I could not help remarking that it seemed to me to be a very poor time to think of grounding the ships. We were coming up to the neap, or low, tide of the fortnight. Would it not be better, I asked, to wait for the springtide? Gordon nodded but did not seem concerned.

It wasn’t actually the ’90s but the early 2000s, for me. At that time, we weren’t connected via the web yet, but instead via a sort of Bulletin Board System that was called “PC communication” here.

The least defined pyrexiae were the continued fevers, divided mainly into typhus, enteric (typhoid) and relapsing.

‘Fair Neophyte, beautiful Christian,’ answered the stranger, with a diabolical sneer, ‘be it known to you that I regard bolts, and bars, and walls, as much as I did the breakers and rocks of your Indian isle—that I can go where, and retire when I please, without leave asked or taken of your brother’s mastiffs, or Toledos, or spring-guns, and in utter defiance of your mother’s advanced guard of duennas, armed in spectacles, and flanked with a double ammunition of rosaries, with beads as large as—’