William Hope Hodgson IV – The Ghost Pirates (1909)

At the beginning of Hodgson’s third novel, The Ghost Pirates, we find an interesting preface:
 

This book forms the last of three. The first published was "The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' "; the second, "The House on the Borderland"; this, the third, completes what, perhaps, may be termed a trilogy; for, though very different in scope, each of the three books deals with certain conceptions that have an elemental kinship. With this book, the author believes that he closes the door, so far as he is concerned, on a particular phase of constructive thought.

Exactly what this “constructive thought” was remains unknown. Sam Gafford of http://williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com theorizes that all three books deal with the incursion of other realities into our own. This is certainly true in a poetic sense, and literally true in the case of The House on the Borderland—the title says it all, as I argued in my last post—but is it true for The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The Ghost Pirates? The former dealt with a shipwrecked crew lost in a nightmare land of subhuman monsters, giant devil-fish, and howling tree spirits… but did Hodgson intend that the castaways had somehow slipped out of our world into a twilight reality similar to ours? Or rather that the crew had merely stumbled onto a “lost world” of sorts, hidden within the Sargasso Sea? Edgar Rice Burroughs would do roughly the same thing in the coming decade (think Pellucidar rather than Barsoom), and he never implied reality was being pierced or transgressed.

And what of the haunted ship in The Ghost Pirates? The title sounds like an episode of Scooby Doo, but Hodgson’s tale is a far more terrifying step-by-step account of a ship’s possession by malign entities. Of all of Hodgson’s nautical tales, seldom has he evoked such a sustained note of unease and isolation as he does here.

Hodgson deftly sets the stage with his usual precision and economy:

I joined the Mortzestus in 'Frisco. I heard before I signed on, that there were some funny yarns floating round about her; but I was pretty nearly on the beach, and too jolly anxious to get away, to worry about trifles. Besides, by all accounts, she was right enough so far as grub and treatment went. When I asked fellows to give it a name, they generally could not. All they could tell me, was that she was unlucky, and made thundering long passages, and had no more than a fair share of dirty weather. Also, that she had twice had the sticks blown out of her, and her cargo shifted. Besides all these, a heap of other things that might happen to any packet, and would not be comfortable to run into. Still, they were the ordinary things, and I was willing enough to risk them, to get home. All the same, if I had been given the chance, I should have shipped in some other vessel as a matter of preference.

Within one paragraph, Hodgson gives us the narrator (still unnamed), his situation, and his motivation: he wants desperately to get home. The only ship bound for home has strange rumors attached to it—but not strange enough to give him undue pause.

The narrator soon finds that there’s something “queer” about the ship. All of the previous crew abandoned ship once they got into port, except for one Cockney sailor who was determined to collect his paycheck (in those days before unions and OSHA, one had to complete the entire voyage to get one’s pay). While the new crewmembers are aware of the rumors, they all seem to think it’s a fine joke. Only the Cockney refuses to share in the laughter, and even he can’t give any good reason for it:

…presently, he came round, and told me that he did not know of any particular incident which could be called unusual in the sense in which I meant. Yet that, at the same time, there were lots of little things which, if you put them together, made you think a bit. For instance, she always made such long passages and had so much dirty weather—nothing but that and calms and head winds. Then, other things happened; sails that he knew, himself, had been properly stowed, were always blowing adrift at night. And then he said a thing that surprised me.

"There's too many bloomin' shadders about this 'ere packet…”

The sailor refuses to elaborate further, but he doesn’t need to. We know what the man means, even if our narrator professes not to. That final, creepy little phrase sums it up perfectly. 

The ship leaves port the next day, and for a few weeks nothing happens. The crew dismisses the rumors, as does our narrator, whom we come to know as Jessop (a surname that pops up repeatedly in Hodgson’s nautical works). While standing watch one night, however, he happens to glimpse something inexplicable: the shadowy form of a man crawling on board the ship from over the side.

Puzzled, Jessop walks the deck in search of the stranger. He is not quite convinced he actually saw anything, but he now realizes that yes, there are too many shadows aboard.  He forces himself to search the dark corners, just to make sure, but the deck is utterly empty.  He even looks over the rail where he saw the figure climb aboard, but there is nothing but a black, empty sea beneath him.

Just as he convinces himself he’s imagined it all, he turns back and—of course—sees the shadowy figure standing by the main-mast. It looks like a human figure, but Jessop is strangely unwilling to go challenge him. Standing “irresolute and funky”—a fantastic phrase, by the way—Jessop gathers his courage and tries to reason his way into action. Finally, convincing himself that one of the other sailors must be playing a joke, he goads himself into approaching the figure… but not too quickly.

Then, as Jessop nears, the figure takes a few quick steps and climbs over the rail:

I rushed to the side, and stared over; but nothing met my gaze, except the shadow of the ship, sweeping over the moonlit sea.

Stunned, Jessop returns to his duties. 

The next day, and for days afterward, Jessop takes to poking about the ship, looking for clues in all the places he saw the “shadowy thing” linger. Not surprisingly, there is not a sign of anything amiss. Nor does he mention what he saw to the others, for fear of mockery.

Nothing further happens until one night when Jessop stands watch with only the Second Mate and Tammy, the ship’s young apprentice, for company. The weather is fine and, with nothing to do, Jessop is on the verge of dozing when Tammy calls his name. Startled, he wonders what Tammy wants, but Tammy silences him and points off into the darkness.

The boy’s fright is so palpable that Jessop half-fancies that he can see it too, whatever it is. But Jessop is far more frightened of rousing the Second Mate’s wrath—which is precisely what happens when Tammy screams, “He’s coming! He’s coming!” The Second Mate charges over, and it is only now that Jessop sees the shadowy figure peering at them from some dark corner of the ship:

I saw something that looked like a man; but so hazy and unreal, that I could scarcely say I saw anything. Yet, like a flash, my thoughts ripped back to the silent figure I had seen in the flicker of the moonlight, a week earlier.

The Second Mate follows Jessop’s gaze but sees nothing. Of course.

After their watch is over, Jessop visits Tammy’s berth. The boy is almost hysterical, claiming the ship is haunted. Jessop tries to calm him, initially denying he’d witnessed anything, but Tammy sees through him immediately. He asks Jessop why he won’t admit he saw it, too, but Jessop tells him only to keep it to himself and get some sleep. He’s worried about what the rest of the crew might think.

Jessop’s plan is to ignore Tammy from here on out and pretend the boy was only dreaming, but two days later something “extraordinary” occurs, rendering further attempts at denial futile.

It happens once more in the dead of night, with only Jessop and the Second Mate on deck. It’s very quiet, when suddenly the Mate calls out: "In the main-rigging, there! Who's that going aloft?"

