I barely said a word to you over the next few weeks, but I thought of you constantly. A crossing is a perilous venture. Each one is slightly different. Some crossings fare better than others, and no two crossings are the same. You had been young, not yet fully initiated. Then there was the musket shot. Perhaps it had interrupted the crossing somehow, cutting it short. And now, though you seemed to remember nothing of your previous life, every night you were racked with nightmares. What was left of you? I longed to speak to you at greater length, but for now I could only bide my time and watch you from afar. With the passage of time you shed your hesitations and became more assured in your work. The memories buried within you of your craft were retrieved by the demands placed upon you, the knowledge returning not all at once but in a drip, one remembrance at a time. Perhaps, I reasoned, your memories of your other, previous life would return to you in a similar way.

There is many an idle hour when a ship is at open sea. A man’s mind, in such slackness, can twist upon itself like old rope. So a sailor devises all kinds of ways to amuse himself, with cards and dice, with song and dance, with the telling of stories and jokes, with the whittling of driftwood and the knotting of lines, and the inventing of designs with which to adorn his body. Since our passage through the South Seas, tattoos had become something of an obsession among masters and seamen alike. Before the crossing Joubert had been esteemed as the finest aboard for his drawings on paper and skin. It was no strange thing for a seaman to approach me asking that I draw a sea monster upon his back, or the name of his sweetheart upon his shoulder. But on occasion a man would come with no specific drawing in mind, simply the desire to feel the satisfying prick of the needle piercing his skin. Whenever I was left at liberty to draw whatever I fancied, I liked to tattoo upon their skin the figure of an eye, such as the eyes that were tattooed on the skins of my island people. After I’d drawn several of them, these tattoos became admired among the crew as a memento of our circumnavigation, only the second such expedition by a French vessel. Even some of the masters came to me, requesting that I ink the design into their skin. Such is the superstitious tendency of a sailor’s soul, they believed that this tattoo was an omen of good fortune.