Read Online In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare - Free Book Online Page B

corned beef dinner served with eight different vegetables and an impressive cucumber. But his optimism had started to ebb.
    In York Town, Kemp watched his commander go steadily barmy. The site had been a disastrous choice. The closest a ship could anchor was six miles away. After rain, the place became ‘a complete swamp’. The climate was windy and the temperature colder than in Sydney. As winter set in the animals started to die. Soon half of the settlement’s 622 Bengal cattle had perished and Kemp and Riley were having to hoist the surviving animals into slings and daily massage their legs. And there was trouble in the garden. Nettles had grown with a sting so violent that it killed four dogs and gave several officers a terrible fever. In February, Kemp discovered that a small white insect, ‘the most destructive in the world of its size’, had devoured his coat and hat and was advancing through the vegetables. Paterson surrounded his garden with soapsuds in a forlorn attempt at defence, but his potatoes and French beans were eaten anyway, by rats. Then one morning, Paterson woke to find that unidentified predators had devoured his ducks and chickens: only their feathers were left.
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    By June, the community was on half rations. Desperate and homesick, the colonists were hanging on by their fingernails when they received a further blow – the pirating of a supply ship by a convict crew. Bringing much-needed pork and flour, the brig Venus was also carrying letters from Kemp’s brother-in-law, which the captain had stored in a small deal box. Not even Kemp could have choreographed the fate of William Potter’s correspondence. In his embarrassed deposition, the captain described how, just before his ship was seized, he saw an object hurtle overboard: the box of papers belonging to Kemp, thrown into the sea by a drunken female convict (‘very corpulent with full face, thick lips and light hair’) who would help navigate the ship to New Zealand, where she took up with a Maori chieftain.
    In August, a sick and fatigued Paterson sailed for Sydney. He had left behind Kemp as acting Lieutenant Governor and enough rations to last five months. Unable to withstand another ‘Breeze of Wind’, Paterson reported to the new Governor that he had put his government ‘in tranquillity with Captain Kemp’.
    Years later, as a bankrupt in London, Kemp argued in a petition to the government to restore his land grant that he had spared neither trouble nor expense ‘converting a howling wilderness into a cultivated plain’. But he was not a natural leader and under his command the settlement almost starved to death. His barn burned down and floods destroyed the crops that the injured Riley had managed to grow in spite of his ‘painful circumstances’ (he had been speared in the loins by Aborigines). The settlers survived on seaweed and pigs which they had fed on whale scraps and that tasted of lamp oil. In February, Kemp sent five men in the longboat to row and sail 600 miles to seek help on the Australian mainland. They were never heard from again.
    Kemp’s most important point in his petition was that he had been responsible for the first crossing of the island by a European. In the same month as he dispatched the longboat, he ordered Lieutenant Laycock, the tallest man in the Rum Corps, to walk to the settlement in Hobart and seek help. Laycock and four men, relying only on a compass, trekked for nine days until they reached the Derwent. They walked through plains of silver tussock and kangaroo grass and pines 100 feet high, and discovered a pair of lakes that Laycock named ‘Kemp’s Lakes’ (now Lakes Sorell and Crescent). But having penetrated the interior, Laycock found that the southern settlers were starving too. Stricken with scurvy, catarrh and diarrhoea, they told him: ‘We can afford no relief.’
    In April, Paterson sailed back up the