Sound

by Sarah Drummond

  While Dancer and Mary talked softly and the child slept huddled between Sal and the dog, the same conversation as the one between the Yankee captain and Jimmy’s crew played out with Hobson and his men. Expressions of mistrust and anger clouded their faces when they learned that Boss Davidson would likely never return for them. The errant Boss was subject to similar curses and obscene titles, and then they questioned the whaler’s honesty in the same manner as Bailey had.

  They drank grog and talked until the early hours, until the fire burned out and no one could be bothered hunting for more wood in the scrub. They fell into exhausted, uneasy dreaming slumbers; men who knew themselves to be the only exotics on the western edge of a continent so vast it took a month to sail its breadth.

  22. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826

  Michaelmas Island rose up, implacable and green, guarded from the harsh southerly swells by the island Billhook stood upon. He could have swum the five hundred yards to Michaelmas, he mused, if he needed to. Past the island he could see the wide stretch of Nanarup Bay and to the east, the stone-speckled mountain they’d sailed past the previous morning. In the other direction, beyond the westernmost point of Breaksea, clad in lichen-stained granite, a wide sea glittering with early morning sun heaved and rolled. The Sound was fringed with low hills, hazy and blue, all the way around to the south, where the head sloped down into heavy seas. Tommy Tasman told him it was called Bald Head, and that around that windswept and roiling point, it was a half-day sail to Eclipse Island, where the seal were plentiful.

  He walked back to where the two crews sat by the fire still swapping news. As well as Hobson and Tommy Tasman, there was George Thomas, Hamilton, Mary, and Black Simon living on the island. Black Simon spoke in his deep, slow voice about the American whaler that had stopped at Two Peoples and built yet another stone lookout. The captain sold them some canvas and they’d used it for their huts. The way Black Simon talked, with a thick French-Canadian accent, he sounded like an ill-born child, but Billhook knew that he was smart as a whip. His towering height, his arms like muscular, thick-boned weapons and his tree-trunk legs made for the image of a man that Black Simon was not. He preferred the quiet life with no bother and so, if ever he spoke, his voice was soft and slow, considered.

  Then Hobson mentioned the other sealing schooner that had arrived in the dead of night one month ago. The next morning, Hobson and his crew were startled to find the Hunter moored in the Breaksea road. The owner-operator of the schooner dropped five men and two dogs on the island with two small boats and few provisions, and left bound for Mauritius the same day.

  “He had five titters and their dogs aboard the Hunter too: Vandiemonians,” said Hobson. He scratched at a sore at the corner of his mouth and the scab came away through his beard. “Coulda been so kind to leave them with us, keep dear Mary company.”

  “Who was boatsteerer?” asked Jimmy the Nail.

  “John Randall.”

  “Randall?” Jimmy laughed. “Randall. So what happened to that mob? They’re not here on Breaksea are they? Shit, I’d like to see old Randall again.”

  “Randall’s no mate of mine,” grumbled Smidmore, and Jimmy laughed.

  “We reckon they left for Chatham Island and the Swan River. They went around Bald Head. Took a bit of persuading …” said Hobson.

  Tommy Tasman laughed. “Persuadin’! George got himself a busted arm. One o’ Randall’s men, Tommy North, he got a busted eye socket. Both from swingin’ oars at each other. Then Black Simon here came out with his cutlass and cut through the mob like a fuckin’ orca through squid. Should have seen that Black Simon work when they got on his bad side. They got back in those boats after that and took off.”

  “Shouldna come here with no food nor supplies,” Hobson said, defending their exiling of Jimmy’s old friend. “The Hunter shouldna left no one here to leech off of us. This is our patch anyway. Don’t need no other bastard fishing it out.”

  Jimmy didn’t look too worried. “They’ll be back sooner or later,” he said.

