Daniel Rooke was a boy collecting pebbles when Cook had landed in New South Wales, a place almost as far on the globe as you could travel in any direction without starting to come back. Its remoteness was turning out to be its greatest asset. His Majesty had formed the view that New South Wales was ideally suited to swallow the overflow from his prisons.
Midway through 1786, when Rooke was twenty-four, Dr Vickery wrote to him suggesting that the proposed expedition might have need of an astronomer. Rooke did not hesitate, replied the same day.
To Major Wyatt, the commander of Rooke’s regiment—an irritable man whose small knowing eyes missed nothing—Dr Vickery explained why an astronomer, along with the prisoners and the marines, should go to New South Wales. He predicted, he told Wyatt, that the comet of 1532 and 1661 would return in the year 1788. This would be as significant an event as the return predicted by Dr Halley of the comet now named after him. However, unlike Halley’s Comet, the one predicted by Dr Vickery would be visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. The Royal Observatory would be prepared to supply Lieutenant Rooke with instruments, if Major Wyatt would exempt him from ordinary duties.
Rooke suspected that Major Wyatt was probably not entirely convinced of the significance of the comet of 1532, and had only the sketchiest notion of who Dr Halley might have been. But Wyatt was not prepared to argue with the Astronomer Royal.
Rooke reminded himself that New South Wales was a smooth page waiting to be written on. Quadrupeds, birds, ants and their habitations: for the sixteen years since the visit by Endeavour they had gone about their business under the antipodean sun. Now he was being offered the chance to see them, and to be perhaps the only astronomer to record the return of Dr Vickery’s comet.
Ten years before, Rooke knew he would have felt such an opportunity no more than his due. He had been blessed with intelligence, and this prospect offered him the chance to use it. It would have seemed the way things ought to be, one piece of the smooth machinery of the world moving in harmony with another.
Now he did not trust that machine. He did not think he ever would again. Life might promise, but he knew now that while it gave it also took.
Of course he would go to New South Wales. In some faraway place within him where eagerness still smouldered, he even looked forward to it. He bought notebooks and ledgers and experienced the first pulse of pleasure he had felt for a long time, running a hand over the blank leaves that he would fill with the data of this unknown land: the weather, the stars, perhaps the quadrupeds and even the habitations of ants.
Silk’s letter to Rooke, urging him to volunteer, had arrived by the same mail as Dr Vickery’s. Between the lines of the letter Rooke felt the new life breathed into his friend by this windfall. He had already volunteered and already been promoted. First Lieutenant Silk was now Captain-Lieutenant Silk. But rank was no longer the extent of his ambition. Mr Debrett of Piccadilly has promised me, Silk wrote. ‘Whatever you can give us from New South Wales, we will publish.’ Those were his words, and I do not intend to disappoint him!
Silk was no more a soldier than he was himself, Rooke saw. He too had been marking time, waiting for his vocation to become possible. Rooke realised that when Silk told those stories in the mess it was not simply to entertain. For Silk, the making of the tale—the elegance of its phrases, the flexing of its shape—was the point of the exercise. The instinct to rework an event, so that the telling became almost more real than the thing itself—that had been born in Silk the way the pleasures of manipulating numbers had been born in Rooke.
I will not take no for an answer, Silk wrote.
Anne had kept the globe he had made when he was fourteen. It was dusty and something had spattered against South America, but it still rotated.
‘The night sky is different there,’ he said. ‘See the way the earth is tilted? I will see stars there that we never see from here.’
He watched her thinking it through.
‘The moon, you will still see the moon? But upside down?’
She was unsure, he could tell, and was afraid of disappointing him with her stupidity. She was not stupid, only clever enough to recognise the limits of what she understood.
Outside, the rain whispered on and on, a voice just beyond the range of hearing. He got up and went around behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders and feeling the warmth of her against his chest. She spun the tremulous little globe around and around.
‘I will look at the moon every night,’ she said, ‘and think of you looking at it too.’
He could see something droll occur to her as she turned to look up at him.
‘Of course, so that I can see it just as you will, I shall be obliged to stand on my head, but that, my dear and esteemed brother, is a difficulty I am prepared to confront!’
When he took out the red jacket again for the first time he felt a swell of nausea. He could smell in its fabric the sweat of his terror, thought he could smell the gunpowder. He put it on, though—a new jacket would be too great an extravagance—and breathed deep to accustom his nose to being a soldier again.
He had come close to dying. Within half an inch, they had said. But he had been spared, and now this thing was being offered. What it meant he did not know, but he was willing to accept that this was the orbit his life was intended to follow.