Brave Harold

Signs of the Time

Blackness. Chanting.

Huge trees tower. Ferns drip. Waterfalls drop into fiords,

their spray tearing away into whorls of mist in the wind.

The eye of a whale looks once then blinks shut as it rolls over

and dives into the wastes of grey water stretching to Antarctica.

Seals are watching from their rocks.

The birds in the forest canopy are jittery and wary.

The chant is telling the story of the beginning of everything.

Endless tendrils of time are leafing and branching

out of the past and curling into the future.

The chant grows fainter,

faltering as the leader looks out from his world at what is to come.

Around them the land is lying under the sky.

The people are worried, they shift and mutter.

The face of the leader is tense and set like a mask as he stares.

He looks at his people, trying to understand that this is the end of it all.

In his ears is growing a great roaring and grinding.

Time is rolling. The earth is reeling away.

The trees, the waterfall, the dark chanting leader;

All reeling away with the rushing earth.

Visions from beyond come half hidden from the dark, fractured and jumbled.

Gunfire. Armies are fighting and dying in the mud, tearing at each other.

Blue against red. Blue columns marching. Red columns marching.

In their train, ragged native conscripts, hauling laden mules and cattle.

Thin dogs snap and bark at their heels in the dust.

A steel mill in a quiet valley. A giant furnace.

Steam, and a great suspended vat of molten steel.

The workers are gasping with heat and exhaustion.

Underground, a line of children toils in the dark,

pulling out the coal on flat dogcarts drawn behind them.

They have rags wrapped round their hands and bare swollen knees.

In threadbare rooms above slum streets boiling with the poor,

a doctor is lancing into the flesh of his patient, collecting the blood in a glass beaker.

The crash of cannon, the shriek of metal and splintered wood,

and the screams of the dying as the sea battle rages.

Great ships heel and turn and blaze fire on each other,

Sails ripped and fluttering.

Armies mass under a hundred banners,

ready to hurl themselves on each other’s swords.

The shadow of Napoleon lies across Europe.

In a great court, a golden king is being crowned,

to the rejoicing of his loyal subjects.

The king is bored, wanting it to be over.

He needs to go to the toilet again.

Continents running with great herds of buffalo.

They are falling and rolling. The eagle winks his eye.

Settlers push trains of rough wagons into the glare of the desert sun.

Sailors stare at the horizon.

Lovers love, mothers suckle,

the old die, babies come squealing into the world.

The armies are marching.

It is starting.

The chant dies. There is silence in the forest.

Huge trees tower.

Ferns drip.

Waterfalls drop into fiords, their spray tearing away into whorls of mist in the wind.

CONTENTS

Poem

Signs of the Time

Chapter One

We meet Harold McCartney, 14 years old,

formerly of Amberside, Scotland, now resident in Denby,

on the southern English coast. We meet Joel and his cohorts.

Chapter Two

We meet Tipo, on a fishing expedition

to the far south-western corner of New Zealand,

a land of mountains, sea cliffs and deep fiords.

Chapter Three

We meet Alkira, a girl of sixteen.

Alkira belongs to the Aboriginal Nuonne people

who range along the southern coast of Tasmania

Chapter Four

Harold is in school. Joel and Harold perfect the catapult bomb,

but are called to account. We meet Harold’s father, the Reverend

Thaddeus McCartney, and the Denby Ladies Mission Group.

Chapter Five

We meet Harold’s mother, Elizabeth, and her brother Vincent.

Harold is beaten but later has an adventure

that will change all their lives.

Chapter Six

Fiordland, New Zealand. Alkira arrives at the sealer camp.

Chapter Seven

Ruapuke Island, New Zealand.

Te Wero and Tipo inspect their southern lands.

Chapter Eight

Harold and Elizabeth visit Vincent at Arundel House.

Harold realises his dream of flying. It does not end well.

Chapter Nine

The Reverend gets a new job.

