Five Parts Dead Read Online Free PDF

place they called Nolan’s Return—the cliff tops above the jetty where a sealer named Nolan used to camp—while their cottages were being built at the Cape. It took the keepers weeks to get all the barrels of oil and flour, plus the timber and other gear up the cliffs. It’s not surprising they didn’t have the time or energy to walk to and from the cottages every day.
    When the captain hiked up to the lighthouse to inspect the builders’ progress, he found the tower was almost complete but the lantern hadn’t been assembled. He seems impatient, frustrated he still couldn’t warn seafarers of the deadly seas. Lives had already been lost at the Cape, or the government wouldn’t have paid for a lighthouse. The delay seems to eat away at the fretting captain.
    Then a schooner arrived with a Marine Board official, dispatched to inspect the new lighthouse. The captain made the bureaucrat climb the cliff and walk uphill to the light station.
    I bet he didn’t have to ask twice for horses after that.
    The day after this visit, the winter turned cruel.
    J UNE 19
Throughout this twenty-four hours strong gales from the NNW varying to the WNW with heavy rain and lightning. Today not able to get anything up the hill owing to the inclement weather.
    J UNE 20
Strong gales from the westward with hail and rain in squalls. All the tents wet and cold and a very high sea at the landing place.
    Examined our stores and found them very much eaten by mice. Salvaged the remaining perishable items and shifted them up to the tents.
    The three families were on the island an entire month before another boat arrived with a horse and dray, hay and extra timber for building a stable and fences.
    How long did it take them to haul the horse up the cliff?
    I pause, trying to sense how the families would have been faring. The men, spending day after day dragging and lifting stores. The women, cooking, striving to keep themselves and their possessions dry and warm—and constantly alert about the Sutton children straying into danger. The cottages must have seemed luxurious after all the weeks they survived in tents.
    Even now I couldn’t believe that the three houses are only metres apart. Why would they build them so close? What if they didn’t get on?
    Sure enough, that’s exactly what the captain records in his elegant handwriting.
    J ULY 12
Mrs Bellows commenced with the assistance of her husband to call me everything but a gentleman. I told Mrs Bellows if she did not keep her slandering tongue from me, I would complain to the Marine Board in order to have them taken from the island. At 8, a strong wind & cloudy from the NNE. At midnight heavy squalls.
    Twenty-four hours later the Bellows household is causing problems again. When called by the captain to help install the lighthouse lantern, Mr Bellows grumbled:
    He told me he had not got his breakfast and
would not work night and day for me or no man.
    How’s that for form? Only three families and one of them won’t pull its weight. The captain must have been ropeable. I mean, if you’re in command, who do you talk to? Where do you go to get stuff off your chest? He only had his daughter and his logbook to confide in. If he wrote to people on the mainland, it might be months before he got a response.
    Then the captain’s life went from bad to worse. On August 12 he wrote:
    At 2pm a sad accident happened to myself.
Coming towards the buildings about two hundred
yards from the lighthouse I tripped over a stump,
pierced my right eye cutting away the lower eyelid.
I am afraid I will lose the sight of the eye.
    I flick through the next few pages. The injury must be pretty bad, judging from the way the captain’s careful handwriting becomes erratic and smudged. He starts cutting corners too, using ‘ditto’ in his weather reports— even letting others compile his precious log. If that isn’t enough proof that he’s