Work Text:
Case #7940021
Statement of Ms. Jane Bird, regarding her experience aboard the HCS Obra Dinn. Statement taken from a letter addressed to Jonah Magnus. Dated 8th of November, 1822, Tangiers, Morocco.
STATEMENT BEGINS
Dear Sir,
Through word of an acquaintance, Mr. S———— [ARCHIVIST’S NOTE: NAME ILLEGIBLE] I have been led to understand that you are in search of those personal accounts of a most peculiar nature. Though we are not formally acquainted, I nonetheless feel compelled to disclose to you the series of unnatural occurrences to which I was witness some twenty years ago, aboard an East India Company ship, the Obra Dinn.
In the autumn of the year 1802, for reasons I still cannot bear to speak of without the bitterest sorrow, it came to pass that I was engaged to be married to an officer of the East India Company who had been stationed abroad. My intended, whom I had never met, was significantly my senior, as I myself was merely nineteen years of age, and I bore no insignificant trepidation at the thought of the coming nuptials. My father, however, heeded not my fears, no doubt itching for whatever material gain was to befall him in such an arrangement, and sought to secure me the soonest available passage East before the winter squalls arrived.
In the weeks prior to my departure it was decided that, as my father was far too occupied with the affairs of his business to even consider the thought of departing London himself, I would be accompanied on my long sea-voyage by my nurse-maid, Mrs. Emily Jackson. Mrs. Jackson was a Cornish widow of fifty or so years of age who had been in my father’s employ for some decade prior. She was a lively, good-hearted woman, who had been our sole companion after our mother’s death, and who had become my sole companion after — well, after I became, through bitter circumstance, my parents’ sole surviving child. Needless to say she was quite dear to me, in the end more mother than maid. Though I could not have foreseen the horrors that would greet us upon the vast and lonely Atlantic, I believe with absolute certainty that, without her presence, I would not have survived our ordeal.
In preparation for the voyage, and for my new life as the bride of Mr. John Radcliffe, I had packed somewhat lightly considering the indeterminate length of my stay abroad, but was assured that I would have means to send for whatever I found myself in need of once I had settled in Jodhpur. It was thusly that I found Mrs. Jackson and myself stood at the London dockyards on a cold November morning, with a mere three trunks between us. I had never been properly aboard a ship before, and then, as I stood before the Obra Dinn, I realized I had over-imagined the immensity of it. The ship was large, surely — a ‘96 East Indiaman, have you any familiarity with such matters— but still, it was somehow smaller than I had pictured it, less noble. As I watched the sailors swarm about the decks in their preparations, the ship appeared to me suddenly to be as the skeleton of some great beast, all bony spar and mast, coiling ropes of sinew, crawling over with men like insects, men who themselves were but carcasses. For a single moment I was sure that I beheld my death. I nearly turned to Mrs. Jackson to say something, but as I did, I felt suddenly very foolish in my nervousness, and assured myself it was only anxiety over my impending marriage and the long journey ahead that was conjuring such a horrible vision before me. Before I could consider my thoughts further, we were beckoned aboard by a bearded man in an officer’s uniform and went, with not a word between us, up the boarding way. We ought, truly, to have turned bodily and run as far as we could from that accursed vessel, but we could not have known then what awaited us. And so it was I came aboard the good ship Obra Dinn.
Once on deck, the ship was, admittedly, far more charming and fascinating to my unfamiliar eyes than it had appeared to me in my perverse fear of mere moments before. The wood of the ship was oiled dark and well-hewn, and certainly felt sturdy enough to my mind. The officers’ buttons glinted from their jackets and cockades in the rare autumn sun, and the furled sails seemed as blank and clean to me as clouds, as smoke. The moment of my horror had fully departed now, and, seeing how the ship teemed with life as a dozen sailors scrambled above in the ropes above me, I was somewhat put at ease about the journey to come.
We were greeted by the First Mate, a brusque-looking Scotsman called William Hoscut. He asked our names, and, upon our reply, at once offered to have us shown to our cabins and called over for some of the seamen to bring up our belongings. I was surprised by the pleasantness of his tone, having assumed that surely all sailors must be as blunt and callous as those in the novels I had read, but Mr. Hoscut would prove to be a most amiable and brave man. I wish deeply that his fate had been different, and to this day it is his face, alongside that of his sister, that appears most strongly in my mind when I conjure the image of those poor lost souls of the Obra Dinn. But alas, I have gotten ahead of myself.
