in no hurry.
"Isla Verde," he said.
I drank my cold coffee.
"Tuamotus?" I said.
"North-east of what is now Napuka. I have a bearing and a latitude. The longitude is the Spanish longitude, so I have corrected it as best I can. The margin note says, in Castilian — I have a transcript — Aquí tocó tierra la fragata y no partió del todo. Here the frigate made landfall and did not fully depart. That is the entire entry."
"Which frigate."
"No name. No date. The chart is undated. The watermark suggests 1790s."
I set my mug down.
"Mr Manning," I said, "I make a living taking film crews to reef passes. I do not make my living from margin notes on Spanish charts. There are fifty atolls in the Tuamotus that are not on modern GPS because they are two metres high and the hydrographic service cannot be bothered, and any of them will match an 1790s bearing if you squint. I will save you four weeks of your life. It is not there."
He did not argue. He untied the cord, slid the chart out, and laid it on the table between us.
Then he lifted his hands away and sat back, and that was when I understood that this was not going to be a conversation I was going to win by the force of my own reluctance.
I did not touch it at first. I looked. The paper was the right colour, the right softness, and had the faint grey ghost across its face that old sea-chart paper gets from a century of being unrolled in humid rooms. The coastline he had drawn — or that the Spaniard had drawn — was the one I knew. The Tuamotus as a long scatter of broken ovals, the names rendered in the old orthographies, Napuka as Pukarua de arriba which I had not seen before but which made sense. And north-east of Napuka, in the empty water, a small careful oval marked in a hand that was not the hand of the main
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.