Jessop walks over and finds the Mate glaring up into the sails. (Keep in mind that those old sailing ships needed virtual forests of sails to speed them around the world and back.) Jessop wonders who would dare cross the Mate and climb up into the rigging like that, until it occurs to him that perhaps the Mate had seen the mysterious shadowy figure.

The Mate rouses the crew and sends them climbing up into the rigging of each mast. He sends Tammy and a few other men fore and aft to cut off every avenue of escape. Tammy hesitates, clearly reaching the same conclusion Jessop has, but his fear of the Mate spurs him on.

Up in the rigging, Jessop and the other sailors fan out and search the rigging. Hodgson seeds the text with nautical terms like “futtock shrouds” and “wind’ard”, reminding us this is a different world—especially up in the rigging, many yards above deck. With the sails unfurled and full of wind, cutting through the blackness of night, it really is impossible to see very far above you until you get up there.

The sailors are puzzled, but eager for some novelty, and quickly scour the masts and rigging. They theorize it must be a stowaway of some sort, and Jessop seizes on this until he remembers the figure climbing over the rail and disappearing into the sea. Still, the men have found nothing, and return to the deck.

The Mate refuses to believe their failure to catch anyone in the rigging. He swears he saw someone ascend, and he hadn’t come back down again. Jessop insists they saw no one. The Mate considers for a while, counting the men. He sends Tammy and the other apprentice down to count the crew still asleep below. Both boys return to say all men are accounted for.

Jessop is more curious than frightened now, and he waits to see what conclusion the Mate will come to. The Mate merely dismisses them, and returns to his post, muttering. The sailors fall into groups, considering the possibilities from every angle. It must be a stowaway, but what stowaway would call attention to himself by climbing the masts with a watchful Second Mate on deck?

Jessop notices that Williams, the sailor who had originally remarked to him about “too many shadders” aboard, has not joined in the discussion. Jessop approaches him, asking if he thought the Mate had seen anything. Williams won’t speak. Jessop admits that perhaps there are too many shadows aboard the ship:

"Wot yer mean?" he said, pulling his pipe from out of his mouth, and fairly surprised into answering.

"What I say, of course," I said. "There are too many shadows."

He sat up, and leant forward out from his bunk, extending his hand and pipe. His eyes plainly showed his excitement.

" 'ave yer seen—" he hesitated, and looked at me, struggling inwardly to express himself.

Williams won’t say it out loud, and Jessop won’t implicate himself, either, so both are stymied. Finally, Williams declares he’s going to get a payday out of the voyage, shadows or no shadows. Jessop asks him what he means. Williams admits that the entire crew quit the ship in Frisco, without pay, except for himself. Jessop coaxes the story from him eventually:

"You think they saw," I hesitated; then I said "shadows?"

He nodded; but said nothing.

"And so they all bunked?"

He nodded again, and began tapping out his pipe on the edge of his bunk-board.

"And the officers and the Skipper?" I asked.

"Fresh uns," he said, and got out of his bunk; for eight bells was striking.

For the next five days nothing happens. The rest of the crew seems to think it’s a lark, and the Captain teases the Second Mate unmercifully—yet Jessop and Tammy and Williams aren’t laughing. Jessop watches the Mate grasping for answers, and wonders how close he’ll get.

On the fifth day, Jessop’s shift wakes to find that one of the sails fastened the night before has come loose. It turns out a young sailor named Tom was responsible for securing it, so he is made to climb up and tie it down again.

As the other sailors go about their business, Jessop smokes his pipe and watches Tom at work. He sees Williams come on deck and peer up into the rigging, and the peculiarity of the situation strikes Jessop:

…all at once, there came into my mind the memory of my first conversation with him. I remembered that he had said sails were always blowing adrift at night. I remembered the, then, unaccountable emphasis he had laid on those two words; and remembering that, I felt suddenly afraid. For, all at once, the absurdity had struck me of a sail—even a badly stowed one—blowing adrift in such fine and calm weather as we were then having. I wondered I had not seen before that there was something queer and unlikely about the affair.

Jessop joins Williams, who only says, “Gawd! It's started agen!" Jessop asks him what he means, and Williams tells him that the previous voyage had lost two men while they were retying loose sails. Frightened, Jessop vows to tell the Second Mate all he knows, but Williams stops him with a bit of common sense: without any proof, there was nothing believable in Jessop’s story.

Suddenly, as if caught in a sudden gust of wind, the sail snaps Tom right off his perch. Tom disappears from their sight, and Jessop hurriedly climbs up after him. He finds Tom knocked unconscious, his arm tangled in a rope, which was the only thing that saved him from plummeting onto the deck. Jessop frees Tom and brings him back down. This brings the Second Mate over, demanding to know what’s going on.

Jessop explains that the wind had caught the sail and it had knocked Tom unconscious. The Second Mate is immediately suspicious, as there’s no wind at all. He doesn’t believe Jessop or Williams, but has no reason not to believe them, either. He helps them carry the young man down and into his bunk.

Tom regains consciousness, and confirms Jessop’s story. The problem is, there wasn’t any wind. Tom seems on the verge of saying something else, but despite the Mate’s prodding he refuses to mention it. The Mate leaves them, swearing he’ll look into it in the morning, but nothing more comes of it. Does the Mate think the men are playing tricks on him, Jessop wonders, or is he starting to believe there really is something wrong aboard the ship?

The other sailors don’t know what to make of it. They know full well there was no wind, so the sail couldn’t have caught Tom in the face like he claimed. With nothing more to go on, the matter soon falls into the realm of idle speculation.

Four nights later, on a clear, moonless evening, one of the sails breaks free, snapping loudly in the wind. Jessop and Williams are again on watch, and they climb up into the rigging to make some quick repairs. Feeling light-hearted, Jessop makes a joke to Williams: “"Don't let the ship's bogy run away with you." Williams’ reply stops Jessop cold: "There's more'n one!"

Jessop demands to know what he means by that, but Williams won’t say another word. The Second Mate calls Jessop down to help the men on deck, and Jessop reluctantly obeys. Williams waves him off, declaring once more that he was going to collect his payday, and that he wasn’t scared.

Jessop returns to the deck, and the Second Mate orders Williams to continue working. There is no reply. The Mate calls out again, and this time some of the men hear a queer vibrating noise. Williams can be heard speaking to someone, but everyone else is down on deck. Suddenly there is a cry, and Williams plummets onto the deck.

The men gather around the body, and the Captain is sent for. He inspects the “poor devil”, and orders that Williams be left on deck for the meantime. The Second Mate’s order is both simple and appalling: "Get a broom and a couple of buckets, some of you."

The sailors turn in, moody and frightened. A sailor named Plummer, who was at the wheel during Williams’ death, joins them. He asks how Williams is doing. Jessop confirms that he died in the fall. Plummer then tells them he heard Williams cry out before falling. Stubbins, another sailor, asks him what he means. Plummer speculates that Williams had hurt himself somehow before falling.

