Read Online In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare - Free Book Online

ceremony’. (The flag, he noted acidly, was hoisted upside down and resembled a dish-rag hung out to dry, and he had had to lend the English dry gunpowder to make their salute.) He assured King he had no intention of claiming a territory that had in any case been discovered in 1642 by a Dutchman and was, in his opinion, already inhabited by Aborigines. Once again he identified the culprit. ‘The story you have heard, of which I suspect Mr Kemp, captain in the NSW Corps, to be the author, is without foundation.’
    By now, King’s illness had advanced into his chest, and he had been forced to take to his bed. But Kemp’s vendetta continued. Somehow a tightly rolled piece of paper found its way to the bed-bound Governor. On it were ‘seditious drawings’ of King and two short poems: ‘Extempore Allegro’, a brisk assault on the Governor’s character (‘for infamous acts from my birth I’d an itch’), and ‘Epitaph’, which cheerfully anticipated his demise (‘A wretch to whom all pity is bereft’).
    This anonymous doggerel enraged King. He arrested Kemp – who had been appointed the Corps’s paymaster – and prosecuted him. The trial was a farce. King, a naval man, had to draw the members of the court martial from Kemp’s army cronies such as the Rum Corps commander, Lieutenant Colonel ‘Phlegmatic’ Paterson, an inebriate botanist with failing eyesight who had been witness at Kemp’s marriage; and Major Johnston, Paterson’s no less alcoholic second-in-command, who had been the first officer to step ashore at Port Jackson. This was a tribunal that protected its interests.
    On February 25, 1803, the trial was suspended and Kemp acquitted. A startling dispatch from the Colonial Office advised King to forget the whole business and ‘consign to oblivion’ all that had passed. He was urged to proceed with his plan to colonise the virgin territory of Van Diemen’s Land.
    The idea of founding a colony had been pretty vague until Kemp started circulating rumours about the French. King now blundered in to fill the empty vortex. In August 1803, he chartered two ships – the Lady Nelson and the Albion , captained by the whaler Ebor Bunker – to unload a party on the Derwent estuary. The 49 passengers included a surgeon, a storekeeper, 21 male and three female convicts, seven free settlers, and a lance corporal and seven privates from the New South Wales Corps. A few months later, King assembled a second and larger force to take control of Bass Strait. He asked Colonel Paterson to lead it. Paterson, as commander-in-chief of the New South Wales Corps, wanted to be in full charge of his own area and refused to answer to a junior officer in the settlement on the Derwent. King agreed to divide the island in two, with Paterson in charge of the northern half. In London, knowledge of the island’s geography was so hazy that Paterson was given the go-ahead to establish a settlement at Port Dalrymple with its ‘advantageous position … upon the Southern Coast of Van Diemen’s Land’. King had to point out that Port Dalrymple lay on the north coast.
    In October 1804, King left his sick bed to wave off Colonel Paterson on board the Buffalo , with Kemp as second-in-command. The four vessels carried 181 soldiers, convicts and settlers, including Kemp’s brother-in-law Alexander Riley, who was to act as storekeeper. The Governor’s relief at seeing the back of Kemp – his ‘concealed assassin’ – must have cheered him at least a little; at any rate, he provided an eleven-gun salute for the expedition’s departure.
    At 7 a.m. on Sunday, October 14, the Buffalo edged away from Government Wharf to the tune of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and the hearty cheers of a ‘delirious’ population – and sailed smack into a tempest.

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    ON A CLOUDLESS MORNING I DROVE TO GEORGE TOWN AND