The Big Read: Pirates of a certain age

I watched Philae land on the comet this week from a chair in the Stardust Lounge with a martini in my hand.

I had been dozing on my bed but it was one of those moments of human achievement that make me want to be around people, so I went up and sat with a woman from Maryland named Louise.

The windows were solid blocks of Caribbean blue and we rose and fell like a pair of astronauts in their capsule after splashdown, two starry-eyed voyagers in a grand and boundless universe. We were aboard the Crystal Serenity, a great stately pleasure dome of a ship, a long gleaming white cloud of ease, leaving the southern states of America for the pirate-rich straits and islands of the Spanish Main. It's big enough and spacious enough for you to be entirely alone in the open air with the gemstone sea and the bright horizon if you want, but small enough to seek out conversation with interesting strangers.

I had met Louise before. Once I walked past as she drove golf balls into a net suspended over the long line of turquoise wake. I said some silly thing from Seinfeld about blocking a whale's blowhole, and she said something about women drivers and we both smiled and thought of the other as an interesting stranger.

I saw her in the streets of Charlestown, South Carolina, a few days later, sitting in the back of a horse-drawn carriage, clip-clopping down Rainbow Row towards the Battery promenade with its view out across Charleston harbour, dense with dolphins and scruffy autumn pelicans, to Sullivan's Island and Fort Sumter. I waved but she didn't see.

Being at sea has a strange effect on me, and I think on others too. It's in the shades of blue and white and the distance that draws your eye further and further away from yourself, but it's also the easy, rhythmic movement of the world on the waves, the breathing of the ship, very deep and very slow, as though asleep. It's a kind of hypnosis, a babied lulling. It's easy to lose the inhibitions of land and to talk in long lolling tos and fros and backs and forths, turning over whatever comes rolling through your mind. It's a dreamy place and a dreamy state and the dreams you dream are rich and strange.

Louise's husband was a historian, specialising in buccaneers. For years he gave lectures on cruise ships about Blackbeard and his rivalry with Stede Bonnet, the Gentleman Pirate. Stede was a wealthy landowner who hit a midlife crisis. He fell to questioning his life choices, secretly commissioned a ship from a nearby boatbuilder and was soon to be seen at wharfside dive bars, recruiting a crew. One moonless night he left his mansion and his wife and children and ran away to sea with a yo-ho-ho to be a pirate captain.I told her that I'd visited the Provost dungeon in Charleston where Stede Bonnet had been held and I'd seen the trees where he'd been hanged, and we talked about marriages and midlife crises and the panic of suddenly noticing how late it is.

I had been to a talk on board about Blackbeard the day before, and I asked if the speaker was her husband, and she told me that no, her husband had died quite suddenly a short while before. He had been diagnosed, and then two months later was gone. It was a cruel mercy, we agreed, and we discussed our own plans for ensuring that we ourselves wouldn't linger too long if ever the going got too bad. The worst of it, she said, was that she had never been on any of the lecture cruises with him. She had her own company, consulting with state entities about disaster preparedness, and she'd never found the time to get away. She wished she'd seen him talk and share his stories, she wished she'd seen him doing what he loved, and walked the streets of Charleston and St Thomas with him and heard his tales of the past, and strolled on deck after dinner and watched the moon make a path of silver coins across the warm black sea. It was too late, but she was here now.

We watched and marvelled as a man-made something 500million kilometres from Earth landed on a speeding bullet four billion years old, and then she said goodbye because she had a booking at the spa. Before she left, she told me she thinks the reason she could never bring herself to go on that cruise was because she once had an affair, and her husband forgave her, but he called it her Stede Bonnet moment. Human beings are very clever, we agreed, and very, very stupid.