All at sea

The ocean was an emerald that stretched itself out to rival the sky. If a man traveled long enough, it became clear that the ocean, if given the chance, would swallow the sky, like a great whale in a school of fish. And the sky would live inside the ocean, like Jonah inside the whale. Such are the idle thoughts of a man who has been too long moored upon the desert of the sea. We were promised landfall at least two weeks ago, but we’ve seen not a bare strip of it in over two months. I suppose the captain thinks his crew so ill-bred that we’d not notice the difference between two months and three. And though we haven’t talked about it, I can feel something brewing aboard the ship, like the way the air becomes charged before a violent storm. No one is talking, but we’re all thinking about it. The captain thinks about it most of all, and so he walks around the ship barking orders twice as loud and cutting rations of fruit at dinner, not because he has too, but because he wants to show that he still has control. I fear that to be in charge of a ship a man must be mean and stupid. I suppose I should arrange my dreams accordingly.

Another day of paddling on the water and I’ve had a word with one of my fellow mates about the possibility of heading back to old England in a day or two, though we both know that the captain has us over a barrel now, as we’d likely run out of food and water a few days short of Liverpool. And thus we only talk, as I suppose men often do, imagine how much better they might handle the task at hand.

The captain is a handsome black-bearded man with a limp in his gait, suffered during a war with her Majesty’s navy at the hand of a French cannonball, the shrapnel from it at least, having lodged itself somewhere just above the knee. Thus, the captain’s refusal to take on any French sailors, though, at night, in his sleep, the cabin boy insists that the captain himself cries out in French during his dreams. None of us see fit to check the story, or to ask why the proximity of the cabin boy allows him such intimacies. The sea is a graveyard for men.