decided. Had he delivered the speech he could still detect in his breeches pocket, he could have made a fool of himself. And he couldn’t do that, he recalled. There wouldn’t be another chance after this. Sir Joseph had made that clear enough.
‘I’ll take that drink, sir,’ he accepted, wanting to rebuild bridges.
He sipped the rum, grimacing at its harshness.
‘And it seems, Governor King, that I owe you an apology. And thanks. I did not intend to be rude to you … unfortunately I am a naturally impatient man.’
The Governor nodded, looking at the rotund figure moving about the room before him. So this was the legendary Bounty Bligh, he thought. After so many setbacks, he would not have expected the man to have been so arrogant.
‘To defeat them,’ he advised, recognising the change in Bligh’s attitude, ‘you will have to bend with the wind until you discover their weaknesses. Men like John Macarthur have more power in this colony than King George himself.’
Bligh looked up sharply. That was treason, he thought. Governor King was either a very honest man, or very stupid.
‘I have been warned,’ said Bligh. ‘Particularly of Macarthur. My very good friend Sir Joseph Banks, a man of great influence in England, has been deeply distressed by the rudeness shown to him by Macarthur over the matter of sheep importation into this colony.’
King refilled his glass, looking curiously as he did so at the newcomer. Bligh intended to settle his patron’s grievance, as well as reforming practices carefully built up for a decade, he realised, uneasily.
There had for several months been rumours circulating in the colony about the new Governor, he recalled. They had appeared so informed yet at the same time so malicious that King had even considered them part of a campaign against the new man; some had even gone so far as to suggest they were the work of families damned by Bligh after the mutiny. He could find little exaggeration in what he’d heard, reflected the Governor.
‘You’re just one man against a well-ordered, well-organised society of corruption,’ cautioned King. ‘You’ll only succeed by cunning.’
‘Why haven’t you adopted your own advice?’ asked Bligh.
King smiled at the rudeness. A Governor’s sash would sit uncomfortably about the shoulders of this irritable man of the quarter-deck, he thought.
‘Because I arrived here with preconceived ideas,’ rebutted King. ‘And had no one to advise me against a course in which I faced unavoidable defeat.’
An honest man, thought Bligh. Weak and ineffectual. But honest.
‘What would your guidance be?’ he asked. He had meant the question to have the proper humility, but it had sounded condescending, he realised. So what? The man was an admitted failure and people who accepted defeat deserved contempt, thought Bligh. No matter what disaster had befallen him, he had never capitulated, recalled Bligh, warmly. Most men, ostracised like he had been in London, would have been beaten; closed up their London houses, even, and avoided the humiliation. Not William Bligh. Elizabeth had been in tears, sometimes, almost dragged from the house to appear at the theatre and the few supper parties to which they were still admitted, more often as objects of sniggering amusement than desired guests. But he’d seen them all away. Now he was Governor-General of a British colony and Elizabeth was on every guest list again, according to the letters he’d received when they’d docked at Cape Town on the outward voyage.
‘Don’t see them all at the same time,’ guided King. ‘They’re a close-knit, suspicious group of men. Receive them separately and play a cautious game, hinting that the others have been indiscreet.’
Tea-party diplomacy, dismissed Bligh, like those scented courtiers he’d seen around the Prince Regent, feigning insult and flicking each other with their pastel-shaded gloves for imagined revenge. The men he’d watched on the dockside that morning, soaked in their own piss, were scum and he knew how to deal with scum. And it wasn’t done to the background music of the harpsichord.
‘I’m obliged for your suggestion,’ he said, sharply, bored with the conversation.
King looked at the man, caught by the tone in his voice. A fool, he thought. A pig-headed fool. It was little wonder that men found such difficulty in serving under him. But he’d tried, the Governor contented himself. And it was time to move on to other things.
‘There is something else that would help you in your dealings with these people,’ he coaxed.
Bligh waited.
‘You will be treated with more respect if you are a landowner here. Accordingly I’ve