The Ghost Camp

The pedestrians carried their blankets and a change of underclothing. That was the recognised fashion on the West Coast. If men didn’t start in the rain, they were certain to be wet through before long. Mr. Blount was pleased to admit that their day of commencement was fine; more grateful still to see Trial Bay the same night. Their condition was fairly good, the walking distinctly heavy. A few miles of sandy beach, then came the track through the bush proper.

Now commenced the stern realities of the expedition, necessary before Mr. Blount could have personal cognisance of his strangely acquired property. After some experience of the forests which lay between Bunjil and the “Lady Julia” claim, he had thought himself qualified to judge of “rough country.” To his astonishment, he found that all previous adventure had given him no conception of the picture of dread and awful desolation which the Tasmanian primeval wilderness presented. The gigantic, towering trees, (locally known as Huon River pines), the awful thickets, the rank growth of a jungle more difficult to pass through, than any he had known or realised, contributed an appalling carte du pays. The peculiarity of this last forest path was, that without a considerable amount of labour being expended upon it, it was impassable for horses, and not only difficult but dangerous for men. The “horizontal scrub,” locally so termed, was the admixture of immense altitudes of forest timber, with every kind of shrub, vine, and parasitic undergrowth. Stimulated by ceaseless rain it hid even the surface of the ground from the pedestrian’s view. For centuries, the unimpeded brush-wood beneath the gigantic forest trees, which, shooting upwards for hundreds of feet, combined by their topmost interlacing of branches to exclude the sunlight, had fallen rotted, and formed a superincumbent mass, through which the traveller, passing over a filled up gully, once falling through the upper platform, so to speak, might sink to unknown depths. From these indeed, a solitary wayfarer might find it difficult, if not impossible, to return.

“What a track!” exclaimed Blount, toilsomely wading through waist-high bracken, and coming to a halt beside a fallen forest giant, eight feet in diameter, and more than two hundred feet to the first branch. “It ought to be a prize worth winning that tempts men to penetrate such a howling wilderness. Hardly that indeed, for there’s an awful silence: hardly a bird or beast, if you notice, seems to make known its presence in the ordinary way.”

“I heard this region described by an old hand as exclusively occupied by shepherds, blacks, bushrangers, tigers and devils,” replied Tregonwell. “The blacks killed the shepherds, who in their turn harboured the bushrangers, when they didn’t betray them for the price set on their heads. The ‘tigers’ and ‘devils’ (carnivorous marsupials) killed the sheep and occasionally the sheep-dogs. They were the only other inhabitants of this quasi-infernal region.”

“Facilis descensus, then, is another quotation which in this land of contradictions has come to grief. I suppose we ought to try and cross this sapling which bars our path?”

“I will go first,” said Tregonwell, “and report from the other side,” and he prepared to climb the huge and slippery trunk.

The outward appearance of Mr. Blount had undergone a striking and material change, from the days of Bunjil, and even of the “Lady Julia” alluvial claim. A blue serge shirt, considerably torn, even tattered from encounters with brambles, had replaced the Norfolk jacket and tweed suit. His gaiters were mud-covered to the knees. His boots, extra-strong and double-soled, were soaked and wrenched out of shape. To add to his “reversal of form,” he carried on his back a heavy “swag,” in which under a pair of coarse blue blankets, all his worldly goods immediately indispensable were packed.

“This is something like ‘colonial experience,’” said he. With a slight twist of the shoulders, and a groan expressive of uneasiness, he shifted the weight of the burden. “I never carried a swag before, though now I come to think of it, our knapsacks of the old days on walking tours were much the same thing, though more aristocratically named. This confounded thing seems to get heavier every mile. There is a touch of John Bunyan about it also.”

The partners found Trial Bay in a worse muddle than Strahan. Tents had been pitched everywhere; men were working hard to get their own and other peoples’ loading away.

The small inn was in the usual independent state that obtains when there is too much custom. “They could sleep there, if they had luck,” said the landlord airily, but “he didn’t know as there was any beds vacant.” Accommodation for the travelling public was a secondary matter, in his estimation. The bar paying enormous profits, was filled to overflowing the whole day through – the night also. Here Tregonwell’s colonial and other experience stood him in good stead – an all-round “shout” or two, combined with an air of good fellowship, and judicious douceurs to the maid-servants, resulted finally in permission to sleep in No. 5 – which haven of rest, after a South African sort of meal, largely supported by “bully beef,” the tired partners bestowed themselves. After forcibly ejecting several volunteer bedfellows, they slept more or less soundly until daylight.