The men talk about Williams’ last words, which were typical of the man, if a total non sequitur to them: "Blarst yer… I've styed… Did yer think… drive… bl—y piy-diy." Stubbins is staring at Jessop quite intently, and asks him what he thinks. Jessop, who doesn’t know himself what happened, merely agrees with Stubbins’ assessment that Williams wasn’t yelling at the Mate—but at something else up there in the rigging.

Stubbins connects Williams’ death with Tom’s near-fatal accident, and the others wonder for the first time if there wasn’t something to the rumors they had formerly laughed off. Just who had Williams been cursing at?

The Second Mate calls for the wheel to be relieved, and Jessop’s turn is next so he returns topside. To his surprise, he sees Tammy pacing the deck instead of at the wheel. Tammy tells him the Second is at the wheel, and he’ll tell Jessop why the Mate relieved him later.

Jessop takes the wheel, knowing something extraordinary must be going on if the Mate took over for Tammy. He watches the Mate speaking to the boy for a long while, but can’t make out what is said. After the Mate goes down to the main deck, Tammy joins Jessop at the wheel and explains what happened:

"I've seen it again!" he said, gasping with sheer nervousness.

"What?" I said.

"That thing," he answered. Then he leant across the wheel-box, and lowered his voice.

"It came over the lee rail—up out of the sea," he added, with an air of telling something unbelievable.

Jessop begins to dismiss this, but Tammy grows angry, telling him it’s no use pretending any more. Jessop relents, and reluctantly allows Tammy to tell him his story. After Williams’ death, Tammy took the wheel. Then:

“Well, I'd been here about ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, and I was feeling rotten about Williams, and trying to forget it all and keep the ship on her course, and all that; when, all at once, I happened to glance to loo'ard, and there I saw it climbing over the rail. My God! I didn't know what to do. The Second Mate was standing forrard on the break of the poop, and I was here all by myself. I felt as if I were frozen stiff. When it came towards me, I let go of the wheel, and yelled and bunked forrard to the Second Mate. He caught hold of me and shook me; but I was so jolly frightened, I couldn't say a word. I could only keep on pointing. The Second kept asking me 'Where?' And then, all at once, I found I couldn't see the thing. I don't know whether he saw it. I'm not at all certain he did…”

After a vehement plea from Tammy to stop treating him like a kid and tell him the truth, Jessop admits he saw a figure climb out of the sea and onto the deck a few nights before Tammy made his sighting. For the rest of the chapter Jessop and Tammy have an extended discussion about the inexplicable things they’ve seen so far.

The talk turns to Williams, and Jessop explains the meaning of Williams’ last words—how he alone had remained from the former crew, determined to make his payday. Tammy wonders if fear had made everyone abandon ship in Frisco, and why things seem to happen only on their watch. At last:

"Is the ship haunted?"                             

For an instant I hesitated.

"No," I said, at length. "I don't think she is. I mean, not in that way."

Here Jessop voices a novel theory, which can only be a pet idea of Hogson’s. He tells Tammy that perhaps the ship isn’t haunted, but is in fact open to visitations from these shadowy things:

“Why, I believe that this ship is open, as I've told you--exposed, unprotected, or whatever you like to call it. I should say it's reasonable to think that all the things of the material world are barred, as it were, from the immaterial; but that in some cases the barrier may be broken down. That's what may have happened to this ship. And if it has, she may be naked to the attacks of beings belonging to some other state of existence."

It’s a rather advanced idea for a mere sailor, and makes one speculate on Jessop’s circumstances. Remember, he was in desperate straits at the novel’s beginning, longing to get home... and this is where the quickest route has taken him.

Jessop goes on to speculate that some sort of “magnetic stress” has altered the ship’s makeup and made it receptive to creatures from some other sort of reality. Interestingly, he wonders if “some rotten thing” had been done aboard the ship—an idea (that places can soak up the bad energy from past atrocities and radiate this evil in the present) that writers like Stephen King (The Shining) would take up in the coming century.

Jessop continues theorizing, saying that what might seem like “spirits” to people in this reality might simply be creatures from another dimension intruding into ours. The ship might therefore be a sort of traveling rip in the fabric of reality:

"Well," I said. "Suppose the earth were inhabited by two kinds of life. We're one, and they're the other."

"Go on!" he said.

"Well," I said. "Don't you see, in a normal state we may not be capable of appreciating the realness of the other? But they may be just as real and material to them, as we are to us. Do you see?"

…"Then, after all, you really think they're ghosts, or something of that sort?" Tammy said.

"I suppose it does come to that," I answered. "I mean that, anyway, I don't think they're our ideas of flesh and blood.”

Tammy urges Jessop to tell the Second Mate everything, and hopes the ship is put into port and burned. Jessop doubts the Second could do anything, even if he did believe them (and from what we have seen of the Mate, Jessop’s probably right—he’d curse them both and boot them off the deck).

Right on cue, the Mate appears, and Tammy scoots off. Jessop says nothing to the Mate, but now he wonders if he ought to do something—and if so, what?

They bury Williams at sea the next day. Jessop and Plummer are soon working on the main deck when a haze rolls in:

"It's gettin' quite 'azy!" and his tone showed he was surprised.

I glanced up, quickly. At first, I could see nothing. Then, I saw what he meant. The air had a wavy, strange, unnatural appearance; something like the heated air over the top of an engine's funnel, that you can often see when no smoke is coming out.

"Must be the heat," I said. "Though I don't remember ever seeing anything just like it before."

Absorbed in their work, the two barely notice as the strange phenomenon grows into a mist thick enough to conceal their surroundings. After a while, they suddenly realize the mist has gone.

Jessop immediately suspects that something is not quite right about the mist, and he keeps a sharp lookout for any further sign of it. After two days, he spots a patch of haze on the horizon, with the setting sun behind it. Jessop realizes the haze can’t be heat-induced, and hot on the heels of that realization comes a simple, chilling statement:

And that was the beginning of it.

Jessop asks around, and finds that others have seen the haze on their watch, coming and going. No one, including Plummer and Tammy, considers the haze as curious as Jessop does, but he keeps his suspicions to himself.

The next day, Jessop is once more alone at the wheel. It’s a cloudless, hot day and he’s very lethargic, but what he sees next snaps him out of his stupor. A ship in full sail floats right off the bow, signaling them. Jessop’s surprise is total, because there is no way a large ship could have gotten that close to their own without someone seeing it first. Jessop turns away to man the wheel, and when he looks again the ship is gone—another impossibility:

Had she foundered? I asked myself, naturally enough; and, for the moment, I really wondered. I searched round the sea for wreckage; but there was nothing, not even an odd hen-coop, or a piece of deck furniture; and so I threw away that idea, as impossible.

