The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

A SUMMONS

A loud rap at the house door startled the young doctor, who was carefully embellishing architectural curlicues in the margins of a page half-filled with his own neat cursive script. As there was no one but himself to answer, he crossed the small parlor in three steps and pulled the door open wide. There he found a thin, bedraggled boy, dressed in a dark-green woolen jacket bearing some resemblance to a uniform and some to a jockey’s coat, stovepipe pants that ended well above his bare, scrawny ankles, and dusty brown boots with the nail heads exposed around the soles. In his gloved left hand he held out a yellow envelope. “Dr. Doyle, innit?” he inquired.

“So it is, my boy,” said the doctor, taking the envelope. It was a telegram. The doctor produced a penny from his coat pocket and pressed it on the boy, who, taking the coin without a word, dashed off down the street.

A telegram. Was it the longed-for hospital appointment? Was it evil news concerning his poor father? The doctor carried the envelope back to his writing desk, where the half-finished page rebuked him. Ignoring it, he tore open the flap and drew out the brief message.

Here was news. The African Steam Navigation Company was cordially responding to his now ancient and nearly forgotten query with orders for Dr. Conan Doyle to proceed at once to Liverpool and there take medical charge of the steamer Mayumba, bound for Madeira and the West Coast of Africa.

Africa. He glanced down at the page he had yet to finish, a tale of the American West, a place he had visited only in his imagination, or, more correctly, in the imagination of Bret Harte, whose adventure stories had brightened many a gloomy hour of his youth. Africa meant Stanley and Livingstone, Victoria Falls, jungles screaming with monkeys, villages populated by naked cannibals, so black they could not be seen in the dark and the whites of their eyes disembodied in the humid night air accosted the unwary. As ship’s surgeon, he was unlikely to see much beyond the coast; the interior of the continent would be closed to him. The experience would be geographically speaking the opposite of his previous post on the Arctic whaler Hope, during which he had clubbed seals and gone out with the harpooner in the boat, holding fast to the rope beneath the mountainous side of a right whale. The blue sky, the white gleam of the drift ice, the endless daylight, the intoxicating air — for seven months every moment had been filled with wonders, and the work so constant and challenging that in none of those moments had he been idle or bored.

The steamer Mayumba would be an adventure of a different order, his function an official one, doubtless requiring a coat of blue serge, gilt buttons, white duck trousers, and shoes that would slip on the decks and take on water when the ship did. The captain wouldn’t encourage him to participate in the business of the voyage, which was purely the transport of goods and passengers to Africa, discharging them, taking on new goods and passengers, and turning the prow for home. His work would be among and at the behest of these passengers, and he was unlikely to visit the forecastle unless a man was dying there. Instead of shifting ice and sparkling skies, there would be beaches, rivers, and tropical jungles. The doctor’s brain buzzed pleasantly over the contrast between his seagoing excursions, the first to the white world, where men pursued and slaughtered beasts as big as houses, the next to the dark continent, on a mission to administer quinine and morphine to various valiant servants and civilizers of the Empire.

In a week he was in Liverpool, lining up his books on the narrow shelf in his berth. Compared to the cramped and heavily populated whaler, the Mayumba was enormous, with space for twenty passengers and two saloons; the passengers’ saloon was as ponderously furnished as a hotel lobby. But unlike the Hope, she was dirty. Rust had a grip on her rails and spars, the skylights were streaked, and the upholstery faded and dingy.

The passengers would equally have benefited by a sprucing up. Among them were a parson named Fairfax, his wife, and two cadaverous boys of eight and ten, bound for Lagos; a pretty brunette, Miss Fox, not in her first youth, possessed of an educated air and an oversize bonnet, going out to meet her father in Sierra Leone; a Scottish crone, forever nameless, with bad lungs and a face like an ailing horse; two Negro tradesmen, dressed showily in the worst possible taste and escorted to the gangway by a phalanx of evil-smelling prostitutes; a British Negress with the manners of a she-wolf, who was betrothed to a missionary in the interior; and finally an Englishwoman, Mrs. Rowbotham, lively, cheerful, neatly dressed, and immediately flirtatious upon meeting the doctor as she was passing out of the saloon.

The captain, Duncan Henderson Wallace, a small man, bald on top with a flowing, well-tended white beard that thrust out from his face suggesting the prominent chin beneath, promised to be good company. He moved gracefully, without fuss, inside a force field of authority. He greeted the doctor with a firm handshake and a bright eye that ran over his new colleague appreciatively, as if he’d seldom seen such a fine figure of a man, and indeed, the doctor was several inches taller and stones heavier than his commander. “Come and have a brandy in my office,” said Captain Wallace. “First time to Africa, is it?”

“It is,” said the doctor, following the captain into his private quarters, which were cleaner than the rest of the ship, and neatly appointed. In the conversation that followed, Doyle learned Mrs. Rowbotham was en route to her husband in Sierra Leone, and the querulous Negress was some madman’s idea of a desirable wife.

“I’ve had Parson Fairfax and his family before,” Wallace continued. “They go out once a year for six weeks, then back at the missionary work. It’s killing the wife, but she doesn’t complain.”

“The boys don’t look fit for much either,” the doctor observed.

“It’s the beastly climate. If they left those boys in Edinburgh, or better yet, Dundee, they’d fatten up in no time. But you’ll see, as we go on.”

“And we sail?”

“At dawn. It may be rough going this time of year.”

In the morning the weather was fine, but it deteriorated as the Mayumba made her way down the Mersey. At Holyhead there was such a gale blowing they had to put in for the night. The next day, in rough weather, they made for the Irish Sea, pitching and rolling, plowing through a fog thick as cream. The lighthouse beam was only a dull sheeny patch in the white sheet off the starboard bow. The crew labored earnestly, each wrapped in a white shroud that kept him from seeing his mates. Nor did conditions improve on the open water.

All the passengers were seasick. The doctor ran from one cabin to the next, dispensing blue bowls, and when the bowls ran out, buckets, to grateful ladies and gentlemen whose complexions, as they clung to their bedsteads or bent over their bowls, were distinctly green, except for the Negroes, who were gray. The steward arranged for the orderly rotation of bowls and buckets, which it was the doctor’s business to supervise. The waves tossed the ship up and then pounded her down and the seas swirled across the decks. The sailors were forever hurtling fore and aft, the captain and his mate washed in and out through the companionway, relieving each other on the deck. As the second day passed exactly as the first, Dr. Doyle recalled the captain’s weather prediction. The fog cleared off, and they could see the waves crashing over the prow.

