Anchor and crossed arrows with lettering

The bread has risen twice since the cutter came alongside, and I have stopped pretending the flour is anyone's business but mine. Cook Dunmore cannot abide a loaf that sinks, so I have been feeding the starter a pinch of sugar and talking to it through the night watch like a fool. The captain is out on the spit with the surveyors, measuring a bay nobody has named. They want to call it after him. He has asked for Galley Point instead, because the men who eat well are the men who come back, and he would rather a chart showed where the good soup is.

Tobias, the powder boy, has taken to shooting gulls with a bow he carved from ash off the old mizzen. His arrows are crooked, the fletching cut from a hen's wing, the heads hammered from a broken spoon. Above the galley hatch someone has cut ADVENTURE AND EXPLORATION in capitals, and the boy reads it every morning like a psalm. I told him adventure is mostly burnt porridge and wet socks. He did not laugh.

The anchor has been down three days now. The bottom is foul with weed and the flukes have caught on something that is either rock or a wreck, and the bosun says it will not lift until the tide turns twice more. So we wait, and the crew have started wagering on whether we sail in spring or next winter. I have stopped making bets. I have started counting the flour and salt pork and the last of the lemons as if we will be here for years, and I find I do not mind as much as I expected.

Tell Mother the goose she sent is still in the lockers and I am saving it for Christmas, whether or not we are home. If the anchor comes up empty, we will know we were meant to stay a while longer. Your loving sister, Margaret.