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Statement of Margaret Smith, regarding a voyage taken in 1912. Original statement given January 13th, 1924. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
I’ve always been a wilful child, I got that from my mother who bore me as a widow from a sea-captain and chose to weather all the scandal that my arrival caused. As she refused to bow to societal pressure, she taught me not to break when one could bend instead, how to thrive. I don’t think that this is what she planned on teaching me, no, but it was this and my wanderlust that made me decide to leave my home on the day of my thirteenth birthday posing as a boy and sign aboard the first ship that would take my at the docks.
I jumped ships a few times, making sure to leave those that were captained by bad man as soon as possible. I was young, yes, but neither blind nor dumb, and I could smell mutiny brewing in the air. And then I signed aboard the Sea Witch and I learned that maybe not all yarns spun old sailors are fantastical lies. It was aboard this ship that I met Hob and the Indian gentleman who never gave us his name.
Hob was a curious Englishman, he came on board in Bombay and the captain was forced to take him on as a passenger. He didn’t like it, our captain, but he didn’t have much of a choice and he was handsomely paid. I later learned that it was because Hob actually owned the ship, or at least enough share in the company that owned it to force the captain to take him on. The Indian was even curiouser. We only found him hiding as a stowaway on the fifth day after leaving Bombay, I thought the captain was going to throw him overboard but he decided he could stay until we got to Aden, even if he had to be put in chains. But Hob intervened, sent us all out, they did, and then they talked. I can only imagine what Hob told the captain and how much he paid but in the end the Indian became our newest passenger on the way to Liverpool.
That was what I liked the most about Hob, he was a friendly man with an easy smile but he, too, refused to bend as long as he could. And he was kind, not only by paying for the stowaway but also to me. But there was something about him that was quite queer. You have to understand, there is a certain way to life on a ship, to sailors and other sea-farers. Stories have always been part of it, you will always find drunken sailors spinning their yarns about mermaids they claim to have seen or other dark shapes under the waves. Hob always looked at the sea with thoughtful eyes and once I heard him telling the Indian man that he wondered what could be found in the ocean, not figures like mermaids but what one would find underneath it all. A curious man he was, I think more of the sciences than of the mystic. And he was clever, he always knew everything that happened on board, and he knew very much about sailing and ships. I enjoyed working for him, I did, but I always felt as if he knew even more than he talked about, as open as he seemed, I never really learned much about him. He could talk with you and stories would flow easily from your lips but after, I never could recall that he offered any real information about himself.
The Indian gentleman was not much better, the most he talked with me was in the night before the storm hit and he only shared a story about a king who loved his wife so much he gave her a fruit that would gift her immortality. But she was unfaithful and gave it to her lover who himself gave it to a courtesan. And the courtesan gave it to the king who despaired and had his wife and her lover executed before clothing himself as a beggar, eating the fruit and leaving his kingdom behind. It was an interesting story but I only laughed. Nobody lives forever, I told him, I had already seen people die on ships and I wasn’t going to believe a pretty tale of a fruit giving eternal life.
And then the storm hit. I got lucky and mostly worked for Hob while half our chickens got washed overboard. It wasn’t actually the storm that became a problem, but the day after when no wind graced our sails. We were stuck. Two days later, the fish. Don’t laugh, but the waters churned with fish! They all swam west, we hauled more fish than we could have eaten in a month, all kinds of them. And then they were past us and the sea was empty. It was eery, no wind and no waves, just calm blue where before there was a frenzy that I had never seen before. We stood there for a moment before someone called land ho. But there was no land, we still hadn’t moved, there couldn’t be any land. There was land, or at least it looked like it, for a moment before it disappeared again. And then the world just went mad.
It was beautiful in a terrifying way. The Sea Witch was a four-masted ship and not small but now it appeared as if nothing but a tiny vessel at the mercy of the creature rising from the sea. It was the sea serpent, a giant whose green scales alone were bigger than a man and with a fin as red as blood. For a moment it loomed above us, maw opened wide, and it was like we were trapped in the eye of a storm, dark clouds gathering and the ocean wildly churning. It looked at us, I could feel it, its pale eyes trapped us in its gaze for a heartbeat before it crashed back into the sea. The whole ship lurched and waves rose up around us but we could do nothing but stand there and weep for we had been graced by something I can’t even now put into words.
In the wake of the sea serpent came wind upon us again and we could finally continue our voyage, making stop in Aden. I wanted to tell people about the Serpent, nobody had ever seen it before, but in the end I didn’t. Who would believe me? Nobody else from the crew told either. So I went into town for shore leave and kept quiet but I knew that one day I would tell somebody about what we had seen. I have already told the story of the Sea Serpent once before, in a pub at the world’s end, but now I am also telling you because I don’t think any story makes it ever out of the World’s End. Maybe this one did.
What I mean with World’s End? As I said, a pub, but I am not here to tell you about that, am I? Let a girl keep her secrets, everyone has them. And I think my biggest secret isn’t the story of the sea serpent but what came after. People tend to miss us simple workers, you know, and not everyone is always vigilant when talking about their own secrets.
Hob and the Indian gentleman were, as I said, curious men but it was in Aden that I overheard something that I never was to hear. I had always thought it a simple kindness when Hob paid the passage for the Indian but when I heard them talking to each other early in the morning when I returned from leave it sounded like they did know, or at least knew of each other. Everyone else was still out in the city and I don’t think they thought anybody would return at that time. It was then that I also learned that the Sea Witch actually belonged to Hob and that he knew I was a girl. He walked with me a bit and then he told me something that has stuck with me since then. He talked about the future of the ship and about himself. See, he told me he only owned the ship until he would tell the company that his great-uncle had died and that he would sell his shares on, that the nephew has no interest in boats. That there will be nothing to link nephew and uncle. It is hard to explain but he talked as if he was both uncle and nephew at once, as if he was a nebulous third figure that used these two personas as his masks, switching his story around at will. I asked how old he was, he always seemed as a middle aged man, not old but not quite young anymore, but he only laughed.
He did promise not to tell anybody about me and he kept that promise, asked me to call him Hob and we finished our voyage to Liverpool. They left the docks and I stayed on for a while more, sailed some more until it got too hard to hide that I wasn’t a boy. I returned to London, met a man and birthed my son. I crafted a new life for myself but I still think about that voyage and these two men that I met from time to time. Maybe someday I will meet one of them again and ask if the Indian gentleman really once was a king or if Hob did find a new identity to inhabitate.
Who knows which yarn is actually spun from a thread of truth and which ones are nothing more than wild dreams but I think I would like to believe for a while longer in what I saw and heard in those days.
Statement ends.
A sea serpent, truly? The statement seems like nothing but fantastical dreaming by Ms. Smith although the remarks about this Hob and the Indian gentleman appear curious.
Sasha found some information about the shareholders of the ship’s company from that time and we managed to narrow down the identity of this Hob to a man named Robert Gadling, an Englishman who is noted as having died in Calcutta, leaving his share to his nephew who promptly sold them before disappearing in thin air. We assumed no further information would be found before Tim unearthed a marriage license of Ms. Smith only a few years after her statement. The name of her new husband is listed as Robert Gadling who adopted her son Victor.
Ms. Smith, or Mrs. Gadling, passed away in 1941 due to a heart attack, her husband enlisted in the navy shortly after and never returned from the war. The only other thing we could find is that her son returned to London after the war and inherited his father’s belongings, he died in 2004. Sasha found a photo of him and an unknown man, most likely his grandson, from shortly before his death. Martin claims it reminds him of Prof. Golding from our latest statement about a Leitner. I think he is getting paranoid.
End recording.
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