Bearing due west at 15 miles, I caught sight of a single flashing light in the darkness. I’d seen it plenty of times, but still wasn’t sure, not having a chart handy.

“What are those four lights in a row to the right of it?” my companion asked.

“Chatham Bars Inn. Just up Shore Road. Those are the lights on the top floor,” I said.

For the first time, I was seeing home from a totally different vantage point. At night, the light beckoned across the distance. But never this far, in this direction. Never this late, this dark. Out in the blue water of the shipping lanes, I saw Chatham Lighthouse.

Certainly no closer the vessel I was on would venture. The Norwegian Dawn draws 28 feet, and even this far out we only had 50 feet at best underneath us. Just the day before, halfway to Boston from Bermuda, we were in waters 16,000 feet deep.

Maybe it is the angle of the sun, or being hundreds of miles from the coastal shelf, or the Gulf Stream or the depth, but the blue water there is not just blue. It’s ultraviolet. It is unreal in its purplish hue, even more so when the foam churned up by the massive propellers of our ship bubble up like crystalline green, literally the color of too many bridesmaid dresses – sea foam.

Now back in New England waters, it felt like home. Cooler, drier air. A slate hue to the ocean.

I’ve always felt – scratch that – used travel as a tonic to blast myself out of routines. If you go somewhere and see new places, you ought to come back with the dial in your head moved a degree or so off where it was before.

Anything less, and you were probably just playing tourist. Anything more and you may have suffered a psychotic break. Me, I was here to punctuate my sleeping in my cabin with breaks of eating great free food and naps on the balcony.

For someone with more entries in my passport than my checkbook, I can get away with at least one trip every decade devoted to actual relaxation with my integrity intact. Especially for a Cape Codder when it is scheduled the last week of summer.

And yet, I was standing on the rail of this massive ship doing something that was common prior to the building of the Cape Cod Canal 100 years ago, starting to connect the dots on some history and thinking about what to write about it. Passing by Chatham Light in a passenger liner – that’s a singular experience. Chatham is an end-of-the-road sort of place. You do not pass through Chatham unless you aren’t paying attention to the map.

We have no highway. Our railroad, defunct decades now, was the end of a spur. Unless you are in an airplane landing in Boston, there aren’t too many times you can point to a fellow passenger and say, “You see that? I live there – right there.” This trip had reconnected me with Bermuda — a place of only the vaguest recollections from a family vacation when I was three years old – in the best manner I could have imagined. By sea. No flight to another part of the country, but just a two-hour drive to Boston. All travel was done roughly at sea level.

Certainly I wasn’t aware as a toddler of my own family’s connection to the “Isle of Devils,” so known from its treacherous reefs. But as a boy I came to learn the connection of my ancestor, Stephen Hopkins, who had been aboard the Sea Venture, en route to Jamestown colony in 1609. The story the shipwreck at the unpopulated Bermuda was the basis of Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.

After the survivors made it to Virginia, the disease, starvation and privation by nearby Native Americans led young Hopkins to return straightaway to London. Ten years later he would be the only man aboard the Mayflower who had actually set foot in the New World. And, as we know, that vessel was turned back from its heading of the mouth of the Hudson by the shoals off Chatham.

The very waters my passenger ship now plied. From one wreck-prone area to another, with a single family member connecting them (and the greatest writer of the English language thrown in).

These are the sorts of mental wanderings one is allowed when traveling slowly, at sea level. We circle back without meaning to, time and again.

Read this and Andy’s other columns online at The Cape Cod Chronicle.