The Bends at Broome

• Chapter 1 The Red Dust of Roebuck Bay
• Chapter 2 The Canvas and the Brass
• Chapter 3 The White Australia Act
• Chapter 4 Boarding the Lugger
• Chapter 5 Into the Murky Deep
• Chapter 6 Mother-of-Pearl
• Chapter 7 Whispers in Chinatown
• Chapter 8 The First Bubble
• Chapter 9 Below Twenty Fathoms
• Chapter 10 The Pressure Rises
• Chapter 11 Nitrogen and Pain
• Chapter 12 The Decompression Chamber
• Chapter 13 Laws of the Shore
• Chapter 14 The Master Pearler's Ledger
• Chapter 15 A Diver's Oath
• Chapter 16 Silent Currents
• Chapter 17 Shadows on the Seafloor
• Chapter 18 The Strike of the Bends
• Chapter 19 Alien on Dry Land
• Chapter 20 Rising Too Fast
• Chapter 21 The Cost of Shell
• Chapter 22 Under the Southern Cross
• Chapter 23 The Staged Ascent
• Chapter 24 The Final Dive of the Season
• Chapter 25 Breaking the Surface
• Chapter 26 Beyond the Tide

The tide did not merely ebb at Roebuck Bay; it abandoned the land entirely. For miles, the sea withdrew across the mudflats, leaving behind a glistening, bruised expanse of wet clay under a sky so blue it burned the eyes. On the wooden jetties of Broome, the air smelled of salt, frying pork, horse dung, and the dry, iron-rich red dirt that coated everything from the brim of a man’s hat to the inner crevices of his boots.

Kenji Sato stood by the timber piling of the main pier, his linen shirt already sticking to the small of his back despite the early hour. He was twenty-three years old, thin-framed but wiry, with hands hardened by hemp rope and the iron handles of hand-cranked air pumps. He had arrived from Wakayama Prefecture two seasons ago, carrying a canvas bag, a pair of canvas trousers, and an abiding understanding of how to hold his breath. But holding one's breath was for the naked divers of the old days, the men who plunged for a minute or two to snatch a single shell from the shallows. In 1912, the business of pearling demanded brass helmets, heavy lead boots, and the willingness to walk along the dark bottom of the ocean while men on the surface pumped air down a rubber hose.

"Watch your feet, Sato," a voice barked in English.

Kenji stepped back just as a heavy wooden crate slammed onto the planking. The crate bore the stencil of the Murrell & Sons Pearling Company. Inside were glass chimneys for kerosene lamps, tin cans of corned beef, and coil upon coil of fresh hemp line. The man who had dropped it was a tall Australian deckhand named Cooper, whose skin was tanned to the color of boiled leather and whose neck was perpetually covered in a fine sheen of red dust.

"Sorry, Cooper-san," Kenji said, keeping his voice light and even.

Cooper grunted, wiping his forehead with a filthy sleeve. "Heat’s going to be a bastard today. The luggers won't get off the mud until two o'clock. You seen the skipper?"

"He is at the pearling master’s office," Kenji replied, pointing toward the corrugated iron buildings that lined the shore. "Talking about the crew."

Cooper spat into the mud thirty feet below the pier. "Aye. Crew. As if there’s any choice."

He walked off toward the warehouse, his heavy boots thumping against the Jarrah planks. Kenji turned back to face the bay. Floating out in the deeper channel, resting on their own shadows in the clear water, sat dozens of two-masted luggers. Their wooden hulls were painted white or tarred black, their rigging standing sharp against the horizon. They looked like a fleet of ghost ships waiting for the water to return and bring them back to life.

Broome in 1912 was a town built entirely on the appetite of the western world for buttons and hairbrush handles. The lustrous inner shell of Pinctada maxima—the mother-of-pearl—was what paid for the iron roofs, the gin imported from England, and the passage of thousands of men from Japan, Koepang, Malaya, and the Philippines. The pearls themselves, the round, perfect gems that made men rich overnight, were merely a bonus, a streak of luck tucked inside the fleshy mantle of a sea creature. It was the shell that kept the town alive, tons upon tons of it, shipped out in wooden crates to London and New York.

