There was a general agreement with our master that they would be able to successfully row across this vast ocean.
And so, with the fatalism of all slaves who served a master, we rowed towards home.
*
Again, Sam skimmed through the journal until he reached what he was after – the final chapter in the fate of the Mahogany Ship.
Southern Land, August 8, 1442
I watched as the days went by, and my master struggled to maintain our latitude with the strong winds and currents continuously pushing our ship further south. With all but one of our masts destroyed, we struggled to maintain a northern latitude as we headed east. Instead, we were forced past the southern land.
Our supplies were not going to last with the increased effort caused by the constant rowing.
After three months at sea and the death of one third of the crew to malnutrition, my master made the decision that we would have to come ashore in the new land.
We had no identifiable lands from which to take a bearing, but the temperature suggested that we had deviated much further south than our homeland. By this stage it didn’t matter. We were going to have to find some fresh water, food, and some means of repairing the decimated masts.
The shore was edged by a rocky cliff, making it impossible to land.
We followed it for three days before finding a place that allowed a ship to anchor. It had a rocky bottom, but the anchor held in the calm weather. Although it would most likely be useless if the swell or wind picked up at all.
A rowboat was dropped, and my master ordered several of his advisers to come ashore with him.
“You’d best come ashore, too, Rat Catcher – I may need your advice.”
I beamed at the praise from my master and dutifully took my place, as the smallest man, at the very front of the rowboat.
The enormous shoulder muscles of the slaves swelled while they rowed towards the alien land. Once we reached the shore, the slaves pulled the rowboat up on to the beach and I scurried up onto the beach.
Our weary group followed my master over the large sand dunes and into the land beyond. It was flat and the flora sparse. This would not be the place to fell trees and rebuild our masts. A large river could be seen up ahead, running towards the ocean. Somewhere it would become fresh and drinkable.
Men went ahead to find it.
And my master paced.
After hours, my master stopped and said, “All right men – what do you make of it?”
“Do you mean where we go from here or if we can even provision at this place?” the chief advisor and oldest person in the party asked.
“Where do we go from here?” my master clarified. “We have already spent nearly a week just trying to find an adequate place to make landfall. Our men are weakening, and we have no way of knowing whether or not this will be our best chance.”
“My best prediction is that we are almost due south from the homeland. If we could somehow cross this landmass, we would be in a perfect position to reach north towards home.” The navigator spoke.
“Then we should row around this land mass,” The leading engineer said. “This land offers little with which to repair your ship, master.”
“Do you think it will sail much further, given its long list of wounds?” my master asked.
“No.”
“Then the decision has been made for us.”
“Tell me, master, what that decision is,” the lead engineer asked.
“We’re going to carry the ship across this body of land,” my master ordered.
It was the sort of stubborn solution that my master would come up with. Something that he knew was as entirely unreasonable as it was necessary, its success a certainty in the giant’s mind. I knew that I, along with all the men aboard, would happily follow my master in his belief – towards our certain deaths.
*
Again I stood at my post on top of the remaining mast.
At two hundred feet, I was in the best position to ensure that the ship wasn’t heading directly for a large reef or rock bed. The rowboats had been used to scout the area, but the eagle’s nest offered the best vantage point. From there I could immediately see any changes in the water color and by now I was well accustomed to determining what those changes meant.
On my master’s orders the men rowed the ship at full speed towards the sandy beach with the fatality of men who served their master at all cost. I watched as the color turned from a dark blue to a light green, and then finally the sand could be seen below the keel.
There was a loud crunch as the flat bottom of our wooden ship came into contact with sand, followed by a series of vibrations that resonated throughout the ship, causing the eagle’s nest to sway ever so slightly.
For a moment I was worried it was going to tear the hull in two.
Then the bow of our gigantic ship reached the sandy beach.
Riding its own wave – which must have been twenty feet high at least, it continued to move high up the first of the shallow sand dunes as if there had been nothing in our way. Her momentum carried her forward like the monster she was.
We passed all four sand dunes as though they weren’t even there.
The ship finally came to rest more than a hundred feet along the new, flat, earthy land. So much water had come with us that our massive ship now appeared to be resting in a small lake of its own creation, several feet deep and as much as a mile wide.
*
My master seemed invigorated by the progress we were making.
He stood on the highest hill in the distance and examined his ship. It had been a week, and still it rested in a small lake. It appeared bigger, if that was even possible, out of the water.
Men were working in all directions. Tasks had been set and teams had been formed to achieve specific purposes. My master confided in me that they were already looking much better for their efforts. Men needed tasks. Idleness often bred poor health. So did a lack of nutrients, but that too was in the process of being rectified.
