Atlantic Ocean: The Doldrums

12) The Doldrums
Early December 1844

The sun comes up, a resounding fire, the great golden gong of the dawn… its hydrogen cauldrons brimming—so to speak—with plasmic fires, and the tyranny of its day begins… The sun roars down from its track in space with a savage and holy light, a fantastic music in the mind.
—Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire”

A) Caught in the Doldrums: Days 1–2
A few days after crossing the equator, the wind begins to slacken. Joab does everything he can to keep the ship moving. Every two hours, the crew uses the pump to hose the sails with seawater—“We’ll catch every particle of wind, by God!” This works for a while; but soon the wind fails utterly. The Quiddity finds itself trapped in the Doldrums.

With no wind or motion to mitigate the temperature, the tropical heat becomes oppressive. During daylight hours, the equatorial sun is merciless. It hangs in the sky like Abbey’s great golden gong. The silence of its heat seems paradoxically deafening; a physical force that presses down upon the sailors, a constant ringing in the skull. The sun turns the sky a blinding white. There’s very little shade to be found at the equator—the sun always feels directly overhead. Tar oozes from the rigging, dripping to the deck in sticky patches that are fiendishly difficult to clean. At some point, the sailors realize that nobody’s seen Faust in two days. If the ship’s cat fell overboard—well, that would explain the bad luck, at least?

The sailors, having little work to do, spend their time in idleness: playing cards, carving wood, reading books, writing letters, and engaging in general horseplay such as whang o’ doodle and King Arthur. While these diversions are enjoyable the first day, by the second day the crew becomes listless, enervated, and bored. Those with surly dispositions become surlier, and the Keeper is welcome to provoke a few fistfights. Superstitious sailors promote sure-fire ways to summon the wind: prayers to St. Erasmus, scratching a backstay, even breaking the usual injunctions about whistling or saying the word “pig.” Owen Love passes around lengths of rope tied with three fearsome knots—“If ye can untie them in under a minute, it’ll bring the wind. Maybe.” Meanwhile, Henry Swain fruitlessly combs the Quiddity for the missing cat. He believes if he can trap Faust under a bucket, the wind is sure to follow! (See “Superstitions” under “Life On a Whaling Ship.”)

B) The Swimming Pool: Day 3–4
The morning of the third day Mr. Whipple calls for five volunteers for “a little project.” Collecting a canvas sail and some buoys from the bosun’s locker, he lowers a whaleboat and rows a few hundred yards across the glassy sea. He orders the sail spread across the water, its corners buoyed by floats and its center flooded to a depth of four feet. “There you have it, men, our very own swimmin’ pool!” Throughout the next two days, men are brought to the makeshift pool for watersports.

Sailors generally swim naked, but if Rachel Ward would like to swim, she’ll be respectfully rowed to the pool and allowed to frolic alone in her clothing—Captain Joab refuses to allow a woman to sport naked, no matter her own degree of comfort! The swimming pool is disassembled every evening, just in case the night brings wind. The reason the “pool” is set at a distance from the ship becomes evident within a few days, as the accumulated detritus of the Quiddity accretes a halo of filth around the motionless ship: discarded casks, food byproducts, human and animal waste, and so on.

C) Taking Measures: Day 5
Upon the fifth morning, Joab storms across the quarterdeck, shouting to the watch: “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean! Damn ye, did anyone murder an albatross?” Mr. Whipple, not understanding his captain’s allusion to Coleridge, begins accosting seamen, angrily demanding to know if anyone’s killed a “goney bird.” Disgusted by his officer’s illiteracy, Joab allows Whipple to continue his fool’s errand. Meanwhile he orders Mr. Pynchon to “Prepare the whaleboats for towing!”

All four whaleboats are lowered without their usual gear. Mr. Pynchon instructs “Mr. Dixon” (not merely “Dixon”) to take command of the captain’s boat, and orders Mr. Coffin to set up a “towing rig.” Some of the more lazy sailors groan—there won’t be any swimming today! Within the next thirty minutes, the men are pulling at the oars, dragging the Quiddity across the becalmed waters. The boats work in shifts to allow the men some rest. At noon, Natty Weeks sends out lunch, his sympathy evident in the amount and quality of the food. The boats are brought in just before dusk, the men exhausted. Joab allows all watches to sleep through the night, ordering the sullen idlers to watch over the deck in shifts.

D) Doldrum Dreams: Night 5
Although the fifth night is little different than the previous four, the men’s aching muscles and the sheer length of the ordeal begin to work their nerves. The air is deathly still, the temperature is sweltering hot, and every creak and groan is distinct, amplified by the preternatural silence. Around midnight Duke Nelson electrifies the forecastle with a prolonged scream: a night terror, some unknown horror compressed into a single, agonized shriek: “I’m not ready!” The Millerite claims no recollection of the nightmare, and no idea what he meant by his “midnight cry.”

