We lost the Captain last night. He didn’t die. Nor did he get lost at sea. He just… vanished. How do you lose a Captain? To answer that question, I have to tell you who the Captain really was.
The Captain wasn’t like the other pirates. He was a man of morals. At least in his own way. When we would ransack a ship, he never let us harm any women or children. And he always made us leave enough food so they could get to the next port over so they wouldn’t starve.
Some say he got his philosophy from the books he read, but I think he knew what it was like to be hungry.
But it wasn’t just the morals. Captain had a certain literary appeal to him. He never let us call ourselves names like “Redbeard” or have a talking parrot or even wear an eyepatch. He wouldn’t let us say words like “matey” or “ahoy”. He insisted we read the classics or learn an instrument.
That doesn’t mean that Captain was soft. Far from it. I once saw him kill a dozen sailors who were getting between him and a chest of gold coins.
“Back away from the chest and I’ll let you live,” he shouted. But not one of those brave fools would back down. He quickly put them each out of their misery, his long, dark hair waving in the wind as the blood sprayed around him.
I think more than anything else, Captain loved the sea. I would often see him standing on the deck at night, staring into the waves and reciting poetry he had written.
Waters I follow,
she guides me
towards the unknown
vastness between us.
The first time I ever sailed with the Captain, he told me of his love for the sea.
“It’s one woman who will never leave you,” he told me, clutching the necklace he always wore around his neck.
There are a lot of sailors out there that talk to the sea, but I’d never met a sailor like Captain where the sea spoke back. Once Captain told us to lay anchor for 2 days in the middle of nowhere because he had a bad feeling about the port we were sailing to. When we arrived 2 days later, the skies were clear but the port and all the ships in it had been smashed by a freak storm.
Some people even said they felt like the Captain could read their minds.
So it’s easy to understand why rumors seemed to spread about the Captain. That he used to be a royal prince and got fed up with the safety of a comfortable life. That he was in prison for 30 years for a crime he didn’t commit. I even heard a rumor that he was a government assassin that went rogue.
Not all the rumors could be true, of course. But that didn’t stop Captain from fuelling the flames and pretending they were.
Which brings me to how we lost the Captain. One of his favorite rumors about himself was that he was having an affair with the Queen of Maldvonia. So the Captain liked to sail to Maldvonia frequently and take anchor just outside of port with his flag flying.
We were on the way to Maldvonia for just such a stay when the Captain decided to change course. He said he had heard something from the ocean. Something was telling him to go west.
A few hours later we saw something in the distance. It was so big that at first we thought it had to be an island. But soon we saw it was a ship unlike any ship I or anyone else on board had ever seen.
The ship was made of metal and round like a pot. It stretched up in the air at least a hundred feet above us. When we saw what it was, we all wanted to turn around. But not the captain. He seemed to have a certain draw towards that thing.
He made us sail right up to it. And how could we tell him no? He was the Captain after all, and he spoke with the sea. As we got closer, the Captain began singing one of his songs.
Ready or not, the sea flows on,
Listen or not, she sings her song,
I row, I row with the western sun,
Until my duty is dooooone.
When we were 100 yards away, the Captain told us to heave-to. It wasn’t long until things started happening. Things I still can’t explain.
First it was the sounds, some sort of ethereal singing. The men thought it was sirens or ghosts. The Captain said it sounded more like angels. Next were the visions. Some men got them when they were waking, others only when they were asleep.
The dreams were the worst. Vivide, nightmarish dreams that seemed not to end even after you awoke.
We spent two miserable days drifting around that thing, the Captain never letting us move out farther than 100 yards away. Some of the men got the feeling that we weren’t just watching the thing, but the thing was also watching us.
On the second night, while most of us were asleep, we heard the Captain yelling and ringing the bell to wake up. The Captain hadn’t slept much the past two days, so he often stayed up with the night watch.
We ran to the deck, and when we arrived, the thing was gone. The Captain swore it had vanished in front of his eyes, but the night watch had drifted off and hadn’t seen it.
We sailed around for days in that area looking for that thing. We began to run out of food. The men began to grow afraid, then angry, then eventually one of them spoke back to the Captain.
I’ve never seen the Captain react like that. The look in his eye. He punched the man in his stomach and dragged him to the edge of the boat, threatening to throw him overboard. After that, no one spoke up again.
It was a week later when we finally found it again, anchored in a large cove near an island. The Captain said to anchor next to it and we were too afraid to say no.
At least this time we had the safety of land. Most of us disembarked and set up a camp on the far side of the island, a brisk 30-minute walk to where the metal ship was anchored. But not the Captain. He stayed on the ship, a few hundred feet from the thing. We sent a few men to check on him every few hours, and every time they came back they said he wasn’t speaking, just muttering to himself about seeing what’s inside. We hunted small game and talked about what to do.
“We can’t stay here, but he won’t let us leave.”
“What do you want to do about it, he’s the Captain?”
“He’s going crazy, we should lock him in the hold until he comes to his senses.”
“Are you going crazy? He’ll kill us all when he comes out, some time in the hold and he’ll be more deranged than he is now.”
“Well, we could always…”
The voice dropped away, everyone knowing what he was about to say.
“You could always what?” we heard a voice from the bushes say. “You could always kill me?” Just then the Captain walked out of the bushes, his face half in shadow, half in light from the fire.
For a few moments the only sound was the crackling of the fire. Then the Captain began to laugh.
“Oh come on, I’m just joking. We all know you’re not going to kill me. Not when I just figured out what we’re going to do.”
That’s when the Captain told us what he’d done. He’d taken the jolly boat out and rowed himself all the way to the thing. He’d rowed all the way around it and found a ladder leading to what appeared to be a small door.
“You’re going to try to get inside it?”
“You bet. What do you think we’re here for, not just to look at it?”
We all made our way over to the cove where the Captain got in the jolly boat and sailed off, waving his hat to us as he disappeared into the dark. He told us to wait for him on the ship, he’d be back by the morning. We waited up all night. The men grew nervous.
“He’s a goner for sure.”
“Stop it, it’s the Captain, he knows what he’s doing.”
The men had even begun placing bets on whether or not he’d come back. The ones that bet he would thought they were going to get paid up when, in the morning, we saw the jolly boat on the horizon.
“The captain!”
“I knew he’d do it!”
“Never doubt the Captain!”
But as it came closer, the cheers stopped. Finally it came to the ship and we hooked it with the yardarm and winched it up. There was nothing in the boat other than the Captain’s hat.
“How’d it come back here?”
“Where’s the Captain?”
The men thought the ship might’ve been cursed so they dropped it back in the water along with the hat. It dropped with a splash.
As I looked up from the jolly boat, the metal ship 100 yards away began to disappear, as if it was a cloud turning into mist. That was the final straw. We all decided the Captain was on his own and we were out of there.
That was less than 12 hours ago. We’re nearly to Maldvania now, where we will stock up on supplies and plan our next move. I end this ship log with another of the Captain’s poems.
The shackles of land off foot and hand,
I fly across the sea.
This body of mine is salt and brine,
For water I’ll always be.