Coppin.

On the main deck, a dozen passengers clustered around one of the elders and read from their Bibles. Their faces were pallid and drawn, their clothes worn and many times mended. Their matted, salt-caked hair and beards crawled from under their hats and across their faces like seaweed. But when they prayed, their voices never faltered.

“Don’t begrudge ’em prayer, Mr. Coppin. ’Tis a great comfort, to them what have the gift.”

Jones raised his newfangled and most expensive spying glass to his eye and studied the horizon. Smoke gray sky sat atop slate gray sea, and beyond the line that divided them lay America. Only three aboard the Mayflower had been there. For Jones and the rest, it remained a collection of words in a few books or a handful of stories from the sailors who had seen it, a new and shining land where men could live in God’s bounty or a frightening immensity filled with savages and wild beasts.

ii.

In the shadows of the tween-decks, a man named Jack Hilyard thought about America while he waited for the prayer to end above him. In his right hand he held the slop bucket used by the four families at the bow of the ship, and in his left hand he held his nose.

The ship hit a swell, and a few drops spilled from the lip of the bucket.

“ ‘My cup runneth over,’ ” came the voices from above.

With his boot, Jack Hilyard smoothed the liquid into the boards. None would see it, and in the stench of the tween-decks, neither would they smell it.

“ ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.’ ”

Hilyard heard the voice of Ezra Bigelow, one of the holiest of the holies, rising above the others. He laughed to himself, and his eyes searched the tween-decks for some trace of goodness or mercy.

Curtains and canvas rags hung everywhere, forming tiny rooms with walls that waved as the ship rode the swells. Feeble shafts of light illuminated scenes behind the curtains, like tableaux vivants at a country fair. A mother tried to suckle her three-year-old, who had stopped eating the salted food. A man crouched by a porthole, held an inflamed wrist to the light, and with his knife, pricked at a pustulant saltwater sore. An old woman wrapped her arms round her waist and coughed. When she stopped, the sound seemed to echo down the length of the ship, but it was other people coughing behind other curtains.

Then Hilyard glanced at his own space, where his wife folded the bedding. She had withstood the voyage better than most, he thought, perhaps because she had more bulk than most. She was strong, and he was rugged, and their son Christopher had the constitution of a sailor. They came from stock that endured, and before long, she would thank him for bringing them to the New World.

The prayer above was nearly completed. “ ‘And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever…’ ”

“Or die of the stink therein,” muttered Hilyard to himself, and he stumbled up the ladder to the fresh air. He tripped on the hatch coaming and more of the slop splattered on the deck.

“Amen and apology,” said Jack Hilyard to the group.

Elder Ezra Bigelow watched the brownish liquid roll toward his boots with the roll of the ship. Then he slapped his Bible shut. “A better course would be to join in the prayer.”

“I prays every Sunday.” Hilyard went to the side and dumped the bucket. Then he tied a rope to the handle and dropped the bucket into the sea to rinse it. “If God hears me prayer on Sunday, I needn’t bother him the rest of the week. If he don’t listen then, he’ll for certain ignore me on days he don’t claim as his own.”

“Every day is his own,” responded Bigelow. “And respect should keep thee and thy stinking bucket below until the morning prayer have finished.”

“Every day is his own”—Hilyard raised a bucket of clean seawater—“and every day he makes the sun to rise and the tides to turn and the bowels to move.” Hilyard dumped the water onto the brownish stain. “ ’Tis our duty to answer his call in the great things and in the small. That be a form of prayer, too.”

“That, sir, is blasphemy,” said Ezra Bigelow with a small note of triumph, as though he now knew the fate of this man’s soul.

“Be not so quick to judge,” said Bigelow’s brother Simeon.