Last Record of The Lyssa

by Sarah Rezendes

Last Record of The Lyssa

Created by: Dr. Amos Hall, surgeon (1841 - 1867)

Curator’s notes: Dr. Hall’s accounts were discovered during the 2001-2003 recovery expedition, the first and only artifact recovered from the ship. The Lyssa is one of 17 whaling vessels lost in the Davis Strait in 1867 after an unseasonably cold September froze the passage, marking one of the deadliest years in the strait’s history. The ship, or any remains of the crew, have yet to be discovered.

TRANSCRIPTION:

3rd of January, 1867, 

The honorable Captain Martin Cooke succumbed on the 2nd of January, 1867. He marks the twenty-fourth crew member lost during our time trapped in the ice, the eighteenth to this mania that has befallen the crew. I had decided to stay awake through the night, so he would not be alone when he passed. It’s been ages since I’ve last written, but it felt imperative I document the final moments of our captain. Or to put into words the truth of what has befallen the Lyssa, no matter how absurd it seems. 

By last evening, frostbite had taken hold on all of Captain’s major extremities. His feet, hands, nose, and ears were blackened beyond recovery. His eyes, which he had not blinked once during his seven day catatonia on the main deck, had so thoroughly frozen over with ice and snow that the entire anatomy of his eyeballs were obscured. Dressed only in his underclothes, his skin was red and cracked from the cold, splitting so viciously in places I could see the very fat freezing in congealed masses within gill-like slits. 

Our carpenter Seamus is convinced these wounds represent the spearing of Christ. Some days he believes it’s a sign of the Devil, marking us damned in a mockery of the Holy Spirit. Other days he swears our suffering is a test from God, marking our flesh with the same trials he laid before his own son, and that we will meet the kingdom of heaven at the end of this torture.

I believe any man who stands naked in the Arctic air for days on end is bound to bear wounds like this, trial of God or no. It is the most difficult difference between the rest of the crew and myself. As a man of science, the mysteries of the world are puzzles meant to be solved through inquiry and hypothesis, reasoning and logic. But sailors are a superstitious breed. Leviathans in the waves, temptress monsters luring you to the rocks. Ghost ships and mermaids and sunken ancient cities full of gold. When you are surrounded for years on end by the unceasing awe of the blue, blue ocean and the perpetual stench of whale carcasses, it is all too easy to invent explanations, rather than waste precious energy on such foolish endeavors as scientific reasoning. 

It is my rationality, I think, that has spared me from this contagious madness thus far. Isolation, the like-mindedness bred through a ship’s crew, the starvation, the nights spent swapping old wives’ tales. It had been no surprise when men started acting oddly. Nor strange, even, when the queerness manifested in the same patterns of behavior, infecting the men one by one. Like the deadly dancing plague; a simple and devastating case of mass hysteria.

But the captain had been a terrible surprise. 

He and I had spent the past few months as fellows in this mystery, studying the behavior of the crew and trying to come up with solutions. Increasing the number of shifts so men had longer to rest had been our first attempt at staving the spread of the mania. Having the First Mate play his violin for hours on end until his fingers bled had been another. 

Trying to physically interrupt one of the patients had proven the worst solution. I can still hear Weymouth’s screams as Baker shoved him over the railing after Weymouth tried to pull him away. Then the much duller sound of Baker’s body landing on top Weymouth’s corpse only moments later as he threw himself headlong after. Baker had only taken vigil for three days then. Every other patient, when left to their own machinations, would only make the dive on the seventh night. No attempts to physically disrupt the ill were made again.

Regardless, there must have been a sign I missed within the captain. A fatigue, or some sort of fever. But his gums hadn’t been bleeding, a sign I’ve been taught to observe for. And just that night he had bid me our usual farewell, the whiskers of his white mustache curling in that charming, catlike furrow before we parted. I found him on the main deck the following morning, stripped to his underpinnings with frost already curling in the hairs on his chest. 

The captain was staring up at that point in the horizon. The one where the light pulses at night, like a malevolent lighthouse calling the Lyssa’s crew. Truth be told, the strange light is a phenomenon I have no familiarity with. A certain gas in the atmosphere here off the coast of Greenland, some unusual refraction of light? Invisible when the sun’s out and only a faint point in the evening sky. There is surely an explanation for its sudden and constant nightly appearance, though the sight of it fills me with dread every time it catches my eyes.

The men, whenever swept by the ship’s mania, seem to fixate on it. Even when it is not in the horizon they are drawn to it. It sits Northwest, to the starboard of where the ship’s bow has frozen in the ice. The crew mistook it for a comet when we first spotted it, a few nights after the captain had officially declared we’d need to spend the winter where we’d become trapped. It’d been September then, not so cold and not so hopeless. 

