The climate has grown bearable — perhaps forty-five degrees by day, forty by night — but it’s still too cold, especially for the children and the elderly. Mr Lightoller’s Franklin stove has proven a boon for those of us in the bow, and our second-cabin passengers have managed to build and sustain a small fire amidships, but our emigrants enjoy no such comforts. They huddle miserably aft, warming each other as best they can. We must get farther south. My kingdom for a horse latitude.

The meat in steerage has thawed, though it evidently remains fresh, an effect of the cold air and the omnipresent brine. I shall soon be obligated to issue a difficult order. “Our choices are clear,” I’ll tell the Ada’s company, “fortitude or refinement, nourishment or nicety, survival or finesse — and in each instance I’ve opted for the former.” Messrs Lightoller, Pitman, Boxhall, Lowe and Moody share my sentiments. The only dissenter is Murdoch. My chief officer is useless to me. I would rather be sharing the bridge with our Bolshevik, Plotcharsky, than that fusty Scotsman.

In my opinion an intraspecies diet need not automatically entail depravity. Ethical difficulties arise only when such cuisine is practiced in bad faith. During my one and only visit to the Louvre, I became transfixed by Theodore Gericault’s Scene de naufrage “Scene of a Shipwreck”, that gruesome panorama of life aboard the notorious raft by which the refugees from the stranded freighter Medusa sought to save themselves. As Monsieur Gericault so vividly reveals, the players in that disaster were, almost to a man, paragons of bad faith. They ignored their leaders with insouciance, betrayed their fellows with relish and ate one another with alacrity. I am resolved that no such chaos will descend upon the Ada. We are not orgiasts. We are not beasts. We are not French.