Only a Sailors Tale
We are told, we sailors, that death by drowning is as peaceful a one as man could wish for. After the time I spent in the South China Seas in 1904 I don't believe a word of it.
I had hired aboard one of the last tall ships sailing from Boston harbor in the June of that year, free at last, on my eighteenth birthday, from the influence of my parents. Well heeled, protestant folk they had a vested interest in several of the regions prominent banks and were, therefore, inclined to keep me as close to home as was possible.
They made, always, a great deal of my responsibilities to the estate and to posterity, but they made one fatal mistake in the early years of my childhood. My uncle, a man much derided by the rest of the family, and my fathers brother, was a shareholder and captain of a cargo vessel, the good ship Sally Mae. He was a great drinker and braggart but was nonetheless called upon, from time to time, to transport certain familial assets to far places, where they might be more lucratively liquidated. The mistake my parents made was to send me with him for the summer of my ninth year, after that they had lost any interest in banking which time may have otherwise cultivated in me.
I worked hard that year, as we sailed down the east coast, into the Caribbean, through the islands, and back, stopping to trade along the way. I was a cabin boy, primarily, though I showed great promise in the many skills in which a sailor must be versed, and by the end of our cruise I could swarm the rigging or splice a line with dexterity the equal of that of the most grizzled of veteran sailors.
I fell in love with the ship. Even then, in 1895 it was clear that the sailing ship was on its way out, ground down by the ever cheaper, ever faster steam boats being produced. We would watch them appear, all of a sudden, over the horizon, their arrival heralded not by the stately rise of masts from the water, but by a great pall of smoke and the noise of belching engines, and with each such apparition we were glad to find live wood beneath our feet, clear skies above our heads, and clean air filling our sails. In even the thickest of storms we fought, proud, against the elements, knowing that we were better men and truer, than those laboring in the bellies of the metal beasts.
There was one man that we sailed with, especially, that I remember with great fondness. A bear of a man he was, fully six and a half feet tall and near as broad, with a beard that stuck out in all directions and tickled his ample stomach. He would not, or possibly could not, climb the riggings or post a high watch, but he did the work of two men when it came to running the bilge pumps or hauling sail, and at night he would tell us tall tales of the things he had seen or done. These tales, frequently bawdy, were as much an education to me as was the running of the ship; but there was one tale in particular that stuck with me, and that I recalled with a shiver of dread anticipation each time I set foot on a plank deck for years to come.
He didn't know how to swim, he would say, and that such knowledge was good for no man “save that it be in rum or women, boy, the waters will just pull you loose if you try to fight it. 'Tis saner to pray, or failing that, to die.” Then he would go quiet for a piece, marshaling his words with great care. “It benefits a man little to strive and struggle, to rail against the falling night, when such increases the chance he becomes one of the damned. They live, yes, decaying and bloated, just beneath the surface. They lie in wait, the restless sleepers, in torment, breathless, to snare the flailing soul. No, I have seen their eyes and will have no further truck with them, it were better I had died.” And here he would stare soulfully into his cup, finish the last of the swill that we on the Sally Mae called brandy, and stagger to his hammock. Half the time he even made it in, before falling unconscious.
Nine years later a more fearsome tale could hardly have held me back, for it was either the dangers of the open sea or the long slow death of finance. Would now, that I had chosen the later.
Even getting out of the house on that day was no mean feat. My parents had spent weeks in frenzied preparation for the day on which I would achieve my majority and emerge, at last, a full member of their society. As such I had to dodge no fewer than two man servants, a maid, and the cook to win even the paltry safety of the out of doors and almost despaired of reaching the end of the drive. I was however resolute in my purpose, and of no mean spirit, so I doubled back and slipped over a low point in the hedge.
I arrived at the docks some twenty minutes later, wearing what were, to me, barely acceptable clothes, but that stood out in that company as the most grotesque of fineries. So dressed I feared that I would be taken less than seriously by any hiring captain and I therefore set about divesting myself of the offending articles (in particular my fine silk vest) and replacing them with several, altogether more practical, sets of shipman's wear such as that I saw about me, namely homespun shirts and loose canvass pants falling to just below the knee and held up by a long belt of coiled rope. I also managed to trade for a good knife, a pair of worn boots more suitable for climbing than riding, and half a bottle of barely proofed rum. Now looking the part I proceeded down the docks seeking out my future.
As luck would have it the third ship I came too, the Alabama Queen, had fallen victim to a massive storm a week or so out of port in which she had lost eleven hands. In the intervening week she had lost two more to dehydration and one to disease, and by the time she had limped into port another half dozen were too debilitated to sign back on. All told she had to hire on almost half of her total compliment and was taking almost anyone clean of disease and strong of limb. When her captain, a swarthy Italian called Idanza, learned I could read and write and had an advanced grasp of mathematics he couldn't find a contract fast enough.
The next two weeks would have been incredibly tense for me, for fear that my parents, or rather their hired help, would track me down and prevent my leaving but I was kept far too busy assisting with repairs to the ship to be worried about anything else.
As one of three people on board capable of reading a ledger, let alone understanding the nuances of trade required to outfit a vessel of that size, I was constantly running into town, up and down the wharf, procuring timbers and caulking and all manner of fastenings. There was once on one of these ventures where I ran straight into a man with whom I had had dealings on my parents behalf but so grimy was I, and such a wastrel, that he took no more notice of me than he would have any piss poor sailor. All in all time passed more quickly those two weeks than at any other time in my life, and before I knew it we were loaded up, with the wind at our backs, and our prow splitting the waves towards England.
