Ambrose Nast
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Eight years after Morrow's death, a British sailor docked in Wellfleet after six months on a whaler working the Greenland Sea.
He came into the hound's bite while I was there, and he drunkenly related to the room a story of what he'd seen near the Davis Street.
A three-masted trader had appeared after a storm, passing in the other direction.
With it too dark to use signal flags, the whaler had sent a simple message in code across the water.
It was many curious minutes before a single figure appeared on the trader's bow.
He had raised his arms and splayed open hands of such a size that the sailor noted their aberrant nature even through the gloom of midnight.
The captain of the whaler had dared guide his ship within 75 yards of its lightless colleague as the crew gathered at the rails.
The man's eyes, the sailor told us as he stared into the wood stove, so inebriated he could barely sit upright.
That's the best way I can say it, except it was like no man I ever saw.
It was like something maybe in the jungle somewhere.
And he was clawing at the air like he wanted at us.
And then the strange, silent vessel passed them.
That if the Dutchman had indeed managed to finally capture a redemptive love after searching for more than 200 years, it lasted only briefly.
The reasons for the fracture will, I suppose, be forever unknown.
Who knows how long the thin belief in a happy end lingered in Colonel Morrow's tired old heart.