I remain yours with firm affection,

Solomon Wiseman

I found myself feeling sorry for him: the grovelling tone to his brother-in-law, the straining after the grand phrase, the elaborate strings of sentences! The way he betrayed himself at every turn—the words not quite right, the sentences trailing along with no grammar to hold them together, the innocent vulgarity (what gentleman would admit that he ‘victualled the convicts by contract’?).

And what did he really think about Sophia? ‘Sound sense, mild temper and accomplishments’ sounded cold-blooded, as if he might have wanted nothing more than a housekeeper and child-minder. But was there the flicker of another kind of feeling, more heartfelt, in ‘I feel it to be the happiest moment of my life’? And what about his appreciation of Sophia being ‘capable of having an opinion of her own’? What sort of relationship did that suggest? What sort of man?

The letter might have been what every ‘family historian’ longs for, to understand their ancestor. But it was also a mass of possibles, maybes, perhapses, as every other document had been.

Whatever the words meant, though, they were his. In two hundred years, the email I wrote yesterday might be hard to interpret too. Human beings were slipperier than the ones I was familiar with on the page: the creatures of fiction. This was the muddle of real life.

11
Voices and Pictures

In 1838, at the age of sixty, Wiseman died. The obituary that Mum had mentioned was indeed flowery, describing him as ‘a very old Colonist, much respected by all the old hands of the Colony as a warm-hearted industrious man’.

Now that I’d read the letter to his brother-in-law, I went back through some of the business correspondence, and found that there, too, I could sometimes hear his tone of voice. This letter was written in 1828:

I am at present awkwardly situated, my stable is left in an unfinished state—the carpenter whom I employed has decamped and like all the other scoundrels of his description who leave their employers when they get in their debt, so did he after getting in mine—he is a free man therefore I shall take out a warrant for his apprehension if I can possibly trace him out. As I am suffering a serious inconvenience by the fellow leaving my stable unfinished, I humbly beg leave to intrude on your kind intercession that I may be allowed a carpenter for the space of three months from Government.

Whatever else he was, Wiseman was no shrinking violet. I was struck by how often he was in the position of defending himself against various kinds of accusations: of defrauding the government, bribing officials, supplying rotten food to the convicts on the road-gangs, of not looking after his assigned servants properly. He always had an answer:

I never received a fortnight’s service from that man he was always sick and when sent back from the hospital he told me he was then not able to work and I immediately returned him to Government so I consider Sir the slops I gave him were more than his due…no servants in the colony are better fed and clothed than mine and they are the only men in the neighbourhood that attend divine service with a clean and decent appearance.