A great foraging party had been sent for miles in all directions to return with provisions. Strange new animals had been found and slaughtered. A great variety of berries had been located and those rich in nutrients were identified, compared with those that were lethal. The men followed their orders and tested the new foods until the ship’s master doctor had a long list of edible, difficult, and lethal plants and animals.
The engineer had used more than two hundred men to make changes to the ship. Large parts of the rigging, oars and weaponry were cannibalized in order to build a system by which the monstrous ship could be carried by an army of loyal men.
Today, the master engineer had ordered a party of three hundred men to remove the remaining water from the lake so that he could make the final adjustments to the base of the ship.
It reassured my master to watch the men work with such loyal efficiency as they removed the water by hand held bucket.
By the end of the day, the senior engineer approached my master.
“We are ready master.”
“Excellent. We leave at once.”
*
It had been three weeks since we had first started carrying the Godforsaken ship. The land was terribly dry and unforgiving. I was starting to question the wisdom of my master’s decision to naively cross an alien land in the hope that it was a narrow body of land with a northern ocean nearby.
But still we pressed on through both day and night with carrying teams rotating constantly. We numbered fifteen hundred men, and it required nearly a thousand at any one time to lift the ship. Teams of ten on each carrying oar would rotate further down every half an hour until they reached the end of the ship and were thus allowed a break.
In doing so, each man would obtain a four-hour break throughout a twenty four hour period.
By the end of the third day and the death of ten men who literally pushed their bodies to death, my master realized that carrying the ship through the night was going
to be impossible.
The days continued on, and we traveled a little less each day.
By the end of the second week we no longer had enough healthy men to rotate the carrying shifts through the day. For a while the men succeeded in maintaining the ship’s movement with a twenty-minute break in the middle of the day. Then, their ability to carry it became less, and they were no longer able to carry the ship throughout the entire daylight hours.
By the third week, my master accepted that the ship could only realistically be moved for four hours each day. The rest of the time the men would be required to gather provisions and prepare the land in front of them, which often required the felling of many trees to allow the movement of the great ship.
As we reached the start of the fifth week, our numbers had dwindled to the point that the entire ship could only be moved every other day and even then for only a matter of hours.
With my master’s encouragement, the men were able to maintain this effort until the eighth week when they were no longer able to move the ship more than twenty or so feet in the day.
“We’ll rest here for a week if we have to,” my master said. “You have all honored me with your effort, but to go on further at this pace would be to ask for failure. We shall rebuild our health and then continue. Surely, the sea must be close. I can smell the salt in the air.”
I have an unusually sensitive nose, and I was certain my master was merely encouraging the men.
The men rested for an entire week and then commenced again.
But the rest time hadn’t improved their condition.
If anything, it had made things worse. Prior to the break, men had continued to work with injuries. Now, those injuries had been allowed to fester.
Over the course of the next week, more people died and many more became no longer capable of carrying heavy weights.
Again, my master ordered a meeting with his most trusted advisers and again, he requested my attendance – although for what purpose, I did not know. I certainly didn’t have any expertise in the area to offer.
This time, he did not ask for our opinion on how to solve the problem, but instead demanded each person to identify equipment and materials on board the ship that could be discarded.
It then took another week to decide on which provisions to discard and which equipment could be done without.
This time our efforts appeared to have been worthwhile, and the ship continued to move in a northern direction for a few hours each day. But within a few days we were back to removing more items from the ship’s complement.
It was on our ill-fated crew’s eighty-ninth day that, despite my master’s encouragement and his orders, the ship was no longer capable of being moved.
It sunk into the mud-soaked land.
Each day, she seemed to rest lower, her new master gaining an unmovable strangle hold.
This time, the Mahogany Ship had found her final resting place.
*
I was prepared to die so that my master may succeed, but had no intention of leaving my master to ruin.
Over the next three weeks it became overly apparent to everyone involved that the new land, rich in beauty as it was sparse and desolate, had no means of providing for the remaining men. Working parties had been sent out in all directions to fend for themselves.
As each leader returned, only one thing was certain.
The crew of the Mahogany Ship must abandon her and disperse if anyone was to survive. And survive we must, because we had discovered the most powerful weapon the world had ever known. If only we could reach our homeland.
“The master wants to speak with you,” said the chief navigator.
“Just me?” I asked.
“Just you.”
“Where is he?”
“In his master cabin – where else?” The navigator shook his head disloyally. “He spends hours each day inside there, just looking at it – you know? I think it’s driven him quite mad. Power does that, you know, and we’ve all witnessed just how much power that thing yields.”
Ordinarily I would have reprimanded even someone as senior as the chief navigator for attacking my master. But I could see what was happening and knew that now was not the time to overplay my master’s authority. I could feel that there would be mutiny before all persons succumbed to starvation.
