Boats everywhere were tooting, honking, blasting their horns; but the Cutty Sark never slowed. It sailed away at full speed, sails all taut-bellied when seen from behind, a beautiful sight. By the time they reached the fallen sailor, the stern of the clipper was low on the water to the east, its masts a cluster of white sail and black rigging, until it disappeared abruptly into another wall of mist.

“What a glorious sight,” one of the men was still repeating. “What a glorious sight.”

“Yeah yeah, glorious, here fish this poor bastard in.”

Bly threw the engine in reverse, then idled. They threw a ladder over the side, leaned over to help the wet sailor up the steps. Finally he made it over the rail, stood bent over in his soaking clothes, holding on to the rail, shivering. “Ah thanks,” he said between retches over the side. Kev and the other crew members got his wet clothes off him, wrapped him in thick dirty blankets.

“You’re a stupid fucking idiot,” Bly shouted down from the wheelhouse. “There you were about to sail the world on the Cutty Sark, and now here you are on The Bride of Faversham. You’re a stupid fucking idiot.”

“I know,” the man said between retches.

The men threw jackets over his back, laughing. “Silly fool, waving at us like that!” All the way back to Sheerness they proclaimed his ineptitude, while getting the bereft man dried and into the wind protection of the wheelhouse, dressed in spare clothes much too small for him. He laughed with them, cursed his luck, described the fall, reenacted coming loose. Back in Sheerness they helped him down into the submerged warehouse, and fed him hot stew, and pint after pint of bitter beer, meanwhile telling the people inside, and everyone who came down the ladder, all about his fall from grace. “Look here, this silly wanker fell off the Cutty Sark this afternoon, the clumsy bastard, when it was running down the tide under full sail to Tahiti!”

“To Pitcairn,” Bly corrected.

The sailor himself, extremely drunk, told his tale as often as his rescuers. “Just took me hands off for a second, and it gave a little lurch and I was flying. Flying in space. Didn’t think it would matter, I didn’t. Took me hands off all the time up the Thames. Oh one mo here, ‘scuse me, I’ve got to go spew.”

“Ah God she was a glorious sight she was, brilliant, really. More sail than they needed of course, it was just to go out in style, but God bless ‘em for that. Such a sight.”