Where The Salt Archive began: a ledger in a lighthouse museum
A water-stained book of ship names, a museum that closed at four, and the question that became a novel.
Six years ago I spent a rainy afternoon in a lighthouse museum with nobody else in it. In a glass case by the stairs was a keeper's ledger: every ship that passed the light, its name, its cargo and, in a different ink, the ones that never came back.
The name in the margin
Halfway down one page someone had written a name in the margin and then scratched it out so hard the pen went through the paper. I never found out whose name it was. The Salt Archive is my answer to that scratched-out line.
Research, then forgetting
I read shipping records, coastguard reports and a hundred years of local newspapers, and then I put it all away and wrote from memory. The facts are there for the reader who wants them, but the novel is about the people, not the ships.