The third day was worse. The aft cabin flooded and the only sound belowdecks was the moaning of the passengers. Occasionally retching could be heard, though most had emptied their stomachs completely by then. The doctor could do little to be of help, so he sat at his desk reading Macaulay, those beautiful sentences, his bare feet ankle deep in the briny water on the floor. The fourth day was like the third.

“But are we making any progress?” cried Parson Fairfax when the doctor looked in on him and his family. The boys were flat on their backs like two skeletons, their mouths agape, and the wife sat clinging to the bedstead, her hair loose over her shoulders, emitting a sharp groan with each lurch of the ship.

“Of course we are,” the doctor assured him. “This is a steamer. We make progress no matter the weather. Make sure those boys take some limewater, whether they ask for it or not,” he advised, going out the door.

In the officers’ mess he found the mate, a taciturn man, but pleasant to his fellow officers. He was drinking coffee, his eyelids heavy as he gazed into the cup he held between his hands. There was no putting it down on the table, where it would be swiftly transported to the opposite side when the ship rolled. He glanced at the doctor, weaving in at the door. “Join me, Doyle,” he said. “There’s some gin, if you care for it.”

“Just coffee,” the doctor said, pouring it out from the pot, which was lodged in a tray screwed down to the counter. He had put on his shoes to visit the passengers and his feet squished as he took a seat at the table.

“And how are your ladies and gentlemen bearing up?”

“As best they can,” Doyle affirmed, “under the circumstances. The parson fears we are making no progress.”

“Does he?” said the mate.

“I think he’s only frightened.”

“Well, it’s foul going, that’s sure. But we’re going all the same.”

“Yes, of course.” The doctor smiled at the foolishness of the parson.

“It’s lucky for them you’ve a seagoing stomach. Our last doctor was worse off than his patients in bad weather.”

“It’s not my first time at sea.”

“Is it not?”

“I was ship’s surgeon on the whaler Hope, under Captain John Gray.”

“A whaler,” said the mate. “Now there’s sailing. You’ve no retching passengers on a whaler.”

“I liked the life,” the doctor said simply. He would have told how Captain Gray had offered his doughty medical officer double duty as surgeon and harpooner on his next voyage, but the mate drained his cup and pushed back his chair. “I’m up, sir,” he said. “I believe we are in for a wild run for our money tonight, but by morning, if we don’t founder, we may find smooth sailing. The Bay of Biscay is a hellion, but by God she moves you, she moves you.”

The mate’s prediction proved true. In the night, it was as if they had entered a mountain range made of water. The doctor, aghast at what he saw through his porthole, made up his mind to go on deck. The ship lurched and trembled like a living thing and he held tightly to the handgrips as he came up. There he saw a sight that made him gasp for breath. In every direction great walls of black water, heavily veined with white, loomed so high they blocked the sky. The ship, which had seemed large, was here revealed to be a child’s toy. There was a continual rush of phosphorescent sea across the decks, hip-deep liquid green flames, which cast upon the pale faces of the sailors manning the pumps an eerie, otherworldly pallor.

From somewhere a voice came to him like something from the Bible, clear, firm, distinct, a voice from the fire. “Go in, you fool,” it commanded. “Go in.” The doctor looked about and saw that it was the captain, waving one hand at him from the quarterdeck, holding on to the rail for dear life with the other.

Doyle ducked back into the companion and sloshed off to his cabin. He was as soaked as if he’d actually dived into the sea. He stripped off his clothes, draped them around his furnishings, and then, strangely exhausted by what he had seen, he fell into the bed and was instantly asleep.

How changeable is life at sea. When next the doctor opened his eyes, a warm beam of sunlight gleamed across his outstretched hand. Nothing in the room was moving up, down, or sideways, and there was a hum, as of a man gently snoring, coming from belowdecks. When he rose from his bed, the water he stepped into barely covered his foot. Outside his cabin door, he heard cheerful voices, then the slap and slop of a mop, and the roll of the bucket moving down the passageway. He found a dry shirt and trousers. He had no choice but to put on the sodden jacket, as he owned no other. He opened his door to find the steward grinning at him. “As you’re up, sir, I’ll just pass in with the mop.”

“And welcome you are, wherever you show yourself this morning, sir, I don’t doubt,” said the doctor.

“It’s true. I’ve found none to complain at the sight of me, would it were ever so.”

The doctor passed out, anxious to be on deck, to see that great roaring bull that had bellowed and threatened in the night transformed into a willing beast of burden.

All hands were in good cheer; full steam was ahead. “Good morning, sir,” called the captain from his post on the quarterdeck. “Will you come up?”

The air was delicious, charged after the storm with a luminous glamour that made even the old Mayumba sparkle. The decks were marvelously, miraculously dry. “I will tell you, Doctor,” Wallace said, as the two men surveyed the scene below them, “there were moments last night when I thought we would not meet again.”

“It was a furious sea.”

Wallace gave his medical expert a close look, pulling down the corners of his mouth, as if something provoked or displeased him. “I expect our passengers are a chastened lot, and a hungry one,” he observed.

“Yes, I heard a great hubbub in their saloon.”

The sound of four bells was accompanied by the appearance of the mate, smiling up at them from the foot of the ladder. “I’ve an appetite myself,” said Wallace. “Have you breakfasted?”

“I have not.”

And so the two men went down to the officers’ mess, where, for the first time since leaving land, a hot breakfast was laid out for them.

A CONVERSATION WITH THE CAPTAIN

Like mushrooms after a rain, the passengers commenced popping up everywhere. They paraded on the saloon deck, converged in the saloon and in their dining room. Passing one another on their shipboard excursions, they chattered volubly in the passageway. In the afternoon, cards were broken out and the doctor joined his charges for a game of whist. All the hatches were open, the air was fresh, and one could sit at the table with a glass of wine or a brandy with no need to hold tightly to the stem. The day passed pleasantly and in the evening Dr. Doyle took his dinner with the officers. Over brandy, Captain Wallace entertained him with stories of the sights afforded the tourist on the Dark Continent. He told of native tribes who offered human sacrifice to alligators, which devilish creatures swarmed the shore when they knew their tribute was due. One could hear, he said chillingly, the screams of the victims for miles down the river. On another occasion, the captain had seen a human skull protruding from a giant anthill, a fate, he learned, reserved by one tribe for its enemies in another. White men couldn’t survive for long in Africa, he opined. Its malignancy infected their souls, no matter how much liquor they took, and they took a lot.

