The Wreck of the Melville

By Mark Smeltz

A lost manuscript from the late 1800s reveals the trials and tribulations of Gordon: a budding journalist cursed with a restless spirit. After stowing away on a sailing ship to meet his literary heroes travelling onboard, Gordon is thrust into adventure and peril on the high seas—and beyond. The ship’s captain, on a harrowing quest to locate his missing sister, throws Gordon and the crew into conflict with forces not of this world. The young journalist will have to confront the treachery of his companions, the rage of the sea, and the cosmic threat of entities beyond his own imagination...if he has any hope of reaching shore again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TWB Press
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781944045791

Mark Smeltz

Mark Smeltz is an author of fiction and nonfiction whose work is inspired by a relentless fascination with the far-flung corners of the world and the mysteries that rest just beneath the surface. When he's not parked behind the keyboard, plugging away at another tale of terror and suspense, he can be found in the game reserves of Africa or the foothills of the Himalayas, exploring the intersection of nature and culture, which ultimately lies at the heart of everything he writes. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with his wife and a ragtag assortment of badly behaved cats and dogs.

Book preview

The Wreck of the Melville

By

Mark Smeltz

Copyright by Mark Smeltz 2021

Published by TWB Press at Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this story (e-book) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or book reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidences are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Edited by Terry Wright

Cover design by Terry Wright

Cover image from pixabay.com by Comfreak

ISBN: 978-1-944045-79-1

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One TELLS HOW I FIRST SIGHTED THE MELVILLE AND DETERMINED TO OBTAIN PASSAGE ABOARD HER

Chapter Two IN WHICH I ENCOUNTER THE CREW AND ATTEMPT TO INGRATIATE MYSELF TO THEM

Chapter Three IN WHICH WE SET SAIL

Chapter Four A CONVERSATION BY STARLIGHT

Chapter Five TELLS OF MY AUDIENCE WITH THE CAPTAIN AND MY SUBSEQUENT INTERACTIONS WITH THE CREW

Chapter Six IN WHICH THE SHIP IS BESET BY STORMS, AND WE FIRST EXPERIENCE A LOSS, AND THEN MAKE A DISCOVERY

Chapter Seven TELLS HOW WE ENCOUNTERED A DERELICT IN A STATE OF SINGULAR RUIN, AND HOW OUR SUBSEQUENT TROUBLES BEGAN

Chapter Eight IN WHICH THE CAPTAIN REVEALS HIS INTENTIONS

Chapter Nine MUTINY!

Chapter Ten TELLS HOW I SOUGHT ANOTHER AUDIENCE WITH THE CAPTAIN, AND OF THAT MAN’S FINAL DESPERATE GAMBIT

Chapter Eleven IN WHICH THE DOCTOR TELLS A CURIOUS TALE

Chapter Twelve TELLS HOW A STRANGE MIST ENVELOPED THE MELVILLE AND OF THE SUBSEQUENT HORRORS WHICH BEFELL HER CREW

Chapter Thirteen THE WRECK OF THE MELVILLE

Chapter Fourteen TELLS OF AN ENCOUNTER UPON THE OPEN SEA

Chapter Fifteen IN WHICH WE SEEK REFUGE ON A HITHERTO UNDISCOVERED ISLAND

Chapter Sixteen TELLS OF OUR EXPEDITION INTO THE IMPACT CRATER, AND OF THE DISCOVERIES WE MADE THERE

Chapter Seventeen IN WHICH I MEET THE SOLE SURVIVOR OF THE FOUNDLING

Chapter Eighteen THE ARCHITECT OF THE EVENING TIDE

Chapter Nineteen IN WHICH I OFFER A FEW FINAL REFLECTIONS

Introduction

The twenty-first century has seen remarkably few works entered into the literary canon. School curriculums and college courses are largely set in stone; it is a given that students will read Steinbeck in high school and Austen at university. More modern pieces, if indeed they are taught at all, are relegated to alternative classes, which seldom offer critiques as thorough as those applied to the classics of English literature. Since the academic culture has fostered this environment in which only an established subset of authors are treated with serious attention, there has been a resulting search for the unpublished lost works of these authors. It is often only by the discovery of such pieces that the literary canon, at least as it exists historically, can be appreciably expanded.

