Chapter 1: Salem Massachusetts 1834

On a high-thrown cliff in Cornwall lies a white cottage that shines like a beacon in the morning sun, counter image reflected as in a ghostly mirror on the face of the glassy waters below. She serves as a lingering reminder of the warmth of home to brave sailors venturing out on the stony eye of the Atlantic, and a first vision of that dreamed of, distant other world to souls newly landed from that ocean’s wild punishments. And in the front room of that cottage, where my father paced and raved in those last ravaged days before our voyage round the Horn, sits a tiny black toy ship, tall crosses empty of sail, perched just on the white horizontal sill-top, next to the glass of the front window. It is a place where an inward boy, such as I was at the time, might close one eye and, looking past the ship to the unblinking eye of the ocean beyond, imagine that small black paintstroke of a vessel a vast ship, floating silently just there, crouched on the blank face of the deep.

It was a ship like that one, my father said, holding the tiny model between the thumb and forefinger of his raised right hand, and gazing upon it with the queer otherworldly fire that had begun to possess his eyes during those agonizing days, that my grandfather, his father, John Merchant, held up, just as he was, against the cold wooden door at the heart of his family’s damp stone cottage in a desolate, landlocked quarter of Massachusetts.

Young John, then just six, held the ship, as my father did, against the curving wooden grain of that old door, making as those lines were the waves of the sea, exerting an inexorable will on the tiny vessel. The boy John dreamed of the sea, of the masculine world of manly adventure, the brotherhood shared by the sons of Neptune, and the distant stretch of limitless ocean where the unreachable loneliness that bound his heart might at last be penetrated. But the pressure the boy exerted on the door in his play caused it to give, and, slowly swinging open, revealed the full nude form of his mother at the center of the room beyond. John had not seen his mother without clothes, and her white, waxen flesh caused to well in him an unpredicted impulse of fascination and horror. His dark eyes stared, as the unblinking orbs stared back, until his trance was shattered by his mother’s confused query, raised in jarring, hysterical voice, as she lifted arms to cover herself.

“John?” she shrieked, “what are you staring at?”