Tales of Terror from the Black Ship (10 page)

George Norton’s father was a wealthy man, a naval hero who had successfully turned his considerable energies and military efficiency to the world of commerce, building a trading empire with few rivals. Though George was the youngest of the family and still only fifteen, he felt it entirely reasonable to have expectations.

But George had been a continual disappointment to his father. His two elder brothers seemed to have inherited his father’s bravery and bluff common sense, traits that George sadly did not seem to share in any measure. George’s interests lay elsewhere.

He was obsessed with the natural world – particularly (because of his own nature) the smaller and humbler species of the animal kingdom – and he already had an extensive collection of invertebrates. He had trays full of beetles and cabinets of moths and butterflies, all pinned to boards with their names written down in George’s neat italic script.

He had developed a special interest in snails and had boxes of their shells and page upon page of drawings he had made of the patterns they carried. Indeed his father had once jokingly suggested that George was more interested in ‘those damned snails’ than he was in his own family. But George had not laughed.

Instead of the dynamic life his brothers imagined for themselves, George fantasised about the life of a country parson, reasoning that such an existence would afford him the time to pursue his studies. He had spent many a happy hour in quiet imagining of this life – the house he would occupy, the wife he would marry, the children he would bounce on his knee and the great leather-bound study of molluscs he would publish to the acclaim of his peers. But George’s father would have taken violent exception to such ideas.

Before George knew where he was, his father was informing him that he had used his considerable influence to get George placed aboard one of the many merchant ships that carried his goods across the globe.

George tearfully begged him to reconsider, explaining in no uncertain terms that a boy of his tender health could not be expected to live such a life. His father’s response to this was to laugh loudly and clap him on the back, saying, ‘It will be the making of you, lad!’

George had a much more certain presentiment that it would be the death of him and this feeling of approaching doom stayed with him as he was rowed across to his ship – the
Swift
– at anchor in Plymouth Harbour some weeks later. No man ever climbed the scaffold at his execution with more of a sense of dread than George did, climbing aboard that ship.

His first voyage was not a happy one. The
Swift
was several days out of Hispaniola when a storm hit. The captain did all he could and were it not for his skills the ship would surely have gone down with all hands. They lost three men overboard and one who fell from the rigging and snapped his neck. Many others were nursing injuries.

George himself had been laid low during the storm by violent sea-sickness, exacerbated by the lack of sympathy he was given by his fellow crewman in the sick bay. While the crew had battled valiantly to save the ship, George had cowered in his bunk, hoping to hide the storm out, praying tearfully that he would be among the saved.

And so he was. The ship had been badly mauled though. The mainmast was broken in two and the rudder all but torn away. Sea water had leaked into the holds and spoiled the food stores; kegs and barrels had been smashed and split open and their contents floated in foul pools. All this should not have mattered as they had not been far from port, but with the rudder gone they were drifting aimlessly into unknown waters.

When George was well enough to venture out on to the deck he found the ship in a poor state. The crew were in a foul mood and the cause was not difficult to detect. The ragged sails hung forlornly above them and about them the sea was calm to the horizon and back.

As George walked to the gunwales and looked over the side, he saw that things were worse still. The ship seemed to have become entangled in a huge floating accumulation of weed.

This weed was a sickly green in colour and seemed so thickly massed that George imagined that he could have stood upon it and it would have borne his weight.

Even as he thought this, a putrid stench rose up from the floating weed – a vile smell that he could not place, save to say that it made him retch almost instantaneously. Two sailors stood nearby and George expected them to grin at his weakness as they had done so often on the journey, but instead they looked towards the weed with expressions of dread.

George had always taken some heart in the past from the way that whatever difficulty they encountered – storms or shallows – the crew all seemed to take it in their stride, but he shuddered now as it became clear that this was something new, something they feared as much as he. For with the damage wrought to the ship by the storm and the lack of wind, they were imprisoned by this weed. Their food supplies were ruined. They would have to make as many repairs as possible and hope that help came soon.

Attempts were made to free the hull from the encircling mass of vegetation, but to no avail. Men were sent down on the end of ropes, but no amount of hacking at the slimy stems seemed to have the slightest effect on the weed as a whole and the ship remained trapped. All that was left was to pray for a fair wind that would blow them clear, but as yet none was forthcoming.

Then, as George looked back at the weed he noticed something strange sitting on top of it. With a nimbleness and cavalier attitude to his own safety that surprised all who saw it and had witnessed George’s fumbling and comical attempts at climbing the rigging, he tied a rope to the rail and, taking a firm hold of it, leapt over the gunwales and clambered down the hull. He managed to lean out and grab the thing and scamper back aboard.

The captain stood amazed.

‘I never thought I should live to see the day that you would look anything like a sailor,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t been your father’s son, I would have left you behind at the last port and said good riddance.’

George frowned at the grins of the crew all about him.

‘What is it, then?’ said the captain. ‘What has finally put the wind in your sails?’

George looked from face to face and then slowly held the creature up – by its shell.

‘A snail, sir,’ said George. ‘Some kind of sea-snail. I believe it may be a new species and . . .’

But he never finished his sentence – or rather he did finish, but the tail of it was hidden beneath the laughter from the crew. They slapped their legs, they pointed, they brayed, they turned and walked away.

