The Sea Inside

well treated. James was assigned to Captain John Montagu, ‘on loan’, and worked as a carpenter, biding his time. Men serving seven-year sentences such as his could apply for a ticket-of-leave after four years’ good behaviour.
    Unfortunately, my cousin did not behave himself. On the morning of 7 November 1831 he was found drunk in a public place, for which he was sentenced to twenty-five lashes – a punishment that could tear the flesh from a man’s back. Luckily for James, the sentence was suspended (possibly because Montagu was also justice of the peace). Four years later, on 27 July 1835, he was found guilty of another misdemeanour, solemnly inscribed in the ‘Black Book’ of convicts’ records: ‘Indecent conduct in a Public Street and exposing his Person while Making Water.’
    James’s latest indiscretion earned him a suspension of his ticket-of-leave, which had been awarded in honour of the Queen’s birthday that year. But he did not learn from his foolish ways. On 25 July 1836, a third infraction is recorded under his name: ‘Misconduct in being in an uninhabited house with a female prisoner after hours.’ James had the luck of the devil, or perhaps a certain charm. For this assignation he was jailed for fourteen days, his ticket-of-leave once more suspended.
    The female prisoner was Sarah Worth, an auburn-haired, freckle-faced young woman from Cheshire who, along with her younger sister Mary, had been transported in 1831 for stealing clothes. In November 1836, his freedom restored, James was given permission to marry Sarah. They lived in Cascade Street, Hobart, and went on to have one child, Ellen. Sarah died in Hobart in 1852, but James lived to the great age of ninety, having moved to Corowa, New South Wales, where he died, never having returned to England, in 1891.

    Orion wheels high overhead, but here his sword points upwards. This is a place of beauty and unease. I’m further south than I have ever been.
    Hobart is a frontier town, swept by polar winds. Down at the quayside, bright-orange icebreakers arrive, bringing back scientists dazed by their first glimpse of anything other than whiteness for half a year.
    I leave my room in a former whaling captain’s house and walk out onto a dark street just before dawn. At the end is a circular close, lined with low cottages. It might be an ordinary suburb, if not for the fact that these were also homes for whalers, built by convicts from convict bricks. As the sun rises, the air is so clear and unfiltered by pollution that the distant mountain seems to speed towards me. The empty streets turn back time.
    I swim from an urban cove, reluctant to push out into water once inhabited by whales – the southern rights or black whales, massive, ponderous cetaceans that came up the Derwent River to their age-old mating and calving grounds. I’ve watched these enormous animals, or at least their northern cousins, rolling around one another within sight of the Cape Cod shore, so engaged in their sensual play as to be ignorant of the human spying on them. Such self-involvement made it easier for their ancestors to be slaughtered in their thousands. Whaling was the commercial foundation of the Antipodes, closely allied to the same process that saw its islands become a convenient dumping ground for Britain’s moral rejects.
    In 1804, David Collins – a naval officer who had been sent to settle a new penal colony on Van Diemen’s Land, having been fervently lobbied by Bentham to put his Panopticon into practice there – had written to Joseph Banks from Hobart, telling him that the river was full of whales, so many that three or four ships could have filled their holds with oil. Later that year the adventurer Jorgen Jorgensen was sailing as first mate on the English whaleship
Alexander
when he claimed to be the first to kill a whale in the Derwent.

    Had its brothers and sisters been warned by the violent death to which their near relation was thus subjected, and avoided the fatal spot for the future, I would have little hope of living in the grateful remembrance of future whalers; but the contrary is the case, for the destruction of one apparently attracted many hundreds of others to crowd up and incur the same fate, and the rising city of Hobart Town is yearly and rapidly becoming enriched on their oleaginous remains.
    The estuary was so full of whales that it was dangerous to navigate the river, and the governor complained of being kept awake by