From the Extraordinary Ship’s Log of Captain R Walton

From the Extraordinary Ship’s Log of Captain R Walton 

Inspired by Mary Shelley’s 'Frankenstein'


The most remarkable events have unfolded today since we pulled that half-drowned sailor from the iceberg. Rather than an expedition to study the effects of the melting ice caps, we have stumbled across disturbing scientific discoveries that outreach the furthest extremities of man’s mind. My second-in-command is quite perplexed as to how he should file our discoveries in an excel spreadsheet.

Dawn broke early clearing the sky with startling brightness, each icecap illuminated like beacons of hope against the neverending blue. RSS Prometheus’s course is smooth, freed from the ice’s deathly grip with the coordinates set straight once again for our destination, she flies through the water at quite the rate of knots. The day was set for clear sailing, and the crew perked up, stopped grumbling about the increasingly bitter cold weather, and our unexpected new crew member.

He sits at boat’s helm, huddled up like a scarecrow among the glinting tinfoil blankets, ice clinging to his straggly beard like the ship’s barnacles; more personification of melancholy despair than a half-drowned sailor. He has a countenance of great benevolence, like some wild creature. He reminds me of the polar bear we tracked for months, you remember I told you? This man, this unfortunate sailor, had stories to tell and yet he was silent. The weight of my curiosity hangs over me as I set about my daily tasks of measurements and calculations, predicting and confirming, adjusting and correcting, commanding and ensuring RSS Prometheus sails smoothly.

Occasionally, as a sailor, I had surges of nostalgia for a time of ships I had never known, to feel the creaking wooden ribs, to sway in a hammock as the oceans thundered around me, to hoist up the rigging, to smell the stench not of disinfectant and salt and metal, but of rotting wood and beer and fish. A pirate’s dreams, not those of the scientist.

I write this huddled up in my captain's cabin on this state of the art research vessel and wonder how science is limited to the extremities of the mind of men, how we must continue to plunge forward into calculable unknowns. Before I set out on the course of this journey, to travel uncharted icy waters in search of the patterns of the stars, I only believed in science. I had no faith, no longing for true love, nor hope for heaven, nor wish to trip into a faeryland. Science was and will be, my one true companion.

My radio crackles with the throaty voice of my second in command, telling me to come out on deck. Every hand is slack on the ropes, eyes raised to the heavens, watching as silence and darkness falls over the unending days of the poles. The sun, that infinite bright round disc is disappearing before my eyes in the cloudless sky; an eclipse? But, that’s implausible, the next solar eclipse is not until June 2021. And yet, it is not cloud cover, nor an aircraft or bird obscuring our view. The sun is going black before my eyes, swallowed into a hole of epic proportions. Had I been of a weaker-willed spirit I would have collapsed right in that moment, but no, I stood my ground like a captain should as the earth was plunged into darkness. No longer did the waves glint or the icebergs sparkle like fragments of mirrored glass; no longer did the clouds billow across the bright skies, no longer did the gull's screech echo across RSS Prometheus. The fire had been quenched from the very spirit of the earth, and our charts fell blank. This apocalypse was beyond the reaches of science, and yet, then I still believed I could do something calculable to rescue the light.

We blundered blindly in the eternal darkness. Like revenge served bitterly cold, we were at the hands of something far greater than science, some omnipotent being, dangerous with mirth leading us blindly through the icebergs that rose out of the gloom at every turn. My veins turned as icy as the inky depths we sailed through, fear coursing through them, I had no command over my ship, let alone command over the course of the stars that I intended to record. We were the caged bird singing in the open skies.

Our ship, like a great hulking beast, plunges into misty darkness, her beams of light barely scraping the surface of the inky black depths of the night. What lurks beneath the frothing surface of the ocean is no man’s guess, perhaps a beast from the depths of hell come to drown my crew, eating them complete with orange lifevests like a shrimp. It has been hours since the sun was swallowed by darkness, and our radios cannot reach any other vessels. The strange sailor still sits on the deck, murmuring in tongues and stares with a grim countenance into the ocean, not at the skies, like the rest of us. I approach him, soft across the deck, and reach out a comforting hand to his bowed shoulder. He stills, then shudders, without glancing up, murmurs "Cherchez quelqu'un qui m'a fui."

The water stills, momentarily, reflecting the flourish of stars across the ink blot skies, the colours of Aurora Borealis echo eerily, a faint reminder of the light that lived far beyond our reach. The plasma particles, the solar winds, rushing through the air with their alien colours bursting across the sky, now they could be anything, anything could be anything, and all our theories could be nothing, why perhaps even I could be nothing. Mapped out on our computer screens the stars blink expectantly, the binary codes for a galaxy perhaps more beautiful than the skies above us, our pulsing location shifting along the patterns of the exploding stars. It is infinite and finite in one broad swoop. There is a storm in the stars, an infinite storm, a war that rages far above us, and the scientific advances of humanity are whispers lost on stormy winds.