However much at fault I may be in recollection of our arrival at
Sydney, my memories of our first night at Livorno Bay (so my father
christened the derelict's resting-place) could hardly be more vivid
and distinct. That night marks for me the beginning of a definite
epoch in my life.
I passed the spot in a large inter-state steamer last year. There was
no sign of any ship there then, so far, at all events, as I could make
out with a borrowed pair of glasses; and the place looked very much
the same as any other part of the Australian coast. There are
thousands of such indentations around the shores of the island
continent, with low headlands of jagged rock by way of horns, and
terraces of shell-strewn sand dotted over with ti-tree scrub, which
merges into a low-lying bush of swamp oak and suchlike growths, among
which, as like as not, you shall find, as we found, a more or less
extensive salt-water lagoon, over the sandy bar of which big, tossing
breakers will roll in from the Pacific in stormy weather. Yes, I would
say now that there is nothing very peculiar or distinctive about
Livorno Bay for the observer who is familiar with other parts of
Australia's coast.
But in my youthful eyes, seen on the evening of our arrival, after a
fifteen miles' walk, and, seen, too, in the glow of a singularly
angry-looking evening sky, Livorno Bay, with its derelict barque to
focus one's gaze, presented a spectacle almost terrifying in its
desolation. Years must have passed since anything edible could have
been found on board the _Livorno_. Yet I hardly think I should
exaggerate if I said that two thousand birds rose circling from
various points of vantage about the derelict as we approached her
sides. That this winged and highly vocal congregation resented our
intrusion was not to be doubted for a moment. Short of actually
attacking us with beak and claw, the creatures could hardly have given
more practical expression to their sentiments. The circumstance was
trivial, of course, but I think it somewhat dashed my father's ardour,
and I know it struck into my very vitals.
'Begone, you interlopers, or we will rend you! This is no place for
humans. Here is only death and desolation for the likes of you. This
place belongs of immemorial right to us, and to our masters, the
devouring elements. Begone!'
So it seemed we were screamed at from thousands of hoarse throats.
For my part I was well pleased when my father agreed to Ted's
suggestion that we should postpone till morning our inspection of the
ship, and, in the meantime, concentrate upon the more immediate
necessity of pitching camp for the night in the shelter of the timber
belt and outside the domain of the screaming sea-birds. Our tent was
fortunately not one of the cumbersome sort I had seen on Wimbledon
Common at home, but a light Australian contrivance of cotton,
enclosing a space ten feet by eight, and protected by a good large
fly. Thanks mainly to Ted and his axe we had the necessary stakes cut,
and the tent pitched before dark. Meanwhile, the little fire Ted had
lighted against a blackened tree-stump had grown into the sort of
fiery furnace that was associated in my mind with certain passages in
the Old Testament; and, suspended by a piece of fencing wire from a
cross stake on two forked sticks, our billy was boiling vigorously.
In all such bush-craft as this Ted was _facile princeps_, and he asked
no better employment. Jerry was turned out to graze, belled and
hobbled (for safety in a strange place), and just as actual darkness
closed in upon us--no moon was visible that night--we sat down at the
mouth of the tent to sup upon corned beef, bread and cheese and jam;
the latter in small tins with highly coloured paper wrappers.
By this time my sense of chill and depression had pretty well
evaporated. The details of our domesticity were most attractive to me.
But I am not sure that my father quite regained his spirits that
evening. We each had a canvas camp-stretcher of the collapsible sort.
In ten minutes Ted had made himself a hammock bed of two sacks, two
saplings, and four forked stakes, which for comfort was quite equal to
any camp cot I have yet seen. Sleep came quickly to me, at all events,
and whenever I woke during the night, as I did some three or four
times, there was booming in my ears that rude music which remained the
constant accompaniment of all our lives and doings in Livorno Bay: the
dull roar of Pacific breakers on the sand below us, varied by a long
sibilant intaking of breath, as it seemed, caused by the back-wash of
every wave's subsidence.
Very gently, to avoid disturbing my father--I can see his face on the
flimsy cot pillow now, looking sadly fragile and worn--I crept out
from our tent in time to see the upper edge of the sun's disc (like a
golden dagger of the Moorish shape) flash out its assurance across the
sea, and gild with sudden bravery the trucks and spars and frayed
rigging of the barque _Livorno_. Life has no other reassurance to
offer which is quite so emphatic as that of the new risen sun; and it
is youth, rather than culture, which yields the finest appreciation of
this. In its glad light I ran and laughed, half naked, where a few
hours earlier, in the murk of coming night, the sense of my own
helpless insignificance in all that solitude had descended upon me in
the shape of physical fear. Sea and sand laughed with me now, where
before they had smitten me with lonely foreboding, almost with terror.
I had my first bathe from a Pacific beach that morning; and, given
just a shade more of venturesomeness in the outsetting, it had been
like to be my last. In Livorno Bay the breakers were big, and the
back-wash of their surf very insistent.
The fire of his enthusiasm was once more alight in my father when I
got back to our camp that morning; and one might have supposed it
nourished him, if one had judged from the cursory manner in which his
share of our simple breakfast was dispatched. Then, carrying with him
a tomahawk, I remember, he led us down across the sand to where the
ship lay, so deeply bedded that one stepped over her rail as it might
have been the coaming of a hatch. Her deck, and indeed every uncovered
part of the _Livorno_, was encrusted in the droppings of multitudinous
sea-fowl. For almost as many years as I had lived, probably, these
creatures had made a home of the derelict. To be sure, they had as
good a right to it as we had; yet I remember how keenly we resented
their claims, in the broad light of day; even as they, on the previous
evening, had resented us. Ted promised them a warm time of it, and
congratulated himself on having brought his old gun.
