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“And this is Smidmore,” Jimmy muttered to Billhook. “Me old mate.”

Smidmore was dark but no native. A Gael perhaps or one of the Black Irish with spiralling black hair that he tied behind his neck with a leather thong and an eye that turned. He carried a fiddle, like the one played in the Hobart tavern, a gear sack and a gun. Smidmore hadn't been on the island long, from what Jimmy had told Billhook, for he wore the canvas slops given to all new sealers. Despite his clothing, Smidmore acted with Kirby as if they were lords of the island. Billhook wondered aloud to Jimmy why they would take on a lay as tars when they could be island chiefs. Jimmy replied quietly that they were being run off
since Johnny Randall planned to go west too. And something about women. There had been some trouble with the women.

They loaded the little boat with two guns wrapped in oiled cloth, two bags of cabbages and potatoes and fifteen sacks of salt sewn closed with the sinew of kangaroo tails. One of the women climbed in, calling her two dogs after her. Kirby and Smidmore got in too. The men and women left on shore pushed out the boat until they felt it free from the sand. Bailey and Billhook grabbed at the oars. The women waved and sobbed and called to the woman in the boat. They rowed out to the channel that would take them through the breakers.

The black woman stood at the bow holding a rope, her feet planted firmly on the thwart. She was magnificent and when he could, Billhook turned to look at her. She looked different to the two Vandiemonian Worthies. Her face was thinner, her hair straighter and she didn't have strings of tiny shining shells about her throat. Instead, so tightly thonged that it dug into the hollow between her collarbones, she wore the whitened skull of a newborn baby.

The crew wriggled the boat alongside the
Governor Brisbane
. The wind had come up in the absence and it blew the boat off before anyone could get a rope. Hands grabbed for flying ropes on the next try and they fastened the dinghy. The island woman pointed to the salt and let Samuel Bailey know in good English that she'd collected it herself and it must be looked after. She had Bailey on the edge of nodding in obedience until he grunted and turned away.

Mary scowled at her from the schooner's deck. Mary had been boss woman on Robbins and Billhook could almost hear her thoughts. Who was this uppity sprite? And how was she allowed to bring her dogs and Mary not?

The woman threw one of her dogs up to the ship. The short,
whiskery terrier landed on deck and turned to snarl at Hamilton, the black jack, then looked over the side at his owner, wagging his tail. On her next throw the bigger dog, a lean hunting dog similar to Mary's, hit the stringers and dropped, shrieking, into the sea. She let out a cry of dismay. Bailey laughed. The dog swam around the dinghy, shaking water out of its ears. She hauled it in by the skin of its neck. The islander Smidmore grabbed a rope dangling from the gunwales and she tied it around the dog. She nodded to the black jack who hauled the animal up, its body hanging from its elbows, tail between its legs and looking down at its mistress with wrinkled brow.

Once her dogs were safely on board, she nodded again at the sacks of salt. “Don't you drop that salt. Plenty hard work,” she said to Billhook. She looked at him hard. “You no white man.” She pointed a good true east with long fingers. “You from over there?”

Billhook nodded.

“K'ora!” she said grinning, her teeth as white as her infant child's skull and Billhook grinned back in spite of himself.

Rope ladders tumbled down. He watched her climb and wondered how many rope ladders she'd climbed in the cover of night to see a white captain moored at the mouth of American River, a man who scribbled in his books about timber and soil and wallabies and winds but never of the black girl who climbed onto his ship and was shown to his cabin.

“Sal,” said Smidmore to the men in the dinghy who were watching Sal climb aboard. “That's my Sal. She's mine.”

The days were much the same until the storm hit. Wind blew over the starboard shoulder in the mornings and port side in the afternoons as the land warmed up and sucked the air in from the south. They rarely saw land and when they did, it was only to find anchorage. Then the land was a thin shabby strip misted and hazy with the afternoon salt spray.

Ten days into the journey across the Southern Ocean, the sky became a frightening greasy yellow, with fleeing petrels and tiny spotted clouds heralding the storm. At midnight Boss Davidson ordered the sails shortened. By dawn the
Governor Brisbane
was running under bare poles at ten knots, sideways. She careened towards the coast, slapping against whitecaps and lurching into valleys of sea. Boss ordered up the main, to get some reach.