My adventure, such as it was, ran as close to plan as is possible in these affairs. We spent no more than a few days becalmed, and weathered no storms of note between Boston and the mouth of the Thames. I settled in well enough with the crew, though they were suspicious of me on principle do to my upbringing and command of written language. I proved my worth though, and pulled my weight, and gradually they accepted me, in part I suppose, because so much of the crew was new to the ship and so the entrenched, if unofficial power structures that so often spring up among seafaring folk were not in place.
Indeed, until some few days after we had departed the muddy docks of London heading south I was of the opinion that this would be my last voyage, and that perhaps my year of adventure would culminate in a triumphant, or at least trivial return home, taking up my parents mantel, albeit one year later and a good deal better traveled than had been their desire. But it was off the coast of France that I first saw the lights that trailed in our wake.
I was standing the night watch, alone in the stern of the ship, sipping coffee out of a beaten tin cup when I saw it, churned up from god knows what depths it shown, not the phosphorescent green with which I was familiar, no alchemical algae that I knew of from my previous cruise presented itself in such a regular manner or so bright, nor did it have quite the quality of lit lamps, bobbing in the surf.
When the hour was struck I called “alls well” with the rest of the watch and in the morning presented myself and my observations to a scientist we had picked up in England, Mr. Hendricks, a biologist from Queens College. At first he expressed the gravest doubts as to the accuracy of my observations, however once convinced that I was a man of some learning myself, and no clueless sailor drunk on duty or delirious with dehydration he became incredibly excited. Believing that what I had observed may indeed be some previously unknown form of marine life he immediately went to the captain to request permission to stand the night watch alongside the men, all the while promising me that my contributions to the discovery would not be forgotten.
I went about my duties in the fog that typically follows a night watch, and staggered to my hammock as the sun set having almost forgotten the events of the night before. They were only recalled forcefully as Hendricks shook me awake. “I don't see it,” he said.
“Hmmm? Oh, seems like no news then, let me sleep...” I rolled over and tried to ignore him.
“If we don't catch it tonight, who knows when we'll be through these waters again, it's probably a highly localized phenomena.” I could see that his face was flushed, his eyes almost feverish.
“Alright, alright,” I slurred, “Just give me a minute.” I stood, rubbed my eyes, and pulled on my boots, “What time is it?”
“About three in the morning, come on.” he was climbing the stairs to the main deck before I could come up with an appropriately invective laden response.
In the end we stood watch for hours, peering for any sign of the mysterious lights. Mr. Hendricks was flummoxed and I didn't admit that, this time, I saw them swarming all about us. When the sun finally rose the sky was a bright blood red.
The weather for the next several weeks was terrible, low winds, or the wrong winds plagued us, and when it did finally pick up it seemed like it was invariably so strong and so sudden that we were forced to dodge snapped lines in all directions while desperately trying to furl the sails. Despite our best efforts we lost several spars and days on end were spent splicing cables back together. Fortunately the main mast held, as we did not have a spare, but it seemed like everything we could afford to lose we lost, and the most common we lost more times than was comfortable.
Always when I was on deck at night I saw the lights dancing, tantalizing, in the water. I told none of my comrades about my visions, but nonetheless word began to spread that I was seeing spirits and sailors, being the superstitious folk that they are, deduced from this that I was bad luck, that I was the cause of the abysmal weather. For a time it was just muttering, for a time I was just excluded.
It was not until we reached the South China Sea that matters came to a head. We had been making reasonable headway for several days when we spotted the storm, cutting across our heading and coming fast, and the mutterings against me had slowed commensurately, but with the arrival of the storm and the cry of “all hands on deck” the old suspicions flared brighter than ever. As we secured the ship in the face of the oncoming storm I felt stares burning into my back, and several times heard the first mate bark reproaches at the men to focus on their duties. Even so, when he called the names of those who would remain on deck, performing certain vital duties even as the storm struck, mine was third on the list.
Almost the instant the last of the crew, save for us “lucky” ones vanished below decks the storm struck with a vengeance. We moved as quickly as possible, bent double in the wind, to keep the ship under some semblance of control and upright in the water, and in the black and the wet, and the frigid cold I felt a hand in between my shoulder blades and a swift, sharp, shove. I lost my feet as a wave rolled over the deck, and tumbled, head over heels, off the starboard side and into the waiting lights.
What I found there, just beneath the boiling sea, almost defeats attempts at description. I saw monstrous fleets meet in titanic combat, barnacle encrusted sails filled by some unnatural wind, I saw bloated corpses dancing on deck to a reel played by a skeleton on the tendons remaining in his right arm. I saw legions of the lost and the damned bearing storm lanterns and torches, the tools of the night watch, but what I will never forget is the eyes. The corpses were wrecked by time and salt water, some by the predations of large fish, but each and every one had a pair of perfect eyes, intact, and in utmost agony. It was a soul pain, not a physical one that most wracked the waterlogged dead, and in that pain they forged bonds with one another. And in my eyes they saw one of there own.
I don't know how long I spent, driven underwater by the pounding of the waves, or stuck beneath the ship, swimming down so as not to be flayed by the hull. It felt like eons, it may have been hours, I do know that I had forgotten to breathe by the time light broke through the oceans surface, and drove the legions to their deeper depths. Free of their influence I kicked to the surface.
I'm still a dead man, though by evening I had been picked up by a steamer flying the colors of the East India company, and have sailed the circumference of the earth with her. As I pen this the great metal hull is creaking most alarmingly, and in places beginning to buckle. It has been many days since the captain has known his course or location, though he admits it to no one.
I will seal this in the strongbox, and hope that if it reaches my family they may have some solace in the knowledge that I sail now, forever, aboard the last of the tall ships, that are my true love.
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