Fishing on the Flying Dutchman

The next day, they dove into a southerly current which they rode for the following week. The ship fell silent; the men cursed and joked by grimaces and hand signals; the captain and the mate sounded orders by drumming on a bell. Light on deck was dim, below was impenetrable, and those who scaled the rigging could mark as the dimness gave way with each second of climbing. Maccus hung about above-decks for days at a time, ready whenever the captain could not make himself understood.

Gilbert Coombs returned to light duty, ornery as ever. The saltwater burned his back, but the cooling was a comfort.

For a few leagues, they sailed under a pod of fin whales, swift and phlegmatic creatures on their way to cold feeding grounds. At Maccus' suggestion, Turner had a man armed with a pike aloft on each topyard, to fend the whales off should they get too curious about the rigging. Swarms of krill near the surface would periodically shade out the sun. They ran into a bank of sardines on the fourth day; the fish clung to the ship, sheltering near the sails, under the hull, and even below decks when they could get there. Thankfully, they turned for the undersea before the pests could attract sharks.

They sank deep, under the edge of the earth, losing the fish in the blackness where the force of the water made sparks dance behind their eyes and their fingers fail and tremble, somewhere twisting around so that when they rose, they rose on the other face of the ocean, to let the water pour and dribble from the sails and gush from the sluices, drying the ship as the men breathed the air again.

They let the Dutchman run before the wind, lazily rolling in the troughs of the waves.

At the bow, Penrod gave a shout of excitement and pointed into the water, and the deck crew scrambled to look over the side, Captain Turner included.

"It's a cone," announced Koleniko.

Jetting along beneath their bow wave, where often they might see a dolphin or a curious fish, was an enormous rigid cone, a narrow straight shell nearly as long as the Dutchman was wide, streaked in dirty white and walnut, with a frill of thin tentacles and two large goatish eyes protruding from its base.

"What is it?" asked the Captain.

"It…well…" said Koleniko. "Looks to be a cone shell. With a squid in it."

Strange fish swam in the Undersea.

Maccus appeared at Turner's shoulder. "Cap'n, if I may, I'll set the port watch on fish duty."

"Thank-you, Mr. Maccus," said Turner. "Mr. Penrod, have we any harpoons?"

"Yes, Cap'n! Right away!" Penrod exclaimed, before rushing off below.


Fish duty did not involve any actual fishing.

While the starboard watch clamored about the bow, trying to catch the squid and instead driving it under the hull, the port watch roused themselves to Maccus' roared insults on their mothers' integrity, grabbed buckets and lanterns, and patrolled the lower decks to scoop up the fish that had gotten trapped inside the ship and died in the black depths on their way to the Undersea. They peered into every corner, shoving goods and miscellany aside as the lantern beams thrust here and there.

"How d'ye expect a fish t'wiggle inta Clanker's chest?" Pip Finn demanded of Tom Sorrel, who had cracked open Clanker's belongings and was pawing through them, mischief in his eyes.

"Can't never be too careful, Pipes. Where's 'Niko berth?"

Finn pointed, and Sorrel pulled a half-carved whale tusk out of Clanker's chest and buried it in Koleniko's.

"Hoy, Broonie's been tying himself a bell-rope. Stow it with Young Ben?"

"Hah!" approved Sorrel, and he tossed Broondjongen's sea chest until he removed an ornate mass of turk's heads and sennits tied in worming cord. "Oh, Broonie's like t'be ticked as Hell's hounds, mark me!"

"Who else to do?"

"Gill's testy enough! What's he got on 'im?"

The more responsible of the port watch conducted a thorough search of every horizontal inch of the Dutchman. Bootstrap was canvassing the hold, a few dead fish limp in his bucket, when he discovered, fixed fast near the bottom of a shadowy bulkhead, a single barnacle. He pried it off with his knife and saved it carefully in a pocket.


