The Last Pearl Lugger

• Chapter 1: The Tide of Broome
• Chapter 2: The Copper Helmet
• Chapter 3: Salt and Iron
• Chapter 4: Reading the Currents
• Chapter 5: The Lay of the Reef
• Chapter 6: Below the White Line
• Chapter 7: Whispers on the Deck
• Chapter 8: The Bends
• Chapter 9: Red Mud, Blue Water
• Chapter 10: Shadows of Eighty-Mile Beach
• Chapter 11: The Japanese Graveyard
• Chapter 12: King Tides
• Chapter 13: The Shell Opener’s Blade
• Chapter 14: Passage Through the Dampier
• Chapter 15: Blood in the Air Pipe
• Chapter 16: The Golden Lip
• Chapter 17: Monsoon Signals
• Chapter 18: The Depth Gauge
• Chapter 19: Custom and Country
• Chapter 20: The Rising Swell
• Chapter 21: Broken Compressor
• Chapter 22: The Eye of the Storm
• Chapter 23: Shipwreck Coast
• Chapter 24: What the Ocean Keeps
• Chapter 25: The Final Haul
• Chapter 26: Sunset Over Roebuck Bay

The sea in Roebuck Bay does not simply ebb; it abandons the town. Twice a day, the ocean retreats over the horizon, draining out across miles of rippled flats until the boats sitting in the harbor are left stranded on their bellies in thick, grey-red mud. To a stranger, it looks like a disaster, a fleet of wooden shipwrecks marooned under a blazing Western Australian sun. But to the men who live by the tide, it is merely the breath of Broome, a violent, predictable lungful of saltwater pulled in and blown out across the mudflats of the Kimberley coast.

In the late heat of March 1977, the wooden pearl lugger The Northern Star lay tilted on her port bilge, deep in the mud beside Streeter’s Jetty. The sun had turned her wet timber hull dark, almost black, and the smell rising from the mangrove roots was an ancient brew of sulphur, rotting sea grass, and baked salt.

Kenji Sato sat on the raised skylight hatch of the main cabin, paring a dried mangosteen skin with a small pocketknife. His skin was the color of teak, toughened by thirty years of salt spray, diesel fumes, and the merciless pressure of forty fathoms of tropical ocean. He was fifty-four years old, though his joints, stiffened by nitrogen bubbles and decades of heavy copper diving armor, belonged to a much older man. He wore a patched cotton shirt, shorts stiff with dried salt, and no shoes. His bare feet were mapped with thin white scars where sharp coral and razor-shells had cut him long ago in the waters off Torres Strait and the Rowley Shoals.

Below him, scrambling through the mangrove knees with a heavy iron wrench over his shoulder, came Billy Walker. Billy was twenty-two, lean and lithe, with skin the rich dark hue of the inland red clay where his mother’s people came from. He was broad-shouldered and quick-footed, moving across the slippery blue-grey mud with the effortless balance of someone who had spent his life stepping between shifting gunwales and rolling decks.

"Tide’s turned out past the mangrove point, Ken," Billy called up, wiping a streak of red dust from his forehead with the back of a greasy forearm. "Water’s coming back fast. She’ll be floating in half an hour."

Kenji didn't look up immediately. He sliced off a thin ribbon of dried peel, tossed it into the mud below, and closed his knife with a dry click. "Engine ready?" he asked, his voice low and flat, accented by the soft, clipped cadence of his native Wakayama Prefecture, smoothed over by decades of rough Broome English.

"Cleaned the fuel lines," Billy said, hoisting himself up the timber boarding ladder that dangled over the listing hull. He swung his legs over the rail and let out a long breath, settling onto a coil of heavy manila rope. "Old Gardic compressor’s spitting a bit of oil, but she’ll hold. I packed the gland on the tail-shaft too. She won't leak no more than usual."

"Good," Kenji said. "Leaky boat is fine. Leaky air hose is dead man."

Billy grinned, revealing a row of sharp white teeth. "Ain't gonna let you drown, old man. Who’d show me where the big gold-lip shells are hiding if you go under?"

