Sal placed more wood on the fire. Dancer and Mary pulled off their sealskin frocks. They warmed muttonbird fat in their palms and smoothed it over their breasts, stomach and thighs in long, sure strokes. Weed sat in the dirt beside the fire and watched them.
Mary spoke. “We cry on the islands. Plenty blood. Plenty cry, yes, us Tyreelore. Island wives. We cry for our families.”
Dancer laid huge hands over her breasts and rubbed in glistening fat. “Plenty cry all over country,” she said and then she told her story in language and Mary repeated her, translating. “Her sister … three shepherds hanging her by her feet from a tree. Sister … dead from a gun in her stomach. Brothers killed by guns.”
“Clansmen bones on every beach.”
“People getting sick inside.”
“My mama’s head. I found it in the hole.”
“Take us little girls away to the islands and make us their wives. Call us their Worthies.”
“Babies buried all over the islands.”
“Fill mouth of my white man’s baby with grass, bury her on the island. We cry, we cry plenty then.”
Dancer and Mary kept anointing themselves with ochre and grease and saying terrible things of finding the mutilated bodies of their kin, killing the offspring from their repeated rapes, their kid siblings stolen for farmers’ slaves, an old man who bled to death with stumps where his hands once were.
They stopped talking. Mary breathed in deep. Her torso gleamed as she straightened. She seemed to suck all those stories inside herself. Billhook saw her body lengthen. The short, stumpy woman was suddenly tall. Dancer stood tall also.
“Renner – Mother Brown – she made this dance for us. Devil Dance is the dance of the Tyreelore. All women like us on the islands, kept on the islands by the Ghosts. Devil makes you sing plenty and sing good.”
Dancer and Mary looked across the fire to Weed.
“Devil Dance sends all your crying away. Devil Dance makes you strong again.”
Sal set a rhythm with her sticks. The Pallawah women began singing. Billhook had heard the song’s strains through the night air from the women’s camp in the days since Mary was reunited with Dancer. But he’d not understood that it was the famous Devil Dance song. Every Straitsman he’d met spoke of this dance with lust and fright in their eyes.
Fire gleamed against their limbs and splayed fingers as the women danced. Hips forward, Dancer and Mary thumped their feet towards the flames, their hands steepled into diamonds over their wombs, chins and lips thrusting their singing up with the fire sparks that plumed into the black sky. Their shell necklaces fell back, clattering between their shoulder blades.
Weed was staring at Dancer and Mary. She seemed unable to move but her eyes were wild and her teeth shone. Sal nodded to her and Weed began patting the ground, thumping it in unison to the women’s feet.
Billhook climbed off the rock as quietly as he could and followed the track back to the sealers’ camp. His own problem with being dishonoured and disrespected by the likes of Jimmy the Nail and Boss Davidson now seemed a petty quarrel. Behind him, he heard laughter and a clatter of Sal’s sticks as the song ended.
25. KING GEORGE SOUND 1826
They watched comings and goings from the French ship for two days. Small whaleboats beetled across the Sound to Oyster Harbour, or into Princess Royal Harbour from the channel, returning in the evenings. One tender ferried back and forth from the ship to the nearby watering point inside the channel heads.
On the evening of the third day, Jimmy, Bailey, Hobson, Smidmore, Black Simon, Hamilton, Billhook and Neddy prepared one of their boats and sailed across the Sound. They intended to arrive under the cover of darkness but the rain cleared and the moon picked up their white sails above a glittering sea. At nine o’clock they arrived in the port shadow of the ship and the sailors were waiting for them.
“Permission to board!” shouted Jimmy, and Black Simon repeated him in French.
Captain d’Urville of the Astrolabe must have donned his regalia to receive the visitors. His brocaded high-necked collar was brass-buttoned around his white shirt, so tightly about his throat that it resembled an armour. His florid face, resolutely pressed lips, waving red hair and snakey eyes indicated that he would give no quarter to the men whom he had doubtless already assessed as brigands. There was nothing for it but to appeal to his sympathy and his need for the brace of freshly killed muttonbirds in Billhook’s hands.