The light signaled our descent. How the terror of true nature compounds.The worst is the sound. It’s near impossible to describe, but it sets every hair of my body on edge, even now. The groaning, crackling, like the very earth itself is shifting under our feet. The sea is so expansive that the sound echoes for miles and miles. How it reverberates through the very steel hull of the ship, turning our hollow home into the body of a cello, carrying the sound even into the belly of the ship, where our cots lay. 

It would explain a general madness. But a veteran like Captain Cooke, who spent thirty years in His Majesty’s Navy and another decade leading whaling expeditions, was not so feeble of spirit. He had been no stranger to the Arctic, to years in frigid isolation. This was his third trip through the Davis Strait itself, and now his last. 

Which is why my hypothesis remains that there is some sort of taint to our food that is responsible for the loss of rationality even amongst our most senior crew. What else could explain how a man could do that to himself? Stand in perfect silence, perfect stillness; so still that every orifice crusts over with a layer of ice, his very skin rotting from the cold. I can’t imagine the pain. It’s like a sick hourglass, watching the frostbite climb from fingernail to knuckle to palm to wrist. How many toes have we swept off the deck? How many black tongues swollen behind teeth? If the madness were enough to transport them from their mortal forms, I would understand. But the men always look so frightened. 

Poor Thomas Paige, our cabin boy of only thirteen years of age, had wept so fiercely the first day he took post at the rails that icicles formed on his cheeks. The weight had torn at his lower lids, peeling them down and down until they ripped along the edges. But the boy stayed rooted in his spot for seven days, just like the others, before flinging himself off the edge of the boat without a word.

I had hoped with the captain I’d be able to reason with him. Break the spell. I spent his final moments  sitting vigil at his side. Speaking to him about how Hawthorne was elected the acting captain in his absence. About his daughter having most likely given birth by now, asking if he would prefer a grandson or granddaughter. I narrated to him as, four days into his catatonia,  a group of the men deserted, taking only what rations they would need for the three month’s trek to Battin Island. 

The next evening, I spotted the five of them standing stockstill on the ice. I needed to borrow the captain’s looking glass to truly see them, but from what I could observe they were all stripped down, staring at the same green point in the sky. We had lost valuable rations for nothing, though at this rate I don’t think we’ll have any men left to even feed by January’s end. 

I cannot help but feel angry at the injustice of our fate. I am only fresh from medical school, the Lyssa my first surgeon’s position. I arrogantly thought myself an adventurer when I signed onto her crew. Dashing and young, braving the new world. Getting my fill of thrills before settling down with my own practice in some seaside village to grow old in. There will be no future for me. I will die alone, unremarkable, nothing but a name in a logbook of a failed expedition. 

By God, the worst thing is the bodies. Stacked together on the ice, piled like discarded dolls. I can see them, pink and purple flesh, limbs upon limbs upon limbs, right along the ship. It’s too cold for the rot to set in. There’s no scent of death, aside from the permanent ichor etched in the wood from hundreds of butchered whales on her surface. It smells cold, just cold, the alien majesty of the Arctic. 

How I yearn to have the captain’s ear to reason through the loss of him. He was a man I admired so ardently, a man who so easily inspired complete and utter trust in his men. In me. Even though I am only fresh from my medical schooling, and he a veteran of both life and the seas, the captain always made me feel an equal. That we were a pair of detectives, pursuing this horrifying mystery with cool heads. And yet last night I watched him jerk to life after seven days of pure stillness. The sound of his bare feet ripping free from where they’d fused to the wood beneath him. How his frozen hands clobbered against the bannister as he scrambled over the edge in a desperate surge. How he disappeared into the darkness, with my last memory of him the echo of his body hitting the pile of flesh that’s lumped beside the ship. 

Tonight I may be the next victim of our ship’s madness. I think it would be preferable to being the last sane man alive on this frozen coffin. Or maybe I’ll find the captain’s old service pistol in his office. I’ve never loaded a gun, but a lead bullet to the skull sounds more appealing than any other fate that awaits me. Maybe I’ll throw myself off the railing without the siren call of that light, fling myself on their corpses to let my blood mingle forever with theirs. 

It’s such a strange thing. To want to live so fiercely, but finding no other escape from this neverending hell of reality, other than death. I hope Seamus is right, and that the Lord waits for me. I feel the Devil’s breath on the back of my neck. I miss my mother, and her hand in my hair. I am cold, and tired, a corpse who has not realized it has no reason to keep pretending. 

Signed,

Dr. Amos Hall