At the villages the captain visited, ‘the men liked to hold our hands as we walked through’, but they didn’t want the strangers going into their houses. ‘If we pressed the point they yielded in this, and awaited us patiently outside.’ Melanesian courtesy, Laedi would say, but Jericho is angry with the people of that long-ago village for being so polite. So credulous. Even after this intrusion into their houses, they offered fresh green coconut to the captain and his men.

While in the harbour the men from the ship were also taken inland to hill gardens. ‘All the valleys we travelled over were covered with rich grass, shoulder high, and had we possessed an army of Irish scythes, and an English market, we might have cut down our fortune.’

On the hard bench at the back of Laedi’s house, Jericho makes a huffing grunt. Is it in the English gene to turn even grass to profit? He puts down the book, creeps past the buckets and mops at the back door – he can hear the women cleaning inside singing out to each other as they work – and looks down to the harbour, where cranes are working on the wharfs.

‘You want tea? Soft drink?’ One of the women is standing at the back door. Jericho shakes his head and she comes over. ‘No good sitting here,’ she says. ‘You strong man yet.’ He shakes his head again, and wishes her away. Her kindness is a salt.

His mood is dark as he starts on the next account of the trading post that is named after Captain Moresby. It makes depressing reading. Just short of twelve years later, when Commodore Erskine sailed into the harbour to claim the south-eastern portion of Papua as a British protectorate, it’s a very different picture. On board HMS Nelson was a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald, who reported on quarrelling natives, and men thought to be chiefs ‘destitute of clothing’. Port Moresby, by his account, was a wretched place. Twelve years of planters and traders and missionaries, and the village of well-built houses separated by coconut groves had become a place of poverty and previously unknown forms of sickness.

In recognition of their protection, a ceremony was held in which ‘gifts attractive to the native eye’ – a tomahawk, a knife, a coloured shirt, a piece of cloth and twist tobacco – were given out to each of the men thought to be chiefs, who were grouped with the officers for a photograph. The faces of the old men are sad and bewildered. Their ‘protectors’ hadn’t even managed to discern that they were elders in a clan system that has no chiefs. Even so, Commodore Erskine raised the British flag in the ‘fervent hope’ that it would be to the people of ‘this portion of New Guinea the symbol of their freedom and their liberty’.

Something inside Jericho gives, and he can no longer sit. He stands, takes a few steps, falls on his knees in the sparse grass beside the washing. He thinks of Aaron, the strong father of long ago who stood with him in the saltwater until he found his strength and could kick off with his feet, until he learned the way of this strange new water so different from the rivers that came from the mountain. ‘No need to be afraid,’ Aaron said, teaching him to hold his breath and sink down under the water. Under they’d go, his hand in Aaron’s, and they’d open their eyes to see the shells and tiny coloured fish.