The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (13 page)

“The hell you say,” Doyle cried, lurching from the bunk, shoulders hunched, fists drawn in close to his chest, legs buckling. He made two steps and toppled headlong into the empty corner. Determined to fight, he rolled onto his side, raising himself on one arm, but someone slipped a warm, wet, black bag over his head and he went down again without a struggle.

He awoke, fully clothed in his bunk, which was on fire. Or so it seemed, until amid a mighty but unsuccessful effort to rise and flee, he realized the flames were inside him. It wasn’t surprising; one didn’t need a medical certificate to know the bone-rattling chill of the night before must be succeeded by a fever. But how had he gotten back to his bed, and what was to be done about the unbearable, suffocating weight of his clothes, which he was too weak to remove? His fingers, unbidden, pushed away the muffler, fumbled at the buttons of his shirt; his feet flailed together, working the horrid socks down to his ankles. Why was he wearing woolen socks?

The chill. The wan gentleman. He attempted a groan, but what issued from his dry lips was a croak. If only he had the strength to reach the water pitcher. He could see it in the bowl on the stand. The pinkish light glinting from the lip informed him that it was early morning. Again a furious effort to rise, resulting in a sudden gush of water from every pore, a fog descending from somewhere, thick as porridge. If only. Water.

When next he opened his eyes and took in the ordinary aspect of things—the afternoon light playing over the compact furnishings of the room, the deep, sonorous pulsing of the ship’s engines, the sound of cheerful voices exchanging courtesies outside his door—a convalescent gratitude swelled in his chest. He was soaked in sweat; the pillow was a sodden rag but when summoned his limbs obeyed the call. No, more than that, they gathered force in a valiant, glorious effort, and in the next moment he was sitting with his feet on the floor, swaying but upright, weak, stunned, ravenous. His tongue, dry and heavy in his mouth, felt like a desiccated toad.

The doctor’s appearance in the officers’ saloon was greeted with a round of applause and the alarming news that three days had passed since the evening he had staggered forth, having failed to relate the seal story. The next morning the steward had discovered him in his bed, unconscious and burning with fever. As the doctor was himself the patient, there was no one to attend him, and he had been left to recover or not. Or not had been the case of a luckless sailor who had come down with the same malady on the same evening and whose earthly remains had been solemnly committed to the Bight of Benin that very dawn. It was more information than the invalid could comprehend, and he sank beneath it into an armchair, mumbling apologies. “Still a bit unsteady.” The captain spoke to the steward, who bustled off to his galley to prepare a tray.

“It’s well we have so few passengers,” the captain observed. “When the doctor himself is ill, it makes them anxious.”

Doyle raised his eyes. Was the man implying that he had failed in his duty by succumbing to a near fatal illness? But no, Wallace’s regard was moist with an indulgent sympathy. “You have had a close call, sir,” he said. “I feared we might lose you, and that would have been a woeful conclusion to your African adventure.”

Doyle nodded. The telegram sent to his mother, what would it say?
Your son, Arthur Conan, dead of fever, buried at sea, yours truly
. No one for her to turn to, no help but her damnable lodger, Dr. Waller, who would take over, as was his damnable way. His poor sisters,
Lottie, Connie, and Annette, condemned to drudgery as governesses for the rest of their lives. Unbearable.

“I’ll be fine,” he assured the captain. “I’ll be up and about in no time.”

He took a light meal, for his stomach was tender, and drank a great quantity of water. His fellow officers urged him to return to his bunk, and as he was too weak to be of use to anyone, he agreed. Lifting his water glass was a heroic effort. He made his way out to the deck and stood at the rail, looking at the sea.

While he was spooning in his soup, Captain Wallace had told him about the dead sailor, an elderly fellow named Wentworth. Wentworth hailed from Liverpool and had been at sea since he was a lad. He had a wife and children; the officers couldn’t agree on how many. He would be missed in the fo’c’sle, as he was something of a practical joker. Once he’d caught a water snake and put it in the empty kettle. With much snoring and muttering, all hands had feigned sleep, waiting for the riotous moment when the cook opened the kettle lid in the morning.

Wentworth’s illness had run the same course as the doctor’s, but he hadn’t the strength to withstand the fever. Presumably his heart gave out under the assault of the microbe.

Doyle leaned over the rail, feeling queasy, but it passed. The sea before him was deceptively calm, and the morning sun, already brutal, smeared it with a gelatinous glow. Wentworth was down there, wrapped in his canvas shroud, carried ever downward by the weight attached to his feet, plucked at, nosed about, shaken, devoured by creatures of that other world. Wentworth, the joker, and thousands like him. How many thousands?

The sailors referred to the end of time as that day when the sea gives up its dead. It was a cliché, but Doyle vexed his brain to imagine that day. It might, after all, be tomorrow. Would the waters withdraw and the souls of the dead rise up through the wreckage of the ships littering the ocean floor? Or would the dead be disgorged onto the coasts of every landmass, clinging to rocks, floundering in
the shallows, pushing forward in waves like the sea itself, waves of the dead, with their pale flesh and hollow eyes?

It was absurd. The sea would not give up her dead. To be committed to the sea, as Wentworth had been, and as he might himself have been—he had seen that in Captain Wallace’s eyes—was to be lost forever in an immensity beyond comprehension. If every living soul on earth were dropped into the deep, would it even raise the level of the oceans? Would a great tidal wave be engendered that would sweep across the sea and flatten everything, including islands and coastal cities that stood in its path? And even if that did happen, it would make no difference. The oceans of the world could absorb mankind entire and still the tides would roll in and out, the sun would rise and set, the moon wax and wane, pulling the waves to the shore.