Certainly no fitter habitat could have been chosen for the desperate irreclaimable convicts, who alone were exiled there. The dense, gloomy, barren forests provided sustenance neither for man nor beast.

No birds – no animals – with one exception, the so-called “badger” (or wombat) which was snared, and eaten by the convicts. The endless rain, priceless in other lands, was valueless here, save to change the mood of the outcast from depression to despair.

The Gordon River pine is the most valuable of the enormous growth of timber in proximity to its banks; a beautiful, soft, red wood, not unlike the cedar of Australia. It can be split into excellent palings and will, fortunately, burn well, either in a wet or dry state. The dense undergrowth, closely intertwined with climbers, renders it impossible even for a man to get through, unless with an axe to clear his way before him. And the locally named “horizontal scrub” is a study in forestry.

It is possible to progress for a quarter of a mile at a stretch, without being nearer the ground than eighteen or twenty feet. This curious shrub, growing as it does at a considerable angle less than forty-five degrees, with its intertwined branches made the jungle all but impenetrable. A stage of fifteen miles was no child’s play therefore, and meant a hard day’s work for strong men, if unused to walking. Even slow walking on the Corduroy, demoralised by the heavy traffic, was exasperating. Many logs were missing altogether. This meant extra danger for the pack-horses and mules. These horses were wonderfully sure-footed and sagacious. Though carrying two hundred pounds (dead weight too) they were fully as clever at this novel species of wayfaring as the mules. The pack tracks were cleared just wide enough for the animals to travel in single file – and with the exception of a few places they could not get off them, as the forest timber, with dead wood and undergrowth, was impossible for any horse to get through, until a track was cut.

No deviations were possible; in a climate where the rainfall was ninety inches per annum, one could imagine into what a condition these tracks would get.

From time to time a pack horse would sink down behind, irretrievably bogged. In such a case he would wait patiently, knowing that struggling made matters worse, until the packer and his mate came to his assistance. They would lever him up with poles, and whenever they shouted, he would make his effort.

Sometimes they would unload, to give him a chance to extricate himself. Then the packs were put on again, and a general start made. Such men would probably have ten or twelve horses and mules walking loose – often with not even a bridle on.

The charge made was at the rate of threepence a pound – roughly twenty-five pounds a ton – from Strahan to the “field,” in those early days. The only variation from the dense forest was that of the “button grass” country. This was composed of open flats covered with a tufted plant, similar to the Xanthorrhea or grass tree – only wanting the elongated spear-like seed stalk. No animal eats the button grass; it is worthless for fodder alive or dead.

What sights on the road they saw! Men and boys, with an odd woman or two, struggling through the mud in the soaking, drizzling rain! Men wheeling barrows with their tools, swags and belongings generally. Men harnessed to small carts, tugging them along. Four Germans drew a small wheeled truck, which they had made themselves, and a staunch team they were. So practised had some of the early prospecting parties become that (Tregonwell said) they plied a paying trade of packing on their own backs to outside claims, where pack tracks for horses had not yet been cut. These men would carry from eighty to a hundred pounds, walking the journey of thirty miles in two days. The charge was a shilling a pound. They would walk back “empty” in one day. If it seemed high pay, it was hard work. Climbing hills of fifteen hundred feet and going down the other side with that crushing weight of bacon or flour taxed a man’s strength, condition and pluck. Tregonwell said you could always pick out the packers in a crowd after they had been a year or two at it. They invariably “stood over” at the knees, like old cab horses, from the strain of steadying themselves down hill with heavy weights up.

“Many a time, when the field first opened” (said Tregonwell), “have I walked beside one of these men the day through, carrying only my blankets and a change, not weighing more than fifteen pounds; my packer companion would carry his fifty to eighty pounds up the long hills with comparative ease, passing me, if I didn’t look out, pulling up, too, quite fresh at night, while I could scarcely stagger into camp; yet I could outdo, easily, any other amateur on the field.”