"Sea bed is full of shells," Kenji replied quietly, looking out toward the shimmering line of blue that was already creeping back across the sandbanks, swallowing the red mud inch by inch. "Problem is finding the ones with pearl inside. Problem is staying alive long enough to pick them up."

The year 1977 was a strange, transitional season for Broome. The town was changing, slipping away from the lawless, multi-ethnic pearling frontier it had been for nearly a century and dragging itself into the modern world. Tarmac roads were slowly covering the red dust tracks that had bound Chinatown together. Plastic buttons had long since killed off the mass market for mother-of-pearl shell, and the lucrative cultured pearl farms up at Kuri Bay and Cygnet Bay had changed the nature of the work entirely. No longer were fleet owners sending out dozens of wooden ketch-rigged luggers to harvest tons of shell merely to be ground up for cutlery handles and coat buttons. Now, the surviving boats were hunting live shell—undamaged, prime specimens of Pinctada maxima, the giant gold-lip pearl oyster—to stock the underwater wire baskets of the culturing technicians.

The industry was shrinking. The old Japanese divers, who had once filled the boarding houses along Dampier Terrace and filled the local cemetery with rows of white headstones marked with Kanji, were mostly gone. Some had retired back to Japan; many more lay beneath the pindan soil at the edge of town, taken by the bends, shark attacks, or the terrifying suddenness of tropical cyclones. Kenji was one of the last of the old deep-water men who remained, a survivor from an era when a diver went down in a heavy canvas dress, lead boots, and a brass copper helmet, linked to the surface by nothing more than a rubber hose and a man pulling on a lifeline.

"Boss was down at the pub earlier," Billy said, pulling a pouch of tobacco from his shorts pocket and rolling a thin cigarette with one hand. "Mr. Mitchell. Saying this might be the last run for The Northern Star. Saying the company’s buying one of those new aluminum twin-hull boats out of Fremantle next year. Hookah gear, diesel winches, air-conditioned cabin."

Kenji spat over the side. "Aluminum," he grunted with mild contempt. "Aluminum doesn't know how to ride a tide. It sits on top of the water like a tin tin-can. Wooden hull moves with the sea. She breathes."

"Maybe so," Billy said, lighting the cigarette and squinting through the blue smoke. "But tin boats don't rot. They don't get eaten by cobra worms, and you don't spend every winter scraping barnacles off 'em in the sun."

"Rot is natural," Kenji said, finally turning his dark, almond-shaped eyes toward the younger man. "Everything rots in the end, Billy. Even us."

The sea was moving faster now. The tide in this part of Western Australia was a monster, rising at nearly a foot every few minutes during the spring tides. The water hissed as it rushed into the gullies and creeks, turning the thick grey mud into a swirling churn of chocolate-colored foam. The Northern Star groaned as the rising sea touched her keel. The heavy wooden timbers strained, timber against timber, creaking like an old house settling in a gale. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the port side began to lift. The angle of the deck flattened out.

Billy jumped down into the narrow waist of the vessel, taking a wooden pike pole and pushing off against the slime-covered timber piles of Streeter’s Jetty to keep the lugger from scraping her paint off as she buoyant again. He was a creature of this coast, born near the Fitzroy River and raised around the salt marshes and lugger yards. His father had been a handyman around the pearling sheds, a man of mixed heritage, while his mother’s people were Saltwater Mob from up toward Cape Leveque. Billy knew the coast not from nautical charts, but from the songs and stories passed down through his family—the places where the sandbars shifted after a big wet season, the deep holes where the sea snakes gathered, and the exact shape of the currents that boiled through the King Sound like a flooded river.

"She's afloat," Billy called out as the hull came level. The lugger gave a gentle, rhythmic roll, her natural balance restored as four feet of seawater filled the creek channel beneath her.

Kenji stood up, his knee joints making a dry popping sound. He walked with a slight limp, the result of a bad dive off Eighty Mile Beach ten years earlier when he had stayed down twenty minutes too long trying to free a trapped net. He had come up too fast, his blood fizzing like warm beer, and spent two agonizing days in a makeshift decompression tank on the beach while the local doctor fed him brandy and prayed. He had survived, but his body never forgot the price of the deep water.

