The Endurance

A beautiful ship, The Endurance: long, sleek, and bound for the West Indies with a belly full of much needed trade-goods. Henry didn’t concern himself with the particulars of the cargo; he was off to sea for the first time in his 17 summers, and little mattered as much as that.

He arrived early to the bustling port. In the soft light men grunted and stumbled, crates passed from hand to hand, and the wind fluttered rigged sails. Henry spotted The Endurance lashed to the end of the pier. Eager, he lunged forward, colliding with a stout gremlin of a man. “Watch where yer going, ye ruddy twit.” Even this snarl failed to dampen Henry, who barely paused to mumble an apology before racing down the pier, between stacks of rigging and rope, eventually skidding to a halt before the gangway of The Endurance.

Mostly out of breath, Henry paused to collect himself. There were things to be said, names to be offered. Papers—papers! Henry fumbled in his satchel, fingers trembling. A sudden shadow gave him pause. He looked up into a wry face. “You’d be Longborne, then?”

Henry opened his mouth. “I- uh- yes. Yes sir! I have my papers somewhere, I’m not sure exactly where but I can find them I also—”

The man chuckled and held up a hand. “Relax, boy. I know you’re Henry Longborne and I don’t need to see any papers to prove it. I’m Jones. The Captain and the first mate are expecting you. Your pop said you’d probably be early, so I’ve been waiting here since dawn.”

Henry rocked onto the balls of his feet. “Soooo. Can we go onboard? Aboard?”

Jones grinned. “Eager huh? We have to load some cargo still. I’ll show you where to drop your bags, introduce you to whoever’s around, and then we can start.”

Loading the cargo took most of the morning. Only somewhat helpful, Henry spent a large portion of the time asking Jones when they were to set sail. Finally Jones sighed. “Longborne. We can’t sail until the captain says so, and the captain won’t say so until the tide does. So relax.”

“The tide will tell us to sail?”

Jones turned to stare curiously at the boy. “Aye. We can’t sail against the tide, lad.” 

Henry fidgeted. He almost asked another question, but some commotion sprang up about the cargo, and Jones went to help. Henry turned to stare at the ship he would spend the next several months on. He could only see a portion of the prow from his angle, but a strange shape caught his eye. A woman, carved into the front of the ship, hands clasped at her breast. Squinting, Henry thought he could make out a sinuous tail snaking back from her waist and melting into the bulk of the ship. 

“Longborne!” Henry jumped, turned, and saw Jones grinning. “It’s time. Say goodbye to solid ground.”

Henry raced up the gangplank, almost colliding with several other crew members. He found a spot at the prow, gripped the railing, and bounced on the balls of his feet. It took The Endurance a little time to make her way out of port, but Henry didn’t stop squirming. His body arched forward, shoulder blades pinched back. Each surge of sea-spray brought a delirious grin to the boy’s face. 

Chuckling, Jones elbowed a sailor called Alf. “Remember your first time at sea?” Alf glanced at the boy and smiled. “Aye, let’s see how he fares after four weeks of pickles and biscuits! He’ll be praying for landfall, just like the rest of us.”

It seemed Alf’s prediction was meant to go unrealized. Henry slipped into a routine quickly enough: arise in the sea-foam morning, eat, clean the deck, stare at the undulating water, earnestly bungle an attempt to be useful, eat supper, stare at the night sky, and slip to sleep with the rhythm of the water. He retained his good humor and eagerness long after most first-time sailors, still peppering Jones with questions well into their third week at sea. Sometimes Jones would catch the boy staring at the ship’s figurehead, lingering after the requisite deck swabbing was done.

Jones had a soft spot for the boy. Constantly underfoot and jittery, too full of movement and noise, Henry tended to irritate most of the sailors. Jones tried to set him straight once or twice: “No, lad, don’t bother the cook with that, you can’t catch a dolphin”; “That’s twice now you’ve misaligned the rigging. Cooper isn’t going to be pleased if you do his work wrong.” At some point, though, Jones shrugged, and let the boy be what he was, assuming this excess of energy would burn itself out at some point.

In the long twilights, the crew swapped stories. A man called Corky, who came from a 

place he only ever described as “the North,” was Henry’s favorite story-teller. Many were the nights that Henry sat spellbound after the mess, listening to Corky weave fantastic tales of battles waged on distant seas, and exotic lands aromatic with spices.  

