A Greek merchant-explorer Pytheas - whose home port was the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles) - is said to be the first person to have circumnavigated the British Isles, in 325 BCE, thereby fixing the islands in the historical imagination as archipelagic, maritime, aloof. His own account of the voyage is lost. This poem attempts to make good that lack, albeit in the consciousness of countless other voyages (imagined as much as real) that have intervened.