All those terrible days of storm and fear the Maria's hands had nothing to eat but hard biscuits soaked with salt water. There was no place to cook and no means of cooking, for the galley with all its contents had been washed overboard. While the crew laboured at the pumps, the captain tried to cheer them up and put a little life into their weary bodies and despairing hearts by playing lively airs on his concertina and singing sailors' chanteys.
"One day," says Bent, "a German brig hove in sight and spoke us. Seeing our signal of distress she asked the name of our barque and the number of the crew. We signalled our reply, and she answered that she could not help us, there was too much sea. Then she squared away and left us. All this time we were labouring at the pumps to keep the old barque afloat. Next day another brig, a Boston vessel deep-loaded, from the West Indies, hailed us and stood by, signalling to us to launch our boats. This we did, after hard and dangerous work, and managed to reach the brig's side, where all the sixteen of us were hauled on board safely. About two hours after we left our ship we saw her go down."
To Bent's intense disappointment he found that the brig that had rescued him was bound for the wrong side of the Atlantic. She landed the shipwrecked mariners at Glasgow. Bent was walking about the streets one day, wondering however he was going to get a passage home, for he had no money, when he was arrested as a deserter—recognised by the description which had been posted in every barrack-room and every police-station. He was taken to the military barracks, and then sent under guard to Ireland and down to Cork, where he was tried by court-martial, and sentenced to eighty-four days in prison. When he had served his term he was shipped off to India with his regiment, landing at Bombay, and for some time did garrison duty at Poona.
The 57th spent two years in India, only just recovering from the terrible throes of the Mutiny. Then news came of a serious war with a wild native race in a distant country called New Zealand, far away down in the Southern Ocean, and the regiment was ordered to hold itself in readiness to go route-marching to Bombay, thence to sea. Marching orders soon followed, and the headquarters of the regiment sailed for Auckland; the company in which Bent was a private (No. 8 Company) was one of those left behind to look after the women and children of the regiment. Orders for them also quickly came, and they took the road for Bombay.
The journey from Poona to Bombay took four days, or rather nights, for all the marching was done by night. Part of the way was through a dense jungle in which man-eating tigers swarmed. The troops marched through this jungle by torchlight, winding along a narrow track through the densely-matted vegetation. The growling of the tigers was heard all round at night, but the blazing torches kept them away.
Embarked in a troopship at Bombay, Bent and his fellow-soldiers sailed not unwillingly for a land spoken of by report as a country which, though wild and new, was a pleasanter place to live in than scorching sun-baked India.
After a voyage of eighty-nine days, the troopship anchored in Auckland Harbour, and her soldiers spent their first week on New Zealand soil in the old Albert Barracks, where the bright flower-gardens and tree-groves of a beautiful park now crown the hill that in those troubled days was girt with a massive crenellated wall, and was alive with all the martial turmoil of campaigning-time. Then the new arrivals were sent down to Taranaki by sea to join the headquarters of the 57th, and went into new barrack life on Marsland Hill, New Plymouth.
Kimble Bent's longing for a free independent life became stronger than ever in this new country. He would gladly have exchanged camp-life for even the perilous occupation of a frontier settler, so that he were free. The parade ground was a purgatory, and the restraint of discipline and the ramrod-and-pipeclay system of soldiering were irksome beyond words. He was sick to death of being ordered about by sergeants and corporals. Fighting would have been a relief, but there was none yet. He endeavoured to get his discharge from the regiment, but without success; and his impatience of discipline led him into various more or less serious conflicts with the regimental authorities.
So opened Kimble Bent's life in the new land, the land in which he was to roam the forests an outlaw for more than a decade.