One night, some weeks into the voyage, a peculiar melancholy invaded Corky. A half-moon lit the heavens. As the crew finished supper, Corky, Henry, Jones, and Alf retired to the upper deck. They passed a flask around, swigging and joking good-naturedly. Henry stretched himself out and sighed, contented.

Something splashed in the darkness. Corky jolted upright. Jones glanced at him. Strange noises were hardly a novelty. The mast creaked in the gentle breeze, and the tired bones of the ship rubbed against each other. “One of them must have seen Sandra and come up to investigate.” An acute mania lit Corky’s face when Henry asked, “Sandra? They?”

Stretching, Alf answered: “It’s the figurehead’s name.” 

Corky leaned toward Henry. “Ever seen a mermaid, boy?”

Jones snorted. “Don’t you fill the boy’s head with nonsense.” Alf spoke, quietly. “I’ve seen one. Off the horn of Africa. Prettiest thing I ever saw.” There was no boast in his voice.

Sighing, Jones settled back against the railing and promptly fell asleep. Awed, Henry shifted forward. “Really? What did it look like?”

Alf shook his head, almost embarrassed, mumbled about being tired, and disappeared into the lower bunks. There were some stories that were for the self alone, memories to remove from the shipwreck of the chest when age came, turning the hair gray and the eyes dull. Alf’s was his mermaid, and he’d say no more about her than that.

Left alone with Corky on the swaying deck, beneath stars flung across the void like dreams, Henry learned of mermaids. Dolphin-like from the waist down, and women above. Beautiful they were, deadly to most, but salvation to a scant few. Legends told of sailors who had willingly forsaken the daylight realms for calmer, watery grottos and a mermaid’s embrace. Corky spoke in detail of a mermaid’s almost translucent skin. He told how mermaids alone can bestow underwater breath to mortal men, and how no sailor was luckier than one a mermaid had chosen.

“How do you know if a mermaid has chosen you?”

Corky smiled. “She’ll sing for you, boy. She’ll sing like the sea itself.”

All through the night, until a bloody sun clawed its way above the shifting horizon, Henry listened to Corky’s voice, enchanted. He learned mermaids’ preferences, their speeds, their penchant for younger and less experienced sailors. He learned, too, that they became shy near the shore or too close to the surface. Their homes lied in unfathomable places, and they longed always for the deep. Thus, on the rare occasions when they did appear, it was in the blackest part of the night. 

The sun seemed unusually bright and grating the following day. Henry found himself running his fingers through the water from the gun port, or staring at the figurehead on the prow. Sleeplessness marked the hollows of his eyes with heavy hues.

That night, Henry followed Corky to the deck again. They’d barely sat before Henry asked about mermaids. Obliging, Corky launched into a story of a friend of a friend who had fallen in love with a mermaid. “Course, all mermaids love shiny things. And are attracted to their own image. That’s why Sandra pulls so many of them in. The sailor in question, well, he lured his mermaid in with a mirror, jumped into her arms, and I bet he’s still swimming around with her.”

Corky yawned and stretched. “Should probably get to bed. Too many nights without sleep out here and the world looks a little funny.” He lumbered below deck, leaving Henry sitting in the cool night air.

The sky rippled with stars. A silvery suggestion of moonlight hung behind gunpowder clouds. Henry put his forearms on the portside stern, leaning over the railing with toes just barely touching the deck. Water lapped gently against the side of the boat, rhythm lulling Henry into a dreamy stupor. With half closed eyes, he stared overboard into the impossible black. The surface caught and swallowed the celestial light overhead. Strange sea secrets laughed along the crests and troughs of the miniature waves. Liquid, languid murmurs soothed his sun-struck brow and feverish heat. How calming, he mused, to settle in such a place.

He imagined strange aquatic cities, dusky with twilight, stretching across a coral floor. Tall spires glinting with mother-of-pearl light, seashells gleaming even under a thousand watery fathoms. Huge polyp-carved doors opening to reveal a flutter of fins and bewildering swirls of movement. Fancy took him fully. He caught a glimpse of long, flowing hair, an enchanting shimmer of scales, an unbearably dappled light playing on smooth arms.

