The Sea Inside

refinement of this watery life – just as the seabird hunters of St Kilda developed broad feet from climbing the cliffs, and the sea gypsies of south-east Asia, used to diving in the shallow seas, have eyes that appear to focus as well, if not better, underwater. Even our organs contain a memory of the sea. Our kidneys evolved to deal with excess salt, to which our evolutionary ancestors were subject; being fifty per cent water, we all contain the sea inside us.
    While many scientists dismiss the notion of an aquatic ape, the proposal is intriguing: that we owe our development and our dominion, our intelligence and even our souls, to the water, although we live out our lives on the land.
    We cannot resist; we are all watergazers. And like so many others, my own, more recent ancestors also felt the urge to travel over the sea, in search of something new.

    My great-great-great-uncle, James, the eldest of William Nind’s thirteen children (of whom at least three died in childhood), was born in Ashchurch, a hamlet near Tredington in Gloucestershire, in 1782. The Ninds had been farmers since at least the sixteenth century, living in the same small triangle of fertile land at the foot of the Cotswold hills, moving between villages such as Beckford, Walton Cardiff, Ashchurch and Alstone, near the towns of Tewkesbury and Cheltenham.
    As the eldest son, James was expected to follow his father, working the land. But in the family tree she compiled in her fine handwriting, my aunt recorded the tradition that James left England for Ceylon to acquire a plantation (probably of coffee, rather than tea, which was not grown on the island until the mid-nineteenth century). He was also said to have been involved in another trade: human trafficking. Slavery had been banned by Britain in 1807, but continued in its colonies until 1838, and James was engaged in ‘blackbirding’, a kind of kidnap in which native people were lured onto ships and abducted, to be sold on as indentured labourers. As a result of his activities, James Nind amassed a fortune worth three hundred thousand pounds, only to die at sea, sailing from Ceylon on a ship called
Breezy Horse
.
    Ever since I heard about it as a boy, I’ve imagined that scene: a storm-tossed vessel, my ancestor tipping over the gunwales in a flash of lightning. Or perhaps he went of his own accord, like Captain William Ostler of the
Marquis of Hastings
, who, on his way back from New South Wales and China in September 1827, ‘threw himself overboard in a fit of insanity off the Cape of Good Hope, on the night of the 9th September. A paper, containing the following words, was found lying on the table of his cabin in the morning: “A bad crew and bad chief-mate is the destruction of William Ostler.”’ Whatever the manner of James Nind’s death, it was certainly unforeseen: he left no will, and his relatives were unable to claim his money. A moral return, perhaps, for such immoral gains.
    For years afterwards the Ninds tried to find out what had happened to James, and his fortune; there were no records of his estate, his ship, or his death to be found. Yet the rumours persisted, fed by the prospect of lost riches. In 1921, a syndicated story appeared in the American press under the headline ‘Unsolved Mysteries’. It speculated that James Nind had actually come to America, rather than Ceylon, along with his brother William, and had accrued his wealth in South America under an assumed name. ‘The theory is that James Nind after living in New York for some years went to one of the South America Republics … building up a fortune as so many adventurers from the Anglo-Saxon race have done in different parts of the world. In these countries the state of society is so unsettled that many obstacles might be thrown in the way of recovering the Nind fortune.’
    None of this makes much sense – the report, in the
Galveston Daily News
of Texas, confuses more than it reveals – but the fact that it appeared in a newspaper gave credence to the story. With rumours of impostors turning up in Cotswold villages, only to disappear again, there were even hints of conspiracy: ‘It seems clear that someone is interested in the matter aside from the Nind heirs …’ Indeed, this family intrigue, with its echoes of a novel by Conrad or Dickens, would be strangely replayed in the next generation.
    James’s nephew, also named James – my great-great-grandfather – was born one of nine children, to