Anatomical heart with ribbon lettering

The mate reckons we will raise the Scillies by Thursday if the wind keeps its temper, though it has not kept it once since Lisbon. I am writing on the lid of the sea chest with the lamp swinging over the page, so forgive the blots. Cook has been heaving over the lee rail every morning for a week, and the rest of us have stopped pretending it is the biscuit.

Something happened off the Bay that I have not told you. We were running before a squall with the foresail split, and Tom Pascoe went aloft to cut it free while the ship stood on her head. He came down with his palms raw and a grin on him like a boy at Lammas fair. In the forecastle that night he showed me the two swallows he had inked at Portsmouth, one for each side of the world he meant to see, and said that if the sea took him he wanted the living to know he had sailed the whole ledger. I laughed at him. I have been thinking about it since.

Last night I held my own heart up in the lamplight the way you would hold a letter to the window, and it looked green and sorry as a cabbage. I wrote a line along the margin of my journal, half joke and half prayer: shipwrecked bones carry my seasick heart home. The bosun read it over my shoulder and said it would make a fine song for the Anchor, if I ever sang, which I never have.

Tell your mother I have not forgotten the wedding list. Tell her the only thing I want brought aboard is you, in the good blue dress, standing on the quay where the gulls are loudest. Write back care of the landlord. I will read it twice, once for the words and once for the hand that wrote them.

Yours from the heaving deep, Will