Free In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare Page B

replies).
    Brandy: ‘The market is completely glutted with spirits and all other goods – such that to force sales would be ruinous.’
    The seedlings: ‘They are unsaleable and good for nothing.’
    But Kemp was encouraging. ‘What is possible for man to do shall be done. You may rely on it, there is no cause for alarm.’
    The family’s distress is summarised in one of Susanna’s letters: ‘There are characters in life who care very little for each other, self-consideration their first and justice their last.’ Complaining about his ‘false excuses’, she united with the Potters in wishing never to see her brother again.

XII
    KEMP WAS ONLY TOO DELIGHTED TO BE SEPARATED FROM ALDGATE ‘by the circumference of the globe’. On January 12, 1816, he was rowed ashore in Hobart. The town consisted of 1,000 people living in wattle and daub huts, and resembled more a campsite than a capital. That night, he dined in Government House (actually a barn) as a guest of the volatile Lieutenant Governor, Thomas Davey. He brought the ‘great news’ of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and informed Davey of his ‘valuable cargo’ and of his wish to become a free settler. He was now 43.
    Davey, who liked to entertain in shirtsleeves, was a jovial incompetent known as ‘Mad Tom’. He had the habit of screwing up his forehead if anyone put him on the spot, and yelling out ‘Pondicherry!’ An ex-Marine who received his letter of appointment in a debtor’s prison, he was also the most alcoholic of Kemp’s superiors.
    Davey’s favourite tipple was ‘Blow my skull’, a cocktail he served in half-pint glasses consisting of rum, brandy, gin, port, Madeira, sherry and claret.
    He and Kemp had plenty to discuss over dinner.
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    Kemp’s first discovery was that the island was no longer divided in two. The reason was an improbable episode involving Major George Alexander Gordon, the third northern commandant at Port Dalrymple, as the area around York Town was known. Kemp was fascinated to learn the details: Gordon, besides being his successor at Port Dalrymple, was ‘an old school friend of mine’ and a fellow regular at the Old Slaughterer’s Coffee House in London. Furthermore, Kemp recently had used Gordon’s name as a reference in his appeal to have his confiscated land grants returned. When Davey explained that Gordon had been relieved of his duties after suffering sunstroke, Kemp understood why the authorities in London had remained unimpressed.
    Sunstroke was not all that unusual – one of Matthew Flinders’s sailors died of it ‘in a state of frenzy’ – but its effects on two men at Port Dalrymple in February 1812 were possibly exceptional. In the week that Gordon was carried off to recover in the barracks in George Street, an Irish entrepreneur, Jonathan Burke McHugo, was passing through Bass Strait from Calcutta to Sydney where he hoped to sell a cargo of rum, tea and trousers. Davey told Kemp that McHugo’s illness demented him into believing that he was a member of the British Royal Family.
    It was a story that Kemp would remember as an old man in his wheelchair. The harbourmaster who boarded the 100-ton brig Active was led into the presence of a man seated on a sumptuous settee who introduced himself as General Count McHugo. He was, he said, travelling under cover on behalf of the Government of India. He had heard that the population of Port Dalrymple were living in a deplorable state, and had come to investigate any grievances and to punish those responsible. On landing, General McHugo went to meet the sick Gordon and revealed to the commandant that McHugo was an assumed name. McHugo told Gordon what he later wrote to the Colonial Office: ‘Every intelligent man who knows me must be aware that although the Son of an Irish snuff and Tobacco seller, I am the lineal descendant of Earl