Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir. Cal Flyn
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envelopes tied with string, and I unpacked them, fingers quivering over creased, delicate documents in their protective plastic sleeves. At last, the insight I was looking for, file 268/1: ‘Journal of a cruise from Greenock to New Holland, 5 September 1837–22 December 1837’. In flowing hand, on the tall, thin pages of a handbound notebook, the thoughts of the young McMillan. I had found him.
It was strange to think that his inner thoughts, scrawled down in a cabin on the raging sea, were present in the here and now, in this buzzing bright-lit room more than a century later. Did he ever consider that they would be read by anyone other than himself, never mind pored over and parsed phrase by phrase by generations of researchers? By me? I suppose we all must, we diarists. Otherwise, what would be the point of recording our thoughts at all? If it were merely the act of writing we seek, we could write upon a slate and then wipe it clean.
I read as fast as I could, my eyes straining to find words in the looping, old-fashioned cursive. When the library prepared to close I stood on a chair and photographed each page, of this and the two later documents, and retreated to my hostel to continue detangling his words from the screen of my laptop. It was my first insight into the character of this man I had hitched myself to.
Much had been made of the negative aspects of his character – his superiority, his outspoken piety (‘sanctimonious, intolerant and churlish’, as one historian has described him) – but I was unconvinced. They should read my diaries, I thought, if they’re looking for a case study in intolerance and churlishness. There was something sturdy about him, his optimism and his faith; his resolve to devote himself to work and to the furthering of mankind.
And there was a romance to him that I had not anticipated. During a storm far out in the ocean he listened as the wind moaned in most melancholy tone through the rigging. Outside, a dark haze extended itself over the whole southern sky. As sail upon sail was taken in and hatches secured, McMillan headed out onto the deck to stand in the lashing rain. I stood silent and alone, thinking of Him who overrules the deep as well as dry land and gladdens our weak hearts when infused with fear.
He had a comic turn of phrase, too. In another such storm, as the ship rocked most fearfully, he noted how some of the passengers were thrown on their beam ends and rolled from side to side, like so many seals. His sketches of his dinner-table companions were lacerating: the captain was a gentlemanly fellow, but a skipper from Greenock travelling as a passenger was of a very cannibal appearance. The German missionary was a fat greasy man, whose wife was so extensive in raising the little finger for I have seen her gulp five glasses of wine and a tumbler of beer before 3 o’clock. (Oh, for a Highland lady, he mourned. She would hardly put her rosy lips to the glass.) An Englishman called Simpson came in for special criticism: a down right ass and a fool of all the company. A Mr Mitchell, on the other hand, was no better than a guttural mumbler.
Ha. Perhaps it was my tiredness, my sense of being out of sync with my surroundings, but his particular brand of misanthropy appealed to me. As I sat alone in the hostel’s bar, adrift in a sea of backpacker hedonism, I found myself strangely drawn to him, so tightly bound by his standards and his islander integrity.
Endless streams of European youths filed out of the main doors into the Melbourne streets, only to be replaced by yet more backpackers coming in, weighed down like packhorses with their rucksacks and carrier bags looped through and over every arm. Girls slept sprawled on the bar sofas, their backpacks like totem poles in every corner. The PA stuttered into life from the speaker above my head every few minutes with the Australian call to prayer. ‘Come on down to the bar,’ a disembodied voice wheedled. ‘Half-price vodka, free beer pong until 10 p.m.’
‘I can’t wait for tomorrow night,’ a Brummie lad told a pretty Czech girl beside me. She smiled blandly back at him, inviting explanation. ‘I’m going to get muntered.’
In my tired, cantankerous frame of mind, I was enjoying McMillan’s catty remarks and his Eeyore-like air. This life, he reminded me, in schoolmasterly reprimand, is only a scene of variety which soon passeth away and affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of doing well, and in the hope of another life. He was a strange, earnest young man. If he were to exist in the here and now, I reflected, he might have been sitting with me, nursing a glass of wine, glowering at all the fun-havers with as much venom as I was. The thought gave me heart.
Across the room, a rowdy drinking game came to some orgiastic conclusion as a stocky young man reared up and half-ran, half-fell out of his seat while his companions roared and heckled. He barged sideways, unseeing, into the nearest sofa, lost his balance and tipped bodily over the back and onto one of the sprawling sleeping girls. Pandemonium. The girl, thrust suddenly from dream into alarming reality, screamed in shock and fear. Strangers clapped and catcalled. The PA coughed again, theme and variation: ‘Come to the bar before 10 p.m. tonight for free beer pong and half-price jugs!’
‘McMillan,’ I couldn’t help thinking, ‘if only you were here to see this.’
I turned back to my screen, read again McMillan’s response to the captain’s warning that in forty years he would have reconsidered the rigidity of his beliefs. McMillan would have none of it: I answered, if I was spared to see another forty years that I hoped to be guided by the same guide.
His comment came down upon me like a weight. Forty years later, I knew, McMillan would be dead. Within five, he would already have the blood of innumerable innocents on his hands.
I felt myself pulled by a complex tug of emotions. I’d come looking for a killer, and had instead found an earnest, headstrong man of my own age, full of ideals and expectations. What happened to him?
They had crossed the equator and found the earth upside down. Each change rang through him with a piercing tone: the new moon, when it appeared, had inverted. It looked strange, but also just the same. The southern sky at least was beautiful. At night he lay on his back on the boards and traced his finger down the sweep of the Milky Way, joined the dots of the Southern Cross, smoothed the smudges that marked the Magellanic Clouds.
And across that glorious sky in the daytime came great flocks of birds. Birds of all stripes: sea swallows and storm petrels; fowl of a sort the sailors called the stormy pheasant – they put me in mind of the common plover, but much brighter in colour – and another they called the castle pigeon, its back spotted with black and white. Albatrosses too, in their dozens, their six-foot wingspans in beautiful dun colours, dark eyes rimmed with white.
But while McMillan’s eyes turned upwards, death stalked the deck, and down below, in the hold, all hell was breaking loose. Fever was taking root among the steerage passengers, spreading from bunk to bunk. McMillan was right not to have travelled there: they were dropping like flies. Almost every other day seemed to herald a new death.
The first victim, a three-month-old child, had died a month into the voyage. All the passengers had attended the service as the tiny body was consigned to the deep. A few days later, more bad news – the young woman who had been married on board was sick: our surgeon reports her to be in a dangerous way.
By the end of November, McMillan reported that ten of the steerage passengers were ill. He fretted that they must be suffering from a contagious fever, though the ship’s surgeon assured him it was ‘only a cold’. I am grieved to say that I cannot rely much on his judgement. Fearful consideration if it proves infectious – no one has a chance to escape its ravages.
And so it proved. A young unmarried man from Greenock was the next to die, and within hours another, a shepherd, laid low by the strong arm of the King of Terrors. McMillan worried for their souls – how poor a time to meet God, when the mind is infected with disease – and prayed that there would be no more deaths. But to no avail. The surgeon soon grew to regret his earlier confidence, as first his own father and then his mother were taken. His oldest sister, by every appearance, is on the brink of the grave.
By late December, another sixteen or seventeen were confined to the hospital. Far from help, the Minerva sailed on. They were far out in