Doyle, startled by these horrors, spoke of the more wholesome oddities of the Arctic, of a captain who, seeing it was light for twenty-four hours a day, decided to change day for night, and of the massive white bears, stretched out full length on their stomachs, wrapping their great paws around an ice hole, waiting patiently for a seal to come up for a breath of air, and when it did — whack, lunch was served.

“Clever creatures,” chuckled Wallace, amused by this image.

At length the two men, in companionable spirits, agreed to take a turn on the quarterdeck, where passengers were strictly forbidden to roam. Wallace swept a sharp eye over his vessel, to the bow, the waist, the strolling passengers on the saloon deck, and at last, to the horizon, which was shrouded in a damp mist. The fresh air of the morning had given way to an oppressive humidity and the doctor would have shed his coat had he not thought it an impropriety to do so. As they contemplated the lazily lapping waves, the dog watch went down and the first watch came on, saluting their fellows as they passed with mild humor. “Wasn’t Mither right?” said one cheerily. “Sell the farm and go to sea.”

“They’ll sleep tonight,” Wallace observed. “And dry for a change.”

“Was the fo’c’sle flooded?” asked the doctor.

“Was it, indeed? Their beds were awash and the cook got up the stove, so it was a veritable steam bath, I’m told, and they could hardly find their way about their slops.”

“They are stalwart fellows,” Doyle opined.

Again, Wallace fixed upon his medical officer a stern look. Then he turned away and positioned himself at the rail, gazing out over the water as it streamed away behind them. Dr. Doyle, unflustered, joined him there.

“I say, what’s that?” said the captain, pointing to the air off the starboard bow.

The doctor followed the line indicated by the captain’s raised arm. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

“Don’t you?” Wallace replied. “Look again.”

Obediently, the doctor surveyed the sea. It was dark, and the heavy mist confused him, but he thought he did see something, a triangle of brighter white than the mist. He saw it, then it was gone, then he saw it again. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a ship,” Wallace replied.

“Is it? Is it coming our way?”

The captain had his binoculars out and for several moments he stood at the rail peering through the glasses. The doctor could only try to see, unassisted, what his commander saw, but he made nothing out, if he ever had. A feeling of helplessness and lethargy — it was really so much warmer than one might expect an open deck could be — came upon him and he coughed, trying to clear his head. The evening cocktail ritual might prove a mistake.

“No,” Wallace spoke at last. “No, she’s gone on. She’s on an odd course.” He pulled the glasses down, and grinned at his companion. “She must be the ghost of the Mary Celeste.”

Doyle recognized the name, as who would not? He was a boy at school when he read about it. It must be ten years, he thought, since that ship was hauled into Gibraltar for a salvage hearing that quickly became international front-page news. A ghost ship she’d been, but was she still? The doctor felt the fine hairs at the nape of his neck stir infinitesimally. “The Mary Celeste,” he repeated.

“She was picked up in these waters, and it was this time of year.”

“And you think the ship itself is a ghost?”

The captain grinned again, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “No, Doyle, I don’t, man. But you’re such an impressionable lad, I thought I’d try it out on you.”

The doctor was unabashed. “I haven’t thought of that story in years,” he said. “I recall it was a great mystery at the time. Was it pirates took the crew? I can’t remember.”

“There haven’t been pirates in these waters in fifty years,” said Wallace. “And there were no signs of violence and nothing taken.”

“Yes,” Doyle agreed. “That’s right. The ship was in good condition, but not a soul on board.”

Wallace nodded, his brow thoughtfully knit. “I knew the captain a little,” he said. “A Yankee gentleman, upright, family man. Name of Biggs, or Tibbs, something like that. I happened to be in port with him at Marseille; it must be twenty years now. He was a young man then, and a handsome one. He had his wife along, and she was much relieved to find English speakers. She had no French and they’d been loading a week. Very dark-eyed, pert creature, confident in that American way, always slyly mocking anything foreign. I invited them on board for dinner and we had a pleasant enough time. He was teetotal, but he didn’t fuss if others took spirits. I liked him for that. There was nothing puritanical about him; he was a cordial man. I remember one thing especially about that night. We got to singing round the table, more polite songs than usual because the lady was present, and his wife took a turn. She had a lovely voice, almost a professional voice, and she sang a song I didn’t know, an American song, I presumed. I’d never heard it before or since, but I recall the refrain. It was ‘All things love thee, all things love thee, so do I.’ ” Wallace tilted his head to one side, as if listening to the remembered voice, while the doctor studied him with a questioning eye. “She stood up to sing, and when she got to that refrain, she turned to her husband, and he, with a smile of the purest satisfaction, looked back at her. They looked into each other’s eyes, you see, while she told him she loved him, and it was as if there were no other people in the world but those two. The look on her face! I’ve never thought to bring my missus along on a voyage, but I think if she ever looked at me like that for one moment in my life, well, I might consider it. I can tell you there was not a man there that didn’t feel envious of Captain Tibbs at that moment. We were all going off to our bunks with a last tot of brandy for a bedmate, and he was going back to his cabin with a woman who adored him.” Here Wallace paused, having concluded his story.

“And the wife and child were aboard, when they abandoned ship.”

“Yes. They were never seen again.”

“Wasn’t there something odd about the cargo? Do you know?”

“Well, that’s an interesting detail. The captain kept a dry ship. There was not a drop of spirits allowed above deck, but he had loaded a thousand barrels of alcohol at New York. That fool proctor at the Admiralty hearing tried to make something of that. He was convinced the crew had gotten at the barrels and killed the officers and the family in a drunken fury. Then they put down the yawl and sailed away.”

Doyle considered this scenario. “One of them would have had to be able to navigate,” he suggested. “It’s possible, I suppose.”

“It would be if the alcohol was brandy. But it was distilling spirits. If you could make yourself swallow it, it would kill you.”

Doyle frowned at this thought. “So it wasn’t mutiny and it wasn’t pirates.”

“No. I mean yes, it was neither of those.”

