By Whose Authority, Again

Nine days towed, four drams the hour, and the men on the quay have stopped asking each other what to do with her and started asking me. Tow her out. Burn her. Board her properly, not the way Tamar went aboard, uninvited and correct. Leave her. Every one of those is an act, and every act wants a seal under it, and I have spent the morning walking the three offices that might plausibly hold one and finding that none of them do.

The Harbourmaster’s writ runs to cargo declared and berths assigned. This is neither — a vessel with no living master cannot be berthed, and cargo no factor will weigh is not yet cargo in the sense his writ recognizes. The Divan hears disputes between parties. There is no second party. A ship does not file a claim, and the dead do not file anything. The Temple has been sent for, correctly, and will take the bodies, which gives it jurisdiction over three men and none over a hull.

I note this here, because the record should hold it somewhere even if I am the only hand that ever reads the line twice: the sealed consignment that came in unclaimed in high summer, Serevan mark, entered under the name Halden Roos, sits in the Archive’s own Registry, built for exactly this — a thing held with no clause for holding it. It has grown a crew this time. I do not yet know whether that is coincidence or the same problem wearing its second coat.

I have not written the instrument. I do not have the authority to write it, which is a different sentence from I do not know what it should say. It should say: custody, provisional, accounting only, no finding as to ownership, reviewable on petition from any party who can first prove itself one. I will draft it tonight, under my own signature, and enter it tomorrow as having been written by an office that was never asked to write it. The drams will keep running either way, and the tide does not wait on jurisdiction to be settled.