Some original inventions Blount noted outside of his gradually extending colonial experience. Each camp had a “fly” pitched permanently over the fire-place to keep the endless rain from putting it out. “Kindling” wood was kept under this fly, so that it was always in readiness. After the fire was well started, green or wet wood could be put on and would burn well.

Tregonwell, having once started, said that he soon got into form, improving in pace and condition daily. He expatiated on the keen enjoyment of the hot meal at the end of the day’s journey, rude as might be the appliances and primitive the cookery. The meal was chiefly composed of tinned meat, stewed or curried, with bacon added for flavour; and freshly-made damper, or “Johnny cakes,” to follow. The change of garments was to dry pyjamas, with a blanket wrapped round the wearer.

It was, he stated, a luxurious, half-tired, languorous but fully-satisfied feeling, the sensation of mind and body essential to the fullest enjoyment of tobacco. Then the yarns of the old prospectors, grizzled, sinewy, iron-nerved veterans! Where had they not been? California in ’49, Ballarat in ’51, pioneers of Lambing Flat, at the big rush, Omeo, Bendigo, New Zealand, West Coast, 25,000 men on the field in a week; those were the times to see life! Queensland, Charters Towers, Gympie, New Guinea, the Gulf, ah! “This Zeehan racket’s a bit of a spirt; but talk of mining! It’s dead now, dead, sir, and buried. Those were the days!” The dauntless pioneer fills another pipe and falls into a reverie of cheap-won gold, reckless revelry, wherein perils by land or sea, danger, ay, and death, would seem to have been inextricably mingled.

A strange race, the prospectors, sui generis. Hardly a spot on the globe was there which these men had not searched for the precious metals. Distance, climate, are nothing, less than nothing, in their calculations, once let the fact be established of a payable silver or gold “field.” Landing in Australia in the early fifties, they had worked on every field before mentioned, and are still ready to join the rush for any country under heaven should gold happen to “break out.” Klondyke, Argentina, South Africa, all equally eligible once the ancient lure is held out. They often put together a few thousand pounds in the early days of a rich goldfield, their wide experience and boundless energy making some measure of success certain. They may not drink, but all live luxuriously, even extravagantly, while the money lasts, possibly for a few years, then go back to their roving, laborious life. They generally make enough on each field to carry them to the ends of the earth, if necessary, and it is mostly so from their point of view. When funds are low, they can, and do, live cheaply; will work hard and do long journeys on the scantiest fare. Natural bushmen, often Australian-born; from this type of man, above all others, a regiment might be formed of “Guides” or “Scouts,” ready to fight stubbornly in any war of the future; would hunt, harry, and run to earth De Wet, or other slippery Boer, if given the contract and a “free hand.”

Harking back to his experiences – “That wild West Coast,” continued Tregonwell, “was a place to remember – the wooded ranges piled one upon another, as far as eye could reach, in shape, height, timber, or colouring hardly differing in any essential particular; yet the noted prospectors never lost themselves. Stopping for weeks at a likely ‘show,’ as long as the bacon and flour held out, they avoided all settlements or mining centres on the way. The first prospector, George Bell, carried a lump of galena of forty pounds’ weight in his swag right through from Zeehan to Mount Bischoff. For a distance of fifty miles he went straight between the two points without a road or track being cut for him.”

When the partners arrived at Zeehan, it certainly appeared to Mr. Blount a place of peculiar and unusual characteristics. The excitement was naturally great; stores, hotels, dwellings, lodging-houses going up in all directions. Timber was plentiful to excess, luckily such as split into slabs and palings easily.

Tents were beginning to be voted hardly equal to so vigorous a climate. No one, however, stayed under cover for that reason. They were wet all day and every day, but the rule was to change into dry things at night. No harm, strange to say, came to anybody. There was less sickness, certainly less typhoid, on that field than any since reported.

Less, certainly, than at Broken Hill and the West Australian Goldfields. The hotels, quickly run up, were rough both in appearance and management. About fifty men slept in the billiard room for the first few nights. Then, as their importance as “capitalists” began to be recognised, beds were allotted. Over these they had to mount guard for an hour or more before bedtime, as a rule, or else to “chuck out” the intruder. Here the personal equation came in. The landlord had no time to support the legal rights of his guests. He merely went so far as to allot each man a bed. He had to keep it and pay for it.

