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    The Imperialists
    The Imperialists
    The Imperialists
    Ebook296 pages7 hours

    The Imperialists

    By Vivian Stuart

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    About this ebook

    The twenty-third book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams.
     
    A new century has dawned as Australia forms their country. 
     
    New hopes characterise the lives of the young Australians. Some had to the Outback in search of gold and glory. Others find their fulfilment in politics and seize power in the newly-formed country. Some are even moving north to conquer new lands.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkinnbok
    Release dateSep 22, 2023
    ISBN9789979642480

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      Book preview

      The Imperialists - Vivian Stuart

      The Imperialists: The Australians 23

      The Imperialists

      The Australians 23 – The Imperialists

      © Vivian Stuart, 1990

      © eBook in English: Jentas ehf. 2023

      Series: The Australians

      Title: The Imperialists

      Title number: 23

      ISBN: 978-9979-64-248-0

      This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

      All contracts and agreements regarding the work, editing, and layout are owned by Jentas ehf.

      The Australians

      The Exiles

      The Prisoners

      The Settlers

      The Newcomers

      The Traitors

      The Rebels

      The Explorers

      The Travellers

      The Adventurers

      The Warriors

      The Colonists

      The Pioneers

      The Gold Seekers

      The Opportunists

      The Patriots

      The Partisans

      The Empire Builders

      The Road Builders

      The Seafarers

      The Mariners

      The Nationalists

      The Loyalists

      The Imperialists

      The Expansionists

      –––

      What’s Australia? A big, thirsty, hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for convenience of foreign speculators, populated mostly by mongrel sheep and partly by fools.

      — Henry Lawson, Australian poet and storyteller

      One who would travel this country for pleasure would, go to hell for a pastime.

      — R. T. Maurice, Australian geographer

      Australian History does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they all happened.

      — Mark Twain, an American tourist

      Prologue

      If you ask me, sir, said Lieutenant James Camber, there are some parts of the British Empire that I’d just as soon give back to the natives.

      Captain Andrew Broome, Royal Navy, turned to his junior officer and chuckled. I think you have a point there, James, though I doubt the Colonial Office would see it your way, or the British people either.

      Standing at the rail of his ship, HMS Durable, Captain Broome took in the scene before him. The vessel lay at anchor in Port William Inlet on East Falkland Island. On shore the few clapboard houses of the town of Stanley overlooked the harbour, their roofs painted in gay colours, as if to offset the drab, chill landscape of this outpost of the British Empire. For the first time since Durable had steamed into the area of the Falklands, the sun was shining, and the captain was surprised to find that there was, after all, some colour on these islands in the South Atlantic.

      Although Captain Broome, an Australian by birth, had been baptized Andrew, his most striking feature — the rust-red hair inherited from his father — had given him the nicknames by which he had always been known, Rufus or Rufe. Indeed, he could not recall the last time anyone had called him Andrew, and he suspected that some of his fellow officers and men did not even know his true given name.

      On deck he was a tall, formidable figure, bulky and snug in his winter blues and cold-weather gear. His greatcoat collar was turned up, and he stood with his hands in his pockets, his visored cap pulled low over his eyes. Even in the summertime it could be chill in the latitudes beyond fifty degrees south.

      It takes a sailor to appreciate the extent of the empire, doesn’t it, James? Rufe commented.

      That it does, sir, the lieutenant answered.

      As for me, Rufe went on, I’ll be glad when this voyage is over and we’ve reached home port in Sydney. D’you know that in my thirty-odd years in the navy I’ve barely set foot in my native land? My family are mostly in Sydney now, and I haven’t seen some of them more than half a dozen times in all those years. It’ll be good to be back there.

      I can imagine it will be, sir, the lieutenant replied. Then, seeing a hint of motion at the coaling station on the Stanley wharves, he lifted his binoculars. Signal, sir. They’re ready for us.

      Very well, Rufe said. Make preparations to get under way, Lieutenant.