Chapter Ten

Harold and Elizabeth get a nasty shock.

Chapter Eleven

Ethan Bolan is sentenced for his crime

and Harold discovers the world can be cruel.

Chapter Twelve

The McCartneys take leave of their relatives

and embark on the Mae Rose. Harold sees a stowaway.

Chapter Thirteen

Aboard the Mae Rose, Joel starts work,

but cannot get to see his father.

Harold meets an eagle and a Maori seaman.

Chapter Fourteen

Harold and Joel visit Ethan and discover

that things are not well on the prison decks..

Chapter Fifteen

Harold asks his father for help and gets none.

Elizabeth intercedes with the captain. Ethan gets the lash.

The Reverend conducts the Sunday service.

Chapter Sixteen

Alkira's life at the sealer camp.

She has a narrow escape and climbs a tree.

Chapter Seventeen

Tipo and Te Wero take in their crop.

Chapter Eighteen

The Mae Rose arrives in Port Jackson, Australia.

The McCartneys meet Governor Philip Gidley King

and his family. Harold dreams again.

Chapter Nineteen

Harold and Joel meet again, and plot to find Ethan.

Te Wera and his party arrive. Harold meets Tipo.

Chapter Twenty

Harold travels to Parramatta with the visiting

Maori party and meets the Reverend Samuel Marsden.

Chapter Twenty-One

Governor Philip Gidley King holds a dinner party,

and Te Wera is insulted

Chapter Twenty-Two

Harold tries to find Joel again and fails.

Charlotte sings a song for Harold.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The McCartney family embark for New Zealand.

Their ship, the Scarlet, is wrecked..

Chapter Twenty-Four

Harold finds The Place.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Harold establishes Creek Camp.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Harold learns to survive at Creek Camp.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Harold finds out about the sealers.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Harold meets Alkira, and loses a friend..

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Harold and Alkira leave Creek Camp

but run into trouble.

Chapter Thirty

The waterfall..

Chapter Thirty-One

Harold and Alkira climb a wall.

Chapter Thirty-Two

In which European cartography

and Maori folklore agree.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The party cross the mountains,

but are faced with a perilous descent.

Chapter Thirty-Four

In which the party constructs a raft

Chapter Thirty-Five

Two Tangis.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The travellers take their leave.

They commit themselves to the river

Chapter Thirty-Seven

All is lost and Harold finds himself alone again.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The party regroups and finds its way towards Omaui.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Harold sees rough justice meted out,

and is reunited.

Chapter Forty

Harold jumps again.

Maps

Notes

Chapter One

We meet Harold McCartney, 14 years old, formerly

of Amberside, Scotland, now resident in Denby, on the

southern English coast. We meet Joel and his cohorts.

Night over the Channel port of Denby. The town is sleeping. High in a stone house in the heart of the town, Harold is in his bed. He is dreaming.

Moving through the air. Flying slowly along, high in the forest.

Harold has been here so many times he thinks of it now as The Place. The place where he goes, where the dream takes him.

The trees sail by like galleons in the green half dark. They are not English trees. They are huge, with tiny round leaves and moss bunching thick on parts of the trunk, and hanging in green misty trails under some of the branches. Far below, the forest floor is thick with fern, and covered in a carpet of brown leaf fall. Down there a river is laughing out of sight, sunken in a dark cleft of rock. Behind and far above, the roar of more falling water. This is a vertical place. Birdsong - liquid runs of notes, and another high wild crying from far off. Beyond the trees, the hard glitter of water against dark walls of rock. Moving again, down the slope towards the water, floating amongst the highest branches.

What happens then?

Joel's grubby, sallow face is intent, eyes big, listening to Harold. Behind Joel, the faces of the other five, eyes on him.

I don't know, I never get there. I never come out of the trees. Harold wishes that he had never brought it up. But they have been waiting half an hour, and it has been boring. They are crouched in thick shadow on the narrow lattice of beams underneath the wharf. One of the smallest of the gang, Spinner Phelan, looks up from under his grubby cap.