Jessop naturally wonders if the ship was some sort of mirage or illusion, but every detail had seemed so realistic. Just as he has convinced himself he had seen something, the ship materializes again, “dim” and “wavering” and “indistinct”. It soon fades away again. It soon occurs to Jessop that perhaps there’s nothing queer about the phantom craft at all… perhaps, to the other ship, his own ship seems the mirage! It occurs to him that the crew hasn’t seen another craft since the ship passed through the mist three days hence. That’s not just odd—it’s highly unlikely on a well-traveled sea lane such as the one they cruised. Jessop wonders if, even now, he’s looking out on their world from some other dimension.

This is all highly metaphysical for a haunted-ship story, yet it perfectly demonstrates Hodgson’s unique slant on things. He’s simply unable to let a ghost be a ghost when it could be some visitor from a shadow dimension. But it was never the cause of the situation that interested Hodgson; he was after the eerie effect this blurring of realities had on an isolated batch of men; how they discovered their predicament and how they tried to solve it, and how this process affected them. It is concerns such as these that elevated Hodgson above the pulps (though he certainly drew from that well often in his short fiction) and kept his flame alive among students of the macabre.

While Jessop works out the stunning implications of his theory, the Captain himself appears on deck, demanding to know where Jessop thought he was taking the ship. Jessop realizes he has let the ship drift entirely off course, and brings her around.

He is unable to rouse himself so easily, and the Captain rants at him and shakes him. Jessop can barely put two words together, so dazed is he, but he manages to explain that he had been distracted by the other ship, which of course the Captain can’t see. Pronouncing him a lunatic, the Captain signals the Second Mate for a replacement to take the wheel.

Banished from the Captain’s presence, Jessop reports to the Mate. He tries to explain about the other ship, but the Second cuts him off and sends him forward for a smoke. Instead of arguing, Jessop complies, for he notices a queer expression on the Mate’s face.

While on watch that night, Jessop reflects that he couldn’t have expected the Captain to react any other way. It was his own fault for mentioning the ship when the surrounding ocean was clearly empty. Jessop suspects the Mate knows more than he’s letting on, but why wouldn’t he say something?

Then, he spies a green light in the distance, closing fast. He alerts the Second, but the light has disappeared and the Mate can’t see anything. The light appears and disappears again, and Jessop sings out once more. This time the Mate joins him, and they both scan the darkness. If it’s a ship’s light, as Jessop thinks, the danger of collision is very real.

The Mate pays a lot more attention to Jessop’s warning than he has before, but there’s nothing to be seen. Jessop remains adamant that he saw a light. When the green light appears for a third time, Jessop waits for the Mate to see it, but finally yells out a warning. The light promptly disappears. Angered, the Mate has Jessop relieved.

Eager for a sympathetic ear, Jessop tries to find Tammy, but the Mate intercepts him and orders him to get some sleep. Furious and frustrated, Jessop turns in. The other sailors are up and playing cards. They ask him what’s the matter, and he tells them the story. They note that in one day, he manages to get relieved for seeing ships that aren’t there, and now for lights that wink on and off.

Stubbins, though, is more reflective. He wonders aloud why the Mate is so sure of himself, when he himself ordered the entire watch up into the rigging to find an imaginary stowaway. Quoin, another sailor, points out that there might still be a stowaway onboard somewhere.

Stubbins ignores that, and here he surprises Jessop:

"It's my hidea he knows you saw that light, just as bloomin' well as I do."…

…"Then you don't doubt that I really saw it?" I asked, with a certain surprise.

"Not me," he remarked, with assurance. "You hain't likely ter make that kind of mistake three times runnin'."

"No," I said. "I know I saw the light, right enough; but"--I hesitated a moment--"it's blessed queer."

"It is blessed queer!" he agreed. "It's damned queer! An' there's a lot of other damn queer things happenin' aboard this packet lately."

He was silent for a few seconds. Then he spoke suddenly:

"It's not nat'ral, I'm damned sure of that much."

The conversation is then interrupted by Jaskett, the man who relieved Jessop. They listen as he alerts the Mate to a red light off the starboard side. Jessop and the sailors go on deck to look for the light, but Jaskett tells them it’s gone again. The Mate joins them, demanding to know what sort of game they’re all playing. He refuses to accept any mention of vanishing lights, and storms off. Jessop takes the Mate at his word, but Stubbins isn’t so sure: "He's a puzzler."

Jessop later learns that the next man on watch saw the light, too, infuriating the Mate all over again. This man got kicked off the deck; his replacement either saw nothing or had learned to keep his mouth shut

The following night the wind picks up, and the sailors take down the sails in preparation for a blow. Jessop’s shift assembles for roll-call on deck, and then disperses to their duties. Suddenly there is a cry from above, and something smashes into the deck between them, right on top of one of the sailors. Surprised into panic, Jessop and the others flee to the far end of the ship. This attracts the ire of the First and Second Mates, who seem to think a huddled mass of frightened sailors equals a mutiny of some sort.

Jessop warns the Mates not to threaten the sailors after what they’ve been through, and then explains about the accident. A cry for help interrupts his story, and he and Stubbins and the Second ascend up into the heights of the rigging to give aid. Jessop can’t see anything as he carries the lantern in his teeth, but he can hear breathless curses and screams. Stubbins takes the lantern and climbs higher, and then Jessop can see… something:

It was Jacobs, the Ordinary Seaman. He had his right arm tightly round the yard; with the other, he appeared to be fending himself from something on the other side of him, and further out upon the yard. At times, moans and gasps came from him, and sometimes curses. Once, as he appeared to be dragged partly from his hold, he screamed like a woman. His whole attitude suggested stubborn despair.

The Second, who’s below Jessop and Stubbins, can’t see anything, but he orders the sailors out onto the yards (the horizontal poles that attach to the sails and connect to the mast) to rescue Jacobs. They do so, hanging on to the ropes for dear life. And don’t forget this is all many feet above the deck of a rolling ship—at night. In the wind.

Jessop and Stubbins manage to reach Jacobs, who is now quite alone. His fellow sailor, Svenson, is nowhere to be seen. But Jessop spies an indistinct shadow at the end of the yard, which quickly “swarms” up behind Stubbins. Jessop warns him, but the man can see nothing. Jacobs panics, forcing the sailors to hold onto him tightly. Suddenly, a whipping sail seems to knock the lantern right out of the Second’s hands, and their light vanishes. The shadowy form recedes into the darkness, if it was ever actually there, and Jessop can see it no longer. The men carry the insensible Jacobs down to the deck and put him in his bunk.

Jessop and Stubbins join the rest of the crew, who are gathered around the berth where the bodies are stowed. Jessop gets close enough to hear the Skipper in conversation with the Mates. The Skipper and the First Mate seem content that the deaths were tragic accidents, but the Second seems convinced they’re not.

