Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 4

Chapter 4

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Table of Contents

If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.

And now,

Kraken in a Coffee Cup.

Chapter Four

I am one of this crew; my shouts go up with theirs; my oath is welded with theirs; and the stronger I shout, the more I hammer and clinch my oath as a bulwark against the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling is in me; hell’s quenchless need seems mine, and from that hell, the cabin boy, who sports a sprout of gray in his beard, takes me under his wing. The mechanics of sailing above the sea are not the same below, and even seasoned hands, he assures me, need tutelage. 

“For some time past,” he says, “we have haunted these uncivilized seas frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. Few of them know of our existence; even fewer have knowingly seen us. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they’re sprinkled over the entire watery circumference, many of them pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so as seldom to encounter a news-telling sail; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these have long obstructed the spread of tidings concerning our existence. Yet, it’s hardly to be doubted that several vessels have reported a sunken vessel sailing.”

I stare numbly at my verbal assailant who, after pattering this great mischief, has seemingly escaped my look of exasperation; the tale in question is no less than a quarter-lifetime long; all these words obstruct my comprehension of his instruction. Yet the cabin boy’s diction is marked by great ferocity, cunning, and malice; and those who by accident have given ear to his prattle compile upon it the greatest exaggerations and most ruinous rumors, for the soul fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which circulate here. Not only are soulmen unexempt from that superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are the most directly acquainted with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though one sailed a thousand miles and passed a thousand shores, one would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone or aught hospitable; pursuing such a calling as he does, the soulman’s fancy is impregnated unto a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, the outblown rumors that circular regarding the cabin boy’s speech incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, half-formed fetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which invest him with new terrors unborrowed from anything spoken. So that he strikes such a panic, few sailors are willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.

Those who, previously hearing the cabin boy’s lessons, by chance catch sight of him in the beginning of the thing, boldly and fearlessly, raise themselves into the ocean’s stream to work the sails, although sailors there already be. The helmsman stands safely at his wheel and the captain in his cabin, but the sailors, battered by rushing water, crash against man and mast and yet refuse to come down again while the cabin boy’s lectures continue.

“And as if this reality of ours has thrown our shadow before it,” the cabin boy continues, “we find spiritualists declaring us athirst for human blood. Their demon familiars are ‘struck with lively terrors at our presence’ and ‘in their flight, dash themselves against the rocky shores of hell.’ And however sailors may amend such reports; yet the superstitious belief is revived in all who set out to sea.”

I am alone to listen, unable to join the others in their escape, and desire to join them I do, despite their many calamities—sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, devouring amputations, and fatalities, to the degree death exists among this strange crew; these disastrous impulses shake the fortitude of many brave sailors to whom the cabin boy’s prattle has come.

I watch as the cooper, who abandoned his barrels to take refuge in the highest rigging, is devoured by a shoal of flying jumbo squid, and we are forced to follow the shoal across half the ocean before we can collect his defecated and hazy remains and leave him to regain form below decks; he is gone two full moons before another barrel is knocked down to staves, and then I could swear he’d been a taller man.

I would think the captain overawed by the rumors and portents concerning his cabin boy and intend to mention this to him when I am recalled to his cabin. Upon our entry the cabin boy at last falls silent, and the captain speaks of the early days of soul fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long-practiced surface-sailors to embark in the perils of this daring profession; such men protesting that although other bounty might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase apparitions was not for mortal man, that those who attempt it would be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, they claimed some remarkable scriptures might be consulted.

“Nevertheless,” says the captain, “some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to stoved souls; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of the Shade, distantly and vaguely, without specific details, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the chase if offered.”

The look in the captain’s eye suggests he was not only one of these early men but their leader and commander; he turns that eye to me, questioning my commitment, though I have been with him these several weeks. I have seen many wonders but not a single soul. Now, he turns his eyes to his table with its maps and devices, and I trace his gaze with my own; one of the wild suggestions referred to there, is the unearthly conceit that the Shade is ubiquitous; that we sail in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.

“There must be another ship,” I say.

“All there is, we are.” He moves a coffee cup, and there we are again, sailing deep in Asian seas.

This conceit has some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the sea currents have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Shade beneath the surface remain unaccountable, even to her men; and from time to time there has originated the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding her, especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, she transports herself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.

“Forget you not,” the captain says, “the curious wonders of the surface world, of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there is said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters are believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are fully equaled by a soulman’s reality.”

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; it cannot be much matter of surprise that soulmen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring the Shade not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spear-like teeth should be planted in our flanks, we would sail away unharmed; or if indeed we should be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined currents hundreds of leagues away, our unsullied sails would once more be seen.

But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there is enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of our vessel to strike the imagination with unwonted power in these limitless, uncharted seas. What then, I ask the captain, does a craft such as ours risk in the chase after a drowned man’s soul?

He traces his finger across the map, gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings. When that finger taps against the edge of his coffee cup, it jostles the dark, half-consumed contents and kicks up dark and murky waves within which I perceive the chips of chewed boats and the sinking limbs of torn comrades. Survivors swim out of the white curds of a direful wrath into serene, exasperating sunlight, only to find that the dark sea below stirs once more with boneless arms.

“Although we are their only hope, we are not their only hunter,” he says, “and we are in no way immune to that which destroys both body and soul.”

The captain drags his finger back across the aged map, and yellow paper becomes green waters; among the ink-drawn waves, I see a whaling captain, his three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies. He seizes the line-knife from his broken prow and strikes upon a whale, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach a fathom-deep life. The beast swims before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which eat upon deep men, till the captain piles upon the whale’s hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest were a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

This collision forces that captain to turn towards home, he and his men with him, but though they are battered and disfigured, they are alive to the last. My own captain then withdraws his hand, for in all that carnage, there is nowhere for us to ply our trade.

“As they stood in peril before the whale,” says the captain, “so we have confronted the lake of fire, hell-beyond-hell, Tartarus risen and made flesh; for long months of days and weeks, anguish gripped those who survived, and only three of us there were, me, the helmsman, and the cabin boy.” The captain stops for a moment to meet the eye of the cabin boy. “Then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. Only then, after the encounter, the final monomania seized him, and the helmsman and I were forced to lace him to the mast. When the lad’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light of shallow seas; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front and followed my orders once again; and we thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, he, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”

“And now the cabin boy lectures,” I say.

“Now he lectures,” says he.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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