Compass, ship's wheel and pocket watch on upper arm

Tobias was bosun on the Marigold, a barque out of Bristol with a wheel as tall as a man and a brass pocket watch his mother had pressed into his palm on the quay. Off the Horn the sky went the colour of a bruise, and the great needle in the binnacle began to spin like a drunk at a wake. Every hand aboard swore the north had run off with the ship. Tobias only laughed and held up his watch. Noon, he said, is noon wherever the sun sits, and if I know the hour in Bristol, I know how far west we've wandered.

So he wound the watch every morning and every night, and he measured the sun against it with a sextant that had belonged to a drowned man. The arithmetic came out in chalk on the chart-room wall, beside an old compass rose someone had painted there for luck. Four days of it. The wheel bucked in his hands, the chain of the watch snapped against his belt, and still he kept the bow turned toward the figures.

Now here's the turn, and mind the lantern. When the Marigold finally bumped against the Clifton stones, Tobias unclipped that watch and found it still ticking. But the hands had stopped on the very hour they made land, as though it had nothing left to count. He never wound it again. He kept it in his coat and let it sleep, and when people asked him the time he said, that's a question for the sea.