With the Americans. But this time, it would be different. These prisoners would be sent to the Empire’s safely compliant new South Pacific outpost, the Antipodean continent fortuitously discovered in 1770 by Lieutenant James Cook.
Well, to be precise, Cook was not actually the very first to discover the southern continent: that had been done more than a hundred years earlier by the Dutch - who called it “Terra Australis Incognita”, the “Great Unknown South Land”. So by now it was well past being “Unknown” to the Dutch – and for that matter, to the French, who had also floated in for a bit of a look; and then there were the Macassan traders popping across fairly frequently from the nearby north; and pirates of course, of various nationalities, who had stopped off for one reason or another before moving on in search of serious looting and pillaging - not seeing much worth looting or pillaging in this particular location.
The British could not, however, contemplate recognising or encouraging in any way the achievements of pirates, even less those of Dutchmen or Frenchmen. No, it was Cook, no mistake, who deserved to be credited with the discovery of the South Land, since he was the first to possess the ceremonial presence of mind to actually plant a national flag and claim the place properly for King and Country.
Well, actually, he was not quite the first to do even this. The French had done the planting and claiming thing – but across on the less hospitable western coast; and anyway, they hadn’t followed it up by properly occupying the great island. It remained quite unoccupied when Cook landed in 1770 and quite rightly hoisted the Union Jack.
Well, that is to say, it wasn’t occupied by any civilised people. There were natives there of course – but they didn’t really count as civilised, since they did no apparent sailing about on the high seas, or planting flags, or anything like that. Thus ran the ingenious legal doctrine of “Terra Nullius” – which asserted that if there were no white Europeans living there, then the place was to all intents and purposes uninhabited – meaning Britain was quite within its rights to march in and take it.
While the colonising officers were under instructions to establish “friendly relations” with the indigines, one cannot remain friendly on an indefinite basis with people who refuse to accept their proper subservient position. After all, as one senior chap in the Colonial Office sagely observed, “If the Almighty had intended the blasted natives to have the place, He would have given them the muskets and us the spears and clubs.”
Even worse, He might have given them the lawyers.
So Britain’s First Fleet arrived in the South Land in 1788 to begin the arduous business of establishing a penal colony. Soon more ships followed, as the Mother Country began to see the possibilities of expanding her fledgling outpost beyond mere felonious dumping ground and into potentially prosperous free settlement. Within a decade, British toeholds had begun to spread around the more temperate southern fringes of the continent to virtually all navigable