He walked forward to the bow, where the heavy cast-iron anchor winch sat coated in grease and red rust. He checked the hawse pipe and ran his hand along the thick hemp riding line. Everything on The Northern Star was old, but everything was cared for. The boat was a fifty-foot ketch, built in Broome in 1952 from jarrah and white mahogany, designed specifically to handle the brutal tides and sudden squalls of the Northwest shelf. Her bow was high and flared to ride over the steep coastal swell, and her broad beam gave her the stability needed to keep a diver balanced on the sea floor far below.

"Start the engine," Kenji ordered.

Billy nodded and disappeared down the companionway into the cramped, dark engine space forward of the cabin. A moment later, there was the loud, metallic clatter of a hand-cranked starter, followed by a heavy cough of black exhaust smoke blowing out of the side pipe. The old Gardner four-cylinder diesel engine roared to life, settling into a steady, rhythmic thrum that vibrated through the floorboards and sent ripples across the dirty water in the bilge.

Kenji stepped to the wooden wheel in the small, open steering well at the stern. He cast off the stern line, casting a quick glance up at the bank where Chinatown’s tin-roofed stores and old pearling offices were bathed in the late afternoon light.

Broome in 1977 was a quiet place between seasons, but as the tide flooded in, the waterfront came alive. On the shore, a few tourist cars—modern Holdens and Fords—were parked near the shore, their drivers watching the spectacle of the luggers rising out of the mud. A few local Aboriginal kids were jumping off the end of the wooden jetty into the swirling brown water, laughing and splashing in the heat. Further down, near the sun-bleached timber framing of the old pearl-shell sorting sheds, a couple of older men sat on overturned kerosene tins, watching the boat with unreadable expressions. They were retired shell-openers and tenders, men whose working days were done, left behind to watch the last of the wooden fleet pull out into the bay.

"All clear forward!" Billy shouted, dropping the bow line onto the deck with a heavy thud.

Kenji engaged the gear lever. The brass propeller bit into the water, churning up clouds of silt and red mud as The Northern Star edged away from the jetty. She slid out into the main channel of Roebuck Bay, her bow swinging toward the open ocean where the muddy brown water slowly gave way to a deep, brilliant turquoise.

As the lugger cleared the mouth of the creek, the wind met them. It was the dry-season trade wind, coming off the vast desert interior of the continent, hot and smelling of dust and spinifex grass, but cooling rapidly as it blew across the surface of the Indian Ocean. The vessel dipped her shoulder into the first long, gentle swell coming in from the shelf.

Billy came aft, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. He stood beside Kenji at the wheel, looking out past the red sandstone cliffs of Gantheaume Point toward the open horizon.

"Where are we headed first?" Billy asked, leaning against the wooden coaming. "South toward the Beach, or north up Dampier way?"

"North first," Kenji said, his eyes fixed on the horizon where the blue sky met the ocean in an unbroken line. "Dampier Creek bottom is dirty after the rains. Sea needs another week to settle down there. We go to the Shoals first. Clean water. High tide tomorrow morning."

Billy looked down at the deck, then back at the older man. "My uncle says the old spirit men down south don't like people digging up the bottom this time of year. Says the tides are too big. King tides coming up in a couple of weeks."

Kenji offered a faint, dry smile—the rare kind that barely reached his eyes. "Sea doesn't care about spirit men, Billy. Sea doesn't care about Japanese divers or white bosses either. Sea only cares about gravity and wind. You remember that when you're tending my hose. If you look away to smoke your tobacco and the current takes the boat, the sea won't stop to ask who your uncle is."

Billy chuckled, though there was a thread of real respect in his voice. "I don't drop hoses, Ken. You know that. I been holding your rope for three years now."

"Three years is nothing," Kenji said softly. "I dive thirty years. Every time I jump off the ladder, I think maybe this is the time I don't come back up. The moment you think you know the water, that is the day it keeps you."

