Why I write about the pilot and not the king

A reader wrote to ask why my chapters are so full of clerks and harbour pilots and translators, and so thin on the people whose names you would recognise. It is a fair question. The kings are in the index of every other book. Why spend a career on the man who guided a ship through a channel he had learned by heart and who signed nothing?

Here is my honest answer. The archipelago was never run from a throne room. It was run from the water, and the water was run by people whose names mostly survive in a ledger, if they survive at all.

Think about what it actually took to bring a ship into a strait on the tail of the monsoon. Someone had to know the reefs that moved. Someone had to know which harbour would take a foreign crew in the fasting month and which would not. Someone had to stand between a captain who spoke one language and a merchant who spoke another and agree a price that both men would honour after the sails were down. That person was the pilot, the broker, the go-between. The king heard about the cargo weeks later, if the weight was worth hearing about.

The treaty is signed on dry land. The deal is done on the water, by people history forgot to write down.

I am drawn to them partly because the records are so stubborn. A pilot leaves no memoir. What you get instead is a name in a port register, a wage, a note that he was paid half again for a crossing made late in the season because the risk was higher. From that one line you can rebuild a life, if you are patient and you do not invent. The invention is the trap. It is tempting to give the man a family and a grievance and a secret, and the moment you do, you have left history and entered something else. I try not to. I give him the weather, the route, the price, and I let the reader do the rest.

There is a second reason, and it is less tidy. I grew up in a town that was exactly this kind of go-between. Two cultures met at the point where they had to agree on a price, and my grandmother could still name which family had brokered which trade, long after the trade had gone. She told it as gossip. It was actually economics. It was actually history. Nobody had written it down because the people in it were not the kind of people who get written down.

So that is the work. Not the room where the treaty was signed, but the jetty where the deal was really made, an hour before anyone important arrived. The king gets the page in the schoolbook. The pilot gets the strait by heart, and the strait is the thing that mattered.

Keep the questions coming. They are better than most of my chapter openings.

The people the records leave out are the subject of An Ocean Between Histories, an account of Columbus's first Atlantic voyage that begins with the people who knew the Caribbean before 1492.