Collector of Lost Things

1


PERHAPS I WOULD BE too late to save them. The last dozen had been spotted on a remote island in the North Atlantic, on a bare ledge of rock, but it was already rumoured the final breeding pair had been killed—their skins sold to private collectors—and the single egg between them needlessly crushed. These were only rumours, I kept telling myself. But as I set out for the Liverpool docks, on that breezy April morning in 1845, I couldn’t help hoping that I might be able to reach them in time, the last of the birds. I pictured myself surrounded by an inlet of seawater, listening to their strange and deep murmurs. An empty ocean in front of us, crisscrossed with the lines of migration that only they could sense, the fluxes in magnetism that has flowed through them for countless years. I would stand there, in awe, and I would be a barrier for them, beyond which there was only one thing: extinction. Yet I felt uneasy as I forced my way along the quayside, passing beneath the masses of wooden masts that towered above me, trying to untangle their rigging and spars and furled sails, trying, impossibly, to extract the shape of the Amethyst among them. It felt as though the ship was a tree among a forest of trees, further hidden by a thicket of thorns and climbers, rigging growing over her and the ships moored alongside, purposefully disguised, and this is a feeling that has remained with me, to this day. I couldn’t see the ship and perhaps I never saw it for what it truly was.

I stepped over the hawsers, rounded the bollards, ducked under the ropes and avoided the piles of provisions, barrels, sacking and cable that littered the quay. Porters and lightermen called and whistled, do that, move it, bring her down, steady now! they shouted, a whole army of men dismantling what others seemed to be assembling. It was only my boarding papers, folded crisply and held firmly in my hand, that made any of it real. Men ignored me, but they read my papers and sent me on my way, directing me through this tangle. Eventually, crossing the decks of two larger ships, I was shown the gangway that led to the main deck of the Amethyst. A three-masted barque, lower than the previous ships, with worn planking that looked as though it had been rubbed down with salt. I had arrived upon it quite suddenly, without even realising it.

‘Mr Saxby?’

‘Yes,’ I had answered, seeing a tall man striding towards me across the deck.

‘The collector?’

‘You could say that. Good morning.’

‘Quinlan French, first mate,’ he said, not offering his hand. He gave me a poorly disguised look of appraisal. ‘The steward will show you to your cabin. I suppose I should say welcome … to the ship, that is.’

With that, he promptly turned his back and marched across the deck, pointing at some aspect of the cargo that was being loaded, a rope that was trailing or a corner of sacking that needed to be tied. He leapt across the corner of the main hatch with such speed, and such sudden agility, that it seemed he was momentarily trying to play a game with his shadow, escape it perhaps, or fling it down into the hold. I, too, kept moving, feeling wary of a deck so full of work and dangers, towards a companionway I presumed led to the passenger cabins. As I crossed the ship my impression was of its size; the lofty structures of three masts rising high above me, cross-hatching the sky with a complicated pattern of wooden yards, held together with a web—yes, a web, I felt—of ropes and rigging. The bases of the masts were as wide as barrels where they pierced the deck. I thought, peculiarly, of candles pushed into a cake. And more than anything I tried to avoid the same wide-open cargo hatches, into which stores were busily being lowered by winches. Men with sleeves rolled up were collected around these wells, guiding the bundles and barrels down into a hold that loomed unnaturally dark and deep, as if the soul of this barque was cavernous and without measure and, above all, hungry.

Assailed by these images, I was relieved to descend the five steps of a companionway and find myself in a saloon that was calm and subdued and more like the drawing room of a country house than I had expected. A stove, near the door, had already been lit, so I gladly stood next to it, holding my hands over the warming plate, listening to the soft tick of the coals burning inside. It was a very peaceful room, panelled in smooth honey-coloured oak, with cabin doors leading off it on both sides. A long darkly polished table reflected a skylight set above it. Beyond the table, I could see a wider space where settees and armchairs were arranged informally, with a ticking sheep’s head clock on the far wall alongside a row of oil lamps. There was a smell of leather and polish and the scent of the burning coal, along with a hint of tobacco. It might have been in any country house, except that in the very centre of the saloon, the thick column of the mizzenmast speared through the room from ceiling to floor.