I spend a great deal of time projecting my thoughts at the ceiling, its lime-washed sky, taunted in memory by episodes I would rather forget. Even cheerful thoughts become infected by the calamity that overwhelmed me. What good a moment’s grace or the perception of felicity when all is perception only or a siren’s endangering music.

Whenever I conjure Van den Broecke’s laughing camaraderie or feel, as if he were present, the firm hand of Brouwer’s approbation, I suffer, too, the calculating censure of Coen’s eyeful silence, the grubby tugging of Medari, and the inconsequence of all those pleasures whose risk now ridicules any pretension I might have had to becoming a great man. Even to catch myself dreaming of Lucretia, to recall the flirtatious chivalry I practised aboard 'Batavia', is to invite such painful dismissiveness that I wince to think how derelict I was in the discipline expected of me.

Yes, I quite forgot myself and my shortcomings in the ripening of my station, in the ease with which I’d learned to command respect. Even setbacks, those professional embarrassments which saw me manoeuvring to sidestep one authority for a higher bench, were easily absorbed in the eventual recognition of my talents. Nothing seriously deflected my calculating progress, my steady rise. Nothing crippling stood in my path to besmirch my standing or outlaw me in the affection of others. Until that night when, hurled from my bunk by the violent concussion, I was cast into sickness of a different tarnish, an unanticipated mortality of spirit from which I would not recover. Scrambling from the coffin of my quarters, a black pandemonium in my ears and illness clinging to my breath, I appeared on deck, ludicrous in my nightclothes, my eyes searching for news, for answers. Throughout the shocked confusion a thick and chilling salt spray gave the impression we were caught amidst the breaching of a thousand whales. The ship had been snared by some unseeable presence, and just as I feared the waters to be rising in the hold, so too did I feel a mounting accusation. From a fever of unsound sleep I had awoken to this nightmare, to my regained but lone responsibility.