George pursed his lips and held back the tears that pricked his eyes. He looked at the snail. It was clearly some sort of sea creature, not unlike the common whelk – but of uncommon size. This creature was huge: its shell was the size of a bowling ball, coiling up to a shallow cone, patterned all over with streaks of pale pink and grey.

Unlike the shellfish George had seen so often as a child among the rock pools of the Cornish coast, this creature did not have a watertight hatch to seal it against the sea, but instead seemed more like the land snails he had collected at home.

A sailor walked by and looked at George and chortled.

‘Let’s have a look at your snail, then, boy,’ he said.

George reluctantly held it out. The sailor leaned forward to inspect the squirming body of the exposed creature and could not resist the impulse to reach out and probe its flesh.

The very second his finger touched the creature he cried out in pain and pulled his finger away, cradling it in his other hand and allowing no one near. When the poor fellow finally let others nearby help him, they were shocked to see that the end of his finger had been stripped of its flesh to the first knuckle. Gobbets of blood leaked from the wound and dripped on to the weathered decking.

They turned as one towards George, still holding the sea-snail, whose blood-soaked flesh writhed obscenely. George snapped out of his trance and dropped the thing to the deck, where it righted itself with horrible efficiency and began to slide away, leaving a crimson trail behind it.

The captain had by this time discerned that something was amiss and had stepped down from the quarterdeck to see what was occurring. With a cool speed he looked from the sailor’s mauled finger to the horrified faces of the onlookers and then to the escaping creature. He strode forward and stamped his boot heel down upon it with brutal force.

George cried out as the extraordinary shell was smashed, but he had never seen such an awful expression of disgust on a face as when the captain lifted his foot and beheld the vile, ruined thing beneath. It was an expression mirrored in all the faces around him.

For, in truth, the crushed thing amid the shattered remains of its shell seemed less like shellfish and more like something from a butcher’s block: more like raw meat or offal.

‘Do you see what you’ve done, you useless lump?’ the captain barked hoarsely, then he turned to the crew, telling them to get back to their work. George saw with some satisfaction that the captain walked with unusual haste back to his cabin. The boorish man seemed to have met his match – in a snail.

The injured sailor cursed and bled profusely and the ship’s surgeon took him below to complete the work begun by the snail and sever his finger. George alone stared at the crushed sea-snail, marvelling at what an addition it would have made to his collection.

‘Clean that vile mess up, Norton,’ said the first mate as he walked by.

But what they did not realise then, though it would have made little difference if they had, was that this fearsome sea-snail was not alone – that the mass of weed in which the
Swift
was entangled was home to a whole colony of the creatures.

Gradually, more of the creatures slowly appeared on the deck and George was not the only one to notice that it was the blood from the sailor’s ravaged finger and the smeared remains of the squashed snail that seemed to be attracting the newcomers, like nectar calls to a bee.

To George this was fascinating; to the rest of the crew, his fascination was as loathsome as the snails themselves. The first mate had caught him attempting to keep one of the creatures in a box, and the captain said that if he did it again, he would be flogged, father or no father.

At first, as each snail slithered slowly over the gunwales, a sailor would be ordered to pluck the creature off, taking care not to touch the flesh, and it would be tossed over the side. The captain clearly had no wish to see another of them smeared across the deck and neither did anyone else.

However, as more and more of them came aboard, George privately began to wonder whether this method was not simply allowing them to return. He was at the point of voicing this concern when another thought occurred to him, one that might elevate his standing with the crew. In fact, thought George, it might make him a hero.

George spoke to the ship’s cook. At first his idea got short shrift, but the more George elaborated, the more the cook began to see that there might be something in what George was saying: that here was a wonderful source of meat. All it took was a quick experiment with a pan of boiling water, and the cook was more than convinced.

The cook spoke to the first mate and met with the same scepticism he had felt himself. But he had prepared the snail and offered it to him to sample. Did the French not eat snails? the cook said. Did the British not eat cockles and mussels and the like?

George walked over just as the cook was getting to the end of his speech, holding out the platter with the snail in the centre, cooked in a little oil and garlic.

The first mate grimaced but the cook laughed and said that it would be a fine revenge on the bloodthirsty devils. On the cook’s insistence, the first mate gingerly picked up the meat, sniffed it and then took a reluctant bite. George fully expected him to spit the mouthful across the deck, but instead his furrowed brow lifted in surprise and he began to savour it.

He took no persuasion to have more and agreed readily with the cook that it tasted like some marvellous cross between the meatiest salmon steak and the tenderest piece of lamb imaginable. It looked like the
Swift
’s food worries were over – they had a seemingly endless supply of meat.

The crew were initially as sceptical as the first mate, but once they too had tasted the meat, all doubts were thrown aside and even the poor man whose finger had been gnawed by one of the creatures was soon chewing heartily upon his attacker’s kinfolk.

The captain had been the hardest to persuade. He retched in disgust at the thought of eating the snails, but, like the others, his revulsion disappeared when he was finally persuaded to taste it.

That evening George and the crew sat down to a great feast of snails, with every man eating like a king. The cook had generously given George the credit for the idea of eating the creatures and he was cheered and patted on the back. He had never in his life known acclaim, and it felt good; it felt very good.

They ate until their stomachs could take no more, and for the first time since George left port he went to his cot without even the faintest pang of hunger and fell into a blissfully deep and childishly trouble-free sleep.

That night George dreamed a wonderful and poignant dream in which he was married to the elder of the two Harris daughters from Weymouth, whom he had admired on many an occasion.