‘Brief words, yes. He’s…what am I looking for? Maudlin. Don’t you think? Says the right things, sounds competent, but no spark. Mind you, that doesn’t bear upon his competence at the helm.’

‘What about the doctor?’ I felt daring, reaching for a reaction from him that might accord with mine. My father took a large swig from the bottle, a sight that often set my teeth on edge. For now I could accommodate it.

‘Seems serious. Urbane.’ he muttered, more to himself than to me. ‘His voice seems…What does he look like?’

‘Oh…tall, well built—vigorous, one might say. Thick hair, some brown but mostly grey. I would put him at fifty years, perhaps older. His face is…well, no one would call it beautiful.’ I found that I did not want to say I thought him the more interesting for his disfigured features.

My father listened carefully. ‘Yes. Hmm. Of what discipline is he a doctor?’

‘Medicine. But he has an interest in diet, and he is taking up a grant of land, and he wishes to study edible fishes on our voyage. I fear such men can be terrible bores in a confined space.’

‘Ah, hmm. I see. On the other hand, he may be capable of quite deep thought.’ He drank again and sighed, so that the fumes gusted over me. He’d lost interest. At times I wondered if his wits were failing him, so brief was his patience for conversation. I took his dish away and washed it in the bucket of seawater by the door. I was about to leave him there when he called me back. He had a bundle of newspapers on the table before him.

‘The doctor gave me these. He said they might be of relevance. Can you look?’

Folded copies of the Sydney Gazette (‘Thus We Hope to Prosper’). Non-sequential dates over the past month. Advertisements, cures, diatribes, gossip…columns circled in pencil. The encircling hand had targeted stories about sealers in the straits: wild men, abductions, rapes and killings. The trafficking of native women and children, an antipode to the antipode we already inhabited, a place where bad men went to hide—from the law, or their obligations. Correspondents fulminated about a lawless society—surely an oxymoron?—led by a handful of powerful men. Christianity and progress are all but forgotten in the islands amidst the stampede for fortune. Such speculations led naturally into other discussions of the fate of the Howrah. Men there, men with Cornish ancestry who knew the art of wrecking. False lights, false hope.

It was a busy trade route between Hobart and Sydney, said the Gazette, and like a high bluff on a lonely highway, equidistant from origin and destination, the islands sat waiting: a hiding place and a natural setting for ambush. There were brigands in the islands, it said, banditti who were no less bushrangers for the fact that they rowed whaleboats.