I had seen natives chained and I had seen them whipped, for you couldn’t live in Sydney and not see such sights, and here I saw the same dead eyes. The people on the deck were more or less free: no fetters of any kind upon them, and the men watching them were unarmed, but the manner of their assembly was so staged that it could only be occurring against their will. The smallest of the children clung to their parents; the older ones stared sullenly into their laps and mouthed the words they had been coached to sing. The adults slumped, resigned.

I listened: I watched. The long notes were broken by a sharper sound and it took me a moment to place it: they were coughing. The cough moved around the gathered bodies like birds alighting: here then there, then again back to the first. The children had less ability to control it, and it would rack them for a full line of the music before they could hack it clear.

I watched a man holding a hymn book and I could not tear my eyes from his hand, which was a gnarled and earthy thing, a lifetime without squares of white paper.

These, then, were the souls the evangelists had collected. These were the innocents they were going to save from the depredations of settlers and sealers. Perhaps their complete despondence was only temporary: perhaps they would come to live in gratitude, fed on psalms and curtseys. Maybe this was the start of generations of happy Christian natives, and all done with the purest of motives. Maybe those in authority really did devote their time to worrying about the least, and least visible, of their subjects. I did not think so.

An officer approached me and stood at my side.

‘You are concerned,’ he began, as though about to discuss the weather.

‘It’s hard not to be, sir.’

‘You must understand, ma’am, that we are sparing these people a life at the mercy of these brutes.’ He nodded towards the island, and I took his comment to be a reference to the straitsmen. ‘Their people are dying out. Those uns over there would terrorise em if we didn’t intervene.’

‘You seem very sure of that, sir.’

‘Had one not so long ago, shot his woman through the breast because she wasn’t plucking mutton birds fast enough. He’ll happily show you the grave he dug, ma’am.’

‘Miss.’

‘Miss. We intervene or they die out.’ The zealot’s fervour, the complete absence of doubt. ‘I won’t be apologising for that.’

‘Where are these people from?’

‘We’ve cleared out Oyster Bay, Cape Portland, Clarke Island…’ He listed their home nations as he pointed, as though they were livestock. ‘Some from Cape Barren. We got to Preservation after you. See…’

He ran a finger down the rows until he came to the person he sought.