“Do you have a theory?”

“I do not. It appeared that she was abandoned in a hurry. That, I believe, is a fact. But she had too much sail set to tie up to her with a painter, as the salvagers claimed must have happened. Any sailor would have more sense than to try that. Ten people in a yawl on the open sea, tying up to a ship rigged to run dead downwind; it would be suicide.”

“So, in your view, leaving the ship as they did was an irrational act.”

Wallace expelled a huff of exasperation. “You may say so, sir.”

Doyle pressed his fingertips over his lips, disarranging his mustache. His eyes scanned the horizon, which was dimly visible now, as the mist had cleared and the moon was half full. “Then there must have been foul play.”

“Or they were mightily frighted of something.”

“Out of their senses with fear. Yes. But if the captain was, as you say, a steady man, of some experience …”

“That’s what has always puzzled me about the incident. I can’t think the man I met in Marseille would abandon a seaworthy ship in a panic.”

The doctor smoothed his mustache ruminatively, and the captain moved his head from side to side, pondering the unsolved mystery.

“Perhaps,” concluded the doctor, “they didn’t all leave at once.”

A COLORED GENTLEMAN

At Madeira, the Mayumba disgorged seven of her passengers and took on only one, a heavyset one-legged American as black as his coat, with snowy side chops descending past his strong jaw and wadded gray knots receding from his wide brow. He hobbled on his crutches directly to his berth. The night proved a rough one and the ship plunged through the turbulent water, sails trimmed, engine sputtering, her prow monotonously slapping down into the trough of every wave. By morning all was calm and the passengers gathered, bleary eyed, for their breakfast, but the American didn’t appear. It was not until afternoon that the doctor found him ensconced in the saloon sipping weak tea, genially charming the generally reticent Miss Fox. Though Doyle had half a mind to turn away, Miss Fox caught his eye and waved him into the conversation, announcing to her companion, “Here is our good Dr. Doyle.” Henry Garnet, for that was the American’s name, raised himself slightly in his chair, holding out a manicured hand, his lips parted suddenly in a smile too broad and too ready. A brief exchange followed in which it was revealed that he was the freshly appointed American consul to Liberia on his way to take up his post. To the doctor’s commiserating remark about the rough weather of the night before, Mr. Garnet offered the astonishing reply that he had hardly noticed, being distracted by his reading of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. Was the doctor perhaps acquainted with this excellent volume?

Doyle pulled up a chair and settled into it with a sense of being snared by a complex web of previously unimaginable stickiness. He did indeed admire Prescott’s work. The consul enlarged upon the subject of recent histories, revealing his thorough familiarity with Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic. The conversation strayed to philosophical authors. The Negro confessed that in spite of certain reservations a strong favorite of his was Waldo Emerson. “One admires him for the felicity of his style, if not for the depth of his vision,” he concluded.

Had Mr. Garnet encountered the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes? Doyle earnestly inquired.

“Indeed,” was the reply. Mr. Holmes’s essay collection The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table had delighted him when he was a young man. He had followed them in The Atlantic with the greatest pleasure and benefit.

Doyle fairly rubbed his eyes in wonder. Surely this man had been born into slavery or was the son of a slave. How was it possible that he should have acquainted himself with Prescott and Motley; at what sort of table exactly had he enjoyed the “benefit” of Holmes’s table talk? Miss Fox interjected a remark Doyle didn’t follow, so deeply had he fallen into puzzlement. When he came to himself and sought to reenter the conversation, he found the black man’s black eyes twinkling with such evident amusement it was as if he had read his thoughts. Miss Fox shot Doyle a chilly, incomprehensible glance; had he spoken without his own knowledge? His wonder dissolved into something sour and defensive, and still the confounded Negro glittered at him, his mouth lifted at the corners, a faint chuckle issuing from the thick throat pressed tightly against his white cravat. He withdrew a folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, swabbed it over his gleaming forehead, and, folding it once, patted his moist upper lip. Miss Fox excused herself; she was off to her cabin to dress for dinner. As she swept past, Doyle caught again a cold, disapproving cast of her eye.

“A delightful woman,” Mr. Garnet observed.

“Indeed,” the doctor agreed, looking after her. He was stymied. Ladies were fond of him; that was the rule.

“Between us, I think she was a trifle bored by our conversation about books.”

Doyle turned his attention to the man, whose sonorous, cultured voice, the voice of a professional lecturer, was so at odds with his moist black amplitude. Beads of perspiration formed as mysteriously as dewdrops across his forehead. This time he applied the handkerchief in quick dabs. “When we left New York, it was snowing,” he observed. “And God willing, it was the last snow I shall see in this life.”

“Then you don’t intend to return to your home,” Doyle concluded.

“I am going to my home, dear Doctor, though I have never been there before,” was the consul’s enigmatic reply.

Two days out of Las Palmas, the Mayumba lost the trades and, all sails set, staggered through the tepid seas into a furnace. The sun, red with fury, hurled itself up, setting the very heavens ablaze. The sailors stumbled from the forecastle, stripped to their breeches, shoeless, their hair tied back in rags. The passengers had not the luxury of dishabille and their only recourse, once they had accomplished the arduous task of dressing, was to sit very still beneath the dull whir of the fan blades that paddled the torpid air in the saloon.

Doyle sat in a stupor before a cup of tepid tea, his eyes resting on the bright cubes of sugar in the silver bowl. The pristine whiteness, the sharp architectural edges, put him in mind of the great ice floes that had hemmed in the Hope during his Arctic adventure. How their looming purity had fascinated him on those days without nights, when he strode the deck bristling with energy, alert to the tireless pumping of his own blood in his veins. Once the mate invited him to take the wheel and he felt the whole quivering, breathing enterprise of the ship through the chilled flesh of his hand. Such light, such clarity; a world without shadow in which to take a breath was to experience an influx of health.

A dull whine near his ear materialized as a fly lazily circled the sugar cubes before landing on the edge of the bowl. After a moment of anthropoidal dithering, the creature set out upon the white landscape, manically working its spindly legs and rotating its compound eyes. A visceral revulsion caused the doctor to stretch his upper lip down and draw his head back on its stem, as if he’d encountered putrefaction. Absently his thumb and index finger smoothed the surface of his mustache. It was damp. His eyebrows held back a line of perspiration; he could feel it gathering there. Though he made no decision to do so, his hand sought out his breast pocket and pulled forth the folded handkerchief, unfurling it like a flag, and mopping his brow. A trickle of sweat escaped from the nape of his neck, rushed down his back, cooling him as the limp linen of his shirt absorbed it. The fly had gotten itself so jammed between two white cubes that it had actually managed to dislodge one from the other.

