The Signature of All Things

Alma sails on a whaling ship bound for Tahiti in November 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace in London, the year a white man sees Yosemite Valley, and the year the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania will graduate its first class of women doctors. Alma travels alone, taking practical clothing, useful items, paper and ink, her microscope, and Ambrose’s valise. She means to search for the subject of Ambrose’s drawings, whom she has come to think of as The Boy.

Alma enjoys the voyage and respects the sailors, who lead hard lives. They travel to New Orleans and then Rio de Janeiro. Alma is enthralled by nearly everything she sees, except for the manacled humans in chains, bound for slave markets. They round Cape Horn and pause at Valparaiso. They see waterspouts but no whales. Alma lands in Tahiti in June 1852.

Alma is unnerved by how mountainous and green Tahiti is. She lands at Papeete and takes a carriage to Matavai Bay, where the mission led by Reverend Francis Welles is located. She finds a small, whitewashed mission church and a cluster of cottages located along a river that runs into the sea. Thinking of the explorers who have been to Tahiti (Wallis, Vancouver, Bougainville, Bligh, Cook, and then her father), Alma waits beneath a banana tree with her pyramid of luggage for Reverend Welles.