Unlike in McMillan’s time, when it was a tangible and gruelling process, travel today is experienced in the abstract. On board a plane, the passenger moves extraordinary distances with relative immediacy, while signing over all autonomy to the cabin staff. One has no need to worry about food, or water, or even amusing oneself, while in the hands of these unreliable timekeepers who slow or speed the passage of the day depending on the direction in which you are flying: skipping from breakfast to dinner, or working their way down the aisles shutting out the light, heralding in the artificial night even as the sun burns fiercely upon the fuselage outside
I ate what food I was offered, drank what wine was given to me, slept whenever my eyes fluttered closed. I got drunk and confused, got off one plane and onto another, drank more wine. I passed out across a bank of empty seats, then snapped at the hostess when she woke me for my meal. Breakfast again. How long had I been travelling? It was an unedifying state of affairs. At least on a ship, as the mercury of the thermometer inches up degree by degree, and the stars slip from view to the underside of the earth, there is time for adjustment. Time to come to terms with the distance, both mentally and physically.
They understood time differences in McMillan’s day – the disparity between the ‘noon’ of a clock set to Greenwich Mean Time and the actual noon observed from on board the ship had been used as a navigational tool since the seventeenth century – but in the nineteenth century it was not so pressing a reality as it is today, given the lack of immediate communication and the slow speed of travel. To those on board, it would not have been apparent that day by day their body clocks were adjusting themselves, that day was becoming night and night becoming day – that they were not, in fact, staring together with their loved ones up at the same moon every evening.
Jet lag began with the advent of high-speed travel, and it is hard, or at least it is hard while suffering from its effects, not to interpret it as nature’s payback for tampering with the natural way of things: that long-distance travel should be appropriately protracted. It put me in mind of an aside in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which quotes ‘an ancient Arcturan proverb’: ‘However fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.’ This would mean, it adds, ‘in these days of hyperspace and Improbability Drive, that most people’s souls are wandering unprotected in deep space in a state of some confusion; and this would account for a lot of things’.
Certainly, I arrived in Australia in a state of physiological and emotional confusion, my sense of purpose and understanding of my mission trailing some way behind, perhaps over Eurasia, certainly a considerable distance from civilisation.
I tottered through the streets of Melbourne, made top-heavy by rucksacks strapped to both my back and my front, navigating the gridiron central business district where tall glass skyscrapers jostled for space in their neat plantations. I was used to tangled, sprawling old cities, had always thought of the ‘central business district’ as a construct of urban development rather than as an actual physical location. But here it was, in poker-straight rows and columns like a computer simulation, every corner tipped with pedestrian signals at each axis, emitting a low, rhythmic chirrup in stereo from all around. In turn, they rose from their drumbeat in a crescendo of solid noise, cicadas taking the air on a remote hillside. In the still night streets it was disconcerting. At least navigation was easy: walk four blocks, turn, walk four blocks. Addresses here were like a game of battleships.
The hostel was an enormous, elderly institution close to the Queen Victoria Market. Downstairs was very jolly, all neon colours and glossy posters, but the bedrooms on the fourth floor had the atmosphere of a Victorian boarding house. At home, I calculated, it would nearly be time to get up. I lay sleepless on a metal cot in a cell-like room, and waited for the clock to tick round and the sun to right itself.
Angus McMillan, I thought. I need to find Angus McMillan, and then tie our lives together again.
McMillan and his fellow voyagers came in the second wave of immigrants to New South Wales: free men, who had decided to make the journey to the convict colony of their own accord.
Those aboard the Minerva were for the most part law-abiding, conscientious men and women, many of whom had been inspired to travel to the far side of the world by the writing of John Dunmore Lang, the first Presbyterian minister in Sydney, who was presently in Glasgow seeking recruits with whom to improve the colony. Lang deplored the wickedness and sexual licentiousness he saw in Sydney; an inevitable result, he wrote, of its beginnings as a repository for the criminal outcasts of British society. In a series of convincing polemics he called for willing members of his flock to populate a country that was, to his eyes, rich in opportunity yet poor in virtue.
These ‘very superior’ immigrants were promised land, an improved standard of living, higher wages, and an escape from the destitution of their homeland. Lang secured sponsorship for 140 Scottish tradesmen, much in demand among the largely unskilled population of New South Wales, and persuaded around four thousand more to emigrate under their own steam over the course of a decade.
McMillan himself carried a copy of Lang’s An Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales when he boarded the Minerva, which he read from cover to cover over the course of the voyage. It was a very flattering account of the country, he thought, and he was taken with one of Lang’s poems, which he copied out in full during a bout of homesickness.
No parent, sister, brother
Can greet me now – nor other
Earthly friend.
The deep sea lies before thee
But Jehovah’s shield is o’er me
To defend …
McMillan’s own writing reveals him to be as devout a recruit as Lang could have hoped for. At his weakest moments he turns his gaze to the heavens, prostrating himself before the Almighty, he who has the boundless ocean in the palm of his hand. He repeats his motto again, and again, until his mind is still: God’s will be done. God’s will be done. God’s will be done.
When the sailors slaughtered a sheep on the Sabbath, the young Highlander was outraged. The German missionary too attracted his wrath when McMillan spotted him whistling on the poop deck after a sermon. It was not the Gaelic way, McMillan said. (It’s true – it is not. Even today the Sabbath is widely observed throughout the Highlands and Islands, particularly in Eilean Siar, the Outer Hebrides, where on Sundays many still refuse to work, watch television, exercise or drive a car except to travel to church. On Lewis there were protests when ferries introduced Sunday sailings in 2009.)
He tried to arouse the indignation of the other passengers, but there were few takers. His neighbour Taylor quoted the apostle Paul: ‘Whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience’ sake.’ The German himself only took a slow look of me and left me to discuss my argument alone.
McMillan felt angry and isolated aboard this ship of heathens. Were they not on a mission to improve an ungodly land? He shut himself in his cabin and refused the meat, turned his face from the world. The captain, a moderate man, tried to talk him down. He was older, made wise by experience. McMillan was quite right, of course, he assured him. He’d defy any one on board to say otherwise as I have the word of God on my side.
But the realities of life in a primitive colony might loosen McMillan’s chokehold upon right and wrong, the captain warned. He said if he met me 40 years hence I would be of a different opinion.
I knew where to find him. His words, at least. His journals – kept during three crucial phases of his life – are held in the State Library of Victoria, a neoclassical pile on the corner of Swanston and La Trobe.
I was there as soon as the doors opened, filed my complicated request forms and waited in the drab