Morgan's Run by Mccullough Colleen

Author:Mccullough, Colleen [Mccullough, Colleen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2000-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Cape Town was beautiful, yes, but could not hold a candle to Rio de Janeiro in the judgment of the convicts, doomed always to look, never to sample. Not only had Rio been visually stunning, but it had also been filled with happy and natural people, with color and vitality. Cape Town had a more windswept and bleakly dusty kind of appeal, and its harbor lacked those hordes of gay bum boats; what black faces they saw did not smile. This might have been a simple reflection of its sternly Calvinistic, extremely Dutch character. Many buildings were painted white (not the favorite color of Alexander’s convicts) and there were few trees inside the town itself. A grand mountain, flat and bushy on top, reared behind the tiny coastal plain, and what the books said about it was quite true: a layer of dense white cloud did come down and spread a cloth over Table Mountain.

They had been 39 days at sea from Rio and arrived at the height of the southern spring on the 14th of October. It was now 154 days—22 weeks—since the fleet left Portsmouth and it had sailed 9,900 land miles, though it still had a long way to go. At no time had the eleven ships become separated; Governor/Commodore Arthur Phillip had kept his tiny flock together.

For the convicts, making port consisted in decks which didn’t move and food which didn’t move. The day after they arrived fresh meat came aboard, accompanied by fresh, soft, marvelous Dutch bread and a few green vegetables—cabbage and some sort of strong-tasting, dark green leaf. Appetites revived at once; the convicts settled to the critical business of trying to put on enough condition to survive the next and final leg, said to be 1,000 miles longer than the trip from Portsmouth clear to Rio.

“There have been but two voyages gone where we are going,” said Stephen Donovan seriously, wishing Richard would let him donate some butter for their bread. “The Dutchman Abel Tasman left charts of his expedition more than a century ago, and of course we have the charts of Captain Cook and his subordinate Captain Furneaux, who went down to the bottom of the world and a land of ice on Cook’s second voyage. But no one really knows. Here we are with a great host aboard eleven ships, attempting to reach New South Wales from the Cape of Good Hope. Is New South Wales a part of what the Dutch call New Holland, two thousand miles west of it? Cook was not sure because he never laid eyes on any southern coast joining the two. The best he and Furneaux could do was to prove that Van Diemen’s Land was not a part of New Zealand, as Tasman had thought, but rather the southernmost tip of New South Wales, which is a strip of coast going over two thousand miles north from Van Diemen’s Land. If the Great South Land exists, it has never been circumnavigated. But

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