      The Durable was a Havoc-class torpedo-boat destroyer, although most Royal Navy men referred to her and her class simply as destroyers. She was 180 feet long, displaced 320 tons, and mounted three 6-pounders and a 12-pounder, in addition to her three 18-inch torpedo tubes. She had been built to serve defensively against enemy torpedo boats and offensively as a torpedo boat to attack larger ships. Why a war vessel was assigned to duty in these cold and largely empty South Atlantic waters would have been a mystery to her captain and her crew, except that wherever the British Empire was, there, too, was the Royal Navy.

      The empire in the Falklands was evidenced by the Union Jack flying over the coaling station in Stanley. The empire extended even farther south, across the Drake Passage to the South Shetland Islands just above the Antarctic Circle and — at least in claims — beyond that to Antarctica itself, to the storm-driven snows and the eternal ice of the southernmost continent.

      After taking on a full load of coal, Durable was covered with black dust. The crew, grumbling as all sailors do, turned out to spit-shine the ship, seeking out all the tiny places on deck tainted by coal dust.

      The weather closed in with fog so thick that one could not see the brightly painted roofs of Stanley. Finally, when visibility permitted, Rufe took Durable out into the open sea. The Antarctic summer was coming, and Rufe’s orders were to use the days of almost unending light to explore the seas around the icy continent. He set a course for the South Orkneys, sighting Coronation Island on a glowering day that threatened storm. Past the Orkneys he gave the order to steer due south, into that part of Antarctic waters known as the Weddell Sea.

      Durable had not been designed for the comfort of the men who lived in her. The wind whistled through the open bridge, bringing with it the scent of the ice cap, and the officers’ and the crew’s quarters were inadequately heated. The ship pitched and tossed as around her the seas towered up, dwarfing her. When she was in the trough of a wave, her stacks were lower than the crest. The wind was holding at about force seven; on land such a gale would sway whole trees, but it was not unusual at sea, particularly in these latitudes.

      As the icy swells grew in size, the seas reaching ninety feet, Durable’s passage became a carnival ride. She was quartering the swells, and that angle of attack gave her all of the motions that a floating body can achieve: up, twist, twist again, and level out momentarily, then dive, twist, and thunder down into the trough, with the cold spray driving all the way back past the forward gun turrets.

      Rather a spectacular show, Rufe Broome commented. Although he was all navy and had been since the age of fourteen, Rufe had an easy way with his junior officers, so long as they did not try to take advantage of his amiability.

      I’m quite sure there’s a misunderstanding somewhere, James Camber replied. It was his watch, but the captain was on the bridge with him, both officers bundled into their coldweather gear. Are you sure our orders aren’t to sail straight for the Coral Sea?

      Rufe laughed. Too bad you’re not the senior officer. If you were, I’d pretend ignorance and let you interpret our orders in just that way. Rufe would have liked nothing better than to have been able to sail straight to those balmy waters off Australia’s northeastern shore.

      The Durable’s job in the frigid Weddell Sea was to take weather observations and investigate the conditions of the ice packs. Afterward she was to proceed westward through the Drake Passage, sailing as close to Antarctica as weather permitted until she reached the Ross Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf — a frozen mass almost the size of France.

      Down here at the bottom of the world a relatively short journey took a ship quickly across many degrees of longitude; accordingly, the run from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea would bring Durable from a point south of South America to a corresponding point southeast of Australia and New Zealand. After the tortuous haul past the Antarctic coast, Rufe would at least have the consolation of being nearer to home.

      The exploration of high latitudes was a priority in naval circles, and other ships were doing the same as Rufe’s. The fact that Durable had not been built for pushing through ice packs seemed not to have troubled the Admiralty. Fortunately, Rufe’s orders were hedged with the words if possible, an escape clause that he would not hesitate to use if he needed it. He would turn back the first time the ice threatened, because if Durable were caught in the pack, her metal sides would be crushed much more easily than those of the specially constructed wooden ships used for Antarctic and Arctic explorations.

      The men assigned to take the weather observations were doing their jobs efficiently. Sooner or later, when Durable’s readings in the Weddell Sea were compared with records she would make in the Ross Sea as well as simultaneous readings on other ships, scientists would have a more detailed understanding of the climate on various sides of the icy continent.

