At this time of the morning, and mid-week, the place was hardly busy and Vincent drifted slowly over to what he had come to regard as “his” space. He placed his notebooks and pens and pencils on the desk and went off to gather the books. A young librarian recognised him as a regular, said good morning and asked if he needed any help.
“Only if I can’t find what I’m looking for,” he said softly, and smiled.
Within an hour the desk was covered with books and printout from the digitised material he had referenced. He stopped, surveyed the mess, scratched his scalp and set about sorting what he collected so far into some sort of order.
What remained of Henry Vincent’s hair was still mousy brown. He’d started losing his hair when he turned forty and his friends had always said that it was because he thought too much. If he was given a job at work, he had always gone into it in depth, researching the background, defining the terms, finding the national and international references, scouring the journals. And what he produced, though lengthy at times, was readable, thorough, accurate and, generally, worthy of publication in its own right. But it always took a long time to finalise and, eventually, it was that that killed it for him.
A program was initiated that provided for a number of public servants to be offered redundancy packages. It was designed to provide federal government departments with the opportunity to free themselves of their "dead wood." They could identify those people who were not contributing, who were unable to adjust to the new-look public service that was evolving, who were being left behind by the new technology, the move to greater commercialism and the emerging entrepreneurialism. And Henry Vincent was seen as dead wood. He'd been called in by his Director and offered the package and he'd gone away and thought about it. He'd gone through all the options, the prospects for investment and his needs for the future - thoroughly, in his usual way. Surprisingly it hadn't taken long and he'd accepted. They'd agreed on a completion date, there'd been a couple of farewell functions from friends in the office. And he'd gone.
It was like manna from heaven, he'd thought afterwards.
As a lad he’d always been fascinated with the explorers who sailed into adventures in ships of all shapes and sizes - looking for new worlds, plying their trade across numerous seas and oceans, the tea carriers, holds full of silks and exotic spices. He built scale models of the more famous ones and got together a small library of books. He could tell the difference between a barque and a barquentine, between a brig and a brigantine. Knew a carrack could have three or four masts and were used by the Portuguese and Spanish to discover new worlds. Read tales of the clippers who plied the trade routes between England and the Far East, like the Ariel that had won the unofficial Great Tea Race of 1866, from China to London. Knew where the wrecks were.
So now he no longer had an excuse of lack of time or sufficient funds to indulge his hobby. He’d been brave enough, in his terms, to write a detailed essay covering two ships that had once brought convicts to Australia. Good enough to publish, he thought – but he’d never tried.
He did some family tree research for a friend and the thoroughness of the end product was enough for the friend to refer someone for another job. A thank you payment of three bottles of 15-year-old single malt whisky had been happily received for the job.
And then – eighteen months ago - he’d inherited a library full of books from an old aunt and he’d set about going through them. He was expecting the books to be about Victoria, but, surprisingly, most of them were about Tasmania and he’d discovered this was because his aunt had relatives there, and that some of her lineage could be traced back to the first years when Van Diemen’s Land was set-up as a penal colony. There was a link to one of the vessels that had been in his essay and the role it had taken in transferring convicts from Sydney to Hobart.
Someone had started some kind of family tree and there were a dozen pages containing semi-decipherable notes about explorers, convicts, timber and gold. And cannibals.
The diary – or diaries to be more precise – covered a number of years. They were not in good condition. The pages were dog-eared, browning around the edges, flimsy and brittle. Loose pages were interleaved between those still attached to the spine, but these were often torn, with pieces missing. There was no way of knowing whether the pages belonged to the volume in which they were inserted. Some pages were dated, others not. Once sorted, he discovered the eleven volumes were not sequential and that one gap covered a period of five years.
Where were the other volumes?
How had the captain arrived at Macquarie Harbour?
What had happened to the captain in the intervening – the lost – periods?
It had piqued his interest immediately.
The pages from the old diary had been kept by a man called Abbotsley. The man had been a lieutenant and then a captain in Tasmania during the time the island had been used as a penal colony. One of the most notorious convict outposts in Tasmania had been on Sarah Island, a small uninviting piece of rock in the extreme south of Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania – and Abbotsley had been posted there.
His initial research had been quite good – confirming Abbotsley’s existence and tracking down the names of some sailing vessels of the time. He’d looked further into the scrawled notes and there was a wealth of information about the time. It was like a time capsule – a treasure trove of its own.
On his desk were notes from the Royal Society of Tasmania confirming James Kelly’s discovery of Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s desolate west coast, although, as was not unusual delving back into history, the dates varied a bit. Discovery was not important, but it gave substance and perspective to the research. The Harbour was accessed by a narrow inlet, some 70 metres wide, a site of swirling tides, later called “Hells Gates”. The Harbour itself was twice the size of Sydney Harbour and home to the Huon Pine.
Henry Vincent knew of Sarah Island from his interest in ships. The Huon Pine was part of the reason the convict settlement was there. To harvest the logs and bring them to the Sarah Island shipyards to build ships. The Huon part was ideal for shipbuilding – dense and of excellent nail-holding quality, and particularly resistant to wood rot. In its time the shipyard at Sarah Island was the biggest in Australia, producing over 100 vessels during its life. Barques, brigs, schooners and a variety of smaller boats. David Hoy was the Master Shipwright at Sarah Island and under his influence the shipyards were highly productive.
Into this environment came the author of the diaries – Lieutenant Abbotsley. Henry Vincent needed to confirm, or otherwise, some issues associated with Abbotsley and his return from Sarah Island. First there was the ship called The Mistress of Dunrobin that had been mentioned in Abbotsley's diary. Vincent had confirmed that this was a convict ship, and there were records that confirmed its date of departure from London and arrival in Hobart. There was a complete list of the convicts and non-convict passengers. A list of those lost at sea and the appearance of a woman called Sarah Grey, who was mentioned in Abbotsley’s diaries.
And with each little piece of information, Vincent made an entry onto a large sheet that connected almost all the pieces with each other, through a maze of interconnecting lines and arrows and broken lines. Vincent now had, spread out on the desk before him, a number of books about Tasmania. There was Binks' book, Explorers of Western Tasmania, a book entitled The Geology and Landscape of Tasmania, and Lloyd Robson's authoritative History of Tasmania.
And, there was the family tree – not a prodigious tree, but he was working forwards from Abbotsley and backwards from his aunt. The branches and the roots were melding.
In the top left-hand corner of the large sheet were two names. The first was Harry Abbotsley, born 1800 in Bath, England and died in June 1880, in Tasmania. The second name was that of Sarah Grey. Vincent had written her year of birth