“We have been shamefully treated by Captain Davidson of the Governor Brisbane,” said Jimmy the Nail, and went on to say how Boss had left two men at Israelite Bay and then their present group at the Archipelago and Fairy Island. They were living from their fishing and birding, having run out of gunpowder. They had no flour, rope or rum left either. The sealers were, in effect, destitute. Jimmy didn’t need to embroider the truth. He told d’Urville of the meeting with the Yankee captain and the news they’d gleaned from the Hobart Town Gazette.
When Jimmy finished his sorry tale, d’Urville looked at the circle of eight men intently and launched into his own.
“We have had a … a … very bad cross from Tenerife,” he said in poor English. “One hundred and eight days, half of them in terrible weather and big seas. I lost a man. Today I have discovered that, from three hundred tins of braised chicken, one hundred and forty tins are spoiled, completely putrid, and we have thrown them overboard. There are all sorts of damage to be repaired and all rigging must now be inspected. The timekeepers need regulating so that we can navigate. My men need resting. They are very tired and sore.”
D’Urville sighed. His speech seemed to have annoyed and exhausted him further. To Jimmy he said, “I do wish to husband my supplies cautiously until we reach Port Jackson. In the meantime we will be anchored here for several weeks until we are refreshed and replenished, Mr Everett.”
“Would you accept these birds, in return for your hospitality tonight?” Jimmy took the muttonbirds from Billhook and held the brown bundle of feathers out to d’Urville. D’Urville’s nose twitched and his lips clamped even thinner. He looked quickly to the shore and Billhook followed his glance to the thin orange light of a fire behind the trees. D’Urville had some men camped there. A sail-making or coopers’ workshop, perhaps.
D’Urville made up his mind quickly, calling over the cook and nodding to him to take the birds. The cook, a short, pointy man, hurried across the deck to Jimmy the Nail, grabbed the bunch of birds by their feet and disappeared into the galley.
“Stay aboard tonight,” d’Urville said to the sealers. “I would like to know things about this King George Sound. Guilbert! See that these men get some ship’s biscuit and brandy. Plenty of brandy.”
It was well after midnight before Jimmy and his crew turned in, climbing into empty bunks and hammocks. Above the sound of two dozen snoring, snuffling men, Billhook heard the strains of singing on the wind from the Frenchmen’s shore camp, inside the channel. French lyrics wove into familiar melodies that he’d heard on ships and islands all along the Southern Ocean. Then the blackfellas replied in song, one child shrieking exuberantly above the other voices. Billhook thought their songs may come from Albert, his boy and his countrymen, singing with the sailors of the Astrolabe. The music faltered and ran out. Laughter. The Frenchmen began another song.
Lying in the hammock, woozy with brandy, he went over the night’s talking in his mind. D’Urville seemed reluctant to trade his powder and shot, though he was stocked well enough, and offered up his men for a hunting trip within the next few days. The captain did not trust them with powder, Billhook knew this. He did not trust them at all. The captain offered the sealing crew a night aboard where he could keep an eye on them, so they did not wander ashore to invade the land party. Judging by the ship’s empty bunks, half of the Astrolabe’s men were staying the night there.
“I can take three as passengers as far as Port Jackson,” d’Urville said the next morning.
The sealers were shocked into silence at the implications o
f this unexpected offer, and Jimmy did not answer for a minute. He worked his jaw and looked at his knuckles. He looked angry at d’Urville’s undermining of his boatsteerer status.
“You’ll have to take all of us, or no one,” he said coldly to the captain.
It was the best answer, reflected Billhook. A bluff yes, but one that would keep Jimmy’s crew resined together.
D’Urville shrugged away the rebuff. “Perhaps, Mr Everett, you are hardly eager to put yourself or your men within reach of the law again?”
“I beg your pardon, Captain! We are not escaped convicts seeking refuge from the law. And any man freed after servitude to that Vandiemonian prick Governor Arthur is quick to sail far from his fresh hell. We are free seamen who have come west after seal and have since been cruelly abandoned.” Jimmy the Nail took a moment to breathe and light a pipe before he stalked out of the hold and into the rain, muttering about having to justify himself to a “fucking Frenchman”.