“Sadly, I report that it is no cooler on deck,” a voice informed him. “I thought there might be a breeze.”

The doctor lifted his eyes to the frankly sweating visage of the American consul. It interested him that the black man’s perspiration held together in round globules, which sparkled over the pores from which they issued. Did Negro skin perspire differently, or was it only the dark background that made the droplets appear to stand out so? “Hello, Garnet,” he said.

The American lowered himself into a chair, easing down from his crutches with practiced skill. “I don’t think tea is the proper prescription for this climate,” he observed, nodding at the half-empty cup.

“No? What do you recommend? Coffee? That surely heats the blood.”

“I recommend water,” Garnet said. “Though I believe the preferred spirit of the British colonialist is gin.” He grinned his toothy grin, like a bridge of yellowish stones connecting the white clouds of his sideburns, and raised his hand to the waiter who was unloading a tray of this very remedy at the next table. Although summoned by the black man, the waiter addressed his attention to the white. “Let us have a pitcher of tonic, a bottle of gin, and two glasses,” Doyle commanded. As the waiter drifted away, his tray lifted above his shoulder in a show of youthful confidence, Doyle addressed his companion gloomily. “I take it you don’t approve of the Colonial enterprise.”

Garnet chuckled, raising his eyebrows and bugging out his eyes, evidently delighted by this opening salvo. There was no offending the man, Doyle observed, nor was he capable of giving offense. He oiled his way through the world with a jovial brand of ironic courtesy. “I’m not against exploration,” he began. “Who can speak against discovering the grand variety of the wide world? No, if the adventure is undertaken as a tourist, I approve that human impulse. I would be an explorer of foreign parts myself, if my health would bear it.”

“But when it’s not so wonderfully various or grand,” Doyle countered, “and one has the means to improve the lives of those who suffer needlessly—”

“Oh yes,” Garnet interrupted. “You are speaking as a doctor and a healer. As such you are welcome everywhere you go. But it isn’t troops of doctors we see trekking through the underbrush with rifles and bayonets.”

Doyle smiled at the idea of troops of doctors. It didn’t strike him as absurd.

“Doctors,” Garnet continued, “and tourists. These will improve the lives of the impoverished and the suffering in this great continent. But missionaries and soldiers, we can do without.”

Doyle noted the pronoun. “So you see yourself as an African.”

Here the drinks arrived and were set down between them while the consul indulged in a disturbing hoot of laughter. “Doctor,” he said, when he had recovered his breath. “Look at me.”

Doyle tipped a splash of gin into the glass and filled it with tonic. He was uncomfortable, and not just from the heat, though that was, he noted again, astounding. Why should he have known that an emissary of the American government thought himself adequate to speak for all Africans, to say we need this and we do not do that? He glowered at the liquid in his glass — there was a dab of quinine in the tonic, but not enough to ward off malaria, if indeed quinine was actually prophylactic even in large doses. Garnet took up the tonic pitcher and filled his glass to the brim. “Yes, dear Doctor,” he continued. “Even an African can be edified by the table talk of Mr. Holmes.”

Though there had clearly been an edge of hostility in this remark, when Doyle lifted his eyes he found the self-proclaimed African gazing at the sleepily rotating fan blades with an expression of rueful melancholy. “I’ve traveled widely,” he said, addressing the fan. “I’ve been to your country.”

“Have you?”

Garnet smiled and turned his attention to the doctor. “I’m a Presbyterian minister,” he said. “The church in Scotland offered me its gracious hospitality some years ago. When I was a boy I sailed to Cuba and Jamaica. I’ve traveled in England as well. But it has been the dream of my life to put my foot on the land of my ancestors. My father was a slave in Maryland, but his father was a Mandinka prince.”

So it was pride of descent. Pride of descent Doyle could understand; the sense of having come down, which he had imbibed at his own mother’s breast. We are come down, that was the message. From the Plantagenets, from the Packs and the Percys, from the D’Oyleys, a lineage to be proud of, a family descended from the highest families, with crests and seals, variously connected, even to royalty, albeit his own family of eight lived in three furnished rooms and his father was confined to an asylum. And here was Henry Garnet, looking beyond his own parents’ tumultuous fall, come down all the way to slavery, clinging to the cherished family legend of an African prince, who, though he may have worn rings in his nose and danced with his subjects around a fire, served no man and was held in esteem by many. This was what made all the wit and good cheer possible. Garnet was a man among men, a rightful heir to an estate that he would, in time, regain and rebuild.

“You must be eager to arrive and begin your work,” Doyle observed.

Garnet was frowning at his glass. “My work,” he repeated, as if the word had a certain novelty for him.

The fly, having pawed over every millimeter of the sugar cubes, hoisted itself onto the rim of the bowl. Both men watched as it teetered drunkenly over the table, disappearing with a sudden cessation of its infernal buzzing engine, into the pure white folds of the doctor’s napkin.

Doyle didn’t speak to the American consul again. Henry Garnet stayed in his berth, doubtless reading The Conquest of Mexico, and when the ship docked in Monrovia, he was whisked ashore by a pompous delegation dressed in garish nightshirts waiting on the wharf. It was not until the Mayumba was steaming determinedly toward Grand Bassam that Miss Fox, finding the doctor listlessly thumbing a back number of Punch in the passenger lounge, enlightened him on Mr. Garnet’s true mission in Africa. “He’s a dying man,” she said. “He won’t live a month. He wanted to die on African soil, so his friends got together and secured him the consul post, but it’s all a sham. It’s just to pay the passage and have a place for him to rest when he arrives.”

“But how do you know this?”

“He told me. Of course I knew who he was at once. He was a tireless abolitionist in New York before the war and some say Liberia is his creation. Really, he’s quite a famous man.” Miss Fox drew herself up so that she could gaze down her nose upon the spectacle of the young doctor’s colossal ignorance.

