The Connolly brothers were playing cards again. Whist, though Declan seemed to have tailored the rules to make things easier for Angus. They were laughing uproariously one minute, cursing and cuffing one another the next. There was something strangely endearing about their antics: pups in a box. Each blow looked painful and would elicit howls of pain—Aargh! Tha’ wis ma fuckin snuffer!—but watching closely I saw that they were not applying their full effort. The punches and slaps, the occasional kicks, were aimed at winning advantage or registering disagreement. Sometimes I thought Declan used them to curb Angus’s antics. Any appearance of ‘claret’, as they called it, would result in ceasefire.

I’d been sitting on the quarterdeck, high above the water, the card-playing brothers below me. As I watched them, Declan threw a self-conscious look over his shoulder at me and I looked off to the sea. The master was watching all this in his silent way, working with a pencil on a chart. He had consulted briefly with me about our intended route: I had no idea what to tell him so he shrugged and continued with his musings. The doctor was absent, but then he reappeared bearing a bowl of rice he had cooked for me.

After a while the master returned with his chart, marked with pencil: a long spiral, just as the doctor had shown me. Great Island, with Cape Barren Island below it, formed a backswept exclamation mark, with the minor punctuation of Clarke Island below. Small islands littered the gaps between and all around.

‘No point searching the Great Island,’ the master affirmed. ‘It’s these ones—Preservation, Penguin, Passage, Gun Carriage—where they’s settled.’ He traced a finger on the paper from one to another. The tightening spiral, islands that did not make neat points in the sea but floated raggedly upon it.

‘Do you really believe these to be lawless people, Mister Argyle?’

He thought about the question. ‘It is possible,’ he ventured carefully, ‘for people to live by the laws of the state and still be scoundrels. Not sure I swallow the stuff that the Gazette would have us believe. I’ve seen different laws down here, but not no laws.’

He said no more and retreated to his private world.

The afternoon sun was warm, and presently the doctor appeared, wearing a new shirt that fitted him well. He peered over the bulwark just below me, assessing the water. I sensed he was aware of me watching him.

He opened a hatch and took out a bundle of netting, threw it overboard. I watched it follow its weights down, a descending cloud in the green. A trail of fine bubbles surfaced in that brilliant clarity, and far below I could make out the shapes of the sand and the reef like forest and meadow under glass.