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...the moon sailed away across the sky and I followed it as far as my eyes the only part in me capable of moving could go after to the very socket rims and then there remained just pin-prick narrow orifices in the dark-violet firmament thru which streamed moist gleam of the stars with the ever present plashing to their fluent glitter

stretched supine hovered I with my numbed back above the pain whose part I was not any more yet still felt too acutely its swaying throbs though at times alleviated with the gurgling of water in a languid brook among the Yorkshire marches and suddenly I recalled both my mother in her white Dutch cap calling “Jimmy! Come, son!” and the richly green verdure over wavy hills dissected with ribs of stone hedges and the sky above our village church and the invisible but ever felt presence of the sea beyond the hills

the ship became my home and wed to the sea I made my way up from an able man to commander and captain the renown cartographer and explorer of the South Seas commissioned by the Royal Society to discover Terra Australis which was not there yet instead I found new territories and islands bringing multitudes of new subjects into the shade beneath the Union Jack under the wise rule of the Crown and I touched the shores inhabited by dark-skinned tribes wild and savage the most horrid was the ritual of human sacrifice which I witnessed on my second voyage to the faraway hemisphere when I didn’t know that at the feast celebrating our ship arrival they would sacrifice a man

they brought him into the sandy square in the clump of huts under high trees like a great prince they brought him on a stretcher naked prostrate and to my question Omai answered the poor devil could not sit or walk for each and every bone in his body was split and crashed minutely except for the scull and that all of the past night he lay steeped in the brook to cleanse his body and spirit with a stone under his head to prevent drowning then under mutual chant and drum beating gushed the blood from the throat cut with the dazzling white knife and they split the victim’s stomach to splash the disembowelment offal onto the sand and we retired to the King’s hut where I was bestowing beads and trinkets of pewter to my sovereign host His Majesty was happy and his royal family too while from the outside in floated through the entrance the sweetish whiffs of baked flesh but I declined the invitation to partake in the feast sick belly after so a long sea journey used for the excuse

all that so vividly I recollected right now it is the third of my voyages and I remember the happening on the yesterday morning and our skirmish with the savages by the whaleboat on the beach in the swaying surf the dawn is nearing and the stars fade out one by one my mind is clear I am omniscient now I even know what will the main course be at the royal dinner