“Apparently,” Cook said after a time, “apparently, the Cyclops was some sort of collier, a coal ship. She was spending a lot of time in the South Atlantic fueling British ships. In mid-to-late February, 1918, she was down in Rio de Janeiro. Sounds like she was having engine problems. There were some sort of repairs made. She took on eleven thousand tons of manganese ore and was supposed to head directly up to Baltimore.” Cook flipped through pages, tried to read through the mildew and separate stuck-together pages. “Apparently there was some kind of bullshit going on. The executive officer, a fellow named Forbes, was locked up by the captain. Guy name of Worley. A lot of these are his entries and they don’t make much sense. I can barely read ‘em.”
Cook read on and explained to Fabrini what he was learning. In Brazil they’d taken some three hundred odd passengers, mostly naval personnel from other ships returning home. But they’d also taken aboard some six military prisoners that were being sent to a naval prison in New Hampshire. Two of them had been implicated in the murder of another sailor and one was due to hang for it.
“They stopped in Barbados, I gather, and had dinner with some dignitaries there. Most of this is gone… but they left on March 4 ^th making for Baltimore. Dammit, these pages are ruined. I’d like to know what happened next…”
Cook went about reading, getting really interested now while Fabrini was getting really impatient. He read on and on for ten or fifteen minutes, ignoring Fabrini’s suggestions that they get out already and get back to the lifeboat.
“I don’t like leaving those two crazies alone down there with Menhaus,” he said.
“Just wait,” Cook said. “Okay, next thing I can read worth a damn is March 13 ^th. Apparently, the Cyclops was already lost, already caught in the fog and this sea. See, there’s been turmoil on the ship. That exec officer, Forbes, he’s doing all the entries now.”
Cook said it was like a soap opera what happened next. During the week that was unreadable, just about everything had happened and he could only put it together from bits and pieces. They were caught in that fog and the crew either mutinied or came damn close to it. Captain Worley refused to listen to the engineer that the engines were in rough shape. Worley kept the ship at full steam, running her right into a gigantic island of weed that fouled up her props. By that time, there was no getting out. The port engine was pretty much toast. The starboard was completely seized-up. The Cyclops was marooned in the weeds – same weed mass it still sat in, Cook figured – and the crew was coming unglued. Worley, from what Cook could tell, sounded violent and irrational, a shitty navigator on the best of days. He was drunk more often than not and spent most of his time verbally and physically abusing the crew.
“Sounds like he wasn’t fit for duty even before they sailed,” Cook explained, mulling it all over. “Somewhere during that lost week, shit hit the fan. Worley, completely out of his head and tired of the men and their ‘superstitious terror’ and ‘lack of fortitude’, as he put it, decided to flex his muscles a little. He took those six prisoners out of the brig and marched them up on deck. In full view of the crew, he shot them all down. Right in the heads with a. 45.”
“Quite a guy,” Fabrini said. “Sounds like Saks.”
“After that, the crew overpowered Worley and locked him in his cabin, they freed Forbes, the Exec. Apparently, he’d been locked up by Worley for standing up to the captain after a sailor died violently. Sounds like it was Worley’s fault, but nobody but Forbes had the balls to tell him so.”
Forbes was popular, it seemed, he managed to hold the crew together, but the engines were beyond repair. There was no hope. During the night, or what passed for night in this place, a number of lifeboats were lowered and much of the crew and passengers set off into the fog. That was the last anyone ever heard of them.
“Read this,” Cook said. “This is important.”
Fabrini sighed, not too happy about the history lesson he was getting here. Leaning over the chart table, he began to read in that oily light:
15 March 1918 (position unknown)
Matters grow worse. Been in this damnable fog for nearly eight days now. Trapped in this seaweed bed with no avenue of escape open to us. Some of the men have suggested, and understandably, that we abandon the Cyclops as she is a death ship now, a derelict, a great tomb for us all unless we abandon her. But abandon to what? Into that awful, congested mist and steaming seaweed sea?
Though I dare not admit it to the crew, I fear there is no earthly deliverance from this place.
