Even after everybody sign them name, it take a long time for the bunks to get claimed. Four to a section, the bunks lined up round each side of the hold, but seem like not enough of them till one of the overseers come below. Order the youngest convicts to move. Them is meant to sleep mid-ship in hammocks they must roll up every morning, hang out every night.

We spend that first night anchored in the harbour, can’t leave our bunks, all we can do is wait. Watch each other, try to stay warm, listen to the wind and rain beating at the ship. Woken early, fed, but kept below deck, locked in fetters, while the paying passengers, soldiers and them family come on board. Hear the sailors getting the ship ready to sail. Listen as the water start flowing past the hull, feeling the ship moving, making headway. Shouts and orders drifting down to us, broken by the grinding sound of the anchor getting pulled up. Every clunk of the chain, a final goodbye to a life quickly passing.

Slowly at first, I feel the ship start to glide, to pick up speed while the voice of Jonas McDuff come floating down on the wind, the sails trapping the breeze.

‘Send a man aloft. Pull out the main sail. Check the Plimsoll line. Depth five fathom. Ten fathom. Twenty. Thirty.’

Four hundred of us convicts sail away that day. Each of us must be hoping we could turn the ship round. Knowing in our hearts the space we left behind might be no longer empty, be already filled. And I notice how everybody lay still, stay silent. Not even a whisper. The listening spell broken, when one of the crew come down the ladder, stand at the top, look down on us with a twinkle in him eyes.

‘Say goodbye to the Mother Country, lads. I wager it’s the last time you lot will ever see ’er.’

Is then I start to feel the fear well up from deep inside. A fear born from barren despair, with not a scrap of hope left in it. And I can see the same fear staring back at me, from all the other convict eyes.

Chained, listening to the battering rain and howling wind from inside a convict ship, I feel the glimmering light up and I can trace the many twists and turns me life took to get me here. And at every turn, it seem like fate keep forcing me to do him bidding. Once in a while him tease me with good fortune, but most times, him come to be a possessive spirit filled with ill fortune, wrapped tight round me shoulders, directing the way.