There are many such examples: Wild Fruits, ostensibly the last of Thoreau’s body of work, was discovered and published over one hundred and thirty years after the death of its author. While perhaps not altogether revelatory, the inclusion of this new work in the literary canon has allowed us to develop a fuller understanding and appreciation of this influential thinker. For an even more recent example, we need look no further than Conan Doyle’s The Narrative of John Smith—written in 1883, it was not rediscovered and published until 2011. That a subsequent frenzy of scholarship surrounding this title would soon follow was a foregone conclusion.

However, discoveries of this significance are few and somewhat far between. It is widely acknowledged that any further rediscovered manuscripts will be of lesser and lesser importance; the great literary legends have been discovered already—or they are presumed lost. Even the most diligent scholars have been unable to unearth Stevenson’s first draft of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for example, and no one has produced the entirety of Melville’s Isle of the Cross. The well, in other words, is running dry. Many academics now despair of finding a major diamond in the rough and have instead turned to the realm of history in an attempt to shed light on the lives of classic authors, thereby influencing the way in which their masterpieces are interpreted.

For example, discussion of American author Henry James’ repressed homosexuality has completely and irrevocably altered the way in which we view his work. The impression of James as a timid man who feared to express intimacy in his private life has largely been swept aside in favor of an altogether different analysis—one in which sexuality necessarily opens his every sentence to a new and productive interpretation. Entire volumes have since been written on the subject. In this way, the discovery of biographical details can have tremendous impact upon the way in which classic literature is evaluated and appreciated.

That is why the following manuscript, if indeed its authenticity is independently verified by the academic community at large, must necessarily force us to reevaluate both the lives and works of its principal actors. Found in a collection of sea stories belonging to (but not written by) the obscure novelist Charles Romyn Dake, whose own career was cut short in 1899 when the writer took his own life [1] it is a journal quite unlike any of its contemporaries. Were it simply a piece of fiction, as at first its fantastic and horrifying events might suggest, it would remain a fascinating story in both the macabre and bildungsroman traditions, and one well worth further literary analysis. However, after many months spent in the laborious task of digitizing the original volume and transcribing its narrative, I have come to believe that it can be nothing but genuine.

[1 - While macabre-minded readers might be tempted to draw a parallel between the novelist’s suicide and this volume (as though he were driven mad by its contents), there are textual indications that it was actually written after Dake’s death. How it ended up in his collection is unknown but is only a curiosity in the face of the volume’s larger implications.]

This is a conclusion which has serious ramifications for the literary canon. Particular attention will need to be addressed to the bibliographies of Jules Verne, William Hope Hodgson, and William Clark Russell. Many of the fantastical moments in their stories, it will now be seen, may have been inspired by true events.

It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of the reinterpretations which will be forced upon our understanding of these authors—to say nothing of our understanding of the natural world itself—as a result of this manuscript’s discovery. As such, I am excited to present this not only to the academic community, but also simultaneously to a more general readership; the discoveries herein truly belong to the entire world.

With this broader audience in mind, I have in certain sections of the text provided my own notes and observations, which I believe will demonstrate relationships to the works of the authors herein, offer evidence to support the authenticity of the manuscript itself, and generally allow a modern non-academic readership to more fully grasp the implications and significance of the piece. I have also engaged in the minor indulgence of inserting a passage from Herman Melville’s body of work (with a single exception) at the outset of each chapter; while these quotations are not always strictly related to the text itself, I believe they are in keeping with the spirit of the memoir, and I do not think that its author would have disapproved.

However, it must be said that in the task of preparing this narrative for the modern reader, I have had only the most cursory hand in the presentation of its content. Serious scholarship of this text must fall to others more qualified than myself—and will, perhaps, belong to the historian and naturalist rather than the literary critic. In the end, of course, the sole credit for the following pages must belong to their author: a singularly courageous young man who, unless further data is eventually brought to light, will be known to history only as Gordon.

