Medusa, Page 2

  "Lord, I've never seen anything like it," the first mate muttered.

  The handsome farm boy of eighteen had been transformed into a wizened old man of eighty. His skin was bleached ghostly white. A lacework of wrinkles puckered the skin of his hands and face as if they had been soaked in water for days. His hair was like strands on a cottonweed.

  Dobbs laid a hand on Caleb's arm, expecting him to be as icy cold as the corpse he resembled.

  "He's on fire," he murmured.

  Assuming his role as the ship's doctor, Dobbs placed wet towels over Caleb's body to bring down the fever. From a black leather medicine case he produced a vial of patent medicine containing a heavy dose of opium and got a few drops down Caleb's throat. The youth rambled for a few minutes before slipping into a deep sleep. He slept for more than twenty-four hours. When Caleb's eyelids finally fluttered open, he saw the captain sitting at his desk writing in the log.

  "Where am I?" he mumbled through dry, crusted lips.

  "In my bunk," Dobbs growled. "And I'm getting damned sick of it."

  "Sorry, sir." Caleb furrowed his brow. "I dreamed I died and went to hell."

  "No such luck, lad. Seems the spermaceti had a taste for farm boys. We pulled you out of his belly."

  Caleb remembered the whale's round eye, then being tossed into the air, arms and legs spinning like a pinwheel, and the shock of hitting the water. He recalled moving along a dark, yielding passage, gagging for breath in the heavy, moist air. The heat had been almost unbearable. He had quickly passed out.

  A horrified look came to his pale, wrinkled face. "The whale et me!"

  The captain nodded. "I'll get cook to fetch you some soup. Then it's back to the fo'c'sle with you."

  The captain relented and let Caleb stay in his cabin until all the blubber had been rendered into oil and stored in barrels, then he summoned the forecastle hands on deck. He praised them for their hard work, and said:

  "You all know that a whale ate the green hand like Jonah in the Bible. I'm happy to say that young Caleb will soon be back at his work. I'm cutting his pay for time lost. The only one on this ship who's allowed to shirk his job is a dead man."

  The comment brought a few ayes and grins from the assembled hands.

  Dobbs continued. "Now, men, I must tell you that young Caleb looks different than you remember him. The foul juices of the whale's innards have bleached him whiter than a boiled turnip." He cast a stern eye on the crew. "I'll allow no one on this ship to make light of another man's misfortune. That's all."

  The ship's officers helped Caleb climb onto the deck. The captain asked Caleb to remove a square of cloth that covered his head, shadowing his face like a monk's cowl. A collective gasp came from the crew.

  "Take a good look at our Jonah and you'll have something to tell your grandchildren," the captain said. "He's no different from the rest of us under that white skin. Now, let's get us some whales."

  The captain had purposely called Caleb a Jonah, a seaman's name for a sailor who attracted bad luck. Maybe if he made light of it he'd suck the wind out of the sails of unfavorable comparisons to the biblical character who'd been swallowed by a great fish. A few hands quietly suggested heaving Caleb over the side. Fortunately, everyone was too busy for mischief. The sea that had been so barren now teemed with whales. There was no doubt that the ship's fortunes had changed for the better. It was as if the Princess had become a magnet for every whale in the ocean.

  Every day, the boats were launched after cries from the lookout. The cast-iron try-pots bubbled like witches' cauldrons. An oily pall of black smoke hid the stars and sun and turned the sails a dark gray. The cook sawed away on his fiddle. Within months of Caleb's encounter with the whale, the ship's hold was filled to capacity.

  Before the long voyage home, the ship had to be resupplied and the weary crew given shore leave. Dobbs put into Pohnpei, a lush island known for its handsome men, beautiful women, and their willingness to provide services and goods to visiting whalemen. Whaling vessels from every part of the world crowded the harbor.

  Dobbs was Quaker by upbringing and didn't indulge in spirits or native women, but his religious beliefs took second place to his sailing orders: maintain harmony among his men and bring home a shipload of oil. How he accomplished these tasks was left up to him. He laughed heartily as boatloads of drunken and raucous crewmen stumbled back on board or were fished out of the water into which they'd fallen.

