MONSIEUR A RLANC DIED a week later. They held on to his corpse for as long as they could, because a fragment of kelp was sighted in the water almost at the moment of his death, and they hoped that they could make landfall and bury him in the earth of California. But his body had been well decayed even while he’d been still alive. Dying scarcely improved matters, and forced them to make another burial at sea. It was just as well that they did. For even though kelp-weeds continued to bob in the waves around Minerva’s hull, it was not for another ten days after they threw the Huguenot’s corpse overboard that they positively sighted land. They were just below thirty-nine degrees of latitude, which meant they’d missed Cape Mendocino; according to the vague charts that van Hoek had collected in Manila, and a few half-baked recollections of Edmund de Ath, the land they were looking at was probably Punto Arena.