Outlander Book Club: Voyager Chapter 47 breakdown

Just the Outlander chapter

We pick up with the story onboard the Porpoise, where Claire is tending to the sick. There is some good news in that some of the men look better and the sounds of the groans aren’t as bad. Claire has had to shout at some of the sailors to get them to do what she needs.

However, the hard work isn’t over. Claire hasn’t found the source of the infection yet. That’s the best way to contain the disease and stop it spreading.

One thing she is having a problem with is stopping the sailors from drinking the alcohol used for washing hands. It’s pure alcohol and deadly. Already one man has died from it and two are in a coma, likely with brain damage if they wake up. Now there is a fourth suffering from alcohol poisoning.

She needs Captain Leonard to help deal with this. The sailors need to stop.

However, Captain Leonard is overwhelmed by everything. He just needs Claire to deal with it, but he does send the purser to her to talk about any more rum that can be used to turn into pure alcohol for cleaning.

While she waits in the captain’s office for the purser, she finds the logbook. In it, she finds a note about Jamie, and now she understands why the captain almost called her Mrs. Fraser instead of Mrs. Malcolm. Leonard knows who Jamie really is and all of his aliases. This is because of Tompkins.

Now Claire needs to figure out where Tompkins is and what he really knows.

That doesn’t take long. Tompkins comes to her because of a gash on his leg. For fear of his leg being cut off, he tells her everything that he knows, including that an Englishman who works for Jamie is working with Sir Percival, who wants a peerage and knows that the capture of Jamie as a smuggler, someone wanted for sedition, and pardoned Jacobite traitor will be just what he needs.

Because the print shop burned down (Tompkins was the one in there), there was no proof. The set-up in Arbroath with the hanged exciseman was a way to make Jamie guilty of something. However, that didn’t quite go to plan either.

Tompkins mentions a missing man. That’s the one who attacked Claire and who Mr. Willoughby shot. Nobody seems overly concerned about the guy, or maybe it’s just the fact there’s no proof that anything happened to him. Claire does think about the cask of creme de menthe, though.

In the end, Claire seems to get all the information she needs. Now she needs to figure out who the Englishman is.