      In the next half hour the wind swung a quarter of the way around the compass and peaked at force ten whole gale. Now the huge swells hissed with white on the top, and they were closer together. Durable bucked and twisted, dived and wet herself back to the stem with frigid salt spray that, as the gale continued, began to freeze on the deck, riggings, and superstructures. Rufe gave orders to put the storm on her stem, steaming northeastward. It would have been more comfortable bracing the storm bow on, but that way lay the Palmer Peninsula and the offshore ice packs.

      The sky was clear, and visibility was unimpaired. The wind blew out of some huge polar disturbance, and by morning the ship was badly iced, weighed down with tons of it. Rufe turned out the crew with axes to begin chipping away the increasingly dangerous burden.

      The whole gale blew on unabated; on land such howling winds would have uprooted trees. The waves lifted Durable’s stem, swept under her, and let her fall backward off their crests. The men chipping ice had to be rotated often to prevent frostbite. Conditions underfoot were hazardous, for the decks were made perilous by the slick ice; men moved with difficulty, leaning on the wind, huge sheets of ice flying as they chipped at it with the axes.

      The wonder of it was that the accident did not happen sooner. Suddenly an axe slipped off ice, then glanced with force into the knee of a seaman. Blood spurted from an opened artery as the man fell, moaning with fright, his hands clutching at his leg.

      James Camber saw the incident from the bridge and raced down to the deck. Sailors tried to staunch the flow of blood, and a medical corpsman was arriving just as Camber reached the spot and began to shoo the sailors away. The corpsman tightened a tourniquet on the outside of the injured man’s clothing and ordered that he be carried to the infirmary. Camber followed.

      Once in the infirmary Camber had to swallow hard to keep from losing his breakfast while the corpsman bared the leg. The axe had severed the sailor’s kneecap and cartilage, leaving the lower leg dangling by a thin strip of flesh and the tough tendons at the bend of the knee.

      There’s work for a surgeon, the corpsman said.

      Not likely, Camber said.

      The injured sailor was comatose.

      He’ll pack it in if that leg isn’t taken off and the bleeding stopped, the corpsman said. There’ll be a doctor at the whaling station on South Georgia.

      I’ll speak with the captain, Camber said.

      Hearing the report, Rufe Broome checked the charts and did some calculations. Durable was more than fifteen hundred miles from South Georgia and caught in the midst of an Antarctic storm. With his second-in-command, Lieutenant Camber, on the bridge, Rufe went below.

      The injured man was awake but dazed with the morphine that the corpsman had given him. How are you, son? Rufe asked him.

      Doc says I’m going to lose my leg, the sailor said weakly.

      That’s a fact, Rufe said. There’s a bit more to it, though. Are you man enough to face some hard truths?

      Ain’t got no choice, have I, sir?

      Not much choice, Rufe confirmed. The nearest sawbones is on South Georgia. One choice is to turn north and run for South Georgia, rolling in the troughs all the way and maybe, in the time it takes us to get there, having you bleed to death.

      The man shook his head in negation.

      The other choice is for me and the doc, here, to cut through what little remains of that leg and tie off the arteries while we ride out this storm, and then head for South Georgia to have the doctor there neaten up what we’ve done. He put his hand on boy’s shoulder. I think you can see what we have to do.

      The boy nodded grimly.

      The nervous corpsman gathered tools and readied the ether. Rufe, dressed in a medical smock, hands and arms scrubbed thoroughly, surveyed the damaged leg as the corps man administered the ether.

      The tendons of the sailor’s legs were surprisingly tough, requiring a lot of force before they were severed. Rufe worked with the corpsman as he located and tied off the main artery. Pressure slowed the bleeding from other veins, and when at last there was nothing more than a slow ooze into the bandages, Rufe wrapped the severed lower leg in a sheet, washed himself, and went back to the bridge.

      Over the next few hours the ship came north gradually as the storm abated somewhat, but the rolls were still severe. The seaman’s leg was buried at sea but without ceremony.

