Joan Makes History Read Free Page B

small joke at the expense of the colonials, but be that as it may. The Captain was a humble and agreeable man, his eyes mild and devoid of guile, and sharp enough to spot a man in a bush at fifty yards, although I knew, as most did not, that those fine eyes showed him only a world of variations on the colour grey.
    There were those who thought that I, as his wife, should be languishing patiently in the Old Country for him. But I was there with him on his voyage, for we were inseparable in spiteof every risk, a couple so attached we would rather sink together than swim alone.
    I had long loved my Captain, and had proved several times previously that my love was willing to undergo the rigours of ship life and harsh latitudes, and even to go to frightening far-off places to be near him. My father, a man of excessive deliberation, who measured out his words with the same care he took with the powders and poisons he kept in the forbidden jars in the dispensary: he had not hidden how much he doubted that lad of mine ever making good, no matter how many of his father’s candles he squandered, hunching over books late into the night. But I had had faith, or perhaps I did not much care. Whether or not that lad of mine would ever make anything of himself, that lad was the one I wanted.
    For me, the Captain was the only man on board, but there were others: numberless grimy sailors, naturally, and the slightly less grimy officers, Stubbs and Devereux and the rest, with their sextants and charts and small anxieties over matters of discipline and dignity. And then there were the scientific gentlemen, come to observe the goings-on at the bottom of the world, and put things in bottles, and press things between paper. There was the pasty pudgy Swede, who seemed always a little out of breath even when sitting down, there were the artists, whose job it was to draw things and make a record of the oddities we hoped to encounter, and then there was the man of leisure, the dandy, the philanderer: the botanical gentleman.
    On the day the ship sailed for parts unknown, he had come aboard lightly springing up the ladder. He had landed in front of me, pink in the cheeks, and stood before me with a pleased smile already in place. He was a small smooth man with a tightsmile of some charm and tiny white teeth, and I could see that he thought himself irresistible to any creature in a skirt, and never missed the chance to charm whatever kind of female was at hand, in case she proved susceptible to later seduction.
    I could see that the Captain felt no great love for this hummingbird of a man, with his quick eyes and brilliant waistcoat of silver brocade that shimmered in the sun, when good honest broadcloth, and a smile that was as rare as gold, were good enough for my plain Captain.
    When the botanist was presented to me he held my hand in both of his—and what small soft hands his were, so that my own felt ragged and gigantic—and bent over it murmuring for much longer than was necessary to pay his respects. I caught enough of his low tones to know that he thought it worth his while to flatter me, and when his hyperbole came to an end he gazed at me in a way that a more foolish woman might have allowed to make her heart flutter. But I, as well as being a woman of considerable Yorkshire shrewdness, was a woman of great plainness of feature. I knew that no dandy in brocade would ever languish after me, and certainly not at first sight, as the sighing botanist was pretending to, so I turned away from his posturing and watched as England slid away behind us.
    The mystery of our voyage, the end we all wondered about, was the Great South Land, one last bit of the globe on which, if it existed, no flag had yet been raised to claim ownership. They tried to conceive of their Great South Land, all those men in the great cabin of the ship, serious in their jackets and braid. They showed me their spidery maps, tracing with their forefingers the ghostly