A famous man. A dying man. But how was it possible? He had betrayed no sign of illness. His breathing wasn’t labored, his mind was clear. His appetite was good. The sclera of his eyes was perhaps tinged with yellow, but Doyle had taken that to be a feature of his race. And as to his fame as an abolitionist — he had shown more interest in Motley than in the struggles of the emancipated American Negro. His chaffing about tourism and imperialism had been more speculative than heartfelt. Or so it had seemed to Dr. Doyle, who had surely not made the trip to Africa to be condescended to by the likes of the self-appointed know-all Miss Fox.

“I really must go and have a look in at the Fairfax boy,” he said, pushing up from his chair and away from the line of Miss Fox’s long nose. “He has a cough and I don’t like the sound of it. I fear his lungs may be affected.”

OBSERVATIONS OF AFRICA

Onward chugged the Mayumba, courting the shore breezes, though these were rare, and so hot they were more like the exhalations of hell. Doyle marveled at the sameness of the view, the breakers, the shore, the bush, and at night the fires, which the captain informed him were set by natives intent on “burning the grass,” to what end he didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. Miss Fox alighted at Grand Bassam, a miserable hole where her father, a stooped, wizened figure dressed all in white with a pith helmet cocked back on his head, eyes the color of water, and the complexion of a Morocco leather chair, awaited her on the flimsy dock. Doyle watched from the deck as she approached her progenitor. He was curious to witness the manner of their greeting. It was a handshake, brief, courteous, the elbows pressed into the sides, and then they turned away from the shore and the intellectual lady followed her father into the jungle.

To live how? To do what? Doyle mopped his brow with his sodden handkerchief. Near an open-air shed perched with its back to the bush, an anthill of half-naked natives suddenly dispersed, marching in a loose formation toward the stern of the Mayumba to receive the cargo already being dropped down by the sailors. Captain Wallace, restless and cantankerous, joined the doctor at the rail. “Fancy doctoring that lot, eh Doyle?” he said, indicating the porters at their work.

Doyle, having looked over but not at the men, who were making a noisy fuss about unloading a pallet of heavy burlap bags, concentrated his attention on a pair of tall, muscular fellows engaged in posturing and angrily baring their teeth. “They look healthy enough,” he observed. “They certainly have white teeth.”

“It’s veterinary work, sir,” the captain crudely attested. “They’re animals and no more. They don’t even know they’re sick until they drop. And they contract all manner of evil from the ground, because they sit on it and sleep on it and even eat it. Every kind of worm and parasite known to man and some as none has heard of is out there. I’ve seen yaws open the flesh of a leg to the bone. And elephantiasis. I don’t suppose you’ve seen what that does to a man. Scrota the size of melons.”

A burst of wild glee broke out from the natives. The two men, who had seemed about to come to blows, leaned into each other, laughing so heartily they plopped down on a pallet, while their coworkers shouted the joke to each other.

“Do you understand them?” Doyle asked the captain, meaning their language.

“There’s nought to understand,” Wallace replied. “Poor, stupid brutes. What in thunder are they laughing about?” And with that he left the doctor and called out to one of the sailors as he approached the loading platform, “Latimer, what are they up to? We’ll never get out of here at this rate.”

Doyle watched the men a while longer, thinking about parasites. He had a treatise on tropical medicine in his berth. He had read in it an article about tiny worms that burrowed into a man, depositing their eggs deep beneath the epidermis. When the eggs hatched, the larvae gnawed their way out. Unthinkable.

His gaze wandered listlessly over the scene. There was a dog lying in the shade of the shed, some mad bird shrieking from the impenetrable bush beyond. Nature here was virulent, producing all manner of venom, not to mention large, carnivorous beasts and people as black as coal. The heat alone, he thought. The poleaxing heat.

A prickling sensation called his attention to his wrist, where he discovered a large mosquito tilted back on its rear legs the better to gorge itself on exotic blood. Case in point, he thought, as he squashed the life out of the insect. He might stroll out to the shed and back, just to have solid ground under his shoes. But between the dock and the shed was only a stretch of unwelcoming, baked, shadeless, dun-colored dirt.

The heat alone, he thought.

“Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, for few come out, though many go in.”

The first officer delivered this cheerful advice as the Mayumba swung listlessly on her anchor chain in the oily brown water off the coast of Lagos.

“And why do few come out?” asked Doyle.

The mate drew closer, lowering his beard toward the doctor’s ear with a confidential air. “Why,” he said. “Presumably.” A pause, a deeper register. “Because they die there.”

The doctor grinned; gazing out at the long swells rolling into the inevitable strip of sand. Another port not fit for human habitation, another infernal pit of hell where black demons fed the flames with bits carved from unwary travelers. A buzzing near his ear provoked him to clap his hand against his head. Was it worth it, he asked himself, this place? Men didn’t last long and women not as long as that. And all to extract palm oil and rubber.

And of course to extend a sorely needed civilizing influence, which might, in a hundred years, beam a few rays of light into this universal moral darkness. The mate wandered away in pursuit of his duty. The doctor patted his pockets, in search of his pipe.

At dinner the remaining passengers were preoccupied with their packing arrangements, as all but two were departing at Lagos. Doyle noted the downcast expression on the habitually resolute face of Mrs. Fairfax, who must surely look upon her destination as a death sentence. Her sickly boys picked at their plates, the younger one taking up his napkin at frequent intervals to cover his mouth while he coughed. His father studied him distantly. The man of God, and his good woman, Doyle thought. What poor luck to be born that man’s son.

Though at least the Reverend Fairfax did, in a manner of speaking, provide for his family. At least he did that.

After the passengers had departed and the blasting sun had set, the ship was quiet and still as the inside of a sleeping whale. In his narrow cabin the doctor sat down at his table to begin an overdue letter to his mother. Dearest, he wrote, and put down the pen. What to tell her? That he detested Africa, its heat, its smells, its people, and longed for a breath of cool, fresh air? He gazed at his porthole. It made no difference if it was opened or closed; it was suffocating inside and out. He drew in a slow breath and released it. Hotter going in than out, or so it seemed. An insect’s dizzy buzzing came closer, drifted away, came close again. He picked up his pen. Here is my carcass stewing like a fowl. Never was there such a pesthole of a place as this, good for nothing but swearing at. I shall not.… The buzzing came close, sounding oddly fierce, as if the creature had turned up its own volume, but he determined to ignore it. He felt the infinitesimal thud on the nape of his neck, the tentative tickling like loose threads unraveled from a collar, and then the sharp sting. His moist hand had smeared the ink on the page. He set down the pen, slapped his palm across his neck, dragged it free, and glowered at the smashed insect, a black smudge in a streak of bright blood.

