The white ship comes home

Barfleur, Normandy, 25 November 1120. King Henry I of England sails for home at dusk. His only legitimate son, William Adelin, seventeen and heir to England and Normandy both, follows on the Blanche-Nef, the White Ship, the newest vessel in the harbor, with some three hundred of the young Anglo-Norman elite. The prince sends wine aboard by the cask, and by full dark the crew is drunk with the passengers. Racing to overtake the king's fleet, the White Ship strikes the rock called Quilleboeuf just outside the harbor and capsizes in calm water. One man survives, a butcher of Rouen. The prince's body is never found. Henry, they said, never smiled again; his attempt to pass the crown to his daughter Matilda ends in nineteen years of civil war that the chronicles call the Anarchy, when Christ and his saints slept.

In the timeline recorded here, the wine stays on the quay. The prince, seasick already from the crossing out and lectured that morning by his father's steward, sends the casks to the harbor guild instead. It is a princely gesture that costs him nothing and buys the world. A sober helmsman takes the Blanche-Nef out on the ebb, and swings wide of Quilleboeuf as every Barfleur pilot has done for a hundred years. He runs her home to Southampton by morning, first of the fleet, the prince laughing at the rail. It is the least remarkable crossing of the winter. No chronicle records it. The atlas does, because the atlas can see the rock.