The ship’s course now set, the frenzy on the upper deck quietened. Once the beating of my heart slowed I raised myself onto my elbows. My first thought was to find you, but you were nowhere to be seen. Another whistle blew and the men of the larboard watch began descending into the hatchways, one after the other. Before I could join them, Icard took me before Captain Marchand, who asked why I had deserted my station. I invented a lie but to little effect. He turned his back on me. “You’ll get what’s coming to you at noon,” he mumbled wearily.

At that moment my punishment was of no consequence. I went below deck and found my hammock and stretched it out in its usual place, hauling myself into it without changing out of my wet clothes. Compounding the weariness of my body was the dizziness of my mind, swimming with novelty and strangeness. Upon crossing into a new body, one takes up the course of a new life, scrambling, at first, to master the mechanism. One is like a weaver who has just sat down at a strange loom, upon which is a carpet already half spun with an unfamiliar weave. Yarns of different colors are already threaded through the spools. One must trust that the skill to continue weaving the carpet is embedded within the very muscles of the fingers, and that the correct sequence will arise of its own accord at precisely the moment it is needed.

Surrounded as I was by strangeness—the strangeness of my body, of the clothes I wore, of my surrounds—sleep eluded me. I lay in my hammock listening to the creaking of the ship and the snoring of the crew, watching slivers of moonlight creep back and forth across the boards with the motion of the water. My mind was beset by questions. What had I done? I’d broken the Law—and why? For your sake, Koahu—impulsively, unthinkingly. And then, from the other end of the ship I heard a man’s voice in the masters’ quarters screaming as if struck by a mighty blow.

Shortly before dawn, the quartermaster woke the midshipmen and the mates while the bosun stood at the main hatchway and barked instructions. “All hands! Larboard watch ahoy!” Shortly after, I smelled charcoal smoke as the cook lit a fire in the galley. For a moment I was at a loss as to what to do, but like an automaton my body stirred into action, storing my hammock, taking a holystone from the hold, climbing the hatchway, and setting to polishing the deck and flemishing the lines. Everything felt habitual and unhabitual at once. At eight o’clock, the bosun’s mate piped breakfast. Most of the crew had slept poorly and were hungover, and we ate our miserable stew of rotten oatmeal in silence.