That Napoleon’s a fucker!

The whole town has been talking about Napoleon. He had been crouching on the other side of the Channel for weeks with his army, and only the constant presence of the patrolling Fleet is holding back an invasion. Everyone nods. The water laps below them.

Joel turns away, glancing up into the flickering shafts of light from above. Feet are moving across the wharf up there, many feet, and the chink of chains. This is what they have been waiting for.

Here they are. Come on - we have to go. Now!

Joel leads Harold scrambling across the beams that criss-cross the length of the wharf to brace the structure. The other boys follow, moving rapidly, like monkeys.

Above their heads is the usual loud confusion of dockside activity. Hawkers are calling, a loud distorted yipping and baying language that none but them understand. They sell cooked cockles, hot potatoes, nosegays (a bit acrid, but essential for those obliged to visit below aboard these ships) and much else. Anything you want in fact if you know who to ask. There are longshoremen shouting, trying to work in the mêlée, loading supplies up narrow plank ways, or manning their wooden gantries to swing down bales and timber cases shrouded in nets and ropes. There are seamen leaving and fishermen arriving to go to their boats at the other end of the wharf, all jostling and shouting greetings and news of the day to each other. Into this throng push a squad of soldiers in the new blue cutaway jackets they have all started wearing, shoving through the crowd, opening the way for a long file of prisoners, all men, manacled hand and foot, two by two, shuffling along to the curses and blows of more soldiers beside and behind them.

To the boys moving along below, it is a familiar rhythm, repeated daily while the ocean-going ships are here. And they are always here. Denby is the jumping off place for the trade ships heading for the Indies and the South Atlantic. Even ships out of the Thames put in here to complete preparations, or load convicts or cargo from the south-east. The boys know all the rhythms of the port and they use them to test anyone who wants to join. And Harold wants to join.

Denby town looks down on the harbour, almost vertically down in some places. The town doesn’t interest Harold in the least. Denby is his father’s new world, as surely as the port has become the magnet for Harold. Denby is a town of solid stone houses on cobbled streets, leading to neat squares flanked by modest stone churches. Stone footpaths in the central square. Soldiers and lawyers, agents for London importers and exporters, bankers and churchmen. It is a miniature city, with the gravity but not the size of greater ports like Southampton or Plymouth. The heart of Denby covers the flat headland above the harbour, leaving a tumble of cheap hostelries and seedy rooming houses to spill down the hill to the water. It is as if Denby finds this principal means of its existence a little disreputable, and has turned its back.

For Harold, the harbour is where the world starts. The great ships come here from over the horizon, dock and unload, load and sail, out from the narrow harbour and back over the horizon. Warships from the Fleet patrolling the channel, merchantmen trading to the Indies, the great five-masters of the East India Company coming in from Calcutta and Bombay, small coastal ships, fishing boats, ferries, military lighters and longboats. The first time Harold saw the harbour spread below him he felt a great opening, like a realisation, and the familiar high floating feeling of his dream, as if he might start moving out over the harbour water.

Harold has turned up at the sloping square above the main wharf every day for the two weeks since he has arrived here from Scotland. The gang of boys he watches are roughly his own age, most of them seem the sons of the fishermen and longshoremen from the huddle of shanties crowding along the cart road which skirts the bay beyond the harbour. They appear and disappear like shadows amongst the market stalls and race down the steep alleys above the port. They are a tight crew, never seeming to notice him as they pass. They hold long conferences in their headquarters, which is a rough construction of crates hidden behind tangles of nets and tackle from the fishing boats strung drying in the sun. They are the line of figures fishing far out on the sea wall which curves round like a hand cupping the narrow harbour. They obviously know everything Harold needs to make the most of this new place.

