The Thorn Birds Read Online Free PDF Page A

Captain Arthur Phillip was ordered to set sail for the Great South Land. The year was 1787. His fleet of eleven ships held over one thousand convicts, plus sailors, naval officers and a contingent of marines. No glorious odyssey in search of freedom, this. At the end of January 1788, eight months after setting sail from England, the fleet arrived in Botany Bay. His Mad Majesty George the Third had found a new dumping ground for his convicts, the colony of New South Wales.
    In 1801, when he was just twenty years of age, Roderick Armstrong was sentenced to transportation for the term of his natural life. Later generations of Armstrongs insisted he came of Somerset gentlefolk who had lost their fortune following the American Revolution, and that his crime was nonexistent, but none of them had ever tried very hard to trace their illustrious ancestor’s background. They just basked in his reflected glory and improvised somewhat.
    Whatever his origins and status in English life, the young Roderick Armstrong was a tartar. All through the unspeakable eight months’ voyage to New South Wales he proved a stubborn, difficult prisoner, further endearing himself to his ship’s officers by refusing to die. When he arrived in Sydney in 1803 his behavior worsened, so he was shipped to Norfolk Island and the prison for intractables. Nothing improved his conduct. They starved him; they immured him in a cell so small he could neither sit, stand nor lie; they flogged him to jellied pulp; they chained him to a rock in the sea and let him half-drown. And he laughed at them, a skinny collection of bones in filthy canvas, not a tooth in his mouth or an inch of his skin unscarred, lit from within by a fire of bitterness and defiance nothing seemed to quench. At the beginning of each day he willed himself not to die, and at the end of each day he laughed in triumph to find himself still alive.
    In 1810 he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land, put in a chain gang and set to hew a road through the iron-hard sandstone country behind Hobart. At first opportunity he had used his pick to hack a hole in the chest of the trooper commanding the expedition; he and ten other convicts massacred five more troopers by shaving the flesh from their bones an inch at a time until they died screaming in agony. For they and their guards were beasts, elemental creatures whose emotions had atrophied to the subhuman. Roderick Armstrong could no more have gone off into his escape leaving his tormentors intact or quickly dead than he could have reconciled himself to being a convict.
    With the rum and bread and jerky they took from the troopers, the eleven men fought their way through miles of freezing rain forest and came out at the whaling station of Hobart, where they stole a longboat and set off across the Tasman Sea without food, water or sails. When the longboat washed ashore on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, Roderick Armstrong and two other men were still alive. He never spoke of that incredible journey, but it was whispered that the three had survived by killing and eating their weaker companions.
    That was just nine years after he had been transported from England. He was yet a young man, but he looked sixty. By the time the first officially sanctioned settlers arrived in New Zealand in 1840, he had hewn lands for himself in the rich Canterbury district of the South Island, “married” a Maori woman and sired a brood of thirteen handsome half-Polynesian children. And by 1860 the Armstrongs were colonial aristocrats, sent their male offspring to exclusive schools back in England, and amply proved by their cunning and acquisitiveness that they were indeed true descendants of a remarkable, formidable man. Roderick’s grandson James had fathered Fiona in 1880, the only daughter among a total of fifteen children.
    If Fee missed the more austere Protestant rites of her childhood, she never said so. She tolerated Paddy’s religious convictions and