He eased the wheel half a spoke to port, bringing the vessel's head around to clear the outer reef markers. The red rocks of Gantheaume Point were slipping past to starboard, bright as burning coals against the brilliant white foam of the shore break. Above the cliffs, the old iron lighthouse stood like a lonely white finger pointing at the sky.

This was the beginning of the season—the final season for many of the old wooden boats, though neither man said it aloud. The talk in town had been clear enough. The banks were tightening up credit for the old pearling families; the cost of maintaining custom wooden luggers was rising too high; and the young men coming up didn't want to live on salt beef, hard biscuits, and warm engine-stove water for six weeks at a time when they could get work on the iron-ore ports down in Port Hedland or the oil rigs off the North West Shelf for three times the pay.

The old world was dissolving, disappearing as surely as the red mud flats dissolved under the incoming tide. But out here, three miles off the coast, with the engine beating like a steady heart beneath their feet and the salt spray rising over the bow, the modern world felt very far away.

"Get the diver's dress out," Kenji said, without turning his head. "Check the copper neck-ring. Check the valves. If there is sand in the exhaust valve, clean it with kerosene."

"Right-oh," Billy said. He tossed his cigarette butt into the wake and turned to go below.

Kenji held the wheel with one hand, feeling the familiar, heavy vibration of the timber hull beneath his bare feet. The sun was beginning its long, dramatic slide toward the ocean west of Broome, painting the sky in bands of bruised orange, violet, and pale gold. The tide was full now, deep and powerful, pushing millions of gallons of water past the point. The Northern Star rose and fell on the ocean’s long, deep chest, heading out into the dark water where the shell lay hidden in the deep.

The foredeck of The Northern Star was cramped, cluttered with the heavy paraphernalia of an era that the rest of the maritime world had long since abandoned. Forward of the main hatch sat the gear that kept Kenji alive: the three-bolt copper diving helmet, polished to a muted brassy gleam, the thick canvas diving dress stiffened with salt and dried oil, the heavy lead-soled boots with their bronze buckles, and the iron-framed manual air pump, now retrofitted to run off a small, throbbing auxiliary diesel engine.

Billy hauled the gear out of the dark lazarette, his muscles rippling beneath his sweat-sheened skin. He set the copper dress down on a clean canvas tarpaulin, handling it with a practiced, methodical care. In pearling, carelessness with the dive kit was not a mistake that yielded a second chance. A frayed hose meant a swift, silent death by drowning; a jammed air valve meant the terrifying phenomenon known to divers as "the squeeze," where the massive water pressure at depth could crush a man’s torso up into the rigid dome of his helmet if the air supply suddenly failed.

"Exhaust valve's clear, Ken," Billy said, sitting back on his heels and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. He blew through the tiny, spring-loaded brass fitting on the side of the helmet, listening to the sharp pfft-pfft of the rubber seal. "No sand. Spring’s tight, too."

Kenji stood at the helm, feeling the gentle heave of the open swell as The Northern Star rounded the low red sand-spits of Gantheaume Point. The wind was backing around to the south-east, bringing with it the dry, dusty scent of the vast inland desert, mixed with the cold, bitter tang of deep saltwater. The sun was slipping down toward the horizon, flat and blindingly bright, turning the ocean into a sheet of hammered brass.

"Bring the lead boots," Kenji called over the steady thrum of the engine. "Check the canvas seams around the wrists. Last season down at Wallal, the left cuff was leaking saltwater. Made my skin go red and raw."

Billy picked up the heavy canvas suit. It was a terrifying garment to an outsider—a massive, one-piece rubberized canvas envelope that enclosed the diver from neck to ankle, sealed at the wrists with tight rubber cuffs that pinched the skin white. The neck was surmounted by a heavy, triangular brass corselet, or breastplate, which rested on the diver's shoulders and took the weight of the heavy helmet.

