Foreword
MALDEN, HIS BIRTHPLACE; THE OCEAN, HIS SEPULCHRE
80 reads the plate affixed to the inconspicuous stone on the neat green lawn in front of the white house facing the traffic of Malden’s Main Street. And in truth, that was the trajectory of his life: in navigator’s language, from latitude 42° 2 5.7 5’ North, longitude 71° 04.4’ West, to latitude 13° North, longitude 93° East.
The great circles of his navigation on our globe had certain intersections: at an unidentified inn in western Massachusetts; in a grove behind the Academy at Andover; in the front room of a commodious house in Bradford; in the Death Prison at Ava on the Irrawaddy; beside a long—open grave in the tigerish jungle below Moulmein; in the harbor of the island of St. Helena; in the city of Philadelphia; at the seaport of Amherst by the Gulf of Martaban.
And there is a final trajectory on a curve only one Navigator can draw, to an intersection only one Navigator can locate.
This One issued a command:
ALL POWER IS GIVEN UNTO ME IN HEAVEN AND IN EARTH. GO YE THEREFORE, AND TEACH ALL NATIONS, BAPTIZING THENI IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY GHOST: TEACHING THEM TO OBSERVE ALL THINGS WHATSOEVER I HAVE COMMANDED YOU: AND LO, I ANI WITH YOU ALWAY, EVEN UNTO THE END OF THE WORLD.
He obeyed it.
The question remains: Why?