Jessop now wonders how much of the picture the Second understands—certainly more than he did a few weeks ago.

The men are ordered to turn in and get some sleep, but instead they have a smoke and ponder their situation. Then the Mate whistles for them. With a heavy rain now falling, they have to furl the sails. Jessop volunteers to go up into the rigging, but nobody else will. Instead of arguing or bullying the men, the Second surprises Jessop and goes up with him. Within minutes a gang of sailors joins them, to keep them company. The Mate considers this, and then relents. Under his watchful eye, they all make short work of the sails and climb down without incident—well, except for a sharp cry from the Mate as he comes down last. He explains that he banged his knee, and Jessop doesn’t think to question this until much later.

Jessop rouses all hands to furl the rest of the sails before the storm worsens. The men seem hesitant about climbing back into the rigging but, made bold by the previous uneventful climb, Jessop and some others return aloft.

This time everything goes wrong almost immediately. Stubbins thinks Plummer touched him as a joke to frighten him, and begins cursing at him. Plummer returns the favor, and they both fall to arguing. Jessop urges them not to fight while up aloft, but they ignore him. Suddenly, everyone seems to be shouting, including those down on deck. Jessop can’t see a thing, and has to fight his way over the next man to get higher. He gets Plummer’s boot in his face for his trouble, but before he can rage at the man, Stubbins cries out a warning: "For God's sake tell 'em to get down hon deck!"

Then:

Even as the words came to me, something in the darkness gripped my waist. I made a desperate clutch at the rigging with my disengaged right hand, and it was well for me that I secured the hold so quickly; for the same instant, I was wrenched at with a brutal ferocity that appalled me. I said nothing, but lashed out into the night with my left foot. It is queer, but I cannot say with certainty that I struck anything; I was too downright desperate with funk, to be sure; and yet it seemed to me that my foot encountered something soft, that gave under the blow. It may have been nothing more than an imagined sensation; yet I am inclined to think otherwise; for, instantly, the hold about my waist was released; and I commenced to scramble down, clutching the shrouds pretty desperately.

Jessop can only dimly recall the panic-stricken race back down to the deck, but soon finds himself safe and sound among a crowd of frightened, shouting sailors. The skipper and the Mates calm them down with a ration of rum. The roll is called. Everyone is present except for Stubbins. Anxious, the Second calls out for the last man to have seen Stubbins.

Plummer steps forward. He looks dazed, and his shirt is in tatters. He tells the crew that he last saw Stubbins up in the rigging. The men are at a loss here, but the Second volunteers to go aloft and look for him. He asks for another volunteer. Feeling very reluctant, Jessop stands forward. He’s the only one, and the others point to Plummer’s torn shirt as the reason they hang back. To Jessop’s surprise, Plummer also volunteers to go up, as long as there’s plenty of light. Then, astonishingly, the Skipper decides to go up as well.

This time they’ll do it right: each man is armed with several flares, to be kept lit at all times while aloft. Tammy will have a few for himself, to keep an orienting light visible on the deck house. Each man has a specific role and place to search, and, not to be caught unprepared, he doles out a pistol to the Second and himself.

The men start climbing, and almost immediately things go south:

And then, all at once, Tammy's blue-light went out, and there came, what seemed by contrast, pitchy darkness… The light from my lantern seemed no more than a sickly yellow glow against the gloom, and higher, some forty or fifty feet, and a few ratlines below the futtock rigging on the starboard side, there was another glow of yellowness in the night. Apart from these, all was blackness. And then from above—high above—there wailed down through the darkness a weird, sobbing cry. What it was, I do not know; but it sounded horrible.

Flares die and are relit, and the men slowly make their way upward into darkness. The Skipper calls out to Stubbins, but there is no answer. With the men spread out in the rigging, there is some visibility between the flares’ glow, but there is no sign of the missing man.

Suddenly, Jaskett curses, and Jessop can hear a vibrating noise. One of the ropes is being savagely shaken. The Second takes out his pistol and fires into the gloom, and the shaking stops. The Mate orders Jaskett to light a flare, and he does so. Jessop can clearly see the bullet-hole in the sail.

Plummer notices one of the sails above them is “adrift”, and the men climb higher. Suddenly, the Skipper cries out:

"There he is!—Stubbins! Stubbins!"

"Where, Sir?" asked the Second, eagerly. "I can't see him!"

"There! there!" replied the Skipper, pointing.

I leant out from the rigging, and looked up along his back, in the direction his finger indicated. At first, I could see nothing; then, slowly, you know, there grew upon my sight a dim figure crouching upon the bunt of the royal, and partly hidden by the mast. I stared, and gradually it came to me that there was a couple of them, and further out upon the yard, a hump that might have been anything, and was only visible indistinctly amid the flutter of the canvas.

"Stubbins!" the Skipper sung out. "Stubbins, come down out of that! Do you hear me?"

But no one came, and there was no answer.

Jessop tries to tell the Skipper there are two shapes up there, but the Skipper ignores him. The Second can’t see anybody at all. Impatient, the Skipper lights a flare, illuminating the whole mast. At once the shapes drop down onto the yard beside them. The humped shape rises up and out of Jessop’s sight.

Frightened, the Skipper and the Mate start firing at the figures. Jessop sees a shape “gliding” down towards Plummer. Then all the flares go out, plunging them into darkness. The men race down to the deck, and afterward Jessop heard some of them telling of a “great black shadow of a man” that had come upon them suddenly in the dark.

As they climb down, a scream pierces the night. Upon reaching the deck they find Jacobs dead, and the sailors on deck talking of something which had leapt over the rail and gone overboard. Yet at least one man claims there was nothing to be seen—a nice touch from Hodgson that stokes the paranoia of the scene. Never does he directly say, this is what was seen, or this is what happened. He always couches his details in shadow and misdirection and doubt, whereas a lesser writer would simply bring the hobgoblin on stage. Hodgson never lets the fear dissipate through explanations; there are no explanations for the crew, and thus none for the reader.

The Skipper orders Jacobs to be taken off deck, and Jessop hears him groan wearily: three more men are dead, and Stubbins is never seen again.

The Second orders Jessop and the apprentices to start hanging lights in the rigging. Tammy takes the opportunity to urge Jessop to tell the Skipper and the Mate all he knows. Jessop is reticent; he doesn’t know anything, he’s just theorizing. Tammy insists he tells, if only to persuade the Skipper to put in at the next port.

Jessop realizes that Tammy doesn’t know about the blinding mist and the disappearing ship, so he explains how they might not even see land until they’ve crashed upon the rocks or run aground. He tells Tammy about seeing the other ship disappear and reappear, and Tammy thinks hard for a moment. He wonders about the disappearing lights seen the other night, hoping they indicate that the ship wasn’t blind all the time. Jessop allows that that might be true, however the lights kept disappearing almost immediately, so there was no guarantee of visibility for any length of time.