  Whenever it was calm enough or boredom struck them, Hobson and his crew showed Jimmy’s men the lay of King George Sound and its surrounds. From their talk of the place, Billhook could see that the sealers, despite now knowing they’d been abandoned, were happier with the Sound than anywhere else they’d been. Their watering point lay in a quiet turquoise bay sheltered from the winds by granite outcrops. A stream of clear, fresh water sliced through the white sand and it was an easy task to siphon it into barrels. Hobson’s crew called it Catshark Bay, after the small, striped sharks that lived in the seagrass meadows there. Through the stone-bound channel at Point Possession lay the huge, protected Princess Royal Harbour where a man could always find somewhere out of the weather. They showed the newcomers dappled, shady forests on the south side where there was timber aplenty for boat repairs and building huts, and grass trees packed with resin for caulking. At the northern boundary of the Sound was another harbour, shallower with long banks of seagrass and commonly called Oyster Harbour for all the shellfish that crowded the red rocks. In the centre of this harbour was a small island that Hobson called Green Island, dotted with pink mallows flowering against a verdant green.

  Their camp on the north face of Breaksea was made of two huts, fashioned from solid timber poles they’d cut on the mainland and the whaler’s canvas lashed to the poles with hemp rope. Between the two huts was the central fireplace ringed with white limestone and the shells and bones from various feasts. King George Sound seemed to be as good a place as any to be marooned. It was a safe harbour for the big ships whose captains would normally stay several miles out to sea, wary of the winds that beat straight onto rocks. The sealers’ best chance for rescue was to stay here and wait.

  The women’s defection from the camp happened quietly. Gradually their tools and skins moved down the hill a little way, until one night Billhook looked around and realised that they were all men sitting around the fire drinking and that he hadn’t seen the women for several nights. Another fire burned and he heard the women singing quietly, or shushing Weed’s occasional eruption of tears.

  It was a bitter winter. They huddled together at night around smouldering fire with the wind at their backs. There were few seal to be found. Damp leaves stuck to their feet. Randall and Jimmy the Nail rationed the shot and powder to occasional kangaroo hunts on the mainland, meting out the powder in careful measures. The women worked harder.

  Sal, Dancer, Mary, Billhook and the child took regular trips across the channel to Michaelmas Island to find food. On one of these forays they sat beneath a massive boulder at the southeastern end, watching rain move across the Sound towards them. The women clutched at their bags of that night’s meal: morsels of reed roots and shellfish. The child pulled her new cloak that Dancer had made for her tight about her shoulders.

  Sitting in the boulder cave, the scent of shellfish and briny weed around him, the hammering of approaching rain drowning out the noise of the waves, Billhook listened to the women talking, and to the child who was copying their words. His gnawing hunger, the brittle cold and a kind of bewilderment reminded him of how he felt sometimes during that lean Otakau year when the people were grieving and they would not eat eel from the tapu waters.

  Ae, there was no purpose in this adventure west.

  As if she’d seen his thoughts spread out for her like a blanket, Sal broke away from talking with Dancer and Mary and said, “What are you doing here, Billhook?”

  He was shocked away from his memory of the oily flesh of eels and all he could think to say was, “Here? We are looking for food.”

  The women were quiet as they waited, staring at him.

  “No, no! In King George Sound. With that mob,” she flicked a finger towards the sealers’ camp on Breaksea Island.

  “Same thing as you, Sal,” he said.

  She looked upset and reached out to pat his arm. “Oh … poor Mister Hook. Did some nasty whitefella grab you off a beach too?”

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nbsp; Dancer and Mary erupted. Their laughter seemed to infect the child until she was hiccupping and out of breath. Sal smacked the rock with her palm, nodding, her eyes shut, her lips splitting into a toothsome grin.

  23. KING GEORGE SOUND 1826

  They were not the only people living in the Sound.

