They fell heavily on him. At once he was soaked, as he had been soaked so often since they had left Hobart Town five days before. Van Diemen’s Land and his whole past life behind him, the unknown and his whole future ahead of him. If he had a future. If the Kitty survived.

Jason worked his way along the slippery deck, free hand snatching at handholds—stanchions, shrouds, the windward rail—all running with water. It was lunacy to be on deck at all in this weather. No matter. Captain Hughes expected a prompt and unfailing response to all his orders and one of them had been to have the cabin boy deliver one pannikin of hot rum every half-hour to the captain’s station beside the helmsman. The cabin boy: meaning Jason, aged fifteen. It was typical of Captain Hughes that he should call him by his function and not by his name, as it was typical to issue such an order at all, disregarding the near impossibility of getting the rum to him in such weather without losing most of it over the side. He demanded it and expected it. Failure would be the cabin boy’s failure, to be punished when the opportunity for punishment occurred.

The weather had been unremittingly foul since the Kitty had put to sea and Jason had therefore had plenty of practice in delivering the precious container of rum. By now he had mastered the art to the point where he spilt hardly any of it and, if Captain Hughes did not praise him, at least he no longer gave him the crack around the head that had greeted his earlier and less successful efforts.

The great world was proving every bit as harsh a place as his brother Tom, slow-witted but five years older and vastly more experienced, had warned him it would be.

Not that Jason cared. He had been hungry for the chance to go with his brother, had warned him that if he did not take him on the Kitty’s next voyage he would stow away anyway.

Cheeky bastard, Tom had called him, but had gone to see the master, all the same. Hadn’t had much choice, really, not with Jason alone in the world. He could have abandoned him, of course, plenty of brothers would have done that and thought nothing of it, but Tom had never been that sort: although Jason, big for his age and with a mind of his own, would no doubt have managed well enough.

It had happened so suddenly: their mother struck down with fever in Hobart Town and dead within a week; his father, liver destroyed by booze, disintegrating before Jason’s eyes.

Tom had been a deck hand on the Kitty for three years. The last voyage had been a long one: up the coast to Sydney and then several times north to Moreton Bay with supplies for the settlers who had been pouring into the area since it had first been opened up three years earlier in 1842. It had been almost a year before the Kitty had re-entered the Derwent River. Tom had returned to find his mother dead, his father dying and Jason on the verge of being alone in the world.

‘Be sure to mind your lip,’ Tom warned him. ‘You always was too smart for your own good, as I recall. Try anything on with the Cap’n, he’ll put you over the side.’

Jason and discipline had never got along. ‘Maybe I won’t come at all, then.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Wild horses wouldn’t have kept him. Home was a tar paper shack in a confusion of other tar paper shacks. Both parents had been transported. Neither had had the energy, ambition or intelligence to rise above their miserable beginnings. All Jason had known had been a confusion of alleyways and mud-filled courts with sewage running in open channels down the middle, the stench of filth, poverty and despair.

It might have been enough for his parents but Jason wanted more from life. If this was home you could keep it.

‘What’s the captain like?’ he asked curiously.

‘He’s all right.’ Tom rubbed his chin. ‘Won’t stand no sass, mind. You jump when he says jump, you’ll be right. Watch out for Lew Bone, though.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Bosun.