Peacock had an easy intimacy about her and an endearing habit of placing her hands on mine when she wanted to emphasise something. She told me the islanders lived by hunting kangaroo, which they did all year round, and by birding and sealing, which had their particular seasons. Gun Carriage was the heart of the islands, she said, the place where most of the men had settled, and from where they did their trade. They knew Munro and respected him, but he was an outpost to them, retired to his chosen patch of rock at Preservation. He was the necessary avenue for their product, nothing more.

I tried to imagine these people as wreckers. As they spoke to me, as they listened to me, I tried to picture them setting false lights, murdering survivors, stealing cargo. The evidence—the cargo—was there before me, but nothing about Peacock’s wonderful brown eyes suggested she would condone such barbarity.

As the tyereelore spoke to me, I found myself looking at the hands that held their drinks and, occasionally, hunks of bread or butchered meat. They were often large, but always scarred and knotted. Their nails were chipped and broken and bruised. The skin peeled away in painful-looking curls from the sides of the nails, and bled where the runs ended. My hands were similarly pitted, but only because a lifetime indoors had rendered them defenceless against the elements. Theirs, I could see, were permanently battered.

They did much of the sealing work, they said. They did the flinching, the flensing of blubber. If there were tasks that required swimming, like retrieving a mooring, they did those too. ‘We look out for each other darlin,’ said one old woman.

Tarenorerer blended in among the tyereelore, laughing raucously. She had shed the fearsome exterior we’d seen. She was one of them in this place: a Van Diemonian, in their speech palawa, but I could imagine that she was separate too: she had not relinquished her native life, and I had the strong feeling she would sooner shoot one of these men than marry one. She had taken our vessel with a gun in her hands, but it no longer mattered: she had what she wanted, apparently, for the time being.

I was watching her thus when Peacock came and sat beside me again. ‘That there’s a rare one,’ she said, as we both watched Tarenorerer. ‘You wondering what you got, hey?’

I admitted that I was, without making the obvious point that it was she who had got us.

‘She been taken, all the time. No matter how much she fights, always taken again. Black people took her, Port Sorell mob, back when she was a little girl. An they sold her to the sealers—Hunter Island men over west, Bird Island over here. Catching seals, catching mutton birds…wasn’t like now—this was back in the wild days. Made her a slave, made her work, lie down with them at night. She didn’t just take it, but. She waited. She waited and she watched. Learned wadjella language, how to fire them guns. All that anger, buildin up in there. Make her heart go dark as night, right enough.