The mist was still there, but it was more of a haze now. The weed stretched in every direction, a watery, seeping matted carpet of green tendrils and coiled leaves, stalks and bladders and rotting creepers snaking through it. It was green and yellow, tinted with flowering pink buds. And set in it like tombstones in viscid, crawling vegetation… wreckage. Keels and undersides, bows and bulwarks, bowsprits and spidery tangles of derricks latticed in marine growths and slimy bloated ivies which were pulling them down deeper into the weed itself. Here were shattered skiffs and gutted scows, the ribbed frameworks of schooners sunk in the weed on their sides. It was some endless, weedy junkyard of the sea, of dead ships stripped of meat and masts, crumbling skeletons encrusted in shells and barnacles and growing things. Dozens and dozens of them thrusting up from the verdant bed of weed.
There was so much of it, it literally took your breath away.
But it wasn’t just sunken and dismembered ships, but nearly intact derelicts and hulks, some riding up high and others dipping down into that creeping green proliferation. This was the fabled graveyard of the seas, hundreds of ships held immobile in the fields of thick seaweed. Freighters and tankers, fishing vessels and yachts, tramp steamers and whalers. Some were recent additions, but some… old beyond old, barks and packets, clippers and 18 ^th century brigantines. George saw a moldering, weed-infested relic laying low in the growth and black polluted water that could have been the worm-holed, riven cadaver of a Spanish treasure galleon.
Many were mastless and bilged, punched through with great cavities like torpedo holes. Caught by the weed, they were unable to sink completely, slowly deteriorating, their crews long dead, their superstructures atrophied to sagging beams and leaning uprights. Some of the old sailing vessels looked almost seaworthy, but most were listing badly to port or starboard, dead and decayed things looking for a grave.
These were the ships that caught the eyes and imaginations of the men in the raft and lifeboat. Not the modern iron ships, but those flaking mummies from centuries gone by: brigs and schooners, four-masters and square-riggers. Their sails had long ago decomposed to dingy rags, but you could almost feel the history behind them, feel them riding high, creaking and groaning, shrouds snapping and flapping. But that had been long, long ago. For the weeds had claimed them now, held them in a green fist like cemetery dirt and would not let them go, would not let them seek the oblivion they deserved. No, the weed had ensnared them, grown up over their hulls, completely engulfing some so you could only see the general shape of a ship under all that growing, glistening, knotted weed. It sprouted from open portholes and roped over taffrails, noosed halyards and wreathed deckhouses.
But it wasn’t just the weeds, for here in this steaming, stagnant swamp, fungi had settled thickly over topmasts and mizzens, meshing jibs and topgallants. It was born in the putrescent hothouse nurseries of the weed and grew up over the masts in snotty lacework and nets, filaments and oozing vines, festooning like cobwebs, drooping and hanging like Spanish moss.
Yes, so thick was the weed and creeping gray fungi, that it was hard to say where the seaweed gardens ended and the ships began. For most of those derelicts looked not like things made by man, but things fashioned by nature out of roping green and yellow growing things that were mockeries of man’s work.
“Oh, my God,” George said, feeling an exhilaration and a despondency he could not shake. “How long… how long has this been going on?”
Marx just stared. “How long have men been plying the sea, son?”
There, of course, were newer vessels, too. Sleek ferries and frigates with ice-cutter bows and radar beacons, satellite dishes and radio aerials. There was, in fact, few ships, few types that were not represented in either pieces or in whole.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Gosling said. “In all your born days?”
Cushing just shook his head. “No… but I was expecting it, I was expecting something like this. Weren’t you all? Down deep, weren’t you all?”
Cushing told them that this was the real Sargasso Sea, the real ship’s graveyard, the great boneyard of the world’s oceans… except it wasn’t anywhere on earth as sailors had long thought, but here, here in this pestilent cellar. This dripping, miasmic, vaporous sea which was just about due south of nowhere.
“This is what they saw,” Gosling said, excited now. “All those old stories you heard of the Sargasso, the ship’s graveyard, the devil’s graveyard… Jesus, just like you thought Cushing, this is it. It ain’t just a story, it’s real.”
“Aye, that it is,” Marx said. “Ships must have passed through here, saw all this, and passed back out to tell the story… maybe thinking the whole time they were stuck in the real Sargasso.”