      The South Georgia whaling station was a bleak, severe place made odoriferous by the rendering of whale fat and the dumping of refuse into the bay, where thousands of seabirds squabbled over the bits and pieces. The doctor in residence smelled of rum, but his hands were steady when he examined the seaman’s stump.

      I wouldn’t call it a neat job, the doctor said. He looked up at Rufe and smiled. But you quite obviously saved the boy’s life, Captain. And I’ve seen worse cutting by licensed doctors.

      With the corpsman’s help the doctor put the seaman to sleep again and trimmed up the stump, pulling skin down from the leg to suture over part of the raw flesh. The seaman was left on South Georgia in the whaling company infirmary to be under the doctor’s care. Durable steamed southwest.

      The detour to South Georgia Island had used up some of the time for exploring Antarctic waters. Rather than return to the Weddell Sea, Durable proceeded directly through the Drake Passage toward the Ross Sea, crossing the invisible line that marked the Antarctic Circle and circumnavigating a good portion of the globe as she made an arc past 150 degrees west longitude.

      They entered the Ross Sea in weather so clear that the sky was a deep blue, unlike any sky that Rufe had ever seen. A distant soaring seabird gleamed like a white jewel in the brilliant sun, and the waves that rolled easily under the ship were as free of colouration as a chunk of freshwater ice. Durable made her cautious way through a field of free ice, passing bergs that were as large as a cathedral. The air was cold but intoxicatingly pure.

      The gleam of snow-covered ice was on the horizon when, gradually, the sea began to turn to slush, and floes of shattered pack ice caused frequent changes of course. A shoal of penguins stitched its way past the ship, the trim little swimmers surfacing and diving, heading for the distant gleam of whiteness. A drifting floe banged Durable’s port bow with a force that made Rufe wary.

      Well, Lieutenant, he said to Camber, it seems to me that this is as far as ice conditions permit.

      I came to that conclusion yesterday, sir, Camber said.

      Sort of anticlimactic, though, Rufe said. Since we’re this near, I’d like to see the ice shelf. Maybe just to say I’ve been that close to Antarctica.

      Let’s pretend we got close enough to see the ice shelf and I swear that I’ll never tell anyone you’re prevaricating, sir.

      Rufe sighed. He gave orders to bring Durable about. As if to prove that his decision to end the penetration of the outlying ice field had been correct, the skies darkened with fearful swiftness, bringing night in the middle of the Antarctic day. As the waves built, freezing rain coated the ship with an icy shroud. The slush through which the ship had been pushing began to freeze into a thin, hard crust of ice. Rufe ordered half speed ahead, and Durable breasted the waves, smashing her bow into them challengingly until, two days later, she emerged from the darkness of the storm into diminishing seas where there were merely sixty-foot smooth-topped swells.

      Rufe took Durable just to the west of Macquarie Island southwest of New Zealand, bypassed Tasmania to the east, and in a climate more to his liking brought her slowly into her new port at Sydney Harbor. He had come home.

      Chapter I

      Western Australia

      For the third straight season, drought held the land of the-snake-as-big-as-a-hill-walking-about in a red haze of heat, hunger, and thirst. The small tribal unit of the Baadu of Warrdarrgana, wandering far from the home given to them in the long ago time of the Dreaming, suffered great privation. If it had not been for Ganba, they would have starved.

      Still, the Baadu hated Ganba as much as they respected or feared him.

      For a Baadu, Ganba was a hairy man, his features large and impressive. From his prominent fleshy nose and heavy-browed eyes, his forehead swept back in an almost flat plane to a shock of hair that was heavily greased and formed a pointed mass at the back of his head. His facial hair was stiff and dark, and his broad chest bore the sweeping scars of ceremony.

      The old ones said that Ganba was large because as a boy, during another time of drought and hunger, he had been given his baby sisters to eat one by one, their fat being spread on his skin as protection against the burning sun. Ganba had accordingly grown faster than the other boys his own age, and he had been initiated into manhood with older youths who, in spite of their years, lacked his size and strength.