CHAPTER ONE

TELLS HOW I FIRST SIGHTED THE MELVILLE AND DETERMINED TO OBTAIN PASSAGE ABOARD HER

"For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown."

-Herman Melville, Pierre; or The Ambiguities

The voice first came to me, as best I can remember, when I was a boy of perhaps ten years. The voice was nothing unnatural, indeed nothing outside the realm of ordinary experience, and I imagine that nary a young man or woman exists who does not, upon occasion, hear its call. It was the voice of restlessness, the voice of wanderlust, the voice that always seemed to ask me—most often in the midst of some unpleasant chore or another—wouldn’t I rather be engaged in some other activity? If I were to be found working in the yard beneath the hard eyes of my father—would I not rather join the boys playing in the street? If I were playing with those same boys, engaging in the idle but wholly engrossing activities, which are an art belonging, I am convinced, only to our youth—would I not rather aspire to greater things? To be in greater company? And if I were at my desk in England, with an ocean betwixt myself and the house of my father, applying myself to my studies—would I not rather be somewhere else, achieving instead of learning? Without belaboring the point, I would make it known to my reader that I was a fundamentally unhappy soul, never to be satisfied, continually yearning for something different, something more.

By the summer of 1890 I had attained twenty years, most spent in the dreadful confinement of formal education, and the voice was louder now than ever before. I wanted to move on and to find something new. That I would find it will no doubt be confirmed in your mind by the time I finish the telling of this tale, if in fact I can, or if indeed such a tale can ever truly be told in its entirety. Do not life’s momentous occasions resound within us for eternity? Indeed such an echo was sufficient remembrance of the horrors I had endured, and I had previously determined not to record the narrative which I now begin; the events that followed the embarkation of the Melville on her fateful voyage had wholly altered my intentions to pursue a life of journalism, for I could scarcely lift a pen without thinking of the travails of that adventure.

The cause of my lapse in determination now can be attributed to the failure of my colleagues to record the details of our travels with their own infinitely more artful pens. It is true that the men with whom I sailed have written many volumes since our brief time together, some of which contain certain elements of the truth under the guise of fiction, but to date a complete record of the events that befell the Melville and her crew is absent their bibliographies. Perhaps their hesitation to record the truth was a reflection of the fear that their stories would not be believed, and that their reputations would suffer in the wake of any published confessional. Or perhaps their reticence stemmed from an undue modesty; reluctant to claim the heroism of that voyage for their own, my friends (I feel justified in addressing them as such) chose instead to project their finer qualities onto characters of their own imaginations. But seeing that I have little reputation to protect and few valorous deeds to call my own [2], I feel no such compulsion to refrain from relating the account which follows.

[2 - The author’s modesty is a recurring element throughout his memoir; despite the legitimate heroics in which he later engages, he is inclined throughout to attribute the best qualities to his elders.]

And so I begin the record of the extraordinary circumstances which befell me in the year 1890, with the caveat that I hope the reader will forgive the antiquated nature of my prose; for truly I had abandoned my passion for the written word following the events that took place aboard the Melville, and as such it might be said that I never developed my voice beyond a style which has since fallen into some degree of disuse.

I have already alluded to the fact that it was my good fortune to attain that most lofty of academic aspirations: an English education. I returned from university at the age of twenty, believing myself prepared to begin an honest American career in journalism. However, I had discovered something extraordinary during those long weeks spent in crossing the Atlantic: with the ocean before me, the crest of every wave seemed to represent an infinity of possibilities, the wind rippling a ship’s canvas seemed to whisper a thousand untold futures, and the voice in my head—that damning, all-consuming voice—had fallen silent.

I must confess that my program of study was literary in nature, and that the intricacies of the human psyche are wholly outside the realm of my educational experience. Any conjecture I make concerning the cessation of that voice in my head is therefore merely that: conjecture. But I found that so long as I remained near the sea, even on the coast, that the restlessness in my soul was more or less quiet. I suspect that the answer to this riddle has less to do with the sea itself than with the prospect of adventure it represented in my mind; with the ocean in sight, it seemed to me that some great thing might arrive on the very next ship to make berth, or that such a ship might carry me on to something grander. And so I found myself unable to settle farther inland than the isle of Nantucket.