Kenji pulled a small, folded piece of paper from his pocket. It was a letter from his mother in Taiji, written in neat, vertical characters. She asked if he was eating well, if the ocean in the south was as cold as the sea off their home village, and whether he had saved enough money yet to buy a share in a fishing boat. He hadn't answered her last letter. He couldn't explain to her that the ocean here was not cold, but warm as bathwater on the surface and ice-cold at twenty fathoms. He couldn't explain that the money was good, but every pound earned was weighed against the darkness beneath the hull.

A shadow fell over him. It was Hayato, an older diver from the same district in Japan. Hayato was forty, which made him an old man in the pearling fleet. His spine was slightly bent, and he walked with a pronounced limp—the souvenir of a bad lift off the coast of Ninety Mile Beach five years earlier.

"You are staring at the mud again, Kenji," Hayato said in Japanese, his voice low and raspy from years of breathing stale compressed air.

"I am waiting for the water," Kenji answered.

"The water will come when it wants to. It doesn't care about your schedule, nor does Master Murrell." Hayato leaned against the railing and offered Kenji a hand-rolled cigarette made of cheap tobacco. Kenji took it, and Hayato produced a match, striking it against the rough timber. "The town is full of policemen today. Did you see them by the Customs House?"

"I saw two men in uniform," Kenji said, taking a drag. The smoke was harsh, burning his throat. "Customs officers?"

"Sub-inspectors," Hayato grunted. "They are checking the papers of every Asiatic coming off the coastal steamer. They have new books. Big ones with red covers. They write down your name, your age, the shape of your nose, and how many teeth you have missing. Then they make you sign an exemption certificate."

"Exemption from what?"

"From being here," Hayato said with a bitter laugh. "The law says Australia is for white men now. The Parliament in the south passed the papers years ago, but they cannot dive for shell. They tried it, remember? Sent those white divers from England three years back. Deep-sea men from the Royal Navy."

"What happened to them?" Kenji asked, though he already knew the story. Every diver in Broome knew it.

"Two died within a month," Hayato said flatly. "The third refused to go down past ten fathoms. Said the water was cursed. So the government lets us stay, but only on paper. We are exempt from the law because they need our lungs and our legs. But every season, the paper gets smaller, and the rules get longer."

They stood in silence for a moment, watching the red dust swirl down the main street of the town. Chinatown lay just beyond the jetty—a bustling grid of tin shacks, gambling dens, noodle shops, and boarding houses. It was a world entirely separate from the neat wooden bungalows of the white master pearlers, which sat up on the hill surrounded by wide verandas and tropical palms. In Chinatown, the air was filled with the scents of dried fish, soy sauce, and burning incense. In the European quarter, it smelled of freshly cut lawns and starch. But here on the jetty, the two worlds collided in a scramble for labor and profit.

A sharp whistle blew near the foot of the pier. A middle-aged man in a sweat-stained duck-cloth suit and a wide-brimmed pith helmet was waving his cane at them. It was Thomas Murrell, owner of five luggers, including the Emu, the vessel Kenji was engaged to dive on for the coming season.

"Sato! Hayato!" Murrell shouted, his voice carrying over the creak of the timber. "Get down here! The storeman needs those air hose coils checked before we load."

"Hai, Master," Hayato called back, straightening his posture as best he could.

They walked down the long ramp to the shore, their boots crunching into the dry sand where the pier met the land. The heat hit them like a wall once they left the breeze of the open bay. It radiated off the ground, carrying the iron smell of the soil into their noses and eyes.

Murrell was wiping his neck with a handkerchief as they approached. He was a practical man, neither excessively cruel nor overly generous. To Murrell, a diver was a piece of specialized equipment—expensive to replace, prone to breaking if mishandled, but essential for turning a profit.

"The inspector cleared your indentures this morning, Sato," Murrell said, looking at Kenji over the rim of his spectacles. "You're bound to the Emu for twelve months. Wages are five pounds a month base, plus two pounds ten shillings per ton of shell brought up. Standard lay."

