‘I see the hull,’ I said. ‘It stretches away to both sides of us. Disappears after a while, just the gloom, I suppose. The deck and the rigging are gone: only the, what do you, the feet of the masts remain in place. The tops of some of the ribs reach up near the surface in places. There’s one just under us, Father!’ It was whiskered with seaweed that the sun had found.

‘In the bottom of the hull I can see piles of sand, very white, and bottles, and plates and timbers.’ My father had his hand on my back, and I could feel him leaning forward as though for a better view of all this. The relics I could see were overgrown with clumps of sea grass. The thick column of the pump lay on the sand, the remains of the broken casks pinned beneath it. All of it was so clear I felt I could reach out and touch it.

A shadow moved over the sea floor from left to right and I gasped. A huge ray, gliding serenely over the belly of the wreck, inches above the cargo and the planks. Its long, thick tail trailed behind it and the tips of its wings pulsed like those of a bird in flight. It banked and soared away through a gap in the hull timbers, then disappeared from sight.

‘May I see?’ came the doctor’s voice. I removed my head from the box and passed it along the side of the boat to him, then took up a position the same as his on the opposite side. The doctor stared into the timber box, his upper body hunched over the low side of the boat so that he looked comically as though his head had become stuck in the box. He was transfixed. Other than the ray, I had seen no fishes down there. I could not imagine what had captured his imagination.

~

When we were safely aboard the Moonbird, Argyle and Connolly set a light sail and inched us along the east side of Preservation until we were positioned at the neck where the narrow peninsula met the northern body of the island. The wind was well up now, and from the deck we could see over the top of the island to the west side, where the swell had leapt into life. We were protected from the breakers, but the wind passed straight over the island and whipped at our rigging.

The doctor stood at the bow, elbows on the rail and chin on hand, deep in thought. My father had come to life and was questioning the master about the chart; now he came to me and asked that I explain everything I could see. I tried my best: I couldn’t know, in all honesty, if I was addressing the things he cared about.