Sound (24 page)

We climbed the rocks sprinkled in shattered turban shells, to a tiny bay gleaming white as the one before but broken in half by a freshwater stream. The Lieutenant saw the cask before I did.

“They must have gone for water,” he said, hurrying along the beach.

The twins lay on the sand above the high tide mark on the other side of the creek. Their bodies were dried to leather and bone and their shredded clothes flapped in the light wind. Eyeless sockets opened to the sky. Jack's tattoo of the upended
Governor Brisbane
was touching his brother's arm and they clasped sinewed, fleshless hands.

The Lieutenant knelt beside the bodies. Tiny black ants scurried around his knees. I roved my eyes over the bush that surrounded us, breathing in the sweat of the trees in the midday heat, listening.

“Death spear, this one,” said the Lieutenant. He'd pulled aside the rags of Tommy's shirt to show the jagged hole in his breast. “The barb is lined with tiny pieces of knapped quartz. Look. The
quartz falls off like shark's teeth. Push the spear in and out a few times and death comes as fast to a man as cutting his throat. Cuts every artery. But this one,” he moved to Jack's body. “This one …” He peeled away more cloth. “I cannot find a mark on him.” He rolled Jack's body towards his brother's. Maggots spilled away onto the sand. “There is no way of knowing.”

“Jack was not a man to lay down and die.” I touched their clasped hands. Where Tommy's fingers were open and straight, Jack had gripped his brother's hand tight before he died.

The two other men found our sorry party and we buried Jack and Tommy where they lay. We used the oars as shovels. Jack's hand could not be prised from his brother's and so they were buried that way. The Lieutenant sacrificed an oar to the double grave, driving it deep into the sand so that it stood as a marker, “like a sapling”, as Boss Davidson had said all that time ago. One of the ship's mates said a brief prayer. We carried the oars along the lonely beach, climbed into the boat and rowed back to the ship.

The rest of the journey to Sydney was slow and we waited out a stilling of the wind in Bass Strait for days. At night I lay with my flesh rolling over my bones in the gentle sway of the brig. I did not sleep often, for Bailey did not sleep. I knew the man could go for days without shutting his eyes and that he dreamed more when he was awake. During the nights Bailey pestered me with his stories of Elizabeth.

“That child Elizabeth,” he croaked from inside his crate one night. “She was mine too, you know. It wasn't only father who had her. She was always a whore. I went back for her later. Before father was done for embezzlement we had a fine time, my father and I. No wonder mother died from the melancholy. She had no
money left for the high life and then it was just father and I and Elizabeth.”

“Be quiet, Bailey.”

People have always told me things. Bailey seemed to warm to telling me his scourge of a life, wanted to confess and was not quiet. He took pleasure in telling me the black children he'd had in Van Diemen's Land. Other things I shall never say aloud for fear of rotting my own tongue in my mouth. I was filthied by his stories. I would have asked for the night watch but then Tama Hine would be alone with him.

“What will happen to the child, Captain?”

“Ahh, you are a New Zealand native then, Mr Hook!”

The ship's master, Hansen, was a doughty, bluff man in his sixties with a neck that fell in two giblets. He was drinking whisky in the companion way and willing to talk. Always been a seaman, he said, although he tried farming once, sold the land and went back to being master.

“My most pleasant memory is the service we held on Christmas day for the Māori.” He told me, most prideful, that he was a close associate of the chief chaplain, Reverend Marsden, and that together they had set up the first English settlement in New Zealand. I searched my mind for the name Marsden and it was the whaler at Doubtful Island Bay, John te Marama from Rangihoua Pā, who had lived with the Reverend.

“My daughter Hannah is married to one of his missionaries, see … though there was a spot of trouble for a while there with my wife regarding muskets. That wife of mine never did give up meddling when it comes to trade and helping our daughter and son-in-law. Never 'til the day she died. God rest her soul. Gun-runner and drunkard, the Reverend said. Giving the natives muskets made for a lot of trouble between them and the missionaries, he said … ahh well … perhaps Marsden and I
aren't such close associates anymore. He shouldn't have said that about my wife. He was wrong. Dead wrong.”

“Where will the child go?” I asked again.

“What child?” The master was lost to his memories. “Oh, the native kid. I'll take her to William Hall. A good man, a good man. He's in charge of the Native Institution at Parramatta now. Knew him well from the Rangihoua mission. One of Marsden's men. Good man. Fanny Bailey will be Christianised. Christianised, Mr Hook.”

Fanny Bailey.

I left Hansen to his drink. My thoughts jammed upon that name. Fanny Bailey. I knew that Lockyer had called her Fanny after a child of his own. But her name was not Fanny Bailey. Her name was … Hine. To me. Tama Hine. And to her now. That she was named after Samuel Bailey made my stomach lurch. Her name, scratched out on paper by the white man. She would hear his name called aloud every day at the Native Institution. Her name
was not
Fanny Bailey.

My sick feeling led me to the stern to stare at an idling, flattened wake. My mind cleared. It was as we were becalmed in Bass Strait, that I decided what I must do when we arrived in Sydney.

Every night I distracted Hine from Bailey's night ranting and mutterings, teaching her my language. The ship's timbers creaked and shackles clanked against the masts. I squatted against the planks and Tama Hine sat on a pile of rope facing me.

“Ko Tama Hine toku ingoa means ‘my name is Tama Hine',” I said. “What is your name?”

“Ko Tama Hine toku ingoa,” she said.