"Thank you, Mr. Murrell," Kenji said in English.

"Don't thank me yet. The price of shell is down in London. If you bring up trash—wormy shell or young stuff—it comes off your lay. And keep away from the hotel on Robinson Street. The constable is looking for an excuse to lock up anyone without a white slip after sunset."

"I stay in Chinatown," Kenji said softly.

"Good. See that you do." Murrell turned to Hayato. "Your hose has a patch on the second section, Hayato. I had the smith vulcanize it yesterday. You check it yourself before you take the boat out past the bar. I'm not paying for another suit if you drown yourself in fifteen fathoms."

"I check it," Hayato replied, his face expressionless.

Murrell nodded curtly and turned toward his office, his heavy white shoes leaving shallow impressions in the red dust.

Kenji looked back toward the sea. The tide was beginning its turn. Miles out, a thin blue line of water had appeared on the horizon, moving slowly back toward the baked clay of the bay. In a few hours, the mud flats would vanish beneath six fathoms of churning tide, the luggers would float upright, and the fleet would begin its long crawl out into the Indian Ocean.

Kenji reached into his pocket and touched his mother's letter once more. He felt the coarse paper between his fingers, then let go. He picked up a heavy coil of red rubber hose from the dock deck, hoisted it over his shoulder, and walked toward the warehouse, his boots turning the red earth into small puffs of dust that drifted away on the dry afternoon wind.

The warehouse smelled of vulcanized rubber, Stockholm tar, and stale sea salt. It was a long, low shed built from corrugated sheet iron that absorbed the morning heat until the air inside felt as thick as warm porridge. Light entered in sharp, slanted bars through narrow louvers high up on the gables, illuminating millions of dust motes dancing over rows of wooden shelves and heavy workbench tables.

Kenji walked past stacks of timber oars and iron anchors toward the diving gear bay at the rear of the shed. Hanging from timber beams by heavy iron hooks were the suits—the "dresses," as the pearling masters called them. Empty of men, they looked like collapsed, water-logged giants suspended in mid-air.

He reached out and smoothed his palm down the chest of a canvas suit. The material was thick double-twill canvas with a layer of natural rubber vulcanized between the inner and outer fabric. It was stiff, cool to the touch, and unyielding. If a man did not take care of his dress—if he let it dry out in the direct glare of the salt sun or failed to rinse the brine from the seams—the rubber inside would crack. A cracked dress at fifteen fathoms meant a slow, freezing leak that would fill your boots before you could signal the tender to pull you up.

"Not that one," Hayato said, stepping up beside him. He carried a wooden crate containing small brass fittings, grease tins, and spare leather washers. "That's the suit Yamada wore when he tore his shoulder open on the reef off Gantheaume. See the seam along the collar?"

Kenji leaned closer. A dark, jagged patch of freshly vulcanized rubber covered the left shoulder of the gray canvas.

"Is it sound?" Kenji asked.

"Sound enough for a shallow dive," Hayato grunted, setting his crate down on a bench with a heavy wooden clatter. "But Murrell wouldn't give Yamada a new one. Said Yamada tore it through his own carelessness by getting his line fouled in a coral brain. So Yamada had to pay the smith five shillings for the rubber patch out of his own lay."

Hayato pulled a pair of heavy brass helmets from beneath a work table. The helmets were massive things, made of spun copper coated in tin, fitted with thick brass faceplates and three circular windows of glass nearly half an inch thick. Mounted on the side of each bonnet was an exhaust valve—a small spring-loaded brass knob that a diver adjusted with his chin or his thumb to regulate the air pressure inside the suit.

Kenji took his assigned helmet, number four, and lifted it. It weighed nearly thirty pounds on its own. Coupled with the brass breastplate—the corslet—and the lead boots and weighted chest pieces, a diver carried more than one hundred and fifty pounds of iron, lead, and brass on his shoulders before his feet even touched the water. On land, under the burning sun of Roebuck Bay, it was an crushing burden that made a man double over and gasp for air. Under forty feet of seawater, that same weight turned a man into a ghost, light enough to float across the seabed on his toes.

