Floating in a blue globe

It had been too easy. The balance was restored one night when the sea started to roll and did not let up, we were thrown from side to side at the helm on shift and in our beds off shift, we put our kit bags on the beds to wedge ourselves against the lee cloths. I’d not felt sea sick after the first time coming below on the way to Martinique and enjoyed the rough sea after the flat calm water. A tern tried in vain to land on the boat, it would try, fail, make a kip sound and try again and again. Never making it. It happened three times along the way, I imagined it was the same bird. I’d say hello laughing as I heard the kip, turning to see it trying to land on the stern. One night I heard it again and looking over my shoulder could not find it, another kip, I searched for it in the near sky above me and found instead it was the boom rocking against the mast. I wondered how they flew hundreds of miles from the land with their little hearts. Hemingway's Santiago went further, I'd been reading a bilingual copy of The Old Man and the Sea, underlining the French phrases and words I wanted to keep in my mind, Santiago feels sorry for the terns on the sea, wondering,

'Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.'

The 4am night shift would see us into the morning where I’d watch the sun light the clouds from below and saw in them a large turtle chasing another, behind them a goat lay facing away with its legs splayed, it was easy to see animals in the clouds which made horizontal bodies and round heads easily, and then I saw clearly as if it had been drawn on the sky with a sharp pencil a man on a winged horse heading north, he moved slowly in a quarter circle rising higher before meeting other clouds and becoming them.

In The Mirror of the Sea, Joseph Conrad describes Landfalls and Departures, in his view the latter has not been completed if the land you leave is still in sight, even if ‘she may have been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase, for days; but for all that, as long as the coast she was about to leave remained in sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday had not in the sailor’s sense begun the enterprise of a passage’—there needs to be a detachment, the land astern has to have disappeared from your view and mind, the land you are heading to cannot be seen, only dreamed of, you have to float in the middle of a globe of many miles each way you look, below you the water which rises to meet the line made by it and the sky which is the only thing above you, up there the birds and below the fish which enter each other's realm to kill or escape, Conrad describes it as ‘a ship having all the open sea before her bows’. He described men feeling sorry and angry to have left their wives but one fellow who ‘walked his deck with a springy step’ since all he was leaving behind was ‘a welter of debts and threats of legal proceedings’. Landfall he described as when ‘You encompass the earth with one particular spot of it in your eye,’ after we could no longer see Antigua, if I ever thought about land it was Bermuda, Bermuda, Bermuda, not the Azores which came after because I needed only to reach the next bit of land. We arrived into Convict's Harbour around 0330hrs, the charts had warned of reefs surrounding Bermuda from north clockwise to the south. Later that morning in King's Square I had coffee, a pigeon with a broken wing hopped around hoping for bread, nobody fed it but plenty commented it would be dead soon. 

We visited Their Majesties Chappell, St. Peter's Church, the graveyard had been used since 1612, among the military gravestones was one with a Star of David, that of Robert Cundy who had died at 32, a separate Burial Ground for Slaves and Free Blacks, and inside a tablet ‘erected by their surviving brother officers’, told of two Royal Engineers who had died of yellow fever, Captain Allan Elliot Lockhart, August 25th 1864, and Lieutenant Bayard Clarke Cochrane on the 28th of the same month. A copy of the Bible, printed in London in 1594, sat behind glass. A Bermudian friend, Archer, was visiting from Scotland, he introduced us to deep fried rock fish and the history of the island and against the advice of the customs officer who said there was little point in going to Hamilton he told us to indeed go. There we found a long road of cafes and bars next to the sea. In one cafe the sun shone but the uniform of those working in finance would not change, two men sat nearby in shirts and gilets and could have easily been talking deals in Canary Wharf. That night there was a street party with dancers called Gombeys, craft shops, food trucks and a recruitment tent for the Royal Bermuda Regiment where a Major told us it was nearly impossible to become a resident, others confirmed, why we asked. Because it's heaven, a local singer told us. After two days we had to leave. 

We left for the Azores, which would be our longest stretch, over 1800 miles, leaving the marina we passed an anchored boat, coming around it revealed an old wiry naked white man with a good tan, on his stern washing his private parts with a yellow sponge with his buttocks facing us, noticing us he waved, short hair, a beard, wearing only the sun, as we turned to starboard and away I watched him jump into the sea to wash off the soap and felt his freedom.

Logbook:

Until the next time thank you for reading and please share this post with friends,

Adnan
Convict's Bay, Bermuda, 2025

Adnan Sarwar is a philosophy student at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He won The Bodley Head/Financial Times essay prize, edited for The Economist and is an Iraq war veteran of the British Army.

References

Conrad, J. (1926) The Mirror of the Sea, 13th edn. London:Methuen & Co Ltd.

Hemingway, E. (2017) Le vieil homme et la mer/The Old Man and the Sea. Paris:Gallimard