He could not look at it, this vast and temperamental creature that was the sea. And he would not, as he had once thought he might, spend some formative part of his life upon it. It was too lonely and cruel, it didn’t pay well, and it made men melancholy, fatalistic, and mad.

As he made his way back to his bunk, his thoughts turned to home. Or not to home, which had, until recently, been a series of increasingly smaller and more crowded rented rooms, but to the spacious, sunny, stylish flat at George Square that his mother and his three sisters now shared with her lodger, Dr. Waller. A lodger who paid the entire rent; in what sense was such a man characterized as a lodger?

A lodger who was young enough to be her son, who had conspired with her to send her husband to the “sanatorium.” A lodger who was the godfather of her baby girl, named for him. An aristocratic lodger, with an estate and a coat of arms quartered with the royal family of France; a pompous and demanding lodger who had refused to fight. It was clear now; Waller had been on his mother’s hands and in her confidence for years. He could not be dis-lodged.

A usurping lodger, like a cuckoo, soiling the nest and driving out
the chicks, the rightful heirs of the poor pale gentleman who cowered in his room by day, and wandered the streets by night, trying to sell his own clothes in exchange for a drink. Did the pale gentleman set fire to the nest? That was the charge against him, among others. The dry-eyed mother had appealed to her son. “We’ll need your signature,” she said, while the lodger gazed out the tall, handsomely corniced window at the park opposite the square. “Here, and here.”

And of course, he could deny her nothing. He picked up the pen and signed.

Now, in his berth, he took out his diary, opened to the last entry, November 18, 1881, and reread his own description of the fires on the African shore at night and his recollection that in Hanno’s account of his voyage along the same coast two thousand years ago, he had spoken of a world on fire, of active volcanoes sputtering red lava rivers that poured into the sea, the steam rising in blasts of white smoke that clouded the night. Now these volcanoes were shiny black peaks, rising cold and indifferent above the florid green of the coast.

He left three blank pages to account for the days he had lost.
November 22
, he wrote on the next. But the pen was mysteriously heavy, and his fingers hadn’t the strength to hold it upright. He laid it across the page and collapsed onto his bed, where a deep, restorative sleep swallowed him up completely, as if he were a fish and sleep a great, black whale.

In the January 1884 issue of the British magazine
Cornhill
, a prestigious publication originally edited by William Thackeray and now under the able editorship of James Payn, there appeared an article titled “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” which purported to solve the mystery surrounding the crew of the American brigantine
Mary Celeste
. As it was the policy of the
Cornhill
to publish its contributions without attribution, the innocent reader was invited to believe that the eponymous Dr. Jephson was in fact the author of the tale, and that his account offered an accurate record of the final days of the crew and a definitive answer to the question that had so perplexed the public: Why had an experienced captain abandoned a perfectly seaworthy vessel?

Dr. Jephson begins his “statement” with a recounting of the known facts of the case:

Dr. Jephson then quotes at length from an article in the
Gibraltar Gazette
, as well as a telegram from Boston, “which went the round of the English papers,” detailing those curious circumstances: the sighting of the derelict
Marie Celeste
drifting on a calm sea by the captain of the
Dei Gratia
and the subsequent boarding of that vessel by two sailors, the discovery of the log, which was “imperfectly kept, and affords little information,” the absence of any signs of violence or damage from bad weather, the dresses and sewing machine found in the cabin, suggesting the presence of the captain’s wife, the boats intact, the rigging and sails in good order, the inevitable conclusion that there was “absolutely nothing to account for the disappearance of the crew.”

Having thus summarized the mystery, Jephson reveals that he has “now taken up my pen with the intention of telling all that I know of the ill-fated voyage.”

Why has the doctor waited eleven years to enlighten a mystified public? He confesses that the story is so fantastic no one will believe him, as he learned when he told it to the police and even to his own brother-in-law, “who listened to my statement with an indulgent smile as if humouring the delusion of a monomaniac.” However, as “symptoms which I am familiar with in others lead me to believe that before many months my tongue and hand may be alike incapable of conveying information,” he feels it incumbent upon himself to record the truth for posterity. “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement”
is, therefore, a tale told by a survivor, and one who will not live long past the telling of it.

Dr. Jephson, a vain, pompous, observant, credulous personage, sociable and self-important, introduces himself as a prominent Boston lung specialist and noted abolitionist. He twice reminds the reader of his influential pamphlet “Who Is Thy Brother?” carefully including the name of the publisher and year—Swarburgh, Lister & Co., 1859—for the perspicacious reader who may wish to look out for this noteworthy though now moot argument for the abolition of slavery, which attracted “considerable attention” at the time of its publication. After a lengthy aside about an odd encounter during the Civil War, in which a dying slave woman entrusted him with a curiously carved black stone, Jephson turns to the year 1873. At that time overwork in both his professional and social capacities had taken a severe toll on his health and, having received a diagnosis of “consolidation” in his left lung, he was advised to take an ocean voyage.

His wife is eager to accompany her husband, but “she has always been a very poor sailor and there were strong family reasons against her exposing herself to any risk at the time, so we determined that she should remain at home.” A meeting with a young acquaintance who is the heir to a shipping company results in Jephson’s booking passage on the
Marie Celeste
. “She is a snug little ship,” his friend assures Jephson, “And Tibbs, the captain, is an excellent fellow. There is nothing like a sailing ship for an invalid.”

Thence follows the complex account of Dr. Jephson’s voyage aboard the
Marie Celeste
, a bizarre tale that includes the African talisman and a mysterious fellow passenger, one Septimus Goring, a mulatto from New Orleans, unpleasant to look upon but well educated and evidently wealthy, who has made up his mind to murder as many members of the white race as he possibly can.