Billy inspected the thick rubber wrist-seals, stretching them with his thick fingers. "Rubber’s still soft enough. I'll put some talcum powder on 'em before you put your arms through. Stop 'em from biting." He looked up at the older man, his brown eyes narrowing against the orange glare of the sunset. "You really gonna go down at the Shoals first light? Tide’s gonna be running like a flooded creek out there."

"Best time," Kenji said softly, his eyes fixed on the distant, pale horizon. "Slack water at dawn. Only forty minutes before the spring tide turns and starts pushing again. In forty minutes, I find ten good live shells, or I find none. But if we wait until midday, the water is like pea soup. Can't see your own hand in front of your face window."

He turned the wooden wheel a fraction, correcting their course. The lugger was cutting through the water at six knots, her heavy wooden bow throwing up a steady curtain of white spray that caught the dying sunlight and turned into fleeting, miniature rainbows.

Billy sat back against the low bulwark, pulling out a small wooden box containing his pipe and a plug of dark twist tobacco. He carved off a few thin shavings with his pocketknife, rubbing them between his palms before stuffing them into the briar bowl.

"My granddad used to talk about the old days out here," Billy said, striking a safety match against the side of the box and shielding the flame with his cupped hands. "Before the engines. When you blokes had four men on the pump handles forward, cranking all day long in the blistering sun till their palms were bloody strips. Said if a man passed out from the heat, the diver down below just felt the air stop, and he had to pull his own line to come up before his lungs burst."

"I pumped those handles," Kenji said flatly. "1942. Before the war took us all away to the camp in South Australia. I was nineteen. Tender’s mate on a boat named The Sea Pearl. Two men on the wheel, ten minutes on, ten minutes off. If you stopped cranking, the diver hit the hull with his iron bar. Clang, clang, clang. That meant 'Pump harder, you lazy bastard, I am suffocating.'"

A quiet chuckle escaped Kenji’s throat—a dry, rasping sound born of too many years breathing compressed, oil-tainted air.

"Now you got the machine," Kenji continued, gesturing with a tip of his chin toward the throbbing little engine forward. "Machine doesn't get tired. Doesn't get heatstroke. But machine can choke on bad fuel. Machine can stop with no warning. A man on the pump wheel... if he sees his buddy in the water, he cranks until his heart stops before he lets his diver die. Machine has no heart."

"That’s why you got me," Billy said, exhaling a plume of sweet, pungent smoke into the sea breeze. "I got a heart, Ken. And I like getting paid at the end of the month. So I ain't letting that engine choke."

They fell into a quiet rhythm, the kind shared by men who had spent years working together in tight, dangerous spaces. The boat rocked rhythmically as she met the longer ocean swell beyond the coastal reefs. Below deck, the old Gardner engine pounded out its dull, reassuring beat: clack-clack-clack-clack.

As the dark crept across the sky, painting the sky in deep indigo and violet, the stars came out with the sudden, startling clarity of the dry season tropics. The Southern Cross hung low over the stern, tilting slowly as the night wore on.

Kenji handed the wheel over to Billy at eight bells. "Keep her two points north of west," Kenji instructed, rubbing the small of his back where the cold salt air always brought out a dull, deep ache in his bones. "When you drop the lead line and hit eighteen fathoms, throw the kedge anchor over. We sleep until four."

"Right-oh, skipper," Billy said, wrapping his large hands around the smooth timber spokes. "I’ll keep an eye out for the iron ore ships coming down from Yampi Sound. Those big bastards don't look out for wooden luggers."

"They don't see us, they run us down," Kenji agreed. "If you see lights, you blow the brass horn. Don't waste time."

Kenji ducked his head and lowered himself down the steep, narrow ladder into the aft cabin. The space was small, smelling of kerosene, damp blankets, dried fish, and the faint, sweet scent of sandalwood that Kenji kept in a small carved box near his bunk. A single gimballed oil lamp swung gently overhead, casting soft, amber light across the curved wooden ribs of the hull.

He sat on the edge of his narrow mattress, unbuttoning his cotton shirt. In the dim light, his chest looked like a map of a long, hard war against the elements. His ribs were prominent, his shoulders thick and bowed from carrying eighty pounds of brass and lead on every dive. Across his right shoulder blade ran a thick, raised white scar where a rogue cable had whipped across the deck fifteen years ago, nearly taking his arm with it.