Tammy urges him once more to tell the Skipper, who’s now on deck with the Mate. Even if they wouldn’t have believed Jessop before, they would at least listen now, with so many men dead. Jessop resolves to do it, and he and Tammy approach the Captain.

The Captain does listen to them, this time:

"What is it, Jessop?" the Skipper inquired.

"I scarcely know how to put it, Sir," I said. "It's—it’s about these—these things."

"What things? Speak out, man," he said.

"Well, Sir," I blurted out. "There's some dreadful thing or things come aboard this ship, since we left port."

I saw him give one quick glance at the Second Mate, and the Second looked back.

Then the Skipper replied.

"How do you mean, come aboard?" he asked.

"Out of the sea, Sir," I said. "I've seen them. So's Tammy, here."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, and it seemed to me, from his face, that he was understanding something better. "Out of the Sea!"

The Captain confers with the Mate, and they decide to confide in Jessop. Here, at this moment, Jessop reveals that he has a Mate’s ticket, meaning he could hire on as a Mate on any ship. This is a surprise to Tammy, and indeed the reader, though it is now clear throughout the book that Jessop was always much more than an ordinary seaman.

Jessop then goes on to tell them about the shadowy figures that climbed out of the sea and moved about the ship. And then he explains about the disappearing ship, and how their own ship was running blind and they didn’t even know it.

The Skipper seems inclined to believe Jessop, and realizes they’re in a hell of a fix. He orders Jessop and Tammy to keep it quiet—if the other sailors realized their peril they might panic and make things much worse. They all resolve to lock down the ship at night, and put lamps in the rigging. It would mean almost doubling the length of their voyage, since they would lose the night travel, but, as the Mate mutters: "Better late than not at all."

As daylight is coming, the Skipper orders Jessop and Tammy to take down the lamps.

That morning, they buried their dead at sea. As the last body slides overboard, the men rush to the rail to watch the bodies sink into the depths. Then:

Tammy pointed, and nudged me.

"See, Jessop," he said. "What is it?"           

"What?" I asked.    

"That queer shadow," he replied. "Look!"

And then I saw what he meant. It was something big and shadowy, that appeared to be growing clearer. It occupied the exact place—so it seemed to me—in which Jock had disappeared.

"Look at it!" said Tammy, again. "It's getting bigger!"

He was pretty excited, and so was I.

I was peering down. The thing seemed to be rising out of the depths. It was taking shape. As I realised what the shape was, a queer, cold funk took me.

"See," said Tammy. "It's just like the shadow of a ship!"

Plummer sees it, but shrugs it off as their own ship’s shadow. The Mate isn’t so sure, and he instructs Tammy and Jessop to say nothing about it to the others. He fetches the Skipper, but the phenomenon is gone by the time the Skipper gets to the rail. Jessop verifies the Mate’s story, and the Skipper, now worried anew, warns Jessop once more not to say anything.

Jessop visits the mess for his breakfast. Lost in thought, he ponders the shadow-vessel. It occurs to him that the shadow men had come out of the sea, and then returned to it. Perhaps these things had come from the ghost ship—the same shadow now lurking in the “profound depths” beneath their very feet.

That afternoon Tammy asks him what he thinks about the strange shadow in the water, and Jessop tells him his theory. They discuss how eerie and terrible the whole situation is, and Tammy ventures that nobody ashore would understand or believe it:

"It seems so strange and unreal, one moment, doesn't it?" he said. "And the next, you know it's really true, and you can't understand why you didn't always know. And yet they'd never believe, if you told them ashore about it."

"They'd believe, if they'd been in this packet in the middle watch this morning," I said.

"Besides," I went on. "They don't understand. We didn't. . . I shall always feel different now, when I read that some packet hasn't been heard of."

Tammy wonders if the ship will really shut down at night, and Jessop thinks they’ll have to: none of the men will go aloft after what’s happened. Tammy certainly agrees with that, vowing they’ll have to put him in irons if they insist on sending him up into the rigging.

Tammy moves to throw some garbage overboard, and stops short. He calls Jessop over, and the two of them count no less than four ghostly ships, deep in the water below them. The Second Mate comes over to see why they aren’t working, and they point out the creepy shapes that are closely following the ship. The Mate warns them to keep quiet and not attract attention, then goes to alert the Skipper.

Jessop can see the worry and bewilderment in the Skipper’s face, but can do or say nothing for fear of tipping off the rest of the crew.

At sunset the crew assembles on deck to take down the sails. It happens that Jessop, the last man aloft, sees an incredible sight just as the sun sets: a great ship materializes out of the distant mist, and slowly orients on the Mortzestus. As it approaches, the craft begins to sink beneath the waves, disappearing into the depths just as the last sliver of sun disappears behind the horizon.

That night Jessop is at the wheel again, bored with nothing to do and still slightly dazed from the almost poetic sight he’d seen earlier. He recalled how it had been heading straight for them when it submerged, and now he had a “horrible feeling that something beastly was going to happen any minute.”

But nothing does, at least not immediately. Jessop gets to thinking about those ghost ships underneath their ship, and wishes the Second had hung even more lanterns about the ship. He watches the Mate standing on the poopdeck, staring moodily into the night-black sea.

Suddenly the sails main topsails and their rigging come crashing down. The Skipper comes running to see what the matter is, but Jessop finds he has his own problems to deal with:

…there came to me a chill of cold breath at my back. I turned sharply, and saw something peering over the taffrail. It had eyes that reflected the binnacle light, weirdly, with a frightful, tigerish gleam; but beyond that, I could see nothing with any distinctness. For the moment, I just stared. I seemed frozen. It was so close. Then movement came to me, and I jumped to the binnacle and snatched out the lamp. I twitched round, and shone the light towards it. The thing, whatever it was, had come more forward over the rail; but now, before the light, it recoiled with a queer, horrible litheness. It slid back, and down, and so out of sight. I have only a confused notion of a wet glistening Something, and two vile eyes. Then I was running, crazy, towards the break of the poop. I sprang down the ladder, and missed my footing, and landed on my stern, at the bottom. In my left hand I held the still burning binnacle lamp. The men were putting away the capstan-bars; but at my abrupt appearance, and the yell I gave out at falling, one or two of them fairly ran backwards a short distance, in sheer funk, before they realised what it was.

The Second asks Jessop why he left the wheel, but Jessop can’t bring himself to speak yet. The Skipper demands to know what’s going on, and the Mate cautions him not to question Jessop until the men have been dismissed. Once alone, they both question Jessop quietly, and he tells them about the Thing. The Skipper tells him gently to get back to the wheel, and from now on there would be an officer on deck and a lit lamp. Jessop feels a little better by the time he’s relieved from the wheel, but by the end of his watch he fancies he’s twice seen something leering at him from over the rail:

I snatched up one of the lanterns from off the spar, and flashed the light towards it, whereupon there was nothing. Only, on my mind, more than my sight, I fancy, a queer knowledge remained of wet, peery eyes. Afterwards, when I thought about them, I felt extra beastly. I knew then how brutal they had been . . . Inscrutable, you know.