He set the helmet down on the workbench and unthreaded the main view-glass, the circular brass bezel that screwed over the front port. He brought the glass up to his eye and turned it toward the light. It was clear, free of scratches or cloudiness.

"Check the non-return valve," Hayato said, without looking up from his own helmet. He was busy scraping old tallow out of the screw threads of his corslet with a small brass spatula.

Kenji turned the helmet around. On the back of the neck section was the inlet elbow where the air hose attached. Inside that elbow sat a tiny, spring-loaded leather valve. It was the single most critical piece of brass on the entire boat. Air was forced down the hose from the pump on deck, pushing the small valve open to enter the helmet. If the hose burst at thirty feet, or if the pump crew stopped cranking, the valve snapped shut instantly under the surrounding water pressure. If that valve failed or jammed open with a grain of sand, the pressure of the ocean at twenty fathoms would force the air back up the hose, and the atmospheric pressure would crush the diver's body into his own brass helmet like soft meat squeezed through an iron funnel.

Kenji blew hard into the inlet fitting. The valve held tight against his lungs. He pressed it inward with his finger, feeling the stiff spring yield, then released it. It snapped back into place with a sharp, reassuring click.

"It holds," Kenji said.

"It holds now," Hayato muttered. "It holds in a dry shed. What about after forty hours in salt water? What about when the leather gets soft and water-logged?" He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small piece of dried shark skin, and began rubbing the rubber neck-flange of his own dress to roughen it up so the brass corslet would seat without slipping. "Never trust the gear just because it worked yesterday, Sato. The sea doesn't keep memories."

A shadow filled the wide doorway of the warehouse. It was Kuma, the Japanese tender who had been assigned to the Emu for the coming season. Kuma was thirty, broad-shouldered, with thick, knotty forearms from years of hauling thick Manila hemp line out of the water. A tender’s job was to hold the diver’s life in his hands. He stood on the narrow deck of the lugger for ten or twelve hours a day, holding the lifeline in his right hand and the air hose in his left, feeling every movement of the diver along the sea floor through the vibrations in the rope. A good tender could feel when a diver stumbled, when he reached down to pick up a shell, or when his breathing became panicked and rapid.

"The air pump is on the cart," Kuma said, wiping his brow with a greasy rag. "Cooper and the Koepanger boys brought it up from the repair yard."

Kenji and Hayato followed Kuma out into the glaring sunlight behind the warehouse. A two-wheeled handcart sat in the red dirt. Mounted on it was a heavy, polished teak box with brass corner fittings—a Siebe Gorman double-acting, two-cylinder air pump. It was the heart of the lugger's operations.

Cooper was standing over the pump, a wrench in his hand, adjusting one of the large cast-iron flywheels mounted on either side of the box.

"She's turned over twice," Cooper said, looking up at Kenji. "Replaced the leather buckets on the pistons last week. You want to test the pressure?"

"Yes," Kenji said.

Cooper nodded to two young Koepang men—deckhands from the Dutch East Indies who served as the pump turners. Their job was the most relentless physical labor on the boat. For six to eight hours at a time, two men stood face-to-face over the box on the narrow deck, turning the iron handles of the flywheels in a rhythmic, monotonous circle to keep a steady stream of air flowing down to the diver below. If they slowed down, the diver suffocated; if they stopped, he died.

"Turn," Cooper ordered.

sequence of heavy mechanical thumps echoed from inside the wooden box as the two turners leaned into the handles. Thump-clack, thump-clack. The iron flywheels spun, their brass counterweights flashing in the sun.

Kenji walked to the end of the long red rubber air hose connected to the pump’s output manifold. He held the brass coupling to his ear. A strong, steady jet of dry air whistled out of the metal pipe, smelling faintly of clean engine oil and warm leather.

He folded the hose over itself, crimping it tightly with both hands to block the flow.

