On windy days, when it seemed the ship might take to the sky and the sailors tied themselves to the deck with ropes so they wouldn’t rise up into the whirling air, Maria kept Cadin safe inside her cloak and fed him bits of cracker. A ship was a terrible place to be as the weeks went by, with less food and water and all manner of pestilence, lice and rats, lightning and storms. There were times when those on board thought the end was near. Men who had never prayed before did so, many in a language none of the sailors could decipher. Women blessed their children and held them tightly so they might walk into the nets of death side by side. But Maria could see enough of the future to know they would reach their destination. She looked in her black mirror and saw that the sun would be stronger than any of the passengers would have thought possible and the streets would be made of red dirt and the trees would flower in every season.

“Hush,” she told the Portugals’ children when they cried. “We’ve almost reached the other side of the world.”

When they arrived, it was exactly as she had seen it would be, a land of oddities and miracles. The passengers looked out and blinked in wonder at where their journey had taken them. The cactus towered thirty feet tall, thorny acacia bushes bloomed with vivid lemon-colored flowers, and the divi-divi trees were bent over in the wind so they might look up to heaven. The children said these trees were little men wearing overcoats. There were yellow and orange birds in the sky, troupials and bananaquits, along with kingbirds and flamingos and hummingbirds no larger than bees that passed by a person’s ear and left that individual’s head ringing with a soft buzzing sound. There were birds that only flew at night, nighthawks and nightjars, black shadows in the dark and the dusk that drank dew from leaves as big as saucers. People of all sorts could be found here due to the Spanish slave trade and the settlement of Sephardic Jews. Many had on modest traditional clothing, long skirts called sayas worn over pants and shirts with combinations of two or three patterns.

A young woman named Juni, only a year or so older than Maria herself, was waiting on the dock, sent to hurry her along. Juni clapped her hands and called out a welcome in Dutch, in disbelief when she realized that Maria knew little of that language. “You had better learn to speak as we do,” Juni advised, in English now. “Or maybe you have the right idea; this way you don’t have to listen to what Mr. Jansen says.”