The next morning brings more terrifying news: Toppin, one of the other apprentices, has vanished from the ship. The crew on watch searched the entire ship, and found no clue of the boy. Even the Mate on deck had seen nothing.

For the first time, the crew starts thinking of mutiny. Their only demand: that the Skipper put into the nearest port. If he refuses, they will take control and do it themselves. Jessop suspects putting in to port—any port—is impossible, but he says nothing, knowing the rest of the crew hasn’t seen what he’s seen, and they certainly haven’t yet reached the same conclusions.

Tammy tells him that the ghost ships are gone, or at least can’t be seen anymore. This surprises Jessop, but even more surprising is the depth of the fear that has gripped Tammy:

"Oh, Jessop!" he exclaimed. "What's going to be the end of it all? Surely something can be done?"

I said nothing. I had a desperate feeling that there was very little we could do to help ourselves.

"Can't we do something?" he asked, and shook my arm. "Anything's better than this! We're being murdered!"

Tammy is on the verge of tears, and he actually proposes locking themselves below decks at night. This would be deadly in a storm, but the young apprentice is frightened enough to try it. In fact, he proposes mutiny himself, to compel the Skipper to put into the nearest port. Jessop tells him this would be impossible. Tammy retorts that Jessop’s idea of sailing blind in other dimensions is just that: an idea. Given the alternative, Tammy is quite prepared to run the ship aground, or worse.

Jessop is in no mood to argue, but as he tries to pull Tammy aside to talk to him, he notices something strange in the water:

And this is what we saw: a little distance below the surface there lay a pale-coloured, slightly-domed disc. It seemed only a few feet down. Below it, we saw quite clearly, after a few moment's staring, the shadow of a royal-yard, and, deeper, the gear and standing-rigging of a great mast. Far down among the shadows I thought, presently, that I could make out the immense, indefinite stretch of vast decks…

…But, you know, what was getting at me more than anything, was a feeling that there was movement down in the water there, among the rigging. I thought I could actually see, at times, things moving and glinting faintly and rapidly to and fro in the gear. And once, I was practically certain that something was on the royal-yard, moving in to the mast; as though, you know, it might have come up the leech of the sail. And this way, I got a beastly feeling that there were things swarming down there.

This eerie sight so hypnotizes Jessop that he almost pitches head first into the water. He saves himself and also manages to prevent Tammy from going overboard as well. Tammy shrieks and struggles all the while, and Jessop has to sit on him to keep him on the deck. Later, he realizes that one of the shadow men had a hold of the boy and was pulling him into the depths, but in the moment he can only surmise that Tammy is trying to jump overboard.

The other sailors pull Jessop off the boy, interpreting the spectacle as a grown man beating on a boy (an instance that Hodgson intimates elsewhere in his writings was far too common an experience). Jessop explains himself, and the men take hold of the boy just as he faints. The Mate clearly suspects that something’s afoot, and has Tammy taken to his berth before Jessop can be forced to respond to questions.

Tammy revives and is made to lie down, and the Mate demands an answer. Upon hearing about the ship floating beneath their own, the Mate runs to check, but there’s nothing to see. The rest of the day passes uneventfully, and Tammy returns to his duties none the worse for wear, though he is strangely silent.

That evening the word spreads through the crew that the boat will be locked down at eight o’clock and the men kept belowdecks. The sailors are satisfied with this arrangement, finding it the first sensible thing the Skipper’s done.

Eight o’clock finds Jessop in the fo'cas'le, talking with some of the other men. Suddenly, they hear shouting and loud banging noises coming from the deck. Jessop and the others race topside, to find this hellish scene:

It was getting dusk; but that did not hide from me a terrible and extraordinary sight. All along the port rail there was a queer, undulating greyness, that moved downwards inboard, and spread over the decks. As I looked, I found that I saw more clearly, in a most extraordinary way. And, suddenly, all the moving greyness resolved into hundreds of strange men. In the half-light, they looked unreal and impossible, as though there had come upon us the inhabitants of some fantastic dream-world. My God! I thought I was mad. They swarmed in upon us in a great wave of murderous, living shadows. From some of the men who must have been going aft for roll-call, there rose into the evening air a loud, awful shouting.

"Aloft!" yelled someone; but, as I looked aloft, I saw that the horrible things were swarming there in scores and scores.

The men with Jessop are either seized and dragged away into the heaving “greyness” or chased down below. Jessop himself leaps onto the pigsty and crawls onto the roof of the deckhouse. There he finds Tammy, sobbing in fear. He silences the boy as best he can, and the two of them watch the ensuing carnage.

The remaining sailors are killed, and an awful silence descends. Jessop can see the shadow-men working in the rigging, and he watches as the sails unfurl. He creeps out to the edge of the roof to see what’s going on, but a heavy mist obscures everything. Then:

…abruptly, from behind me, came a single wail of sudden pain and terror from Tammy. It ended instantly in a sort of choke. I stood up in the mist and ran back to where I had left the kid; but he had gone. I stood dazed. I felt like shrieking out loud. Above me I heard the flaps of the course being tumbled off the yards. Down upon the decks, there were the noises of a multitude working in a weird, inhuman silence. Then came the squeal and rattle of blocks and braces aloft. They were squaring the yards.

The end comes swiftly now.

As Jessop watches, the ship begins tilting forward. Sharply increasing its slope, the ship’s bow plunges beneath the waves. Jessop’s ears are filled with the screams of those that still survive, and then he is hanging from the roof of the deckhouse. The deck has become nearly vertical, and men and equipment hurl past him to disappear into the heaving maelstrom below.

The ship slips bow-first into the black depths of the sea, nearly dragging Jessop with it:

…there came a drear chorus of bubbling screams, a roar of waters, and I was going swiftly down into the darkness. I let go of the winch, and struck out madly, trying to hold my breath. There was a loud singing in my ears. It grew louder. I opened my mouth. I felt I was dying. And then, thank God! I was at the surface, breathing.

Amazingly, there is a ship not three hundred yards away, and Jessop swims toward it…

Here the novel ends from Jessop’s point of view, and switches to an account written by the officers of the rescuing ship, the Sangier. They have listened to his tale, and agree with him that none of it will go into the ship’s log… only the barest facts of what they have witnessed, which the Third Mate now sets down in a letter.

They sighted the Mortzestus early in the afternoon and pulled up close, but the ship seemed completely unaware of them. Strangely, they are close enough to hail but there is not a sound to be heard from the ship… even though they can see the Skipper shouting something, and see the sails being furled—a usually noisy endeavor.

