Tell Out Loud Tale

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She was the daughter of whaling master Amos and his wife Louise, being born on the first leg of her mother’s first voyage. She was in utero on the sea, born in Peru, and picked up at six months, after enough time had passed that Mom’s and baby’s blood were set upon the land, and before she began to crawl. 

 

She learned to walk on board – she had sea legs first. No more than six months on land until the age of six, and thereafter on land only between their voyages – their always happening voyages – until fifteen when she left at the end of one.  

 

There was a brother too. On land, he never settled in our eyes, coming through whenever he did, always coming through though eventually, coming through to check that all was well enough and moving on again. He is hereafter not mentioned here, through no intent, but because somehow Annie came down to us, raising us all as she did. His direct ancestors of our age when we knew her, indeed, although knowing him so much better, did not know if he had sailed with Amos and Louise and Annie! Oh, yes, he sure did.

 

She told the stories only to her grandchildren and then only when she thought her grandchildren were too young to remember (and thus to pass them on). As luck would have it, Aunt Anne had a prodigious memory, or they would all be lost. 

 

She hated it. She always turned her back to the ocean. At Pine Point for their week there each year, for that one week a year, she turned her back on the ocean. Always she watched her granddaughters as they played, all their lives, but never when they played at the ocean for she never faced the ocean. How strange it was the them that she did not watch them only that one time when they played.  

 

And she refused to float again, even on the Swan Boats in the Boston Public Gardens, even when she went with her three granddaughters, my mother and my aunts.  The Garden itself was fine, but floating on any water would never do. 

 

She hated it.  Blood in greater and greater and then lesser and lesser parts per gallon of water; fat floating across greater and lesser surface area determining levels of iridescence   (from dark brown to mud dull to mud to band and swirl to traces of color to is-it-there silvery sheen, to barely visible in favorable light).  Blubber boiled and oil barreled.  It was when the fat trapped the blood in glassy seas and the ship stayed in it that she hated it the most.  Blood has a smell, the smell of blood, death has a smell, the smell of death for it shouldn’t be smelled for when it is smelled it means it is out here to be smelled and not where it belongs in the pulse of a life.  

 

She hated it. Sharp hoes cutting the fat filleting it from the skin  of the whale. Can we smell that, can we slip in the grease, can we watch the strips of blubber peeled cut and rent and pulled into the boat while the whale spins into the sea, the strips of blubber pulled into the boat while the whale spins into the sea, dipped and yanked with great zippering away of flesh dipped and yanked like so many candles in reverse.   

 

She hated it. That small, small cabin, pitch black but for the porthole, where she could only sew and read the bible, that sewing, and that bible, salt cod and that hard tack and that maggoty hard tack (and the hard tack and water and sugar for her only treat, that her grandchildren loved, given with love as she lived with all of them from birth to young ladyhood, all three girls, all three cared for and confided to that which only she could tell). 

 

1000’s of names for water, for waves, for wind, for clouds, for whales.  Breeze and gale, full sail and dead in the water, and water oily and flat with the blood, and the bilge sloshing waves of rotten air.  Sea legs, seasick, blood legs, blood sick.  Of warm and cold oceans, rounding  the horn and being becalmed far from land, of, in all that time, ocean surface and depths, day and night skies, sunrise and sunset skies, calm and stormy weather, breezes and gales, ocean glowing and slate gray, full and furled sails, dry decks and decks wet with blood, sluiced decks and decks stained by blood, rot, and sweat, frangipani wafting and stink from blubber boiling, sweet and salty breezes.   Did only the cabin stay the same? Did the cabin stay the same?   

 

Hard tack and water, root vegetables and dried cod, jerky, scurvy.  And did she  ever eat fresh fish?  The ocean was for oil from blubber, for baleen, and, rarely, for ambergris. 

 

Many green hands, and the islanders taken on in the islands, non-English speakers, and non-literate men would sign with an “X” never being informed of small print, perhaps even under Chase’s thumb as he stood at the gangplank to get their X… Semi-conscripted, then, these men signed on for what they understood to be a one, two to three year voyage (or what they thought was one leg of that), and then could just as well it be said to be stolen from their families for the actual length of time a voyage took, being precisely how soon they had made enough profit for Chase to come home. 

 

Many if not most Islanders were required to put up with the use the last name Kanaka, told apart by the so-called christian name of Jonah Kanaka or Moses Kanaka or Sam Kanaka  a ocean-worlds’ spread anglicization of a French word for the island word for the peoples of New Caledonia, “Kanaq/k,” itself an francophone version of an Atollian word for man.  Perhaps Chase did not know, or if he did, would not get it, that that the name was not just a name for a man,  but a  name for all men, for great men, for free men (and for the Kanaq people in all their f). The islanders would have known, and that is great. When Annie noticed them as more than sailors and caretakers, as Kanak/q, as that sort of man, she had to go ashore.

 

Mother was rowed in a few times to meet the king, or the traders, the king and the traders.  But Annie could never set foot on the islands, she never set foot on a beach.  The men weren’t able because they surely would desert, and she wasn’t able because she was only a child, because she might be stolen, with much worse to come.  Then, she knew land only from sea, so a galloping horse was compared to a sleigh-ride, the men in the skiff roped to a thrashing, speeding, and sounding whale until it exhausted them and they gave up or were dragged under, or exhausted itself and could be killed. 

 

One mutiny was quashed when a belaying pin was lashed between the leader’s teeth as a bit to tie the ropes to, ripping the easy flesh into the jaw joints, "not long before he was ready to resume duties."  

 

Another mutiny threatened when the casket of opals the Master got in Australia somehow made its presence known.  Believed by the crew to doom their voyage, it was spilled into the sea in their presence to appease them.  Was this when a Pitcairner, a “full blood” or “mixed race” descendant of Fletcher Christian, of that Fletcher Christian of  the Bounty mutiny was aboard, as they were recruited from Pitcairn too? 

 

Was there a mirror?  She is in one photograph from that time, hand colored, that was taken in Australia when she was four, and looking more sad than even the many minutes she had to sit frozen would cause.   

 

She was transfixed by a mid-ocean visiting master’s wife’s snake ring with ruby eyes.  

 

What were her dreams like?  

 

She heard the drums of Africa off the coast after being blown there by a hurricane. Sounding like nothing she had ever heard before, not even the drumming of waves, the bigger, deeper waves. They must have had to anchor of the coast of Africa, and she must have had to stay on board. Were these particular drums, or just the drums of Africa that we all can hear when we he that phrase, she heard the drums of Africa.  Were these drums drumming about their boat?  It never occurred to me to ask...

 

The dusty shudder of a Peruvian  earthquake was just one more way the surfaces were partable, fissioned, never fast.  Her nightmares were nightwhales, night wails. 

 

Although her school mates in South America -- for the six-months she spent on land --  knelt in the mud when a priest walked by, she, in her first truly white dress, refused.  

 

No wonder no one ever entered the sea, for it swallowed one up in an instant. When men were lost at sea the sharks drawn by the ever-present smell of blood would make of them short work. When a man died on board, rotting canvas and tack would bind them, work would cease for the duration of a short prayer and he’d be assigned to the deep, parted the surface, or hit and sank. 

 

What would she make of sushi?   Would it be shocking?  As fascinating as the silken scarves she collected at finishing school?  An alien life form like those the whales belched out?  Would she try it, would she recognize it from something somewhere, would she take it in, or would she spit it out?

 

By now of my knowing her, I think, she’d at least have been intrigued.