In Jimmy’s absence both Hamilton and Black Simon said, “You could take me, sir.”
D’Urville looked at them, quite sanguine with Jimmy’s outburst. He nodded at Black Simon. “You speak Français, oui? Then you can come on as a seaman.”
Black Simon and Hamilton looked pleased with this arrangement but Billhook could see that the crew were anxious for when Jimmy found out.
At dawn, the rain set in from the north again. The Astrolabe swung on her anchor overnight and was now backed by a second anchor on the starboard side. Shouts drifted up from the little boat that came alongside. Seamen threw down the ladder and who should climb over the line but Albert and his son. Another man called Mokare climbed aboard. Albert’s long beard was caked with red ochre, he wore one of Billhook’s whalebone sewing awls through his pierced septum and his teeth were brilliant with the huge smile he presented to Billhook. His son looked tired and wary and his eyes cast down as soon as he recognised Bailey and Everett from the day they’d pointed their guns at him.
Two of the officers who had rowed the father and son to the ship rushed about, finding some biscuit for them to eat, then disappeared below deck. Albert and his son sat on a comfortable bed of canvas sail, sheltered from the rain and chewed at their strange food. D’Urville and some of the other seamen stood and watched them curiously, talking among themselves about the previous night’s celebrations. One of the men used pencils and paper to sketch a profile of Mokare; a fine recreation thought Billhook, looking over his shoulder.
The two officers returned with an armful each of booty for the three blackfellas. ‘Australians’ they called them. While the artist battled with sharp, impatient words to keep his subject still, Albert laughed with delight as the two officers loaded his lap with a steel knife, an axe, several blankets, a shirt, two pairs of trousers, a compass and a mirror.
“And our piece of biscuit,” grumbled Jimmy, watching this tin-pot diplomacy, “speaks plain enough to where us English folk stand in their book, compared to the blackfellas.”
26. KING GEORGE SOUND 1826
In the three weeks that the Astrolabe was moored at Point Possession, the sailors were sustained with fresh meat from the sealers. It became obvious to Billhook after an expedition with Smidmore, Sal’s hunting dog and three officers, that the Frenchmen could be relied upon to waste every grain of the precious gunpowder and shot that they guarded so jealously. They crashed through the bush in heavy boots, frightening game, rather than waiting quietly for the birds or kangaroos to settle, then crashed onwards to flush out more. A huge buck stopped fifteen feet from Officer Gaimard and glared at him. The man took a shot and missed. The pellets whooped through the trees. The gun’s echoes sounded long after the roo bounced away. Without their ship’s biscuit, the remaining tins of unspoiled chicken and the constancy of the sealers and the blacks to trade with them, Billhook thought that the French would surely have starved to death.
But they would not give up their gunpowder and shot. The sealers had brought the Frenchmen fish, fairy penguins, possums, pigeons, marsupial rats, muttonbirds and seals. The women gathered red berries on the island and dried them in baskets, set lizard traps, dug tubers and picked samphire fruit. In return d’Urville gave them rope, tea, tobacco and rum and shook his head firmly at all requests for powder.
Of course fresh meat was not the ultimate trade. The Captain and some of his men talked often with Black Simon in their own language and, during his last days on the island before he embarked as their seaman, the big black man would recount their conversations.
“They asked me if we ever see the native women,” he said. “The men are hungry for women. They say the women are never seen. The French, they sing all night with the blacks and that one Albert says ‘Oh yes! Tomorrow we will show you the women,’ and then in the morning the blacks are all gone. The same every day. ‘Show us your women?’ … ‘Oh yes, tomorrow!’ the blacks say.”
“They won’t give them up. You just gotta take them,” said Bailey, and Billhook looked sideways at him and shook his head. “Anyways, we got women. And they got the gunpowder.”
They were all eating the women’s gatherings that night. Billhook picked the oily, fishy meat from the baked carcass of a muttonbird chick and scooped out the stuffing of damper and wild celery with his fingers. He threw the bones to the dog. Before it grew too dark, he turned to his other project, weaving sleeping mats from the strap leaves of the rushes. It was a womanish task but no one else would do it. The Pallawah women were too handy with their snares, digging sticks and waddies to worry about sleeping mats. Weed helped him. She sang funny little songs and Billhook sang some back. She looked over to his hands sometimes to see how she was going.