In the first years of the Dutchman's service, when the underworld had been operating smartly, the lookouts had scanned the surface for floating fleets. Will Turner's crew struggled to peer down into the water, looking for shoals. Many of the men had been fishermen, and the captain frequently called on their expertise in bringing things from under the water onto the decks of a ship.

It was daylight in the undersea, a decent breeze kept the hull stiff against the water, and Turner had ordered two boats launched, each fitted with a little spritsail and a rudder, and trailing the lines of a broad, shallow, wide-mesh net. Each boat both sailed itself and was towed by the Dutchman, holding a triangle formation as they cruised downwind. The boats dragged harder and harder against their rudders as they crossed the shoal, the triangle sharpening and the net bowing behind them, until they halted, hauled up the net with their catch, and beat back upwind for another pass.

The men in the boats were always overjoyed to be far from the deck when the nets were emptied.

Whenever they spotted a shoal, from below the water by the dark shapes against the surface, or from above water by the pale shapes beneath or occasionally by swarms of . . . not-birds circling over the souls to feed on the fish that hid beneath them, it was easy to forget that the shapes belonged to thinking, feeling beings—they were so still and dull, without a flicker of movement beyond the tossing of the waves. When they were hauled on deck, the souls remained limp and motionless—but out of the water, they could speak. They poured out madness.

The men would hear their ceaseless sobbing and gibbering, and imagine the hell of long decades drifting in the sea beyond the protection of the Dutchman until what life they had in them ran out and all that was left was the mind, alone, powerless. The souls were cold and sodden, heavier than any human had a right to be, white-fleshed, helpless as paralytics and pitiful as raving old women in their beds: wiry sailors, mostly, grizzled men so like the crew that they saw themselves lying mad and motionless in the hold.

"Shut the blitherin' ye thrice-damned twat," snarled Gilbert, hefting a wailing boy over his shoulder. His cries were long, wordless, wavering, and cut above the shivery drone of the other dead like a bagpipe's whistle.

Captain Turner, glancing down from the aftcastle, caught Coombs' bark and grimaced in frustration.

It was impossible, all impossible. A hideous state. The dead—ancestors, uncles, grandfathers, brothers before the mast—were ruined and burned out with misery, more helpless than infants and a dozen times the burden, and no one could spare them so much as a kind word as they were laid belowdecks in the hurry to shuttle them to land.

And so many. In places, the water was choked with them, but for the most part, the Undersea was so vast that they could sail days without sighting a shoal. They were stripped of all hope and dignity, with only the Dutchman to look to, and his men…his men disappointed him.

He slumped.

"Her again?"

Turner jerked upright. Bootstrap was leaning next to him on the rail, looking a bit nervous, or perhaps that was the sweat from running about below picking up fish. Family or not, the man was so sneaky it was bloody terrifying. He seemed to do it by accident.

Recovering, Will tried to think of the question.

"No," he replied, surprised at the realization. He glanced at his father, who looked away and shifted uncomfortably. He checked the rigging, nets, and boats again, before realizing that Bootstrap might be waiting for some kind of response. He swallowed. "I was…wondering if I'd done the right thing."

"Wiv Gilbert?"

"Yes."

Bootstrap frowned, and Will tensed, uncertain if he was ready for Bootstrap's honesty. "We best take this t'the cabin," he said at last, watching Maccus glower at them from the deck.


Gilbert's not a horrible person; he's just really bad with kids.

Sailors sure do make some pretty bell-ropes. They double as clubs. "Sennits," which is an all-encompassing word for braids of any complexity is pronounced "sinnays." I think.

Lying in the waters of the dead for years would make anyone go mad. Credit goes to Emma3 for her (eerily prescient, considering she started her trilogy before AWE) picture of bodies floating in the waters of the dead, from which I stole the idea that the water would sap souls' strength and will.

The dead lying in the water also create their own miniature ecosystem: open-ocean fish rise to the surface under their shade, which in turn attracts predatory fish, and soon there is a transient population of not-bird food below a shoal of souls. That's right, not birds: "not-birds." Bird-like, only not.