The term “capitalist” on a mining field is understood to apply to people with money of their own, or substantial backers who are prepared to pay down the deposit on mines, sufficiently developed or rich enough to “float”; worth securing the “option” of purchase for a month, so as to give time to raise the necessary funds.

The Tregonwell party had secured the “fancy show” of the field (i. e., the next richest in reputation to the Comstock) by promptness in agreeing to all the owner’s conditions, as he named them, thus giving him no chance to change his mind. Other offers had been made from Hobart and elsewhere. However, they paid a liberal deposit, and, after thoroughly sampling and examining the ore body, agreed to float the mine in a fortnight. Very short terms! Also to place £10,000 to its credit as a working capital, and to give the owner £5,000 cash as well as a certain number of shares.

They knew the market, however, and their business. Tregonwell walked to Strahan in a day and a half, being then in high condition, and got off to Hobart by steamer that night. Had the transfers signed and registered in the Mines Department in his name, subject to the conditions being fulfilled. Wired to their Melbourne brokers, and in twenty-four hours the shares were applied for three times over, and the stock quoted at a premium. It seems easy, but such is not always the case. The boom must be on. The buyers must be well known to the public as having the necessary experience, and being reliable on a cash basis.

A shout from a tall, well-dressed man – comparatively, we may say – greets them at the long-desired camp. He comes forward and shakes hands with Tregonwell, more heartily than even the occasion demands, it would seem.

“By Jove! old fellow. I am so glad to see you. Would have sent a line to Hobart to hurry you up, if I could have found a man to take it. But most of the fellows have gone to Marble Creek, so we’re a small community. But we’re forgetting our manners. Introduce me.”

“Mr. Valentine Blount, permit me to present Mr. Charles Herbert, one of our partners. You mustn’t swear at the place, the roads, the climate, the people, or anything belonging to Tasmania, as it’s his native land, to which he is deeply attached. In all other respects he may be treated as an Englishman.”

“He certainly looks like one,” said Blount, glancing over the fine figure and regular features of the tall, handsome Tasmanian. “If the other gentleman who makes up the syndicate is a match for him, we should be an efficient quartette.”

“Clarke is a light-weight,” said Tregonwell, “but as wiry as a dingo, besides being the eminent mining expert of the party (of course, when I’m away); but he’s perhaps more up to date, as when he went to California he learned the latest wrinkles in silver-mining. He’s rather an invalid at present, having jarred his right hand with a pick, and sprained his left ankle in taking a walk through this ‘merry greenwood,’ as old writers called the forest.”

“I thought I had seen some rough country in New South Wales,” said Blount, “but this tops anything I have ever seen or indeed heard of, except an African jungle.”

“Climate not quite so bad, no fever yet,” replied Herbert, “but can’t say much for the Queen’s Highway. However, the silver’s all right, and where that’s the case, anything else follows in good time. But, come inside – no horses to want feeding, luckily, as the oats which came in advance, cost a guinea a bucket.”

So saying, he led the way to a small but not uncomfortable hut, at one side of which a fire of logs was blazing in a huge stone chimney. The walls of this rude dwelling were composed of the trunk of the black fern tree, placed vertically in the ground, the interstices being filled up with a compost of mud and twigs, which formed a wind and waterproof wall, while it lasted. On one of the rude couches lay a man, who excused himself from rising on the score of a sprained ankle.

“It’s so confoundedly painful,” he said, “that even standing gives me fits. Of all the infernal, brutal, God-forsaken holes, that ever a man’s evil genius lured him into, this is the worst and most villanous. In California, the Tasmanians and Cornstalks were looked on as criminals and occasionally lynched as such, but you could walk out in daylight and were not made a pack-horse of. If I were this gentleman, whom I see Tregonwell has enticed here under false pretences, I should hire a Chinaman to carry me back to Strahan, and bring an action against him as soon as I reached Hobart.”

“I’m afraid he’s delirious, Mr. Blount,” said Herbert, soothingly, “and as he’s lost a leg and an arm, so to speak, we can’t hammer him at present, but he’s not a bad chap, when he’s clothed and in his right mind. In the meantime, as a fellow-countryman, I apologise for him.”

