The Ship Less Remarkable (PG)

For Alicia

“No less remarkable is that of the cutter Alicia, which sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from where she never again emerged, nor was anything further ever heard of herself and her crew.”

- From the Problem of Thor Bridge.

Jack leant nonchalantly over the railings, the dying embers of a cigarette drooping from his lip. Behind him, the ship was lit up by the lanterns of the night watch, but in front of him there was only the murky depths of a chill dawn, as the thirteenth day of their voyage slowly began to crawl into life. Hanging over the railings, he felt as though he was hanging over the edge of the world, and he loved the feeling of the wet breeze on his face, and the salt in his mouth, despite the cold.

There was a slight fizzing sound as finally the inevitable happened and some of the sea spray hit the cherry of his cigarette. Jack barely blinked, and spat the thin roll of paper out, and watched it’s descent into the sea below. He had by now gotten used to the rolling of decks beneath his feet, and the emptiness of the world around him. His hands had become calloused from handling ropes, and he could feel the muscles building in his arms and back. He no longer felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach every time it came to eat the same plain meal, but looked forward to the companionship of his shipmates. His meagre bunk in the cabin which had seemed such a hardship at first was now simply his bed, and the shifting and snoring of the other men was his lullaby.

When his merchant father had suggested that he take this journey to better his understanding of the business, he had not thought he would actually enjoy it. Before he left, he had joked with his sweetheart Elizabeth that he might lose his heart to the sea, and run away to become a sailor. He had not realised then just how satisfying physical labour and a strict routine would become. For as long as he could remember his schooling had always involved numbers and places – the price of tea, the cost of a vessel, the empire’s latest conquest… countries that would trade, and those who would not. War, and famine, and politics. The addictive nature of opium, and how that made it such a valuable crop. Foreign currencies, foreign monarchs, foreign goods, and the prices they would fetch in London. Life had always been a giant balancing act, and the accounts ledger was the fulcrum.

But here on the ocean… none of that mattered. The captain ordered their everyday life, down to a man. The right winds meant a good day, a calm day meant a slow one, and the rain and the sunshine fell equally on all of them with no diffidence to rank. Jack found that some of the sailors disliked him at first, calling him ‘the soft merchant’s son’, and the ‘land lubber’, and he suspected only the fact that his father paid their wages prevented them from saying worse. However, when they saw he was willing to take up his share of the work, and was nimble on his feet, and a quick learner, the annoyed nudges amongst old hands turned to a friendly gibe and a quick grin every now and then. When at last he mustered the courage to scale the rigging, the result was an outburst of cheers. It had only been a couple of weeks, but he was already slipping into the seamless team of the crew. With nothing to think of, and nothing to balance, he felt more relaxed than he had in years.

On the deck behind him, there was a rattling cough, and the second mate came out of the cabin, to relieve the night watch, and himself over the railings. Jack turned, and the man gave him a slight nod. Jack motioned to the leather pouch of baccy in his pocket, but the mate shock his head, and swaggered off down the deck, to the echo of more coughing. Jack simply shrugged, and turned back to watch the sea.

It was strange, the way the waves moved. He had always imagined the sea a great flat mass, but now he knew it was not so. In one particularly hairy night, the peaks and troughs of the waves had been several yards high – and yet his shipmate Jim told him with a laugh that the waves could be much bigger still. As he looked into the distance now, the sea was fairly calm. There were no white mares riding on the waves and the wind was light… and yet, he could almost see something, in the distance. The dawn sky was rapidly lightening now, and against the sky he could see some kind of thin silhouette thrashing about, alternatively raising up into the air, and sinking down into the depths

“Hoy, Murdoch!”

His call brought the second mate back to his side with a grunt, and Jack pointed out over the waves.

“Ever see anything like that?”

Murdoch squinted against the salt spray of the sea, and the quickly brightening sun in the East.

“Don’t see nothing.”

“There again, look! There!”

Jack pointed again, wildly, as the strange shape emerged from the sea once more, and appeared to wave at them. He found it hard to judge distances on the ocean, but realised with a first shiver of nerves that it was some distance off, and must therefore been much larger than he first realised. Beside him, the mate paled.

“It’s the dawn light yeah. Plays tricks on the eyes.”

“But-!” Jack turned to his companion, naïve disbelief on his face. “You see it don’t you? Clear as I do! That’s no hallucination.”

“That’s exactly what it is, and I says leave well alone. Forget it lad.”

The old Jack might have cried out ‘I’ll do no such thing’, and run to fetch a telescope, but the new Jack – the seaman Jack – he had no desire to disobey his superiors. He might have nodded his head, and gone about his business, and the whole matter would have been forgotten, had the pilot not then strode up beside them, and demanded to know in a deep voice, what the two of them had seen.

“Trick ‘o the light, sir.” Murdoch replied tersely “O’er yonder.”

The pilot slanted a hand against his eyes, and gazed out over the sea. He audibly gasped.

“By the good God…”

“Sir?”

Jack couldn’t help look up with hopeful eyes.

“I’ll be blown… that’s no trick of light, Murdoch…”

The gruff sailor gave a worried frown.

“Let her be.” he said, and then added almost as an after-though. “Sir.”

“You know jolly well we can’t.” the pilot replied, with a vein of terrified glee in his voice, that found an answer in Jack’s belly.

“What is it sir?” he asked eagerly.

The pilot looked down at him. He was an old sailor, deeply browned by the sun, but with fashionably cut whiskers, and an expensive flair in clothes. Jack knew him from his boyhood, for while his father didn’t socialise much with the captain, he had always shared the pilot’s equal fascination with maps both old and obscure and new and barely charted.

“My boy, have you ever heard of the Kraken?”

Jack shook his head, eyes wide.