Player Character Nightmares
Keeper—now is the perfect time to plague the characters with bad dreams! Beckett’s “neurasthenia” is bound to flare up, invoking suffocating visions of the Arkham Horror. Dr. Lowell falls into a reverie haunted by the whispers of an unknown woman: always out of earshot, never making sense. Rachel Ward may imagine her drowned parents, anchored to the seafloor and staring up through fathoms of glassy, still water. And Morgan—surely Morgan hears the submarine whispers, watery voices exhorting him to open his jaw wide, wider; to clamp his teeth over the soft flesh of his sleeping comrades. Even those unaccustomed to nightmares are tormented by visions inspired by the Halloween Tempest, Watt’s sea-chest, or Zadok Allen’s stories: howling winds, the walking dead, brutish figures, froggish natives, ravaging whales, tumbling cities, behemoth tentacles.

Morning brings a round of 0/1 Sanity rolls. It soon becomes obvious the entire ship suffered from a poor night, and spirits are the lowest they’ve ever been. Some murmur about last week’s falling star, the missing cat, or perhaps even Rachel Ward; others blame the “madness of the doldrums.” If any character has been deemed “Unlucky,” they may bear the brunt of the general displeasure, finding themselves deprived of their share of food by Joshi and Swain.

E) The Sixth Day
The sixth day dawns as the previous five. Joab is in a dire, black mood, stomping across the quarterdeck and shaking his fist at the heavens—“Thou shalt not keep me from my quarry, my eternal foe! I’d open the bag of Aeolus himself, and damn the consequences! D’ye hear me, fates, bring me Aeolus!” Still: no wind. Soon it’s back to towing the Quiddity south.

Optional: The Fistfight/Lock-socking
If the Keeper would like to liven things up, tensions may finally come to a head this evening, right after the whaleboats are returned to their davits. The Keeper should pick some beef that’s been simmering in the boiling stew of discontent: some fractious relationship, some unaddressed grievance, some misunderstanding. Maybe it’s Matty Shoe ribbing a player character? Maybe it’s the way Morgan feels Henry Swain’s been looking at Rachel? Maybe it’s the tension between Mr. Coffin and Dixon? Whatever it is, the Keeper should let it fly, whether it’s a sucker punch or a clearly telegraphed haymaker. If the situation has grown truly ugly, a character deemed “Unlucky” or worse may be given a “lock-socking.” Similar to a “blanket party,” in this heinous act a gang of ruffians throw a tarpaulin over their sleeping target and beat the victim with knotted ropes.

Consequences
Depending on the length and location of the fight, it’s possible officers may become involved, working to break up the fracas. Even Whipple knows that such tensions should be resolved in private. If Joab or Pynchon become involved, neither cares who started what, and neither has any plans to adjudicate a fair outcome. All characters involved in the fight are punished equally—sentenced to clean the heads and denied grog for a week. Any furtherance of the altercation will result in a more severe punishment—“I’ll have ye flogged in the rigging, just like the blasted Navy!” More individual consequences must be roleplayed by the involved parties, whether that’s a friendly handshake or a lasting enmity.

The Sixth Night
The sixth night passes worse than the fifth. The Keeper may dig deep into her spookiest bag of nightmares. Suggestions may be found under “Character Secrets and Development.”

F) The Aeolus Bird and the Polydactyl Cat
Just after dawn on the seventh day, a lone seabird is spotted high in the sky. Even with a telescope, it’s impossible to identify the species: it’s as big as an albatross, but seems to be entirely black! The bird wheels higher and higher, and within moments Henry Swain appears on deck, crying triumphantly, “I found him! I found the little bastard!” He’s holding an inverted wooden bucket, trapping its contents with a blubber spade. The feline howls emanating from the bucket leave little doubt as to its inhabitant. Swain places the bucket on deck, and an outraged Seph Lovecraft steps up to free the bedraggled cat. Swain hoots, “He was down in the hold, trapped between the some casks! The barrels must have shifted during the storm. I just followed the smell through the cuntlines—he killed three dead rats, the saucy little bastard! Glad we ain’t flooded the hold since then, eh Faustie?”

On cue, a faint breeze touches the ship like the caress of an angel. The mermaid pennant stirs to life, and the sailors cheer their throats raw. Owen Love points to the distant bird and says, “That must’ve been the ayolus bird the cap’n was talking about!” By two bells into the forenoon watch, the ship is underway again.

White Leviathan, Chapter 2—Atlantic Ocean
[Back to Encounter 11: Crossing the Line | White Leviathan TOC | Forward to Encounter 13, The First Whale]

Author: A. Buell Ruch
Last Modified: 26 August 2023
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
White Leviathan PDF: [TBD]