“Don’t believe a word these monomaniacs tell you, Mr. Blount,” said the sufferer, trying to raise himself on one arm, and subsiding with a groan. “Herbert’s an absurd optimist, and Tregonwell – well, we know what Cousin Jacks are. However, after supper, I daresay I shall feel better. Do you happen to have a late paper about you?”

“Several,” said Blount, “which I hadn’t time to read before we left, including a Weekly Times.”

“In that case,” said the pessimist, “I retract much of what I have said. I have read everything they have here, and thought I was stranded in the wilderness without food, raiment, or pabulum mentis. Now I descry a gleam of hope.”

“I brought a packet of wax candles,” observed Blount. “Thought they might be useful.”

“Useful!” cried the invalid, “you have saved my life, they are invaluable. Fancy having to read by a slush lamp! Mr. Blount, we are sworn brothers from this hour.”

“For Heaven’s sake let us have supper,” interposed Tregonwell. “Is the whisky jar empty? I feel as if a nip would not be out of place, where two tired, hungry, muddy travellers are concerned.”

“Not quite so bad as that,” replied Herbert, who had been spreading tin plates and pannikins over the rude table on trestles, with corned beef in a dish of the same material, and baker’s bread for a wonder. A modicum of whisky from the jar referred to was administered to each one of the company, prior to the announcement of supper.

When the primitive meal had been discussed with relish, Mr. Jack Clarke considered himself sufficiently restored to sit up against the wall of the hut, and begin at Mr. Blount’s newspapers with the aid of one of that gentleman’s wax candles in a bottle, by way of candlestick. The others preferred to sit round the fire on three-legged stools provided for such purpose, and smoke, carrying on cheerful conversation the while.

The discovery of the Comstock as a deeply interesting subject, commended itself to Mr. Blount; so Tregonwell persuaded Herbert, who was the pioneer, to sketch the genesis of this famous property, destined to exercise so important an influence on their future lives.

“Come, Charlie,” said he, “you’re the real prospector, Clarke wouldn’t have gone into it but for you, and I shouldn’t have taken a share but for Blount, who knew nothing about mines, having just come from England. I wanted to chuck it, but Blount, who is obstinate (not a bad virtue, in its way), determined, for that very reason, to stick to it.

“So he paid his share of the expenses, went away, met all kinds of adventures and all sorts and conditions of men – with, of course, a girl or two, not wholly unattractive, and forgot all about it. I kept an eye on it, so did Charlie; complied with the labour condition, kept up the pegs, according to the Act, did a little work now and then. And now, Charlie! it’s your turn.”

Mr. Herbert put down his pipe carefully and began the wondrous tale. “You know I was always fond of mooning about – wallaby-shooting, fishing, and collecting birds and plants in mountain country. We had a sheep station on the edge of this horizontal scrub country in old times; and I used, when I had leave, to get away and spend a week or two of my Christmas holiday there. One of the shepherds was a great pal of mine. Like many of the prisoners of the Crown in old days, he had been transported wrongfully, or for very slight offences (as much to get rid of Britain’s surplus population as for any other reason it really would seem). He was fairly educated, and was a very decent, well-behaved old chap, with a taste for geology and minerals.

“When his sheep were camped in the middle of the day I would find out his flock, and we would boil the billy and have lunch, with ever so much talk.

“‘Look here, Master Charles!’ he said one day, as he took out a dull, grey-looking stone from his ‘dilly bag,’ ‘do ye know what that is?’ I did not, and like most youngsters of my age, looked upon it as rubbish, and showed that I would rather have had a shot at one of the ‘tigers’ or ‘devils’ that came every now and then and killed the sheep at the stations than all the silver ore in the country.

“‘It’s silver ore,’ said he in a solemn voice; ‘and there’s enough where that came from to buy all your father’s stations ten times over, if I could only find my way back to the place where I found it.’

“‘And why can’t you?’ said I; ‘you know all the country round here.’

“The old man looked very sad, and pointed out towards the Frenchman’s Cap, which was just being covered with mist, while a heavy shower began to fall, and a thunderstorm roared and echoed among the rocks and caves of the ‘Tiers,’ at the foot of which we managed to get shelter.