The single women aboard who expected to find husbands as well as gold in the new land primped their hair and put on their clean caps, saved for this very moment. Those children who were not weak with sickness could not be contained; they leaped about on bags and crates and barrels and were cuffed indiscriminately, whenever they stumbled to a standstill. Husbands and wives exchanged apprehensive or hopeful glances. J wondered at the coldness around his heart; he felt no relief that the voyage was over, no excitement at the thought of a new country, of a new land, of a new horizon. He realised then that he had been half-hoping that the ship would founder and take him and his sadness down below the waves to Jane; and then he shook his head at his sin of selfishness that he should ill-wish a voyage because of his own pain.

The sailor stood at the open hatch at last. ‘Come on up!’ he called. ‘Welcome to paradise.’

There was a moment’s hesitation and then a rush up the narrow wooden steps and the first emigrants stepped out on deck, and J followed.

It was evening. The skies were a colour that J had never seen before, the palest of mauves lying in stripes like gauze over the enormous river which reflected the colours back up in pink and blue and purple. The river was still, like a tarnished silver mirror, and as J watched it went suddenly dark and stirred and then went still again as an immense shoal of fish swooped by. It was a stretch of water greater than J had ever seen, except for the sea itself. Only dimly behind the ship could he see the distant southern bank as a dark shadow of trees. All around him was the smooth sheen of river water and as he looked inland, away from the sea, it seemed to him that it went on forever, flowing as wide forever, making no compromise with narrowing banks, impossibly wide, impossibly rich, impossibly beautiful.

J looked towards the shore. The emigrants were disembarking in haste; already a chain had been formed, tossing their goods down the line to land with a careless thump on the dockside. Half of Jamestown had turned out to greet the ship, there were shouted enquiries for news of England, demands of the captain for commissions completed, bills paid, and then coming through them all was the governor, Sir John Harvey, grandly shabby in an old coat spruced up for the occasion with worn gold lace, moving through the colonists with his head turned away, as if he despised them.