The sound of the pump changed immediately. The iron flywheels slowed, and the two turners groaned, straining their shoulder muscles against the sudden resistance. The pressure gauge mounted on the teak box flickered, the needle rising steadily from zero to twenty, thirty, forty pounds per square inch.

"Hold it!" Cooper shouted to the turners.

The turners locked their arms, holding the handles still against the compressed air trapped inside the cylinders and hose. Kenji listened intently. There was no hiss, no whisper of escaping air along the length of the red rubber tube. He held it for ten seconds while the needle on the gauge remained frozen at forty-five pounds.

Kenji released the crimp. The trapped air burst out with a loud whoosh, and the flywheels spun forward freely again.

"Good pump," Kenji said, nodding to Cooper.

"Aye," Cooper said, wiping the grease from his wrench onto his trousers. "She’s a good engine. Better than the old single-cylinder cast-iron tub we had on the Mary Rose. That one used to pump half a cup of oil straight into the diver’s helmet every time the piston hit the top of the stroke. Old Suzuki was down there coughing up black sludge for three days after a dive."

Cooper leaned against the wooden frame of the cart, pulling a tobacco plug from his pocket and biting off a chunk. "You're taking the deep water off the Eighty Mile Beach this year, aren't you, Sato?"

"Master Murrell says we go south first," Kenji said.

"Nasty bottom down there," Cooper observed, chewing slowly. "Lots of sponge and black coral. Easy to get your line fouled if the tide catches you. And the grey nurse sharks are thick as flies near the drop-off."

"Sharks do not bother us," Hayato said, walking out from the shed carrying his own copper helmet under his arm. "A shark is curious, but he does not like the bubbles. When the exhaust air bursts out of the valve, it makes a big sound under water. Bo-bo-bo-bo. It frightens them away."

"It's not the sharks you need to worry about anyway," Cooper muttered, looking toward the main town street where the dust was rising behind a horse-drawn buggy. "It's the water pressure. My brother was on a lugger out of Thursday Island back in '06. Saw a man come up from eighteen fathoms too quick because he thought he saw a tiger shark. Came up like a cork out of a bottle. By the time they hauled him over the gunwale, his legs were drawn up to his chin and he was screaming so loud you could hear him over the wind."

The air fell quiet for a moment, save for the rhythmic thump-clack of the pump turners easing the handles back to their resting position.

Kenji knew the story. Every diver knew twenty stories like it. They called it the "paralysis," or "the bends," or simply "the strike." It hit without warning after a man climbed back onto the warm deck of the boat. Sometimes it was just a dull ache in the shoulder or a stiffness in the knee. Other times, it was a sudden, violent knot in the belly that doubled a man over in agony, followed by numbness in the feet that crept upward until the lungs forgot how to expand and the heart stopped beat by beat.

No one understood quite why it happened. Some of the white doctors in town said it was caused by cold water rushing into the diver’s ears; others claimed it was due to exhaustion, or bad blood, or staying under the mud too long on a full stomach. The old Japanese divers said it was the ocean taking its toll—that every foot of water above your head was a weight that squeezed the life out of your body, and if you pulled away from the sea too fast, it reached up and snapped your spine to keep you there.

"Enough talking," Hayato said sharply, setting his helmet down on the cart. "The tide is coming back in. The water is already at the foot of the piles."

They began loading the heavy wooden crates onto the cart. Beside the air pump sat the canvas dresses, folded neatly into oiled canvas bags to keep them dry; three pairs of boots made of thick cowhide nailed to heavy lead soles, each boot weighing twenty pounds; two chest weights made of solid lead slabs that hung from hemp ropes over the shoulders; several spare lengths of rubber hose wrapped in canvas sleeves; and wooden boxes filled with tools—spanners, brass scrapers, small iron bars for prying recalcitrant shells off the stone, and tins of beef tallow for greasing the threads.

Kenji picked up one of the lead boots. The brass toe-cap was gouged and scratched from hundreds of hours of scraping against limestone reefs and granite boulders on the seafloor. He turned it over. The bottom of the lead sole was worn smooth in the center where the diver's weight concentrated as he trudged through the mud.