  Caleb stayed on board and watched the comings and goings of his fellow hands with a benign smile. The captain was relieved that Caleb showed no interest in shore leave. The natives were friendly enough, but Caleb's bleached hair and skin might cause problems with the superstitious islanders.

  Dobbs paid a courtesy call to the American consul, a fellow New Englander. During the visit the consul was notified that a tropical sickness had struck the island. Dobbs cut his men's shore leave short. In his log he wrote:

  Last day of shore leave. Captain visits U.S. Consul A. Markham, who conducted tour of ancient city named Nan Madol. Upon return, Consul advised of sickness on island. Ended liberty and left island in a hurry.

  The remnants of the crew stumbled back onto the ship and promptly fell into a rum-soaked snooze. The captain ordered the sobered-up hands to raise the anchor and set sail. By the time the cherry-eyed men were roused from their bunks and ordered back to work, the ship was well at sea. With a steady breeze, Dobbs and his men would be sleeping in their own beds in a few months time.

  The sickness struck the Princess less than twenty-four hours after it left the port.

  A forecastle hand named Stokes awakened around two in the morning and raced to the rail to purge his stomach. Several hours later, he developed a fever and a vivid rash over much of his body. Brownish red spots appeared on his face and grew in size until his features looked as if they were carved in mahogany.

  The captain treated Stokes with wet towels and sips of bottled medicine. Dobbs had him moved to the foredeck and placed under a makeshift tent. The forecastle was a pesthole in the best of circumstances. Fresh air and sunlight might help the man, and isolation could possibly prevent the spread of his illness.

  But the disease spread through the foremast hands like a windblown brush fire. Men crumpled to the deck. A rigger fell from a yardarm onto a pile of sails, which fortunately broke his fall. An impromptu infirmary was set up on the foredeck. The captain emptied his medicine kit. He feared that it would only be a matter of hours before he and the officers fell ill. The Princess would become a phantom ship, drifting at the mercy of wind and currents until it rotted.

  The captain checked his chart. The nearest landfall was called Trouble Island. Whalers normally shunned the place. A whaling crew had burned a village and killed some natives there after an argument over a stolen cask of nails, and the inhabitants had attacked several whalers since the incident. There was no choice. Dobbs took the helm and put the ship on a straight course for the island.

  The Princess soon limped into a cove lined with white sand beaches, and the ship's anchor splashed into the clear green water with a rattle of chain. The island was dominated by a volcanic peak. Wisps of smoke could be seen playing around its summit. Dobbs and the first mate took a small boat ashore to replenish freshwater while they could. They found a spring a short distance inland and were on their way back to the ship when they came across a ruined temple. The captain gazed at the temple's walls, overgrown with vines, and said, "This place reminds me of Nan Madol."

  "Pardon me, sir?" the first mate said.

  The captain shook his head. "Never mind. We'd best get back to the ship while we can still walk."

  Not long after dusk, the mates fell sick, and Dobbs, too, succumbed to the disease. With Caleb's help, the captain dragged his mattress onto the quarterdeck. He told the green hand to carry on as best he could.

  Caleb somehow remained untouched by the plague. He carried buckets of water to the foredeck to cure the terrible thirst of his crewmates
and kept an eye on Dobbs and the officers. Dobbs alternated between shivers and sweats. He lost consciousness, and, when he awakened, he saw torches moving about the deck. One torch came closer, and its flickering flame illuminated the garishly tattooed face of a man, one of a dozen or so natives armed with spears and cutting tools used to strip blubber.

  "Hello?" said the islander, who had high cheekbones and long black hair.

  "You speak English?" Dobbs managed.

  The man lifted his spear. "Good harpoon man."

  Dobbs saw a ray of hope. In spite of his savage appearance, the native was a fellow whaler. "My men are sick. Can you help?"

  "Sure," the native said. "We got good medicine. Fix you up. You from New Bedford?"

  Dobbs nodded.

