We rowed the short distance to shore and I felt the familiar crunch of the gravelly white sand under my feet. The ground steadied itself by tiny adjustments. As I guided my father out of the boat and onto the beach, I wondered how many more times he and I would perform this ritual. The familiar smell of him as I was close and lifting, sour and old. Filled with knowledge, if still unwise. It was an instinct he himself had honed over the years of his blindness, the ability to read stories into smells.

The men on the shore were sealers: scruffy, strong, affably drunk.

‘Good time to come in,’ one of them said under his beard. ‘Smith’s daughter’s playin the piano.’

None of them thought to ask what we were doing there. None of them inquired after our welfare, or how many of us there were, whether the rest of us were armed or just the native woman who glared at them without speaking. A pack of ribby dogs wove around each other on the dry-kelp sand, eyeing us.

We were each offered a drink from a short cask. Then there was some explanation I half-followed about the rum coming in as payment for skins, twelve hides to the gallon. The man who mentioned the piano and the girl spoke up again, nodding towards the cask that Gideon was carrying.

‘Ye goin to share that around?’

Gideon looked down at the cask and laughed a little. ‘I think this stuff would rather change your evening, sir.’ He did not explain further. The man wasn’t deterred.

‘Ye got pipe baccy?’

Again, we had nothing to offer. My father, of course, had accepted their offer of rum and was already tipping a glass of pungent spirit.

At the top of the beach, and before the sand gave way to thick grasses and boulders, two men stood waiting. We were introduced formally by the men who had brought us up. The first of the pair was a Scotsman; his name was John Smith. Hard-faced and somewhere in his forties, I guessed, his hair and whiskers were a fair kind of brown and his manner was authoritative.

‘First man to make a home on Gun Carriage,’ one of the men said proudly of Smith. ‘Ten year ago.’

John Smith, I laughed to myself. What other name would a man use if he’d run away to an island?

The drinkers who introduced us had wandered off, taking with them an invalid who plodded along with the assistance of two canes. Smith led us into a narrow pass between the great boulders, the lantern’s light glittering off the feldspars and throwing crazy shadows against the rocks beside us. The granite formed a low wall and a gully that was out of the breeze. And in that small space was a sight that defied belief.