The Madness of Mikel Brinecraft

The Madness of Mikel Brinecraft

By

C.R. Tyroak

    It is often told, that the sane may become afflicted with a sickness of mind when too much time is given to the infatuation of a thing. Never, had it been documented or said, that such a thing as madness could be passed from one soul to another as easily as the pox or the common cold might. Yet, I am witness and accountant of this very phenomena, having sailed with the Callisto and her Captain, Mikel Brinecraft, in those curious and illustrious southern seas.

 I had first met Brinecraft, as one knave often meets another, in a bawdy hostelry situated on Providence Island. I was taking time out after a close encounter with the Spanish fleet, which nearly saw me to my end. The captain strolled into that brigand’s den-like some imperious lord, dressed in tight white breeches which were tucked into his calf kissing boots. His shirt was red silk, baggy, and spoke of wild abandon and pagan charm. I recall how captivated all seemed to be for most knew him personally or via reputation. I was instantly enthralled, for it was clear that this urbane blackguard was one who lived the life of a crafty corsair. Having just spent the previous four years fighting in the English navy, I had grown tired of the pomp and circumstance, and of the regimented regrets which seemed to ever stalk my mind.

 Captain Brinecraft was a devilishly handsome man, and this was evident by the way the wenches gravitated toward him. A more cynical mind might believe that his reputation would proceed him and that the due attention from all quarters came primarily from that fact, yet I saw a genuine affection and attraction discharge from all those who clamoured around him. There was something about those narrow green eyes of his, they held a rather alluring warmth, yet if one stared long enough, a clear disturbance brooded within, as if haunted. His mouth held a whimsical aspect, and it seemed that he was always on the verge of projecting a comely smile yet held that promise at bay to enhance the enigma.  I was myself subjected to this charm when the captain disembarked from larking in merriment and clashing tankards, to amble over to the table at which I sat.

 “English?” he asked as he sat on the stool opposite. I was hesitant to answer though I knew he had no Spanish loyalties. “You look like you know the sea, you also look like ya’s lost lad.” There was that promise, that half-smile which made a person feel enough comfort as to engage.

 “I know the sea Sir,” I said, “sailed with Drake’s fleet from England, across the wild Atlantic on fair course for St. Augustine.” The corsair raised an eyebrow, for he was suitably aware of the fracas between the English and the Spanish further north.

 “Terrible business that was,” he said, “the whole town burnt and sacked by the English, did it make ye proud?” I detected more than a hint of sarcasm in his tone which informed me that he cared not whether I had participated.

 “Let us just say that I wanted no more of it,” I said, “and so ended up here.”

 “A deserter!” he grinned, “I knew there was somethin’ mutinous about ya, it is like them cinders are still burnin’ inside, I see them when looking in ya eyes.”

 “Aye, it seems I am not too content with acquiring booty for others, even the queen,” I said.

 “I drink to that!” Brinecraft said. Our tankards clanked and we both drank greedily. When the captain had come up for air, he leaned inward.

 “I am to sail this evening,” he said, “on the Callisto, you may have seen her out on the harbour there, fashioned from the finest timber she is, and a crew of all sorts, Dutch, English, Irish, Danish and heck we even have a Frenchman if ya can believes that.”

 “No Spanish,” I smirked.

 “The last Spaniard on my ship was too busy listening to his God rather than to his Captain,” Brinecraft said, “so I let him to his God.” He shrugged.

 “Thomas Howard,” I said, whilst holding out a receptive hand. The seafarer grinned and regarded the gesture before forcibly rocking forward and grasping my hand in his, in a firm and almost overbearing greeting.

 “Captain Mikel Brinecraft.” He said.

    We set sail on a heading to the Dry Tortugas, a small group of islands off the southern Florida peninsular. I was very much enthralled by the promise of a most unusual and ancient treasure which the captain told, was stowed at these islands. It was told to me that this prize was more antiquated than the holy grail and that no man knew from whence it had origins, other than of sometime before the recording of time. I was immediately impressed with the way Captain Brinecraft possessed knowledge of this artefact and indeed as his tale elongated, he spoke of how many years earlier, a rival corsair had first happened upon the treasure and had become slightly mad by the majesty of it. The rival, whose name, Swampbeard, was well known in the southern ports, had buried it somewhere beyond the eyes of mortal men. The brigand had boasted often about how he had seen into the hoary past, before men had emerged from the sea and before all known civilisations had come to exist. The stories were regarded as little more than drunken boasts and though he was often asked, Swampbeard would never describe or paint with any crystal clarity, of that which he had claimed to have seen. The last account of the pirate Swampbeard was told by a timid laddie who had survived the terrible storm of the insane that had wrecked the pirates’ ship off the Santa Elena islands. The hellish storm, so the lad told, had come upon the ship with a supernatural emergence and with all the fury of those demonic forces which had vengeance in mind. It was determined from the boy’s strange tale, that he had gone mad with the brutality of the encounter and it was so considered probable that captain Swampbeard himself must have delivered this madness to his crew entire. For it was said, the full complement did engage in a final ritualistic pact of hurling themselves over the side of the boat and into the calamitous waters. All save for the one laddie, who was so afflicted with dysentery, that he had not the strength to follow his mates into that mortiferous sea.

 Captain Brinecraft had spent the previous months tracking down the last living relative of the ill-fated Swampbeard, and after meticulous clue finding and solving, he and his crew had tracked the illegitimate girl to Boston. The girl had been told by her father, that the greatest treasure was hidden in the land of the turtles, yet before she embarked upon the journey she should seek out the old shaman who inhabits Providence Island in the eerie south. The girl being so young had not yet fathomed what Swampbeard’s cryptic message had meant, for he had bid her to not seek the prize until into her thirtieth year.