They are suspicious of him at first. Dressed like a nob, but in old threadbare stuff. Harold doesn’t push it. Turns up the next day, looks for them again. Then, after a week of this, they pass him on the road below the square, all munching huge yellow dripping fruit he has never seen before. Joel lifts his head in greeting as they pass, laughing amongst themselves. Contact. They wait for him in the square the next day. They shake hands. Harold. Joel. Muff. Jamie, Spinner. Max. William. Harold is smaller than Joel, but as big as most of the others; wiry, and with a look which tells them he is up for it. But he has to be tested. This is their test.

The second ship of the three is loading wooden crates, bags of grain and huge hogshead barrels into the after hatches by a series of ropes and plank-ways. Amidships, convicts are shuffling aboard single file up a narrow gangplank. This is the head of a long line that stretches back through the crowd. As they board, their names are called, then checked against a list held by the soldiers at the quayside. This is the target, a convict transport ship, bound for Australia. England has been sending its convicts to the penal settlement at Port Jackson for more than twenty-five years.

Underneath the wharf, the boys arrive at the great crossbeams directly beneath the mid-ships gangplank. Joel carefully raises himself up into the gap between the wharf and the ship, craning his head to look. He turns and nods to Harold. Harold swings out from below the wharf and into an open gun port, quick as an eel. He finds himself on the first convict deck, a space barely four feet high underneath the main deck. Prisoners are obviously going to spend the voyage here. Already at the far end, the first of them are being shackled to their berths and to each other, two to a space. About a yard of space for each pair. Three feet of air above them if they lie down. Harold watches for a moment, crouched in the shadow. An argument breaks out between a guard and one of the prisoners who cannot pay the Unlock Fee, the charge for removing the heavy leg-irons put on by the soldiers. The guard leans over to cuff the man round the head.

Ye don’t pay, ye travel in iron boots. Hope the ship don’t sink!

Harold scuttles through the half darkness to the companionway leading to the deck. He flattens himself behind some water barrels for a moment as another guard enters, bent almost double. Harold slips up the short ladder and out onto the main deck. He runs for the base of the main mast, bent over to stay out of view of the guards posted at the hatch covers. Below he can hear the clanking and curses, then a scream as more prisoners are caged and shackled. He reaches the mast. Now is the moment.

He stands up, and shouts to the officer of the watch at the top of the gangplank who is checking each prisoner that boards against a list in his hand.

Hey! Tosspot!

The officer’s head snaps towards him.

Who’re ye boy? What did ye call me?

He curses and starts towards Harold, drawing a wooden club from his jacket.

I called you Tosspot!

Harold turns to the mast, and runs up the rope ladder to the first cross trees, quickly checking below on the progress of his pursuer. A small posse of crew now surrounds the officer, gazing up at him. The officer sends two of them up the mast after Harold. They are big, bulky men, but they run up the ropes like rats. Harold yells down at them.

Tosspots! Lack-brain blunder heads like you couldn’t catch a flea! Sure you can’t catch me!

He climbs quickly up to the third and top-most cross tree.

He grasps the horizontal lines that run along its length and starts inching his way out to the end of the great boom. He pauses there at the end, eighty feet above the sea. One of the sailors is now behind him on the boom, moving easily towards Harold, a smile starting on his face.

Harold looks down. Joel and his friends have dived from the wharf and are swimming past the ship to the rendezvous point. They tread water and look up. Harold takes a deep breath and jumps outward as far as he can, so his leap will take him well clear of the ship’s rail. He seems to take a long time falling ... Then he hits the water, driving towards the murky harbour bottom in an explosion of iridescent bubbles. Joel and his friends are converging on the spot. Harold looks up at their shapes against the light as he turns for the surface.

*****

Chapter Two

We meet Tipo, on a fishing expedition

to the far south-western corner of New Zealand,

a land of mountains, sea cliffs and deep fiords.