“I’ll go to him immediately.”
I climbed the steps up and into the master cabin at the aft of the grand ship. It was larger than the average house back home and fit for a king. In this case, it housed my master, a would-be king, and wielder of the most powerful weapon mankind had ever built.
“Rat Catcher – have you come alone?” my master asked immediately.
“Yes, Master.”
“Good. Very good.” In the middle of the room stood the magnificent weapon, its sparkling gems glistening in the dim light of a candle. My master spoke, but at no time did his eyes look away from the evil weapon that had driven us to our current state. “Five weeks ago, I believe every single man aboard this ship would have happily given their lives if I asked them to. But as you know, a lot has changed in that time. Hungry men will do many things they never would have previously dreamed of if they are hungry enough.”
“Master…”
“Wait… I’m not finished. I cannot maintain command of the Mahogany Ship for much longer, and I cannot risk losing my master’s great weapon. So I will tell you what must be done.”
“You will always be my master!” I protested.
“Of course I will. You always were a fool, and a foolish man alone dies serving a master who cannot provide for him basic sustenance.” My master’s hand almost touched the precious stone, but then withdrew it as though it were poison.
“What would you have me do, master?”
“I need to disband my crew. Even fools must understand that this new land, sparsely inhabited, is incapable of providing for the men in such close proximity. I have broken my crew into eight groups, each under a different leader’s command. I will send them in all directions in search of food and help. I will remain here to guard the weapon – I cannot even imagine the consequence of its power falling into the hands of our master’s enemies.”
“And for me?”
“I have a different plan.”
Homeward Bound, September 1, 1442.
In the early hours of the next morning, well before the sun had risen, I left with another seven of my master’s most trusted men. We were on our way back to the southern land where we had arrived so long ago.
We moved quickly, hindered only by meagre provisions and no personal belongings, with the exception of one scroll on which I was to continue this journal in the hope of one day retracing our steps.
At the end of the first day, I stopped and made some notes in this very book. It is the one that my master gave me so that I could record our journey and so one day return to retrieve the weapon for the homeland.
I had pleaded with my master to let me stay by his side, but in the end he ordered me. And so I now obey his wishes.
“Should we try and bring the weapon back with us?” I had asked.
“No, you won’t be able to protect it,” my master had responded. “The rowboat may sink, and if it does then the weapon will be lost forever. Worse still, you may be captured by any one of my master’s enemies. If that were to happen and the weapon lost, I would be the one responsible for the collapse of my master’s reign.”
“Then, should we carry it closer to the shore where we first landed?”
“No, then someone else may come across it. Leave the weapon here, and I will guard it so long as I’m alive.” My master had then handed me the scroll and said, “Take this. I have made the first entry in it – our position in relation to those mountains in the north, the river to the south, and the desert to the west.”
I had taken the book and held it as if it were the most valuable possession I’d ever had.
“Keep your entries clear, and make
them often so that you alone may one day return with enough men to fetch the weapon. Don’t fail me in this, Rat Catcher.”
My master had tears in his eyes as he spoke. As do I, now that I make my own entries in this journal.
The days went by and we continued to move quickly. I made entries in my journal often, until we reached the shore where our wooden rowboat had been deserted.
During that time, the weather had changed considerably for the colder.
“The seasons are changing – we must find a way north before we freeze here,” I told my men, of whom I was now master.
“Of course, Master. The rowboat will be ready within the hour.”
“Good – we must complete our journey so that we can return in time to save our master.”
All eight of us then loaded the rowboat and started our long journey home.
The sea was rough and demanded all the strength and intellect we could muster not to capsize. After three days of continuous rowing we reached the southern tip of the land. A number of strange currents ran in both directions and it took us a further three days to finally round the point and head north.
On the first beach that appeared accessible I gave the order to land so that we were able to find fresh water and resupply.
Our party found that we were able to row in a northern direction almost continuously for months on end. Regularly beaching the rowboat for a day or two – just enough time to find fresh water and scavenge for food – sustained us.
We never stayed very long on any of the beaches, fear telling us that the dark colored locals may be violent. More often than not, the native people appeared more frightened than anything else and kept their distance. Even so, I had no intention of remaining long enough for a physical confrontation. The eight of us would make a poor army and would be vulnerable on land.
After three months, we reached the top of the massive landmass and were once again able to head west where surely our homeland must be.
We navigated by the stars as best we could, but none of us could recognize much of what we saw. I alone knew that we must travel further north, but had no way of knowing just how far that was. We rowed hard, driven by the fanatical desire not to betray our master’s trust.
The Sam Reilly Collection Page 45