 For an old sea dog like Brinecraft, the reference to the land of the turtles was easily deciphered, and so he and his enthused crew had first set out to Providence island. When I had asked about the said shaman, Brinecraft merely smirked and pulled out a rather tatty garment which favoured that of a long cloth gauntlet. This item was said to be the antiquated glove of some forgotten tribe, those who had fashioned it had believed the glove protects the man who dares to touch the artefact.

 The story of adventure had been well conveyed to me, and as I had come to know the crew, I had shared in their collective exuberance during the passage to the Dry Tortugas. This positivity, however, was soon quashed as we soon discovered that the area where the artefact was supposed to be buried, had been recently explored by the informed scrutiny of another. Captain Brinecraft was, for the first time in my eyes, shaken from that measured sophisticated swanker. I was sorely shocked to see the corsair flail around in the golden sand like some demented creature in a sullen death throe. It occurred to me that the crew were also despondent, for their faces no longer looked fluted and streamlined for adventure, but heavier and more bulbous, as one might find sunken in the abyss of a forlorn memory.

 When I had suggested that perhaps Swampbeard had deliberately misled us, by leaving false information with the girl, Brinecraft laughed as one touched by mania and told that whoever had taken the relic could not be a mortal man, for they did not have the glove which he held in his possession, the only one of its kind that existed. It was clear that my words or my thoughts could not permeate that which was thickened and resolute in the captains’ mind. The crew had gathered and were clearly in contemplation of this wayward idea, though to them, it was clear that the prospect of something monstrous and inhuman was a perfectly viable explanation.

 “I had served in the Queen's navy for years and had never witnessed anything fouler than a simple man,” I said.

 “Had you ne’er seen the squall of haunted wind Mister Howard!” Brinecraft shouted, “or hows about the reflection of the terrible ones, sittin in a man's eyes when his guts are spillin’ out through a fresh cut hole in him belry?”

 “Terrible ones?” I said.

 “Sea ghosts,” crewman Potter said.

 “They ain’t ghosts,” said crewman Visser, “they’re real, that’s who has taken the prize, now it is under the water.”

 “Enough!” Brinecraft hollered, “I been looking for the prize since before I could cut a hair on my chin, it’s matters not to me whether who took it be that man or some devilish thing, it belongs to me!” As he cursed, Brinecraft shook with a brutal rage and his crew seemed galvanised by this indomitable rhetoric. For the first time, I looked around at those rather shambolic and scantily dressed dogs and felt out of place, a stranger amongst a band of ruffians.

 “We will sup tonight,” the captain yelled, “for we will not be cowed by the adversity, and when drunk we shall damn who took the treasure, and we shall avow to thems, that we will come, and we will find!” The crew cheered to a fashion, though I sensed through that display of comradery, that there was some aged fatigue resident within many.

 True to his word, the Callisto was a scene of revelment and drunken frolics that night. I maintained a lower profile than I had, for I was still stricken with the distinct feeling of being an outsider to this band, for theirs had largely been a history written without my participation.

 “Rum!” Brinecraft shouted as he staggered toward me brandishing a bottle. The man now made me nervous and timid by his sheer presence, for that tincture of disturbance I had seen in his eyes when first we met, was now grown into something vastly more horrible. As he continued to pour Rum in staggering fits, over the table and myself, I was suddenly accosted by his large firm hand, which struck out to grasp my neck like a viper.

 “Maybe it was you!” he sneered.

 “Me?”

 “These mates of mine, they would not dream to take it, not from me,” he snarled, “but ye, I can’t know you boy, except that you are a mutinous dog eh.” His words not only induced fear in me but also raised my ire which was close to a point of hitting out. But during that long moment when our eyes wrestled for dominance, a crewman came charging from above and declared that the wind was up and that a violent storm was expected to pass directly over the Tortugas that night.

 Captain Brinecraft lessened his grip and that genial smile returned to his face as if the monster had retreated somewhat inside.

 “Then we sail,” he said.

 “To where Captain?” crewman Potter asked.

 “Boston! We start with that damned girl, maybe learn something new and truthful.” Brinecraft said.

 The Callisto had barely moved a mile away from the islands when the sudden emergence of a dark and fierce wind came upon us as something told in biblical texts. As the ship writhed within those winds and the drubbing rain, I was sure I saw more than one time, the eerie and harrowing glimmer of luminescence upon the breakers. At first, I thought this must be due to some discharge of lighting, yet the shapes which illuminated were rather too distinct and horrifying for some random creation. The chaos soon became a fight for survival as the ship was thrown like a lost bottle into darkest air and taunting abysses. As I clung tightly to the pole mast, I was struck with the very bolt of terror as I watched the first crewman throw himself over the side of the ship and into certain death. What horrified me most was as each crew person followed in the act and sacrificed themselves, they seemed to commit this treason to life, willingly.

 The horror of it all took my breath and froze me in place for I was unsure as to whether this affliction might yet come to me and make my actions no longer ones under my control.

 I recall through the squall of black rain and those hideously glowing demonic shapes, Captain Brinecraft turn to me, the promising smile posed as ever upon his sallow lips, and his hand beckoned me to depart over the side of the ship. I remember nothing more than the violent impact of a beam aside my head, a trauma which took me fully to an unconscious state.

 When I awoke, amidst the glare of the sun and the calm restive waters of the gulf, I was alone upon the vessel. Without even having checked to see if any other had escaped that perilous storm, I knew that all had been lost during that malevolent storm.

 I write this curious account now, to send to my relatives in Plymouth, England, for one day they might be the only ones who could speak of my story.

 For myself, I am to Boston, and eager to discover if the girl knows anything more about the prize.