The Signature of All Things

finally passed and the sea was tranquil once more, Alma felt it had been the happiest experience of her life.
    They sailed on.
    To the south, distant and impossible, was icy Antarctica. To the north was nothing, apparently—or so said the bored sailors. They kept sailing west. Alma missed the pleasures of walking and the smell of soil. With no other botany around to study, she asked the men to pull up seaweed for her to examine. She did not know her seaweeds well, but she knew how to distinguish things, one from the other, and she soon learned that some seaweeds had conglomerate roots, and some had compressed. Some were textured; some were smooth. She tried to puzzle out how to preserve the seaweeds for study, without turning them into slime or black flakes of nothingness. She never really mastered it, but it gave her something to do. She was also delighted to discover that the sailors packed their harpoon tips in wads of dried moss; this gave her something wonderful and familiar to examine again.
    Alma came to admire sailors. She could not imagine how they endured such long periods of time away from the comforts of land. How did they not go mad? The ocean both stunned and disturbed her. Nothing had ever put more of an impression upon her being. It seemed to her the very distillation of matter, the very masterpiece of mysteries. One night they sailed through a diamond field of liquid phosphorescence. The ship churned up strange molecules of green and purple light as it moved, until it appeared that the Elliot was dragging a long glowing veil behind herself, wide across the sea. It was so beautiful that Alma wondered how the men did not throw themselves into the water, drawn down to their deaths by this intoxicating magic.
    On other nights, when she could not sleep, she paced the deck in her bare feet, trying to toughen up her soles for Tahiti. She saw the long reflections of stars on the calm water, shining like torches. The sky above her was as unfamiliar as the sea around her. She saw a few constellations that reminded her of home—Orion, the Pleiades—but the northern pole star was gone, and the Great Bear, too. These missing treasures from the vault of the sky caused her to feel most desperately and helplessly disoriented. But there were new gifts to be seen in the heavens, as compensation. She could see the Cross of the South now, and the Twins, and the vast, spilling nebulae of the Milky Way.
    Amazed by the constellations, Alma said to Captain Terrence one night, “ Nihil astra praeter vidit et undas .”
    “What does that mean?” he asked.
    “It’s from the Odes of Horace,” she said. “It means there is nothing to be seen but stars and waves.”
    “I’m afraid I don’t know Latin, Miss Whittaker,” he apologized. “I am not a Catholic.”
    One of the older sailors, who had lived in the South Seas many years, told Alma that when the Tahitians picked a star to follow for navigation, they called it their aveia— their god of guidance . But in general, he said, the more common Tahitian word for a star was fetia. Mars was the red star, for instance: the fetia ura. The morning star was the fetia ao : the star of light. The Tahitians were extraordinary navigators, the sailor told her with undisguised admiration. They could navigate on a starless, moonless night, he said, reckoning themselves merely by the feel of the ocean’s current. They knew sixteen different kinds of wind.
    “I always wondered if they ever went to visit us in the north, before we visited them in the south,” he said. “I wonder if they came up to Liverpool or Nantucket in their canoes. Could’ve done, you know. Could’ve sailed right up there and watched us while we slept, then paddled away before we saw them. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn of it.”
    So now Alma knew a few words of Tahitian. She knew star , and red ,and light . She asked the sailor to teach her more. He offered what he could, trying to be helpful, but mostly he only knew the nautical terms, he apologized, and all the things you say to a pretty girl.
    Still they saw no whales.
    The men were disappointed. They were bored and restless. The seas were hunted to depletion. The captain feared bankruptcy. Some of the sailors—the ones that Alma had befriended, anyway—wanted to show off to her their hunting skills.
    “It is such a thrill as you will never know,” they promised.
    Every day they looked for whales. Alma looked, too. But she never did