How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #10
Out of the depths of his ritual/baptism something was rising, some white memory/of a midshipman coming up close to the hull,/a white turning body, and this water go fill/with them, turning tied canvases, not sharks, but all/corpses wrapped like the sail, and ice-sweating Achille/in the stasis of his sunstroke looked as each swell/disgorged them, in tens, in hundreds, and his soul/sickened and was ill. (XXIV.ii.129)
Achille is just entering his sun stroke-induced hallucinations at sea. As he bathes the white sail in the ocean, he riffs on his earlier observations that many people died of drowning right under his boat. The whiteness of the sail is echoed in the whiteness of Midshipman Plunkett and his memory.
Quote #11
Time is the metre, memory the only plot./His shoulders are knobs of ebony. The back muscles/can bulge like porpoises leaping out of this line/from the gorge of our memory. (XXIV.ii.129)
We're not going to attempt to parse this one out completely, but we will point out that Walcott's vision of history here is mediated by his poetic vision. Also note that Achille's body is not just working the lines of the boat—it is actively pulling on the chords of history to "disgorge" a cultural memory that has been lost to Achille over generations. In about two seconds, he's going on a spirit-journey to his ancestors' settlement in Africa.
Quote #12
He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes;/he came into his own beginning and his end,/for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes./Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth/to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,/skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself. (XXV.i.134)
Achille has slipped through the space-time continuum to sail down the tributaries of the Congo and make it back to the settlement of his ancestors. That "light inside him" is an understanding of his true identity that is about to get larger as he journeys onward.