‘Would you show me these people?’ I said to him. I do not know what possessed me. ‘The native people you have on your boat. Perhaps I can intercede if you…’

Parish looked at me like he had not yet noticed my presence. ‘Of course, Mrs…’

‘Miss. Miss Grayling. This is my father, Lieutenant Joshua Grayling.’

Parish looked with pity on the stooped silent man who felt the air for his handshake. ‘Lieutenant, is it? Hello, then.’ The smile of a man dealing with an imbecile.

‘So you are in the government’s employ, Mister Parish,’ said my father slowly, and Parish nodded—nodded at a blind man—and the blind man said, ‘Prestigious work, I imagine.’

This rooster had no ear for sarcasm. ‘Yes it is, sir. My word it is.’

He turned to me. ‘Miss, my men will row you out to our vessel. The, um, the lieutenant may find it easiest to stay with me.’

And so it was that I sat in the longboat with more room fore and aft of me than I was accustomed to. They rowed me out, past the Moonbird, the dear girl waiting at anchor like the patient friend she was.

I heard singing as we approached, native voices in stilted unison. A hymn I did not know. I looked up at the nameplate as we rounded the stern: the rower must have assumed I was not able to read.

‘The Charlotte, ma’am,’ he said. I was glad my father was not with us to hear that name spoken into the bright and pitiless daylight.

The rower’s bearing was military, his dress civilian, like the rest of them. He tied the longboat to small cleats on the strakes and a ladder was lowered. I went up, conscious that he followed under my skirts.

Aboard, the beam was wider than the Moonbird’s and the main mast sprang from further forward. There was a hatchway under the quarterdeck and a wide, generous forecastle, but it was none of these things that struck me. It was the people sitting in supervised rows on the boards of the deck.

Several dozen natives: men, women and children, dressed in English clothes and holding hymnals as they sang. The hair and whiskers of the men had been trimmed short; the women’s hair was tied back in ribbons.

The sweet piety of the singing was not reflected in the faces, which were set in exhausted obedience. They stared at the useless books without expression.