J. Bowie was traveling on a schooner, the Argonaut, that foundered between San Andrés and Bocas del Toro just a few hours after setting sail. The captain of the ship defended his claim before the company that, naturally, denied the existence of any insurable interest. I burst out laughing, laughed until I cried, when I read the case for the first time, heard in a Maryland court in 1873. Even two hundred years ago, I realised, there already existed what I had come to see as a mainlander’s trade, foreign and new: my trade. I laughed to see that Bowie appears in this Baltimore document – luckily for me – for an ‘inexplicable reason’. The captain had made a mistake: on the list of witnesses, he’d written James, the sole missing person from the shipwreck, instead of his father, ‘Torquil’ Bowie, ‘governor or primary person of the island of St. Andreas, father of the supercargo drowned at sea amidst the emergency’. Who knows how a captain could mistake the governor of his island for the crewman killed in the accident – I have no idea, it must be a duppy thing.

I picture a young James Bowie, responsible for the purchases in ports and cities, running errands in Limón and Kingston, all over the Creole nation. There had to be a sailor in my family: the grandson of a Scotsman married to an African woman roaming the open seas between his island, the United States and all of the southwestern Caribbean, at a time when sailing was the supreme expression of the freedom of the human spirit – like the ocean, lacking any real borders, still barely troubled by failed fictions. He needed to have died a sudden, tragic death so that a great-great-granddaughter could recognise him in a voided insurance policy.