I convey this information now because it is critical to the development of an understanding of how I came to be at the Inquirer and Mirror, that worthy newspaper which accepted my apprenticeship and will, perhaps, publish this account upon its completion. [3] It will also perhaps prove useful to provide an understanding of my state of mind during the period in which the Melville made berth in Nantucket.

[3 - The Inquirer and Mirror, which dates back to 1821, did not ever publish this memoir in whole or in part. Certain language in its final chapter leads me to believe that its author chose never to submit it for consideration in the first place.]

The subject of the arrival of the Melville and the subsequent voyage she was to make were to be featured in the newspaper, and the coverage of these noteworthy events had been assigned to me. This was to be the first real story upon which I had the honor of reporting, and I intended to do so with the greatest enthusiasm. Such enthusiasm was not hard to muster upon learning the purpose of the ship’s voyage. She was not destined, as so many ships out of Nantucket once were, to be a whaler. Instead she was to be a ferry for passengers, although this description does inadequate service to her splendor. The Melville had been assigned the singular honor of being chosen to transport the greatest literary minds of the day upon a brief sojourn along the eastern American seaboard, during which time these authors were to engage in a writing session which was, as was made plain to me by my superiors at the Inquirer and Mirror, perceived to rival even that meeting between Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, which in 1816 generated the seed that had eventually matured into the legendary Frankenstein.

This meeting promised to be no less extraordinary, for on board the Melville would be none other than the eminent French author, Mr. Jules Verne, and the master of the rousing sea story, the incomparable Mr. William Clark Russell. Only Herman Melville himself was to be missing from this great meeting of minds. It must be duly confessed that this last writer was somewhat unappreciated at the time of our adventure and has only since come into some degree of well-deserved posthumous fame (for he was fated to pass away only shortly after the conclusion of our adventures), and as such an invitation was not extended to him. [4] Nonetheless, the captain, whose description will presently be furnished, professed a great admiration for the man and so named the ship in his honor, unwittingly ensuring that the man’s name would forever be associated with our time aboard the vessel.

[4 - Of course, one may speculate whether Melville, by 1890 a retiree working on his ultimately unfinished Billy Budd, Sailor, would have accepted such an invitation even if it had been extended.]

It is useless to describe the excitement which I felt upon learning that I would be reporting on the business of such great men, both of whom I had read during my time in England. In anticipation of the work to be done, I had bent the ear of a sympathetic customs man at the harbor in advance, who saw that I was promptly notified upon the arrival of the Melville. Thus I found myself approaching the docks on the unusually foggy evening of the ship’s arrival. Dusk was falling and the light was failing, and the sounds of the workday had begun to fade, to be replaced only with the lapping of the waves and the reluctant cries of the gulls, which were loath to give up the day.

The crewmen were said to have gone ashore, seeking carousal and merrymaking prior to spending several weeks more at sea. This suited me, for I had intended merely to observe the ship with the aim of securing some description of her for my story. I did not anticipate any special need to interact with her crew. While such a description of the ship indeed shortly follows, it is colored with the realization that presently overcame me: the Melville was the finest sight upon which I had ever laid my eyes, and that I would do anything, indeed I felt that I would make any sacrifice, to walk her decks and again feel the salt spray of the Atlantic upon my face. Such is the draw of a great ship, and such is the allure of the sea upon all men. Melville himself has said, and with more brevity and eloquence than I might summon were I left to my own devices, that there is magic in it.

The ship named for him was not lacking in such magic. She was a glorious square-rigged three-masted sailing vessel, without perhaps the utilitarian practicality of a modern steamer, but surpassing any such ship in sheer imaginative grandeur, rising at least fifteen feet from the water and looming out of the evening mist as a Biblical leviathan. Well over a hundred feet in length, I could see that she was thirty feet in breadth if she were an inch. The mere sight of her called to my mind all of the most daring sea stories I had read, most of which originated from the pens of the authors who were shortly to board her.

To think that these great authors would be gathered together! To imagine what stories might be conceived as the ship cleaved her way through the waves! The romance of the idea seized my mind with such force that I found myself possessed of a sudden irrational desire to participate in this adventure by any means necessary. For the first time in months, that damning voice was speaking to me again, and it seemed that during its absence it had grown swollen and pregnant—for now its bubble burst with unsurpassed loudness and urgency in my mind.

Wouldn’t you like to go along? it cajoled. Wouldn’t you like to leave this dull fishermen’s town behind you?

Indeed the fancy struck me so powerfully that I moved down the docks at that very moment, forgetting for a time any idea of recording a description of the ship herself.

I found the harbor nigh deserted but espied a lantern glowing aboard the ship which had so caught my eye. I approached as far as the end of the docks, where the black ocean was deep enough to harbor the vessel and certainly deep enough to swallow me (I confess to being no great swimmer). Therefore, with my feet firmly planted upon the planking, I cupped my hands to my mouth and uttered the loudest halloo! I could muster. Initially it appeared as though my call would go unanswered, but at last I perceived the motion of a second lantern onboard the ship, glowing only dimly through the fog. I distinguished that a figure held the lantern aloft, moving across the deck to lean upon the rail to make my acquaintance. I found myself unable to see the man with any real clarity, but I determined that he had large build and possessed a most unusual tangle of hair. This lent a decidedly lion-like character to his silhouette as it appeared through the veil of mist, which cloaked the ship in twilight.

What’s this? What brings a boy to call upon an hour so late? In the man’s other hand, illumined by the lamp in his raised fist, I thought I detected the presence of a bottle. My suspicion was further evinced by a slur to his tongue and the general rudeness of his manner, though, as I would learn, this latter was as much a fixture of his personality as it was a byproduct of his intoxication. Be damned or be gone, or both, if it suits you, for I’ve nothing to say to you.

I have come to negotiate terms of passage.

I’ve no taste for passengers, and less use. Again I say be gone.

I beg you hear me. I mean to write of your ship.

I had no opportunity to further explain my intentions, for the man perceptibly straightened, and he called out in an altogether different tone of voice.

A writer, is it?

The same, sir.

"No doubt you are aware of the purpose of the Melville’s voyage."

It is to be the finest adventure in literary history, I declared, tasting on my tongue for the first time the words which I had already devised to be the headline of my story.

At this the man laughed. It was a harsh, nasal sound, not unlike the barking of a dog, but there was a rueful note in it, which I believed to be absent in any species, save for man. It is our unique providence in the natural order to experience mirth in communion with despair, and such a combination I sensed in the laughter of this strange man from the first.

Indeed, he said, it is a voyage to exercise the minds of great men. Doubtless you would like to study with them, and have so approached the captain of the ship to plead your case.

I suspected that this praise of his passengers was somewhat less than genuine, if his intonation were any guide, but I thrilled at my luck in stumbling across the skipper with such ease. It must be admitted that perhaps I should have been turned from my scheme upon the acquisition of the knowledge that it was the captain who was in his cups, and that such an inauspicious encounter might hardly bode well for the journey to follow, but it must also be admitted that I was young, and rash, and felt no such apprehension—and indeed I persisted in my entreaties to be heard and understood.

"I am to report on the voyage in the employ of the Inquirer-"

Ho! A reporter, then? You’ll do well to keep away from my ship!

He turned his back to me, and once more his strange laughter rolled across the still water to reach my ears. At this, I shouted to clarify my position, but the captain had begun to move away, swinging the lantern in his hand and roaring the tune of a bawdy sailor’s song, the words of which are perhaps not altogether suitable for inclusion in my narrative here.

The reader would be correct to surmise that my blood had thoroughly risen upon the receipt of so abrupt and unjust a dismissal from the captain, without having first been given the opportunity to explain my intentions and so make a reasonable case for enlistment as a passenger aboard the Melville. My account may well have ended upon receiving such a discharge, save for a story I had once read as a boy. The tale in question was written by an author whose name I find myself unable to recall—but it concerned a young man who sneaks aboard a sailing ship and only reveals himself to the crew once the journey is sufficiently underway to prohibit his return to shore. [5]

[5 - While there are many such stories that the author may have read, one possibility is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe. This is Poe’s only novel, and it is doubly interesting for our purposes here. The story prompted Jules Verne to write his own sequel, An Antarctic Mystery (1897), which may in turn have also been inspired in part by certain events that transpired aboard the Melville.]

So inspired, I began to entertain thoughts of likewise sneaking aboard the ship and acting as a stowaway, and indeed I immediately began to put this ill-conceived plan into effect. I moved away from the pier at the end of which the Melville was anchored and proceeded to walk along the harbor in the hopes of finding an amenable soul who might be persuaded to ferry me alongside the ship. For I was now determined beyond all reason to circumvent the skipper’s admonitions and to gain passage aboard the Melville at any cost.

Would that I had obeyed the captain! What tragedies might I have been spared were it not for the presence of a stubborn streak in my heart, which chose to assert itself at that very moment! Each step along the docks, unbeknownst to myself, was bringing me closer to that strange circumstance of fate which was to transform my life, hitherto a promising and successful enterprise, into a trial of horror and anguish!

But all things seem clear on the further side of experience, and in any case it must be admitted that there are times when even I grow restless with the predictable routines of life ashore. It is during these times that I look back upon my adventures with some degree of fondness, tempered as it must be with lament for those who were irrevocably lost. And so I do not altogether regret that my life was full enough to include experiences which lent to me a greater understanding of human nature and of what is possible on this earth, and which perhaps even gave my life some semblance of meaning. But as I am not particularly given to philosophic digressions, I will dispense with further such discourse and get on with my tale, plainly as I am able to tell it.

Now, I have said that night was falling and the docks had become largely deserted. Still I chanced to come across a lone fisherman who was in the process of mooring his fishing boat and tying up his day’s catch. Without further hesitation, I decided to seize upon this opportunity so afforded to me by Providence, and I approached the fisherman presently. He was a thin and wiry sort of fellow, with a face tanned by long exposure to the sun and wrinkled into a semblance of leather with the unyielding force of wind and wave to which his occupation relentlessly exposed him. And yet, for all his time spent upon the sea, he was as far removed from the station of a true mariner as myself. For as the mariner wanders across the oceans of the world, on one ship or another, here was a man who possessed a home to which he would return at the close of day. Though I was distinguished by no great powers of deduction, I needed only look at him to place him as such; he was marked with no tattoos and carried no sea-chest aboard his little boat. No, this was a man who went to sea by day and returned to shore ere nightfall—the true mariner was a man who carried all his earthly possessions with him, though they might consist only of a Sou’wester and a housewife. [6]

[6 - A rain hat and a small sewing kit, respectively.]

This is not to suggest that this man’s station was in any way inferior to that of the seaman; indeed, it might rightly be said that the fisherman enjoyed an altogether higher standard of living on the whole. I illustrate the difference only to demonstrate to my reader, who may be as unfamiliar with life at sea as I once was, those particulars which made my companions especially suited for the trials with which we would soon find ourselves confronted. For the mariner is of a unique constitution, and peculiarly hardened to face the ever-present dangers supplied by an ocean whose temperament changes upon the slightest of whims. It must furthermore be acknowledged that he has few enough defenders at shore, where he is widely perceived as an errant drunkard—and so I feel compelled to make a case for his bravery here. Let those who live their lives in comfort ashore experience for a moment the harrowing fury of the sea, the crash of her mighty combers on deck, which have washed many a man overboard ere they drain through the scupper-holes, only to be succeeded by a yet mightier cascade of water, to say nothing of the rigid discipline enforced upon those who live their lives before the mast, and witness how they too would seek comfort in liquid libation and seize any moment of relative safety as an occasion worthy of celebration!

It is my fervent hope that the reader may forgive this digression into the character of the sailor, as it is not without its purpose. Many a man has died at sea without knowing the why; I illustrate the manifold dangers here so that the pluck of my companions might shine out all the brighter in the pages to follow, more especially when contrasted with my own cowardice. For truly I exhibited such fright as would shame a child (and I thought myself a man!), and which certainly shames me in the admission. So let the reader not be deceived with my apparent exhibition of disregard for the security of my own future as I approached this fisherman with the aim of sneaking aboard the Melville; ‘twas a flight of impassioned fancy and little more, and it was as far removed from bravery as the earth and stars. Consequently, it will come as no surprise to learn that I experienced some inward relief when my scheme was presently foiled.

