Baby J – her baby no longer – disengaged himself from her arm. ‘I shall go on my own account,’ he said stiffly. ‘I shall not wait for someone to send me.’

The ship was in mid-river now, the sails which had been slack when sheltered in the dock flapped like sheets on washing day. Elizabeth gripped her son’s arm.

‘He is old to go venturing,’ she said anxiously. ‘So far, and into such regions. What if he is taken ill? What if they get lost?’

‘Not he,’ J said with scorn. ‘But when I travel I shall go to the Americas. A boy at school has an uncle there and he has killed hundreds of savages and is planting a crop of tobacco. He says that a man who wants land can just cut it from the forests. And we have our land there. Father is going in the wrong direction, he should be going to our lands.’

Elizabeth’s eyes were still on the ship which was picking up speed and moving smoothly downriver. ‘It’s never been owning land for him,’ she said. ‘Never building a house or putting up a fence. It has always been discovering new things and making them grow. It has always been serving his lord.’

J pulled at her arm. ‘Can we have some dinner before I have to go back?’

Elizabeth patted his hand absently. ‘When he’s gone,’ she said. ‘I want to see the ship out of port.’

J pulled away and went to the waterside. The river was sucking gently at the green stones. In the middle of the water, unseen by the boy, a beggar’s corpse rolled and turned over. The harvest had failed again and there was starvation in the streets of London.

In a moment Elizabeth joined him. Her eyelids were red but her smile was cheerful.

‘There!’ she said. ‘And now your father gave me half a crown to buy you an enormous dinner before we take the wagon home.’

John watched from the deck of the ship as his wife and son grew smaller and smaller, and then he could no longer pick them out at all. The sense of loss he felt as the land fell away was mingled with a leaping sense of freedom and excitement as the ship moved easily and faster and the waves grew greater. The voyage was to take them northwards, hugging the coast of England, and then eastwards, across the North Sea to the high ice-bound coast of Norway, and then onwards to Russia.

Tradescant was as much on deck as any of the ship’s watch, and it was he who first spotted a great fleet of Dutch fishing ships taking cod and summer herring just south of Newcastle.