The muttonbird mothers began to wheel in, black and angular against a pinkening sky. Suddenly thousands of birds thickened the air looking for their chicks and the noise grew – cheep whip cheep whip cheep whip – until the sky above the ridge was hectic with their dark, arcing forms. The penguins began then a song of a singular, whistling man in four or five notes. Venus revealed herself in the west.
“That Captain of the Astrolabe,” Black Simon nodded his head towards where the Frenchmen were moored below Venus, “he is famous in his country for finding Venus in a field in Greece.” When Black Simon spoke he was frugal with words, meting them out like precious shot. The whole camp stopped what they were doing to listen. “She was six foot tall and cool, white stone, as beautiful as the inside of a seashell. Her ears were pierced and her hair was coiled around her neck and she held an apple in her hand. He pulled her out of the earth, from a tomb.”
“No wonder the officers are asking after the women,” laughed Smidmore.
“He’ll get no classic Greece in the Sound,” said Jimmy the Nail, “just mullet and muttonbirds and blackfella women smeared with fish oil and red clay, feathers in their hair.”
“Venus,” said Bailey. “The oldest whore in the world. First one out at night and the last one to leave.”
“Meremere, ah Meremere,” sang Billhook quietly over his weaving.
“Manilyan, Manilyan, Manilyan,” chanted Weedchild, who seemed to understand which star they were talking about, and then she burst into tears.
“We got Venus of Breaksea Island right here,” Smidmore nodded towards the women’s camp.
“Shut that kid up, Billhook,” Jimmy said, irritated, and returned to the subject of women and gunpowder. “So we send Sal and the girls on a trading run.”
“Yep.”
The Captain looked over the side of the ship, wiping the remains of his muttonbird dinner from his face. What he saw made him drop his napkin.
“We have tucker for you, Captain,” shouted Sal.
At the sound of her voice eight more men, some wearing hats and others bareheaded, showed their faces at the gunwale, nudging each other and staring.
It was the first time the Frenchmen had seen the three sealer women and girl child. Billhook saw how the scene would look from the decks of the Astrolabe. The little
whaleboat was crowded with exiles of Breaksea Island. Mary, plump in her sealskin frock, black face, red knit cap with tufts of wiry hair escaping it and rows of gleaming marineer shells strung tightly around her neck; Weed, a tiny, waif-like creature in boy’s trousers, her wild halo of hair buffeted by wind and salt, resembling a sea urchin; and he, Wiremu Heke, standing at the tiller, his tattoos spiralling over the belt of his canvas trousers, no shirt or shoes, beardless, wearing a slender length of green stone from his left ear and a necklace of huge white teeth; Smidmore, his ruined face, turned eye and stoved-in cheek, his long black hair not quite concealing the gold earring; Dancer, naked but for her scars and shells, her ring of furry hair framing her round glossy face; and Sal, with the skull of the child strung about her throat, her long straight hair held back with a scrap of bright woven cloth, wearing a wallaby frock, standing with one brown foot on the thwart and the toes of her other foot gripping the gunwale.
Sal held up a heavy sack dripping with blood and circled by blowflies to show the bemused sailors. From the sack, she produced a fat black skink the size of her forearm, its triangular head bashed in. “It’s good!” she said.
D’Urville ogled Sal, Mary and Dancer, his thin eyes and nostrils widening. He looked over to the cook, questioning the lizards and the cook shrugged, smirking.
The Captain said little as he conducted the deal. They were given ten yards of frayed rope and some eyelets for their sails. Tied to the rope was a scrap of parchment with two lines written in French.
They hoisted the main and sailed back to Breaksea Island. On the rocks Bailey, Hobson and Black Simon helped them haul the boat high and dry. Billhook gave the rope and the bag of trivets to Hobson. Hobson looked at the note, tore it from the rope and handed it to Black Simon, who read it slowly out loud.
“M. Simon shall bring the black lizard woman to starboard at midnight. You shall have your powder and shot.”
Sound Page 10
