Anchor and sailing ship on upper back

The Jane carried tea out of Foochow the year the ice came early, and her bosun, a long Cornishman called Ebbe Trask, had a sweetheart in Penzance who tied a length of her own pink ribbon round his anchor-chain pin the day he signed on. He never took it off. Not in the squalls off the Horn, not when the fore-topmast went and we lost the Dutchman's boy overboard. Ribbon still on. Men laughed at him, then they stopped, because a ribbon that survives the Horn looks less like a joke and more like a promise somebody meant.

We raised Cape Agulhas with the glass dropping like a stone down a well, and the old man ordered the anchor let go in the lee of the bay. Ebbe went forward with the cutter and didn't come back for four hours. When he did, he came up the side soaked to the skin and set a tin cup of cocoa in my hands without a word. Under his oilskin was the ribbon, still tied round the shank, and a little heart of tin he'd had cut from a biscuit box, painted purple in the middle by his own thumb.

That's all there is, love. He never said what the cutter found in the surf. He just put the heart in the galley drawer, where it still is, and every Sunday he ties the ribbon fresh. Now mind that kettle, I said.