We were moving slowly, nosing in and out of tiny coves ringed by the domed boulders. Silver in the daylight, soft pink and gold in the dawn and the dusk, they were our constant companions. The oldest and highest of them were dusted in orange, a mysterious coating that spread over them and looked, up close, like old paint. Beyond the seaside boulders, every island grew the same: hills forested in the dry-stick trunks of she-oaks, khaki needles with yellow tips that whistled softly in the breeze.

Most of the bays were empty. Birds, an occasional seal, washed-up remnants of boats older and smaller than the one we sought. One bay, on the north coast of Clarke Island, contained a hut. A sealer named Briggs lived there with his wife and a gaggle of small naked children. Her name—I wrote it down to see more clearly the architecture of the words—was Woretermoteryenna. Woreter. Moter. Yenna.

We’d found Briggs covered from head to foot with blood: a nightmare vision that smiled and waved to us as he reclined on a sunlit boulder. He was watching his wife, further away, stalking a seal. What kind of maniac had we chanced upon? I was learning to look to Argyle when something disturbed me, and the wiry little figure on the rock did not perturb him.

Briggs, it turned out, was a reserved sort of man who’d chosen a life at the margins of the world. He did not invite us into his hut, and I sensed no other motive than that he did not want to open his home to strangers. He stepped down from the boulder to the flats that the retreating tide had made, and there he scoured a small pool in the gravelly sand with his foot and proceeded to wash the blood out of his hair and off his face and his hands. He had been flinching seals, he explained, ‘bein work what’s fit only for the worst of the lags’.

Only when he had completed this strange ablution would he shake our hands, but the smell of the gore lifted from him in the warm sun, the blooms of still blood drying on his shirt.

Briggs wanted to talk about his boy, as parents do, I suppose. The lad was thin, strong-looking, half-assembled on the edge of adulthood. He was named Dalrymple, after the river town in northern Van Diemen’s Land. Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs, his father said proudly, baptised in Launceston and therefore: ‘Bit Van Diemen’s, bit Christian, lil bit Irish, eh.’

The morning was quiet, just the breeze through the she-oaks in my ears. We watched Briggs’s wife approach the unknowing seal. She lay flat, clawed at the rocks to gain purchase and inched forward. Maybe it heard her. Maybe it was scent. It lifted its great head and studied the air with a wrinkled snout. Then it scratched itself and lay back down.