Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 5

Chapter 5

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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 Five

It is the middle-watch: a fair moonlight broadens upon the under-surface, and the soulmen gaze beneath the white veil and through lead-colored waters. A strange dreaminess reigns all over the ship and all under the sea, only broken by the intermittent dull sound of a sword. This is the imagined loom of time, and I myself am a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the fates; I pass a woof of marline between long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and the cooper slides a heavy oaken sword between the threads and drives home every yarn. In his eyes we build a barrel, but in mine, my fate is measured, drawn out against the standard of all who set out to sea.

On one strand, I was beaten by the captain of a merchant vessel for trifles against his command, and when we docked after three years at sea, I spilled penniless and vagabond onto the streets. He made me a byword among sailors, and no ship who set to harbor would take me. My every morsel I had to steal, and the gutter became my refuge. It was a damp, drizzly November, and I paused before a coffin warehouse, below the apartment where sat the black-eyed widow.

“Is the captain her husband?” I have asked, but no man answers.

The fixed threads of the warp are subject to but one single, ever-returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seems necessity; and here, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads, blending my life with these others, my cause with theirs. Meantime, the cooper’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly; and by this difference producing contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric, giving an unpredictable change of pattern to the direction of our lives; this sword by which he builds up his barrel, by my fancy, finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—all interweavingly working together, twisting a man one way and the other before returning him to his determined end. The straight warp of necessity is not to be swerved from its ultimate course.

I start sharply from my thoughts at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of marline drops from my hand, and I stand gazing up at the surface of the moonlit sea whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees is that mad cabin boy. His body reaches eagerly forward into the current, his hand stretches out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he echoes the plaintiff cry. He stands hovering over me, half suspended in the sea, so wildly and eagerly peering into the darkening deep, and I would think him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

“Sailors? Souls?” I ask.

“Whales,” the helmsman whispers.

The cooper squints at the surface in search of unseen ships. “Somewhere, someone cries, there she blows!”

“Maybe not this time,” I say. “Maybe they sing in the solitude of the sea, undisturbed and unperturbed.”

The cabin boy drops out of the current and onto the deck. “On the lee-beam, two miles off! a school!”

The whales go down, heading to leeward, long black shadows against the gray. Just then the captain bursts out his door and rouses his men to action. “Apply yourself to the practice, boys! Give chase as if they be our quarry.”

The sailors at the fore and mizzen come down and fix the line tubs in their places; they thrust out the cranes, back the mainyard, and swing three boats into the sea. Outside of the bulwarks, the eager crew cling to the rail with one hand, one foot expectantly poised on the gunwale, like a long line of a man-of-war’s men ready to throw themselves upon the enemy’s ship.

An exclamation takes every eye from the whales, and all glare at the captain, surrounded by three dusky phantoms fresh formed out of air. “Put the new man at your head and fly as if Tartarus itself were at your flanks.”

The men pause long enough to grab me by the shoulder and then spring over the rail; the sheaves whirl round in the blocks; and with a wallow, the three boats dive into the sea. We pull out from under the ship’s lee and spread ourselves widely, to cover a large expanse of water.

In the nearest boat, the headman’s unspoken voice speaks into all our heads. “Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; break your backbones, boys.”

The rowers ply themselves into the oars just as the Captain sends his dark phantoms, spilling over the railings and into the sea; at the sight of them my heart grips tight my chest, and they pursue us as we chase the whales.

I will my own thoughts into the water. “What is it you stare at?” I chide my men. “Pull, then, pull; nevermind the brimstone devils. Snap your oars, you rascals. Bite something, you dogs! Long and strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.”

My men row and the two boats with us, and behind us, the three phantoms gain. It is a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast and omnipotent sea; the surging currents along the six gunwales; the deep’s endless glens and hollows into which the cetaceans flee; the crushing grip of the ocean upon every inch of our being; the voiceless cries of the headsmen and harpooneers; all these outdone as the three gray stains draw nearer, like shadows at noonday.

I, the raw recruit, marched from the bosom of shore into the fever heat of battle, for the first time pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunt, perhaps, myself, a dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world. The dancing dark water made by the chase turns inky thick; jets of bubbles tilt past us right and left; and the whales separate their wakes. The boats drift apart, the harponeers now on their feet, standing above their headsmen. On a falling current, we rush along with such madness, the lee oars scarcely escape being torn from the row-locks.

We sink into the enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. The currents curl and hiss around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents. 

A short rushing sound leaps out of the boat, the darted iron of the cabin boy; it strikes its target and passes harmlessly through, and the emotion I feel off my men is one of victory. Then all in one welded commotion comes an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat strikes as on a ledge, nearly tossing me from my perch; our current-sail collapses and explodes; something rolls and tumbles like an earthquake beneath; and a gush of phantasmagoria rushes over us, moments etched upon the sea. The whole crew are tossed helter-skelter into the gray, curdling deep. Phantom, whale, and harpoon all blended together; and the whale, who is but a stand-in for a sunken and sinking soul, escapes.

The men gather floating oars, lash them across the gunwale, and tumble back to their places in the suspended craft, seeming a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean. Elsewhere, the other men likewise scramble back into their boats, immortal in these jaws of death, and from their voiceless words jumbling together, I gather how they rate our run: our boat alone has struck her target.

Afloat in the depths, I stare into the faces of my men and realize I know not their names, nor do I know my own. My history runs behind me and my future before on the same unbroken yarn, but from it some pieces of me are lost. Taken, perhaps, in the moment I sacrificed myself to the sea and fell upon the Shade’s smooth deck. 

“If it’s death you’re courting,” the widow said, “my late husband soon sets out to sea. Sail with him, and a coffin will be not be wanted.”

Some part of me sails beneath the waves; some part is buried already, and this half-death is the finest life I’ve known. The men cheer, and the Shade dips down to retrieve her warriors, the helmsman and our captain beaming in dark waters.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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