'I'll show 'em whose ship it is,' he said, 'to-night.' And the boy in
me rose in sympathetic response. I suppose I looked forward to the
prospect of those birds being given a taste of the fear they had
helped to inspire in me.
The _Livorno_ had a long, low poop, no more than three feet high, and
extending forward to the mainmast. She had none of the _Ariadne's_
bright-work, as the polished teak was always called on that ship. Her
rails and deck-houses had been painted in green and white, and I made
out the remains of stencilled ornamentation in the corners of panels.
No doubt my father had his preconceptions regarding the derelict of
which he had thought so much in the past week. In any case he did not
linger by the way, but walked direct to the cuddy or saloon, which we
entered by a deeply encrusted, sun-cracked scuttle, just forward of
the mizzen-mast. So here we were, at length, at the heart of our
quest.
Personally, I was for the moment disappointed. My father, being wiser
and knowing better what to expect, was pleased, I think. My
anticipations had doubtless taken their colour from recent experience
of the trim, well-ordered smartness of the _Ariadne's_ saloon. Here,
on board the derelict, nothing was left standing which could easily be
carried away. The cabins opening into the little saloon had no doors,
save in the case of one--the captain's room--that had been split down
the centre, apparently with an axe, and its remains hung drunkenly now
upon one hinge, which, at a touch from Ted's hand, parted company with
its bulkhead, leaving the door to fall clattering to the deck. But,
curiously enough, the good hardwood bunks were all intact, except in
the case of one, which had, apparently, been wantonly smashed, perhaps
by the same insensate hand that smashed the door.
The saloon table had gone, of course, and the chairs; but the brass
cleats which had held them to their places in the deck were there
still to show us where our predecessors here had sat and taken their
meals. Here they had done their gossiping, no doubt, over the remains
of savoury macaroni, with, perchance, an occasional flagon of Chianti
or Barolo. There was a sort of buffet built into the forward bulkhead;
and by a most surprising chance this was unhurt, save for a great star
in the mirror behind it. Even its brass rail was intact. Some idle
boor must have observed this solid little piece of man's handiwork,
and then, I suppose, struck at the mirror with his axe--a savage and
blackguardly act. But here, at all events, was our little store
cupboard.
'Sideboard's all right then,' was Ted's grinning comment. 'And a man
could still see to shave in the glass.'
The saloon skylight had been removed bodily, perhaps to serve some
cockatoo bush farmer for a cucumber frame! And the result of this,
more than any other circumstance, had been to give the saloon its
desolate look; for, beneath the yawning aperture where once the
skylight had stood, there was now an unsavoury mound of bird's
droppings, near three feet high at its apex. This was now dust-dry;
but the autumnal rains of bygone seasons had streamed upon it no
doubt, with the result that all the rest of the saloon was several
inches deep in the same sort of covering. There were naturally no
stores in the pitch-black lazareet which one reached through a trap-door
in the saloon deck; but among the lumber there we found an old
bucket, a number of empty tins, packing-cases, and the like, a coal
shovel with a broken handle, and two tanks in which ship's biscuits
had been kept. How these latter commodities came to have been spared
by marauding visitors it would be hard to say; for, in the bush, every
one, without exception, requires tanks for the storage of rain-water.
From the saloon we made our way right forward to the forecastle, in
which practically no damage had been done; for the reason, I suppose,
that little was there which easily could be damaged or removed. No
anchors or cables were to be seen, but the seamen's bunks remained
much as I imagine they had left them; and, on the side of one, some
sundowner had contrived to scrawl, apparently with a heated wire, this
somewhat fatuous legend:
'Occewpide by me Captin Ned Kelli Bushranger. Chrismas day 1868. Not
too bad.'
In many other parts of the ship we found, when we came to do our
cleaning, initials, dates, and occasional names, rudely carved. But
the only attempt at a written tribute to the derelict's quality as a
camping-place was the pretended bushranger's 'Not too bad'; a
thoroughly Australian commentary, and probably endorsed in speech at
the time of writing by the exclamation: 'My word!'
Internally, the _Livorno_ had been very thoroughly gutted, even to the
removal of many of her deck joists and 'tween-decks' stanchions. But
in her galley, which, having remained closed, was in quite good order,
we found the cooking range, though rusty, intact. It had been built
into the deck-house, and, being partly of tiles, would hardly have
lent itself to easy transport or use in another place. Ted had a fire
burning in it that very day, and water boiling on it in tins. Hidden
under much mouldering rubbish in the boatswain's locker were found two
deck scrapers, which proved most useful.
Ted strongly advised the adoption, as living-room, of the forecastle;
and he may have been in the right of it. The place was weather-proof,
its tiny skylight being intact. But sentiment, I think, attracted my
father to the quarter-deck. 'The weather side of the poop's my only
promenade,' he said gaily. 'And those square stern ports, with the
carving under them--it would be a sin to leave them to the birds. Oh,
the saloon is clearly our place, and we must rig a shelter over the
skylight by and by.'
In the end we accomplished little or nothing beyond inspection that
day. Towards evening Ted laid in a stock of firewood beside our camp,
while my father wrote a letter to the Werrina storekeeper, which Ted
was to take in next day with a cheque. I say we accomplished nothing,
because I can remember no useful work done. Yet I do vividly remember
falling asleep over my supper, and feeling more physically weary than
I had ever been before. We were on our feet all day, of course. We
were gleaning new impressions at a great rate. The day was, I suppose,
a pretty full one; and assuredly one of us slept well after it.