Across a hundred yards of flat, poppled water I stood on the Moonbird’s deck, watching the island burn. The fire swept across the low ground, taking the house we’d first stayed in, then a collection of the lesser ones and their outbuildings before moving out to engulf the close-packed scrub and the grasses. It took livestock and tools and building materials and stored food and, in a soft yellowy eruption that billowed black smoke, a store of mutton-bird oil. Whole season’s work, one of the men said. But how could it matter when their homes had been destroyed?

The fire took five men, their charred remains fused with the ash of the house, the incinerated surrounds. The straitsmen wept as they shovelled them out, gagging at the smell.

After the flames had devoured the settlement they tore away across the island, muted over grassland and flaring when they found thickets. Terrified kangaroos darted ahead of the front.

Argyle and Tarenorerer stood near me, transfixed by the sight. Tarenorerer had been unable to find the man: she watched the burning land now as though she expected to see him running somewhere in the glowing darkness, a ghost made of ash and fury, mad as the flames.

Argyle had gone below, come back up with bandages and rolled them around my forearms and one of my shins, hands working gently and eyes lowered.

The daylight arrived dull as pewter; clouds had rolled in from the west and now lay heavy over the island, drifting low enough to obscure the peak of the hill. They brought rain, and the rain swept this way and that, directionless as the frantic kangaroos. The rainfall would eventually dampen the fire but for now the flames crackled low and unchecked across the early summer grass.

Smoke issued from the blackened houses, wisps of steam. The rowers laboured back and forth to other vessels moored nearby. Men sat desolate on the beach, waiting. A shift in the breeze and the smoke came our way, bitter and damp, rising high now, too. It became a column that stood taller than the peak of the island. They would be seeing it on Van Diemen’s Land—word would spread, people would come. The island with its billowing cone had made a volcano of itself. There was too much for the islanders to explain; more reasons to evacuate and leave Gun Carriage to the evangelists.

The Moonbird’s deck gleamed in the rain. Argyle took himself to the bow and sat alone under a shelter of sailcloth pulled up over the windlass. I went to join him, grateful for his company, uncomplicated as it was. He wore a simple shirt and trousers and had combed his hair back from his forehead. He was clean, absolved of something, so that he looked older and, at the same time, newer.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ he asked me.