What they Saw at Sea

The sailors drifted for years. After countless repetitions, their daily tasks, once so exciting, turned mundane. They adjusted the sails dispassionately and cleaned the decks with little care for effort or effect. Rum lost its flavor, poker its excitement. In time, every sailor won luck’s favor. The gambled coins, first brought aboard the ship in the hopes of being wagered for a win to dwarf the meager sailor’s pay, traveled through every sailor’s hands at some time during the journey. So many times were the coins passed around that no one could remember who first brought them aboard.

Over time, the journey’s original purpose faded from their minds. Were they lost? Or simply on a long, long expedition? It was the latter that kept them going: the conviction that all their travel, all their years of looking across nothing but endless sea, had a purpose so important they simply could not abandon it.

Perhaps it was the sea air, damp, salty, and suffocating, or the motion of the ocean beneath them, maddeningly unceasing, but eventually the sailors came unhitched from the world around them. A delirium settled around their minds, and they began to make fantastical discoveries.

They filled the pages of their logbooks with sketches of the islands, reefs, and atolls they came across, and claimed to have discovered a new part of the ocean. They drew pictures of exotic creatures and wrote of stays on beach-rimmed islands with forested hearts, where fruit was plentiful and wildlife easy to catch and easier to eat. Some sailors chose to stay on these islands, preferring the heavenly outposts to decades more of wandering on the sea.

Their logbooks took on the appearance of a wizard’s almanac, with each page crammed full of sketches, drawn in such detail that when the sailors returned to their home country, skeptics struggled to argue their falsehoods. The sailors rambled on about freak weather occurrences: storms that lasted weeks and brought in water from every corner of the globe; waves as tall as mountains that overtook the ship, only for the sailors to emerge moments later on a dry deck; and second suns that appeared in the sky and tailed the true sun like shifty followers.

In the margins of the logbooks they wrote in the script of all the languages they claimed to have heard on their voyage. Not the tongues of island natives or far-flung ports, but the whisperings of sprites and mermaids. They described encounters with creatures that had translucent skin and shadowy eyes who claimed they too had once been from the mainland, before curiosity and a thirst for adventure drew them away from their native homes and beckoned them past their known seas.

It was all fake, undoubtedly. In later voyages, after the eras of romanticism and exploration had flared and faded, scientists switched out words like voyage and expedition for scientific inquiry and experimental journey. These sterilized terms sobered those who dared to hope that perhaps the tales were true, that the islands, reefs, and atolls the sailors claimed to have discovered would emerge from the horizon; that the translucent once-humans would welcome them from the depths of their forested abodes; and the foreign languages recorded only in writing would fall upon their ears.

One band of scientists, firm believers that there was truth to the sailor’s ramblings, put together the funds and minds to embark on a voyage of their own. They pledged to their skeptical peers that they would discover the truth and pinned their reputation upon their success or failure.

What was it that compelled these scientists such that they would risk the loss of their credibility over the word of 18^th century sailors? Perhaps a childlike love of both myth and knowledge, or a resolve to pursue every possibility: the very traits that first set them upon the path of the sciences.

Setting off at sea, the scientists followed the path the sailors once took. Their ship, metal-hulled, coal-powered, sailed easily across the same waters the sailor’s wooden vessel had once suffered through. When they came upon the region of the sea the sailors had written of, they saw an empty field of blue. The waves moved teasingly, slapping the hull of the ship as the scientists gazed upon nothing. Confronted with the unwanted failure of their hypothesis, the scientists fell into a desperate sorrow. They wanted to lunge into the water and tear apart the waves, convinced that their lapping motion obscured the truth the delusional sailors described.

But they were just that. Driven to delusion by the rocking of their ship and the endless sky and sea that stretched out in all directions in twin shades of blue. Hundreds of miles from a safe port, the sailors had taken refuge in escapist fantasies. The islands they described in detail were mirages, their time ashore hungry hallucinations. The creatures they drew were fusions of the fauna of their home country, pulled from their memories of home and mashed together by a subconscious straining to create some semblance of familiarity for them. The freak weather they described was nothing more than the usual conduct of the seas, supercharged into madness by sailors who grew to fear the blow of every wind and slap of each wave. The sailors who they claimed chose to stay behind on the island paradises had instead perished during the voyage, their bodies given a burial at sea.

The translucent-skinned shadow-eyed beings who emerged from the island’s forests were the demons that plagued the sailor’s nightmares, turned from foe into friend by sailors desperate for contact with any other creature.

The creatures, the islands, their inhabitants, the new region of the sea…none of it was real. But the scientists, their dreams destroyed, began to believe they too had seen them, brought to despair by the blue that stretched out around them. They pulled islands up from the ocean floor, created creatures from their own blood, and plucked the demons from their nightmares and befriended them just as the sailors had before. They recorded the fantastic weather occurrences the sailors documented and began to hear in their heads the languages the sailors had brought back only in writing.

When they returned to the mainland their madness continued to cloud their minds, and to their colleagues they brandished their notebooks: not the sheepskin logbooks of the sailors, but filled just the same with crazed writings and sketches. They insisted on what they had seen and heard, even as their evidence was ridiculed by their former colleagues.

A few of the scientists, their minds cleared at the sight of skyscrapers that pierced the clouds and automobiles that defied travel by foot, renounced their past declarations. They claimed their ramblings were the work of temporary madness, hallucination, food poisoning, whatever was necessary to permit them to rejoin the world.

But a central band of scientists continued to believe in what they saw, traveling to conferences worldwide to peddle their beliefs, going to each one equally enthusiastically as the last, even as fewer and fewer venues welcomed their presence.

What they said was nonsense. Dangerous nonsense. There was an attraction to their stories, a siren’s song entwined in their words that lulled in the dreamers, the romantics, the believers, and made them yearn to see what the scientists spoke of. Distracting reason, it planted the seed for belief. Unknowingly taking the place of their 18th century predecessors, the scientists passed on their delusion to a new generation. Soon a new set of explorers, perhaps artists this time, would embark on their own journey across the sea, anxious to avenge the sailors and scientists that the world had scorned and bring back true evidence of what the sailors and scientists had seen.

by Eileen Miller