His name wasn't Sambo. But that's what they called him. Other times, he was "boy" or "slave" or worse.

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He lay shivering in that stinking loft above the dark brewhouse where the sailors drank. They thought him dumb but he knew their gargled voices.

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It was the fever that kept him quiet, right until the end, when they buried him with the rabbits by the shore.

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He was a sailor, a linguist, a traveller, a brother and a son, an explorer of a foreign land. He was many many things but he wasn't Sambo.

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