After conversing with Mr. Hoscut, we were briefly introduced to the ship’s Captain, in whom I had observed a charming Guy Fawkes resemblance, and to Mr. Sathi, the quiet-spoken ship’s steward who would assist us as needed throughout the course of our voyage. Mrs. Jackson and I learned that we were to occupy two of the passenger cabins atop the main deck adjacent to the Captain’s quarters, just behind the helm. I was quite glad of this, as it would put me far from the other passengers and, more importantly in my mind, the common sailors — though I am now sure that most of them were decent men, I am certain I need not explain the discomfort a young lady might feel alone amongst them.
The grand cabin adjacent ours was occupied as well by the Captain’s wife, a Mrs. Abigail Witterel, née Hoscut, whom I quickly learned was the sister of the First Mate who had first welcomed us aboard. It was through both her proximity and her pleasant demeanor that she quickly became our natural companion. She was a tall Scottish woman with flashing sea-grey eyes and long, dark hair, which, in our private company, being only ladies as we were, she often wore loose. In my childish fancy, it looked at times like long strands of eel-ish algae as she moved in her muslin gowns like a spectre about her husband’s quarters. I often do wonder if the image was not some strange prefigurement of her lamentable fate, and even now I have not forgotten her face. She was a clever and beautiful woman with a quick wit, and it was not hard for me to see why the Captain loved her with such passion. In truth, the pair gave me a small hope for my own dismal future. In hearing of — and on occasion hearing more intimately, much to my young embarrassment, as my own cabin did share a wall with theirs — the affection Captain Witterel and his wife shared, I tried to nourish some small hope that my own husband might be similarly loving. Even then, however, I must admit that never truly looked upon the prospect of the marriage with anything but horror. But what did I know, then, of true horror?
The first sign of our voyage’s troubles came as the ship loaded cargo in Falmouth. Mrs. Witterel, Mrs. Jackson, and I had been taking our morning tea and enjoying the pleasant air on the aft balcony when we heard a most horrible scream and the loud crash of something heavy below us. Mrs. Witterel, concerned, went out on deck as Mrs. Jackson and I waited behind. She returned a short time later, pale and shaken. A sailor had been crushed to death by a crate when loading the hold, she said, an accident, of course, but how dreadful. And he’s got a brother aboard too. But none of us had met the man, and I am ashamed to admit our dour mood did not last more than a few hours. It is with some sadness that I realize I have never learned that man’s name, though he was to be only one of so many.
Our voyage, yes, was one of many losses. Death stalked us across those waters, and by the time we departed the port of Tenerife, some few weeks later, several more sailors were dead of disease. Even then, however, I had payed it somewhat little mind, as the ship’s surgeon, a Mr. Henry Evans, had assured us there was no risk of contagion, and in those days, as it is still, it was not uncommon for sailors to die upon a longer voyage.
It was after few days after we had departed from the Canaries when we learned that Mr. Pasqua, an Italian violin player who had taken passage with us and was set to disembark in Cape Town, was found murdered in the cargo hold. Though the circumstances of his death remain even now unclear to me, his killer had evidently confessed and was executed the following day upon the yard arm. I did not see the man’s death, as Captain Witterel made clear that we ladies were not to witness such a beastly thing.
Late that night we were woken to a commotion on deck and learned that a mutiny of sorts had occurred, in which an officer and several seamen were gone, stolen away with the skiffs and a chest belonging to some of the other passengers, a pair of Formosan nobles, I believe, with whom we had traveled. What it contained, I do not know, only that it certainly brought death upon them. Mere hours later the fled officer returned alone, his companions dead or missing, before he himself was killed by a musket shot from a lower window. I peered from the small porthole in my cabin as the men worked to heave up the lifeboats and their contents. At first I had assumed the bodies littering the skiffs to be the corpses of the mutineers, and though some of them were, as I looked I came to realize that the rest were neither dead, nor human.
The creatures the men pulled from those little boats were profoundly, shudderingly unnatural. I do not, even after so many years, feel that I possess the proper words with which to describe them to you. They bore some vague resemblance, I suppose, to the mermaids of children’s stories, but entirely devoid of any charm or beauty. From their fanged and gnashing mouths came screams so inhuman and piercing as to haunt my dreams even now. I do not know what was done with them. I was told that more several more men died as they were carried below.