  From his favourite granite perch on the western end of Breaksea, Billhook saw the small fires that began burning daily in the hills and hollows around the Sound with the onset of spring. During their forays to the mainland, Jimmy the Nail would take a party of men to target the burnt-out swamps for kangaroos coming in to feed from the fresh new shoots. It was then that a black man would deliberately step out into clear view in their path. Sometimes painted with ochre and oil, or dusty and covered in ash from firing his country, the man would gently lay his spear on the ground when he saw the sealer’s guns. There were always other men waiting, unseen. He would stand quietly. Sometimes he had a boy with him. The two parties would stare at each other in the quiet, still glades, until Bailey or Jimmy the Nail lifted his rifle. The black man would shove his wide-eyed, protesting boy sideways into the scrub, not far behind himself, and leave his spears lying on the track.

  Billhook despaired at his crewmates for another opportunity lost. He was busy on the island as the evenings grew long. He carved hooks, lures and sewing awls from whalebone, polishing the barbs with the skin of the shark they’d caught at the Doubtfuls. Then one day, just as the honeyeaters were getting into the tiny red woolly bush flowers, he set off alone in the little jolly-boat, with a dilly bag of his makings instead of a gun.

  He put in at the long white bay, in the corner out of the surf. He stashed the sail and walked a mile along the beach until he could cross to where a thin plume of smoke hung above the lake behind the dunes. Here, the same man he’d seen several times before was stalking through the reeds and stopping to hold something small and solid against dry tinder. His brow was knitted in concentration or thought. When the fire took, he would step back, his face easing its stern expression and softening to approval as he watched the reeds smoulder slowly into a widening circle. The crackling and small explosions of wet wood and gum, along with the smoke, meant he did not hear or see Billhook watching him, until Billhook cleared his throat and said “K’ora!”

  The black man jumped and the skin across his chest twitched. Billhook held out his hands with the bag and the man, who seemed embarrassed, had the presence of mind to look around for more sealers, or even his own countrymen who may have seen him taken unawares and laughed at him. By his side he held a smoking banksia cone and he blew on it to create sparks, for want of another gesture in his moment of discomfort.

  Billhook held out his hands again and the man stepped forward, took hold of his right hand and shook it like a white man. By now, both men were surprised by one another. The black man’s hand was sinewy and his glance was now strong and reckoning.

  “Wiremu,” said Billhook with his left hand on his breast.

  “Wirddemu,” said the man, rolling his r’s like Billhook’s own accent.

  “Yalbert,” he returned.

  “Albert,” said Billhook.

  The man talked, waving his hand over to Breaksea Island and then to where he had last seen Billhook and the sealers, when he’d been firing a swamp on the western end of the harbour. He pointed to the fire he’d just started, still talking. He spoke in his own language but his message was simple. This was his patch. It was bad form for Billhook and his mates to shoot kangaroo here after he’d fired it for hunting himself. He couldn’t argue with a rifle, but hunting on his land without permission made for problems between people.

  Billhook nodded, a lot. Finally, when the man stopped talking, Billhook handed him his bag full of treasure. Albert sat down and spilled the contents over the ground. He fingered the whalebone shark hook and felt its barb, nodding. He examined the sinewed join between paua and wood and put it back in the bag. He took all three awls and tied the whalebone hook to his possum string belt, clucking happily. Then he handed the bag with the items he didn’t want back to Billhook. He said a few words to him and jogged away down the track, the white hook bouncing against his bare thigh.

  Billhook waited for a while, amongst the acrid stench of burning swamp wood, not sure of what to do, or even if the meeting had been the success he’d planned. He began the trek back to the beach, to where his boat lay in the corner by the rocks. Even if he honoured Albert’s wishes and hunted for roo away from his fired country, he had no hope of persuading men the like of Bailey or Hobson to do the same. They’d already reminded him of the folly of going ashore unarmed against the blackfellas.

  He was treading around the sharp, broken scallop and helmet shells on the shore, thinking about all this, when he heard a shout. Albert picked his way over the grassy dune and down to the shore where Billhook stood waiting for him. He no longer held his smouldering banksia cone but instead, a grey, furry bundle of limbs and tails. He handed it to Billhook.

  Four huge eyes stared at him. Two thin white tails wrapped themselves around his wrists. The fur was impossibly plush and smelt like rutting marsupials. As they were. It wasn’t one creature but two. The black man had given him a mating pair of ringtail possums, their bodies bound tightly together with hair string, with instructions to allow them to breed on Breaksea Island.

