Minimal heart and bird outline on a forearm

We are three weeks out of Valparaíso and the bird has not left us yet. It is a small grey thing with a neck bent like a question mark, and it came aboard off the Horn perched on the bowsprit as though it had paid for its passage. Cook calls it a dove and Mr Halloran swears it is a petrel, but I have decided it belongs to nobody, and so I leave it the crusts from my bread at the rail each evening.

It keeps to the lee side when the wind goes round and it sits very still when the watch changes, as if it is listening to the bell. Last night the sea was black and the lamp threw a long yellow road across the water, and the bird turned its head to look at me the way a person does when they have something to say and have decided against it. I thought of the heart somebody once scratched into the chart house table with a marlinspike. Nobody will own up to it, but I know it was Tom Greaves, who was always soft on sentiment and hard on everything else.

When we raised the Azores this morning the bird lifted off and flew straight for the land with its wings held low, and I was certain I had lost it. But at the first bell it was back on the forestay, and it dropped something small and dark from its beak into the coil of the halyard, then looked at me as if it had done me a favour. I went down on my knees and found a single seed no bigger than a peppercorn, the colour of ink.

I am sending it to you in this envelope. Plant it in the yard when you see the Thames in April. I will be home by then, or the bird will, which comes to much the same thing.

Your brother, William