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returning to his home in Cheshire. Looking at his pinched face, Rooke did not ask whether it was true his father was a dancing master.
    When his health returned sufficiently, Rooke eked out his half-pay with a little tutoring of dullards in mathematics and astronomy, Latin and Greek, fuming with irritation at their slowness. Anne would come into the parlour when they left and see him glowering into the fire. She never sighed and sympathised the way his mother did. Oh Dan , she would cry, what was the point of being hit on the head, if it did not give you the blessing of being as stupid as the rest of us?
    He would offer her the poker and suggest she might hit him again, until the desired effect was arrived at, and thanked God for such a sister.
    But in the mornings he would wake up in the attic room under the shingles, in the bed that had only ever been meant for a child, and think of the wasted time behind him, and the years stretching ahead: he was twenty-three, and how could he ever again find a life?

D aniel 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 prisonersand 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