For three days without sleep the crew fought to keep her off the red cliffs, where the country looked broken off and dropped into the sea. None of the men knew the colour of the sky during those days and nights, only the light on dark and heaving water. The cliffs stayed a smudge on the horizon, always present but no one wanted to look any closer.

The beach near the island was a shock of white sand after the long days of red cliffs. It was near here that one of Flinders' men met his maker, Boss Davidson said on the quiet morning after the storm. But not to worry of dead men. The Blunt brothers were to stay and get their lot of seal here. Elephant seal were fished out of the Strait and there was some oil money to be made.

Jack and Tommy were born in this country. Tommy had said that when they were babies the colony was starving because no one knew how to live there and they depended on ships for supplies. They grew all the wrong vegetables and the sheep and cattle ran off into the bush where they ate poisonous plants or were speared by blackfellas. When their mother's milk ran out, Tommy said, he became sick from dirty water and almost died. Lucky they were, Tommy said, with both parents sent out on the hulks, to be born free men. Jack said he just remembered being hungry.

Jack had the build of a coursing dog, all sinew and bone. He shaved his head every other day and wrapped a cloth around his skull. His eyes were thin. Wrinkles rippled around his lashes. Jack talked fast like gunshots, hard and sharp. He moved quick too and worked in bursts of speed. When Jack wasn't talking his silence was as hard as his words. His silence was like the stillness of a bad sky. Jack held his rage, nursed it like drink.

He tattooed himself all over his forearms; one was of a seal with the breasts and head of a woman, with no arms and bound in rope. In the nights after leaving Bass Strait, he'd pricked an image of the
Governor Brisbane
into his skin. He tattooed the ship so that when he stood, the ship was upside down with the roiling sea above her keel and her sails blooming towards the real sea. For the crew it was too bad an omen to look at without shaking their heads.

Jack talked about his twin brother: his carelessness, his untidiness or his clumsy feet. Tommy never seemed to notice the injury he caused Jack. Tommy not bothering to clear the gun. Tommy leaving the embers of a fire all wrong and out of place. Jack seethed with small hurts. When they split in their mother's womb it was like they'd been cut away from one another. Tommy had long hair that he never tied back. Shanks of it were always
across his face. He never wore shoes or a hat. His feet were furry, his eyes wide and brown. Tommy had landed in a gentler, softer place than Jack, where he was never blown sideways in a gust, never narrowed his eyes against the midday glare, nor picked the gun stock's splinters from his skull after a beating. His legs were short and he was strong. His hands and wrists were chunky with muscle. He moved slowly but he got the work done. He was clever with boats and could spot a riff on the water long before it hit the sail.

The two young men were given knives, a gun, a water barrel, empty oil barrels, rations of salt pork and cabbages and one of the dinghies. At the cove, a small island broke the back of the open ocean and was supposed to be comfortable living. Boss Davidson cautioned the Blunt brothers to make their hut on the island as the natives in the area liked the white man a little too much.

“Weren't far from here that the
Aida
foundered and the last man to survive told of cannibals who came down from the desert and found his shipmates dying of thirst on the beach. And then they had worse things than dying of thirst to think about, you mark my words. He was raving, mind, when they found him. Worse than Billhook's mob, the blackfellas around here. You'll know the beach they washed up on when you find their oars stuck in the sand. Five oars standing up like saplings. Five oars.”

Jack and Tommy's eyes flared at this. “I'm not gettin' eaten by no blackfella,” said Jack. “You'd better be givin' us more powder than what we got.”

As the little boat was lowered past the planks of the
Governor Brisbane
, Tommy looked up to Boss Davidson. “You be sure to return for us,” he shouted. He looked afraid.

“Four months,” said Boss Davidson. “You be gettin' those seal for me.”

Billhook could hear the sharp patter of Jack as the brothers rowed towards the island. “Of course he'll be back, you dolt. Plenty of skins and oil. Too greedy not to come back.”

