Downstream

housed in the Southend
Museum where Ken Crowe,
Curator of Human History,
has left them out for me. I’m
expecting a few press reports;
instead I find a large
cardboard box on a table in a
top-floor office. The first item
is a neatly folded letter,
several typed pages written
by Derham’s daughter,
Penny, who describes her
father as ‘perhaps the last of
the great adventurers’. I can’t