“What is your name? Say it again, Hine.”

“Ko Tama Hine toku ingoa.”

“Ae, you are clever, Tama Hine.”

She nodded to me and looked nervously to Samuel Bailey's cage.

“Yes,” I nodded. “Ae.”

She nodded again. “Ae.”

“No,” I shook my head. “Kahore, or kao.”

She shook her head too. “Kahore
.
”

“I am hungry. Kei te hiakai ahau. I am hungry.”

“Kei te hiakai ahau,” she said.

“I am full, not hungry. Kei te kÄ« ahau
.
Kei te kÄ« toku puku. I am full. I am not hungry. I come from Doubtful Island, from west coast of Port Jackson Land.” Because I knew that when asked, Tama Hine could not say where she came from. As a seven year old, her country was the centre of her world and did not need a name. But if ever she wanted to find her way home without me, she needed to name it.

“I come from Doubtful Island, from west coast of Port Jackson Land. Say this now Tama Hine: ‘No Doubtful Island ahau, kÄ« te Tai Hau-a-uru o Poihakena
.
' Say where your home is, Hine.”

“No Doubtful Island –” she faltered.

“– ahau, kÄ« te Tai Hau-a-uru o Poihakena,” I prompted.

“No Doubtful Island ahau, kÄ« te Tai Hau-a-uru o Poihakena
.
My home is Doubtful Island.”

“In your statement, William Hook, you say that the prisoner shot dead the man on Green Island.” The sergeant became angry and shoved a scrunched paper at me.

The air was silky and hot in Sydney town and the place where I sat with the sergeant was thick with heat and flies. I heard the music of a metal cup bouncing on stone in the next room.

“I did not say Samuel Bailey shot the black man. I said Samuel Bailey was in the boat when the black man was shot.”

The sergeant straightened the paper on his rough table, held it at arm's length and read again.

“I am telling you the truth, sir,” I said.

He shook his head and I became afraid that I would not make it back to the docks and to Tama Hine before she was taken.

“But Major Lockyer states clearly in his letter to the Colonial Secretary that Samuel Bailey …” he wiped his freckled hand through his hair. “Mr Hook, can you read English?”

“No sir.”

“In your statement to the Major, you say that Samuel Bailey was in the boat but nothing of Samuel Bailey killing the man. And yet the Major wanted him charged with murder. This puzzles me.” He threw my statement onto the table and I stared at the strange marks sloping across the page. “I shall keep the prisoner here until I hear otherwise. You are free to go.”

I ran to the docks. I ran through streets paved in wood and stone and past the horses, dodged the people who sold or begged
food from their hands, past the gangs of men heaving adzes into the ground and the clanging of metal against stone. At the docks I ran towards the twin masts of the
Amity
and a cart waiting alongside, the horse champing into a nosebag, resting one leg. Straight up the gangplank and down the hatch to where Tama Hine swung in her hammock. The glee that spread across her face crept away when she saw my panic.

“Where is Hansen? Where is the Lieutenant?”

“They talking, Wiremu. In their cabin,” she whispered and pointed aft.

“Do you have your things, if we go now?”

Tama Hine pretended to busy herself looking around the hold for a sack of her belongings. She pulled a piece of pumice stone from under her frock and grinned at me. “This.”

For seven days we lived like ghosts on the docks, sleeping during the day in places nobody could find us. At night I went to the bars where men and women swung out of the doors and the place heaved with music and the people swayed and sang together like one great monster of the deep. I cut the child's hair short with a knife so that she looked like a ship's boy and taught her more of my countryman's language.

Maybe one day Tama Hine will decide to journey to her home country. For now I taught her to be strong, to protect herself and to ready herself for when that day comes.

On the seventh day, the same day a storm stood like a grey wall out to sea, Tama Hine and I found a berth on a whaler bound for my southern island Otakau.

“In times of trouble,” I said to the child as we sailed through the heads of Sydney Harbour towards the storm, “be strong! Be brave! Be of big heart, Hine!”

And as the rain smacked into the sails, Tama Hine shouted back to me:
“
Āhākua nga uaua, kia kaha! Kia toa! Kia manawanui, Wiremu Heke!”

And so we were going back to my home, together. I did not know what awaited us there. Maybe Te Rauparaha had already cut his way through our village. I did not know. I did not know. I did not know anything of James Kelly. I had given up on that vengeance long ago.

The Sound
is based on a true story of the men, women and children who travelled from Bass Strait to King George Sound in 1825–1826 on the sealing schooners
Hunter
and
Governor Brisbane
. To get an idea of the lives of the Breaksea Islanders, you can find their individual biographies and a historical rendition of events at my website
www.sarahdrummond.org

On being swallowed by a whale

The Star of the East was in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands and the lookout sighted a large Sperm Whale three miles away. Two boats were launched and in a short time one of the harpooners was enabled to spear the fish. The second boat attacked the whale but was upset by the lash of its tail and the men thrown into the sea, one man being drowned, and another, James Bartley, having disappeared, could not be found. The whale was killed and in a few hours was lying by the ship's side and the crew were busy with axes and spades removing the blubber. Next morning they attached some tackle to the stomach which was hoisted on the deck. The sailors were startled by something in it which gave spasmodic signs of life, and inside was found the missing sailor doubled up and unconscious. He was laid on the deck and treated to a bath of sea water, which soon revived him … He remained two weeks a raving lunatic … At the end of the third week, he had entirely recovered from the shock and resumed his duties.