Purple thistle on a leg

It came aboard in a twist of brown paper in the boy Jamie Rennie's sea-chest, him from a village on the Forth where the thistle grows through the cart ruts. The fever took him off the Canaries before we'd seen a single palm tree, and the mate threw his chest over the side with the rest of it. I fished the paper out with a ladle. Seed, no bigger than a grain of pepper, and a scrap of his mother's handwriting saying it was for luck. I poured it into the tin with a handful of stove ash and prayed over it like a fool.

We were nine weeks running down the Horn with the decks iced and the bread gone green. The men were ready to put me ashore in the Falklands for a pot of stew from my own boots. Then one grey morning there was a purple head on the thing, spiked and stubborn, lit by the lamp like a wee lantern. The men came down the companionway in their stockings to look at it. Nobody spoke. Then Calloway, who had cursed me the hardest, took off his cap.

We made Valparaiso with the cask of biscuit still sound, and that bloom went ashore in my apron. I planted it in the kitchen garden of a widow who had never heard of Jamie Rennie. So when you pass a thistle growing in a crack on a quayside, leave it be. It's only doing what it was told.