“There are many monsters of the sea lad, no doubt you’ve heard of some of them, even at home. But most of them are just that, see? Monsters, legends, fairy-tales. But the Kraken? Aye, she’s something else all right.”

“She’s real?”

“She’s real enough,” the mate broke in “For us to be satisfied to let alone.”

The pilot laughed abruptly, and Jack shuddered to hear a madness in that laugh that he had never heard before.

“Come now Mr. Murdoch! You know well as I do that there’s a reward out to the first to capture the beast.”

Even Jack could tell that was madness, and the second mate instantly voiced his fears.
“Ain’t no way a vessel this size can capture that leviathan!”

“Ah, no now.” the pilot agreed easily “But young Williams belowdecks is a dab hand with a sketchbook. And what it would be to bring back a scientifically accurate drawing of the Kraken!”

Jack found himself looking up into Murdoch’s face, willing him to agree.

“You’ll have to ask the cap’n.” he said finally.

~

To Jack’s delight, not to mention that of many of the younger deckhands, the captain was of a similar mind to the pilot. He saw it as a chance to bring glory to his ship, and although he had a tidy little contract with Jack’s father, he was not immune to the temptations fame could bring. Neither was he a careless man however, and as the pilot brought the ship about, he ordered the bosun issue every man with a long spear, and make the cannon ready. He hadn’t got his captaincy by taking unnecessary risks.

The Alicia was a small ship, and she easily cut through the water, to point her prow at the ominous shadow ahead. Jack longed to run to the fore of the clipper, to hang once more off the railings, but the second mate caught him up, and put him to task, perhaps sensing the young man’s eagerness, and fearing it. Jack busied himself without too much disappointment, as he imagined it might take a while to catch up with the beast. As it was he was surprised when he heard anxious shouts from the forecastle after only a short while. He raised his head, to where one of his shipmates was tangled in the rigging, watching the horizon.

“Ahoy, Thomas! What do they see?”

The lad above him looked down excited.

“She’s coming about Jack! Right for us!”

At this something in Jack snapped, and he dropped the rope he was coiling and ran to the fore. If Murdoch saw him he did nothing, and several others dropped their tasks, running to meet the famed beast. Others however bowed their gaze, or shook their heads, stern disapproval written in the lines on their foreheads. One man even took a furtive glance around him, before disappearing below.

It was the sheer size of the thing which hit Jack first. He wasn’t sure how big he had imagined the creature to be, but the big bulbous head which reared out of the water was some nine feet long. Afterwards he supposed it was it’s immense size which prevented him from realising what’s manner of creature the Kraken was, for it wasn’t until several of its ugly welted tentacles had risen from the waves that he realised what he was seeing.

“It’s a squid!” he cried out, unable to stop himself.

At this his shipmates would usually have laughed, and given him a push, but today they were all too busy gawking at the strange creature. The pilot had Williams by the collar, and was eagerly shoving the reluctant boy to the front, desperate that the lad should get a good look. One by one, the hands began to lose their fear, and instead pushed forward, all wanting to get a clear view of the creature who didn’t seem as fearful as it’s name.

The next sequence of events happened so quickly, that later Jack was hard-pressed to remember exactly in what order they had occurred. The ship rolled forward, one tentacle waved too close and wrapped round a railing, and one of the deckhands gave a yell, and pitched his spear straight towards the giant squid’s head. The pilot gave an angry shout, but it was too late, as the man’s aim was true, and the spear buried itself into the Kraken’s rubbery flesh. The beast made no sound, but withdrew into itself, and then in a flurry was swimming away.

“After her!”

The captain’s yell carried easily, and the man at the helm leapt to his command, and turned the ship into the wind, and then they were flying behind in pursuit. The pilot leaned over, and appeared to be trying to convince the captain that they had all had a good look, and it was time to resume their course, and leave the poor beast alone. But the captain would have none of it.

“Where d’you think she’s gone?” the man at Jack’s elbow asked him.

“I dunno. But it looks like she went into that small patch of mist.”

Jack pointed ahead of them, and true enough, that’s where the ship was headed. He’d seen sea mist on a still day before of course, but there was something eerie about the way this mist hung on the water, when they were sailing towards it so fast. He found himself gripping the bars of the railings.

“This ain’t right, Birks.” he said, hating the quiver in his voice, but not being able to do anything about it. “We should turn back.”

But then the mist engulfed them, and suddenly all around them was grey. Jack started at the mere thickness of it, for it was more like fog than mist. He turned again to speak to Birks, but the man was a mere ghost through the mire. There was an eerie quiet, as though the sounds of the ship were muffled by water in his ears. For a moment there was nothing. For a moment no one could see the water for the mist, let alone the Kraken.

Then it happened. A large tentacle, of a beast at least twice the size of the creature they had chased rose out of the mist. As Jack watched in horror the underside of the giant appendage come crashing down, snapping the mast, and wrapping easily about the midship. The men’s muted screams didn’t register properly in Jack’s mind as he watched them run forward with spears and axes, desperate to cut themselves free. A couple of pistol shots cut through the mist, but Jack stood by dumbly, petrified by what he saw. The planks of wood groaned under the pressure, and another tentacle swept up to wrap around the small craft. Jack suddenly became aware of water washing over the decks, and realised that the massive beast was dragging them under. The vision of being dragged down into the drink snapped him back into reality, and he ran forward with a yell, hurling his spear into the nearest bit of flesh available, and punching and kicking when the spear was plucked from his grasp, and tossed into the sea.

It was a losing battle they fought, and although they fought it hard, they did not fight it long. The Alicia began to break up, and then she was sinking, more rapidly than Jack could have imagined. He slipped on the soaked decks, and was suddenly falling, falling into the glinting sea which welcomed into him into it’s cold depths with a smothering embrace.

To be continued…