There is nothing like it any more: to trade solid land for the open ocean, bound for an unknown country on the strength of promises. The only thing like it, one day in the future, may be when spaceships leave Earth carrying colonisers to new planets. It really was that strange.

The nineteenth-century sea crossing from Britain to Australia used to seem to me rather quaint, a thing that people used to do, not particularly relevant to modern life. At a distance of a hundred years and more, from the comfort and superiority of a twenty-first-century viewpoint, even the most dramatic realities of past lives can be reduced to mere stories, just as space travel was the domain of science fiction until a man walked on the moon.