Heart-shaped ribcage drawing in black ink

The surgeon has finally let me keep the drawing board in my cabin, so you may stop asking whether I am eating. The mess is a sea of salt biscuit, and the cook has threatened to hang anyone who feeds the ship's cat from the galley. Mr Harrower, who keeps the specimens for the Bristol cabinet, dropped a crate of gulls' skeletons into the bilge last Tuesday, and I spent three hours fishing them out with a boathook. Every one still had its little bones in perfect order, which is more than I can say for the crew.

Here is the thing I wanted to tell you. The whale rib we took aboard at Cape Verde is the finest thing in the hold. Six feet of it, bleached like a church candle, and the men will not touch it after dark. Yesterday I stood it upright against the mainmast and drew it in pen, the ribs curving out from the spine, and when I stepped back to the rail I saw the whole cage had folded into a heart. Two lobes, the lower one tapering to a point. I laughed aloud, and Harrower swore I had gone soft.

I have hatched every bone twice over so the light falls grey between the lines, and I am sending the page home folded inside the almanac. Keep it somewhere dry. Pin it to Father's study wall if he asks after me. Tell him the sea makes an anatomist of everyone, even a girl from Clifton who was meant to be stitching samplers.