Someone once told me, and it’s not an unreasonable assumption, that children who spend hours poring over maps are destined to become travellers. I remember spending rainy afternoons immersed in an ancient atlas when I was still very young, and in my late teens I pinned a map of South America to my bedroom wall, even though I wouldn’t actually go there until I was nearly fifty. Delayed gratification, perhaps, of a self-preservatory kind.

When I was asked, a few months ago, if I had any ideas for the cover of my new collection of poems, Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure, published this month by Seren, I knew that I wanted a map of the eastern Mediterranean, the area in which the miscreant stowaway of the title ploughs his watery furrow. I wanted an old map, and conducted some online research, eventually finding a series of  prints from the Catalan Atlas, which was published in 1375, and attributed to Abraham Cresques, a Jewish map-maker from Mallorca, who, along with his son Jafudà, was responsible for some of the most beautiful maps of the period. In an interesting twist, considering the subject matter of Stowaway, Jafudà became a converso following the persecutions of 1391, and changed his name to Jaume Riba.

After some initial resistance, the publishers eventually accepted my idea of a map, and found a way of adapting the one I had in mind for the cover of the book. And that, I thought, was that.

In July this year, we visited Palma de Mallorca to attend the International Robert Graves Conference, and on the first day, after visiting the Cathedral and the Almudaina Palace in the morning, we ambled through the city with no particular destination in mind. Lunch was a couple of hours away, and there was no hurry. The day was hot, and the lanes overlooking the bay offered shade. I noticed a museum, the Museu Fundación Juan March, and we went in. The place was completely empty.  An series of Dalí prints, an exhibition of pessebres (nativity scenes, but expanded into extraordinarily detailed arenas of daily life in a medieval town, with all the craftsmen and merchants and peasants at work, which are called Neapolitan Pessebres). And upstairs, to my delight, a small collection of medieval maps – of the same appearance, I thought, as the one I had found for the cover of Stowaway – but not, however, from the Catalan Atlas of Abraham and Jafudà Cresques: these, I since learned, are held in the Bibliothèque National de France (such as the one in the image above) and the Maritime Museum, close to where I once lived in Barcelona.

In one of these photos I accidentally caught a reflection of Mrs Blanco, standing behind me, mirrored by the glass of a map, in a place we hadn’t intended going, but into which, by that strange reflective symmetry that governs the universe, we had unwittingly wandered.

Views from the map room.

A red chest, for the storing of maps.