Script quote on a forearm

We lost the trade winds off the Horn three days back and have not found them since. The second mate swears the chronometer is sound, but the sun has been a grey smear for a week and the old man has stopped pretending he knows where we are. I keep my letters in the oilskin tin under my bunk, so if this reaches you, it will be because the sea has been kinder than I had any right to expect.

Something odd has happened, and I want to tell someone who won't laugh. The cook, Mr Adeyemi, who has crossed these waters twenty times, sat on the hatch cover yesterday with his tea going cold and said that a man only learns his own mind when the charts run out. I took it for the sort of thing men say to fill a silence. Then I found him again at midnight, scratching numbers into the lid of a biscuit tin with a marlinspike, and he showed me he was reckoning our position by the swell alone.

We are not lost in the way I feared. He says the swell comes up from the south-west, steady as a heartbeat, and that if we keep it on our left shoulder we will raise land within the fortnight. I have no idea whether he is right. But I have stopped counting the days the way I used to, waiting to be home, and started counting the waves instead.

Tell Mam I am well. Tell her I have learned something on this voyage I could not have learned at Hull, and that I will explain it when I am standing on the quay with my feet on something that does not move.

Your brother, Tom