Tipo is swimming deep, moving through giant streamers of bull kelp. They are swaying as the swell above sucks back from the cliff. Three long shadows dash past him, twisting away and disappearing through the kelp. Seals. Tipo reaches the stony bottom and begins moving from one crayfish trap to the next, checking for movement inside. The traps are woven from flax and ribbed with split saplings, anchored by stones. There. Two. He turns the trap over, pulls out the twisting flailing fish by their backs, and drives for the surface, lungs bursting, a great crayfish in each hand. Above him, the long black shape of the waka. He surfaces beside it, holding up his catch. Ripiro stretches out his hands, laughing, and takes the crays. Tipo hauls himself aboard, with a little help. The waka is lying just yards from a sheer wall of rock against which the water is rising and falling as the swell runs in from the sea. The paddlers are busy along its length, adjusting position. They all have an eye to Tipo, and what he has brought aboard. Ripiro crouches over the catch. Maybe thirty crays. He grins up at Tipo. Tipo points north towards the entrance to Tamatea, the great fiord that cleaves deep into this land of mountains like an axe, leaving vertical rock walls a thousand feet high enclosing inky depths. But there is shelter there from the sea.

Paddle!

It is an unconscious command from Tipo and the paddlers dig in unison and drive the waka forward into clear water. Tipo is the eldest son of Te Wero, who commands the southern part of New Zealand and the straits beyond from his island fortress on Ruapuke. Tipo is the best diver on their island, and the men from Ruapuke respect his skill as much as his connection to their chief. They have been gone two weeks from Ruapuke, but they will return with kelp bags full of crayfish.

Fire stings Tipo's eyes as he watches the crayfish redden in the heat, then split and blacken. He grabs it, tears off the tail and throws the body back in the fire. He bites into the thick white meat, and the juice runs down his chin. He passes the rest of the cooked meat to the man beside him. Around the fire the crew are all feasting on the crays. There is a low warning call from above. It's Ripiro. Tipo douses the fire in an instant and springs up the rock incline at the back of the small beach where their canoe is pulled up. They are at the very mouth of Tamatea, the fiord behind them and the sea in front. There is a sail out there, a European ship, huge to their eyes, and heading straight towards them. Tipo turns and hisses down to the paddle party below, pointing at the waka. Willing hands run it along the shore in the shallows to the mouth of the creek, and out of sight under the skirting branches of a great tree that clings to the rocky point at the end of the beach.

The waka party watch as the schooner heaves to a quarter of a mile off shore, in the lee of one of the string of rocky islands dotting the entrance to the fiord. A longboat is put off, and makes for a small islet just off the cliff shore, below them. It is just a great jumble of rocks sticking out of the water, maybe four or five times the length of their waka. The rocks are swarming with seals and their young, a breeding ground and rookery. They watch as four sailors leap ashore while two remain in the boat to keep it in position. The sailors wade in with their clubs, and the rocks are soon a heaving mass of panicking seals, and a growing welter of blood. Some of the men begin skinning even before the rock has been cleared. By evening they have killed more than a hundred seals, and skinned a quarter of them.

A pipe sounds from the ship as the light begins to fall, and it turns for the safety of the fiord, leaving the men on the rock. It sails past the Maori beach camp on its track into the sheltered waters of the inner fiord without noticing anything. Tipo watches it go. The killing party are being left for the night.

The waka crew return to the beach and Tipo leans down over the remains of the fire to get it going again. The others are splitting up to do the familiar tasks. Finishing processing the catch, cutting flax and saplings for a shelter against the chill of the night.

In the morning they paddle away from the canyon walls of the fiord and the abandoned camp. Tipo is thoughtful. Around him the sea boils. They pass the seal colony rock at close range. The small party of sealers is completing the work of skinning and stacking. The whole rock is red with the blood of the seals. The crew of the waka are transfixed by the sight of so much slaughter on one small outcrop of rock. The sealers stand amongst the gore, watching nervously as the great canoe passes them.

*****

Chapter Three

We meet Alkira, a girl of