It is 9.30am and I have a few hours free until I get back on watch. This morning at 3am I saw the most amazing site. Kent pointed out a Dolphin streaming alongside the side of the boat lightly shone by the navigational light. As I was adjusting to night vision I began to see this ghostly spirit dance and glide in the water. It was such a beautiful site and such a good start to the watch. 

The weather has recently and unexpectedly been fantastic. When off watch it’s so nice to walk out on deck barefoot on such a hot day and sit up by the bow and try to read. Being in shoes all day doesn’t do wonders for the shoe or my foot and the smell in the fos’cle from the shoe bucket is getting a little funky. Yesterday I did a little bit of laundry but it didn’t really work. Everything smells, but oh well that’s the life of a seaman and I should just get over it I guess. Today I started to walk round the deck and try to draw out the sails and lines; it’s the only way I can actually remember! I cant believe there are so many, its probably going to take me hours.
 
I’ve started to read part 3 of ‘Bury The Chains’ for a presentation. The first chapter ‘An 18th Century Book Tour’ talks of Equiano’s famous ‘Interesting narrative…’ and how it was promoted, sold and received. I’ve just read the actual book and its so interesting to now read of the context of the times and of Equiano himself after the story he talks of. The author mentions just how well known Equiano was in Britain at that time and his own skills of self-publishing, which gave him much more control.  I’ve started to really like the book and reading the expansive range of extracts the author uses. Each day a few people have been presenting on different parts of Bury the Chains. Yesterday Mike and Tim began with the first part. They mentioned something that was in the book that really interested me; an argument of how the passage going from inland to the ships was as bad or even worse than the more commonly known middle passage. Not much is known about this journey except that within it there were many transactions between different dealers and that many people died from the cruel hard journey due to exhaustion and the little food and water intake. I read about Equiano; one of, or the most well known African writer of that time but there are so many stories out there about these journeys. They may not be on paper or in a published book but I expect they must live on in other respects. Learning about parts of this subject I never even thought of before helps to place some of the numerous pieces together. I think information like that helps me to remember to stop looking at history from only one source or direction.

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