It wasn’t Moonface whose eye had met with both of mine. The eye that I saw seeing me was a pleading eye, not of a ghost but a man.

What was the plea?

Was the eye asking me not to see? To forget what I had seen? Or to give help?

I walked on by.

We were three days’ journey away from my home port of Wellington, New Zealand, where I was looking forward to time with family and friends. What came to mind as I walked while being watched, was that after setting out from San Francisco, we heard that a stowaway had been dragged out of the chain locker and put to work mopping galleys and scrubbing the boards – slow on the job because he had busted ribs or something. I hadn’t seen him myself and, the next I heard, he had disappeared. A search was made and the message went out that we must report any sightings. After twenty-four hours the rumour was that the man had gone overboard when we hit rough weather.

Now, I thought, the eye must be telling me to keep walking, keep the secret – which I was more than willing to do. The owner of the eye may have known, as I did, that the way some ships’ officials dealt with stowaways was to throw them overboard before docking. In this way the masters were able to avoid all the red tape and responsibilities to do with landing a stowaway. I’d seen it happen once in my travels and had always wondered if that poor fellow made it to shore or not because the weather was so cold that morning. There were whitecaps on the waves of the harbour and it was barely daybreak.

I’d heard of stowaways being thrown to the sharks or the alligators, or dying in a fumigated hold. I’d been told others had gone mad from drinking salt water and ended up in chains with irons on their feet. I’d seen men arrested and taken away on arrival. The latter happened once in Wellington. It was difficult to tell what would happen now if this poor man was discovered. I didn’t know what kind of heart sat in the chest of the present red- and hair-faced shipmaster, so it was best to keep the secret. A secret can give you musing as you work, something to bring you forward to a clean-up, a smoke, tots and a decent feed. I walked back the way I had come, felt the eye again – the owner of which was afraid of what I might do – seeing me.

Though the man-not-a-ghost was on my mind as I turned in to my dormitory – where mates were already snoring, muttering, cracking their jaws – nothing kept my eyes from slamming themselves shut for the remaining night hours.