The Mayne Inheritance Read Online Free

low. The crop, mostly potatoes, constituted the family food. Milk or butter were luxuries rarely seen. Any small grain crop, or perhaps a cow or pig, often had to be sold to pay rent or tithes, which were exacted regularly.
    One of life’s few consolations was the marriage bed. The little shacks were filled with undernourished children: more mouths to feed and no hope of future work for most of them. Isaac Mayne and his wife Rose, née Mullen, were caught in this subsistence trap at Cookstown. They produced at least five living children: Patrick (b.1824), James (date of birth unknown), Annie (born 1829), Rosa (date of birth unknown), and Eliza (date of birth unknown). Both parents were dead before Patrick turned seventeen; with minimal education he had been labouring wherever he could find work. Ireland’s poor were abused by the system, and either directly or indirectly, so were the children. This is reflected in colonial records showing the highincidence of crime and difficulties with authority among the nineteenth-century Irish who were sent, or fled to the colonies. During the first forty poverty-stricken years of the nineteenth century, Ireland’s population had doubled to 8,200,000; by 1840 people were being encouraged to migrate to reduce the large numbers of uneconomic land holdings. For those who made the decision to leave, the choice was usually to sail for Canada or America, but by the time the impatient Patrick decided he was old enough to go, Australia, too, was calling for artisans and labourers.
    To meet that need, Sydney entrepreneurs were quickly active with Bounty ships. They contracted to bring to Port Jackson strong, healthy young workers for whom they were paid a bounty of £19 a head. The Bounty rules encouraged strict screening for selected migrants. It was cash on delivery and since the promoters were not paid for any who died en route or proved to be puny, diseased, or otherwise unfit for work, they tried to ensure a reasonable standard of existence during the voyage. There was a set food ration, physical exercises, school classes and dancing. To protect their valuable cargo from disease and avoid the expense of being quarantined on arrival, the ships did not call at any ports en route. With luck and good management it was quite a lucrative trade. A Sydney partnership, John Gilchrist and John Alexander, was agent for several Bounty ships, one of which was the Percy. When it sailed from Greenock on 21 May 1841, on board was the seventeen-year-old farm labourer, Patrick Mayne.
    Young Mayne was tall, strong, and darkly handsome.He had the makings of a big man, and a temper as quick as his ready wit. He was also ambitious and possessed the drive and single-mindedness to realise that ambition. There was little patience in Patrick.
    To leave behind the deprivation of his childhood he advanced his age to an eligible eighteen, left his four sibling orphans to whatever care was available, and set out to find a better life for himself in Australia. His entitlement certificate suggests that as a labourer in poverty-stricken County Tyrone, he had found sufficient work and food to keep him physically strong. It declared that his state of bodily health, strength, and probable usefulness made him suitable for any work. He had no physical complaints, could read and write and had been baptised into the Catholic faith by his parish priest, William Conville.
    On 28 August 1841, after one hundred days of endless heaving ocean with rarely a sea-bird to vary the scene, there was a sudden calm as they passed through towering cliffs to the sanctuary of the harbour. The late winter sun sparkling on Port Jackson, with its backdrop of sombre grey-green scrub, so different from the vivid green of home, must have stirred mixed emotions in the 282 passengers on board. Welcome as dry land and the sight of settlement were, the future was still disturbingly unknown. Conflicting tension, excitement, and gut-wrenching