But what troubled him more than the low, cramped cabin was the smell that pervaded the berthing deck. It was a sickly stench which Ross likened to the stink of rotting flesh and he wondered whether the crannies of the vessel were blighted by dead vermin which had lain there since its last voyage. He turned to the carpenter, who, perhaps noting that some of the colour had drained from Ross’s face, gestured to the floor of the cabin and said, ‘what you can smell, Sir, is the ballast. Sand and gravel. Innocent enough, sand and gravel, but whatever is lowest in a ship, where the ballast lies, down into that place seeps all the filth and spills, all the vomit and foul water left unmopped from the decks above. We call it the “graveyard whiff” or more properly “the mephitic”.’

‘I see,’ said Ross.

‘I thought I wouldn’t get used to it. I thought it would make me ill, but it didn’t – no more than the roll of the vessel. Two or three days out into the open sea and you don’t notice it any more.’

‘I’m glad of that.’

‘But, if you don’t mind my asking, Sir, why does a man like you – a doctor, you told me – want to leave the safety of our own sweet land?’

Ross asked the carpenter if they might walk up to the quarterdeck, where the mephitic might be less troubling, and when they got there, Ross sat down on a wooden chest which looked as though it might contain guns or ammunition, and took some gulps of the salty Plymouth air. Finding the orange still in his hand, he put this to his nose and comforted himself with its bittersweet scent.

The carpenter wiped his brow with an oily rag and stood at Ross’s side, looking back over the ship’s rail at the fervent life coming and going along the quayside.

‘In answer to your question,’ Ross began, ‘you ask me why I want to leave what you called “our own sweet land” but let us consider, here in Plymouth, whether it is really so sweet. What I observe in everybody I see here is that they are driven and distressed by commerce, reaching after this thing or that thing and never resting or at peace.’

The carpenter smiled. ‘If you don’t mind my saying, Sir, how are you in a position to know that your “observations” are correct? Might a man not find what you term “peace” in humble trades, such as selling oysters – the smell and beauty of them, the money he will get? And take me. I may be an ordinary man, a low man, but I love my work. A perfectly crafted tongue-and-groove alignment can bring me wondrous happiness.’

Valentine Ross spent another two nights in Plymouth before returning to Bath. He walked about the town, not with any destination in mind, but going in wider and wider circles away from and then back towards the Rainsford, trying to reconcile himself to the moment, two weeks hence, when he would set foot upon this ship and be carried away towards an unknown life.