On a morning in mid-June the captain sent word that we were to be on board in a few hours. My spirits were agitated. All week in Hull I’d woken in fits of trembling. Now that departure was imminent, I knew I’d been wishing that Imlay would save me from it. But he never came. When we set out, on a vessel hardly designed for passengers, the winds changed again, leaving us afloat at anchor for another week in a misty fog that might as well have been purgatory. Marguerite was seasick from the first moment on board, and needed my constant care. A fidgety Fanny, gay as a lark, wanted to run about on her newfound legs, fall, get up again, and play. Imagine my guilt at stealing a glance out to the cold, gray sea, flashing on my secret wish that it might become our tomb.

You needn’t know all the details, little bird, of the lost treasure ship that was the aim of my journey; Imlay knew most of them already. I went because I needed to believe that if I succeeded in some way, at least secured restitution for our loss, Imlay would see that I was indispensable to him, that he couldn’t be parted from me. I could turn him around and back to us. But I see now that the mystery of the ship was not my true purpose, nor even whether Imlay and I would be together. Rather, I sought the answer to the deepest mystery of my own life in that moment—whether I should live or die.

The captain agreed to put us on shore at Gothenburg, where Elias Backman awaited me, but rough conditions forbade it. I caught sight of a lighthouse not far away and asked to go there. The captain, surprised by my determination, put out a signal for a boat to emancipate us (after eleven wearying days at sea), but for two hours no one came. Finally I used all my rhetoric to persuade the good-natured captain to let me have the ship’s boat, which argued against all his instincts and, he hastened to tell me, broke general rules. “But I see you like to break rules,” he said when he relented, and three sailors hoisted the boat in minutes, promising to row us to the lighthouse where we might recruit a pilot for Gothenburg.

“I don’t see a single soul,” said Marguerite as we neared the little island. Her fear always acted as a feeler before her adventuring spirit, but I didn’t listen until we landed, alarmed to find only two hermits who emerged out of their wretched hut. We made out that they had no boat, but some miles over there was a dwelling—they pointed past an outcropping of giant rocks—and we could try there. Our sailors didn’t want to risk their captain’s wrath, but for two guineas took the chance.