  "Too bad," the native said. "New Bedford men take me. I jump ship. Come home." He smiled, showing pointed teeth. "No medicine. We watch you burn up from fire sickness."

  A quiet voice said, "Are you all right, Captain?"

  Caleb had emerged from the shadows and now stood on the deck in the glare of torchlight.

  The native leader's eyes widened and he spat out a single word.

  " 'Atua!"

  The captain had picked up a smattering of Oceanic and knew that 'atua was the islanders' word for "a bad ghost." Rising onto his elbows, Dobbs said, "Yes. This is my 'atua. Do what he says or he will curse you and everyone on your island."

  Caleb had sized up the situation and went along with the captain's bluff.

  Lifting his arms wide above his head for dramatic effect, he said, "Put your weapons down or I will use my power."

  The native leader said something in his language and the other men dropped their killing tools to the deck.

  "You said you could do something about the fire sickness," the captain said. "You have medicine. Help my men or the 'atua will be angry."

  The islander seemed unsure of what to do, but his doubts vanished when Caleb removed his hat and the silky white hair caught the tropical breeze. The islander issued a curt order to the others.

  The captain blacked out again. His slumber was filled with weird dreams, including one in which he felt a cold, wet sensation and a sting on his chest. When he blinked his eyes open, it was daytime, and crewmen were moving around the deck. The ship was rigged with full sail against a clear blue sky, and waves slapped the hull. White-plumed birds wheeled overhead.

  The first mate saw Dobbs struggling to sit up and came over with a jug of water. "Feeling better, Captain?"

  "Aye," the captain croaked between sips of water. The fever had gone, and his stomach felt normal except for a gnawing hunger. "Help me to my feet."

  The captain stood on wobbly legs, with the mate holding an arm to steady him. The ship was on the open sea with no island in view.

  "How long have we been under way?"

  "Five hours," the mate said. "It's a miracle. The men came out of their fever. Rashes disappeared. Cook made soup, and they got the ship moving."

  The captain felt an itch on his chest and lifted his shirt. The rash was gone, replaced by a small red spot and a circle of irritation a few inches above his navel.

  "What about the natives?" Dobbs said.

  "Natives? We saw no natives."

  Dobbs shook his head. Did he dream it all in his delirium? He told the mate to fetch Caleb. The green hand made his way to the quarterdeck. He wore a straw hat to protect his bleached skin from the sunlight. A smile crossed his pale, wrinkled face when he saw the captain had recovered.

  "What happened last night?" Dobbs said.

  Caleb told the captain that after Dobbs had passed out, the natives had left the ship and returned carrying wooden buckets that emitted a pale blue luminescence. The natives went from man to man. He couldn't see what they were doing. Then the natives left. Soon after, the crew started waking up. The captain asked Caleb to help him down to his cabin. He eased into his chair and opened the ship's log.

  "A strange business," the captain started. Although his hands were still shaking, he wrote down every detail as he remembered it. Then he gazed with longing at a miniature portrait of his pretty young wife, and he finished his entry with a single declaration: "Going home!"

  Fairhaven, Massachusetts, 1878

  The French mansard-roofed mansion known to the townspeople as the Ghost House stood back from a secluded street behind a screen of dark-leafed beech trees. Guarding the long driveway were the bleached jawbones of a sperm whale, placed upright in the ground so their tapering tips met in a Gothic arch.

  On a golden October day, two boys stood under the whalebone arch, daring each other to sneak up the driveway and look in the windows. Neither youngster would take the first step; they were still trading taunts when a shiny black horse-drawn carriage clattered up to the gate.

  The driver was a heavyset man whose expensive russet suit and matching derby hat failed to cloak his villainous looks. His rough-hewn features had been sculpted by the hard knuckles of the opponents he had faced back in his prizefighting days. Age had not been kind to the misshapen nose, the cauliflower ears, and the eyes squeezed to nailheads by scar tissue.

  The man leaned over the reins and glared down at the boys. "What're you lads doing here?" he growled like the old pit bull he resembled. "Up to no good, I suppose."

  "Nothin'," one boy said with averted eyes.