Sir, I began, May I beg a moment of your time?

The fisherman, a creature seemingly composed of raw muscle and sinew, did not stop in his work, but did lift his head and cock one gray eyebrow at me as I clumsily attempted to explain why I had accosted him.

I am a reporter, and I should very much like to get a closer look at that ship. I gestured to the Melville as I spoke; the fisherman could hardly have remained ignorant of its arrival, which had caused quite a stir in the harbor.

So feast your eyes, the man said to me in a voice that was as flat as the still night air. I won’t stand in your way. He hauled his net, nigh bursting at the seams with the slick, scaled bodies of his catch, some flopping feebly about in the salt air which was life to us and death to them, over his shoulder, and he pushed past me.

I should like to do it under the cover of darkness, I continued, only slightly raising my voice to retain his attention as he moved a few paces from me. When I saw that he looked back at me, I lifted a change purse from my pocket. And I would be pleased to see that you were duly compensated for your time.

For the first time since I spoke to him, the fisherman’s composure wavered. Though I have already contrasted his vocation favorably with the hard station of the mariner, it bears mentioning that his life was not an easy one. A purse full of coins could well represent a week’s worth of wages. I watched, fascinated, as a battle of emotions waged open war across his tanned and lined countenance in the evening light. My hopes were momentarily raised as I began to suspect that he would succumb to my proposition, but were summarily dashed when his face settled back into its previous disinterested scowl.

I don’t know what you’re up to, he said slowly. And truth be told, I don’t much care. But I’ve heard tell of the man that sails that ship. He fixed me with a dead stare. "And you won’t catch me sneaking up on him in the dark."

I suppose he must have considered me duly warned, for he turned to go, but I was not to be discouraged so easily—foolish youth that I was! I shouted to him one final query, desperate though it seemed. For having been rejected by both the captain and this worthy, I had no one else to whom I might turn.

Do you know where I can find the crew?

He stared at me for several moments, as though deciding whether to reply, and finally sighed. Do you know the Green Pelican? [7]

[7 - Though Verne places his fictional Green Cormorant in the Kerguelen Islands, it seems likely that he took inspiration from this small Nantucket inn when writing An Antarctic Mystery (1897). Like the crew of the Melville, Verne’s characters spend time at this inn before embarking on an eventful voyage at sea.]

I indicated that I did.

You may find them there.

Without another word, he moved away and rolled into the rapidly darkening evening with the unmistakable gait that is peculiar to those who spend much time on the water. As he was lost to my sight, lightning flared somewhere over the sea to my back, briefly illumining the evening with the light of day. And before that light had fully departed from the sky, a boom of thunder rattled the heavens.

For the first time, I felt some misgivings about the course I was pursuing. A vague, unspecific apprehension lifted the hairs about the back of my neck. But as the first of the night’s rain began to fall, I pushed my doubts aside and left the harbor, heading for the Green Pelican: a pub well-known for the crowd of ill repute it attracted.

CHAPTER TWO

IN WHICH I ENCOUNTER THE CREW AND ATTEMPT TO INGRATIATE MYSELF TO THEM

"But who can forever resist the very Devil himself, when he comes in the guise of a gentleman, free, fine, and frank?"

-Herman Melville, White Jacket or, the World on a Man-of-War

Though it could scarcely compare to the force of an out-and-out gale upon the sea (a spectacle with which I would soon have the dubious pleasure of becoming fully acquainted), the rain which fell upon the isle of Nantucket that evening was of an unseasonable cold. My clothes were presently soaked through as I approached the doors of the Green Pelican, and it came as no small relief to enter the inn and behold the warmth of a crackling fire, the jovial laughter of men in their drink, and the intoxicating aroma of stews and chowders boiling upon a greasy stovetop.

The inn had wholly embraced the whaling culture which had once lent it prosperity. Behind the bar were arranged broken and rusted whaling lances, most of which doubtless originated