It was strange to be in Alejandro’s house. Though in a good street and three storeys high, with a small stable in the rear and a beautiful staircase inside, it was modest and warm in feeling, and Elisabeth saw in the simple furnishings and unadorned walls the calm, generous spirit of her husband. There was a courtyard in the centre with a well and there were lemon trees and flowering vines that climbed up the stone and wound through the balcony railings. A hammock there, too, and she often saw Alejandro lying in its tender sling, though his image would not hold for long and faded with the passing days.

It took many months, but the young lawyer successfully defended her claims. Clear of the Montoya family (though they still paid the scandal sheets to print malicious stories about her), Elisabeth began to live as a woman of independent means, beholden to nobody, with many interests and holdings in and around Valdivia, including property, silver and tin mines, and shipping. Soon enough, the dark-haired and moustachioed Valdivian gentlemen, and the tall, discreet, barbered English officers stationed in the city, pursued and wooed Elisabeth Montoya; she was never short of suitors. And there was a moment or two over the years when her emotions intensified and the thought of being loved again was a temptation and a comfort, and she considered their proposals; but no sooner had she indulged the possibility than they were let go.

Love should never draw from the well of loneliness.

HELL’S GATES

Twenty days to get there and barely two hundred sea miles, in their agony they’d prayed the ship crushed upon the rocks. Then five more days anchored in the wave surges and rains, waiting for the pilot to row out and guide them through the heads.

Not named Hell’s Gates for nothing, this cruel sandbar with only a narrow channel to course, treacherous tidal waves sweeping left and right.

‘The bastards could’ve hanged us to begin with!’

In the end, only one soul lost, seaman Toby Price, sixteen and born in Penzance, who fell overboard and was sucked under the hull and never came up again.

In Macquarie Harbour (vast as a sea and foamy) they were given government issue on Settlement Island, then taken in a launch to their new home on Small Island. Then made to swim for it in their coarse new clothes (there was no jetty), or given rope if they couldn’t, hauled like dead meat through the freezing water.

A guard said to John Myer, ‘Get used to being wet.’