      The flesh of Ganba’s baby sisters had not only made him broad and fat but given him a permanent taste for human meat.

      No one in his tribe knew exactly what had formed Ganba’s attitudes toward his fellow man, but it was said that he had never met a man, woman, or child that he liked. He had hated his natural mother, his various tribal mothers, and his older sisters and brothers as well. He would gladly have eaten them all, but that would have been impossible, for they were older and stronger than he. However, as soon as he had grown big enough, he regularly beat his mother and any other female who dared challenge his wants or needs. Once he blinded a young girl by throwing pebbles into her eyes, and he seemed proud of the deed.

      For these reasons, when the time came for Ganba’s initiation, the men who threw him into the air during the wa-warning dropped him several times instead of catching him, and the blows they struck him were not merely ceremonial, as they were with the other boys. Ganba was furious but forgot his rage when it came time for the drinking of blood. All Baadu were blood drinkers, but few of them relished human blood as much as did Ganba.

      After surviving the initiation ceremony, Ganba became, as he matured into manhood, a wearer of murderer’s slippers — the ceremonial anklets, without soles, that were worn by those appointed to carry out tribal executions. He thus became a stalker of human game. He was also — in that time of direst hunger — the chief supplier of food for the small, displaced unit of Baadu.

      Finally, as the sun continued to bake the land and no clouds formed in promise of breaking the drought, Ganba made two decisions. First, he would leave the land of the-snake-as-big-as-a-hill-walking-about, and second, he would not travel alone. Selecting a young, plump, hardworking woman, he told her family — he would not deign to ask — that she would be his wife. The bride price he offered was the food that he would supply.

      Bildana, the young girl, was terrified, for she was not sure whether Ganba wanted her as a bedmate or as a meal. She wanted to run away and was prevented from doing so only by her greater fear of unseen things in the bush — beasts and spirits that were even more terrifying than the possibility that she, like several of Ganba’s former wives, might end up in his cook fires.

      Unwilling to flee, Bildana appealed to her kommuru, her mother’s brother. The killing of wives must be stopped, she pleaded. While it is true that women who wantonly give themselves to any man may, by custom, be eaten in times of hunger, Ganba’s wives were chaste, and Ganba broke tribal law when he killed them.

      The kommuru nodded.

      Ceremony was a vital part of the Baadu’s life, as it had been since the Dreamtime, when men walked the earth as kangaroo and barramundi and wallaroo. In this year of unrelenting drought four young men were preparing for marriage along with Ganba. During one phase of the drawn-out festival Bildana’s kommuru tried to kill Ganba.

      The five men to be married were lined up facing the kommurus of Bildana and the other wives-to-be. The older men held in their hands the livers of unfortunate members of another tribal group who had been slaughtered by Baadu hunters and thus had unwillingly joined the festivities. The young men preparing for marriage had to catch pieces of raw liver in their mouths as they were tossed by the kommurus; the youths were forbidden to touch the slippery chunks of meat with either hands or teeth. It was not an event to be taken lightly, for if a man-to-be-married touched the liver with his hands, or if he was observed using his teeth, or if he vomited up the raw and bloody pieces, then he, too, would die and become a part of the wedding feast.

      Bildana’s kommuru gradually increased the size of the pieces of liver that he tossed into the gaping mouth of the man who wanted his favourite niece. He was fervently trying to force Ganba to miss, or to hit the meat with his hands or teeth, or to gag and reject the larger and larger pieces.

      To Ganba’s left came a strangled cry. A young man, made frail by sickness and the long drought, bent at the waist and coughed up bloody bits of liver. From the darkness beyond the blazing fires a woman cried out in sorrow as a tribal elder struck the blow that was ordained by ancient ceremony. The frail young man would never know the pleasures of having a wife.

      Ganba laughed and opened his big mouth to catch a still-larger piece of liver tossed by Bildana’s kommuru. He let the slick meat glide past his teeth and tongue, then swallowed convulsively. The fresh blood in the liver almost satisfied his thirst.

      Now you have failed, old man, Ganba mocked. The kommuru angrily

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