The image of the Fairfax boy pushing his fork through the mush he’d made of his dinner, languishing beneath the indifferent eye of his righteous father, recurred in the doctor’s imagination, striking a moody, somber chord, definitely in a minor key. He couldn’t escape the conclusion that the boy was trapped and perhaps doomed by the single-minded zealotry of a parent who cared more for the souls of benighted savages than the health of his own family. If the boy survived he would certainly have some tales to tell, though he might prefer to close them away, to condemn his childhood as a prisoner to a prison.

Unbidden another image rose. The tall gentleman, rolling over on his side in the gutter, howling gibberish at the jeering boys who pelted him with pebbles, and the lady, fabricating an excuse about the urgent necessity of a conversation with the draper, gently steering her son into a byway; the son who knew his mother had seen the gentleman, and also knew she would never admit it.

And another, the lady again, one hand pressed against the kitchen table, the other covering her mouth, keeping in what she might say, what she must be thinking. Before her, uncapped, cast aside by the desperate, trembling fingers of the gentleman, the empty bottle of furniture varnish. The boy was there, in the doorway, but he didn’t speak, and the lady didn’t know he was there, not then, not to this day. She didn’t know the boy watched her as she buried the bottle in the trash bin, and she couldn’t know that later, when she went out to her ladies’ educational meeting, the boy had fished the bottle out and sat for some moments puzzling over the meaning of it. Until he grasped the meaning of it.

The voice of the captain in conversation with the mate drifted in from the passageway. Doyle crumpled the smeary page, used it to wipe away the mess in his palm, and went out to join his fellow officers in the saloon.

There the drink was gin; the atmosphere was masculine, smoky, and amiable. The talk was all sea tales, some as tall as the mainmast, of survival against impossible odds, dereliction of duty, cannibalism in extremity and as accepted practice, madness on board and on shore, ships cursed, ships derelict, ships on which the crew was found all dead, or all dead save one man, raving at the helm, collisions on dark stormy nights and in strange ports, ships sailed purposely into reefs or shoals in order to defraud insurance companies, ships rammed by enraged whales. At the close of the whale story, Doyle would have offered his adventure on the ice, in which he had fallen through a hole and saved himself by clinging to the flipper of the seal he’d just clubbed to death, but the occasion didn’t present itself. As the evening wore on, his brain fogged over and he could no longer follow the conversations. A queasy rumor stirred in his gut. He stopped drinking the captain’s gin and switched to tonic water. Something was definitely amiss in the waist, he thought, amusing himself with his pun. He wasn’t feeling entirely seaworthy.

He excused himself from his companions, pleading fatigue, and went out onto the deck for a breath of fetid air. The night was black. The ship rocked gently at anchor in the black water. Even the stars appeared to have been dimmed. Looking up hurt his eyes. His head was throbbing, his throat dry and constricted. No, he was not well. His legs had gone rubbery, and from somewhere in his core a chill commenced, washing up to his face and down his limbs, so fierce and abrupt that his teeth chattered. How curious to be cold in the broiling African night.

He knew what must come next and steadied himself at the rail, then, with decision, pushed off and made his staggering way, clutching the boom, careening into the housing, down the hatch to his berth. He drank water from the pitcher, pulling the sheet off the thin mattress, feeling about the storage space in the bunk for the heavy socks and woolen muffler he’d worn on the trip from Edinburgh to Liverpool; when was that? A world ago. With trembling fingers he pulled on the socks, wrapped the plaid round his neck, crossing the ends over his chest, folded the sheet, pulled it tight across his shoulders, and sat there on his bunk, shivering like a man in a blizzard. His thoughts were disordered, darting from hypothetical diagnosis of his condition, malarial fever being the most likely, to anxiety about the state of his intestinal tract, which had a seismic feel to it, to regret that he hadn’t told the seal story, interspersed with the repeated observation that it was passing strange to be shivering in a broiling cabin, and a vague premonition, distant now but beckoning, like that tall, wan gentleman standing in the corner there, insistently wagging a bony index finger, that he was entering an entirely different order of consciousness, one that would preclude attendance upon his medical duties. He wasn’t afraid — he was never afraid — but he was helpless. The cadaverous gentleman closed his fingers in a fist, narrowing his watery eyes in a theatrical glare. Something familiar about the fellow, though he clearly wasn’t really there. Doyle rubbed his fists into his eyes, clamped his jaw against the appalling clatter of his teeth. Damn this gentleman, in his woolen vest and frock coat; absurd attire for a specter. He lowered his fists and blinked his eyes at the man, who had the temerity to bare his rotting teeth in a fiendish grin.

“The hell you say,” Doyle cried, lurching from the bunk, shoulders hunched, fists drawn in close to his chest, legs buckling. He made two steps and toppled headlong into the empty corner. Determined to fight, he rolled onto his side, raising himself on one arm, but someone slipped a warm, wet, black bag over his head and he went down again without a struggle.

He awoke, fully clothed in his bunk, which was on fire. Or so it seemed, until amid a mighty but unsuccessful effort to rise and flee, he realized the flames were inside him. It wasn’t surprising; one didn’t need a medical certificate to know the bone-rattling chill of the night before must be succeeded by a fever. But how had he gotten back to his bed, and what was to be done about the unbearable, suffocating weight of his clothes, which he was too weak to remove? His fingers, unbidden, pushed away the muffler, fumbled at the buttons of his shirt; his feet flailed together, working the horrid socks down to his ankles. Why was he wearing woolen socks?

The chill. The wan gentleman. He attempted a groan, but what issued from his dry lips was a croak. If only he had the strength to reach the water pitcher. He could see it in the bowl on the stand. The pinkish light glinting from the lip informed him that it was early morning. Again a furious effort to rise, resulting in a sudden gush of water from every pore, a fog descending from somewhere, thick as porridge. If only. Water.