He thought of his first dive two years ago. The terrifying moment when the tender slid the heavy brass helmet over his head and turned it ninety degrees until it locked into the corslet with a dull, metallic clack. The sudden sound of his own breathing, trapped inside the small copper dome. The blinding darkness as the view-glass was screwed down tightly from the outside, sealing him away from the sun, the wind, and the world of living men. And then the splash, the cold rush of green water over the front port, and the long, slow descent down the weighted rope into the murky gray silence below.

"Sato," Kuma called out, grabbing the handles of the handcart. "Take the back wheel. The dirt is soft near the pier."

Kenji took his position by the heavy wooden wheel, pressing his shoulder against the iron rim. Together, the four men—Japanese divers and Koepang hands—pushed the heavy cart out of the shed's shade into the glaring red sunlight of the yard.

The main street of Broome was coming alive as the tide returned. Wagons hauled by teams of bullocks creaked through the red dust, carrying sacks of flour, wooden cases of kerosene, and iron drums of fresh water down to the shore. Group of men stood under the wide verandas of the tin-roofed stores—white pearling masters in clean linen suits and pith helmets, Malay sailors wearing colorful sarongs, Chinese merchants with long waistcoats and ink-stained fingers, and Japanese divers in canvas trousers and wide-brimmed straw hats.

As they pushed the cart past the Japanese Boarding House on Sheba Lane, an older man sitting on a low wooden bench raised his pipe in greeting. It was Taniguchi, a retired diver whose right arm hung limp at his side, withered to the bone from a case of the bends fifteen years earlier.

"Going out, Sato?" Taniguchi called in the Wakayama dialect.

"Today, Taniguchi-san," Kenji replied, pushing hard against the cart wheel as it bit into a patch of deep sand.

"Bring back big ones," the old man said, his eyes half-closed against the dust. "The master is paying good lay for double-A shell this year. Don't waste your breath on the small buttons."

"Hai," Kenji said.

They reached the top of the ramp leading down to the jetty. The bay was transformed. The barren expanse of gray mud that had stretched for miles only two hours before was rapidly vanishing beneath a churning, turbulent flood of pale green sea water. The tide was rushing into Roebuck Bay with incredible force, rising an inch every few minutes, swirling around the timber pilings of the pier with a heavy, gurgling sound.

Out in the channel, the luggers were already riding high on their moorings. The Emu sat near the middle of the fleet, her black wooden hull swaying gently as the current pulled at her anchor chains. Her two tall wooden masts creaked against the sky, her rigging tight and ready.

A small wooden dinghy pulled up to the foot of the jetty stairs. On the thwarts sat Master Murrell, his face red from the heat, his white suit stained with red dust around the knees.

"Get that gear aboard the tender boat first!" Murrell shouted up to them, gesturing with his cane toward the heavy air pump crate. "Careful with the pump, Cooper! If you drop that engine in the salt mud, I'll take the cost out of your wages for the next three seasons!"

"She won't drop, Mr. Murrell," Cooper muttered under his breath, signaling to the Koepang deckhands to grab the lifting ropes.

Kenji helped lift the heavy teak box containing the air pump down the slippery timber steps of the jetty. The wood was slick with wet green algae left behind by the receding water. Step by step, their boots slipping on the wet Jarrah, they lowered the mechanical heart of the boat into the stern of the waiting rowboat.

When the pump was secured, Kenji stepped back onto the lower landing of the pier. He looked down at his hands. They were stained red from the iron dust of the town, but as a stray splash of sea water washed over his fingers, the red clay dissolved, revealing the pale, tough skin beneath.

He looked out toward the open horizon beyond the headland of Gantheaume Point. Far out past the shallow reefs, where the sea turned from pale green to deep, ink-black blue, lay the pearling grounds. In a few hours, the sails would be raised, the anchors weighed, and the long, dark work of the season would begin. He took one last deep breath of the hot, dry land air, smelling the eucalyptus and the dust, before turning back to load the canvas suits.