He reached into his small canvas sea-bag and pulled out a worn, black-bound notebook. Its pages were yellowed at the edges, filled with tight, neat lines of Japanese characters written in dark ink, punctuated by numbers and rough hand-drawn maps of the sea floor. It was his private logbook—a record kept over thirty-five years, detailing the hidden coral patches, the gravel beds, and the deep, silent trenches where the giant gold-lip oysters grew in the dark.

Most of the old divers kept their knowledge locked in their heads, jealous of their secrets until the day they died. But Kenji knew his time on the water was winding down. His body was telling him what his mind tried to ignore: the heavy pressure at forty fathoms was getting harder to shake off. Every time he came up now, his hands trembled for an hour, and his knees felt as though they were filled with crushed glass.

He flipped to a page marked with the date May 12, 1968. There was a rough sketch of a submerged limestone ridge three miles off the Barred Creek mouth. Good shell, the Japanese characters read. Deep water. Heavy current. Many sea snakes. Large gold-lip, clean white lip.

He traced the ink line with a calloused thumb. That patch had yielded fifty brace of prime live shell in three days back when he was diving for the Male & Co. fleet. If the bottom hadn't been swept clean by the big cyclones in seventy-five, there should still be shell down there, sitting in the lee of the limestone ledge out of the main force of the tide.

"One more good run," Kenji whispered to the quiet cabin, his voice barely audible over the sloshing of the sea against the outer planks. "Just one more."

He closed the book, blew out the oil lamp, and lay back in the dark, letting the rhythmic, rolling cradle of the Indian Ocean lift him into a light, uneasy sleep.

At four in the morning, the deck above his head vibrated as Billy cut the Gardner engine back to a low, muttering idle. The sudden change in sound woke Kenji instantly. He was on his feet and pulling on his woolen socks before the boat had even come to a full stop.

When he climbed up onto the deck, the morning was pitch black. The air was cool and crisp, carrying no wind at all. The sea was as flat and polished as a black mirror, reflecting the brilliant, cold glare of the Milky Way overhead. The world felt enormous and utterly silent, save for the gentle lap-lap of tiny ripples against the timber waterline.

Billy was standing near the bow, holding a coiled lead-line. He dropped the heavy conical weight over the side, letting the line run smoothly through his fingers until it went slack. He felt the line with his sensitive fingertips, counting the leather markers knotted into the rope.

"Seventeen fathoms, Ken," Billy called softly, his voice carrying clearly across the quiet water. "Fine sand and broken shell on the bottom. We’re right on the edge of the bank."

"Good," Kenji said, walking forward. He looked up at the stars, checking the alignment of the horizon. "Drop the small anchor. We don't want to drag while I go down. The tide will begin to push in half an hour."

Billy dropped the small iron kedge anchor over the rail. It went down with a brief splash, the rope humming as it ran through the hawse hole until Billy took a turn around the wooden bitt and tied it off. The lugger swung slowly into the invisible, deep-water current, bringing her bow around to face the dark expanse of the open ocean.

"Right," Kenji said, his tone turning sharp and businesslike. "Light the lamp. Start the compressor."

Billy moved with quiet efficiency. He lit the bright Coleman lantern and hung it from the boom, casting a harsh, white glare across the foredeck. Then he stepped to the auxiliary engine, pulled the starter cord, and set the little motor throbbing. The air compressor let out a rhythmic, chugging sound—puk-puk-puk-puk—as it began pumping filtered air into the heavy steel equalizer tank mounted on the engine box.

Kenji sat on the heavy wooden diving seat set into the starboard bulwark. He pulled on a pair of thick, grey woolen long johns—essential protection against the bitter cold that lurked at eighteen fathoms, even in the tropical sea—and then eased his legs into the heavy, rubberized canvas diving dress.

