I saw that if I went to sea when I should be grown in years I should be little better than a slave, going with many a hungry belly and wet back, and being always called ‘old dog’ and ‘old rogue’ and ‘son of a whore’. But all people are not born to live at ease. My desire was from my youth to see strange countries and fashions and I must with hunger and cold pay for it.

Edward Barlow, 1668

… a past that’s personal as yesterday,

vast as the tent of stars

where the sanguine navigators

vanish to be our present,

being elsewhere deeply here.

Alan Gould, ‘A Catamaran on Lake Coila’, The Twofold Place (1986) and Selected Poems (1992)

I’ll cross it though it blast me. Stay illusion.

Hamlet