"I counted eleven men on deck, all in loud checked sarongs. One of them, a smiling young man, came up to me, saying, ‘Good morning, sir. I am Chandra, brother of the captain. Are you Catholic sir?’ When I said, ‘Protestant,’ he answered cheerfully, ‘All same, sir. Excuse us now while we go to pray,’ and under the black masts of the Herman Mary, against a backdrop of grey-white warehouse walls, the Tamils stood to pray in the bows of their ship.

These prayers were brief compared with the later services at sea. In two minutes the sailors had crossed themselves, and then began to swarm about the ship. The mainsail was hauled up, ropes were cast off, and Mr Missier’s supervisor waved from his bicycle on the quay. ’Sit here, sir,’ said Chandra, patting a ledge near the helmsman. Suddenly transformed into something like a giant moth poised for flight, the Herman Mary silently and slowly edged away from the wharf.

It takes some time, I found, to get used to a sailing ship’s slow, silent ways, particularly to her utter dependence on a breeze, after weeks of noisy but self-reliant motor vessels. At first, the Herman Mary’s progress, though silent, was almost non-existent. We hung about. The sun came up, but no breeze followed suit, and we continued to be becalmed. An hour and a half after casting off we were still in Columbo harbour. It was a little embarrassing. Ropes had to be flung to barges and other vessels ahead of us, and our crew took it in turns jumping across to them and pulling the dead weight of the Herman Mary along like mahouts trying to shift a recalcitrant elephant. At one point a young crewman stripped off his sarong, dived into the harbour with a rope around his waist and carried it with a vigorous breaststroke to a dredger, whose crew helped him aboard. Before diving, he was careful to kiss the talisman he wore on a chain round his neck, and he held it firmly between his teeth as he swam.

For the first time in my life I heard sailors whistling for a wind. The Tamils wandered about the deck, lips pursed, uttering plaintive birdlike sounds, which eventually seemed to work. At last, as we reached the old white lighthouse at the harbour entrance, something swept a wisp of hair across my eyes. A breeze.

Immediately the captain – I could see the fraternal resemblance to Chandra – shouted an order, and in a flurry of sarongs and black limbs the crew ran up other sails, which devoured the masts like white flames and filled out. We moved.

At a fair speed the Herman Mary, alive at last, dipped through the troughs of sea, alive in the creaking of her spars and the hiss of water under her bows. I hadn’t felt a greater elation since leaving Piraeus. One of the boy cooks brought me a mug of grainy coffee and, as we tacked down the Sri Lankan coast, my strongest desire was to canonise Mr Missier as soon as it could possibly be arranged.

The crew soon rigged other sails on heavy booms which they pushed out on either side of the ‘Herman Mary’ between her mainmast and bowsprit. A sail was run up below the foresail, then a topsail on the mainmast; by now we had five sails over our heads. Steering west we moved briskly into the Indian Ocean."