20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

I don’t believe in sea monsters.

I want to say that at the start, before any of this, because everything that follows is going to sound like a man who does. I am a harpooner. I have spent twenty-two years on the water. I have killed things in the ocean that most men have never seen and will never see – sperm whales, right whales, humpbacks, a finback once that took us three days and nearly cost me a leg. I have been in the water with things that could have killed me and chose not to, and I have been in the water with things that tried. I know what is in the water.

There is no monster.

There is something else.

It started in the summer of 1855. Ships coming into port with their hulls staved in. Not from reef, not from ice, not from anything the captains could account for. The damage was consistent in a way that damage from a reef is not consistent. A reef is specific to a location, makes an irregular wound shaped by the underwater geography that caused it. This made a wound that was regular, controlled, the same depth and the same shape repeated across three ships in four months, in three different parts of the Pacific Ocean.

A consistent wound from three different locations means the location is not the cause. The thing is the cause. And the thing moves.

What the thing was doing was less clear. The damage was impact damage – something colliding with a hull at speed, but a deliberate attack would have sunk the ships. These ships limped home. Whatever hit them hit them in passing, without following up, without finishing the job. Something large and fast running through the shipping lanes in the dark, striking hulls in passing. The ships were damaged. They were not sunk.

That distinction mattered. I was still working out what it meant.

The newspapers decided it was a creature. A narwhal, enlarged beyond reason. A sea serpent of the kind sailors have been inventing for as long as there were sailors. The papers in San Francisco ran illustrations of the creature. The papers in New York ran the illustrations from San Francisco. In Paris they drew their own.

The newspapers are written by men who have not been on the water.

I had been on the water since I was sixteen. My father put me on a whaling ship out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, in 1833, when I was sixteen and large for my age and needed somewhere to go.

The ship was the Minerva, and the captain was a man named Blythe who was neither good nor bad but was consistent. I threw my first harpoon at a right whale six weeks out of St. John’s and missed it badly and Blythe said nothing and I threw the second and hit it and that was the beginning of twenty-two years.

I was thirty-eight in 1855. I had been on ships for nearly half my life. I had been to the Pacific twice, the Indian Ocean three times, the Southern Ocean once, the trip I do not discuss in company, the winter of 1848 below fifty degrees south, the thing we lost in the ice that I will not put in writing. I had harpooned things I cannot remember the count of and I had never seen anything that explained the damage to those ships.

Which meant I had not seen it yet.

When the US Navy came looking for a harpooner to join the expedition aboard the USS Susquehanna, a steam frigate out of San Francisco, I said yes. I said yes because the Navy was paying three times what the whalers were paying and because I was between ships: the Dauphin had come into San Francisco in September with a broken drive shaft and a captain who had decided to winter in California – and because I wanted to see what had done that to those hulls.

I said yes because I don’t believe in sea monsters.

I was right not to.

* * *

The Susquehanna was a good ship. A Navy steam frigate, five years out of the Philadelphia yard, side-wheel driven, fifteen knots at full steam. The kind of vessel that makes other ships feel like suggestions. She carried two hundred and thirty men, twenty guns she was not going to use, and enough coal for sixty days at cruising speed. Captain Creighton was a Tennessean, forty-two, with the kind of face that has made a decision and is comfortable with it. He ran a tight deck. His crew liked him.

He believed in the creature. He had made the mistake of reading the newspapers.

The first morning at sea he assembled the officers on the bridge and delivered a speech. I was there because harpooners attend such things. The speech was competent: we were hunting an unknown animal, the evidence suggests a large cephalopod or a narwhal of unusual size, we will pursue and destroy it for the safety of international shipping. He used the word creature eleven times. I counted.

I spent the first three weeks at sea explaining to Creighton, politely and then less politely, that what had hulled those ships was not a biological organism.

“The damage pattern,” I said. We were on the bridge on a clear Pacific morning three weeks out of San Francisco, the kind of morning that makes you understand why men go to sea – the quality of Pacific light in September, the water a color that has no name, the horizon so sharp it looks like someone drew it. “A narwhal, even a large one, hits and drags. The horn is a tusk, it goes in at an angle and it keeps moving as the animal drives past. What you get is a gash that deepens at one end and shallows at the other. The damage on the Perière was perpendicular. Clean entry, clean exit, consistent depth.”