When next he opened his eyes and took in the ordinary aspect of things — the afternoon light playing over the compact furnishings of the room, the deep, sonorous pulsing of the ship’s engines, the sound of cheerful voices exchanging courtesies outside his door — a convalescent gratitude swelled in his chest. He was soaked in sweat; the pillow was a sodden rag but when summoned his limbs obeyed the call. No, more than that, they gathered force in a valiant, glorious effort, and in the next moment he was sitting with his feet on the floor, swaying but upright, weak, stunned, ravenous. His tongue, dry and heavy in his mouth, felt like a desiccated toad.

The doctor’s appearance in the officers’ saloon was greeted with a round of applause and the alarming news that three days had passed since the evening he had staggered forth, having failed to relate the seal story. The next morning the steward had discovered him in his bed, unconscious and burning with fever. As the doctor was himself the patient, there was no one to attend him, and he had been left to recover or not. Or not had been the case of a luckless sailor who had come down with the same malady on the same evening and whose earthly remains had been solemnly committed to the Bight of Benin that very dawn. It was more information than the invalid could comprehend, and he sank beneath it into an armchair, mumbling apologies. “Still a bit unsteady.” The captain spoke to the steward, who bustled off to his galley to prepare a tray.

“It’s well we have so few passengers,” the captain observed. “When the doctor himself is ill, it makes them anxious.”

Doyle raised his eyes. Was the man implying that he had failed in his duty by succumbing to a near fatal illness? But no, Wallace’s regard was moist with an indulgent sympathy. “You have had a close call, sir,” he said. “I feared we might lose you, and that would have been a woeful conclusion to your African adventure.”

Doyle nodded. The telegram sent to his mother, what would it say? Your son, Arthur Conan, dead of fever, buried at sea, yours truly. No one for her to turn to, no help but her damnable lodger, Dr. Waller, who would take over, as was his damnable way. His poor sisters, Lottie, Connie, and Annette, condemned to drudgery as governesses for the rest of their lives. Unbearable.

“I’ll be fine,” he assured the captain. “I’ll be up and about in no time.”

He took a light meal, for his stomach was tender, and drank a great quantity of water. His fellow officers urged him to return to his bunk, and as he was too weak to be of use to anyone, he agreed. Lifting his water glass was a heroic effort. He made his way out to the deck and stood at the rail, looking at the sea.

While he was spooning in his soup, Captain Wallace had told him about the dead sailor, an elderly fellow named Wentworth. Wentworth hailed from Liverpool and had been at sea since he was a lad. He had a wife and children; the officers couldn’t agree on how many. He would be missed in the fo’c’sle, as he was something of a practical joker. Once he’d caught a water snake and put it in the empty kettle. With much snoring and muttering, all hands had feigned sleep, waiting for the riotous moment when the cook opened the kettle lid in the morning.

Wentworth’s illness had run the same course as the doctor’s, but he hadn’t the strength to withstand the fever. Presumably his heart gave out under the assault of the microbe.

Doyle leaned over the rail, feeling queasy, but it passed. The sea before him was deceptively calm, and the morning sun, already brutal, smeared it with a gelatinous glow. Wentworth was down there, wrapped in his canvas shroud, carried ever downward by the weight attached to his feet, plucked at, nosed about, shaken, devoured by creatures of that other world. Wentworth, the joker, and thousands like him. How many thousands?

The sailors referred to the end of time as that day when the sea gives up its dead. It was a cliché, but Doyle vexed his brain to imagine that day. It might, after all, be tomorrow. Would the waters withdraw and the souls of the dead rise up through the wreckage of the ships littering the ocean floor? Or would the dead be disgorged onto the coasts of every landmass, clinging to rocks, floundering in the shallows, pushing forward in waves like the sea itself, waves of the dead, with their pale flesh and hollow eyes?

It was absurd. The sea would not give up her dead. To be committed to the sea, as Wentworth had been, and as he might himself have been — he had seen that in Captain Wallace’s eyes — was to be lost forever in an immensity beyond comprehension. If every living soul on earth were dropped into the deep, would it even raise the level of the oceans? Would a great tidal wave be engendered that would sweep across the sea and flatten everything, including islands and coastal cities that stood in its path? And even if that did happen, it would make no difference. The oceans of the world could absorb mankind entire and still the tides would roll in and out, the sun would rise and set, the moon wax and wane, pulling the waves to the shore.

He could not look at it, this vast and temperamental creature that was the sea. And he would not, as he had once thought he might, spend some formative part of his life upon it. It was too lonely and cruel, it didn’t pay well, and it made men melancholy, fatalistic, and mad.

As he made his way back to his bunk, his thoughts turned to home. Or not to home, which had, until recently, been a series of increasingly smaller and more crowded rented rooms, but to the spacious, sunny, stylish flat at George Square that his mother and his three sisters now shared with her lodger, Dr. Waller. A lodger who paid the entire rent; in what sense was such a man characterized as a lodger?

A lodger who was young enough to be her son, who had conspired with her to send her husband to the “sanatorium.” A lodger who was the godfather of her baby girl, named for him. An aristocratic lodger, with an estate and a coat of arms quartered with the royal family of France; a pompous and demanding lodger who had refused to fight. It was clear now; Waller had been on his mother’s hands and in her confidence for years. He could not be dis-lodged.

A usurping lodger, like a cuckoo, soiling the nest and driving out the chicks, the rightful heirs of the poor pale gentleman who cowered in his room by day, and wandered the streets by night, trying to sell his own clothes in exchange for a drink. Did the pale gentleman set fire to the nest? That was the charge against him, among others. The dry-eyed mother had appealed to her son. “We’ll need your signature,” she said, while the lodger gazed out the tall, handsomely corniced window at the park opposite the square. “Here, and here.”

And of course, he could deny her nothing. He picked up the pen and signed.

Now, in his berth, he took out his diary, opened to the last entry, November 18, 1881, and reread his own description of the fires on the African shore at night and his recollection that in Hanno’s account of his voyage along the same coast two thousand years ago, he had spoken of a world on fire, of active volcanoes sputtering red lava rivers that poured into the sea, the steam rising in blasts of white smoke that clouded the night. Now these volcanoes were shiny black peaks, rising cold and indifferent above the florid green of the coast.

He left three blank pages to account for the days he had lost. November 22, he wrote on the next. But the pen was mysteriously heavy, and his fingers hadn’t the strength to hold it upright. He laid it across the page and collapsed onto his bed, where a deep, restorative sleep swallowed him up completely, as if he were a fish and sleep a great, black whale.