Peculiar lettering on the lower stomach

I am typing this on the galley machine, the one with the sticking e, so forgive the gaps where it has refused me. Your letter found me in Valparaiso in March and I have read it a dozen times since, usually while the bread is proving. You ask why I wrote that word on the dinner tally, and whether the Captain was offended. He was not. The chandler sold us eleven tins of pears with a label nobody could read, and when Ossie Brand opened the first one it smelled of pear and of nothing else, so I wrote peculiar in the column and let it stand.

The mate laughed, then the boy, then Ossie himself, who said a thing ought to be called what it is or it will never trust you again. By the third week the word was on every menu we pinned up, and the stewards were copying it onto their own cards with the careless pride of men who have found a joke that belongs only to them. Nobody asked what it meant. I looked it up in the old dictionary in the saloon, and learned that peculiar once meant belonging to one person alone, a private thing, the opposite of common stock.

That was the part that stopped me. We are forty men in a tin hull with one stove, and every one of us carries something private that the others will never see. I have decided the pears were the most honest item on the manifest. Ossie has pinned the last tin lid above the stove, the e struck through by the opener, and the Captain now calls it our ship's motto when he is in good humour.

Yours faithfully, Arthur Venn, purser