Where the light blue of the sky met the darker blue of the sea, our eyes strained for sight of a ship. Every man did it. You might be fishing for your dinner. You might be picking fruit. You might be laying with your wife under the shade of a palm tree, or blind drunk with your mates on William McCoy’s firewater. It might be the start of the day, or when the sun was setting over Tahiti, the endless ocean and home. We all tried to fight against it. But some point in every day your eyes would drift towards the horizon, looking for the black sails of a ship. You could not help it. And when a man looked, he could not look away. I tried to rip my eyes from the horizon. I tried to order myself not to look. With all the strength in my being, I tried to turn my eyes inwards, to Pitcairn, and our new life. Yet my eyes would always drift back to the horizon. I was walking on the cliff where my wife had died hunting for gull eggs, and I came across John Adams, sitting cross-legged with the big black ship’s Bible in his lap.
