“It’s a hull for chrissake,” Marx said. “Goddamn shitting hull from a ship. She must have turned turtle here in the weeds.”
They could see about fifteen or twenty feet of it, the rest was under water and weeds. George got a weak feeling in his belly looking at it, almost like he was getting some disturbing psychic vibe from the thing. But he supposed that wasn’t surprising, for whatever had happened to the ship was probably a dark, depressing story and one that had taken lives.
They rowed around it, deeper into that grim cultivation of seaweed. Pausing only to clean off their oars from time to time. But every man was expectant now. The signs were there — planks and logs, the hulls of sunken ships — and they were getting optimistic. They felt it in their bones and blood, they were very close now to something.
And George was thinking, I just hope it’s something good. God knows we need something good-
And those thoughts had barely exited his mind when they passed by some huge and amorphous shape in the fog, something vague that disappeared into the mist before they could really get a good look at it. But they knew. They all knew.
“A ship,” Gosling said. “I think it was a ship…”
And that stopped them from rowing, stopped them from doing just about anything. The ship had been off their port side, but now it was gone. The question was: Did they stop rowing and try to find it?
Which was pretty much what Gosling was thinking about when something happened that stopped him from thinking. Stopped them all from thinking or doing anything else — the fog began to lift.
It ran thin, then thinner, became diaphanous like something sheer and clingy. It began to unravel and unwind, casting aside motheaten rags and guazy wrappings and misting cerements. Disintegrating and pulling apart like moist blankets and ancient shrouds. Yes, like a stripper, the fog disrobed, tossing its dressings aside, and revealing the bare bones beneath. And that was pretty apt… for everywhere, bare bones.
Cushing said it before anyone else could: “The ship’s graveyard. Jesus, it’s the ship’s graveyard…”
And they saw, they all saw.
The mist was still there, but it was more of a haze now. The weed stretched in every direction, a watery, seeping matted carpet of green tendrils and coiled leaves, stalks and bladders and rotting creepers snaking through it. It was green and yellow, tinted with flowering pink buds. And set in it like tombstones in viscid, crawling vegetation… wreckage. Keels and undersides, bows and bulwarks, bowsprits and spidery tangles of derricks latticed in marine growths and slimy bloated ivies which were pulling them down deeper into the weed itself. Here were shattered skiffs and gutted scows, the ribbed frameworks of schooners sunk in the weed on their sides. It was some endless, weedy junkyard of the sea, of dead ships stripped of meat and masts, crumbling skeletons encrusted in shells and barnacles and growing things. Dozens and dozens of them thrusting up from the verdant bed of weed.
There was so much of it, it literally took your breath away.
But it wasn’t just sunken and dismembered ships, but nearly intact derelicts and hulks, some riding up high and others dipping down into that creeping green proliferation. This was the fabled graveyard of the seas, hundreds of ships held immobile in the fields of thick seaweed. Freighters and tankers, fishing vessels and yachts, tramp steamers and whalers. Some were recent additions, but some… old beyond old, barks and packets, clippers and 18 ^th century brigantines. George saw a moldering, weed-infested relic laying low in the growth and black polluted water that could have been the worm-holed, riven cadaver of a Spanish treasure galleon.
Many were mastless and bilged, punched through with great cavities like torpedo holes. Caught by the weed, they were unable to sink completely, slowly deteriorating, their crews long dead, their superstructures atrophied to sagging beams and leaning uprights. Some of the old sailing vessels looked almost seaworthy, but most were listing badly to port or starboard, dead and decayed things looking for a grave.
These were the ships that caught the eyes and imaginations of the men in the raft and lifeboat. Not the modern iron ships, but those flaking mummies from centuries gone by: brigs and schooners, four-masters and square-riggers. Their sails had long ago decomposed to dingy rags, but you could almost feel the history behind them, feel them riding high, creaking and groaning, shrouds snapping and flapping. But that had been long, long ago. For the weeds had claimed them now, held them in a green fist like cemetery dirt and would not let them go, would not let them seek the oblivion they deserved. No, the weed had ensnared them, grown up over their hulls, completely engulfing some so you could only see the general shape of a ship under all that growing, glistening, knotted weed. It sprouted from open portholes and roped over taffrails, noosed halyards and wreathed deckhouses.
But it wasn’t just the weeds, for here in this steaming, stagnant swamp, fungi had settled thickly over topmasts and mizzens, meshing jibs and topgallants. It was born in the putrescent hothouse nurseries of the weed and grew up over the masts in snotty lacework and nets, filaments and oozing vines, festooning like cobwebs, drooping and hanging like Spanish moss.
Yes, so thick was the weed and creeping gray fungi, that it was hard to say where the seaweed gardens ended and the ships began. For most of those derelicts looked not like things made by man, but things fashioned by nature out of roping green and yellow growing things that were mockeries of man’s work.
“Oh, my God,” George said, feeling an exhilaration and a despondency he could not shake. “How long… how long has this been going on?”
Marx just stared. “How long have men been plying the sea, son?”
There, of course, were newer vessels, too. Sleek ferries and frigates with ice-cutter bows and radar beacons, satellite dishes and radio aerials. There was, in fact, few ships, few types that were not represented in either pieces or in whole.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Gosling said. “In all your born days?”
Cushing just shook his head. “No… but I was expecting it, I was expecting something like this. Weren’t you all? Down deep, weren’t you all?”
Cushing told them that this was the real Sargasso Sea, the real ship’s graveyard, the great boneyard of the world’s oceans… except it wasn’t anywhere on earth as sailors had long thought, but here, here in this pestilent cellar. This dripping, miasmic, vaporous sea which was just about due south of nowhere.
“This is what they saw,” Gosling said, excited now. “All those old stories you heard of the Sargasso, the ship’s graveyard, the devil’s graveyard… Jesus, just like you thought Cushing, this is it. It ain’t just a story, it’s real.”
“Aye, that it is,” Marx said. “Ships must have passed through here, saw all this, and passed back out to tell the story… maybe thinking the whole time they were stuck in the real Sargasso.”
George liked none of it. He felt like a white man finding the fabled elephant’s graveyard in Africa. He was seeing something that he was not supposed to see. No man was meant to see this and live to tell about it. Some things, he knew, were best left as folklore and twice-told tales.
There was a subtle current in the weed, not enough to touch those big ships, but enough to propel the lifeboat and raft deeper into that murky, misting swamp.
“I can understand the old sailing ships getting trapped in here,” Marx said. “Becalmed, dead in the water… but those freighters and steamers, no, they could cut right through this shitting stuff.”
“Maybe the weed’s thicker than it looks,” Cushing suggested. He dipped his oar down into that spongy, floating mass, could find no end to it. “It may go down for a mile for all we know.”