It was the next evening that our true nightmare began. After the previous day’s excitement, I was tired and not in mood of company, and so I lay alone in my berth and watched the flame of my lantern cast long shadows on the walls. The Captain and officers were below, I believe, but I could her the muffled tones of conversation between Mrs. Jackson and Mrs. Witterel as they did their needlework in the adjoining cabin, a sound which did offer me some gentle comfort as I dozed. It was when my thoughts had begun again to drift to those inhuman creatures I had earlier glimpsed that I heard the ship’s bells begin to chime rapidly, and all at once. I froze in sudden fear. Was that not the signal that we were to be boarded by an enemy? My first thought, I admit, was that in the dark we had been stolen upon by a French Man-of-War, as this was back during the war times, or worse, that it was a band of pirates, as we were not far from the Barbary coast. I strained to listen for the sounds of a violent boarding as I had expected, but the night remained eerily silent but for the bells. At that moment Mrs. Jackson came at once through my door, and bid me dress quickly and retreat with her to the Captain’s quarters, where she had ascertained we would be safest.
Within the cabin had gathered already two of the stewards, Mr. Moss and the young Mr. James, along with Mrs. Witterel, who paced back and forth nervously in the half-light of the lantern’s dim glow. None of us had heard any sounds of boarding, and no other ship was visible from the aft windows, but the horrible cacophony of shouting and gunfire below us made us certain that our unseen enemy must now be aboard. It seemed as though we spent hours in our frightened silence within that cabin, and it felt at times that our fear was so immense as to entirely consume us. Mrs. Jackson, whom I had never before known to be a devout woman, began to pray fervently for our deliverance, and at the sound of every gunshot I would watch Mrs. Witterel grow paler and more tremulous, and I knew that she must be gripped by a tremendous fear for the lives of both her husband and brother.
When she suggested some time later that she would emerge from the cabin and search for them, or at least ask about of their state, it was all we could do to keep from restraining her bodily. I often wish we had — perhaps she may yet have lived. But we did not, merely scampering after her in our own fear, clustered around the helm as she left our den of safety for the vast black night. We ought to have dragged her back, forced her to retreat within. But she was not to be reasoned with in that moment, driven mad, I now believe, by that encompassing, unnatural fear.
The scene that greeted us upon the deck was one of unimaginable violence and terror. A blinding rain was falling now, heavier than any I had ever seen, and the bright oil fires gone up along the deck threw a hellish orange light upon us. All about us men lay dying, or dead, their bodies torn and broken horribly by some immense force, their blood slicking the decks as the surviving men raised their guns desperately to the darkness of the night surrounding us.
Mrs. Witterel made sight of one of the officers, and she shouted to him through the rain, her lantern flickering in the tempest’s angled onslaught as her hair and skirts became soaked black with rain, or sea, or blood. It was then that I saw it, that being of most horrible and deepest evil. To this day I can hardly conceive of the monstrousness, the enormity of what it was that reached out of that dark water. Through the blinding rain I beheld vast, slick limbs distending from the sea. And in that moment I knew that she had seen it too, though she stood frozen and mute in terror as it swung towards her.
And then she was dead.
On instinct I attempted to run forward, desperate to go to her aid, but Mrs. Jackson and Mr. Moss gathered me up and brought me shrieking with grief and fear into the cabin, barring the door with a heavy bureau that had not been properly lashed down.
I remember very little after that. I know we did not sleep that night for fear and weeping, and when daylight rose again some hours later we were told by those few survivors who remained that the creature had gone. But by then so many more were dead, too many, we were told, so many that it would now be impossible to sail. A few of us would take the remaining skiff and make for land. If we did not survive — well, we hardly gave it thought. We would certainly die aboard the Obra Dinn, were we to remain. Looking at the broken, lost visages of the Captain and the Mate, I knew that they too, would die. And so I wept in the bottom of that little open boat for a week, after which time we made land upon the shores of Morocco.
I did not send word of my survival once we reached Tangiers, and I believe that both my father and my betrothed were informed of my presumed death, a presumption I did not care to correct. Whatever life it was for which I was once destined had died upon that ship, and I had few thoughts of ever returning to England. I lived for some time with Mrs. Jackson and the surgeon Mr. Evans, along with another of the survivors, a boy by the name of Davey James who had, I believe, been the personal steward of one of the officers, though I never did learn which of them it had been. We seldom spoke of those events we had borne witness to, and several years afterwards we received word that the Obra Dinn had, by some horrible miracle, returned to Falmouth, tattered and adrift, and those few souls we had left aboard were now but sun-bleached bones. It was shortly afterwards that Mr. Evans died, and none of us ever spoke of the poor dead of the Obra Dinn again.
My dear Mrs. Jackson succumbed to typhoid in the year 1811, not long after the young Mr. James. No other witnesses to these events now live, save for myself. I hope that my account may be of some use to you. Please do not write back.
Jane Bird
November the 8th, 1822
STATEMENT ENDS