He did not sleep in his bunk that night. Rather, he made his way to the prow, threw his threadbare jacket down, and drifted into dreams of dusky, silken embraces. Jones found him the next morning, a jumble of sharp angles and moon-struck eyes. A hand on Henry’s arm awoke him, and he bolted upright before Jones could feel his forehead.

“Have you ever seen a mermaid, Jones?”

Jones grunted. “The sea has a way of fooling you. Don’t put stock in anything Corky tells you. And get some sleep tonight!”

But Henry’s longing was not so easily swayed. That night, and the following, he lingered late into the waning darkness after begging Corky for more details. He took to sleeping curled up in a nook at the prow. Hyacinth petals marked his orbitals. An acute, sharp desperation had taken up residence somewhere just northeast of his third rib, and he did not know enough of life to understand its source or its salve.

The wind died down somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic for a few days, and the crew grumbled. An incessant sun scowled down on Henry. He shirked its cutting light whenever he could, forsaking those glaring rays for softer, muted shadows. Nights grew kinder to him, easing his heart’s staccato cadence.

He passed through daylight hours in a daze, disconcertingly calm. One evening Jones told Henry no less than four times to swab a particularly mucky section of the upper deck, and returned to find Henry standing in the same spot, absently mopping the deck-boards in front of him.

“Longborne! What are you doing? You’ve been here for hours.”

Henry turned a fevered face. “Sorry, Jones. I’ll get to it. I was listening.” 

“Listening to what?” But Henry moved away. Jones noted the boy had dropped weight, and made a point to comment on it to the cook, who informed him that it was hardly his responsibility to keep an eye on every no-name good-for-nothing sailor with moony eyes.

Concerned, Jones kept an eye on the boy, but as they approached harbor more and more things demanded his attention. And, Jones reasoned, the boy would likely be fine, as they were no more than several days out from their destination. On their third-to-last morning, Henry stumbled toward Jones. “Do you have a pocket mirror I can borrow?” Hoping this meant the boy was thinking about how he’d look once they went ashore, Jones handed over his silver mirror. “Just give it back before we land, eh?”

The final night at sea saw most of the sailors celebrate with an abundance of rum. They drowned the anxiety that always accompanied ports with the heat of the well-brewed. The cook pulled out his violin and played a merry jig. Henry drank more than his share, but stumbled to the prow before the revelries died down. Jones thought he caught a small spot of light refracting through the darkness, but was quickly drawn into a dance and thought no more about it.

Some hours after midnight, after most of the sailors fell asleep, Henry heard a muted humming. He strained his ears, trying to hear the song beyond the creaks of the ship and the lapping water. At the prow railing he glimpsed a shimmering flicker. In the bewildering starlight, Henry squinted at the vacant darkness. His fingers trembled as he rubbed his eyes and dropped the mirror he carried. He heard the humming again, and a dark shape splashed into the water. Liquid laughter bubbled up.

With shallow, rapid breaths Henry searched the water. The world blurred around him, star trails swirling. Little bits of light glinted at the corners of his vision and pulled maddeningly at his eyes. He heard a sound—a call. A supple suggestion invited him. He saw again those translucent spires, that shimmering radiance. The air tore like shrapnel at his skin.  

Henry crept below deck to the cargo hold. He tugged out a cannonball and with quivering hands looped rope around it. He shuffled up to the top deck. A tight kernel of need swelled inside him. He untied his boots and connected them to each other. His eyes flashed from the sea to the rope in his hands. The all-consuming melody haunted him; he focused only on the embrace he knew awaited. He tied the cannonball’s rope to the extra length of shoe string and climbed onto the railing. 

He stared into the many-faceted waves. Another note drifted toward him. Holding the cannonball in his arms, he swung his legs out and slid overboard, his entire body forming one arch of a cry. He sliced through the water.

Bubbles burst from his lips as he called out to her. She must be near. He knew, beyond certainty, beyond doubt, that she would come for him. An impossible pressure built in his lungs. Wild lights danced around him. His ribs cracked beneath the weight, and he thought he saw a tail-flick of certainty through the splintering agony. He felt his bones shatter into angles unknown to his boyhood imaginings, his thoughts scatter with the hurt and the impossibility of her absence. Still, he thought, if he could hold out just one more moment, just one more crushing, almost-breath, she would appear. She must.