Battle Fleet (2007) by Paul Dowswell

ship’s cutter. With him were ten of the crew including myself and Bel, whose campaign to persuade the Captain to go ashore had finally succeeded. Lizzie wanted to go too, but here Evison absolutely refused. Bel was obviously of less concern, and the Captain made it clear I was responsible for her safekeeping. Richard had not volunteered tocome. ‘I had enough of the jungle in New South Wales,’ he said.
    The boat put down on a long narrow crescent of beach bordered by thick vegetation. Above us loomed the smoking summit of a tall volcano. A sharp, acrid smell pierced the air. There was another smell too – rotting human flesh. We found the bodies soon enough. There was a trail of them down to the shore. It looked as if they had been fleeing for their lives. The corpses were hideously burned and blistered. Evison shook his head. ‘The volcanoes – they give off hot vapours, hot enough to kill anyone caught up in them. You can see them coming down the mountain, a big misty blob shimmering in the trees, which burst into flame as they pass.’
    We buried the natives quickly in the sand. Bel joined in with the rest of us. I liked her for that. ‘Every one deserves a burial,’ said Evison. ‘Even these savages.’ Digging the graves wearied us all – the heat sucked the strength from our muscles.
    While Evison and Garrick supervised the others in the finding and felling of suitable timber, Bel and me were sent into the jungle to look for fruit and fresh water with our shipmate Thomas Bagley.
    ‘I should be good at this,’ I boasted. ‘After all that time in the bush in New South Wales.’
    But this wasn’t like the bush at all. It was dank anddripping – a stultifying wet-dishcloth heat that had us all drenched in sweat in minutes. Still, it was a magnificent place, with tall trees reaching a hundred or more feet before their canopies opened to the sky. The flowers were big and their colours garishly bright. Here and there shafts of sunlight poured down like glowing waterfalls, illuminating the dead leaves and moss of the forest floor in dense pools of light.
    My sense of wonder mixed with unease. Everything was too big. We were ants in a land of giants. Another foul smell caught my nostrils.
    We followed our noses. In a forest clearing was the most grotesque plant I had ever seen. It had a flower wider than I could stretch my arms. The five petals had red and white stripes across them, like fat in meat. It stank like a rotting corpse.
    ‘A place like this should be teeming with animal life,’ I thought. It was here, all right, but we could barely see it. Once in a while, a flutter of wings would alert us to a bird flitting from one perch to another. Occasionally we would be distracted by a rustling in the bush, but other than the took-toka-tok call of the birds, all we could hear was the swish of our feet ploughing through the dead leaves on the forest floor.
    I felt something slimy crawl up my leg – a slug-like creature, which I swiftly brushed off. ‘Looked like a leech,’ said Bel.
    ‘Bet you wished you’d stayed on the
Orion
,’ I said to her.
    She laughed. ‘Crikey no. It’s nice to have a change of scenery. This is such a great adventure for me. We both kept pleadin’ to be let off the boat. We could see the Captain weakenin’ … It’s Mrs Evison that wouldn’t hear of it. ’Specially not Lizzie.’ Bel started to mimic her. ‘“Much too dangerous for a young lady.” I said to Evison, I’ve gone all the way to New South Wales and what have I seen? The inside of some of the posher houses of Sydney and the wooden sides of a ruddy ship. I want to have something more to tell about when I get home –’
    An unearthly roar stopped Bel in her tracks. ‘What the devil was that?’ she said and gripped my arm.
    Her fear was infectious. ‘It sounded quite a distance away,’ I said. ‘But if it gets any nearer we’ll climb a tree.’
    Peering through the branches, I caught my breath and a