Having lain some miles off during the night, they were under sail again. Captain Sharp had never been to the island before, and was taking no chances. Getting in would be no trouble, as Harry Ball of Supply had lent him Supply’s sailing master, Lieutenant David Blackburn, who knew every kink in the reefs and every rock and shoal offshore.

Because the sun shone in the eyes until it climbed higher into the vault, all that could be seen of the island—three miles by five miles in extent, Donovan had informed Richard—was a dark, disappointingly low mass. No Teneriffe, this. Then, it seemed in a second, its bulk filled up with light. The green of it was blackish and the 300-foot-high cliffs were either dull orange or charcoal. Therefore the place should have looked ominous, brooding; that it did not lay in the sea, shading from purple-blue out where Golden Grove was trying to find a wind to a glowing aquamarine around its coast. That gradually paling water made the island seem as if it grew there as part of some gigantic marine plan, as natural as inevitable.

They were sailing from west to east in catspaws of breathy breeze which came from the southwest, then from the northeast. Two other isles attended the big one: a tiny low isle close in shore bristling with pine trees, and a larger isle perhaps four miles to the south, craggily tall and vividly green save for a few clumps of dark pines. White waves broke at the base of all the cliffs and against some sort of bar in the direction they were heading, but the ocean was quiet and calm.

Golden Grove anchored some distance off the reef where the surf broke in placid flurries; beyond it a lagoon glittered almost more green than blue, and having two beaches, the western one straight, the eastern one semi-circular. The sand was apricot-yellow and merged at its back right into the pines, thinned out by men, and the tallest, biggest trees Richard had ever seen. Amid them along the straight beach lay a small collection of wooden huts.

A large blue flag with a yellow plus was flying limply from a staff very close to the straight beach, on which people were busy manning two tiny boats. Golden Grove’s jollyboat went over the side and across to the reef to meet them; the tide had flooded in sufficiently for the jollyboat to cross the reef into the lagoon, where it would remain. The longboats, said Lieutenant Blackburn firmly, would go no farther than the outside of the coral, there to transfer cargo to the smaller boats for the run to the sand.

One of the two tiny boats approached the ship, a man clad in white, dark blue and gold braid standing in its bow, his powdered wig and hat on his head, his sword at his side. He came aboard, shook Captain Sharp warmly by the hand, and Blackburn, and Donovan, and Livingstone. This was the Commandant, Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, whom Richard had never really seen before. A well-made man of medium height, King had sparkling hazel eyes in a tanned face which was neither plain nor handsome; it owned a firm, good-natured mouth and a large, though not beaky, nose.

The pleasantries over, King turned to the convicts. “Who among ye are the sawyers?” he asked.

Richard and Bill Blackall shrinkingly held up their hands.

King’s face fell. “Is that all?” He toured the ranks of the 21 men, pausing before Henry Humphreys, a big man. “Step out,” he said, and continued touring until he found Will Marriner, another strong-looking man.

“You step out too.”

There were now four of them.

“Have any of ye had experience as sawyers?”

No one answered. Stifling a sigh, Richard found himself, as usual, the one who had to speak in order to save the group from official irritation in the face of silence.

“None of us is experienced, sir,” he said. “Blackall and I know how to saw, though neither of us has worked as a sawyer.” He indicated Blackall with one hand. “I am actually a saw sharpener.”

“And,” Donovan put in quickly, “a gunsmith, Lieutenant.”

“Ah! Well, I do not have enough work for a gunsmith, but I certainly do for a saw sharpener. Names, please.”

They gave their names and convict numbers.

“Numbers,” said King, “are unnecessary in a place owning so few people. Morgan, Blackall, ye’ll head the sawpit—go ashore with Humphreys and Marriner in the coble at once. To start work, not sit about. We have to fill Golden Grove’s holds with timber for Port Jackson before she sails, and losing my only experienced sawyer in a boating accident has meant there is not near enough done. The saws are nigh as blunt as a Scotchman, so ye’ll have to start sharpening this very minute, Morgan. Have ye any tools? We have only two files.”

“I have plenty of tools, sir,” said Richard, and proceeded to do what experience had taught him was politic: ask for what he wanted before ignorance or misinformation burdened him with people he either did not know or did not trust. “Sir, may I take yon Joseph Long? I know him and can work with him. He has not the build for a sawyer and his wits are weak, but he will do as he is told and can be of use at the sawpit.”

The Commandant of Norfolk Island’s eyes went to Joey and lighted upon the dog, clasped in Joey’s arms. “Oh, I say, what a little beauty!” he exclaimed. “A male dog, Long?”

Joey nodded wordlessly, never having been the recipient of a simple remark from an official before. Orders he had heard aplenty, snapped or barked, but never the kind of thing one ordinary man said to another.

“Splendid! We have but one dog here, a spaniel bitch. Does he rat? Say he rats, please?”

Joey nodded again.

“What dashed good luck! Delphinia rats too, so we will have ratting pups—oh, do we need ratting pups!” King realized that the five were still standing watching him, fascinated. “What are ye waiting for? Over the side and into the coble!”

“I always heard that the Navy was mad,” said Bill Blackall as the boat pulled away.

“Well,” said Richard, uncomfortably aware that the two oarsmen, both strangers, could overhear, “ye must not forget that there are but few people here. The Commandant and they must be very used to each other by now. They are probably short on ceremony.”

“Aye, we are short on ceremony, but very glad to see some new faces,” said one of the rowers, a man in his fifties with a Devon drawl in his voice. “John Mortimer, late Charlotte.” He tilted his head at his opposite number. “My son, Noah.”

They did not look a bit like father and son. John Mortimer was a tall, fair, placid-looking man, whereas Noah Mortimer was short and dark—and rather self-opinionated, if his expression was anything to go by. It is a wise man knows his own father.

The coble, so called because it was clinker-built in the manner of a Scotch fishing dinghy, very flat-bottomed, glided across the reef without grazing itself and stroked the mere 150 yards across the lagoon to the straight beach, where some of the surviving members of the community stood waiting: six women, one—the oldest—big with child, and five men whose ages, if their faces reflected their years, varied between shaveling young and grizzled old.

“Nathaniel Lucas, carpenter,” said a man of thirty-odd, “and my wife, Olivia.”

An attractive and intelligent-looking couple.

“Eddy Garth and my wife, Susan,” said another fellow.

“I am Ann Innet, Lieutenant King’s housekeeper,” said the eldest female, one hand a little defensively on her swollen belly.

“Elizabeth Colley, Surgeon Jamison’s housekeeper.”

“Eliza Hipsley, farmer,” said a handsome, strapping girl, her arm protectively about another girl of the same age. “This is my best friend, Liz Lee. She farms too.”

Good, thought Richard, I know where I stand with that pair, as must any man of perception. Eliza Hipsley is terrified at the advent of so many new men, which means that she is not sure of Liz Lee. And Len Dyer, Tom Jones and their like will be hard on them. So he smiled at them in a way which told them that they had an ally. Oh, names! Out of the seventeen women Norfolk Island would now own, five were Elizabeths, three Anns, and two Marys.