  "Is that a fact?" the man sneered. "Well, I wouldn't be hanging around here if I was you. There's a mean ghost lives in that house."

  "See," said the other boy. "Told you so."

  "Listen to your friend. Ghost is seven feet tall. Hands like pitchforks," the man said, injecting a tremor into his voice. "Got fangs that could rip boys like you in half just so he could suck out your guts." He pointed his whip toward the house and his mouth dropped open in horror. "He's coming! By God, he's coming. Run! Run for your lives!"

  The man roared with laughter as the boys raced off like startled rabbits. He gave the reins a flick and urged the horse through the whalebone gate. He tied up in front of the big house, which resembled an octagonal wedding cake layered with red and yellow frosting. He was still chuckling to himself as he climbed the porch steps and announced his arrival using the brass door knocker shaped like a whale's tail.

  Footsteps approached. A man opened the door, and a smile crossed his pallid face.

  "Strater, what a pleasant surprise," Caleb Nye said.

  "Good to see you too, Caleb. Been meaning to stop by, but you know how it is."

  "Of course," Caleb said. He stepped aside. "Come in, come in."

  Caleb's skin had grown even whiter over the years. Age had added wrinkles to skin that looked like parchment to begin with, but, despite his premature aging, he still retained the boyish smile and puppy-dog eagerness that had endeared him to his whaling colleagues.

  He led the way to a spacious library lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The wall sections not devoted to books on the subject of whaling were decorated with large, colorful posters that had the same motif: a man caught in the jaws of a sperm whale.

  Strater went up to one particularly lurid poster. The artist had made liberal use of crimson paint to depict blood flowing from the harpoon shafts into the water. "We made a bundle of money out of that Philadelphia show."

  Caleb nodded. "Standing room only, night after night, thanks to your skills as a showman."

  "I'd be nothing without my star attraction," Strater said, turning.

  "And I have you to thank for this house and everything I own," Caleb said.

  Strater flashed a gap-toothed grin. "If there's one thing I'm good at, it's putting on a show. The minute I laid eyes on you, I saw the potential for fame and fortune."

  Their partnership had begun a few nights after the Princess docked in New Bedford. The oil barrels had been off-loaded, and the owners tallied the take and calculated the lays. Crewmen who didn't have wives or sweethearts to go home to went off in a raucous mob to celebrate in the waterfront bars that were more than wil
ling to relieve the whalers of their hard-won earnings.

  Caleb had stayed on the ship. He was there when the captain came back onto the Princess with Caleb's pay and asked if he was going home to his family farm.

  "Not like this," Caleb had replied with a sad smile.

  The captain handed the young man the pitifully small amount of money he had earned for his years at sea. "You have my permission to stay on board until the ship sails again."

  As he walked down the ramp, the captain felt a heavy sorrow for the young man's misfortune, but he soon put it out of his mind as his thoughts shifted to his own promising future.

  About the same time, Strater had been contemplating a much bleaker outlook as he sat in a seedy bar a few blocks from the ship. The former carnival pitchman was down on his luck and almost broke. He was nursing a mug of ale when the crewmen from the Princess burst into the bar and proceeded to get drunk with all the energy they had devoted to killing whales. Strater perked up his ears and listened with interest to the story of Caleb Nye, the green hand who was swallowed by a whale. The bar patrons greeted the tale with loud skepticism.

  "Where's your Jonah now?" a barfly shouted above the din.

  "Back at the ship, sittin' in the dark," he was told. "See for yourself."

  "The only thing I want to see is another ale," the barfly said.

  Strater slipped out of the noisy bar into the quiet night and made his way along a narrow street to the waterfront. He climbed the ramp to the lantern-lit deck of the Princess. Caleb had been standing by the rail, staring at the sparkling lights of New Bedford. The young man's features were indistinct, but they seemed to glow with a pale luminosity. Strater's showman juices started flowing.

  "I have a proposition for you," Strater told the young man. "If you accept it, I can make you a rich man."

  Caleb listened to Strater's proposal and saw the possibilities. Within weeks, flyers and posters were plastered around New Bedford with a blaring headline in circus typeface: