She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect.

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me.

We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?