He wasn't sure about Samuel Bailey. Bailey never looked frightened. Not even when that wave rose right up from the sea like a fist and punched the whole boat and crew onto the rocks, sucked back and dropped them again onto the barnacles. Barnacles good enough to eat but no good coming towards Billhook's face, straining brine through their teeth. Bailey was the only calm one that day. He lay in the belly of the whaleboat, facing a mess of clouds. He was laughing while everyone was white and silent. And he was laughing when he told Neddy as he found his seat again that he was going to fucken kill him next time he let the boat get that close to the rocks on a swell. He knew what had happened to Neddy's brother on Kangaroo Island and he told Neddy he'd break his arm over his knee, break it off and chuck it to the gloamy-eyed devils that hunted seal too.

His laughing and his curses made the crew lighten after their fright but Billhook could not laugh. There was something in Bailey's way that shivered him. The next morning it was the solstice. One of Neddy's black fingers was but a bleeding stump and he would tell no one what became of it.

The granite cliffs loomed over the whaleboat, streaked black with plant tannins and white with the water of lime. “The Eyes,” said Jimmy the Nail, pointing out a deep pair of round holes in the sheer face of stone. “The Eyes.”

The Eyes stared down at them as they neared the ledge where a crèche of young fur seals lolled. A single clapmatch, nursing the pups while the other seals hunted, rose to her front flippers as the boat inched closer. Two pups played, flashing their teeth and snaking around each other's sleek bodies. Sal's dog barked at the seals and she shushed him with a quick word. On the lee side of the island, the water close to the ledge was flat. Albatrosses and the big gulls waddled over the surface chasing up a school of whitebait. Muttonbirds sheared the water in quick, black arcs. Jimmy and Smidmore raised their guns and shot the clapmatch and one of the larger pups before the rest of the crèche slipped, yelping, into the sea.

“Better off clubbing those big girls,” said Jimmy the Nail as the seal writhed on the rocks, and smirked at the still body of the pup he'd shot. Smidmore rushed to reload, stuffing down wadding and pouring powder from his horn. He sighted again. Billhook and Sal kept their oars sculling at the bow, holding the boat off the rocks. Smidmore's second shot boomed against the island, the bullet sparking on granite and pinging away into the water. He cursed. The seal grunted and squealed beside the dead body of the pup, her chest running with dark blood.

“Take me in,” said Jimmy. He clamped his skinning knife between his teeth and looked around for the waddy. Smidmore handed it to him, silent. Jimmy the Nail nodded and climbed over the barrels and stowed mast and sail to the bow, where he stood with his bare feet clutching the gunwales. Billhook and Sal worked the boat in to where water sucked at the rocks. A small surge and the boat bunted the rocks. When the wood hit stone, Jimmy leapt and landed sure on the slippery ledge. Billhook used his oar to push away and the boatload of sealers stood off to watch Jimmy the Nail work.

“Wind's turning,” said Smidmore. Out to sea, feathery tips began bothering the water. He looked up at the sky. “Jimmy'll be wantin' to flinch that bitch this week.”

After whacking the female seal across the snout, stilling her, Jimmy turned her on one side. He crouched and cut a sure line along the belly. As he cut, the animal's blubber flashed white and then clouded with red. Blood ran over the rocks and into the sea. He peeled back her belly blubber until her guts spilled in silken, colourful heaps over his feet. He continued cutting around the flippers and head until he had a raft of skin and blubber. The seal's peeled body shone red and white. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

“Get that pup aboard,” shouted Smidmore to Jimmy. “Wind's coming up.” He nodded to Billhook and Sal. “Bring her in.”

Sal threw Jimmy a rope and he tied it around the body of the pup. They hauled it in as they would a tuna or shark. Then Jimmy floated the blubber and skin of the clapmatch to the boat. As it rafted closer, Smidmore gaffed at it until it lay draped over the gunwale leaking brine and blood, swilling into the sea that had seeped in since the boat was last bailed.

Jimmy the Nail waited on the edge of the rocks for the boat. By then the wind was blowing her towards the rocks and it
took four oars to hold her off. The bow bashed against stone. Jimmy hurled himself into the boat, landing badly against a thwart. Billhook felt the deep bite of his oar as they struggled to get the boat off the rocks. The bow smacked into granite again. The wind grabbed at the stern and started swinging it around towards the ledge.