In this book on the eighteenth-century Providencia, there is no information – nor in the book about the archipelago prior to 1901 – to indicate that Torquato was the first Bowie to reach the islands. And I need to reach him somehow or other. Later, Torquato, whom I first encountered in the will, joined the council that signed in favour of recognising the Constitution of Cúcuta in 1822; the council that joined San Andrés and Providencia to New Granada. My ancestor who endorsed the mainland, the triumphant republic emancipated by Bolívar’s spectacular campaign. Adhesion to the new republic was partly due to the feats of a French corsair, Luis Michel Aury, in this region. Another pirate.

I pause for a moment and lift my eyes from the book. The two kids are playing, sprawled out on a sheet of plastic shaped like a jigsaw puzzle. I’m still here, in the twenty-first century, but these incidents touch nerves, open doors in me; I sweep my way through them, stitching them into the reconstruction of my own memory.

France had supported Simón Bolívar’s independence campaign to weaken Spain. Europe was busy at war, as always; Napoleon Bonaparte had turned Spain into a district of the First French Empire. Aury the privateer, sympathetic to French revolutionary interests, had travelled around the Caribbean during the birth of its modern republics, when Haiti had won its independence from France and Marie Antoinette and Louis XV were sent to the guillotine.

Louis Michel had been a figure of some importance during the reconquest period, marked by the Battle of Boyacá. As Pablo Morillo, ‘the peace-maker’, launched the famous siege of Cartagena, Aury was expelled from the United States on charges of piracy. He’d departed with three ships from Amelia Island, but he had thirteen under his command by the time he appeared in Cartagena. He’d taken up the mission of evacuating two thousand people from the fort; he failed due to bad weather, though, and while one of his captains managed to evacuate the governor, he ended up kidnapping the man and fleeing with the spoils to Providencia. The following year, when Aury reached Haiti – where the Liberator was in exile – Bolívar obviously didn’t roll out the red carpet. Aury’s opposition to Bolivarian strategy earned his enmity until the Frenchman’s death in 1821. According to some, it also secured Aury’s elimination from the pages of Colombian history, despite his key role in ensuring that the idea of adhesion to New Granada spread across the islands. Aury died in Providencia, where he had returned with his friend Agustín Codazzi, a young geographer. Thanks to him, we know about the destruction wrought by a twelve-day hurricane that devastated all the buildings on the island in 1818. It was on Aury’s ocean voyages that Codazzi traced the maps of the day.