Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
The ship was Dutch. The Vrijheid — Freedom, in their language, which I noted with the particular appreciation of someone who has learned not to trust the names things give themselves.
I signed on in Rotterdam in the autumn of 1714 as an able seaman, which I was. My references were accurate, my skills were genuine, and the first mate was the kind of practical man who cared more about whether you could hand, reef and steer than about anything else you might be carrying. I could hand, reef and steer. I was hired without ceremony.
The Vrijheid was bound for the West Indies. Sugar, rum, tobacco — the holy trinity of Caribbean commerce that was making certain men in Amsterdam and London very wealthy and killing other men in the cane fields with quiet efficiency. I had no illusions about what I was sailing toward or what sustained it. But I needed distance and the Vrijheid was going far enough.
The Atlantic crossing took eleven weeks.
I will not romanticize the Atlantic. It is enormous and indifferent and it tests everything you think you know about endurance in the first week and then continues testing it long after you believed you had nothing left to test. Storms came without apology and left the same way. Men were sick for days at a stretch. The food deteriorated in ways I will not describe. The smell below decks was a living presence that followed you up into the air and stayed with you even on watch in clean wind.
I found I did not mind it.
This surprised me. I had crossed water before, the Channel, the North Sea, but nothing like this. Nothing that put you so completely beyond the reach of everything you had ever known. The coast of Europe disappeared on the third day and after that there was nothing in any direction but water and sky and the ship beneath your feet, which was either reassuring or terrifying depending on your disposition.
I found it reassuring. I had left everything behind deliberately. The ocean confirmed it absolutely.
I stood night watches and thought about the Soldier and let the thinking happen without trying to stop it, which was new. On land I had kept myself too busy for that kind of thinking. The sea removed that option. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do between watches and so I thought about him with the thoroughness I had been avoiding, and after several weeks of this the thinking became less sharp. Not absent. Never absent. But workable. Something I could carry without it slowing me down.
I think that is what the ocean does. It gives you enough emptiness to process what you have been too busy to process. Sailors who love the sea often cannot explain why. I think this is why. It is the only place the world leaves you alone with yourself long enough to become reacquainted.
The Caribbean appeared on a Tuesday morning, green and impossible after weeks of nothing. The other sailors crowded the rail and pointed and made the noises men make when they see something beautiful after long deprivation. I stood slightly back and looked at it carefully.
It was the most alive place I had ever seen. That was the first impression and it never entirely left me. Everything in the Caribbean was excessive — the color of the water, the density of the vegetation, the heat that hit you like a physical object when the wind dropped, the smell of flowers and rot and salt all together, the birds, the noise. England had always seemed to me a place that was conserving itself, holding something back. The Caribbean held nothing back whatsoever.
We made port in Jamaica. Kingston harbor was chaos of the productive kind — ships from a dozen nations, cargo moving in every direction, merchants and sailors and dockworkers and vendors and criminals all conducting their various businesses simultaneously in the thick wet heat. I had seen busy ports. I had not seen anything like this.
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