The Mate continues his story:

Then, just before eight bells, the thing Jessop's told us about happened. Both the Mate and the Old Man said they could see men going up her side a bit indistinct, you know, because it was getting dusk; but the Second Mate and I half thought we did and half thought we didn't; but there was something queer; we all knew that; and it looked like a sort of moving mist along her side. I know I felt pretty funny; but it wasn't the sort of thing, of course, to be too sure and serious about until you were sure.

After the Mate and the Captain had said they saw the men boarding her, we began to hear sounds from her; very queer at first and rather like a phonograph makes when it's getting up speed. Then the sounds came properly from her, and we heard them shouting and yelling; and, you know, I don't know even now just what I really thought. I was all so queer and mixed.

The mist engulfs the ship, though the sails and the tops of the masts can still be seen. Some of the crew on the rescue ship can see strange men swarming on the masts, yet other witnesses can’t seem to see anything of the sort. Oddly, the Mortzestus’ sails seem filled with wind, while their own sails hang limp on their masts. Then they watch as the ship tilts forward and plunges into the depths.

The Third Mate sees a single man swimming towards them, and orders a boat put out to pick him up. Thus ends the statement of the officers of the Sangier, and thus ends the novel.

It’s a startlingly brief climax, I think, to a book with such a slow, steady rise in tension. And yet it suits, since Hodgson knew well how rapidly disaster can strike a ship at sea. A seemingly normal ship with an unsuspecting crew can sink with frightening speed for a host of different reasons. Many ships have been lost without a trace over the centuries, and here Hodgson gives us a frightening possibility as to why.

His facility with exploring the many facets and ramifications of supernatural phenomena was quite unique in his day. Notice how he plays with the perception of sound towards the very end of the book. The men of the Sangier pull up to within hailing distance of the Mortzestus, yet they can hear nothing of the other ship despite seeing the activity aboard. Then the sound gradually fades in “rather like a phonograph makes when it's getting up speed”, only to completely disappear altogether once the mist settles over the ship. This fading in and out of sound is a natural side effect (and a nice touch) of the boat slipping through dimensions. Yet few other horror/fantasy writers of the time were bothering with exploring the scientific realities within their supernatural occurrences as Hodgson seemed wont to do. Some sci-fi writers would explore the darker corners of their genre in the coming decades, but I rather think Hodgson’s work was unique in his melding of everyday realism and dark fantasy.

One can also now readily see the “kinship” Hodgson spoke of in the preface between The Ghost Pirates and The House On The Borderland. Both novels deal with a central location, a ship in the former and a house in the latter, that seems to slip in and out of our reality into… somewhere else. As I noted previously, the title The House On The Borderland says it all: a house straddling two different territories, two different realities—not quite belonging to either.

The Ghost Pirates is the flip side of that coin. Whether it is some fluke property of the ship itself, or whether it is simply bad luck, the ship pierces the veil between worlds, and it attracts the unwanted attention of the denizens of that other reality. While the House occupies a spot within a permanent state of flux, it seems the Mortzestus can move in and out of its own reality. Hodgson suggests much, but never explains whether the ship itself is a doorway, or attracts one, or something else quite different.

The Ghost Pirates also marks Hodgson’s last exploration of nautical terrors in novel format. He would go on to publish other maritime short stories in the years leading up to World War I, such as “The Derelict” and “The Thing In The Weeds” (both 1912), but The Ghost Pirates would be his final novel-length work dealing with life at sea. One can tell he was deeply conflicted about the subject. One the one hand, a sailor’s life is everything they say it is: adventure, a means for the poor to travel the world, and a chance for a man to get away from society for a while. On the other hand, a sailor’s life was full of hard physical labor, and abuse from his superiors was always a possibility. In fact, Hodgson suffered such abuse as a cabin-boy that he later took up body-building to defend himself. Abuse and bullying would become a minor theme in his nautical work. Beyond that, the food was frequently disgusting, and the pay always low. Hodgson was moved to write an essay about the hardships of life at sea, advising against anyone trying it if they had other options. He also refused to return to a sailor’s life when World War I began, choosing instead to join the Royal Artillery, which eventually got him killed. That speaks volumes.

And yet Hodgson was moved by the sea, and it shows in his work. The loneliness, the danger, the isolation, the beauty and terrible splendor of a life at sea obviously affected him and found outlets in his fantastic work. It was the brutality of Man that soured him, not Nature. It was thus probably with great joy that Hodgson pitted his sailors against super-Nature (giant crabs; weird fungi; endless, choking seaweed) and the supernatural (ghost pirates, screaming trees).

The Ghost Pirates is a near-perfect example of tension, a case study of a group of men isolated from the rest of the world and terrorized by the unknown. Having lived it, Hodgson knows the hard life men fall into when cooped up on their own for long periods of time, without the saving grace of women, families, and society to curb their brutalities. In The Ghost Pirates, the sailors are largely uneducated and superstitious. The officers are blunt at best with the men, but at their worst they are only skeptical of the mysteries haunting their ship. When men start dying, the crew is united in their efforts to uncover the cause, if possible, or at least prevent further deaths. Their pains are futile, and looking back in hindsight one can see Hodgson crafting their doom as all but inevitable. Unlike most modern horror novels, which try to implicate their victims in their fates somehow (such as zombie tales, where the trapped survivors are mostly undone by their own misguided actions), Hodgson gives no reason as to why the crew of the Mortzestus must perish, beyond the obvious: they shipped out on the wrong boat at the wrong time. True, in the beginning they scoff at the rumors swirling about the ship, but don’t forget that Williams, the Cockney who knows there’s something wrong with the ship, is the first to die.

Coupled with this mounting tension is a sometimes lyrical use of imagery: witness the passage about the ghost ship slowly sinking beneath the waves as it approaches them. Witness Jessop and Tandy looking over the rail to see four grim shadow-ships trailing them, fathoms below the surface. Jessop can even see their sails, full of wind, and shadow-men climbing the rigging. These are powerful images Hodgson is using, and he ends the book the only way it can be ended, with the ship dragged bow-first into the depths, to join this unholy submarine fleet.

In a way, the fate of the Mortzestus conforms to one of Hodgson’s major themes: we are intruders into this alien world, the sea, and randomly we pay for those intrusions—swiftly and sometimes terribly. Hodgson made the supernatural an instrument of retribution in his nautical stories, sometimes in ways that are not at all expected. This was his gift.

With the completion of his third novel, Hodgson seems to have concluded his exploration of multiple realities and the shadowed doorways connecting them. His next novel would be a radical stylistic departure—a sprawling, epic blend of science fiction, horror, fantasy, romance and…chivalry? Yes, indeed. It would also be his final novel, as World War I erupted just two years later, and Hodgson would not survive its fury. Join us next time as we dare enter The Night Land!