Billy stepped over, taking the thick rubber neck of the suit and stretching it wide so Kenji could drop his body down into the envelope. He helped Kenji shove his arms through the tight wrist-seals, using a dusting of powdered talc to let the rubber slide over the skin without tearing.

Next came the boots. They were massive, brutal things—heavy leather shoes bolted to thick brass soles, weighing nearly twenty pounds each. Billy knelt at Kenji’s feet, sliding the boots onto the diver's thick socks and cinching the heavy brass buckles tight around the ankles.

"Boots tight?" Billy asked, looking up.

"Tight is good," Kenji said. "Check the weights."

Billy lifted the heavy lead shoulder weights—two thick slabs of lead connected by canvas straps that hung over the corselet, one across the chest and one across the back. Each weight weighed nearly thirty pounds. Added to the boots and the brass helmet, Kenji would be carrying nearly one hundred and forty pounds of gear. On deck, it made him a clumsy, slow-moving monster, barely able to lift his feet. But forty feet down, under the tremendous upward thrust of the ocean, the weight would be the only thing keeping him standing upright on the sea floor.

Finally, Billy lifted the copper brass breastplate over Kenji’s head, fitting it down over the wide rubber collar of the dress. He picked up the heavy brass wing-nuts and began screwing them down onto the threaded studs, tightening them with a heavy wooden wrench in a criss-cross pattern to ensure a perfect, watertight seal.

"Air check," Kenji grunted.

Billy took the end of the heavy, black rubber air hose—reinforced with internal wire winding to prevent kinking—and threaded it into the non-return intake valve on the back of the helmet. He tightened the fitting with a spanner, then turned the brass tap on the air tank.

A loud, furious hissing filled the quiet morning air as compressed air rushed into the helmet. Kenji reached up and adjusted the tiny hand-valve on the side of the corselet, checking the airflow. He smelled the familiar, dry, slightly oily scent of compressed air. He nodded once.

"Air is clear," Kenji said. His voice was already echoing slightly inside the unsealed helmet.

Billy lifted the heavy copper dome—the main helmet—and positioned it over Kenji’s head. Before lowering it into the locking ring, he leaned in close to the front glass window.

"Forty minutes, Ken," Billy said, his face framed in the circle of the open helmet hatch. "I'll give you two jerks on the lifeline when the tide starts to pick up. You see anything bad down there, you give me three fast pulls and I bring you up."

"I know the signals, Billy," Kenji said softly, his eyes calm and dark behind the brass frame. "Watch the hose. Don't let it catch on the rudder."

"I'm on it," Billy said.

He lowered the metal dome down over Kenji's head, twisted it ninety degrees until the heavy brass lugs locked into place with a solid clack, and dropped the iron safety pin through the locking ring.

Instantly, the sounds of the outer world died away for Kenji. The sound of the wind, the gentle lap of the sea, and Billy’s voice were replaced by the loud, roaring echo of his own breathing and the frantic, dry thud-thud-thud of the air pouring in through the back valve.

Billy stepped to the front of the helmet, picked up the thick brass face-glass—the circular window that sealed the front of the helmet—and screwed it tight into place.

Kenji was now completely enclosed in his copper and canvas world. He stood up slowly, the massive weight of the suit pressing down on his old spine with a dull, crushing force. He took a heavy, shuffling step toward the side of the boat, where a iron staging ladder hung over the starboard rail into the black, invisible water.

Billy held the lifeline—a heavy six-strand hemp rope braided around the air hose—in his left hand, keeping it taut as Kenji swung his leg over the rail. The heavy lead boots struck the iron rungs of the ladder with a dull clank.

Kenji paused on the bottom rung, the dark, cold sea water coming up to his chest. He looked up through the front glass window. Through the thick, curved glass, he could see Billy leaning over the rail, his dark face illuminated by the harsh white light of the lantern, holding the line with practiced, powerful hands.

Kenji reached for his hip, checking the heavy bone-handled diving knife sheathed at his waist, and adjusted the brass exhaust valve on his helmet with his gloved right hand. He let out a long breath, allowed the air to vent slightly from the canvas suit, and stepped off the ladder into the dark, deep ocean.