  24. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826

  The sealers stamped out their fires and watched the ship for a good part of the day. The man-o’-war worked with short tacks on a north wind to stand off Breaksea Island.

  They looked to be waiting for favourable wind to come in, positioning themselves for an entrance into the Sound. In the afternoon the wind turned to the south-west and the ship sailed slowly between Breaksea and Bald Head, its tattered white sails vivid against the streaky bosses of granite.

  On the windswept peak of the island, the sealers gathered: Jimmy the Nail, Billhook, Samuel Bailey, Neddy and Sal, Dancer and Mary, Tommy Tasman, Weed, Hobson and the others. They passed Jimmy’s looking glass around and strained to see the man-o’-war’s sails furled at the channel entrance to Princess Royal Harbour.

  “French,” said Jimmy, lowering his glass. “They’re putting out an anchor on the port side. Not going to try scudding that sandbar in the harbour by the looks. Must be sixty fathoms where they are now.”

  “They’d be resting up for wood and water,” said Bailey. “And to fix that rigging. Looks like they had a rough crossing.”

  In the evening the wind dropped. The sealers lit a small, furtive fire on the north side of the island and discussed their situation. There were opportunities for gunpowder and rope, items they were now in dire need of, and also a berth from the Sound to Sydney. As they talked, hope rose in each of them like reptiles feeling the first warmth of sun after sleeping season.

  “Tomorrow we keep a weather eye on them,” said Jimmy the Nail. “See what they’re up to. You women,” he nodded to Sal, Dancer and Mary, “you get some muttonbirds in the morn. They’ll be wanting fresh meat. Where are those possums, Billhook?”

  “Best to leave them ’til after they’ve kidded,” said Billhook. “Plenty more then.”

  “Nah, they’d be worth a skerrick of powder,” said Bailey.

  Billhook flashed with anger. He’d worked hard for that deal. “They’d be worth more later when I’m in Port Jackson Town and you’re still here looking for a feed, Bailey.”

  The men were quiet for a moment.

  Jimmy said finally, “You’re my crew, Billhook. And now that Boss Davidson is out of the show, I’ll say who stays and who goes.”

  Billhook stood up and walked out of the camp.

  My parents were proud when I was given the berth aboard the sealer, he thought. They knew it to be my future as a seafarer and adventurer. They saw me as the seed that flies through the air and travels on the water to other lands or the bird who returns with a twig in its beak so they can grow that twig into a tree. Jimmy the Nail is not my decider.
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  The Pākehā only want a man who can kill. They know that we Māori are brave in the face of a whale or a seal; we have no fright to come alongside and drive in the pike, hold it fast, dodge the slimy brown teeth of the bull. That’s why the white men like us, for we are strong and we are brave. What they don’t know is that the young men they gathered from the bays and inlets of Otakau were offered up by our families as a privilege because we have strong hearts and are sons of high birth.

  Jimmy the Nail had just made it clear to him, that Billhook was a mere minion to Boss Davidson – who was more interested in selling a ship that didn’t belong to him than honouring a promise – and a sidekick to Bailey’s folly with kid thievery. Bailey holding that wriggling child under his arm, Tommy and Jack standing on the white beach and waving, and Dancer’s lifeless body mauled by barnacles and later by Jimmy the Nail.

  At that moment on Breaksea he wanted nothing more than to be away from these useless violences. There was Captain Kelly to find and Otakau to defend. There was his father to honour. The arrival of the Frenchmen had cleared his position in his mind, the way autumn rain washes the dust haze from the horizon.

  He sat on a rock that still seeped the warmth of the day’s sun, above the women’s camp, and looked out across the water to Michaelmas Island. Beyond the island, a swelling moon rose over a hill on the mainland. Four dark figures – three women and the child – trod silently along the path in front of him and made their way to their fire. They didn’t notice him sitting there as they passed but he could smell the muttonbird oil that they had smeared on their bodies.