From the opening pages
I first heard of Key West in an old stone house inside the Medina in Essaouira, a fortified town on the west coast of Morocco. Places connect, inter-connect. That place, built by the Portuguese, where the trade routes from Africa converged, where for centuries merchants had come to meet the long caravans and carry goods, cotton, indigo, gold, across the Mediterranean to southern Europe. And then, this other place, the one I heard of for the first time, on the sea-route from South America, from the silver mines in Potosi. The island, near where the Spanish ships had gone down, leaving their treasure scattered on the ocean floor. Where people came still, hunting for its riches – and more.
It’s a long time ago now; I was there in the early nineties, for two winters, with my friend from Scotland, the poet and novelist Andrew Greig. It was where we went to escape from Edinburgh winters, to write our books, discuss poetry, search for plots, hang out on the ramparts gazing at the Atlantic – while on the other side of that ocean, the treasure hunters still continued their search for the drowned ship, and this island awaited me, its lizard-shape nosing down towards the Caribbean, no ramparts in sight – a gentler sea, another climate, another world.
Places connect – not only in the imagination. For we travel, endlessly, across the surface of this blue world, we meet other travelers, the messages are carried – by camel, on horseback, by airplane, then by cable, by telegraph, and at last, by the almost invisible threads and currents that intersect all around us, the information, the blood-lines, the memories, the clues.
From the manuscript in progress. © Rosalind Brackenbury.