Sound (14 page)

“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 of 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.”

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.”

With fresh supplies of powder and shot, Billhook, Hobson, Jimmy the Nail and Samuel Bailey sailed to Whalers Cove. The heavy rains of the previous few days were blown away, leaving scudding clouds and flashes of sunlight. They pulled the boat onto the beach. Jimmy and Hobson agreed to head sou'-east over the hill towards the point. Billhook and Bailey walked west along the little beach, over the sheets of granite that sloped down to the sea and along the next beach to where the spring seeped out of the hill.

Billhook stopped to drink the brown water. It tasted good, if a little of the antiseptic trees that grew above. They climbed the isthmus until they could see the harbour, stepping over the short, scrubby reeds, using the plates of stone as their path. As they walked down the other side towards the karri forest, Billhook found one of the roads the blacks had made, a neat path of chopped grasses, worn with many feet. The only sound was their footfall on the slippery leaves blown down from the last northerly.