The charming title of this book is a quotation from The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe. It's rather fitting, considering it's about four convicts who escape from a Norfolk Island prison in the early 19th century and survive a period on the lam in Sydney, only to find themselves cast away on one of the Snares Islands, 200km south of the South Island.
This inhospitable island is really only suitable for seals and penguins, yet these four convicts are deposited on it with a cooking pot and a few potatoes, which wisely they plant. The captain of the ship didn't have food enough for stowaways but promised to be back within the year to collect them - and their only real instruction while on the island, aside from staying alive, is to try seal culling.
A decade later they are rescued, but it's the intervening years that form the narrative, during which time alliances form and relationships fracture.
Based on a true story, the four men do whatever they must to survive on this Godforsaken island at the bottom of the world.
One takes the role of leader and is also a dab hand at clubbing seals; another cooks, doing what he can with the monotonous food sources; a third declaims and brags and minces about while dabbling in tasks; and Bloodworth, our narrator, collects firewood and sews clothes from seal skin - a vitally important role. Liberated yet hardly free, bit by bit their stories emerge and sometimes, even, confessions are made.
To stay sane, Bloodworth spends a lot of time away from the camp, studying the natural world, which he finds fascinating, but the others do not like this. They find it queer and start to accuse him of things - of going mad, or plotting a revolution. And when he steals a few green potatoes in the hopes of getting some sort of high, the others take advantage of his transgression and punish him, confining him to a solitary cell, a hole dug in the ground. Despite them all being convicted prisoners, the moral high ground is greedily taken.
